asgaard

International buy nothing day

Fri, 25 Nov 16 22:18:40 +0000

Or so it was supposed to be, but in reality I bought a new pair of running shoes as Strava has been nagging me that I've run over 900km in my current pair (actually far more as I was using them for some time before signing up to Strava).

For the past few years I've worn Asics Nimbus, and I like them a lot, but the price inflation in the last 12-18 months has been insane. The last pair I bought were about £70, now they're retailing at a mere £150. That's far too expensive.

With a Black Friday offer that went down to £100, and with a 15% off voucher code, £85.

But I also ordered a pair of Saucony Triumphs which I hope will prove to be a cheaper alternative in future.
[...]

Plusnet is a mess (packet loss)

Sun, 20 Nov 16 14:14:07 +0000

I have 40mb fibre broadband from Plusnet which for well over a year and a half was absolutely fine. Around the start of July I was promised a free upgrade to 55mb which didn't materialise. Instead, the connection began experiencing large amounts of packet loss during daytime and evening, but virtually none between midnight and 7AM.

Despite a very long and active thread on their forums detailing the same issue among a large number of people, when I submitted a fault report they appeared oblivious to any underlying problem and I didn't get anywhere. After several weeks exhausting their very support (which takes up to a week to respond and isn't helpful when it does), I disconnected for a few hours before reconnecting and ended up on a different part of the network, and all was fine again.

Until yesterday...

I noticed that the 55mb upgrade had been switched on at some point, but the reason I noticed this was because I did a speed test when trying to diagnose an unreliable connection. Yes, the packet loss is back.

So I disconnected again hoping to end up on a different part of the network, and it sort of worked in that I went from 200.* (or was it 209?) to 146.198.*, but unfortunately 146.198.* is getting around 20% packet loss.

Oh, and since reconnecting, I'm back on 40mb.

Insulation

Sun, 06 Nov 16 19:59:06 +0000

The overnight temperature getting worrying close to freezing, even though it's only the beginning of November, prompted me to take action.

Several layers of bubble wrap will hopefully give the soil an extra degree or two.

So far there's no reason to think they're faring any differently to the plants in the unheated conservatory, which is usually a few degrees warmer, but occasionally shoots up to 30°C for short periods if the sun comes out. Both sets of plants have very noticeably slowed their growth and might halt it entirely soon. Traps on the Venus Fly Traps are dying faster than new ones are growing.

Note the unfortunate wasp that wandered head first into the venus fly trap.[...]

The most important feature of a blockchain is motivation

Thu, 03 Nov 16 20:16:58 +0000

A lot of people have recently become very excited about various imagined applications of The Blockchain, which is what underlies Bitcoin.

The blockchain, in simple words, is a distributed database where nobody adding to it trusts anyone else, but they do, as a whole, trust the collective group of everyone contributing to it.

Something these people are missing is that the blockchain is interesting precisely because of this trust model. The trust model is what makes it able to handle situations that couldn't be handled by a traditional database or even a git repository.

You don't need a blockchain if:

You don't need a database, or
Nobody but you needs to write to the database, or
You trust everyone else who needs to write to the database, or
Everyone who needs to write to the database all trust one or more people who can write to the database

The blockchain becomes useful when you have a large number of people who need to write to a database and any one user doesn't trust at least one of the other users.

But there's another important component: Your blockchain is useless if you are accepting entries from untrusted users without verifying them, and verification takes time and resources. Bitcoin motivates people to donate their resources because it's tied to a currency so people get some monetary value out of it.

It is difficult to see how smaller and more private blockchains could work while still retaining the properties that makes a blockchain special. Once you strip away those properties, what you have is more like a git repository where you have a chain of transactions which can be verified cryptographically to be in the correct sequence.

Enabling internet permissions in a Cordova/Ionic app

Sun, 30 Oct 16 20:34:42 +0000

If you try running a Cordova/Ionic app with few plugins, you'll probably be very confused when you try to create an HTTP request. It'll work fine in the browser, but on a device it'll fail.

If you hook it up to the Chrome developer tools and inspect the webview, it'll show Status: (failed) and Type: Pending.

The answer to this is that you need to ask for access to network permissions.

It seems like you should be able to define your app's permissions in the config.xml file, but this doesn't seem to be the case. However, plugins can declare permissions in their plugin.xml file.

So, I created a plugin which does nothing else than defines a plugin.xml which asks for network permissions.

To install it, use:

cordova plugin add https://github.com/markwatkinson/cordova-plugin-internet-permissions.git

[...]

Dormancy experiments

Tue, 18 Oct 16 20:51:49 +0000

Carnivorous plants: I'm the proud owner of a set of carnivorous plants which need to be going dormant for winter quite soon.

Nothing I read online tells me what's really necessary to make a Venus Fly Trap or a Sarracenia go dormant over winter, so I am not really sure if keeping them in an unheated conservatory is OK. My main concern is the heat can build up very quickly when the sun comes out, but this will be a pretty rare occurrence over winter.

So I'm doing it the only way I can: I have a Venus Fly Trap and Sarracenia Purpurea inside, and one of each outside too. I'm interested to see which set goes dormant first, how much if any growth they experience over the winter, and when they come out of dormancy.

I've had the outdoor Venus Fly Trap for a few years now. It went dormant on my windowsill two years ago, but last year it did not, so I really want to make sure it does this year. I think it's ready for it - it's nowhere near as impressive as it was a month or two ago; it has much fewer traps and the ones it's growing now are very small.

Date	Avg outdoor min temperature (°C)	Avg outdoor max temperature (°C)	Observation
2016-10-16	—	—	Plants put out
2016-10-23	7	14	Indoor VFT has caught a spider. Otherwise, not much.
2016-10-30	9	14	New growth on all plants has definitely slowed and traps seem to be dying at a faster rate than before. The indoor sarracenia (which has a huge number of pitchers) has 3-4 that are definitely dying. The outdoor one looks unchanged.
2016-11-06	3	10	The weather has suddenly become a lot colder, which prompted me to insulate the outdoor plants' pots, but, apart from that, little obvious change.
2016-11-13	3	9	I'm pretty sure that any new growth on the VFTs has stopped
2016-11-20	5	10	No obvious change.

I won't update this anymore, as I'm confident both sets of plants are dormant, and they went dormant around the same time. The conservatory was consistently a few degrees warmer than the outdoor temperature, with occasional (short lived) peaks up to 40°C, which didn't seem to affect anything.

Your APK's version code needs to be higher than 100008.

Sat, 15 Oct 16 18:59:40 +0000

When trying to upload my Android app Crossword Solver CS to the Play store, I have been encountering the error:

Your APK's version code needs to be higher than 100008.

The app is an Ionic/Cordova app and Cordova handles creating that version code.

The 8 on the end makes little sense because the version I had there already was v1.0.0. I checked through git and my config.xml always had the version as v1.0.0.

Cordova claims that the version code will be generated automatically from the string and will be equal to: versionCode = MAJOR * 10000 + MINOR * 100 + PATCH.

For some reason it has followed this formula, then concatenated an '8' on the end making the end result an order of magnitude too big.

As far as I can tell this has come about because I used a Linux VM to generate the initial release and a different machine to generate the update. The latter has a newer version of Ionic/Cordova, which presumably does not have the '8' bug.

How do you fix this? Well, you need to bump up one of the components to multiply your end result by 10 and offset it by 8.

So I have gone from v1.0.0 to v10.0.9, which seems a bit ridiculous.

Wasteland 2 Director's Cut review

Sat, 08 Oct 16 16:00:58 +0000

I started playing Wasteland 2 last year and got about half way through the story when they announced the Director's Cut edition, at which point I lost some free time and decided to leave it until the DC was out and stable. So here we are.

Wasteland 2 is a modern incarnation of the classic RPG formula. There's a lot of text, a lot of detail and it can be pretty heavy going. It can also be rewarding and the details ooze personality. This might make you think "Fallout", and, obviously it's a similar sort of setting, but Wasteland's world is a bit more superficially grounded by virtue of not having the 1950s wackiness strewn around. The overarching story itself is, in RPG tradition, largely uninteresting and lacking any sense of urgency, but there's plenty of settlements in the wastes full of people and plots to keep you interested, and despite Wasteland's outwardly serious demeanour, some of them are completely off the wall.

The player takes control of a military-ish squad (of the Desert Rangers) and has full control over them, rather than playing as a lone warrior who picks up independently minded NPCs who run in front of your crosshairs at integral times. This is possibly a barrier to getting interested in the game early on, as although you can have up to three NPCs in your party who will add their own comments occasionally, the four core members of the squad you start off with are entirely player made (or chosen from a preset) and don't have any dialog or interactions associated with them. Ok, never mind, it picks up soon.

Character creation and progression follows a familiar format consisting of attributes, skill points and perks. The skills system generally works very well by being thoughtfully coupled with the gameplay. There are often more ways to solve a problem than simply shooting everyone causing it. Sometimes you don't have the skills or foresight you need to resolve a situation to your satisfaction, but the game handles the branching well. If you end up with a sub-optimal outcome, and you will occasionally because your actions do not always have predictable outcomes, then that's just life - maybe you'll do better next play through. The game really demands a second play through just to see the alternative possibilities. The breadth of this hits you very early on: the first decision you make is to respond to one of two distress calls. Each represents a large chunk of content and gives access to a different NPC companion, but you can't do both.

The only obvious criticism of the skills system is that they are a bit diluted by there being too many of them. For example there are essentially four different door opening skills: lockpick, safe cracking, computer science (electronic locks) and brute force, which seems a bit excessive.

The combat itself is OK, but could be better. It's deeper than Fallout 2, but shallower than Fallout Tactics. Tactics is a dirty word with fans who wanted an RPG, but people unfairly overlook that it was a really good tactical turn based combat game. W2's combat is not bad, but it can be a bit algorithmic in that environments and enemy behaviour are not varied all that much. Once combat starts there aren't any surprises - everyone in the engagement is immediately visible to everyone else regardless of where they are and the AI knows exactly where your squad is regardless of whether anyone has line of sight on them, so you rarely need to change tactics away from getting everyone spread out and behind some cover for an evasion and chance to hit bonus, and have your sniper take a pot shot to initiate the fight. Later on in the game enemies do start packing so many hit points that you do sometimes need to think about using targeted shots to hurt their arms to cripple their aim, or slow them down by hitting their legs, but for the first half, tactics can be pretty simple. Weapon jams, intimidation effects and minimum effect ranges on some classes of weapons make things a bit more interesting, but overall some of Fallout Tactics' combat features could have been used to much stronger effect here.

Weapons are diverse and offer a satisfying progression of stopping power as the game goes on, but they are somewhat unbalanced, i.e. assault rifles and sniper rifles are the main work-horses, and shotguns are virtually useless. Handguns don't become competitive until you get the 9mm variants. SMGs and heavy weapons exist in the hands of enemies but eat too much ammunition to make them particularly tempting to the player (although you might occasionally use burst mode of your assault rifle in a tricky fight). The game advises you to vary your weapon skills so your squad isn't fighting over ammunition, but ammunition isn't that sparse, and given another play through I'd just give everyone points in assault rifles or sniper rifles. Fallouters will be pleased to know, however, that rushing up to someone and hitting them over the head with something heavy is a mostly viable strategy, but is neutered somewhat by the fact that heavy armour has serious drawbacks.

Overall: Wasteland 2 has a pretty long list of minor flaws, but none of them are serious enough to take away from the fact that the game is engaging and continually tempts the player to poke around, meet people, and learn more about the world. The bottom line is that if you're a CRPG fan you'll probably like Wasteland 2. If you're not, you'll probably find it long winded and lose interest.

4/5

Crossword Solver CS Free

Sat, 10 Sep 16 22:11:30 +0000

I am pleased to announce the release of a free version of Crossword Solver CS: Crossword Solver CS Free.

As the name suggests, it's a free version of Crossword Solver CS:

A crossword and anagram solver
Missing letters word solver
Anagram solver, which also supports missing letters
Simple user interface
Large word list of around 350,000 English words

It is ad-supported, but otherwise entirely functional. In the current version 1.0.1, there's an ad banner at the bottom of the screen and a full-screen advert will appear randomly when solving the missing letters of a word - however - this will only happen at most once during the app's runtime.

Download

Free (ad-supported):

Pro (ad-free):

[...]

Plusnet packet loss and gaming lag

Thu, 04 Aug 16 12:27:11 +0000

A few people seem to be talking about this, but since the start of last week (25th July 2016, i.e. 10 days now) I've been getting unreasonable amounts of packet loss on Plusnet fibre. Sometimes it's fine, other time I'm losing 20% of my packets. It's making gaming impossible as latency shoots up to multiple seconds at random intervals. At one point, Planetside 2 was reporting a 90 second lag! Packet loss is visible on ICMP, and websites (TCP/HTTP) become unresponsive at random intervals too.

I submitted a fault report last week which doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

This isn't isolated to me:

https://community.plus.net/t5/Fibre-Broadband/High-packet-loss-and-other-DNS-issues/td-p/1354749
http://eu.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/17612893774?page=1
https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?p=29859356
https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/4vho1j/packet_loss_issues_in_eu/
https://community.plus.net/t5/Fibre-Broadband/Packet-loss-when-using-video-conferencing-service/td-p/1353723

The lack of any official response seems to indicate that Plusnet are employing an ostrich approach.

Using a VPN doesn't help either because I just get loss to the VPN.

(Unrelated:) They were also supposed to be raising my downstream limit from 40mbps to 55mbps on Monday, which hasn't materialised.

Overall: If you are currently wondering whether Plusnet are good for gaming, the answer up until two weeks ago was "yes". The answer right now is "definitely not".

Update: 2016-08-23: Two and a half weeks later this is still an intermittent problem, but it's occurring less frequently than it was. I got bored of pursuing Plusnet support because they take days to respond, don't read my responses properly and don't seem to be willing to admit there's a problem they need to fix. I am off contract now so if it continues the easiest course of action is a different provider.

Update #2: Forget that, it's worse than ever tonight.

Update #3: git clone through PlusNet: 10kB/s. git clone through VPN on the same machine: 400kB/s. Ouch.