Rubenerd

It was bad enough that we had this race queen figure of everyone’s favourite UMU! Sorry, I don’t know what came over me; everyone’s favourite Saber, Nero Claudius. And this unbearably-cute racing figure of original Saber.

But this Saber fig that’s up for pre-order now may the most beautiful anime figure I’ve ever seen, ever, ever. The cranes on her dress are my favourite touch.

I’m serious, someone please change the password on my PayPal account before I buy ten of these.

Here’s an email from someone calling themselves Marvis:

I am having a cocktail near your house.
Do you want to call me on a date?
I have some free time and I’m excited about new acquaintances.
See my location, bloke.
Check the link.

?c25ydWJAcnViZW5zY2hhZGUuY29t

See my location, bloke? Paying for a botnet to send your junk, but forgetting to put the FQDN before the gibberish? Classic Marvis.

My coworkers and I are obsessed with this unlikely collaboration album that came out last month. This the second of many blog posts dedicated to each song.

Today we have Morning is Coming:

Rouse yourself
    and get out of bed;
Track a comb
    across your sleepy head.
Clean your teath
    and wash your face;
Act like you’re a member
    of the human race. ♫

I love mornings, but they nailed the feelings after a late night! All it needs is to somehow work in some monitoring or failed CI build emails to wake up to.

Addendum, a day later: Not to get all Turns Out on you, but went to the GP, and it's a throat infection that spread to my sinuses. I knew it was worse than a regular cold, damn it!

So I was sitting on the floor of our shower breathing steam, like a gentleman. My hope was this fake sauna would reduce my mancold symptoms, which include:

• runny nose
• sore throat
• did I mention sore throat?
• ringing in my ears
• aching joints
• hot extremeties, and cold body
• bleary eyes
• everything tasting like metal
• dull headache
• incessent whinging to Clara, and colleagues on our corporate chat

The hot water and steam helped a bit.

To pass the time, I counted all the things in the bathroom that were white:

1. toilet
2. cabinet thing that holds the sink
3. the sink
4. the LED shining out of my phone
5. toilet paper
6. tissues
7. mouthwash bottle
8. toothpaste tube
9. toothpaste inside the tube
10. electric toothbrush
11. me, though by now I was very pink

I couldn’t have the ceiling light on, because it’s on the same circuit as the exhaust fan, which would have sucked all the steam out. It gets dark in that bathroom in winter.

Thank you.

Wikipedia continues to be a fascinating source of information for this aircraft enthusiast. Under a caption for the above photo by ConvairsForever:

Economy on TWA consisted of two sections: the large one immediately aft of the second door, and a smaller section farther aft, after door 3.

All five lavatories were located in a semicircular arrangement behind this smaller section. Lockheed engineers dubbed this ‘cannery row’.

I imagine there’d be several types of congestion with that. Thank you, I’ll be here all night.

The seats shown here were installed in late 1978, when most early DC-10s and L10s were converted from 2-4-2 to 2-5-2. These were retained until the very last TWA L1011 flight in 1997. This 1978 design originally featured a red seat cover as well, but by this time it had been removed in favor of just business-like blue and grey.

Business-schmisness.

By the standards of the 90s, when thin-backed slimline seats were becoming popular with most airlines, these seats were quite cushy, with decent padding. The center seatback folded down to form a table, another throwback to an earlier (and more comfortable) era.

Every part of that sounds awesome.

TWA did not retrofit their L1011 cabins with larger overhead bins, as Delta did in the early 90s. This was a mixed blessing: the cabin looked more spacious with this original blended design, but the bins themselves were small and items tended to shift in flight, then fall out when passengers opened the bins.

I guess that’s why we’re told to check these things now.

NASA has a beautiful eulogy:

Bean, the lunar module pilot on Apollo 12 and commander of the second crewed Skylab mission, died in Houston on Saturday, May 26, 2018.

“Alan Bean once said ‘I have the nicest life in the world,’" said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. “It’s a comforting sentiment to recall as we mourn his passing.”

♡

I thought I’d seen all the official art and magazine articles about Unlimited Blade Works, but this full-pager appeared in the October 2014 issue of Animedia. It’s the most unreasonably-adorable picture of my two favourite characters I’ve ever seen!

It’s on Netflix now, so you have even less of an excuse to have not seen it. I reviewed it in 2016, if you need a refresher.

Sherisse Pham reported for CNN Tech:

The United States has cracked down on one of China’s biggest tech companies, banning it from buying components from American firms. [..] On the same day, ZTE also received a blow from the UK government, which warned telecom companies against using the Chinese firm’s equipment and services.

And Australia followed suit, as Simon Sharwood reported in The Register:

Australia’s largest and dominant telco, Telstra, has stopped selling the ZTE devices it sold under its own brand. [..] Telstra blamed US sanctions recently imposed on ZTE that prevent the Chinese mobe-maker from acquiring parts made by US companies.

If I may indulge in some rhetorial questioning, why? There could have been a few reasons.

Misrepresented software patches

ZTE, along with an unsurprising but worrying array of Android manufacturers, were caught lying about what software patches were installed on their phones. Andy Greenberg reported in Wired on the Security Research Labs team’s discovery:

[..] the lowest-performing companies on the list were the Chinese firms TCL and ZTE, all of whose phones had on average more than four patches that they’d claimed to have installed, but hadn’t.

This didn’t get anywhere near as much coverage as it should have. This cuts right to the heart of how software patches have to be filtered down from Google to all these third parties.

It’s understandable that hardware would be shipped with outdated software, especially in today’s climate where software gets constant updates. If ZTE and these other manufacturers had bundled a slip of paper saying welcome to your new phone, please update to get the best experience, nobody would have minded or cared. Instead, they fudged version numbers, so not only would a large number of people have avoided updating because they don’t see the urgency, security concious people would actively think they don’t need to.

If a third party, okay, a third third party in this case, had got into your phone and tweaked version numbers so you’d stay vulnerable for later exploitation, we’d consider that malware.

Pre‐installed adware

Could it have been banned because some of their devices had been caught hosting after market adware to their unsuspecting users, as the Avast team discovered?

The Avast Threat Labs has found adware pre-installed on several hundred different Android device models and versions, including devices from manufacturers like ZTE, Archos, and myPhone.

Running an OS by a company making most of their money from advertising makes this somewhat moot, but still.

Class

This is another age‐old issue, but especially true in the age of The Notch. But I’ve always been struck by how… familiar ZTE’s designs are. As Alex Heath reported for the Cult of Mac:

While ZTE has tried to make a phone like the iPhone, “the actual build quality and feel in the hand is a completely different story,” notes Android Authority in its review. “The entire body of the Blade S6 is made of plastic, and while plastic doesn’t necessarily have to feel cheap, as we’ve seen from the slew of premium quality mid-range smartphones released recently, unfortunately in this case, it does.”

What bugs me about this isn’t the blatent copying, its that Apple has one fewer competitor in design. Legitimate competition is the best thing for consumers.

Also calling it the S6 has gotta be a swipe against Samsung. Maybe they should call their next phone the Galax S7.

The real reason

What about GPL violations? The fact most Android phones are still running outdated software? The fact alternative stores to Google Play have been released because people don’t trust the offical channel anymore?

Okay, you figured out by now that those concerns weren’t the reasons why. Not to get all Merlin Folders on you, but turns out, it was politics. Back to Sherisse’s article:

The US Commerce Department said that ZTE lied to American officials about punishing employees who violated US sanctions against North Korea and Iran. The Chinese company agreed to pay a $1.2 billion fine last year after a US investigation found it had illegally shipped telecommunications equipment to Iran and North Korea.

Which leads us to the only reasonable, unavoidable conclusion: I miss Palm.

The English Wikipedia Featured Pictures team have been on a roll, like so many quality condiments. I found myself lost in this photo by Colin, but was lulled into a false sense of security by the serenity.

It shows the Sky Garden atop 20 Fenchurch Street, known to locals in London as the Walkie Talkie. I’d tell you it’s in London, but that would now be superfluous, and a little insulting to your comprehension abilities.

The tower isn’t without criticism, which is to say it’s been criticised. By critical people, and critics. Specifically, according to Wikipedia:

• it won the Carbuncle Cup in 2015 for the UK’s ugliest building

• the garden itself was smaller and has less greenery than expected, and you have to book to visit it; and

• the word literally is thrown around liberally these days, but the angle of the windows concentrated light and literally raised temperatures on certain points at street level past boiling point.

I guess it makes a better desktop background!

This was written quickly in a brief fit of anger, and may not be up to the usual quality of posts here on Rubenerd. Because if I’m known for anything, its quality writing; see what I did there?

Clara and I got some face wash last night. I was about to slather it all over my mug in the shower, like a gentleman, before I noticed these tiny, bright blue grains of crap in it. I spend a solid five minutes picking it out because I didn’t have another immediate source of face cleaning in my soapy, bleary-eyed morning state.

Yes, this abomination had plastic micro‐beads; those grains of non‐biodegradable plastic.

I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt to so many companies. When they released the first versions of their product years ago, they weren’t aware of the future consequences of their use or disposal. Mr Carrier didn’t set out to destroy the ozone layer with his air conditioner, for example.

Plastic micro‐beads are comparatively recent. They were proposed and developed with full knowledge that it’d be washed down sinks, and end up in the oceans. And they didn’t care. These are incontrovertible facts; I don’t buy any defence of this decision.

Oil spills garner headlines, but I put these people in the exact same league. Possibly worse, because while oil is used to power things, micro‐beads are an entirely useless marketing gimmick. They saw a potential environmental disaster, and thought they could make a quick buck off it.

Get this out of toiletries, now. Governments, legislate against this shit, because we can’t trust businesses to act in our collective interest here. And to the people who thought this was a good idea; choke on a plastic-filled fish. Bon Appétit, halfwits.