Wires rule, wireless drools

So for about fifteen years this has been my TV/movie watching sitch — I’m over here, and the computer that plays the stuff is over there *points at bookcase*.

And I control this with this handy li’l keyboard.

Now, when I first started this thing, I went through about half a dozen keyboards until I found this one. Most mini keyboards have a pitiful range — like a metre at most. But this one (which is not Bluetooth, but uses a USB dongle) works pretty well.

That is, normally it has, like, a 98% success rate. Which would be infuriatingly low for a normal keyboard, but since I’m just using this as a “remote” — i.e., to stop/start movies and control the volume etc — it’s not that bad.

But! On random days, it drops to 70% or so. It does not seem to be correlated to anything I can find — not the battery charge, and not… well, that’s all I can think should affect this, because I’m stationary and the dongle is stationary.

A neighbour blasting a microwave for hours on end? Or a wifi AP gone wild that spams the entire spectrum? Comic radiation? TEH RUSSIANS?!?!?

So I’ve lived with this mysterious phenomenon for years, but like I said — it’s annoying, but it’s not maddening. Just push the “start” button once more. There you go.

But this week I decided to do something about it.

I don’t want to snake a … 15-metre-long USB cable (it’s only four metres as the crow flies, but I’d have to nail it up along the walls around the room), but I wondered whether a generic USB-over-wireless thing exists, and sorta — they used to, but not really any more. And… I’d be exchanging an unreliable wireless thing with another wireless thing of unknown reliability.

But then a friend suggested using a USB->cat5 thing. But… do I have cat5 here?

I do! I’d forgotten! I have an extra one that’s not in use! (The two other ones in use there are for music distribution.)

And USB->cat5 things exist! Still! Several different ones, some powered and some bus powered. So I went with a bus powered one.

So you just plug your USB device in one end…

… and then the other end into a USB port on the computer.

And it works! I’m amazed. I mean, it supplies the power to the dongle via the cat5 cable! Sick!

I still have to tidy up some cabling in the bookcase, but other than that, seems like I’m done — the dongle receiver for the keyboard is now about half a metre from where I’m sitting, so it now seems to work ~100%?

At least today.

The future is here, old man!

It happened

I knew I had a Google Maps API key in a Microsoft Github repository publicly viewable, so I’ve been meaning to rotate it. Since 2017. Procrastination, eh?

But it didn’t really seem that urgent because I had a $10 spending limit on the key, so eh whatevs — I have more important things to do. Like washing my hair! Reading comics! I’m a busy man!

After nine years, it finally happened: Somebody started using it and ran up a $6 bill, so I disabled the key (and I guess I now have to push a new version of the CSID app; the map portions no longer work).

Eh, tant pis. But I’m idly wondering whether there’s any way to tell what the IP addresses of the API calls were? It would have been amusing if the usage came from some Openai LLM or something…

Merely Secondary Interests

I love this — this is what I’ve always been thinking, but said better: What’s important is what’s on the page (the prose with novels, the art and prose with comics), and the rest of the stuff is merely secondary.

Which is why I find 97.4% of reviews so frustrating — they talk almost exclusively about plot, characters, psychological insight and form, but not actually about the reading experience itself.

I do think that this lines up with what a lot of people are interested in — I sometimes get the feeling that people like reading recaps more than actually reading a book/comic or watching a movie.

A. S. Byatt: Scandinavian North Knower or What? An Investigation

I was reading an old short story by Byatt yesterday, and I came across this — which is totally correct. It’s not that the people in the “Scandinavian North” (i.e., the north of Norway) are better at English per se — far from it — but the prosody of the dialects matches up with English much better than the sing-song dialects of the Scandinavian South.

(And we’re not even going to mention the general unintelligibility problems that Danes have even when speaking their own language.)

So I thought: “Finally, a woman of culture!” And also “Gee, the educational system in the UK is pretty good”.

But then!

It’s established that he’s from Tromsø, which is about 350 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle… so… er… that’s an odd thing to say.

And then later, he talks about taking the train south, and there definitely aren’t any trains anywhere near Tromsø.

But! It’s also established that he’s a liar!

So my in-depth investigation into whether A. S. Byatt is a Scandinavian North Knower is inconclusive. Did she put that stuff in to let observant people into the secret beforehand? Or did she just not have access to the Internet in… let’s see… 1998?

I guess it’ll have to remain a mystery.

You’re welcome, I’m sure.