Commentapocalypse Nighness Numbers

I was kvetching about AI-generated comments the other day — for some reason or other, Akismet anti-spam doesn’t seem to recognise them, so I have to manually mark them as spam, which is annoying.

What makes the AI comment spammers especially annoying is that the first few times you see them, you don’t realise that it’s spam, because the comments will respond to what you’ve written in your blog post. So it’s not some generic, general text, like we’re used to recognising. (As an example, above we have an AI comment from a potato blog (!).)

But I was idly wondering how prevalent these spammers are — and I suddenly remembered that Ahrefs is something that exists. So let’s see:

whisperweb.dev is one of the most prolific AI comment spammers, and… it has only hit 815 web sites!? That’s a lot less than I had expected, really.

And similarly, the videotranscriber.dev spammers have only hit 345 web sites.

And migos-aivideo.net is only on fifteen sites!

If these numbers are to be trusted, I guess the Commentapocalypse isn’t as nigh as I thought?

I don’t know how good Ahrefs is, though…

One other slightly amusing thing here — when clicking through to some of these blogs to double-check, I note that several of the sites themselves seem suspiciously AI-like… Dead Internet Theory time.

(The potato blog (!) seems real, though.)

Anyway.

Goldilocks and the Three Keyboards

This is a quick followup to the blog post about having a dedicated li’l keyboard for doing translations.

The problem is that this product category — small keyboards — is cursed. It’s not surprising, because it’s not something that the major producers are involved with much (they concentrate on actual, real keyboards), so you get a lot of semi-no-name producers pumping out junk.

One of these was the smallest keyboard up there — the M4 — which is complete junk: It drops half the keystrokes.

The biggest one up there uses a USB dongle, and works fine. But it’s just a bit too large, really — I just want to be able to have it on my table by my reading chair permanently in case I need some emergency French translation.

Today I got this keyboard in the mail. It’s a Rii 518BT Bluetooth keyboard, and it’s very straightforward — it’s got all the normal keys and stuff, and not too many weird ones. And the layout is pretty standard, which is something you can’t always count on with these small keyboards.

Rii has a wide range of keyboards, and looking over that list, I recognise several of those keyboards — they’re keyboards I’ve tried and discarded for a previous project (either because the range was awful or because the keyboards were awful to use otherwise)…

This one seems fine, though.

The only weird design choice they’ve made is that there’s a Bluetooth pairing button on the back? Like… why? Why not have the pairing be Fn+Q or something?

But it’s fine — doesn’t matter.

It works!

The range is good (at least seven metres, which is as far as I tested it), it doesn’t drop any keys, and the keys are pretty good — a bit squishy, but have some click to them.

It did take more setup than the keyboard with the USB dongle, but that’s Bluetooth for you — since the input device goes away on the Linux side, I have to listen to D-Bus events and start re-listening to the devices when it reappears so that I can route the keyboard events to the right place, and all that boring stuff…

But it seems to be stable.

When it wakes up, though, it takes the host/device several seconds to get things up and running, so you type away at the keyboard and apparently nothing happens… But! It buffers up all the keystrokes and then transmits them when everything is up, so you don’t lose any keystrokes.

So that’s OK, I think.

Darn! The keyboard is just a centimetre too long to fit into the box I have on the table… Oh well.

And! Please remember to consider aircraft security while operating this keyboard.

The thing that goes *boit* in the night

(I mean, in the day…)

So I was sitting on the couch, minding my own business, when I heard this *boit*-sounding thing. A soft sound… like a polite notification beep or something.

I checked all the Firefox tabs, but didn’t see anything — and then switched the sound off on the laptop. Still getting a *boit* every couple of minutes. So then I had to get off the couch — like an animal — and try to locate what device I could possibly have somewhere in the living room that made the sound.

Reader, it was a plant:

(Sound on to experience the *boit*. The click after the *boit* is me using a keyboard on the other side of the room, I think.)

It turns out that this potted plant (which I’ve put in this vase) had been over-watered, and when the sun shines on the vase, it’s probably heating up the water enough for some bubbles to happen?

Anyway — *boit*.

My New Horticulture Blog

In the kitchen, I’ve got this humongous sansevieria plant… Well, actually, it’s a number of plants in the same pot: This sansevieria variety has only a single leaf per plant, and then it propagates by setting out a new rhizome that then has a single leaf.

Allegedly.

So when I bought it a decade ago, it was just one little leaf that poked up… Hey! I’ve got a snap of it from 2014:

Aww!

I’ve been repotting it in gradually bigger pots until it’s now reached the biggest size of this series of terracotta pots (which is the only series I use — having the same pot series for everything makes things less busy).

But now what?

Yes, I went to the garden centre and bought this monstrosity — it’s the only pot I could find that even vaguely resembles my go-to series and that has a diameter “one up” from the previous one.

But my window sills are too narrow to have a saucer that fits this pot. What to do!

Well… perhaps I could just line it with plastic on the inside? I know, I know — drainage. But I’m so lazy with my watering that there’s really no chance of overwatering my plants, so I don’t think it matters much in this case.

OK… a very sturdy bag and some excellent scissoring…

There! Brilliant.

Oh, er, OK, yeah. It was about time that I repotted this thing — the pot contains 60% roots and 40% dirt.

There! It fits! Just a slight overhang!

Man, plants are a lot of work.

Are your USB-C gadgets not getting a charge from your PD charger?

This might be common knowledge, but I only learned of This One Neat Trick today, so:

I’ve got a bunch of gadgets with batteries that need to be charged. All of them are USB-C these days (thanks, Europe), so I’ve got a spiffy GaN PD (i.e., high wattage) charger with lots of ports that I use for that.

But some gadgets, like the Sennheiser Momentum 3 wireless headphones, refuse to be charged by this (or any other) PD charger.

But if I connect it to a real computer, it charges just fine. So what’s up with that!?

I had just lived with this situation (like an animal) — until today, when I finally did some research. It turns out that the problem is that these headphones (probably) do not have the required resistors that announce to the charger that it’s fine to give the device some power, while the computer’s USB ports always deliver 5V no matter what.

But we can fix this very easily:

First of all, use a USB-C to USB-A adapter.

Plug it into the PD charger.

Then take a USB-A to USB-C cable…

… and plug it into the adapter.

And then plug the USB-C plug into the headphones. Tada! A green light! It’s charging!

Problem solved.

Isn’t the future disappointing?

(Apparently you can achieve the same thing if the USB-C to USB-C cable you’re using includes the resistors itself — but it’s very difficult to identify these cables without actually testing them. But you might get lucky — cheap-looking ones are more likely to work than expensive ones, because they are made to work with cheap, out-of-spec gadgets…)