Waste Management or Disposal

This is fine, the BBC have released this film to highlight to us mere tax paying mortals the problem affecting the environment... Personally, I loath when I see any waste discarded, fly tipping being my personal bug bear in Nottinghamshire (a land-locked county).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-environment-53287940/coronavirus-the-masks-you-throw-away-could-end-up-killing-a-whale

Good, great we all know...

But realistically what can we do about this?.... Well, we, or at least I certainly, pay my council for refuse collection services, they come each fortnight and take my waste away.  Any excess I store, compact and take to the local household waste site run by Biffa.

These are council services, they are firms whom have tended to the council to responsibly collect, manage and dispose of my waste on their behalf, and I as a customer of the council expect it to have been done responsibly.

Maybe, I should contact the council for an audit trail of where my waste goes, but I'm pretty sure the council would say "they collect it, and they dispose of it".. and way back when in the mists of the negotiations for that lowest rate possible waste collection service there was a plan probably waved about in front of a Councillor or clerk and it was accepted as the planned disposal method.

And across the whole country there will be similar, if not identical, sets ups with each and every council, from London to Llandudno, from Nottingham to Norfolk, everywhere in the UK the waste is collected and managed by councils.

So this piece of journalism by the BBC, though informative and ghastly, is really pointing the stick at the wrong folks, we can't opt out of council waste collection, one can't selectively only pay for part of the services afforded by our council tax.  If we could then one would be able to opt in and out of anything, chaos would reign.

The responsibility to dispose of this waste therefore, rather than it end up in the ecosystems of our planet, is that of the collecting agent, they took our money for it, we put our trust that its being fulfilled, and if not perhaps those councils need to be brought to account, rather than this kind of video make me feel guilt.

For I do feel guilt.

But there's very little practical steps I can take to dispose of my waste through any other channels, or companies.  I can't incinerate it myself, I can't bury it anywhere myself, I can't recycle things myself, they are large industrial tasks which is why I pay my fee and clearly hope for the best.

But the best isn't good enough.  Councils of the United Kingdom, sort this one out.

Is YouTube Advertising AI Imploding?

As of May 2025 you can no longer read this post..... Shame on you Alphabet!

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On February 28th, 2023, this post was somehow highlighted and marked by blogger as being in violation of their adult content policy; I do not believe this post at all to be in violation of their policy, specifically:

Your content has been evaluated according to our adult content policy. 

I do not find any of my content below to be in violation, I do not know what algorithm, person, or perhaps company flagged my content on this post, I could take a guess from my commentary that the company in question is the issue.

However, I would point out that I clearly show these in appropriate adverts were embedded in YouTube pages, which is a google company, and I have had my post censured on blogger; also a google company.  The irony of this is now lost on me.

I therefore repost my content, with this new passage at the top, to be clear that I will not be silenced.

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We've all see the adpocalypse and it's effect on our YouTube Channels; not only from advertisers pulling out of YouTube and google cutting us small fry video makers out of the monetisation features but also this new strange wave of advertisers.

Now, I have no objection to Udemy, but really do I have to see their advert every five minutes?  I have some objection to Polish government based advertising I've seen as well both pro and con sides of other political advertising.

However, today, YouTube has hit a new low for me, watching a video related to second hand server hardware, look at the advertisement plastered on the bottom of the page!

Yes you're not mistaken, this is a category in appropriate, audience in appropriate, utterly and totally in appropriate for YouTube advert for Mature Women who always want to fuck... Yes, that's the long and the short of it, or the schlong of it....

And I am utterly flabberghasted this is the bottom of the barrel from YouTube in their advertising campaign, if this is the depths of depravity they're willing to stoop to then one really can't help but feel they've totally lost their way.

It seems the YouTube evil AI has intrinsically linked server or home networking enthusiasts with wanting to date mature women who have no moral compass, because going to another page, here's ANOTHER example of the same advertiser...

I'm interested in whom is able to post this inappropriate advertising to YouTube, and I want to confront them with it, when they themselves are willing to censor and judge others, when they're willing to kick people off channels, and when they're seemingly not in control of their own systems; as any human would surely have spotted these are perhaps not the most wholesome things to advertise on a platform like YouTube you can understand why people currently have so much hate for YouTube's policies...

Clicking the think then where do we go?

The bottom of this page we can then find a company name:

Who are Bulova Invest Ltd and how do they get away with advertising this junk on YouTube?  Well, there's no contact or company information on the page beyond this copyright notice so lets take a look what a search turns up.

A post office box in the British Virgin Islands... Oh My... They have a whole gaggle of unsavoury sites... "upforit.com", "sexeronde", "fattychaser", "bediscreet", "yolovers" to name a few... And they go to some lengths to hide who they are, if you copy the above text (from the yellow screen shot) you will not get "Bulova Invest Ltd" you will actually copy the text "dtL tsevnl avoluB" obfuscating easy paper-trail checking & accountability.  It is just so seedy, so dodgy, its below bottom feeding.

So YouTube allowed out of control posting of any content, which had a lash back to loose advertisers, their reaction was to restrict those few inappropriate posters, but the social media cat was out of the bag so they lost mainstream advertisers, and so now they have more work to police a minor few for stupid video posts, less revenue, and hence are forced to take on inappropriate advertisers like this, it seems like the trip down the rabbit hole is only half complete... Is YouTube self imploding?

Its a farce, bad posters got rewarded to went off the rails, advertisers fell out of line, small video producers got "punished" for this really and now the advertising is inappropriate?!?!  Its a positive feedback loop in that YouTube AI to just really really turn me off of the platform, or perhaps worse still for their bottom-line, to reinstall an adblocker...

I've tried always to avoid blocking adverts, as a small producer myself I know how important those ads were, but now... I'm not going to have this kind of crap advertised in my face.

Virgin Media : Poor Internet Speed Misery

You know that moment in Misery where Annie (played by the excellent Kathy Bates) raises the lump hammer to Paul (James Caan's) ankles?  That hopeless moment, where you know what's coming, and she's determined this is the best, and he's helpless to change things....

Yeah, his feeling at that moment is the same feeling I get whenever I try to solve my service problems with Virgin Media.  I've tried in the phone centre, they either won't talk to me, or deny I'm an account holder - the account being in my wifes name, but I'm a registered up user of the account etc etc.... Or they simply deny there's an issue....

"I can ping you now sir"....

Really, a few ICMP packets get through and you think it's a-okay do you?

Or I get told, reboot your superhub...

Or variously asked "are you on wifi or wired"... It makes no difference when the speed recorded by either is less than 2mbits!!!

And I've just been told in a reply on twitter "If you have been told about an Area Issue were you given an estimate as to when the issue will be resolved"... I've not been told anything about any area issues, nothing, nada, zip.

Therefore I'm still not best pleased, remember I went down from paying through the nose for Vivid200, as I never ever got anywhere near 200mbits/sec ever.  I did record regular speeds of around 34 to 50 mbits, therefore the safer, more cost effective option was to pay for Vivid50.  Simple, see, simple logical option, if they can't meet the expectations of their own service, play the system at it's own game.

However, it seems that in reality, Vivid200 should be labelled Vivid50, and Vivid50 itself should be called Vivid1... Because breaking the 1mbit/sec barrier seems to be too much for it.

I have therefore decided to create something anyone can interpret, a chart... Managers love charts... People can interpret charts....

This chart is going to record the internet speed (recorded from my linux server, on my wired Cat5e directly to my 1gigabit router, which is directly wired to the Virgin Media Superhub 2 set into Modem Mode).  No wifi, no confusion, no bull, and my router has pfSense, so I can see there's no shenanigans, just the pure speed through put.

I'm going to record the speed with "speedtest-cli", which you can see yourself how to install here.

I will collect my results by running a python script, which runs the speed test and outputs the time, the upload and finally the download speed into a CSV file.

Find the source on my github... 

import subprocess

import time

from time import gmtime, strftime

# Open a simple text file for writing the result

resultFile = open("speedtest.txt", "a+")

while True:

# Header text & placeholders for our result

print ("Starting Test...")

timeStr = strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", gmtime())

downloadSpeed = ""

uploadSpeed = ""

# Action the process to test our speed

# capturing it's output

result = subprocess.run(['speedtest-cli'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)

# Process the output into text & split the text

# at each new line character

btext = result.stdout

text = btext.decode('ascii')

lines = text.split("\n")

# For each line, check whether it is upload

# or download

for line in lines:

# For Download, take a split against space

# and the middle value is the speed

if line.startswith('Download: '):

speedParts = line.split(" ")

if len(speedParts) == 3:

downloadSpeed = speedParts[1]

# Likewise for upload, the middle  value is

# the tested speed

elif line.startswith('Upload: '):

speedParts = line.split(" ")

if len(speedParts) == 3:

uploadSpeed = speedParts[1]

# Print our output result as a CSV

print (timeStr + "," + downloadSpeed + "," + uploadSpeed)

# Write the result to a file also

resultFile.write (timeStr + "," + downloadSpeed + "," + uploadSpeed + "\r\n")

resultFile.flush()

# Count down until the next test time

count = 10

while count > 0:

# The line is repeated, so we use the end=""

# and a return carriage to print over and over

print ("\rTime until next test " + str(count) + " seconds", end="")

time.sleep(1)

count = count - 1

# Print a new line to stop the next text appending

# on the time count down line

print()

I will then load this CSV file into a spread sheet and create a chart, here's one I created earlier with 5 test data points.

The blue-line is where I'm most concerned, that is my download speed, as you can see within three minutes I had quite a difference, ranging from a high of 2.24 mbit, to a low of 1.23 mbit.  Upload speed has been more consistent giving a measly 3.5 to 4.0 ish.

I already know where VirginMedia will take the conversation, they will talk about "based on average peak time download performance".  However, I want to immediately counter that their speed information states that speeds are based around "Movie based on 4.1GB file size a single user and wired connection", and this chart is provided.... 

Average download speed at peak time (8pm to 10pm) the time's I have mostly messaged to them on twitter are sub 1mbps... Right now at just before 11am they are still reporting as extremely low.  And yes, this server is the ONLY machine on in the house, the wifi is off, the other wire into this hub removed, there is one wire to one machine and one wire to their Superhub...

And yes, I can get 1gbit disk to disk over NFS on this hub, the wires to and from it to the machines are perfect, and I've also swapped the wire to the superhub.

I'm going to run this for a few days, and see what speeds we get in the dead of night, or early mornings, and see if there is a pattern.  I have known for years Virgin will throttle speeds, however, their table of speeds is labelled "Average", one can only believe we're on the lowest ebb of that bell curve, and I am not a happy customer.

British Gas's Zero Bills

On the 27th October, I sent a post out putting a shot across the bows of British Gas, so tired am I of them.

Today however, my post bore fruit, for after paying everything, sorting everything and being assured their systems are in order, I've not only received an email bill, but a red reminder to pay...

You want to see the bill?....

You Ready?...

Wait for it.....

Yes, its a bill for zero... And a demand for zero... and after giving them a call and explaining the operator, a lady whom I could hardly hear because of the background chatter, said... "Well you have to pay the bill"...

Right, okay, an envelope of absolute vacuum will be winging it's way to you now.  Fucking ass clowns.

We move next week, so I'm excepting to give them the tennant of the other house's final reading and then just dump them like hot shit.

Michael Bay - Turtles

I'm a little bit tired of seeing Michael Bay films... And his next turn has been floated into the sewer of existence, this chap says it all better than me... Not east with the creepy fucking Turtle faces... WHAT THE FUCK... 

http://www.gigwise.com/news/92814/michael-bays-sacreligous-turtles-reboot-gets-atrocious-theme-tune

or this

This ain't fun looking, this ain't good... I'm not even going to watch the film based on this.. Well, crap....

This is how they should look:

How many Garibaldi's

So, how many Garibaldi's constitute one of your five a day?

I ask, because I've been continuing to experiment with biscuits and sweets whilst I code... Garibaldi's are not my favourite biscuit, but they're one of the few, alongside fig rolls & fruit shortcake, with a promise of some actual roughage in them...

Also, they come in those long slices, which scores marking the slice into 5 biscuits.. Do you eat the whole slice, or just a few biscuits?

The multiboxer has also had new work, the filtering works, we can transmit strings, it will auto logon... Quite neat watching 39 clients open, move and then log into their respective games.  Next is a hot-spot mouse clicker, to let us select a window remotely and click on it, so we can potentially accept quests on all clients together...

Sky Internet Customer Service Sucks

I've had a very busy few days, I mentioned a certain bank dragging their feet, well all is forgiven they've got into gear and are getting on with things.  However, not before I've been accused by the party on the other side of this transaction - a transaction wholly out of my hands - of being a time wasting bastard.  Hey ho.

I'm also investigating issues with the in-laws ADSL, now I hate ADSL, I hated it when it was ISDN and I hated dial-up even more before that.  I have, since 2000, exclusively used cable internet services, they're faster and for the most part more reliable, for instance cable in my area has been fiber optic since around 1996 when it was laid.  Not like the Johnny Come Lately British Telecom offering of "Fiber has arrived".. yeah, well I've had fiber a long long time slow coach.

The issue with the in-laws connection though is a case of the utter diabolical service from Sky, their provider, Sky's service just piggy backs on BT's infrastructure, and its ADSL based... I hate ADSL... I don't have spare routers for them to try, and I don't have filters or anything like that... so I'm struggling to fix the issue, and the reason is that Sky simply put the burden of proving the fault on the customer.  Its not a case of calling customer services and getting actual customer service.

No, its a case of calling Sky customer services and being told to fiddle with wires, filter and even wall sockets like some giant rubix cube and their telling you how expensive it is to involve BT Open Reach into this situation...

Now, luckily Sky customer services were not telling these tales of woe and foreboding to the technofeeble in-laws, they were telling me, and I batted them out the ball park as the bull shit they are.  Though Sky insist the issue is not their end, its with "your" router.

The router which is sat in their home says "Property of British Sky Broadcasting"... yet sky say it "belongs to you" and "you have to buy a new router"... yet the label on the router says "property of sky, do not dispose, not for resale"... its like... erm.. this is your kit, I'm just a customer paying for a service.

I'm tempted to lay the whole statutory rights on Sky here, because in essence the in-laws have been without a service they pay for, for over a fortnight, and all because Sky are arguing, or trying to rope the in-laws into being stuck with them for a further 12 months contract on the internet...

Anyway, I have an ADSL router to try, and I'm going to strongly advise the in-laws to move to a cable internet provider in the area.  Sky suck, their customer service is the worst I've come across - whilst actually sounding legit - they are so full of shit its untrue, they may as well just let this guy do their support... 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byFhCC2pUEU


UPDATE 30/9/2013 - I finally got them to admit a line fault, I did this by borrowing $1000 worth of Cisco professional grade routing kit from work and setting it all up and running my own reverse line test, when the guy (who, give him his due was helpful) on the phone then tried to argue I had them by the short and curlies because I could see them just try to PING the line... Some line test... and I could see the carrier wave of the ADSL coming and going with no more than a 12% peak it was unacceptably low.  Explaining all this worked (well i think pointing out I had Cisco testing kit attached worked) and now an engineer appointment is booked.

But, not before four very technical phone conversations, not before proving absolutely everything in the house was in order and having to borrow professional kit to prove the point, an unacceptably high level of entry just to get a support call booked me thinks.

So I stand by my statement, Sky customer service, your bar to entry is too high, so you suck!  Support shout be "Have you turned it off and on again?"... "yes".... "Right, we'll come see", even it there is then say a £10 call out charge or whatever.

But to blanket say "no" and then only offer to send out a new router IF they sign up to 12 months more contract.  If it were me, I'd tell you to get stuffed after already having been a customer for 10 years.  I don't need to sign up for 12 more months to prove loyal and worthy of support, I already pay my monthy service fee to be worthy of help!