Be Excellent To Each Other

Thanks, I'll bear that in mind if I don't get a fix from O2.

Yeah, I'd be swapping - go via Topcashback to make it even more worthwhile. Unlimited texts and calls seems extravagant - I rarely use any - but you can go way under £10. And these days it's just a couple of texts to port your number.

I had a similar situation when I had home broadband and two mobiles with the same telco, they just couldn't seem to change one thing without messing up another, it was infuriating.

Moving to a different telco (and then back again when there was a good deal) seemed to do the trick, it was like starting over. It really shouldn't be that hard though.

I had a call on Monday from Theresa at O2's Complaints Review Service in response to my email complaint. Unfortunately, the screenshots of my account that I attached weren't visible, but she understood the problems I was having. She'd had a look at my account said that it appeared my number is associated with both a Pay and Go and a Pay Monthly account, so she was taking it up with the Migrations Back Office Team.

I haven't had a text to tell me to top up on Pay and Go, which I'd usually have had by now, so it looks like the've been tweaking things. I've also just checked on the phone app and the on-line account and the references to Pay and Go have disappeared, but it's not showing my Pay Monthly allowances yet. Perhaps they'll appear when the first DD payment is taken.

They're definitely fiddling with it, my SIM became 'not provisioned' just after I posted the previous update.

All sorted now.

"Drone art"

Absolutely do one.

MIDI channels are my new SCSI id’s.

I can't, I've only got one drone and I've never learned to fly it.

I'd like to cancel please ........... Oh.

I won an Apple HomePod Mini at work, but we already have 5(?) Echos around the house so now I have to sell it.

The cat sitters got confused about when we needed them to feed the cats and turned up at 6:15am and not pm.

We want to change our broadband provider as the internet keeps going down but we can't as the internet keeps going down.

I went to see a theatrical show that a certain lady friend was involved in. It was bloody awful. There's a limit to just how polite about it I can be.

Was the lady your own mother?

Awful because the writing was no good, or because the acting or production were less than skilled?

The latter! It was a charity thing and so I'm not going to be mean about it but I've said a lot of things like "you all looked like you were having so much fun" and "I can tell how hard everyone worked"

You did good to find those positives, at least. Having seen a lot of Am-Dram you really have to let go of expectations Sometimes you find a lovely surprise. The most surprising piece of theatre I’ve ever been to was a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, done by the year 5s at a local primary school when I was about 17-18. It was excellent, brilliantly acted and the staging was *chef’s kiss*. I think about that show a lot.

"We sat through three hours of so-called acting last night and the kiss was the only convincing moment of it!"

Had to go back and check I didn't scan over that the first time, you scamp!

Haha, me too!

It wasn't quite that bad

On the topic of theatres, the New Theatre in Oxford is so proud of its fading 1930s interior that the closest men's toilets to the stalls remain utterly inadequate.

I know I could wander to other parts of the building during the interval, but that's not the point.

I got the batteries changed in my G-Shock and now one of the buttons doesn't work. The shop is a couple of towns over and my car is currently broken.

So I'm having to wear a nicer Seiko to work and I'd be upset if it gets a scratch or scuff.

I don't want 'romance' options in games.

My selfie camera is still broken.

But that was the best bit of Leisure Suit Larry, although I guess that's using the term 'romance' somewhat loosely.

I should have bought two extra TS tickets and then sold them., looking at the resale prices.

Nah, I would have taken two friends.

You have TWO friends?

More iPod classic/iTunes/file renaming shenanigans.

I've been gradually renaming the thousands of music files I copied from my iPod to my Windows laptop and putting them in album folders, before copying them on to my phone, but I had a lot of tracks in playlists on the iPod so wanted to replicate those on my phone. I couldn't find any way of copying those playlists, so I had to manually make notes of all the tracks in each playlist and then manually create them on the phone. I also suspected that I might have lost some of the files I'd copied off the iPod, so plugged it back into the laptop to see if my memory was playing tricks on me.

For unknown reasons, Windows 11 sometimes doesn't really recognise the iPod and neither does iTunes, so I have to keep disconnecting and reconnecting it until it plays ball. After one such reconnection Windows said it could see the iPod as an external drive, but that it needed formatting. It's done that before and I've just hit [Cancel] and started again. This time, not only did it want to format the drive, but when I'd cancelled the formatting, it said drive D: had been corrupted and no attempts to recover it were successful. But then iTunes offered to reinstall the classic software, but warned that all data would be lost. So now I've got a virtually empty but working iPod classic, and have only been able to make notes of a couple of playlists. At least I HAD copied everything off the iPod on to the laptop.

So I thought I'd better make a backup of all the music files on to the external hard drive I bought a few months ago.

It only took a few minutes, but when I looked at the Music folder I'd copied across, Explorer said it was empty. I wondered if I'd made a mistake of some sort while copying, so I was going to try again, only to find that the Music folder on the laptop was also empty, at which point I had a moment of panic. BUT, when I asked Explorer to show me the Properties for the Music folder, it said it contained 4006 files and 393 folders. Then I had a look at the external drive and found that it also had 4006 files and 393 folders. Windows 11 decided to hide the contents of the folders during the copying process. Why would it do that??? And why did it successfully copy the iTunes folder, with the files that haven't yet renamed and copied on to the phone without making them hidden folders during the same copying process?! Fuck knows.

This fresh hell where the plastic caps on drinks are attached to the bottle. Fine if you're drinking water or whatever.

But what if you're having a chocolate milk type drink or one of those yoghurt ones. You have to shake those up so there's going to be some in the cap. So then if it's attached, it's definitely going to spill some of that on you. Like save the planet for sure, but don't make it look like a bird with food poisoning has shat on my shirt.

I hate those attached caps with a passion. You always have to angle them just right to screw the lid back on properly because the 'hinge' gets in the way of it making the proper seal.

Just rip the fuckers off.

Eeesh, I remember trying something like this many years ago - i could never get it to happen in a quick and convenient way, and in the end I just gave up. In fact, my MP3 collection was very poorly curated in all regards.

With the program I use - mp3tag - it's got some very handy extra features including the option to rename the mp3 film from the mp3 tag. And if you get really OCD about these things, which I do, it can do case conversion too. Which means mp3s/tags that are ALL CAPS or no caps can be automatically fixed.

I've completely nerded out on this over the last few weeks. I've completely sorted my collection out including fixing things like when you have two names for the same band (ie - Sick of it All or Sick Of It All), sorting all album artwork and even adding good b-sides to albums rather than having them separate (so, for example, Babble and A Japanese Dream are now bonus tracks on The Cure's Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me album rather than stuck in a giant compilation full of rubbish demo tracks and remixes).

Thanks for that, I'll have a look. I'm gradually working through anomalies with varying degrees of success, but it's a bit like Whack-a-mole at times. I fix one problem only for another to pop up.

I tried Music Brainz Picard, and while it seemed like an OK piece of software and could probably do a job my source collection was in such a mess to begin with that it couldn't really help me unless I did a lot of manual stuff, and I was too lazy to want to do much manually.

But man, it was exciting at the time to willy-nilly acquire a whole bunch of stuff without a plan or regard for what I was really trying to achieve.

After holding firm about denying the children other faddy things (no Prime for you, kids) we relented and let them have some of the Mr Beast Feastibles chocolate bars.

FOUR FUCKING DOLLARS for a relatively small and thin bit of chocolate. And I bought one bar for each of my three kids. It's not going to bankrupt me but I felt pretty pissed off.

It tasted like a cheap and kind of poor chocolate too, like the low to middle range easter eggs. Not bad as such, but not good either, and noticeably inferior to any of the other chocolate brands I could have got at the supermarket for less than FOUR FUCKING DOLLARS. These ones didn't even have amazingly fun names like 'Deez Nutz' either.

But the kids enjoyed it.

My gym is GREAT. It's fully kitted out and they also do lots of classes and stuff. All for £26 a month.

But NOT GREAT because they've changed up their whole booking system to use some sort of app and it's THE FAFFIEST THING YOU'VE EVER SEEN. Also, it barely works because they're not using an off-the-shelf bit of software and instead seem to have had it made for them or something.

Anyway, now everything is much more difficult and unintuitive. It also has at least two separate log-ins for some reason. And it can't find today's classes so you can't even book on the day to avoid the queues which are now much bigger because you can't just self check-in with your fob like you used to be able to do.

SHITE!

Next thing you know they'll be introducing dynamic pricing.

WhatsApp scam warning.

I don't usually post these things because they often turn out to be hoaxes, but in this case it appears to be genuine. And I'm sure members here are savvy about these things, but I decided to post this warning anyway.

Last night I got an invitation on WhatsApp to join a community group called William Smith Study Club. As I’d never heard of it I did a search for it and that showed lots of press and police reports that there are scams going around with these invitations and they've been in circulation for some time. The press reports say that if you join the group you’ll receive an invitation from the group moderator to join one of the discussion chats, but they’ll send you a code that you need to type in to join it. This will allow them to take control of your phone and then send invitations to all your WhatsApp contacts to scam them as well and you'll also be locked out of your own phone.

When I went back to WhatsApp to decline the request I found that I'd automatically been added to the community and a couple of individual chats within it, so I had to exit from the community and delete the chats.



So, if you receive an unsolicited invitation to join some kind of discussion group, or just an unexpected friend request just click on the ‘Exit Group,’ button or the ‘decline request’ button so that you don’t join the group or accept the friend request. If you ever get any invitation to join a group in ANY app in which they send you a code to join, just delete the invitation and NEVER enter a code to accept any kind of invitation for anything that you haven’t requested.

I know there have been a lot of hoax messages circulated in the past, so if you're in any doubt that this might be a hoax please do your own search for William Smith Study Group and you'll see how widely this has been reported.

Funny you should post this as I was added to this community last night.

Annoyingly, WhatsApp make it very difficult to leave a 'community' as apposed to a group chat.

Indeed. And I thought I'd delete/removed all references to it, but last night discovered that I still had two chats at the bottom of my chats list, so had to manually delete those aw well.

I ordered a yellow mobile phone (a samsung z flip 6) thinking it would be bright and fun and bring some colour and cheer to my dull life, but it's a pale pastel-y yellow and the yellow metal actually looks a more like gold and reminds me a bit of one of those horrid 'rose gold' iphones that Lady T's dad had.

I dilly-dallied about thining about sending it back, but by the time I'd installed all my apps and stuff on it and made my mind up. I realised I couldn't be arsed to send it back for another colour and it was too late anyway. At least I'm only stuck with it for 3 years of contract :/

Otherwise it's a really good phone, and I like the watch and the 'pro' earbuds that came with it. I really like the earbuds (Pro Buds 3).

Sandpaper will fix it.

Phone case?

Raises a good point, presumably it's quite a bit more of a challenge to create a decent phone case for a flip-phone.

//edit: Apparently not, lots of 'em about. Most of them look either as ugly as hell, or look flimsier than my excuse for not attending my brother's birthday party.