Category Archives: Tech

“This is a recording”

We started getting early morning spam phone calls on our landlines a few years ago (our house has an apartment for my mother). Early as in 6:30 a.m. early. My mother was not usually out of bed or, if she was, she was getting dressed or in the bathroom, and she would rush to answer the phone. As her mobility decreased, I was afraid this would all end in a fall.

To prevent a possible tumble, I started taking her kitchen phone off the hook every morning when I got up. I’d hear a dial tone followed by a ring noise and then a voice telling me to hang up and try my call again (apparently known as an intercept message). After the message was repeated twice, a rapid busy signal would start and eventually would go dead after a long period.

My mother would replace the handset when she was in the kitchen and ready for her day, and if someone called to tell her that her Windows machine was acting up or she had won a cruise, she was awake and ready to hang up on them. This was an easy solution to an annoying problem.

We have two phone lines in our house. Our copper line was replaced in 2021 by a fibre optic cable that gives us internet, television and telephone. As my mother doesn’t use the internet, and we are able to wirelessly bounce a television signal from the Bell Home Hub modem to give her television, we decided at that time to leave her copper telephone line as it was.

Until Bell Aliant sent out letters earlier this year. The first informed us that if my mother’s copper line broke, they wouldn’t fix it and my mother would have to get a fibre line, which was fair enough, I suppose. That was followed a month later by another letter saying they would be cancelling her phone service by August if she didn’t switch to their fibre service. A classic Bell passive-aggressive move.

As we already had the fibre line and Home Hub in our house, it was an easy matter of some magic person left over from Island Tel days doing some programming at the Bell Aliant office in Charlottetown and rerouting my mother’s phone number to our modem (each of the Home Hubs has room for two phone lines). We lucked out again and had a tech come to our house (another Island Tel vet nearing retirement) who was able to make things work in our basement to easily route from our modem to my mother’s phone.

The morning following the switch, I picked up my mother’s handset expecting to hear the regular pattern. As I moved around her kitchen, I heard the dial tone followed by the signal to warn that the phone was off the hook, but no gentle, helpful voice.

I thought that was the end of the voice, but a couple of weeks later I was looking after a friend’s house while she was away and remembered she still had her copper line service, so I had one last visit with the Bell Aliant voice:

Anyone know who recorded this message? It certainly sounds like an Atlantic Canadian voice, maybe PEI but could be Newfoundland or Cape Breton, too. Recorded on tape? A copy of a copy of a copy? Let me know what you know, and please try your call again.

Rosa

This beautiful vignette from Peter’s Italian travels sees him momentarily propelled back in time to the backlot at Cinecitta in 1962 and onto the set of a Sophia Loren/Marcello Mastroianni classic, and I’m swooning at the thought of it.

What if we had all agreed to use the internet only to share the beauty we had seen through our days, like digital Damiels and Cassiels?

2020 Bolt EV

My 2020 Chevrolet Bolt EV was part of an August 2021 recall by General Motors to address battery fires. I waited patiently for my new battery only for GM to announce in June 2023 they were ending the battery replacements and would instead be installing enhanced monitoring software in vehicles that hadn’t yet had the replacement completed.

I’d heard George Iny from the Automobile Protection Association on the local CBC Radio noontime show many times, so I wrote to the APA after hearing about the change in recall and was surprised to have a response from Iny himself, who asked if he could use my email as part of an article on the subject, which I said would be fine. I sort of forgot about that part of our exchange until I did a search tonight for the latest information on the recall and found the email (attributed to T.B., cough cough) as the basis of a MoneySense article.

One thing I thought of after I emailed the APA was the potential hit in resale value I could incur. There seems to have been no rhyme or reason as to which cars did or didn’t get the battery replacement, so other 2020 Bolt EV owners did get the new battery and the 8-year warranty that came with it, while I get nothing but software. When it comes time to sell or trade my car, I would expect it to be worth less than a 2020 that had the new battery and warranty, and there will be no compensation from GM for that loss.

I’ve gone from being impressed by GM promising to look after all their Bolt EV customers to being pretty sour. I had only owned one other GM product in my life: an ancient quarter ton pickup I bought from my car-dealer cousin, Warren, to use while our house was being built, handy to pick up supplies for the carpenters and keep construction moving forward, but in constant need of repair so a short-lived possession. Unless GM have a change of heart (which would mean they would have to first acquire a heart), I can’t imagine I will ever buy a General Motors product again. I’m sure Mary Barra won’t be losing sleep over that, though, because I’m old and like to keep cars for a long time, so probably another couple of cars will see me out.

I still like the Bolt EV, think it is well built and have enjoyed driving it, but GM’s absolute disregard for customers stinks like the tailpipe of their stupid Hummers.

Me driving my first zero-emission car, a gift from one of the toy salesman who used to visit to my parents’ general store, 1969. I assume someone stopped me from driving off the step, or was this the inspiration for the final scene in Thelma and Louise?

Rotary Un-Smartphone

Justine Haupt has started taking preorders for rotary cellphone kits and has released a video explaining the whole thing (it includes a great Contact Easter egg!). I don’t need a rotary cellphone, but love that this wildly intelligent and creative person has created it just because she wanted one. The combination of an ePaper display, rotary dial and real ringer bell is so steam-punk exciting!

One seafoam, please.

Earth Music

Canton Becker has released a 1,000,000 hour long song today for Earth Day, on cassette tape, of course! You can randomly skip to a section that no one else has heard before and name a 15 minute section. Here’s Squeaky Ducks on a Summer Evening at around hour 695,203 for your listening pleasure.

I spent part of Earth Day cleaning out a pond in the decommissioned gravel pit on the land we inhabit, gently replacing frogs I stirred up and waving at the one butterfly I saw, seagulls, crows and blue jays wheeling and calling above it all. It was warmish in the late afternoon sun, and I was content in a way I never am in any other place. Water, trees, sky…that’s really all I need.

PhotosRevive

I’ve been a Setapp subscriber for a few months now. MacPaw, the company behind the Setapp service, are a Ukrainian company, something I only learned since the Russian invasion on February 24. MacPaw took many steps to protect their services, and are now using their apps in innovative ways to communicate to their clients and make their voices heard, like this release note for an update that basically was, really, just this note:

A new app showed up on the Setapp service this week, PhotosRevive. It promises to colourise black and white photos using some AI hocus pocus. I popped some photos in to see what it could do, and the results were mixed, but interesting.

From left to right: my great-grandmother Eva Hardy, great-great grandmother Martha Sharp, grandfather Wilbur Hardy and my mother Vivian Phillips, probably taken in 1927. The older folks look pretty good, my little mother looks a bit ghostly.
My great-great aunt Florence Arbuckle, twin sister of Eva Hardy. She was married to a doctor and quite well off, so could afford beautiful beautiful clothing like the dress she wears in this photo.
My mother Vivian and her Uncle Elmer Hardy. The app handles foliage really well.
My mother in my parents’ general store in 1966. Pretty sure they didn’t just sell blue and yellow products! She’s holding a box of King Cole Tea, which has always had an orange and green theme. I think they won an award from the tea company, so this was a publicity photo.

You can tweak the PhotosRevive settings to make things look a bit better, but I’ve not had time to play with it yet. I like black and white photos, or am at least used to them, so probably wouldn’t have gone looking for this, but it’s a fun addition to the Setapp universe.

Certified

The first computer I remember using was a Commodore PET circa 1981. When I say using, I mean I watched as my male junior high classmates used it to play a very slow flight simulator in our Industrial Arts class; it was the late 70s, and girls couldn’t be trusted with high tech gadgetry. I did operate a plastic moulding machine in that class to make a small screwdriver I still use, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

When I was in high school, I took an introductory computer evening course at our local community college, and most of it was spent learning some of the BASIC programming language. I sort of forget, but I guess there weren’t any computer courses offered in my high school at the time, or at least not for my academic stream.

I found it difficult and never programmed anything after that course. It would be 5 or 6 years until I ever touched a computer again. At the time, computers didn’t seem like anything that would ever become important in my life, but rather something that someone smarter than me would study for a specialized career as a programmer.

END

Don’t mess with me, I’m certified!
Some of my industrial art (I did not make the pen, but I bet that was next on the course!)

Eurvosion 2021 #openup

Haven’t heard all the Eurovision finalists who will be performing in Rotterdam tonight, but I’m rooting for Malta and Iceland. I enjoy many types of music, but I LOVE upbeat dance music, and both countries have fun entries.

I’ve been watching Eurovision since 2012, when I used a VPN to watch the BBC coverage led by Graham Norton. Don’t have the VPN anymore, so will either watch the YouTube stream or OMNI Television, who are the Canadian broadcasters this year. Neither of those options will have commentary, so might listen to Ken Bruce on BBC Radio 2 at the same time to learn more about the performers and their songs.

I believe the last frontier of the online world that needs to be sorted out is the ability to watch terrestrial television stations live from anywhere in the world. I would gladly pay the BBC to be able to (legally) watch their stations live, without the cat and mouse games. By now this should be easy.

Ogham

David Sparks points out that the Mac special character and emoji list can be customized in some very cool ways. You can add dozens of sets, including divination symbols, Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform, and the mysterious Glagolitic and Ugaritic. I added the ancient Celtic Ogham set, which I first learned about from Diana Beresford-Kroeger. An alphabet based on trees is thrilling to me.

Trees speak to each other through chemical and electrical impulses, and they speak to humans, too, but we are often in too much of a rush and too loud to hear them. Find the tallest tree in a forest some moderately windy day (don’t try this in a hurricane!), something that is waving gently back and forth like a birch or poplar, and press your ear to it. You might hear the wind through the branches, the creaks and crackles of the vascular system, the roots and leaves, all of it. Trees exist at a different speed than we do, rooted in one place, reaching high, making the best of where they have landed, providing shelter, feeding and drinking, sleeping and dreaming.

We live with hundreds of tall teachers.