WTF Bites
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
@BernieTheBernie I'm afraid my pizza might be cold by the time it gets delivered from Nigeria.
Are you sure they will really deliver it?
Anyway, be prepared to pay lots of fees before the contract will actually be signed...
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TIL: Steam has a "music" player.
I send a few keystrokes to the wrong window (Steam), and weird sounds started happening. Apparently I had managed to activate the built-in music player that I didn't know it had.
Took me a few minutes to hunt it down (mainly due to false leads on Google). That was a good few minutes listening to the awesome soundtrack of
that steam had found somewhere in a random folder in one of its games.
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@BernieTheBernie said in WTF Bites:
I found a thread in an OpenStreetMap forum where the low quality of OSM's search gets discussed.
A funny example there is searching for "pizza":
pizza | OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap is a map of the world, created by people like you and free to use under an open license.
That's exactly what anyone would expect, isn't it?
Maps from the more regular providers like Navreq (now Here) or TeleAtlas are proper databases. Each layer (streets, houses, forests, rivers etc.) has defined attributes and foreign keys to the administrative areas. Some country-specific logic is still needed to do proper geocoding. For example usually the town in address corresponds to an administrative division, but e.g. Brussels (the big one in B⯀⯀⯀⯀⯀m) is several municipalities that nobody knows by name, so the map has a note that these are collectively known as Brussels. Or in most places street names are unique in towns, but not e.g. in Russia, so you need to add disambiguation by district, but you can't just do that everywhere, otherwise you'll get long streets that have unique names, but span several districts, broken up. Nevertheless the structure is regular, so creating rules that do a decent job of address resolution isn't too hard.
In contrast, OpenStreetMap is a steaming pile of slowly rotting free-form tags. There is some documentation on what tags to give to what, but of course people forget or make typos or whatever, and then someone tries to clean it up with various scripts, but it's still pretty messy. And then the nominatim tool that searches it is, well, let's say not stellar either.
I consider it a miracle that https://en.mapy.cz/ managed to build something working on top of it—they started with something commercial (I think Navteq) for Czechia and Slovakia, and then started updating it themselves, but for the rest of the world they started with OpenStreetMap, and somehow managed to get it to a practically working state (they also have someone who still remembers how to draw maps to be useful, which is a big bonus).
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Or in most places street names are unique in towns, but not e.g. in Russia,
Or London, due to it consisting of lots of smaller towns and villages that have been consumed by the urban sprawl. A fact I discovered when trying to get a night bus home and my London transport app thought a bus would be able to teleport from SomeStreet in SW1 to SomeStreet in E17
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Or in most places street names are unique in towns, but not e.g. in Russia,
Or London, due to it consisting of lots of smaller towns and villages that have been consumed by the urban sprawl. A fact I discovered when trying to get a night bus home and my London transport app thought a bus would be able to teleport from SomeStreet in SW1 to SomeStreet in E17
Yet in other places you have to sometimes combine several street names to get a usable address: what you'll usually find on the street sign of a side street here is "nth Lane" of which there are at least dozens in a medium-sized city so it's absolutely useless without the name of the main street. Took me a while to understand it's basically the same scheme in Sri Lanka as in Laos because when I looked for houses I got a real estate agent who didn't seem to understand this and gave me only the lanes as "address" and was surprised I couldn't find them.
At least Lao places usually have a semi-sane house numbering scheme while SL is pure chaos. The house number directly following mine is 300m away in a densely populated area and on a different street. Apparently they numbered the lots before this street (that doesn't follow the "lane" scheme anyway) got a name of its own so our place was numbered as belonging to the main street
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@LaoC one wonders why they even bother with addressing if they're making it so ambiguous.
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@LaoC one wonders why they even bother with addressing if they're making it so ambiguous.
Keeps the postman job interesting. Supposed to help with dementia.
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@LaoC feels more like dementia simulator.
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At least Lao places usually have a semi-sane house numbering scheme while SL is pure chaos. The house number directly following mine is 300m away in a densely populated area and on a different street. Apparently they numbered the lots before this street (that doesn't follow the "lane" scheme anyway) got a name of its own so our place was numbered as belonging to the main street
Reminds me of numbering in Tokyo. Apparently even the locals have problems figuring it out…
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There are enough subtle differences in house numbering methods that usually the solution to finding a specific house is (a) Google Maps or (b) a randomized gradient descent.
Actually, depending on where you are and how bad information Google Maps has, you might as well just skip to (b) directly.
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I consider it a miracle that https://en.mapy.cz/ managed to build something working on top of it—they started with something commercial (I think Navteq) for Czechia and Slovakia
These two countries also have official database of all addresses, downloadable as csv dumps of proper tables (region, "county", city, citypart, street, number). I have worked with that and it's quite neat.
Except the city of Bratislava, which is bigger than the "counties" it is in. I've been informed that locals call that anomaly "Mečiar's spite". But then again, it's not worse that than two completely independent systems of city districts that Prague has...
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but of course people forget or make typos or whatever
Yeah, just a fresh example in a thread there: German alphabet has the famous
ü. But someone managed to use anuwith a diaresis on top of it, which looks correct for people reading it, but is of cause totally different from anüduring text search.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
These two countries also have official database of all addresses, downloadable as csv dumps of proper tables (region, "county", city, citypart, street, number). I have worked with that and it's quite neat.
Yeah, but for those countries Mapy also started with more professional base map. I was talking about how they managed to make something useful starting with OSM data for the other countries.
Also for Czechia and Slovakia the OpenStreetMap does import those address point tables (and a bunch of other things that are freely available from the government).
@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
Except the city of Bratislava, which is bigger than the "counties" it is in. I've been informed that locals call that anomaly "Mečiar's spite". But then again, it's not worse that than two completely independent systems of city districts that Prague has...
Prague is fairly regular in the maps though. It is a city on the usual level 8 with subdivisions on level 9 that other cities simply don't have. There were trickier places like the Brussels, B⯀⯀⯀⯀⯀m with the zone, or Ankara, Turkey, which is on level 3 or 4 (one level below country, basically) IIRC.
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@BernieTheBernie said in WTF Bites:
Yeah, just a fresh example in a thread there: German alphabet has the famous
ü. But someone managed to use anuwith a diaresis on top of it, which looks correct for people reading it, but is of cause totally different from anüduring text search.Given that
$ unicode ü U+00FC LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS UTF-8: c3 bc UTF-16BE: 00fc Decimal: ü Octal: \0374 ü (Ü) Uppercase: 00DC Category: Ll (Letter, Lowercase); East Asian width: A (ambiguous) Unicode block: 0080..00FF; Latin-1 Supplement Bidi: L (Left-to-Right) Decomposition: 0075 0308(and yes, I copy&pasted from your post)
that is correct, and any software that fails to normalize the two to the same thing is PO
.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
But then again, it's not worse that than two completely independent systems of city districts that Prague has...
Do they have one number for doors and one for window exits?
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@topspin This is something else. Prague used to have 10 districts. Long long ago the administrative division (with separate councils) changed to I think 15 numbered plus a lot of smaller named ones on the suburbs, but post still uses the old 10-district division. Except because Prague is sane and has unique street names it does not actually matter, because the street + number and Prague is good enough address.
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In contrast, OpenStreetMap is a steaming pile of slowly rotting free-form tags. There is some documentation on what tags to give to what, but of course people forget or make typos or whatever, and then someone tries to clean it up with various scripts, but it's still pretty messy. And then the nominatim tool that searches it is, well, let's say not stellar either.
Oh, it's not only the database. The software itself is a pile of
as well. I fiddled around with it for my brother's project and found SQL statements inside the XML definitions.
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@BernieTheBernie said in WTF Bites:
Yeah, just a fresh example in a thread there: German alphabet has the famous
ü. But someone managed to use anuwith a diaresis on top of it, which looks correct for people reading it, but is of cause totally different from anüduring text search.Given that
$ unicode ü U+00FC LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS UTF-8: c3 bc UTF-16BE: 00fc Decimal: ü Octal: \0374 ü (Ü) Uppercase: 00DC Category: Ll (Letter, Lowercase); East Asian width: A (ambiguous) Unicode block: 0080..00FF; Latin-1 Supplement Bidi: L (Left-to-Right) Decomposition: 0075 0308(and yes, I copy&pasted from your post)
that is correct, and any software that fails to normalize the two to the same thing is PO
.Oh, you think that German software does Unicode normalization?
Representative sample:
body = body.replaceAll("\u00C4", "AE"); body = body.replaceAll("\u00E4", "ae"); body = body.replaceAll("\u00D6", "OE"); body = body.replaceAll("\u00F6", "oe"); body = body.replaceAll("\u00DC", "UE"); body = body.replaceAll("\u00FC", "ue"); body = body.replaceAll("\u00DF", "ss");And this is actually one of the better ones, because it does handle U+00DF (ß). It does not handle U+1E9E, but that might be a deliberate decision.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
It does not handle U+1E9E, but that might be a deliberate decision.
It's probably just older than the code point.
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After all those bad words about OpenStreetMap, let me tell you, it offers some possibilities. Not perfect, but it worx.
I use it for my Garmin device, which I normally mount to the stirring bar of my bicycle. OpenStreetMap is the best source for cyclists.
When I still lived in cold north-east Bavaria, I also had some (OSM based Garmin) maps for nordic skiing.
Well, I know how to generate maps from their data, some "features" of the Garmin devices, and how to put things together.
If you need ready-made maps, there are also several people / projects who have done quite good work. As I said, not perfect, but generally quite good.
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@BernieTheBernie OSM is, in most places, more detailed than the commercial maps when it comes to tracks, so it definitely has that for outdoor activities. And there are indeed some applications that manage to provide working search on top of it. But it's pain to make one and the “nominatim” tool on the openstreetmap server itself is the worst of them.
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I guess you are talking about https://openmtbmap.org/ or something
It takes osm data and makes it in to maps for outdoor activities (MTB, ...) compatible with Garmin and other devices
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@BernieTheBernie I've previously used OSM to keep my dad's ancient Garmin GPS updated, usually with decent results. But it doesn't always work. E.g. the OSM-based Garmin maps for Portugal are either messed up or too advanced for the device, and it can't find almost anything, from street addresses to famous landmarks
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
T-Mobile bought out Sprint and ever since they took over I have found it extremely frustrating so sign in to their website. Every single time I have to reset my password. Without fail. It also takes multiple attempts to get signed in, necessitating multiple times that I have to retrieve a 2FA code from my email. Today I found them a bit amusing.
Service has never improved in the past few months. In addition to having to reset my password every single time I needed to login to their website they keep trying to default to an old payment method that has been invalid for at least a year.
Well, today was the last straw. Our phone service was shut off this morning. Which leads me to another gripe I have with them post transition, if your phone service is shutoff and you go to make a call it should at the very least tell you this fact and should probably route your call through to some way to make a payment. But no, it just drops the call. So then you're sitting there trying to make a call over and over again with zero indication that anything is wrong. FFS, at least give some indication of what is wrong and not just silently drop the call repeatedly.
Which I would never have found out this information if they did not make it a gigantic hassle to pay my bill. This last time I tried to pay it through their pay-by-phone mechanism, told it which payment method to use and it still tried to use the wrong one.
I can call in, wait on hold, and they have refunded the fees and all of that, and even given me a bill credit, etc. for the trouble. But there are only so many times I will do that before telling them to fuck off.
So anyway, this morning our phones were shutoff. I go to login to the website and of course have to reset my password as per usual. I go to make my payment and:
Oh, FFS, you can fuck right off. Now I can't even pay through the fucking website. I spend a few minutes trying it over and over again to no avail. Okay, fuck this shit. I've been meaning to switch our service anyway. 20 minutes later I have our service switched to a new carrier and have emailed out instructions on how to activate the new e-sim to those who need it and I am back up and running. Concurrently my wife had been waiting on hold trying to get it sorted out and never received any help. I told her to hang up and if they want their goddamn money they can call me.
I guess this explains why I have been getting lots of calls and emails about renewing my account. I am assuming that the integration of Sprint systems with T-Mobile systems has not went well and they are just trying to get all of the newly acquired customers onto their native system so they don't have to fix the bugs that they have. Well, fuck 'em. I just fixed ours for them.
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
if they want their goddamn money they can call me
This reminds me of dealing with Vodaphone. Telcos are the worst.
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@Polygeekery If I got an almost $700 phone bill, I'd be looking for a different provider as well.
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@cvi several lines, two months of service.
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This reminds me of dealing with Vodaphone.
(all my rants about "I was this
close to hiring a lawyer" are 
)
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
Sorry, can't see what you're saying. I think you put the page backwards into the fax machine and sent us a blank post.
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@cvi
?
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We'll deliver your orders together except for the ones that may arrive early.
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@Rhywden I have a two-wheeled, fully human-powered vehicle in the basement which I used to drive to work and back every day (~20 mins of good exercise each way). Unfortunately during the ongoing health crisis we haven't been allowed into the office for over a year and a half now, and on top of that the local office was declared redundant so I'll probably never drive it to work again.
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Well, TBH, having roof and windshield would be nice in rain and sleet.
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Digging for a source to share elsewhere, disappointingly it turns out to be satire:
If Tech Brands Pivoted To Vehicles | Vanarama
We imagined what would it look like if a range of tech companies followed Apple's lead and added self-driving vehicles to their to-do list.
That was then taken completely seriously:
Peloton CommuCycle Could Make Your Drive to Work a Fitness Routine
Peloton CommuCycle rendering envisions an autonomous vehicle that could be packed with gym equipment by the company by the same name
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
Well, TBH, having roof and windshield would be nice in rain and sleet.
Rain and sleet are surprisingly easy to avoid most of the time if you just have a bit of flexibility with your work times. And you'll need flexibility anyway if you add a box the size of an SUV that you can probably move at walking speed if you're fit. And especially when it's cold outside you'll have a problem with fogging, so people on the sidewalk can't see you being super health conscious—that's what the windows are for, right? Because it doesn't appear to have a transparent windshield. Or at least not close enough that you could see anything but completely straight ahead. Oh wait, she's looking at the screen while riding anyway, so it's probably all drive-by-wire-and-camera. Or just a self-driving car that you can exercise in and that smells like used trainers? Who knows.
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Rain and sleet are surprisingly easy to avoid most of the time if you just have a bit of flexibility with your work times.
And here I am used to a climate where those can keep going all day.
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Rain and sleet are surprisingly easy to avoid most of the time if you just have a bit of flexibility with your work times.
And here I am used to a climate where those can keep going all day.
Yeah, the UK is a special case. It looks a lot better just across the channel though.
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@dkf #britishproblems
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a self-driving car that you can exercise in and that smells like used trainers?
Welcome to the future!
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Welcome to the future!
Addressed in one of the articles:
Vanarama does say Peloton would have to “invest in a state-of-the-art air conditioning/fragrance unit to keep the 'gym smell' at bay from ride to ride,” but makes no mention on whether this thing would be equipped with a shower.
And, well:
If it’s not, it kind of limits its use to after working hours, as we bet no one likes to get into that morning meeting all sticky, sweaty and smelly.
Makes you wonder what people that bike to work do? ...
They're also talking about adding all sorts of gym equipment. As dumb as the training cycle looks, at least you can bolt it down. Weights an similar? A lot of fun once you hit an incline.
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Makes you wonder what people that bike to work do?
Quite a lot of workplaces have showers. Thankfully.
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smells like used trainers?
No kink shaming! I'm sure people pay good money for that!
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
smells like used trainers
Is that a rare demo version of a Nirvana song?
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
smells like used trainers
Is that a rare demo version of a Nirvana song?
Or a Weird Al cover.
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@loopback0 well there is this…
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
Well, TBH, having roof and windshield would be nice in rain and sleet.
thread is 
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