The minor rants thread.
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Minor rant: has shown me the exact same ad ten times in the last few days. It's an ad for something I have absolutely zero interest in, and I've skipped it as soon as I could every single time. Yet it keeps trying.
Either the advertiser is throwing money out of the window , or 's analytics are a joke. (Or
)(And it's a TV, so I can't easily install an ad-blocker. Pi-Hole is an option, but
. Not to mention that Raspberry Pis have been pretty hard/expensive to get for months.)
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@Zerosquare said in The minor rants thread.:
Minor rant: has shown me the exact same ad ten times in the last few days. It's an ad for something I have absolutely zero interest in, and I've skipped it as soon as I could every single time. Yet it keeps trying.
Targeted Advertising thread is
Either the advertiser is throwing money out of the window , or 's analytics are a joke. (Or
)(And it's a TV, so I can't easily install an ad-blocker. Pi-Hole is an option, but
. Not to mention that Raspberry Pis have been pretty hard/expensive to get for months.)Consider yourself lucky. I've used the "Stop seeing this ad" function on nearly 97 percent of the ads (with the "I've seen this ad over and over again, please stop" reason selected) and after a month.... it now shows me a unique ad some 3 times out of 61.
If I never see another ad about taking pins out of lava and water, or some asshole talking about how that pins puzzle game is actually real, I might be possibly happy.
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@Tsaukpaetra It varies massively between devices for me. The tablet loves that same advert, but the phone prefers a mix of TV shows and kids toys.
And there's always Garmmalry.
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@dkf I am thankful I haven't seen an ad for that particular piece of shit for a while. It irritates me no end because 1) it encourages blandness in writing for the sake of it, and 2) if you do happen to use it, it vomits up a WYSIWYG editor that may or may not work seamlessly with whatever you were trying to work with, but odds are it won't.
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For a few months, GMail has been warning anyone still using a classic e-mail client without OAuth support that they will be shutting down the "insecure" log-in option, because, apparently, my e-mail client can be easily phished into giving away my account password or something. I'm left with the option of upgrading to something that supports OAuth (which, for e-mail, is so under-specified that one has to hard-code additional per-provider information in order to get it to work, not to mention that Google keeps inflicting breaking updates in the name of security, too) or enabling 2FA on my account in order to use app passwords.
That latter option sounds easy as pie, right? Just plop a secret code into a TOTP generator app and be done with it? Ha-ha, no, this is Google we're talking about. My options are tying it to my phone number (and phone companies never lock people out of their phone numbers, or sell their location data, or tie the phone number to their government ID), adding a smartphone (while smartphones never break or get stolen; also, my smartphone is older than some people currently going to school and I'm not buying a new one on my current income) or using a hardware cryptographic token that I'll subsequently have to lug around with me all the time like some kind of Gollum (do they come in ring variety?), because that's a thing that everyone has, or can buy for pocket money at their favourite corner store.
Once I've done that, then I can plop a secret key into a TOTP generator app, but the primary second factor is likely to stay there. That would be making my account hell of a lot easier to get locked out of for almost no added security (I can still be phished unless I go with the hardware token that authenticates the web site at the same time as the website authenticates me, or so I'm told).
Oh, and that OAuth thingy? Someone has to create a client ID for your e-mail client, and if the client's developers don't want to bother (and I really can't blame them), it's up to you, in just, er, a few easy steps! And it can always be revoked by a bot for no particular reason, just like your YouTube videos or Android apps! It's almost as if they wanted to make it as hard as possible to use anything but approved™ e-mail clients! (Or a browser, preferably, Chrome.)
Sadly, a lot of GMail alternatives can be just as bad. Not even paid options can guarantee you that you won't get locked out because
$BOFH_excuse_of_the_day, with the added nagging feeling that you are a few missed payments away from being denied your online identity. And those usually happen at the worst possible time, e.g. when you're in the middle of switching countries. About the only thing I can trust to keep working is my alumnus e-mail, but (1) it's too close to my real-world identity and (2) it won't ever keep up with the mail volume or the spam load. Also, with my university self-hosting it, I always suspect it of losing messages.There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, of course, but even paid lunch tastes terrible. One could think that we should be moving towards decentralised identity, but those are always troubled by spam & Sybil attacks and, as cryptocurrencies have shown us, always centralise in the end. Time to take one step closer to enlightenment and learn to live with temporary, disposable online identities?
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@aitap said in The minor rants thread.:
Time to take one step closer to enlightenment
We have a thread for that, and NOPE!
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@Zerosquare said in The minor rants thread.:
Minor rant: has shown me the exact same ad ten times in the last few days. It's an ad for something I have absolutely zero interest in, and I've skipped it as soon as I could every single time. Yet it keeps trying.
Either the advertiser is throwing money out of the window , or 's analytics are a joke. (Or
)(And it's a TV, so I can't easily install an ad-blocker. Pi-Hole is an option, but
. Not to mention that Raspberry Pis have been pretty hard/expensive to get for months.)A few weeks ago YouTube on my TV was doing that but with the same two adverts.
Some stupid BMC advert about Autonomous™ Enterprise, and another which was a Christmas advert for a UK clothes store despite it being many weeks after Christmas.
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WhyTF is it so hard to export to Excel with SSIS?
Fucking Microsoft applications don't like each other.
Why can I make a dynamic name with a flat file connection manager but not with an excel connection manager?
Why can I overwrite a flat file but not excel?
Solution:
We have Kingswaysoft for working with Microsoft Dynamics and their productivity pack.
With their excel connection manager I can select overwrite. I write to an excel file that is the "template." It still must have a static name.
Then a copy file task copies from the template file to an excel file with the desired name.
There is likely something I am missing. I've only recently learned how to do some of these things. Prior, I did relatively simple packages with the work being done in SQL.
I really don't care for SSIS or SSRS. I think most of that is how unintuitive they both are.
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"Star Trek" The Ultimate Computer (TV Episode 1968) ⭐ 8.0 | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi
