Notices by Moof! 🔜 T3chFest (moof@cupoftea.social)

Hot take: Toilets should be gendered, but not the way they are now. There should be “Men” and “Everyone Else” toilets

Nobody deserves to have to suffer the smell that we men seem to always create in toilets. No, I don’t know why or how we do it, but we do.

But at least with that gendered split, it’s only some people that are subjected to it.

This post is brought to you from a toilet that is supposed to be sparklingly clean, but still has a certain miasma to it.

A friend has asked me whether I'd prefer to change at Lyon or Valence TGV for a train down to Barcelona.

I'm in two minds, there's advantages and disadvantages to both. Ultimately, it depends how much you like crowds.

So, here's a thread about the two

Today is dedicated to all the Hoopy Froods out there who really know where their towel is.

The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation would like to wish you a Very Happy Day

#TowelDay

So, last night I discovered the hard way that #HomeAssistant does not verify that backup files are not corrupted, even when uploaded to Home Assistant Cloud. This is particularly annoying when your storage device is dying and corrupting files left, right and centre.

I am currently attempting to restore a backup from a few days ago, and seeing if it'll work.

I suppose I’m going to have to implement some way of automatically testing that a backup file can be restored, now.

On the winds again… #CrossBorderFlight

This morning @wendy, a friend and I are on the red-eye to Stuttgart for a May Day weekend trip.

Today’s itinerary: https://moof.space/trip/2026-04-30

We are mostly using this plane as a way of launching ourselves towards the right general area of Germany. There are no direct flights to Karlsruhe from Barcelona, and a train from Stuttgart is easy enough. We’ll be taking the train back to Barcelona this weekend.

But I’m really not awake enough to do proper posting yet, so see you the other side…

(CW: eye contact)

@wendy Don’t forget to turn on airplane mode when in a flight, it might end up costing you money…

In this case, as I flew over Switzerland, it activated a 24hr 500MB data package for 6.05€ :blobcatfluffangry:

I’m told that sometimes Claude can be frustrating. I gather that interacting with it can be quite rewarding, especially when it creates passing tests in your programmes. But sometimes that dopamine rush is not quite enough. Maybe you need a bit of stroking of your ego, or a good pat on the butt when you’ve done well.

So now, someone has now taken Vibe Coding to tbe logical conclusion, and has created an interface from Claude to buttplug.io.

So now the shafting you get from AI is no longer just figurative.

https://github.com/AletheiaVox/signal_bridge_android

All the supply of RAM for the next few years has been bought up by American companies.

This has also affected SSDs, and to a lesser extent SD cards.

GPUs have been scarce for years now, and CPUs aren’t exactly easily available.

Now we have news that all the supply of Hard drives for the year has been bought up. Again, by American companies.

What exactly is the difference between this and the rest of the world getting trade sanctioned on essential tech supplies by the USA?

@CorioPsicologia El ministro Óscar Puente ha anunciado una comparecencia televisiva a las 00:45. Esto creo que será la fuente que más información tiene y que menos polémica marcará.

Por otro lado, lo que ya sabemos y lo que intuimos es verdaderamente terrible.

@CorioPsicologia Por si quieres un resumen, he plasmado los hechos que conozco en este hilo (en inglés): https://cupoftea.social/@moof/115921459899033535

Big high speed train accident near Córdoba, Spain around 19:50 (UTC+1) this evening.

Iryo 6198 Málaga to Madrid derailed onto the second track at a switch near Adamuz, Córdoba.

Renfe Alvia 2384 Madrid to Huelva heading in the opposite direction has crashed into it

More information including disturbing images in any Spanish news site. Here’s my preferred one: https://cordopolis.eldiario.es/cordoba-hoy/sucesos/descarrilan-trenes-provincia-cordoba_1_12916936.html

I’ve just gotten culture shock.

Those of you keeping track will know that I did a Christmas market tour early December last year. I ended up downloading the Karlsruhe transit authority’s (KVV) app and buying a day ticket or two off them.

These days I’m more familiar with German transit ticketing, so I haven’t used the KVV app since then.

And today I have received this SMS, telling me they’re going to delete my account soon.

…

⁃ A company that is systematically deleting accounts after a year?
⁃ That takes their data protection responsibilities seriously?
⁃ That proactively informs their data subjects with plenty of time to cope?
⁃ That doesn’t do so using dark marketing patterns that try to guilt me into staying?
⁃ Or upsell me?
⁃ Or trick me into clicking somewhere as the only way to exercise my rights?

I am agog. My flabber is truly ghasted.

Genuinely, this sort of attitude needs to be praised. It’s been 10 years since GDPR, and this sort of thing is still that rare.

Good Morning all, and Merry Christmas!

@fuzzyfuzzyfungus @mackaj @quixoticgeek But you still have a yubikey sync problem… now you have to remember what keys you added to keychain, then sync them to your yubikey on your keys and the backup one in a deposit box…

@fuzzyfuzzyfungus @mackaj @quixoticgeek Also, a yubikey can only hold 25 discoverable passkeys on it, the type they don’t require a username, and given the number of websites that require credentials these days, that’s not exactly a great thing. Yes, you can have unlimited non-discoverable keys on them, but those aren’t username/password replacements, merely password replacements.

(Source: https://docs.yubico.com/hardware/yubikey-guidance/best-practices/sp-bestpractices-passkeys.html )

Good Morning! Today is Day 1 of the #ICEAgeChallenge and boy is it starting off with a Bahng!

In case you’re not up to speed, the #ICEAgeChallenge was set to me by @quixoticgeek a month or so ago. @darkphoenix decided to join in, as the challenge progressed, and has been a great help in setting the route.

The aim of the challenge is to ride all the 7 active types of ICE train in order of entry into service - :ice_1: ICE 1, :ice_2: ICE 2, :ice_t: ICE T, :ice_3: ICE 3 (403), :ice_3: ICE 3 (407), :ice_4: ICE 4, :ice_3: ICE 3neo) as a run-up to going on the first ICE L that is leaving Köln to Berlin this Sunday.

We are starting at Koblenz Hbf, and our original aim was to get to Würzburg Hbf tonight, changing at Hamburg-Altona. But Deutsche Bahn has other ideas, and has decided to cancel the Köln-Hamburg portion of our train. Even if the replacement service were to be an :ice_1: ICE 1, we wouldn't make any of our buffer options. I'll let @darkphoenix talk a little bit more about that.

Currently, our plan is to get on the original :ice_1: ICE 1 train as far as Köln, and then change onto another :ice_1: ICE 1 as far as Hannover Hbf, where we can hopefully catch the same :ice_2: ICE 2 we intended to catch as far as Würzburg Hbf, arriving at 20:28 (DB Standard Time). Should we need more buffer, there is a later :ice_2: ICE 2 two hours later.

We are taking advantage here of one of the rules we set: We have to take the types of train in order, but we can take several of the same type, one after the other, as long as we don't break the sequence. Once we've taken an :ice_2: ICE 2, we can't go back down to an :ice_1: ICE 1, but we can take several :ice_1: ICE 1s in a row.

In case it becomes useful later, we can also use Non-ICE trains to get us between stations, e.g. Regios, S-Bahns, or even ICs, as they don't count towards the sequence.

Our original, planned route is available here: https://trainlog.me/public/tag/ac3a00b0-1f79-4707-8d8b-5456a0932130

I'll be updating the actual route on another map a little later

On the rails again… #ICEAgeChallenge #Interrail

Today we start off on a thoroughly delayed and half-cancelled :ice_1: ICE 1.

I am ably joined by @darkphoenix and Wendy the DBJUNGLESKOG, and we are busy enjoying the first class cabin of this refurbished :ice_1: ICE 1.

You can follow our progress on the #ICEAgeChallenge map that is available here: https://trainlog.me/public/tag/e94de609-9108-49cd-9c3c-5421472de1ae

I will be updating that map with the real trains I take as and when plans change.

For added meh, the bordbistro is running on minimum rations today. I managed to blag a cup of tea and a croissant off them, but it’s a far cry from the full French Breakfast that is now the tradition when we take the Rhine Valley line in the morning.

CW: eye contact

So, why Koblenz as a starting point?

Mostly, because the Rhine Valley Railway is the most beautiful railway in Germany, and I felt that it would be nice for any trip of this magnitude to go past this stunning scenery.

We tried to fit it in several different ways. There aren't that many ICE trains that go through Koblenz, all either :ice_1: ICE 1s or :ice_t: ICE Ts and we wanted to do it in the daytime to have a chance of seeing the river.

Another reason to pick Koblenz is that this route has the added advantage of going through Bonn Station.

Bonn was the capital of Germany at the time the first ICEs went into service. In fact, the Hauptstadtbeschluss, the Decision on the Capital was voted on 20th July 1991, 18 days after the first commercial ICE service, although it took a further 8 years before the change became fully effective. In 2006, the German constitution was changed to explicitly state that Berlin the capital of the German Republic.

Given that this trip is a voyage through time, and will be ending in Berlin, it seemed appropriate to either start from or go through Bonn early on