Author Archives: daniel

Nine newspapers: one for all

Nine Entertainment’s major Australian newspapers, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, and Brisbane Times, have a soft paywall. You can get some articles for free; some are only for paying customers; and some fall somewhere in between, with them granting complimentary access to a few, before asking for money.

This post is not to tell you about various ways of bypassing the paywall if you don’t have a subscription.

But if you have a subscription to one of these, then you can get access to the other two.

I subscribe to The Age, but sometimes hit the paywall when trying to read SMH or BT articles.

In fact sometimes the links within Age articles are sloppy, and point to SMH. Ditto some of the social media shares I see that are from people who I know to be Age readers. I think there’s something dodgy in the app or web site that sometimes spits out an SMH link.

Then I noticed the articles on each site are replicated to the others. If there’s an smh.com.au/whatever/article URL that I can’t read, simply changing it to theage.com.au/whatever/article works. Same with brisbanetimes.

Not too hard to do this by hand in the browser, but it can also be done automatically with a browser plugin such as Redirector.

I wanted it to preserve the SMH or BT home pages, so I can see what the Sydney or Brisbane headlines are. So I added an exclusion for that.

It just about works, with the caveat that if browsing the SMH or BT home page, you need to right-click and open link in a new tab for Redirector to kick-in with the modified Age URL.

Import the JSON config I’ve listed below, or write your own.

{
    "createdBy": "Redirector v3.5.3",
    "createdAt": "2024-11-12T04:20:41.494Z",
    "redirects": [
        {
            "description": "SMH to Age",
            "exampleUrl": "https://www.smh.com.au/technology/shameful-tech-council-facing-questions-over-richard-white-saga-20241025-p5kla6.html",
            "exampleResult": "https://www.theage.com.au/technology/shameful-tech-council-facing-questions-over-richard-white-saga-20241025-p5kla6.html",
            "error": null,
            "includePattern": "https://www.smh.com.au/*",
            "excludePattern": "https://www.smh.com.au/",
            "patternDesc": "",
            "redirectUrl": "https://www.theage.com.au/$1",
            "patternType": "W",
            "processMatches": "noProcessing",
            "disabled": false,
            "grouped": false,
            "appliesTo": [
                "main_frame"
            ]
        },
        {
            "description": "Brisbane Times to Age",
            "exampleUrl": "https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/business/companies/abc-to-slash-dozens-of-jobs-ahead-of-restructure-20230615-p5dgoe.html",
            "exampleResult": "https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/abc-to-slash-dozens-of-jobs-ahead-of-restructure-20230615-p5dgoe.html",
            "error": null,
            "includePattern": "https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/*",
            "excludePattern": "https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/",
            "patternDesc": "",
            "redirectUrl": "https://www.theage.com.au/$1",
            "patternType": "W",
            "processMatches": "noProcessing",
            "disabled": false,
            "grouped": false,
            "appliesTo": [
                "main_frame"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Hopefully this is useful to others who subscribe to one of these sites.

Printer review turns into commentary on content farming

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My old Canon MP610 is something like 17 years old, and does the job I need it to – sits in the corner out of the way, occasionally used for printing and scanning.

I even got it to work in Windows 10, though I don’t know what’ll happen with my next OS once Win10 falls out of support. (It may be possible as a consumer user to pay for updates, but it won’t be cheap.)

Anyway, I sometimes ponder a new printer. Not that I need one, but if I did, this review caught my eye:

The Verge: After a full year of not thinking about printers, the best printer is still whatever random Brother laser printer that’s on sale.

It’s not just a printer review; it’s a commentary on the new world of AI, content farming, and hopeless Google search results, and it’s well worth a read.

New used laptop

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I just realised it’s the new year, and I should push out some posts that I wrote last year but never got around to finishing.

I’m rarely in a rush to upgrade my laptop – the old one is a secondhand Thinkpad T430 which I got in 2018 – that model was first released in 2012.

It’s been good, and I was reluctant to invest the $1000+ for a new one, so I thought I’d try another secondhand one: an ex-government T480s for $499. i5-8350U CPU (1.7 GHz), 12 Gb RAM, 256 Gb SSD.

This is a big upgrade for me – from then 7-year-old tech to 4-year-old tech. The T480s was first released in 2019. It got good reviews at the time.

Comparing the CPUs in CPUBenchmark.net’s ratings, the old scored 2639, the new 6265, or 2.37 times faster. Up against that is a shift from Windows 10 to Windows 11… which at first glance seems to have more cruft in it, but runs mostly okay… except Chrome, which is a little slow to get going.

(For comparison the new-used desktop that I recently got given has an i5-4670K CPU that scores 5557, but it’s got a much better GPU.)

Laptop setup:

It came with Windows 11. I did a reset on that to get rid of anything funky.
It also came set up to automatically logon as “User” – after creating my own standard and admin users, turning off the auto logon seemed quite tricky, and I ended up using the SysInternals Autologon tool, which once found was quick and easy.
Find the Lenovo site and check for driver upgrades. For some reason the Lenovo tool for checking for updates is quite finicky, and needs to be run as an Admin user. Updates included a BIOS upgrade.
Swap Ctrl-Fn in the BIOS – I just can’t get used to Ctrl being anywhere but the bottom left corner, as on every other keyboard I use
Turn off Touchpad taps. I’m terrible for false clicks on this, though this one seems less prone to it than the T430

Other than these last two dot points, the keyboard seems good, as Thinkpads generally are.

The proper touchpad buttons are at the top; on the T430 they were at the bottom. This may take a bit of getting used to.

But overall I like this new machine. Heaps lighter and thinner, faster, better screen.

(I also recently got a new used desktop machine, courtesy of a friend who was upgrading. It’s a beefy beast, but uses Win10, and can’t be upgraded to 11. No matter, at least for now. 2023 seems to have been the year of new PCs for me.)

WordPress Collapse-o-matic plugin retired

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For anybody using the very handy Collapse-o-matic plugin on WordPress, according to a (slightly vague, and difficult to find) support post, it’s being retired due to ongoing security issues.

The plugin provides an expandable section in blog posts.

Fortunately WordPress now supports this natively via the Display block type. Some people are hunting around for other plugins with additional functionality, but Display looks good to me.

One issue I had was finding which blog posts used Collapse-o-matic.

The solution I found was in the WordPress admin posts page, search for [expand

Then it’s hopefully easy enough to move the relevant content into a Display block, and deactivate the plugin.

For anybody else using WordPress, this is probably a nice reminder to review WP plugins and check for any other vulnerabilities that haven’t been widely advertised.

Fast uploads on NBN

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I had been on Uniti Wireless for some years for home broadband. Costing $79/month, it was pretty good, and is the equivalent of NBN 50/20 speeds. But I really wanted faster uploads, and Uniti recently has had slow down problems, with speeds dropping randomly through the day. And twice this year it’s had outages.

Plus, since I joined Uniti, my street got NBN, opening up more options.

But I don’t understand why it’s so hard to find NBN plans with upload speeds of 40+ Mbps, and why they’re so expensive. You basically have to pay for 100 Mbps or higher downloads to get faster uploads.

Search sites like Finder have the option to look only for 50+ upload speeds, but then all it finds is one 250/50 plan costing $209/month, which is overkill.

Canstar only allows you to filter by download speeds. It does find one 100/40 plan from Belong, which Belong’s own web site doesn’t know about. Very helpful. Ditto TPG. The big companies, Telstra and Optus, don’t even offer fast uploads.

I found a reviews.org page that supposedly highlights fast uploads. Two of the five options listed are only 20 Mbps. Really?

Anyway, after some hunting around, here are a few options I found:

Provider	Plan Download/Upload	Initial monthly cost	Usual monthly cost
Leaptel	500/50	$109 for first 12 months	$129
Aussie Broadband	100/40	$109	$109
iiNet	450/40	$119.99 for first 6 months	$149.99
Superloop	100/40	$75 for first 6 months	$89
Exetel	100/40	$74.99 for first 6 months	$88.99

I’m sure there are more, but let’s not make the decision harder than it has to be.

As I understand it, Superloop and Exetel are the same company, which is why the pricing is near-identical. I’m somewhat suspicious of the amount of advertising Superloop is doing at the moment, and wonder if they have an influx of customers, what support will be like when something goes wrong.

My old provider, Uniti (using fixed wireless) has been pretty good but continually falls down with poor support when anything goes wrong.

iiNet I’ve used in the past and they were very good for support, and their service includes mobile internet as a backup during outages. But their only plan with 50+ upload is 450 download, which I don’t need, and is way more expensive any anything else.

But I ended up with Aussie Broadband, which has a very good reputation for good support. So far so good. 100+ downloads, 35-40 uploads.

Good by world standards? Probably not.

But fine for AU. I’m happy with that for now.

WordPress issues and Cloudflare

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Cloudflare will speed up one web site for free. I’ve used it a fair bit over the years for my main blog, and it seems to have been pretty good.

Recently I struck some issues:

I could not save a post with the word “Casin0” in it. (actually spelt with an “o”; I was referencing the town in NSW.)
Sporadic “Updating failed. you are probably offline” errors from WordPress when trying to save (existing) posts
Sporadic image upload failures

On the first I temporarily gave up and spelt it with a zero. This is still unresolved, and it affects this blog too. It’s probably a web host issue – a security filter somewhere.

But while researching the second issue, I saw a reference to Cloudflare, and tried turning it off. It resolved it immediately. I suspect it was the cause of the third problem too.

Now I’ll need to more thoroughly investigate WordPress caching. The W3 Total Cache free plugin seems to do an okay job.

UPDATE: And then the error started coming back, but only for saving new posts – not editing existing ones. It seems I need to keep investigating.

One problem I’ve had is WP Multi-site seems a bit dodgy, at least with my setup. There are instructions for turning it off here.

Still worth trying turning off Cloudflare if you’re having issues though.

iPhone – directions in Google/Apple Maps not being announced

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I was trying to figure out why my iPhone driving directions weren’t being announced – in both Google Maps and Apple Maps.

All the relevant options seemed to be on – within the apps and in Settings.

As is sometimes the case, the typical internet help articles weren’t any help at all. They made various suggestions for settings I’d already found, along with restarts, reinstalls, and factory resets which I didn’t fancy doing as I had no confidence they’d help.

It took finding this Apple Community discussion to solve it. Bluetooth was the problem.

The phone was sending the audio via Bluetooth, but unless the car was on the BT Audio setting, it wouldn’t hear it and repeat it. I do use Bluetooth occasionally in the car for podcasts, but usually it’s on the radio.

The Apple Community discussion mentioned a setting for audio output. I haven’t actually found that yet, but turning off Bluetooth on the phone works just as well.

EDIT: I’ve also found that Google Maps on iPhone won’t announce directions when the screen is turned off to conserve battery. Apple Maps will continue to announce directions. Apparently Google Maps on Android will do it.

Why are streaming apps so dodgy?

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Why are commercial streaming apps so dodgy?

In the past few weeks I’ve seen two that I use develop major issues with Chromecast (I think it’s a 1st generation model) from iPad (iPadOS 15.7), which I’d have thought is a very common use case.

Britbox, at the moment, flat out doesn’t work for me. You try to start the stream apart from a big logo, nothing happens. And I’m not the only one:

Still not working @Britbox_CA @BritBox_US @BritBox_UK @BritBoxHelpUK @Chromecast pic.twitter.com/sD3ixYbT5n
— enviromo (@enviromo) October 12, 2022

Disney Plus works, but has more subtle problems.

Audio cuts in and out during the credits at the start and end of the program
The subtitles turn themselves on every single time I start watching something – they have to be repeatedly turned off.
Rating and content information only appears at the end of the program
The ”buffering” spinner keeps appearing during the stream, perhaps for half-a-second or so every few minutes – even though the internet connection is strong and fast. Thankfully the audio and video doesn’t drop out.

I’ve also tried on a newer Chromecast. Some of these problems don’t occur on a third generation model, but on the older unit, even switching Disney Plus to the low bandwidth option doesn’t help.

Playing streaming video is meant to be the core business of these companies.

All the others I’ve used recently (apps from all the Australian TV networks – ABC, SBS, 7, 9, 10, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Apple TV Plus*) are okay – how is it Britbox and Disney Plus are so bad?

And why did they work a few months ago, but now they’re broken?

*Apple TV Plus doesn’t work with Chromecast – I use it with an old Lightning to HDMI adapter that I’ve got.

On a Zoom/Teams call? Turn off your sounds

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I think a few people need to know this:

If your computer is set up with audible alerts for email and other events, unless you’re on mute, sounds will blast out for everybody else on a group Zoom or Teams call with you.

This will block out your voice (and anybody else’s) and is very jarring.

The easiest way to avoid this is to turn off these system sounds.

Windows:

Search for “Change System Sounds” – or go via Control Panel to Sounds
Select the Sound Scheme: “No Sounds”

I’m not a Mac OSX user, but it looks like the option is in System Preferences / Sounds – you need to turn “Play user interface sound effects” off.

These settings will let media and audio calls play as normal, but otherwise the computer should shut up when a calendar reminder pops up, or an email or Slack message arrives.

Making text and lines bolder in Paint.Net

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I use Paint.Net quite a lot for mostly minor editing of pictures, including scans.

Scans of text and diagrams tend to come off the scanner with very thin text/lines, so I was wondering how to make them bolder. Thanks to this forum discussion I found a quick one-step way of doing it, without requiring any 3rd party plugins.

From the Effects menu, choose Noise > Median

Set the Percentile to 0, and the Radius to a low value such as 1 or 2. Depending on the file, a slightly larger value might work too.

That’s it. You can adjust the Brightness and Contrast too, but the Median tool makes a huge difference to readability of these scans.