gaming – dangermouse.net

Fixing broadband… and glasses. And some nice food

Friday was online games night with my friends. After a busy day of ethics classes, and going for a 5k run in between.

In one of my classes, since we were talking about the topic of Science Fiction, the idea of AI came up, and what sort of things it might do in the future. One kid said:

Whenever I talk to ChatGPT, I use “please” and “thank you”, to make sure it doesn’t turn against me in the future.

My 5k run was very fast. The day was cold, only 14°C when I did my run around 11am. It meant I didn’t get hot and sweaty, and I managed my second best time ever for the distance, with 26:18. I was very pleased with that.

After lunch I went to pick up my new prescription glasses for use when working at the computer. I mentioned on Tuesday that they’d put the wrong prescription in, making them for close reading instead, and had to change them. I tested them out at the optometrist and they felt better, being good for reading something held with my arm fully outstretched. But when I got home I discovered that they were still focused too close. I had to lean forward uncomfortably in my chair from my regular posture to see the screen clearly. I used a tape measure to measure the distance from the screen to my eyes. The optometrist had said that screen-reading glasses are set for focus at 60cm. Which I discovered to be roughly true, in fact it was closer to 55cm where I felt my vision was clearest. But then I sat in my normal computer posture and measured the distance from the screen to my eyes, and it was 70cm. By the time I figured this out, it was after 5pm and the optometrist had closed for the day.

We stayed in for dinner and I made frittata with mushroom and tomato. After that I played online games. We played Knarr, Welcome to the Moon, Jump Drive, FLip 7, CodeChains (a game one friend invented and implemented on a Discord bot; it involves linking pairs of words into chains and then everyone trying to guess the same word that is being clued by both words on either side of every link), Just One, and Word Traveller. A lot of short games for variety.

First thing this morning I phoned the optometrist about my glasses and explained the problem. I said I didn’t want the second pair that I’d left there yesterday made with the same prescription – I needed it balanced to focus an extra 10-15cm away. They asked me to come in so they could check my eyes with the proposed correction to ensure right distance.

So after my wife returned from the gym with the car, I drove over to the optometrist. They remeasured my eyes to make sure and got the same refractive error, then wrote a prescription for new lenses to set a focal distance at 70cm as I requested. They said they’d get my second pair made with the new prescription and when they are ready I can swap the first pair back for new lenses. Fortunately this is under warranty so it won’t cost me any extra!

On the way home I stopped off at the Italian cake shop to pick up a cake to take to my mother’s place this afternoon. I got a chocolate and hazelnut torte. And then after my wife got home with Scully from her dog grooming appointment, we bundled into the car for the long drive to my mother’s place.

We arrived just before 3pm. My mission was to configure their broadband Internet and VOIP phone, which had stopped working when we deactivated their previous ISP account, as I mentioned on Thursday. I prepared by printing out a bunch of configuration info from the new ISP.

When we got there, I checked the ports of the modem/router. The phone was plugged into the only VOIP socket. The broadband was plugged into the second of 4 LAN ports. I moved it to the first LAN port, and bingo, the Internet came on! I could browse websites and access my mother’s email. That was easy.

But the VOIP phone still wasn’t working. I had some configuration information to enter into the modem, changing the old ISP server and proxy settings and entering a new VOIP password. I tried this, but it didn’t seem to work. I fiddled around a bit with it, but after a few minutes decided to contact the ISP phone tech support. I chose the new ISP for my mother because I’ve been very happy with their support on my own account, and they were brilliant again.

I got a very helpful guy who did some remote diagnosis stuff and then asked what router I was using. I said it was one supplied by the previous ISP. He said it’s possible that the VOIP was locked to that ISP and I’d need to get a new router, but he’d try a few things first. After changing some settings fruitlessly, he put me on hold while he contacted a co-worker with more experience, and together they did more diagnostic stuff and we explored the modem/router’s advanced settings. Eventually he tried turning off the firewall and lo! The phone started working! Aha! The other guy said the router’s default firewall settings were extremely restrictive, and it wasn’t letting the VOIP port through. They asked if I was okay leaving the firewall off, and I sort of hemmed and hawed and said I’d feel better if it was on. So they went back into the configurations and set up a firewall pass-through for the VOIP port, turned the firewall back on, rebooted the modem, and voilà!

We tested the phone, dialling out (to my wife’s mobile), and in (from my wife’s mobile) and it worked with no further problem. Phew! The tech support was really good. They had two of them on my call for over an hour, and they were determined to find a way to get it working without me having to go buy a new router. So kudos to Aussie Broadband – highly recommended if you’re after an Australian ISP.

We left my mother’s place later than we’d expected, and got hungry on the way home. We decided to stop at a place soon after we got off the freeway and back into Sydney’s outer suburbs (still half an hour drive from home). We went to Kipling’s Garage Bar at Turramurra, a place we’ve been to a couple of times before. We had a few tapas-style dishes to share, including arancini balls, and pulled duck with sesame chips:

And roasted cauliflower tacos:

Also some backed haloumi and for dessert a sticky date pudding. All really good. Then it was a drive back home for the evening.

Incognito Art

Friday I had my regular ethics classes, and in the evening board games night with my friends. We assembled at one guy’s place, and the five attendees played games such as Knarr, Faraway, Landmarks. Knarr was new to me, and really enjoyable. But we only played once as it’s only up to four players and our fifth arrived partway through the first game. We played Landmarks I think four times, since we were all keen to give a go at being the clue giver in the game. It’s a frustrating role, but in a socially fun way.

Today I did my 5k run and I managed to record my third best time! 26:26. My second best is 26:24, just two seconds faster. The best is a strangely anomalous 25:59, which I set on a much flatter route that I’ve only ever tried once. And to be honest I’m wondering if the tracker GPS got the distance right. Perhaps I should try that route again some time.

This afternoon my wife and I took Scully for a ride on the ferry.

We headed into the city. The day was cool and cloudy.

From the ferry terminal at Circular Quay we walked up past the State Library, through The Domain (a park) to the Art Gallery. Nearby is a gate into the Royal Botanic Gardens, where there was an art exhibition on at the Garden Gallery: the Incognito Art Show (which I mentioned previously). My wife had submitted three pieces for the show and wanted to see what else was available, and if any of hers might be on display at the moment. They weren’t, but they probably will be at some point over the next month or so that the artworks are on sale.

We stopped afterwards at the nearby restaurant in the Domain to have a drink and a snack before heading home. We walked back and had a quick look around The Rocks while waiting for our ferry. Then we hopped on the ferry and headed home.

The sun had come out and was just setting as we travelled back.

A nice day out, but after that run in the morning and all the walking, I’m pretty exhausted!

Gaming night and SEO “DMCA” link trolling

Friday was games night with my friends. We’d planned to swap online games for real life gathering this week, due to next week co-opting the regular real life event for our online Pathfinder game. But one guy had a cold so couldn’t come, and the rest of us were a bit lukewarm, so we converted it back to online.

We played Space Base, Just One, and Harmonies. I was happy to get a second game of the last one, since I enjoyed my first game of it. And this time I managed to win with three players, so that was good!

Today we drove up to Gosford for a pre-Mother’s Day lunch with my mother and brother. The traffic was truly awful. It normally takes an hour door to door. We left 15 minutes early, thinking we’d be nice and early…. but we ended up 45 minutes late! The trip took a full two hours. The traffic in Sydney getting up to the freeway was atrocious; in the first twenty minutes we barely got walking distance from home. The freeway was fine, moving nicely. But when we got off at the other end the traffic was just as bad as in Sydney.

Anyway, we had a nice pizza lunch and caught up with various things. We gave my mother the gifts we’d got in Japan and New Zealand. We headed home after wards and the drive back was much easier, taking basically an hour.

When I checked my email at home, I found an ominous looking message, which I reproduce here in full, with one redaction:

Dear owner of https://www.dangermouse.net/travel/tanzania2018/day07.html,

I represent the Intellectual Property division for Big Cat Cheetah. We have identified an image belonging to our client on your website.

Image Details: https://i.imgur.com/KDsoHSP.jpeg
Location of Usage: https://www.dangermouse.net/travel/tanzania2018/day07.html

We require that you credit Big Cat Cheetah for this image. Please add a direct and clickable hyperlink to
[link to website removed]
either beneath the image or in the footer of the page. The anchor text should be “Big Cat Cheetah”. This must be completed within the next five business days.

Please understand the seriousness of this request. Simply removing the image will not suffice. If you do not comply within the given timeframe, we will have to start legal proceedings under case No. 72134, following the DMCA Section 512(c) guidelines.

For historical image usage, you can check the Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org.

This is an official notice. We value your prompt response and cooperation. Please correspond in English.

Regards
James Harris
Trademark Attorney

Citi Legal Services
1 Beacon St 12th floor
Boston, MA 02108

james@clexperts.org
www.clexperts.org

I immediately recognised this as ludicrous because—although, yes—there are photos of cheetahs on that web page of mine, they are photos that I took.

I own these photos. I am the copyright holder. If someone is really trying to get me to remove them from my website or demand credit for them, then screw them. I did a quick web search and found that Citi Legal Services does (at first glance) appear to be a real law firm at that address in Boston, as stated on (what appears to be) their web site. But all is not as it seems.

Firstly, if you click the imgur link (it’s safe), you’ll notice that the image they’re claiming I “stole” isn’t even the same as either of my cheetah images.

I dug further and searched for whether this is a legitimate law firm, and found this blog post by someone else who had received an almost identical email, with the details appropriate to their website swapped in. I also found a thread on reddit with the identical template, and advice from several people that this is a search engine optimisation (SEO) scam.

In short, no, Citi Legal Services is not a real law firm. Their website is utterly fake, and as pointed out by the above-linked blog, mostly AI-generated. The address they claim to have is an abandoned building. The “lawyers” don’t actually exist.

This email is a scam intended to scare people into linking to the target website in order to drive up their search engine ranking. Hopefully by reproducing it here I’ll also help any future people who get a similar email and go searching online for advice.

With that done, I’m marking it as junk email and happily ignoring it.

D&D and Election Day!

Friday I had my usual ethics classes, and prepared for a night of Dungeons & Dragons with my friends. I had five of them over to my place and we played from 6pm to about 10:30.

In the last session they’d started to deal with the curse placed on them by the God of Swords: kill 9 people in 9 days with 9 different swords, or die! Now they had a lead from an old sage who wanted them to recover some magical artefacts from an ancient vault hidden in the hills a half day’s ride from the town they were in. He said there were rumours that the place was now overrun with snake people – suitable targets for despatching with swords if they got the chance.

They reached the hidden vault and found their way in via a ruined lookout tower, and discovered a large chamber almost filled with what looked like a black rectangular block of absolute darkness. They figured out it was solid and highly magical… and there was a giant horned skull resting on top of it. Needless to say there were plenty of shenanigans and some fighting against snake people and some cool magical things, and we all had a great time!

This morning I got up and collected the groceries from the supermarket. Normally I do this on Friday but for the third week in a row something was happening so I had to postpone to Saturday. I went for a 5k run, and I pushed myself and recorded a time of 27:02, which I’m very pleased with. I ran past a polling place, because…

Today is the federal election. We’d already voted back on Wednesday, so didn’t have to head out to a polling place today, which was nice. I read a story that for this election 47% of the electorate had already voted prior to today’s official election day. This is a record number of pre-poll votes. It’s good that we make it so easy for people to vote.

It’s now 2 and a bit hours after the close of polls in eastern Australia and in early counting it looks like our left-leaning Labor government is going to win with an increased majority. There’s a big swing away from the conservative Liberal Party, and it seems certain that their leader Peter Dutton will lose his own seat in Parliament. This is a big change from before Trump was sworn in as US President in January, when the conservatives were leading all the polls. Our swing back away from the conservatives hasn’t been as stark as in Canada at their election last week, but Trump definitely had an effect, causing Australians to react by also rejecting our own conservative party.

We shall see the full results in the coming days.

Games night, games day

Friday I had my usual four ethics classes, continuing the Antarctica discussion. I found this topic a bit tricky to keep the kids engaged, so I rejigged some of the questions to prompt more detailed logical thinking and get their brains working more. Like thinking about what possibilities might happen when the Antarctic Treaty comes up for renegotiation in 2048, which I point out is within their lifetimes so they will get to see what actually happens in real life.

Friday was also Anzac Day, so my wife was home for the public holiday, and all the shops were closed. This pushed my usual Friday morning grocery pickup to today (Saturday). After doing that I did my 5k run.

Last night was online board games night, though a few people were away, so we only had four people. We played a new game, Easy Peasy, which is a fairly simple card game. After one game we characterised it as Uno with more complexity and more luck. It felt like a very random shoot-out. There was an extremely obvious strategy (get rid of your high cards as fast as possible), tempered by random chance deciding if you could manage to do that or not. Needless to say we didn’t bother playing it again. I can’t even recommend it for a kids’ game, as it’s significantly more difficult to learn and understand the scoring than Uno, for no more fun.

After this we played some of the usual suspects: A couple of games of Jump Drive, Just One, It’s a Wonderful World (which I won!).

Today I played a game of Root with my wife. She played the Marquise de Cat, I played the Eyrie, and we used a clockwork bot Alliance, with no Vagabond. We also tried the winter map for the first time ever. It was a super close game. I won, but my wife could have won on her turn before mine if she’d only had a bird card in and, and if I hadn’t won, the bot Alliance would have won next turn.

For dinner I made okonomiyaki, which we haven’t had for a while. Yum!

Board game learning night

Today was Good Friday, but unlike most people I didn’t have a day off work. I had two ethics classes in the morning, and two in the afternoon. But in between I got to do a long walk with my wife (who had the day off work) and Scully.

After the last class I went over to a friend’s place for our fortnightly board games night. But since most of our friends were off enjoying the long weekend with their families, there were only two of us present. We used the opportunity to teach each other some complex games that we’d been stalled on learning. I taught him Root, and he taught me Spirit Island.

I also spent some in between time writing up the log of our last Dungeons & Dragons session, in preparation for the next one, scheduled in two weeks time. I divvied up the treasure and awarded experience, and most of the characters will be going up levels… or at least they will be when they get time train! At the moment they’re too busy dealing with a death curse placed on them by the God of Swords to take time out to train, so they’re going to have to defer levelling up until they (or if they) manage to avoid dying from the curse.

Chicken fried rice and board games night

Today is online board games with friends. My wife is also out having dinner with her friends, so I’m minding Scully at home. We went out together (me and Scully) for an early dinner before my wife left.

We walked up to the new shops area at St Leonards. I was thinking of trying the chicken place again for a kebab wrap or a burger. But next door was a Chinese place that did noodles and rice dishes. I grabbed a table outside and tied up Scully and went in to order. I tried the satay chicken fried rice. The woman behind the counter was super friendly and came out to say hi to Scully and bring her a bowl of water. The serving size was very generous and not expensive. It was nothing super special, but decent and filling and good value, so I’m happy with that.

Back home and we’re into our online games. I’ve played a couple of games of Jump Drive, then won my first ever game of Marrakech, which was nice. I’ve played this game many times and never managed to win before. I think I was lucky with the die rolls though. Then we played a game of Space Base, which I also won. And then Word Traveler. And Harmonies, which I hadn’t played before, and was really fun. I’ve seen it on the BoardGameGeek hot list and was keen to try it, and yeah, it’s great.

Other than that, not much else to report today. I worked through a few things I needed to do for Standards Australia and ISO work, including applying for funding for my trip to Berlin in June to attend the next ISO Photography meeting there. And I tidied up some random chore-type things in my inbox, dealing with tasks like tax payments and setting up two-factor authentication for a site that’s requiring it soon. All the boring stuff.

Board games night and a nice autumn Saturday

Friday was board games night at a friend’s place. I did the usual grocery pickup in the morning, followed by four ethics classes. I’m having fun with the current topic of “An Ethical Society”. One of the interesting questions for the variety of responses is as follows:

Imagine that we could somehow make a society where everyone behaves ethically. Would such a society still need laws?

About half the kids have been saying that yes, you should have laws just in case someone does something wrong, because if you don’t have them, then there’s no way to enforce any way of stopping them. A few said you need them just to remind people, to set the boundaries of what behaviour is okay and what is not—even if nobody is stepping over the line, you still need the line to be drawn there. And a third group said no, you don’t actually need laws, because everyone is (according to the premise) behaving ethically, so nothing can go wrong.

After classes I drove over to the friend’s place for games. We played three different games, all new to me: [one I can’t remember the name of, where everyone drafts 8 cards from a central pool, and they combo in various ways to score points – the description is so generic I can’t search for it successfully, and the theme was so non-evident that I have no idea what it was; but it was actually fun and we played it twice], Forest Shuffle, and Kingdomino Origins (which I’d been wanting to thy for several weeks, always arriving at games night after the others, just when they’re packing it up).

Edit: As identified in the comments, the mystery game was Faraway.

This morning I did my 5k run, and for the first time since January recorded a time below 27:30, which is what I like to aim for as I can manage it about 50% of the time. The past few weeks have been messed up by high temperatures and humidity, travel, and being out of practice due to the time spent travelling. The cooler autumn weather is definitely making things feel nicer at the moment.

Scully is doing a lot better. Her poops are blood-free, but still a little soft, perhaps due to the antibiotics. So presumably it was some sort of gastro infection, which the antibiotics are fixing up.

A big task accomplished today was booking accommodation for our trip to Europe in June/July. We’re moving around and staying in five different cities, so had a lot of options to browse through and choose and then book. But we managed to book them all. The next step will be thinking about the train trips between cities and working out the best ways to get tickets for those. Some will be Deutsche Bahn, which I’ve used before and have an account with, but some will be with other rail companies as they’ll be traversing countries like Austria and Hungary.

For dinner tonight I made vegetable fajitas. And I’m baking more sourdough rye bread.

Finding a new Path, and Working Carriages

Friday was online games night, and one of my friends was again running a Pathfinder roleplaying game for us. The previous session was a one-shot to test out the virtual tabletop and playing online, but last night was the beginning of an ongoing campaign. I had a fresh first level character, a halfling druid named Osric “Stormy” Mossfoot.

The general setup was that the PCs all came from separate areas around a village and were there for their own purposes. I was investigating a vague feeling that something wasn’t right with the forest. We met our fellow PCs by taking a common interest in assisting a distraught young woman who was lamenting breaking up with her boyfriend, after a night-time tryst in the forest, where they witnessed some mysterious motes of light rising from the forest floor. This seemed to have affected the young man, changing his personality and causing him to ignore the woman.

We investigated his house, which turned out to be the home of his parents, wealthy jewellers, who were almost alarmingly welcoming. They said he’d got up that morning and headed off east. The only building to the east was an abandoned church, which we poked around in enough to determine that the ground floor and cellar were both so dust choked that clearly nobody had been in either for years.

We convinced the young woman to accompany us into the forest and show us their trysting spot, ominously named “Nana’s Grave”. As we approached, we had to fight a few shambling zombie-like creatures, overgrown with vines. And as I used one of my druid spells, we witnessed motes of light rising from the ground! With the zombies defeated we approached nana’s grave itself, only to find a six-foot deep hole in front of the headstone. There were also a couple of other similar combats. The woman mentioned there was an abandoned cottage that belonged to Nana nearby, and we took a look there. There was nothing on the ground floor, but we found a trap door leading down to a dark cellar… And there we paused play for the evening until next session!

Early on Friday I picked up the groceries from the supermarket. Fresh figs were cheap, so I got a pack of those, and when I had some later they were really delicious. And I had four ethics classes during the day before the gaming.

Today the weather forecast was dismal, up to 90 mm of rain, with very heavy falls. I went for a 5k run anyway, in the steady rain around 9am, since I hadn’t done a run for two weeks because we were in New Zealand last weekend. It was cooler than other recent runs, so actually not that bad. Just very wet.

After a shower and changing into dry clothes, my wife and I drove over to Carriageworks Farmers Market, braving the rain with Scully. This market is fairly fancy, with a lot of stalls selling “gourmet” produce and foods. I got a trout and horseradish pie to eat for lunch, and a strawberry cheesecake babka as a sweet treat afterwards. We also bought some vegetables, including some special “Queen May” potatoes for roasting up for dinner tonight.

Along with the potatoes we roasted sweet potato, pumpkin, and some spiced chick peas. And just steamed some broccolini to go with it and provide some greens.

The rain eased off after lunch too, rather than intensifying as we expected. So we managed to take Scully for an evening walk without getting too wet – it was a very light sprinkle by then.

And in other news, the Prime Minister called the next Australian federal election yesterday. We go to the polling stations on 3 May.

Games night and new lights

Friday morning I did the first regular grocery shop since we got home from Japan. It was a big order. When I picked it up from the supermarket, the friendly woman there who always says hello told me that it was her last day working there. She’s moving up the coast for semi-retirement, and working reduced hours at the local supermarket branch up there. I don’t think I ever knew her name, but I wish her well.

After my ethics classes, it was gaming night. I took Scully with me to a friend’s place – my wife had a dinner out with her friends. We played a couple of games of 7 Wonders with the Cities expansion – the first time I’ve ever played the game with any expansion set. It was pretty fun, and I managed to win the first game, though did poorly in the second one. Then we played Azul: Queen’s Garden. I’d brought this game from home, but hadn’t played it in a while and had to refresh myself on the rules. Unfortunately I botched one rule and didn’t discover it until the second round, but from then on we played correctly. I ended up coming a poor third of four players.

This morning I went for a 5k run for the first time since leaving for Japan. I didn’t push too hard, but was pleased that my time wasn’t unusually bad.

After lunch my wife and I walked down to a lighting showroom that is not too far away. I’d been thinking about replacing our old boring light fittings with something a little more stylish, and possibly getting one with an extra bulb for increased brightness in the living room area. Since we moved from incandescents to smart LED bulbs, they’re not quite as bright and I miss the brightness when doing things that require concentration, such as playing games (board or D&D) on the dining table.

Anyway, we looked at hundreds of light fittings that were in display and tried to find the intersection of our preferences. There were some styles that I liked that she didn’t like, and vice versa, but we eventually narrowed things down to some that we were both happy with. The lights need to come from their warehouses, and the guy said that one major warehouse was in Brisbane, which is being affected by Tropical Cyclone Alfred, so it might be some time until we get all the lights. But we’re not in a rush, and they should be available in a couple of weeks or so.

That’s the other big news here in Australia. Cyclone Alfred hit Brisbane overnight and fortinately it lost strength just before making landfall, so wasn’t as intense as initially expected. But it’s moving very slowly and will dump a lot of rain on the area over the next two days. There’s a lot of flooding and fallen trees and power lines, which will take weeks to repair. One man is missing, suspected dead, after being washed away by floodwater.

The tail end of the cyclone will hit Sydney over the next couple of days too, as the tropical low moves south. We’re expected to get heavy rain, mostly on Monday and Tuesday, but no damaging winds thankfully.