Tech

  • Local rag treats bereaved like software

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities, Tech

    Yesterday’s Bristol Post featured a report of a man found dead at the scene of a camper van fire at the Hengrove Mounds nature reserve in south Bristol.

    Reports about unexpected or unexplained deaths are not exactly uncommon fare for the local press anywhere.

    However, what made this particular incident unusual was the manner in which the reporter chose to represent the subsequent action of the police after attending the incident, as quoted directly from the piece itself.

    Efforts are currently ongoing to identify him in order to update his next of kin.

    Update?

    Use of appropriate language is just as important in writing for the local media as it is to a scientist writing a paper or an author penning a work of fiction. The poor man’s next of kin are not like software or kitchen cabinets!

    For the benefit of any passing media studies graduates pretending to be journalists, you would have been told by any half-decent sub-editor that relatives and the next of kin are either notified or informed of their loved one’s untimely demise. Lumping grieving family in with software that needs a bug fix is not only very bad English indeed, but abysmal writing not worthy of being classed as journalism.

  • Auntie’s hardware malfunction

    Steve WoodsMedia, Oddities, Tech

    Back on 2nd February 2004 singers Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson issued a statement attempting to explain the 38th Super Bowl half-time show controversy, during which Jackson’s right breast was exposed. In that statement the phrase wardrobe malfunction was coined.

    Fast forward to August 2025 and it would appear that the nation’s quasi-state broadcaster has had what can only be described as a hardware malfunction in which the wrong sort of device was exposed.

    Earlier today BBC Breakfast had a long segment about the 30th anniversary of the release of Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system.

    As this is TV there were some visual props on hand, as shown in the screenshot below.

    Screenshot showing Windows 95 upgrade pack, a pile of floppy disks, MS-DOS 6 installation pack and a Macintosh SE

    Observant readers will have noted that the hardware used is in fact a Macintosh SE, a machine manufactured and sold by Apple between March 1987 and October 1990.

    That’s right! It was discontinued five years before Windows 95 was introduced.

    Furthermore, the Macintosh SE also ran on Apple’s Classic Mac OS, not MS-DOS and Windows.

    In bygone times, the BBC used to brag about the accuracy and trustworthiness of its broadcasting. It still does, but that boasting appears to be on very shaky foundations indeed.

    Who else likes the smell of facepalm in the morning? 😉

  • Gemsbok

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Social Media, Tech

    One neoligism (posh for new word. Ed.) that has become prominent in recent times is doomscrolling, defined as the activity of spending a lot of time looking at your phone or computer and reading bad or negative news stories.

    This can naturally be extremely depressing, hence the tendency of folk to seek comfort in online content not concerned with people’s inhumanity to their fellows to alleviate the feelings of despair, be this fluffy cat and dog photos, even fluffier photos of sheep (yes, I’m looking at you, Mastodon! Ed.). These are joined by wildlife and avian photography.

    One of the sources of wildlife images that turns up in your ‘umble scribe’s timeline comes courtesy of Namibia Weather. This features a live webcam at a waterhole in the Gondwana Namib Park, which claims to be Namibia’s first live webcam and regularly posts stills from the feed on Mastodon.

    Waterhole in the Namib Desert with drinking wildebeest

    The wildlife varies by the minute if you watch the live Youtube feed. Besides wildebeest, other large mammals that regularly visit the waterhole are South African oryx, otherwise known as gemsbok Note the striking monochrome facial markings.

    Gemsbok at the watering hole

    Sometimes cats, dogs or even sheep are just not a good enough antidote… Happy browsing! 😀

  • First… for greenwashing

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Tech

    First Group has a virtual monopoly on public transport in Bristol via its buses and GWR Trains. However, its inability to run any service to timetable – no matter how important – has earned it the nickname of Worst Group.

    First Bus was all over the local media at the start of June when it announced the opening of a new bus depot in the city’s Hengrove area for servicing its fleet of electric buses which will eventually total 74 vehicles.

    One of Worst's new electric double decker buses.

    Your ‘umble scribe recently tried out one of the new double decker electric buses on the Number 24 route, which runs between Ashton and Southmead Hospital. On the whole the experience was very positive. The bus was clean, the ride silent and smooth. However, at this point a significant however enters the picture, namely that your correspondent was less than impressed by the greenwashing on the sides of the bus.

    Text reads I'm a zero-emission electric bus

    According to Wikipedia, greenwashing may be defined as follows:

    Greenwashing (a compound word modeled on “whitewash”), also called green sheen, is a form of advertising or marketing spin that deceptively uses green PR and green marketing to persuade the public that an organization’s products, goals, or policies are environmentally friendly. Companies that intentionally adopt greenwashing communication strategies often do so to distance themselves from their environmental lapses or those of their suppliers.[6] Firms engage in greenwashing for two primary reasons: to appear legitimate and to project an image of environmental responsibility to the public.

    Whilst the engines of the new buses produce zero greenhouse gases or particulate emissions, that does not necessarily mean the vehicles are entirely free of emissions, especially when significant elements of the vehicle produce particulates due to wear and tear caused by their function. The two components involved are the brakes and tyres.

    Until First acquires vehicles with zero tyre and brake wear, they should continue to be called out for being less than honest with the (travelling) public.

  • Gone quishing

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Security, Tech

    QR code with link to one of the reference articles for this postIn recent times, QR codes have started to be exploited in phishing attacks, as reported and explained by The Daily Record. This has given rise to another neologism and such attacks are also known as ‘quishing’.

    The phenomenon has been very prevalent in Cymru recently, as noticed by the Rhyl Journal.

    Denbighshire County Council and Conwy County Borough Council has urged residents to take care, as neither use QR codes as a payment method at council-run car parks.

    Similarly, more than 20 fake QR code reports have been made regarding parking meters across the promenade in Llandudno.

    For comprehensive advice on fake QR codes and how to avoid them, plus other scams visit Stop Scams UK.

    NB: The QR code at the top of this post contains a QR code to one of the links used in the piece.

  • Grammer, AI style

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Tech

    From your ‘umble scribe’s social media timeline.

    Social media post by @prettybbuckley reading well no over an image featuring the text but truly wasn’t sure how., which Grammarly AI has suggested should be corrected to was trulyn't [sic]

    We all occasionally need help with English grammar, even we pensioners who have spent decades working at linguists, but the above ‘suggestion‘ from Grammarly could be diplomatically described as unhelpful.

    According to Wikipedia, “Grammarly is an American English language writing assistant software tool. It reviews the spelling, grammar, and tone of a piece of writing“, as well as being a tool for detecting plagiarism.

    On its own website, Grammarly is described as ‘Grammarly, the trusted AI assistant for everyday communication‘.

    On the basis of the above howler, your correspondent would not trust it to write out the alphabet in the correct sequence.

  • New abbreviation in the wild

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Social Media, Tech

    Ever since it was first coined in 2002, the online world has benefited from the creation of the slang abbreviation TL;DR, i.e. too long; don’t read, indicating that a body of text is not worth one’s while to read.

    The abbreviation is used in both upper and lower case versions.

    As the Wikipedia entry states, ‘TL;DR is commonly used in online discussions, comment sections, and social media posts. Writers often employ the acronym to summarize a preceding lengthy text, allowing readers who prefer brevity to quickly understand the main point. Conversely, readers might use TL;DR as a critique, signaling that a text was excessively verbose or lacked clarity‘.

    Official recognition of the abbreviation came some 11 years after its first appearance, as Wikipedia explains.

    In August 2013, TL;DR was officially added to Oxford Dictionaries Online, recognizing its widespread use in digital communications. Merriam-Webster also documented the term, noting its establishment as part of modern digital lexicon.

    Human brain made out of electrical circuits denoting artificial intelligence. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.TL;DR has now been joined by another new slang abbreviation, AI:DR. This denotes that the text in question has been produced by generative AI, that environmentally costly means of producing low quality output (affectionately known as slop. Ed.) without human intervention.

    There is already speculation that AI is being deployed in regional newspaper offices in titles owned by Reach plc, but that would prove difficult to verify as the quality of their content starts from a very low base anyway. 😀

    Your correspondent trusts that readers and the wider public will not be shy in using this new abbreviation accordingly.

  • LibreOffice advises don’t use OpenOffice!

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Security, Social Media, Tech

    The developers of LibreOffice, the most popular free and open source alternative to Microsoft’s ubiquitous office suite, are advising against the use of its OpenOffice progenitor due to security vulnerabilities and its lack of development, German news site heise reports.

    In a post on Mastodon, they point to security vulnerabilities that have been known for years but still remain unfixed. According to minutes of the Apache board meeting in March 2025, there are three security vulnerabilities in OpenOffice that are more than a year old. This has been confirmed by a representative of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) security team.

    Post reads Hi everyone! We still see people on the fediverse recommending OpenOffice, despite it having year-old unfixed security issues. So if you see someone recommending it, please inform them about the risks - but also that there are actively maintained successor projects (like LibreOffice).

    According to the record there are numerous other, previously unaddressed issues with OpenOffice software, including vulnerabilities have existed since at least November 2023. “We are making progress in identifying improvements to address these issues,” the ASF security team representative explains.

    LibreOffice: Apache Foundation is harming open source

    Furthermore, the LibreOffice developers accuse the ASF of not developing OpenOffice actively any more, but of feigning to do so with minor changes to HTML tags and blank lines. This harms the entire open source community. The ASF has not commented on these allegations. However, OpenOffice has an active project management committee and retains its status as a top-level project within the ASF, according to spokesperson Brian Proffitt. In fact, the recent commits in the OpenOffice GitHub repository have primarily consisted of correcting typographical errors and making minor amendments to translations.

    The current version of OpenOffice, 4.1.15, was released in December 2023. It included several bug fixes and dictionary updates, whilst it last received new features with the release of version 4.1 in April 2014. In the light of this, the LibreOffice team recommends using alternatives and in particular its own office suite.

  • Generative AI art – the ultimate comment

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Social Media, Tech

    The photograph below showed up in your ‘umble scribe’s social media feed today and is the best comment he has seen to date in respect of the so-called “AI slop” (or just plain “slop”. Ed.) produced by generative AI engines.

    Message reads Say no to generative AI art. Buy art from a real degenerate.

    However, your ‘umble scribe is not the only person who questions the utility of generative AI, let alone its accuracy and/or faithfulness. Here’s the historian Dan Snow of History Hit clearly suffering from the output of generative AI in respect of great events in world history Whoever would have guessed the USA had ships in the thick of the Battle of Trafalgar? :-D.

  • Happy anniversary Open Document Format

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    ODF logoToday marks the 20th anniversary of the ratification of the Open Document Format (ODF) as an OASIS standard. Two decades after its approval in 2005, ODF is the only open standard for office documents, promoting digital independence, interoperability and content transparency worldwide.

    Even though it was originally created as an XML-based format to enable universal access to documents across platforms and software from different vendors, ODF has become a technology policy pillar for governments, educational institutions and organisations that choose open, vendor-independent formats to assert their digital sovereignty.

    ODF is the native file format of LibreOffice, the most widely used and well-known open source office suite and is supported by a wide range of other applications, including Microsoft’s ubiquitous office suite.

    ODF has been adopted as an official standard by the ISO (as ISO/IEC 26300) and by many governments on all continents to support digital sovereignty strategies and public procurement policies to ensure persistent and transparent access to content. These administrations include the UK government, which has comprehensive information on sharing and collaborating on government documents using ODF.

    If a reason were required besides those referred to above, one only has to hear the words of Eliane Domingos, Chair of The Document Foundation (TDF), the organisation behind LibreOffice: “In a world increasingly dominated by proprietary ecosystems, ODF guarantees users complete control over their content, free from restrictions”.

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