Be Excellent To Each Other

MacBook Air showing battery degraded and service required. Also some intermittently flaky keys and not wanting to power on sometimes.

Found a chap who specialises in Macs and MacBooks only 5 mins drive from me.

Called him Thursday, took it in that afternoon. Battery replaced, KB cleaned, all seems to be OK now. £99.

Seems ok that, shame it needed to be done though. How old is your MacBook Air?

It's a 2017 model, but I got it in early 2018.

Decent then! Hope it keeps running well now.

My car, which I chose because it's a bit more powerful then others in the range, uses a lot of petrol when I drive it faster than necessary. Which seems to be often. And it likes the expensive stuff.

This seems in every way a consequence of my choices and also a first-world problem.

If only someone had pointed out the economy lies to you beforehand!

Oddly mine seems to be getting more economical with mods. By which I mean I've seen 33mpg on my commute a couple of times.

Yeah, although I probably still would have done it anyway, and then still groaned about it later.

"16 billion passwords exposed in record-breaking data breach, opening access to Facebook, Google, Apple, and any other service imaginable". The source being quoted for this is Cybernews.com, a site I'd never heard of until today.

Mrs. W said this popped up on her notifications this morning and when I ran a search I found that it's being reported on news websites all over the place, as well as lots of YouTube channels, with the notable exceptions, as yet, of the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and The Register, among others. So either the they don't know about it, haven't got around to reporting it, or is there a possibility that it's misinformation and lots of outlets have jumped on the bandwagon without checking its veracity.

Scary to start with, but a few paras down we get, 'With a dataset containing 16 billion passwords, that’s equivalent to two leaked accounts for every person on the planet.

We don’t really know how many duplicate records there are, as the leak comes from multiple datasets. However, some reporting by other media outlets can be quite misleading. Some claim that Facebook, Google, and Apple credentials were leaked. While we can’t completely dismiss such claims, we feel this is somewhat inaccurate.

So maybe it's not as scary as some of the headlines would like us to think.

We all know it's good practice to change our passwords regularly, and to use 2FA and/or passkeys but it's going to be pain in the arse to update all my accounts, 'just to be on the safe side.'

It's pretty much bollocks. It's not a new breach, someone has just collated and released a bunch of smaller, old releases. Usual common sense applies: use long random passwords and store them in a password manager, change your password(s) if you suspect an account has been compromised, and please for the love of all that is good in the world turn on 2FA.

You didn't mention "write passwords on a post it and stick it to your monitor"

Still more secure than using the same password for everything. 99.999999% of all security breaches happen remotely.

Unless the password you've written down is "password" in which case yeet yourself into the sea.

I'm in a privileged position at work where I can get someone's password just by asking for it. It scares me how easily some people give up there details.

If I ever do need someone's password (say to log into a laptop that's been left with me for repair or upgrade) I will always offer to change their password to something temporary so they don't have to give up their "main" password. But no-one, and I mean no-one, has ever taken my up on that.

Also, I would say 95% of people use their kids names plus a number. Maybe throw in an @ or a ! for flavour

I only recently changed my password on here from the one Craster set for me some 14 years ago

When I'm driving in my car and I ask Siri to play one of my favourite tracks (The Secret He Had Missed by the Manics, with Julia Cumming); Siri cheerfully respond with "Sure, here's blahblahblah featuring Julia *BEEEEEEEP*"

It doesn't matter all that much, and the name is displayed on the screen just fine, but it still irritates me.

Also, my delightful children found an album full of fart noises on iTunes and have listened to it so much, and also starred some of them, that when I'm happily driving away and grooving along or bopping along to my favourite tunes somewhere I am occasionally surprised by the interruption of a very loud and very rude blow-off sound.

It was quite funny the first time, and many subsequent times (and I'm laughing typing this) but now it's at the point where it's irritating me enough to want to do something about it but not enough to actually go and deal with it.

When I went on my induction course with the fabulous Fujitsu in 2013 one of my fellow inductees had downloaded a farty app and couldn't resist letting fly at random times. Indeed, it was quite funny until after about the 5th eruption.

I’ve been given hundreds of dance 12”s but they all need a proper good clean and new inners. Mountain of work and bit of expense getting them playable / sellable…

Christ, that's a haul

Yep. I thought of you and Craster as I flicked through…

Look at the state of the one on the left

The huge oregano plants that live in the gaps between the pavers on our patio are really starting to get in the way.