I wonder if US vice-president Vance has a love seat.
The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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9:00am on Friday, 21st February, 2025:
Weird
I'm guessing that this furniture store doesn't have any voice-command devices on site.
I wonder if US vice-president Vance has a love seat.
7:42am on Thursday, 20th February, 2025:
Anecdote
Another of my Chinese students, having heard I like tea, has given me some to try.
This is a black tea, and I have to say I really like it. I liked the green tea I was given too, but this one doesn't involve the same amount of faff to make it. On the tin (which is very nice — that red part is some kind of fabric) it says "Han Zhong Hong", which if asked I would hazard at a guess meant [something]-middle-red, although Hanzhong is a city so who knows? When I asked Google Translate what the symbols meant, it told me "Chinese New Year".
OK, so it's Chinese New Year tea. Whatever it is, I'm a fan.
Before I accepted it, I asked my student if it was expensive. We're only allowed to accept small-value gifts — mere tokens — and I didn't want to fall foul of being given something worth a lot more. The student assured me it wasn't expensive.
Apparently, his mother owns the tea plantation, so I guess he has a point.
7:28am on Wednesday, 19th February, 2025:
Anecdote
I'm getting a new work PC today. The old one, which I basically only used for slides-editing, word-processing and email, is being replaced by another PC that I will also only use for slides-editing, word-processing and email. The difference is that the new one is Windows 11 and the old one is Windows 10.
It's harder than you might think to remove from a browser everything that it knows about you, especially when you don't have system privileges. In many cases, it's not the browser cache that's the problem so much as the fact that there's a lot of synchronisation with your profile on other computers. I could delete my Google account, but then it would have deleted it from my home PC as well, which I don't want. I'm fairly sure I managed to stop easy access to to it by the simple expedient of logging out, but if I see any strange purchases on Amazon it's because clearing the cache isn't necessarily the same thing as wiping the data from the hard drive and replacing it with zeroes.
Quite why the university would want to replace a swathe of Windows 10 PCs in the middle of a finance squeeze isn't clear, but I guess they must have signed contracts when they weren't expecting to be cash-strapped and it turned out to be less expensive to go through with them than to cancel them.
I don't expect I'll be playing many games on the new PC, because I'll need system privileges to install Steam (and the games). Also, I doubt it's going to have a decent graphics card. Oh well, slides-editing, word-processing and email it is, then.
8:12am on Tuesday, 18th February, 2025:
Anecdote
There's a first time for everything.
I've been lecturing for most of my professional life, but yesterday was the first time that a student has fallen asleep in a lecture and snored so loudly that I had to interrupt the lecture to wake him. It was an 11am lecture, too, which normally covers that brief window in which students aren't sleepy.
I can't criticise him too much, though, as it was a boring lecture and I'd have fallen asleep myself if I hadn't been giving it.
7:55am on Monday, 17th February, 2025:
Anecdote
I bought some more playing cards last week.
These are French: B. P. Grimaud no. 1502. They're a famous deck because they're absolutely gorgeous. I had two copies of them already (plus a third I gave away to my elder daughter), but I bought another one because I like it so much and it had a buy-it-now option on eBay much lower than what they normally fetch.
Grimaud did make other decks (presumably at least 1,501 of them), but I only have one. It uses the regular French pattern as isn't remotely lush.
I now return you to your normal service.
10:34am on Sunday, 16th February, 2025:
Anecdote
I had another play with DeeVid, and while it remains very sound and impressive most of the time, it does produce occasional strange artefacts.
Here, I wondered what this Midjourney-generated face would look like without the glasses, so I got DeeVid to have her take them off. This it did, and the result does look very realistic — except for a strange flicker as she brings her hands up to remove the glasses, where the glasses appear then disapppear for a moment.
https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/vCleo0.mp4
I asked it to regenerate the image, but the same thing happened.
In this second example, I asked to have the model turn around.
https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/vCleo1.mp4
Here, the model starts off looking vaguely Indian but when in profile suddenly looks vaguely Chinese. I did notice something similar with the full-length picture from a couple of days ago, but this is more noticeable. Also, her legs seem to get markedly thicker when seen from behind.
Rather than practice only on Midjourney images, I thought I might try it on some photos of real (but deceased) people. I tried one of the Edwardian actress Maude Fealy, who I (if not necessarily anyone else) consider to be very pretty. The first three I tried were all rejected for being inappropriate content, which I can only attribute to the fact that the images must have appeared in the training data somewhere (along with countless images of women from the Far East turning around). The fourth attempt succeeded, though.
https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/mf.mp4
I just asked to have her smell the roses then smile, which she does, although not the part of roses that people usually smell. I like the fact that the original coloriser's watermark was preserved.
I paid $11 for 30 5-second renderings (or 15 10-second ones), so won't be playing with this much unless I forget to cancel the subscription. I shan't be putting any pictures of living people or of people I knew in there, though; I think that would be too disturbing.
2:34pm on Saturday, 15th February, 2025:
Anecdote
We're looking to buy a new car. Our current car is a Ford Focus from 2014, which will be due a cam belt replacement soon that will set us back around £1,700 and take two days. Also, there's a leaf or something in the air conditioning that's making an annoying whining noise.
We didn't want to go full electric because the UK infrastructure isn't there yet. It is if you live in London, but not if you live in not-London. I don't want to run out of juice driving to Bristol or Yorkshire, and I don't want to have to queue for 20 minutes at a service station to spend another 20 minutes recharging. We therefore looked at getting a plug-in hybrid, as these use electric for short journeys but switch to petrol when the electric has run out. Most such cars are expensive, even more so because anything costing over £40,000 attracts an extra tax — even for full-on electric vehicles (yet the government wonders why car manufacturers aren't meeting their electric-vehicle sales targets).
Checking out the reviews, the clear winner in plug-in hybrids is the MG HS. Not only is it much, much less expensive to buy (maybe 2/3 the price of some of its rivals), but it's also super-efficient as the battery can hold enough for 75 miles without using petrol. However, in common with other plug-in hybrids, it's big: 10 inches longer, 2 inches wider and 8 inches higher than our Focus.
We therefore decided to look at some non-plug-in hybrids as well as plug-in hybrids. These run off petrol, but they have a momentum recovery system that charges a battery when you brake or freewheel. They're therefore more efficient than regular petrol cars, but they're not as environmentally-friendly as a plug-in hybrid or an electric vehicle. They cost a lot less, however, and are smaller, too.
After rejecting some candidates for not being hybrid enough, not having a big enough boot or not having much legroom in the back, we came down to four manufacturers: Ford, Kia, Toyota and MG. Last weekend, we had a look at their offerings.
The Fords are dated. The main one they wanted to sell us was a Kuga, which is ugly and over-priced; it's about the same size as an MG HS. The Puma would have been OK but for there not being a fully-hybrid model, just a mild hybrid (which uses the electricity it collects from braking to charge a battery for non-drive purposes such as the heating system). The latest Focus was only available in petrol form. We rejected Ford. Sorry, President Trump: we won't be buying American this time.
The Kias we looked at were the Sportage and the Niro. The Sportage is available as a plug-in hybrid, but it's costly. It's not as big as the ZS, but it's still 6 inches longer than our Focus, 1½ inches wider and 6 inches higher. Higher isn't a problem, but we were thinking of down-sizing rather than getting a larger vehicle, so it was still a little alarming. The Niro was a nice regular hybrid, but the boot was only slightly larger than the one on the Focus. Also, it cost £3,000 more than the MG ZS, which is a bigger and more high-specification car. We rejected the Sportage, but the Niro remained a possibility until we visited the Toyota showroom.
Toyota do a Yaris Cross hybrid that's very nice, out-gunning the Kia Niro in every area. It's 7 inches shorter and 2 inches narrower than our Focus, meaning my wife might actually drive it. There's also a Toyota C-HR plug-in hybrid almost the same size as our Focus (apart from being 3 inches higher), but the price is perilously close to the £40,000 barrier beyond which vehicle tax skyrockets. If we wanted, say, 360° cameras, we'd need to buy an extra package that would push us into this high-tax band. The Yaris Cross made it to our shortlist, though, so we booked a test drive for it.
Finally, we looked at the MG ZS, which is now available as a regular hybrid (it was previously either petrol or electric only). This ticked all our boxes, and is a lot less expensive while being fully-featured. It's an inch shorter and half an inch narrower than our Focus. This also made it to our shortlist, so we booked a test drive for that, too. The HS plug-in hybrid wasn't available for a test drive as they're changing all their cars over for the new 75 registration numbers that come online in March, but I could test-drive the petrol version so I booked that, too, just to get a sense of what it would be like to drive a larger vehicle.
Today was the day of the test drives.
All these cars are automatic. I had never driven an automatic in my life before then. It was a lot easier than I was expecting, coming from a manual-gear background; I suspect that going manual from automatic might be more of a challenge.
First up was the MG ZS. This was great! It delivered a smooth ride and decent acceleration, despite its only having three forward gears. It handled well, and I even managed to reverse-park it.
Next up was the MG HS. I loved the higher driving position, but its extra width took some getting used to and its extra length made parking harder, even with its four-camera feature. This was the petrol version, but I won't be trying the plug-in hybrid for a somewhat unusual reason: I got motion sickness. I've only had motion sickness as a driver once before, when my dad took me to an aerodrome where people too young or too disqualified to have a driving licence could drive legally. As I was only maybe 12 years old at the time, our car must have felt to me then as big as the HS did when I drove it today. The salesman hadn't come across anyone feeling queasy driving the HS before, and it hadn't occurred to me that I might until I did. It was enough to put me off wanting to try it in plug-in hybrid form, though. So, HS out, but ZS a very strong finalist.
Finally, it was the turn of the Toyota Yaris Cross. It wasn't a lot different to the MG ZS, but I wasn't a fan of the steering: it seemed to be quite slack to start with then get progressively more powerful the more it was turned. This wasn't a feature the chap selling it recognised, but I certainly did. Hmm, I say "selling it", but he didn't make a great effort to do so — it was almost as if his attitude was "this is a Toyota, that's all you need to know, it sells itself, if you want something else then you know nothing about motor vehicles". He didn't accompany us on the test drive, unlike the bloke at MG, and as a result wasn't able to answer any questions that cropped up along the way.
We'll have to do some more research before making the final decision, but at the moment I'm leaning towards the MG ZS. The Yaris Cross Excel is £31,190 at the Colchester Toyota dealership (less in some other places). The MG ZS is £26,060. Toyota has a strong reputation for reliability, and MG in its current incarnation hasn't had time to build one up yet. Is more reliability worth £5,000, though? It's not all about the price, of course, but all else being comparable it could be the deciding factor. We don't really know for sure that everything else is comparable, however, hence the need for more research.
By the way, car manufacturers: take a leaf out of game developers' books and make the digital dashboard display configurable like the HUD in an MMO client. That way, the speedometer won't be hidden behind my hand when I'm driving in a straight line unless I want it to be hidden behind my hand when I'm driving in a straight line. Just a friendly suggestion.
9:11am on Friday, 14th February, 2025:
Anecdote
I ran out of Midjourney credits yesterday after being in too many boring meetings this month (it's OK, they replenish this evening), so I thought I'd try out some of the animate-from-static-images tools available online. As my base image, I used this one that I produced in Midjourney before it ran out of juice.
The first tool I tried, HitPaw, was absolutely awful.
http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/Tallyh0.mp4
The second tool I tried, Klingai, allowed me to give an animation prompt. I gave it "A young woman smiles and waves at the camera", using a different base image.
http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/Tallyk0.mp4
The face is excellent, but the finger look as if they're made out of jelly.
Klingai had a wait time for free renders of "3+ hours", so I didn't get the result until this morning. The third tool I tried, DeeVid, produced its result within minutes (using the same prompt).
http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/Tallyv0.mp4
That's frighteningly good, or, as my wife more succinctly put it, frightening. There's still a little jelliness about the fingers, but it's nevertheless very impressive.
It was so impressive that I used my second free go on another image, this time a full-length one. My prompt here was "A young woman looks at her shoes then laughs at the camera".
http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/Tallyv2.mp4
I particularly like the movement of the skirt out of the way.
There are plenty more such tools out there.
Sadly, I don't have any actual use for any of them.
8:14am on Thursday, 13th February, 2025:
Anecdote
7:35am on Wednesday, 12th February, 2025:
Comment
When US President Trump was asked if he would consider withholding aid from Egypt and Jordan if they continue to reject his plan to resettle the population of Gaza in their countries, he said that if they don't agree then he would conceivably withhold it.
Hmm.
Last year, the US gave 1,309,483,582 to Jordan. Of this, $1,306,468,039 came from the US Aid for International Development agency. This is the agency that Musk's Department of Government Efficiency wants to close down for wasting money.
Some of USAID's functions are likely to be merged into the State Department, but even so I don't think Jordan or Egypt should expect a great deal of money to come their way in 2026 even if they were to comply with Trump's bizarre proposal.
8:59pm on Monday, 10th February, 2025:
Weird
I don't know what the point is of the bulllet shape at the front of old Riley motor cars.
Obviously I could look it up, but where's the fun in that?
I'm leaning towards the idea that it's some kind of missile that can be launched at people who don't get out of the way.
8:09am on Monday, 10th February, 2025:
Comment
I haven't heard yet who will be representing the UK in this year's Eurovision Song Contest.
Maybe, instead of asking industry experts or (worse) the British public, we should run some songs past focus groups made up of representatives of those who actually vote — people from other countries in the competition.
Even if they collectively decided to choose the most hopeless song in the mix, it wouldn't lead to a worse result than what we would have chosen ourselves.
10:09am on Sunday, 9th February, 2025:
Weird
Modern MMORPGs shy away from calling lockboxes "lockboxes" because of the low opinions that players have of the concept, but older ones such as Star Trek Online have no such qualms.
Mind you, it's still probably not a good idea to call one "Partners in Crime".
9:07am on Saturday, 8th February, 2025:
Anecdote
I went to get a jab against shingles earlier this week. I'll need a second one a year from now.
The nurse doing the injection couldn't get the needle into my arm until her fourth attempt. She was very excited by this, because it had never happened before — she couldn't wait to tell her colleague. My left-shoulder skin is apparently a lot tougher than anything she'd previously encountered. Her final effort drew blood, she had to put a plaster on me afterwards.
I suggested that she break out the Kryptonite next time.
As I was about to leave, she noticed that I was also entitled to a jab against some forms of pneumonia. That sounded good to me, so I had it. Rather than repeat the throw-it-like-a-dart exercise that the shingles jab had entailed, I had it in my right arm instead. This time, the needle went in just fine.
I don't know why I'm more thick-skinned on my left than on my right. The only explanation that immediately springs to mind if that I sleep on my left.
I also have trouble when I need to give a blood sample, but that's in both arms and it's because my body doesn't want to lose any.
8:42am on Friday, 7th February, 2025:
Anecdote
You may recall that in September I bought a kilogram of Afternoon Darjeeling tea. Somewhat horrified by how much a kilogram of tea actually is, I expected that I'd still be drinking it in 2025.
I was comfrotably right. I finished it yesterday.
I'm now wondering if I should buy another kilogram, given that it took me five months to finish the last one.
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Copyright © 2025 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).