So, sorry. First off, yes, still a cough. Um, almost gone. Clearing up a lot. triggers it. I went outside for 5 minutes in the cold, triggered it. Ihave doctor's appointment 16th. I will, if it's still going, talk to them. So, panic nod. However, today's rant is about a telescope. So, my well, one of my granddaughters has expressed an interest in the night sky, stars, telescopes, and the like. And I thought, well, let's help get her a beginner telescope. And I Googled a bit and I probably fell foul of some AI because what I found was um a review of a Sonara telescope that was apparentlyquite good as a starter kids telescope. And so I went to their website and there it was and it's 169 quid. And I'm thinking, well, firstly, obviously, my granddaughter is worth this. Duh. Um, but, you know, it's it's not cheap. Claims to have, you know, really advanced optics and whatever. Anyway, based on the review, which in hindsight I think the review was just but anyway, based on the review, I ordered one and it's from a site that has UK in the domain name and charges in poundsand then ships from Hong Kong for sake. And I hate this. The website does not have on it who the legal entity you're buying from is. And this is actually I think a legal requirement. Uh and they don't. Anyway, let's see what I got. It's a telescope. Okay. F370. I think the 70 is the aperture and the 300 is the focal length. Okay. Let's just go around the sides the end. Now, I'm not going to open it up because there's no more information in there. Okay. Okay, fine. Um, it's a telescope and it kind of meets the spec of the ... It has no manufacturer name, no country of origin, a CE mark, but the suppliers seem unwilling or unable to provide a declaration of conformity which is a requirement as part of a C mark. So essentially this is a scammy illegal fake CE toy telescope. I'm not saying it doesn't work. I'm not saying it doesn't even have the aperture aperture and focal length it claims. What can I say? But it's a scam. If I go on Amazon, I can find this for as little as 20 for the same telescope. So I quered and they said, "Oh, no, no, it's not toytelescope. The optics are way better." Blah, blah, blah. I said, "Fine. Declaration of conformity." Oh, no. We can assure you it meets all the standards, etc. No, declaration of conformity. Requirement for a C mark. No, no. I mean, I went around the whole we can't read your emails. Your email seems to have the weird attachment. It's just a signature. Um, uh, they replied to me saying, "Your email seems to be blank." But I heard this before. The reply quotes my email which is not blank saying your email seems to be blank. This is not an uncommon thing etc etc. We're going around circles and I'm basically saying if you cannot provide a declaration of conformity then your C mark is fake. Therefore you cannot legally sell your product. You can't do that because you've got no manufacturer ID or country of origin anyway. Therefore, I need to report it to the authorities and my bank and get a claw back. Sad. I was ripped off. I fell for it. I'm an idiot. I'm sorry. Now, what I've got, Alice, now and have a look at this. What I've got Alice now is 260 quid. Okay, this is clearly an actual telescope. Just the very fact it comes in a box labeled 14 and a half kilograms is is a clue. And we put it together and she is so excited to go out in the night sky with this. I've got her some books on specially aimed at kids looking at the night sky. So, I've got those. I hope she likes it. If she doesn't, she doesn't. But this is a real telescope I've now gother. So, I now need to sort out this that I fell for, which is clearly a toy telescope that's worth 20 quid, charged 169 quid, and an absolute ripoff with I mad. So, that's my latest rant. I hope to follow up with her exploration of space. I I really hope she loves it. I hope she gets pictures of Jupiter's moons and Saturn's rings and nebula and whatever. There there's a lot she can look at. and they're planning a a sort of camping trip to take her onto the moors um with her telescope and it's got a whole clip thing for a mobile phone so she should be able to get lots of pictures straight off it. It's good. Yeah, but the toy telescope is either going back or getting clawed back or something. Don't fall for that crap, please.
2026-02-02
Losing my dad.... Fuck facebook.
Hi. I did a thing today. What I did was kill off Facebook. No, actually, I killed it off quite a few days ago. Facebook came up with a choice. Pay or don't pay, and don't pay is we're going to trawl what you say and what you do even more than we did before. And I thought I'll try it without a few a few days, you know. I did. And then finally today I went for the whole, delete it all. Okay, I've downloaded 2.28 28 gigabytes of stuff I've posted on Facebook just as an archive, but it's gone. Facebook's now gone. And what hadn't really hit me was there would be one thing that would also go, and it's this. Oh, get out. Ah, right. Is this is this it's a Facebook portal thing. And then I realized that hasn't been used for quite a while. And the reason it hasn't been used for quite a while is we got it during COVID. I got those for everyone in the family during COVID so that everyone could instantly video call anyone else or group of people during COVID. So, we're talking six years ago. And the one person who kept that going for way longer than anyone else was my dad. He would randomly call me on that and it would be on my desk here and it would pop up. Hi, Dad. How are you? who have things, you know, and he called lots of other people with it, but it was the one non- tech thing that he was happy to use and his sister was even happy to use at one point. I think she gave up on it sooner than he did, but they died within like a week of eachother. It's which is really sad. But it was the thing that he kept using for longer than anyone else and it's been sat on my desk for years now and finally I've taken it off my desk because I've given up on Facebook. I think I might be able to make it work with WhatsApp. I have no idea. I'm not sure how long I'll stay on WhatsApp. But yeah, the hit of leaving Facebook meant leaving that which meant that was amemory of my dad was unexpected. I've still got all the last IME messages he sent, but we all move on. It's sad, but that was unexpected. So, that's today's thing. Apart from the fact the cold seems to be clearing up. It's not completely gone. It's really, really clearing up. So, okay.
Yes, some shit from so long ago impacts things today...
Okay. Hi, I had an interesting complaint from a customer today where the document we sent them demanding payment of a direct debit notification had weird errors on it.
Now, we sent them a notification of direct debit collection and a PDF and the PDF when they viewed it when they printed it. So they printed it and scanned it and sent it to us which is you know a lot of effort.
Every digit on that document, the date uh everything and the bank details and so on were all fives. Every digit was a five. And it wasn't even a complete five. It was like a truncated five. It was very messy
And there was also a weird thing where the word notification was notation.
Um, which doesn't make sense.
And this brought me back this brought me back a lot of decades. I mean, I don't know how many decades.
We've got to be talking 45 years, maybe.
My dad had a printing press.
He's he actually had several over the years, including a big industrial one
But he had a printing press.
And so he would compose things to print with an uppercase and lower case. And in those days that meant a wooden case of lead type upper and a wooden case of lead type lower.
And it had all of the letters you'd need.
And one of the letters in this was an FI.
Looks like this.
And there was also FFI.
That's not a terribly good example of an FI, but the the point is the FI sort of merged together where the dot over the I became the top of the F as a single lead character.
And that was the thing that that that's what you used.
Now fast forward today, we have.
Now first off just to address the complaint. The direct debit notification has plain text ASCII saying all of the details about the direct debit notification. everything, the amount, the account, the name, everything in plain text. Paper ASCII.
We may go as far as some UTF8 encoding of a pound sign, I think, and that's about as far as we go. But even that would still be readable
But we also add a PDF. And this is just a courtesy. People like this.
The PDF we use by default uses a font which has an alternative character set for the digits. So the digits can either be really fancy different sizes huge descenders weird or unified sort of spacing of the digits.
Now for any accounting purpose you want the digits that are unified spacing. You want digits that line up. And so by default, we use this alternate version of the character set on the font to make the digits line up and most things show it fine. The downside is copy and paste from it tends to be messed up, which is a real shame.
And I'd love to find a way of making that work. And it's all down to go script and god knows what. But anyway, most PDF viewers of the PDFs we send show the characters correctly.
This particular customer, I don't know what they have, but it shows all the alternate digit characters as a five.
So, everything was fives. What can I say? It's mad.
But a clue as to how bad it is is the FI character in the word notification did not show correctly, which gave gave him the wrong spelling, layout, whatever notification
So this just gave a clue of how bad his PDF view is. And what struck me is how this goes back to the days of that lead type, those 45 years ago and how that's impacting something happening in 2026 and that is just unbelievable.
There is, as I recall, a film that has a guy finds some universal remote that, amongst other things, allows him to skip forward. The moral of the film is he skips over his entire life and regrets it.
But this would, some times, be cool - right? It is 4pm on a Saturday and I am doing nothing special, watching TV (a show I have watched before) and a bit hungry - if only I had a magic button to make it 6pm and I could order Chinese now.
But yes, massively tempting to "skip" more and more, I am sure.
To be fair, if I had a magic button to skip ahead I would want it to not eat from my life time as well, that would be way more sensible.
But we sort of have this - it is sleep - we can skip over 6 to 8 hours of time over night (and use up some of our life).
It is almost a shame we cannot simply choose exact periods that would be handy to skip instead, maybe.
Hi. Yes, I still have this cold. It's come back. Don't ask. But I've had a weird weekend. It started with early hours of Saturday morning where two jobs decided to take concrete slabs off the wall outside my house and dump them on the A40. uh police did attend and the good news is having given them all the CCTV is apparently they actually have suspects which is great. So we'll see how that goes. It's not the first time we've had this before but we suspect it's the same people as before. So that's going to be interesting to see how it pans out. But then later on Saturday we had something a little bit unexpected. A guy walking his dog decides to take the Christmas wreaths off our gate. Now, to be fair, we've been meaning to take them off for a while, but we haven't got around to it. And he dumps them behind the gate, and the result is they get run over. Basically, uh my one of my kids came up to the gate, open the gate, can't see the wreaths because they're right up by the gate. It's under the under their bonnet, and drive over them, smashing blessings. We're kind of hoping we can kind of recover them now. Replace some Bbles, check the lights work and things, but they're probably about 50 quid each. Quite large Christmas wreaths. So, not funny. So, I put a poster up on the gate basically who does this and and a Grinch image and some pictures. Well, guy with his dog comes back. He's obviously not amused. And you know, I was half expecting him to just like rip the poster off as he went past or something like that, but no, you won't believe this. He seems to have planned a midnight raid. Okay, half past midnight. He's got a woolly hat, different coats, hand over his face, and he sort of creeps down Belmont Road, comes around the corner, grabs the posters off the fence, sort of half hides behind a a pole at one point, and then scurryies back up Belmont Road, sort of ducking under the under the wall. And yeah, I it sounds crazy. I have the video. see this. Uh, I think it's fairly sensible because I've, you know, I can't identify who's in the video. I'm not sure anyone else can. That's the whole point of him covering his face. So, I think I'm I'm quite legit in publishing this. So, yeah. Well, I have the weirdest neighbors, but I mean, 10 out of 10 for entertainment. Who'd have expected him to plan a midnight raid to take a poster off my gate? I mean, that's just Well, wow. Wow.
It is not the really tedious one hour 45 minute video, or even the heavily edited 28 minute video.
It is the 9 minute summary - enjoy.
This is extracted subtitles, not perfect, but a good start...
Hi. Well, firstly, for those that have been following, my cold has nearly cleared up, but I do apologize that I will almost certainly end up coughing at some point during this. Also, I'm letting you know I'm sparing you from a really tedious video. I had a chat, online chat with Amazon yesterday and I recorded it. I recorded the chat window. I recorded me and audio and so on and put it all together and edited an hour and 45 minutes of online chat down to 28 minutes. That took me a while and then I decided no, that was actually too tedious, too boring. Even though it was meant to sort of highlight how tedious and boring it is dealing with Amazon, I decided no, even that was too tedious. It was mostly me typing and you can see in the chat window and I didn't even narrate what I was typing. So it was interspersed with some rants but that was it. So I've spared you that but I thought I'd do a summary. So I've mentioned the issue with Amazon. It's very straightforward. We've been selling product for years. It's called Facin. It works with Din air controllers. Hence the similar name. And Amazon got a letter from Dacin saying it's bit trademark. Amazon pulled the listing froze 200 stock that we had in Amazon and we've been battling with them for months now. Last month, December the 3rd, went around circles with them. They kept saying, "Well, you need to to appeal." I said, "Well, we've been through the appeal and you just keep asking for more information. There is no resolution. We've given up appealing. The matter's now closed. We're not going to appeal anymore. Send them back." And the comment then was, "Well, we're holding them for 36 days." Now, I did suggest that they pay me rent for that, but they didn't understand that. Holding them for 36 days, but after 36 days, you can have them back. And it was very clear on that. So, I got pissed off, but I decided I'll play their game. They clearly said I'll have them back in 36 days. It's been about 40 days now. So I chatted with them yesterday and this was the hour and 45 minute chat and it's like speaking to a brick wall. The the person I'm speaking to just doesn't understand the concept. He's saying well you need to appeal. I said tried appealing. We've given up on that. We need to send these documents. But there aren't any documents to send. They're not going to send any documents. Just send them back. At one point he's like well if you send the documents how can we send them back? And he's sort of like put them in a box with our address on them. Put them in the post. It's not complicated. But he just, you know, he's got a mental block with the whole concept that they can send them back. They don't need me to send documents or appeals to send them back. They can do it. It is physically possible for them to do it. But no, it just that didn't that thought didn't enter his head. It was a very frustrating hour and 45 minutes and very boring. As I said, the summary of the call finally came in. Um, and the email came up and said, "Well, you've still got to send some documents in." Basically, they're saying they're going to hold them. In fact, at one point, they even suggested they might destroy them. And to be clear, the whole Amazon process for this is for handling fake merchandise. So, if I was selling trainers that had Mike instead of Nike on them, then I can understand that they're fake products and they want to do something about it and take them off the market. Although, I'm not really sure they should be entitled to destroy them without court order. But this is not what's happening. These are not fake DIN products. DIN don't make development boards. They do make a Wi-Fi adapter, but it doesn't look at anything like this or work in the same way. So, this isn't a fake DIN product with a similar name to Fool People. It's a different product and and their process doesn't really get up to that in the first place. So given that they're basically trying to tackle potentially fake products, their process is wanting documents like the invoice for where I got it, what supplier I got it from. So if I had a supplier that said, "Yes, this is genuine DIN um Wi-Fi controllers, then maybe I'd get somewhere." Or if I had, you know, if I bought them from DIN. The problem is we're not claiming that they're DIN. So we don't have an invoice from a supplier that says that they're genuine DIN. Also, we made them. So, we don't have an invoice for the splat. I mean, I've got an invoice for the bare circuit boards, but that's that's not the final product. And they just argued up for that. Their appeals process seems to lack a couple of obvious steps. One is it's not a breach of trademark. It's not a concept they seem to understand. The other is okay, it's a potential breach of trademark. We're not saying it's breach of trademark. Obviously, we're not conceding that, especially as you might destroy the goods, but it's a potential VA trademark. So, we're prepared to pull the products, withdraw the products from sale, um, get them back, rebrand them, so there's no confusion, there's no there's no ambiguity. And again, that's not an avenue they understand. I had a chat today and actually someone slightly more helpful, although he did admit that often they can't actually do anything to fix problems. He has actually managed to escalate it to a specialist team. And the reason we got somewhere, I think, is because the the summary from previous chat wanted five things from me. And these five things are invoices and receipts, pricing information may be removed, supplier information, name, phone, number, address, and website. Item description and quantities, import or export documents, and documentation showing that your fake products do not infringe on the day trademark. And I was able to basically tackle all five points preemptively in the chat. So when it comes to invoice and receipts, there is no invoice of receipt. We make these. When it comes to supplier information, there is no supplier. We make these. When it comes to item description and quantities, well, you know the item description and how many you have. When it comes to import and export documentations, well, we make these. We didn't import or export them. documentation showing your faking products do not infringe trademark. Well, my answer there is what documentation could we provide that faking does not infringe other than the daking trademark which states the letters D, A, I, K, I, and N and not the letters F I, A, A, I, K, I, and N. So, I preemptively answered all five points. So, that stock answer is not going to work this time. And I actually got through to someone who seemed to grasp that concept. Now obviously I had to explain it's not a fake puppet um and a few other things but basically he's transferred it to a specialized team but the one other thing I have said is if it helps if you choose not to return them then this will result in a county court claim to challenge your actions and policy in front of a judge. This is the course you are taking if you choose not to return them. As you know, there has been no legal decision in a court to declare this product is a beach. And it does not use the actual word day. So, it's not automatically a beach. It needs a legal decision. It could only be decided by a court, not by Amazon. So, that's all been passed through to them. So, we're hoping maybe, just possibly this time, it'll get through to a person who's not completely brain dead and can actually answer it. Otherwise, it will be a county court claim. It may well be that Amazon terms and conditions and policies clearly state they can withhold goods and destroy them at a whim like this. But even if it does, I'd like to see that in front of a judge. A judge may well say that that policy and that contract is not a valid thing. Um, I mean these are quite cheap, but this could be really expensive goods, a lot of stock and purely on the allegation of a trademark infringement. They are holding them and threatening to destroy them without any actual decision or court order. I'd like to see that in front of a county court judge just to see what they say and and it will be worth the I don't know 50 quid or whatever it cost to do that. So, and Amazon probably won't want to sit in a county court and defend their retention or destruction of my property. So, we will see. So, fingers crossed. But yes, this is how impossible Amazon are to deal with on a day-to-day basis. Good luck if you want to deal with Amazon. And sadly, they're in such a monopolistic position that it's hard not to. Thank you.
