Blog

Rich Communication Services (RCS) have been supported by Google on Android phones for some time and are about to reach iPhones. Here is an explanation of what RCS is.

RCS is effectively an upgrade to the standard messaging services, known generally as "texts". The standard — and often free — method is Short Message Service (SMS). There is also a more expensive system called Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), which, as the name implies, you can use to send photos, videos and files. RCS adds the power of MMS without the expense — so long as the recipient has also enabled RCS on their phone.

If the person you are sending to has not enabled RCS, the ⫸ send symbol will indicate that it will be transmitted as SMS or MMS.

A big advantage is that RCS shows symbols beside a message to indicate that it is being sent ⏱, has been sent ✓ , delivered ✓✓ and when it has been read ✓✓. That is helpful if you have friends who do not use their mobile phones very often! The reverse as also true — they can see when you have read their message.

Unlike ordinary messages, RCS may also be sent over Wi-Fi, useful in poor data signal areas and to save on data costs.

To enable RCS in the Messages app, tap your profile icon at the top-right and then Messages settings and then RCS chats. If you can't find 'RCS chats', tap Chat features.

With the breakup of Yugoslavia into different Balkan states, the area around Skopje took the name Macedonia to reflect the history and tradition of the inhabitants. This caused a problem for neighbouring Greece who feared a possible move to join with their northern territory that shared similar history back to Alexander the Great. After lengthy discussions it was finally agreed that the newish state would adopt the name North Macedonia. Problem solved - for them. Problem created for LPMCC.net. The addition to Hans Veenendaal's Rally Listing of a North Macedonia rally wasn't recognised by our obtuse programming. It took some hours to track down several locations where the country's identity is checked for place, flag and name. Why couldn't they simply call the place Peonia?

Within living memory many countries have changed their names to mark their break from colonialism or for political reasons. In Africa, Bechuanaland, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, Tanganyika, Nyasaland, Belgian Congo, French Equatorial Africa, French West Africa, French Guinea, (German) South West Africa. In Asia, French Indo China, Siam, Burma, East Pakistan, Ceylon, Persia, Palestine. British and Dutch Guiana in South America and British Honduras whose BFPOs were always mentioned on Two Way Family Favourites.

We have had to learn new names for all of those places over the years, Yet we still adhere to our own names for our neighbours. Deutschland is called Germany, España Spain, Magyarország Hungary, Česko Czechia, Slovensko Slovakia, Polska Poland, Lietuva Lithuania, Eesti Estonia, Suomi Finland, Norge Norway, Sverige Sweden, Schweiz (or is it Confederation Helvetica?) Switzerland and Nederland most incorrectly Holland! It depends if you are a stamp collector, but most of the names sound foreign.

At least most people know what country they live in. The Scots know as do the Welsh. It's only people in England who aren't quite sure, when asked, if they are from Great Britain or the United Kingdom. Just look at your passport and the plate on your motorcycle.

It's 13 months since I predicted that Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT would take over the world and it seems that they are well on the way ... except...

Embers cycle on Thursdays so that they can be reasonably flexible and delay until Friday, or exceptionally, ride a day earlier if the weather demands. This month the weather forced our hands (or legs) to change twice. But we still managed to ride five times. When will be the next year that there are five Thursdays in February?

I asked ChatGPT and was assured it would happen in 2036. Oh dear, is Google Calendar wrong? I don't think so.

Asking conversational sweetie Pi.AI resulted in a chirpy "There will never be five Thursdays in February because there are only 28 days". Oops. A failing of the education system; there is another line to the rhyme "Except in leap years when there are 29." When pressed, sweetie Pi reasoned that it will occur in 2029. Pi.AI and pigs might fly!

A Windows 10 update placed a Copilot icon at my disposal. Asked the same question it confidently responded that, after this year, it would occur again at a suitable leap year, the next being 2026. Not just wrong, not even a leap year! Since then, Copilot has flown off my PC and the Bing version of Copilot said 2036.

Google, who are breaking new ground with quantum computers, offered the help of Gemini. After briefly pondering the question, Gemini concluded the next occurence would be in 2029. Null points.

What we need to do next is make these LLMs argue the point with each other, so the human race is guaranteed to survive until 2052.

It is quite understandable that we should become wary of photographs and videos that are manipulated to cause harm. Deep fakes of people apparently recommending a product or doing something we would not expect. But the furore over the Princess of Wales family photo needs to be taken in context. The media has been quick to "kill" the photograph, yet they are still keen to accept advertisements for items that look nothing like the picture on the tin.

Here at LPMCC.net we shamelessly alter photos to make them works of imagination rather than historical records. Photos are straightened, cropped, colourized and photoshopped to emphasise the subject. Here are a couple of examples.

The things often airbrushed out are wheelie bins, photo-bombing cars and telegraph poles growing out of the top of someone's head. I've occasionally swapped faces, and some smarty-pants phones will now do that for you.
Please don't "kill" my photos!

After lambasting current free AI's inability to work out their Leap Years, today I have Easter egg on my face.

It all began when I noticed that the average rate of work shown on the statistics productivity chart was not working for March. (It's fixed now)

Inspection showed it was counting the files correctly, but the time taken was reported as NaN (Not a Number) In fact, the chart didn't recognise Sunday 31 March. I suspected confusion about which months are Calendar (1-12) and which are JavaScript (0-11). Many mistakes boil down to that quirk. But our Calendar was handling 31 March fine and even recognising it is Easter Sunday.

We identify the last day of the month by finding the first day of the next month and subtracting a day. In JavaScript ...
1 day = 1000millisecs×60secs×60mins×24hours.

...except the first summertime Sunday is only 23 hours. So subtracting a day from the first of April this year skipped over the preceding Sunday and took the date to 11pm Saturday 30 March!

Another bodge job fixed that issue. I will also bear in mind that the first Sunday of wintertime is 25 hours long.

And maybe a little less hubris about AI in future. There is little difference between expecting AI to give the correct answer or trusting JavaScript with my error prone input.

Note to self: Watch for similar errors in autumn 2027, spring 2030, autumn 2032, autumn 2038 and spring 2041. AI answers for this time period...

ChatGPT gets 1 correct, 3 wrong.
Pi.AI gives 3 correct and 5 wrong.
Copilot none correct, 4 wrong.
Gemini none correct and 7 wrong.

What years, up to 2045, will the last day of March or October be on a Sunday?

By JavaScript.

Spring 2024, 2030, 2041.
Autumn 2027, 2032, 2038. 


ChatGPT

To find the years up to 2045 where the last day of March or October falls on a Sunday, you can use a simple algorithm:
Start from the year 2022 (the last year provided in my training data) and check if the last day of March or October falls on a Sunday.
Incrementally move forward, checking each year until 2045.
Here are the years where the last day of March or October falls on a Sunday:
2040 (March 31st and October 31st)
2041 (March 31st and October 31st)


Pi.AI

Let's see... in the years 2024, 2030, 2035, 2041 the last day of March will fall on a Sunday.
And for October, it'll be in 2025, 2031, 2036 and 2042.
There you go!


Copilot

The last day of March or October falling on a Sunday can be an interesting pattern to explore! Let’s find out which years up to 2045 fit this criterion.
Using the Gregorian calendar, which is the most widely used calendar system today, we’ll calculate the years when the last day of March or October lands on a Sunday. Here’s how we’ll proceed:
We’ll start from the current year (2024) and go up to 2045.
For each year, we’ll check if the last day of March (March 31) or the last day of October (October 31) falls on a Sunday.
Using an automated date calculator, we find the following years:
2027: March 31 (Sunday)
2033: March 31 (Sunday)
2038: March 31 (Sunday)
2044: March 31 (Sunday)
These are the years when either the last day of March or October will be a Sunday.
Please note that this calculation assumes the current Gregorian calendar rules, including leap years. If you have any other calendar system in mind, feel free to ask for specific adjustments!


Gemini

Here are the years up to 2045 where the last day of March or October will be on a Sunday:
Years with March 31st on Sunday: 2028, 2037, 2044
Years with October 31st on Sunday: 2026, 2031, 2039, 2045

They don’t have a bullshit filter.

- Geordie Williamson
University of Sydney, Australia

Back in the 70s I read an interesting report that revealed that riders who used daytime headlights were more likely to be involved in an accident.

Putting it that way was guaranteed to be misleading; riders recognise hazardous conditions and that's when they put their headlights on.

It's the conditions that are the root cause of the accidents, not the headlights.

Housewives putting out washing are not what cause rain although I suspect that these solar panels are absorbing all the sunshine. It's why I keep my solar powered calculator shut in a drawer.

I called upon my assistant ChatGPT for advice on how to circumvent our perennial problem with cached pages. ChatGPT confirmed our present methods and suggested a few others. We took another shot at them, so you may see ?v=240614 at the end of this week's on-line News address, and similar appendages to other pages where latest content is essential.

Other methods involve sacrificing small animals and chanting curses under our breath.

The weather here in Blighty has brightened up a little this week, after a diabolical cold and wet summer. We have dodged the rain as best we can but the BBC weather forecasts, provided by an overseas company, have been way off the mark. Some of our pages still use a creaky widget from Accuweather who have a much better track record. Today I am testing a version from weatherwidget.io.

Look in from time to time to see if it is reading the runes successfully. If it works okay, it may replace the older widgets on pages that need it.

It is important to have a secure website, even though we don't sell anything or collect any personal information from visitors. Google, in its wisdom, gives preference to secure websites.

Secure sites are identified by the leading https:// before the www. bit, as opposed to plain http:// protocol without the s.

Old bookmarks and links from other websites sometimes direct people to the old insecure http:// version. Browsers throw up their metaphorical hands and declare that the site isn't secure, suggesting that you are about to be violently mugged.

A problem occurred if you confidently clicked the "proceed anyway" button. It failed to deliver our website in either secure or insecure version.

I assumed it was Google messing things up — my knee-jerk reaction to difficulties is to blame someone else. The URL that produced a "404 error not found" result had an extra set of www's inserted.

This week, while minding my own business, doing something unrelated, I needed to pinch a line or two of code from LPMCC.net files. While dipping in for a swift pilfer, serendipity took pity on me and I noticed a dumb error in my own code meant to redirect from insecure to secure website, was inserting superfluous W's.

That is now corrected. Hopefully we didn't lose too many visitors through frustration. I have to apologise to Google for all the silent curses aimed at it.

Test this http://www.lpmcc.net/ insecure link, then check the protocol has https:// in the resulting address by double-clicking inside the line.

Pelican (and puffin) crossings are installed with great expense and optimism. The reality is that they reduce pedestrian safety and traffic flow.

Pelican stands for PEdestrian LIght CON.

PUFFIN stands for Practically Useless From start to FINnish.

Take a typical case: I stop at the pelican because it is supposed to be a safer crossing route. Hopefully the engineers have chosen a "desire line" that matches where pedestrians cross before the pelican is installed. Usually the desire line is close to an adjoining street so the pelican location is moved away from that position because of possible conflicts with vehicles entering/exiting that street. That's the first problem, often overcome by pedestrian fences to discourage continued use of the desire line.

I press the button and watch the little red man. At a pelican, he is on the signals facing me across the road. At a puffin, he is next to the button on the post on the side of me from which traffic will be approaching. That's the second problem. With a random mix of pelicans and puffins along the same route, I can spend more time looking for the little red/green man than watching for traffic.

Phase

I wait for the little green man. That's the third problem. The delay is interminable. With no traffic approaching in either direction, I wait like an idiot. Usually because there is a parent with young child opposite, desperately trying to teach her child how to cross the road safely. I must set a good example. We all wait for the green man. And wait with not a vehicle in sight.

Eventually we both give up, look both ways and cross. That's the fourth problem. The child has learned to ignore the lights.

When I'm twenty feet down the footway on the opposite side of the road, at last, streams of traffic approach from both directions. That's the fifth problem. The pelican now changes to a green man and stops the traffic. Drivers are irritated by another red light but no pedestrians! Traffic is stopped for no purpose.

Some lights have a PIR detector to check if pedestrians have wandered off (defeatism?). They aren't quick enough and if they are obscured by traffic dust or broken, you will never get across that road because it cannot see you! They would be unnecessary if the lights changed sooner after the button is pressed.

A good example of a staggeringly bad example: Pedestrians are taken away from their desire line and faced away from oncoming traffic when in the centre island.

Concerns about traffic being repeatedly held up are more than offset by eliminating stops when pedestrians have grown old and gone home. Pelicans are typically installed where a zebra crossing would hold up traffic too often. In other words, to purposely increase the time it takes to allow pedestrians to cross the road.

I can't grumble about the pelican outside my home; it is instantly responsive because it is on a route to school and also gets us oldies across to the bus stop. It proves that they can be set better.

If there is a worry that traffic 85%ile speed (ie the real speed of traffic whatever the speed limit) would result in over-run of the crossing, increase red light to green man interval, (known as the inter-red — that says it all!).

While on that subject, why not set pelicans and puffins to all red during nighttime, the same as some junctions. Doing so would reduce after-hours speeding that is both a noise nuisance and safety issue.

[ HC 7, 22, 28, 81, 191-194,196-198, 240. ]

Ten years ago I added an Easter Egg to the website. It is still there, ready to be discovered using the Konami Code^A.
It is a sudoku puzzle.

Coincidence that it was released at Easter. In software, Easter Eggs are nothing to do with either Easter or eggs. They are hidden games.

Coding a page to make sudoku interactive is trivial. Even developing an algorithm to solve sudoku is only automating the logical steps taken by a human. But creating a sudoku is an entirely different kettle of figures; I wouldn't try to do that. The random sudokus on my page are pinched from published versions.

That doesn't mean the puzzles are limited to the 150 that form the basic data on LPMCC.net. Far from it...

1. The order of the columns can be changed. The number of permutations for doing this is 9! (nine factorial) which is
   
   9×8×7×6×5×4×3×2(×1)
   Check it on your calculator — it's 362,880.
2. The order of the rows can be changed. (×9!)
3. A sudoku can be rotated 90° and still work. Back-to-front is the same as 180° turn and reversing the row order. (×2)
4. Finally, any and all the numbers can be interchanged.
   For example, swap all 1s and 2s, or increment all numbers with 9s wrapping to 1s. (×9!)

ONE sudoku can be presented in 2×9!³ = 95,569 trillion ways. We have 150 puzzles^B, so there are more than 14 million trillion arrangements.

Try our sudoku.

Looking back over this year's blog entries looks like a list of foul-ups, corrected after hours of puzzling and recoding.

• Jan 19: North Macedonia threw a spanner into our Rally Listing.
• Apr 1: we found the last day of March only had 23 hours.
• Jun 14: another cache attack.
• Sep 11: driving innocent browsers to a "404 — page not found".

The year is not over yet and there will doubtless be more to report.

I try to take lessons from every mistake by using my RIPCORD when parachuting out of a crashing situation.

On Nov 22 I posted a News Update that contained a few broken links; in particular one that should have directed to a 2022 blog entry. That was corrected, thanks to Jean-Francois Helias, who pays good attention to my foibles.

NOT A TRANSCRIPTION This is an example of how to reveal text When I find an error that has existed for some time, and no-one has bothered to alert me, I kick the cat, in frustration. If some kind visitor does alert me to a fault on the website, I am so pleased that I used to send them a (metaphorical) basket of kittens, to be drowned at their discretion. That is the background to Cat-Drowning. (Move pointer off area to revert to the image)

Francois is now Cat-Drowner-In-Chief for LPMCC.net —
no baskets of kittens for him, he dunks really fierce moggies.

That blog entry delved into a fiddly and obscure way of accessing the transcribed text of photos. By the time I've crushed the life out of the original photos, they are no longer capable of being read by software optical character recognition, no matter how sophistcated it has become over the years. As well as satisfying idle curiosity, the text is vital for the many non-English speaking visitors to feed into Google Translate.

The D in ripcord demands the devising of improvements. The obvious need here was for a simpler method than copying and pasting something that is invisible!

Every why has a wherefore.

For the F.N.O.M.C.C. report, and future pages that include transcribed text, it will be available by clicking the image.

'Tis time, I think, to trudge back and be gone.