If your SMTP server on Bell is failing to send mail from a web application with an obscure/misleading error like the following, just avoiding a foreign sender address (like @gmail.com) may solve.

If you've upgraded to Plasma 5, you'll want to:

1. First get rid of the broken new default clipboard manager which is very similar to Klipper. Sorry, I forgot how I managed that, but it's possible.
2. Start Klipper
3. Finally, get Klipper to start automatically... which is also non-trivial. To achieve that, exit Klipper, and when asked whether Klipper should start automatically, obviously agree.
4. If you're like me, enable Synchronize contents of the clipboard and the selection

And that, my friend, completes the path to go back to an experience as sane as KDE 4, at least in clipboard terms... if you manage to get Ctrl+Alt+V to bring up Klipper, and accept that selecting text using the keyboard will update the clipboard.

When I found the replacement battery I needed for my laptop on Tmart.com, I verified before since I didn't know the store. The first review I found was positive, so I bought. Unfortunately, I did not realize the BBB's rate for Tmart.com is "F", and for good reasons.

As indicated here, Tmart doesn't ship you what you bought. In my case, over a month after my order, they refunded me. The reason they invoked is terrible (no, I did not request a shipment to the skies or to another planet):

The "compensation" they offer is even worst:

That's right. A 5% discount from a worthless company valid for 3 weeks.

But the worst part? They are still "offering" me the very same product, supposedly shipped to the very same impossible-to-reach location.

After I worked around the issue with Lenovo's Yoga Mode Control, my Flex 4 worked fine. But now that it was stable, it was time for me to proceed to the storage drive change I had planned.

The easy part should have been to physically switch the drives, right? Well, if you have ever opened a Lenovo Ideapad Flex 4, you will remember that is not the case with these laptops which are physically anything but flexible.

If you want to replace any part of your Flex 4-1570, sorry, but your weekly nightmare is coming. Unless you are reasonable and just give up.

Replacing anything will require you to remove the whole motherboard case. As Lenovo's Hardware Maintenance Manual shows, opening is possible. After removing 10+ screws, your are supposed to simply lift the case. As discussed in this forum thread, this apparently trivial step is in fact incredibly difficult and costly (both in time and risk of damaging the notebook).

Thanks to the instructions on the forum, I managed to open mine, but it took me an insane amount of time, and I still broke the case.

If you are extremely determined, secure:

• A good starting mood, a worthy objective and much patience.
• at least 1 hour
• at least 1 sufficiently long nail
• Several tools. I used screwdrivers with flat and very sharp heads (in addition to the electronic screwdrivers which will remove the screws).
• A surface where your laptop won't move despite great force. It should not move back nor on any side.
• Ideally, an anti-static device (of course)
• The new parts you want to install. No, really, all the new parts. You will not want to do this twice.

I managed by starting with my nails, then using a small (electronic) flat-head screwdriver, and then a regular flat-head screwdriver. In general, your should start at the front and progress towards the back, except the most difficult part is the rear half of the Ethernet port's side. I broke my case when I got to the USB ports there. It was necessary to open the back before opening the rear half of the left side.

Good luck, seriously. And if you read this before buying, buy something else. Unless you love having your up arrow key to the left of the right Shift key (what were your designers thinking, and where in hell were your testers)!

Ma mère est d'une générosité extraordinaire, c'est bien connu. À preuve, suffit de rappeler le cadeau à l'humanité qu'elle fit en lui donnant son fils.

Mais en regardant sa facture le lendemain d'un souper dans un nouveau restaurant de Sillery, elle est néanmoins restée étonnée de mesurer la générosité dont elle avait elle-même fait preuve la veille :

Générosité maternelle débridée («POURB» pour «pourboire»)

On ne peut certainement pas reprocher aux concepteurs du terminal de paiement électronique utilisé aux délices tandoori de freiner les élans les plus altruistes.

P.S. Le restaurant a bien sûr accepté une révision de la générosité de ma mère à son égard.

After the liberals announced they would break their promise to get rid of FPTP, some 130 452 Canadians protested by signing petition e-616 (thanks to the readers of this blog who have grown that number). Perhaps the fact that no other online petition to the Canadian government had gathered that many signatures compelled the government to respond.

Unfortunately, it seems the government preferred a lengthy response to a concise and focused response. If "The Government of Canada is pleased to respond to this petition.", rather than listing over a page of measures supposed to "enhance public trust in the integrity of the electoral process", it would have helped to provide a more convincing apology than...

…in particular since petition e-616 never asked for a referendum. E-616 merely requested to honor the party's promise:

In fact, the Minister's response has little to qualify it as an apology. While it may contain many excuses, it does not contain the words "apology", "apologize", "sorry", or really any terminology characteristic of apologies.

And as if this treason and this non-apology weren't enough, they didn't even take the time to fill the response form properly ("Prepare in English and French marking ‘Original Text’ or ‘Translation’" at the very top? Talk about adding insult to injury!)

Taxes are very important. So much so that I learned about 2 critical security vulnerabilities in important free software components, namely CVE-2014-0160 (Heartbleed) and more recently CVE-2017-5638, by watching CBC, because both affected the CRA's website during the income tax returns filing period.

I confess that learning about Heartbleed on The National was exciting in a sense - because I was learning of free software usage by the federal government on TV, because I was learning about free software in a national broadcast, because I had never heard about a free software bug on TV before, and because I was discovering the first named free software bug (it is after watching the report that I discovered Heartbleed had its Wikipedia article).

Unfortunately, I was less excited when a similar scenario repeated with CVE-2017-5638 and The National broadcast this report. In part because CVE-2017-5638 is much less interesting than Heartbleed, in part because I do not use Apache Struts, and in part because the report did not mention the vulnerability anyway. But mostly because the report refers to what is possibly the world's most known bug as "the Heartbleed virus".

My ears are almost done bleeding from hearing the report. It was broadcast nearly 2 weeks ago, and still features uncorrected. How can Canada's public broadcaster make such a flagrant error and fail to correct it for weeks? A 2014 article from CBC itself asks "What is Heartbleed?" and describes it as a bug or software vulnerability, obviously never as a virus.

Margo McDiarmid is a parliamentary reporter, and surely cannot be expected to know each field deeply. For the first part of the question, one could think that having to publish each news story first, CBC put the story out quickly, before having the time to have it reviewed by someone knowledgeable about information security. This hypothesis breaks down when we see that the report was broadcast on 2017-03-13, more than 2 days after a story with no major error was written by the CBC, and even after private media had published articles identifying the vulnerability more specifically (the Globe and Mail and MoneySense, the latter specifically mentioning Apache Struts). Less than 12 hours later, even the CBC had written a quality story with all the necessary details. That story was written by CBC's Matthew Braga, Senior Technology Reporter, who should have been able to catch such an error. The rush hypothesis seems even invalidated by the fact that the CBC could have requested the report to be reviewed by the very expert interviewed in the report.

As for the second part, the webpage which contains the report has a "Report Typo or Error" link. Should I feel guilty for not having reported the error instead of complaining? Not a chance; click on it, and you find a simple form, without any indication of previous reports. Does the CBC really expect me to send a benevolent report without even being sure that the problem has not been reported already?!

There is probably no simple answer. The conservative government's 2012 cuts may still mean CBC's information sector is unable to guarantee a minimal level of quality. I sincerely hope that budget restoration will make the CBC a source of information which can be trusted.

I do not frequently notice gross errors from our public broadcaster, but then I am ignorant about the vast majority of the world. Most of the serious errors I hear from the CBC and from the media in general are about computer science, my own field of "expertise". At these times, I ask myself how such a lack of rigor is possible, but also how bad the problem is. How specific to computer science are errors in media coverage? Is health coverage also unreliable? If our public broadcaster can't tell software viruses and vulnerabilities apart, can it distinguish biological viruses from genetic diseases? Looking at the efforts (or lack thereof) it makes to fix errors post-publication, I doubt it; the issue with quality is systemic. If this has to do with budget, here is one more confirmation that taxes are very important.

Update

Coincidentally, it's a remark from a general in an article about open source intelligence which made me realize that big media are not particularly unreliable regarding computer science. Sean Corbett claims he used to shout frequently in front of his television due to important errors, which shows even the military domain is a challenge for big media. At least, he claims the situation improved (with OSINT).

I replaced my 6-year-old TP-Link TL-WR1043ND with a Gigabit Ethernet 802.11ac router bought for 105 CAD (shipping included) from Dell this week.

Wireless range seems to solve the connectivity problem of one of the clients I was experiencing with the previous router. For reasons I never understood well, at times the client would have huge packet loss and even disconnect, even though it is 1 decameter from the router, no other wireless device was active and other houses a several meters away from ours. With the Archer, the worst path has a 0.01% packet loss.

The interface is satisfying (although English-only until you install the May 2016 firmware update, since the router came with the 2015 firmware!). It is simple and the feature set includes most of what I need.

I accidentally pressed the reset button while relocating the router. As noted in this TechHive review, this button could easily cause an inadvertent reset, but I did not push it long enough for that.

I chose this router partly because of its comparatively long warranty (2 years rather than the usual 1 year). I am mostly surprised to find no specification of warranty in the box. The box contains 2 quick installation guides (1 multilingual, 1 English-only), 3 prints of the GNU General Public License (versions 1, 2 and 3), a copy of the GNU LGPL, a superfluous "Resource CD", but no mention of warranty.

Issues

There are a few issues with the firmware. In the first month of usage, I once lost access to the interface until I rebooted.
The firmware features "NAT Boost", which allows to collect bandwidth usage statistics for each device. While this is quite useful, it needs refinement (in particular, the total bytes column is unreliable due to a 32-bit overflow after 4 GiB of transfer).
While the firmware has some support for Dynamic DNS, it does not support my provider (DNSEXIT). After a few months, the interface got unusable again until I manually rebooted.

As of 2017-09-23, the firmware does not support standards-based dynamic DNS update (automatic DNS on a LAN).

...as well as many vehicles circulating in these streets of Bangalore. In fact, their solution completely stops many vehicles on the streets which benefit from their ecological treatment.

Unfortunately, due to the side effect nails on a road have on pedestrians and other self-propelling travelers, their plan is being fought by opposant Benedict Jebakumar and other nearby workers, frustrated by the environmental tax it also imposes on commuters like themselves whose tires are puncturing more frequently. But even with police getting involved and arresting innovator Ranganath and Chand Pasha, the fight continues, with police now closing repair shops.

While the strategy is not new, it has not yet managed to make a hole in the inflating number of motorists. But this is at least one more proof of how the tenacious altruistic efforts of individuals can benefit an entire city, and, step by step, or puncture by puncture, perhaps eventually bring back more air for citizens of the whole world.

Disclaimer: having had at least 5 punctures on his bicycle last summer, the author of this sarcastic article has in fact much sympathy for the victims of this awful scheme.

During the last federal election, an unprecedented share of political parties favored electoral reform. In a bad position, with a mere 10% of the seats, Canada's most popular party - and therefore the one most favored by the flaws of First-past-the-post voting, the Liberal Party - made the unthinkable: an unequivocal promise to get rid of FPTP, by 2019 (presumably because they considered a majority victory equally unthinkable anyway).

Unfortunately, the 2015 elections doubled the popular vote of the Liberal Party, which brought the liberals back from the parties disadvantaged by FPTP to the parties advantaged by FPTP - so much so, that their 39% popular vote granted the liberals not only the government, but a majority government. Surely, at this point the liberals would break their promise.

But the hope survived. It might have been too selfish to break their main promise right after benefiting from the status quo, but instead of becoming silent on the issue, the government renewed its commitment to electoral reform in its December 2015 Speech from the Throne. Yours truly - despite all his knowledge of politics and cynicism - was still enthusiastically wondering what would happen in 2016. Even in June 2016, the liberals weren't ready to break their promise and constituted the ERRE special committee on electoral reform, and yours truly went to an ERRE hearing last autumn wondering if change could still happen; after all, a strong majority of voters chose a party promising electoral reform.

Unsurprisingly, the experts and the public urged the government to abandon FPTP. It wasn't before October that it became difficult to stay hopeful. After millions had been spent, the Minister of democratic institutions then criticized the committee she had formed and dismissed its recommendation to adopt a more proportional electoral system. The liberals then designed their own biased survey on electoral reform.

And only after that much more money was wasted were the liberals willing to admit no reform would take place under their government. This week, after the Minister of Democratic Institutions was changed, electoral reform was removed from the mandate of the new Minister.

In more than a year, the liberals could not find better than an insulting bunch of misleading and pitiful excuses (served just one week after a certain candidate was elected president of a certain neighbor of Canada despite the will of its citizens, thanks to that country's broken electoral system).

I would like to thank those who contributed to this battle, despite the difficulty and high risk of failure, notably Fair Vote Canada (in particular Anita Nickerson and Executive Director Kelly Carmichael), which is outraged by this abandonment, as well as Quebec's MDN, which is also denouncing and calling for protests.

It is hard to accept defeat when a victory seemed so much more likely than ever. Although I signed petition e-616, I consider this battle lost. But if advocates of decent governance have lost one battle, the war is far from over. As for the liberals, they may have won another election, but they permanently lost any credibility (the one thing won permanently being a place in a certain activist's Political Party Blacklist).

See also
Why we broke our electoral reform promise. Signed, a Liberal MP.