Mastodawn

Oh, and each “xls” file is about 12kb in size but only contains a dozen or so transactions, as it isn’t my main card. Each download also has the same file name, regardless of the date range it covers.

serríað 8h ago

Today I’ve tried to write a script to extract some useful information from my bank and credit card statements.

Current account provider: not a problem. Here’s the last year of transactions as a csv file.

Credit card provider A: not a problem. Here’s the last year of transactions as a csv file. You’ll have to provide your own column headers, though, and I’m gonna quote and comma-separate any values >£1000, because I’m sure those are too big to store as regular numbers.

Credit card provider B, santander: you can have 12 months of transaction history, but only if you do 12 separate one month queries, twiddling a form by hand each time. I’m gonna claim that you’re downloading XLS files, but actually it’s some kinda XHTML that excel (and open office calc) can parse, because it’s very important to me that your spreadsheets have my corporate branding.

Wtf, santander. It could have been so much simpler for us both.

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serríað 1d ago

Blink and you’ll miss it, but every 20 minutes or so the advertising screens on the ceiling of the carriage do in fact say how fast you’re going.

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serríað 1d ago

Anyway, I’m pretty certain it is going really fast, which is always nice.

serríað 1d ago

“I wonder how fast this train is going. Surely it should be easy to find out, as my phone does gps magic” and other stupid and deeply ignorant things I have thought recently.

My iphone doesn’t offer a native speedometer, and the ios app store is absolutely choked with offerings which will spew ads and harvest a load of data about me and “offer in-app purchases”. All this for something my phone hardware can do already!

Anyway, in conclusion, I still hate modern technology.

serríað 5d ago

I do not like the french soap dong.

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serríað Mar 22

@siriusfox i decided not to try different keyboard layouts, because i spend quite a lot of my time having to use other people’s keyboards and computers and having the wrong muscle memory would probably drive me mad quite quickly.

Maybe it’s worth experimenting with for different keyboard shapes, though. I don’t have problems with using my left hand to operate a mouse or gear lever, perhaps in part because there’s a clear context shift.

serríað Mar 22

I think my mastodon client moonlights as a matrix client when I’m not looking.

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serríað Mar 20

Also, shout-out to the folks doing sound at paris gare du nord. Piped-in birdsong was pleasantly cheering, and the PA system in the metro station sounded like it had a couple of jazzy saxophone notes instead of the usual bing-bong announcement tones.

Didn’t hang about to check though. Turns out that getting from gare du nord to gare du lyon in 45 minutes is quite doable even with awkward luggage, but you don’t want to hang around.

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serríað Mar 20

I think this might also be my first time travelling a reasonable distance on actual high speed rail, and it really does seem magic and slightly implausible (180mph at one point!) though I can’t say that the views between london and lyon were particularly interesting.