aggravating – Ursecta

Mac mini sucks (power)

I’ve got a new Mac Mini, and it has a gloriously low power consumption. At least it had for a while. If you wait long enough, it starts consuming power like crazy. See the graph of total power consumption to see the problem:

Now, looking at the processes, one process sticks out, the “corespeechd”. Today, it consumed around 130% of a CPU, constantly. Remarkably, I have all speech-related functionality switched off, but it still does this.

The solution? Well, I don’t want to reboot the machine all the time, so I created an entry in Lingon X to killall corespeechd once a day. I think that will do it. I’d like to kill it forever, but I see no way of doing that.

Update 2019-02-02: And this is the difference it makes installing that kill command:

Installed the “killall corespeechd” script on Jan 19. See the difference it makes to total power consumption.

Update 2019-04-03: After following Marty’s suggestion (in the comments) and even after disabling my kill-script, it looks like the problem is solved:

Is there life after Crashplan?

Dead Crashplan — Crashplan for home is dead

Now that Crashplan for home is gone, or at least not long for this world, a lot of people will need to find another way of backing up their stuff. It’s tempting to get angry, and there are reasons to be, but in the end you have to forget about all that and move on. Even though you may have months, or even a year, before Crashplan stops working, there is another reason you have to get something up right now, namely file histories.

Continue reading “Is there life after Crashplan?”

Payza takes the sleazy price

Payza must earn some kind of prize for this… got this email today:

Dear Martin Wehlou,
Since you haven’t logged in for 18 months, your account is now dormant and a monthly inactivity fee of $10 USD is being applied. 
For more information on dormant accounts, please review Section 12.1 of our User Agreement.
To avoid the dormant account fee, all you need to do is log in to your account. So come on by and see what we’ve got for you!
• Personalize your account and make it even safer by setting up your customizable avatar and welcome message.
• It’s a small world after all – send money to loved ones in over 200 countries. Always free, always fast. 
• Our fresh account design makes for easy account navigation – find what you need, when you want it.
Thanks for choosing Payza, 
Team Payza

My first thought was: phish! Goes to phishtank! But no, this was real. Checked headers and links. Real as it gets.

Checked the user agreement, and yes, there it was. A “dormant fee”. And, an unspecified “reactivation fee” after dormancy. It was on page 24 of a total of 41 pages.

And, no, no way to cancel the account anywhere. I did find an unobtrusive link to delete the credit card, though. Wrote a support “request” to them:

I’ve received an email from you that I initially was certain was a phish, but actually seems to be real. You’re starting to charge me for *not* using my account… Oh, man, this is so sleazy I can’t believe it.

Additionally, there seems to be no way to cancel my account either. What I did was remove my credit card. If you so much as attempt to charge me, I’ll file a complaint through the bank.

I think you may have earned the epithet of most sleazy, not to say borderline criminal, internet company yet.

So, just remove that account pronto.

The basic idea here seems to be to exploit people who have changed their email addresses and won’t get the warning. Or who for some other reason aren’t paying attention.