Web browser plug-ins

Recently I've been wrestling a little with browser plug-ins. On mst3kmoxie's Debian GNU/Linux laptop she was hoping to be able to watch Channel 4's on-demand streaming service All 4. I forget the details now, but under both Iceweasel (Firefox) and Chromium (basically Chrome) I failed to get their DRM'd flash Brightcove thing working. Now it's as far as complaining about her having an ad-blocker installed but even if I wipe those plugins from the actual hard drive it still complains. Video from the other sites she uses still work fine.

Anyhow, I found that logging in on Dreamwidth wasn't working too well, Iceweasel complained about some improper redirection. The culprit turns out to be the Redirect Cleaner add-on that I use to copy links from Google searches usably. It's a pity that DuckDuckGo isn't actually as good at finding the search results I want. Still, I don't need to use that add-on often, so I'll just temporarily enable it when I do.

The transit time of packages in the mail

In the US I got used to waiting awhile for Amazon deliveries. Ground shipping from somewhere like Arizona or even Kentucky could quite reasonably take a few days. Since moving to Scotland, one pleasant surprise was that a smaller country means that parcels tend to arrive promptly, though perhaps it helps that we are not very far from Amazon's large distribution center near Dunfermline.

For a package that arrived today, the tracking recorded the courier as being Amazon Logistics, suggesting that perhaps they are getting into moving their own packages. It progressed most impressively, too: the tracking claims that it was in Swansea (Wales) at 17:46 yesterday and it arrived this morning. Okay, Britain's not a large country, but given that I typically use Amazon's free super saver shipping, it was nice to get the package today instead of Monday.

In contrast with this is perhaps Parcelforce or at least some part of Royal Mail. Over recent weeks we've had a few international deliveries come that took remarkably long. For instance, package tracking showed a parcel from China arriving in the UK on December 8th, but it didn't arrive here until shortly after Christmas.

Local weather

For weeks now much of the UK has suffered from wind and a lot of rain. There has been flooding around this region and seeing sunshine became a rare treat. This weekend the wet weather has been giving way to cold weather. We now get frost, but it doesn't get much below freezing.

We live at low altitude east of Perth among riverside farmland that the Scots call a carse. Our everyday life is just north of the Firth of Tay, which lately has run high enough for the Queen's Bridge into Perth to sometimes be closed. For work I commute east into Dundee. It is a pleasant enough drive, but I miss having more choice of reasonable daily routes. The carse seems to be rather temperate; being so near the Firth, and the North Sea, probably helps. Since moving here I've needed neither gloves nor shorts.

More through luck than judgment, I seem to live and work somewhere that hasn't been much hit by the weather. A little north of the region between Perth and Dundee are hills, perhaps they help to shelter us. After all, further north the hills become small mountains on which people ski in the winter. We haven't even lost power, except for a few seconds on one occasion, despite all the wind.

I don't know if all the recent rain is simply unusual or something that climate change is making the new normal for early winter. The first week I lived in Scotland it rained continuously and I was glad that it turned out to have been an unusually wet week. Our area is actually among the sunniest in Scotland.