Social Networks in 2019

I started the 30 day process of deleting my Facebook account yesterday. I think I've weaned myself from the platform (I was mainly a lurker in the past) but we'll see, maybe I'll go crawling back. Google Plus goes away next month. I haven't really posted to either platform in a long time. I suspect the idea of creating content for those ecosystems was part of the disincentive.

I've causally looked at Mastodon and Diaspora over the years but never very seriously.

Maybe I'll get back into writing every once and again on my blog. The WordPress editing UI is pretty good these days. We'll see, maybe this'll be one of those posts followed by nothing for years, hopefully not.

Six Years of Lastpass Support Requests : What have I learned

I went through the 38 support tickets I've opened with LastPass over the last 6 years to see if it's really as bad as it feels. Here are some themes that are revealed

  • Lastpass has a persistent and serious problem with product quality and quality assurance. I've never used a service or software before with this many problems over this long of a timespan. The breadth of areas where they have user facing bugs is staggering. This is not one product in their suite of products with a bunch of problems. Everything from their browser plugins to pocket, to their website, to their credit monitoring service have all been critically broken for long periods of time over the last 6 years.
  • Lastpass support personnel has never followed up once in 6 years. With every bug that I've reported that they've confirmed they've never once notified me when the bug was fixed unless the fix came within the following day of the report, which only happened in the early years of Lastpass. This causes every user that reports a problem which is confirmed to be a real problem feel as if their report has gone into a black hole and their effort to report the problem was wasted
  • Lastpass takes years (literally years) to fix known bugs. They are either so short on resources or their priorities of favoring new features over a functioning product are so out of whack that known bugs that break core functionality can be acknowledged and remain unfixed for years.

Here is a short summary of the last 6 years of support tickets. I've summarized the multi-paragraph bug reports that I've sent in (with screenshots and screen capture videos) into a few sentences each to give an idea of the problem. I've also summarized their response. Finally I've added a subjective rating of how badly they handled the support ticket from 1 to 5, 1 being fine and 5 being as bad as it gets.

Date Type Problem Response How bad
2017-10-25 Pocket bug Pocket segfaults in Ubuntu 16.04 No reply yet 1
2017-10-04 Site bug Received email saying to signup for lastpass families. Clicking the link in email gives page with error "The page you are trying to access is currently closed" We sent an email and then close signups for the feature we invited you to 3
2017-09-13 Browser plugin bug Search bar is no longer focused when vault is launched requiring mousing to click before searching Over a month now and still broken 5
2017-09-10 Site bug Signing up for lastpass credit monitoring results in "ERROR: An unexpected error has occurred" Known issue 4
2017-09-09 Browser plugin bug Export feature doesn't work Devs notified 4
2017-05-02 Browser plugin bug New saved credentials are saved with a URL of "http://" Devs notified and bug persisted for months 5
2017-04-20 Site bug Changelog is many revisions behind Devs notified 3
2017-04-07 Site bug Downloading the firefox plugin downloads 4.1.44 which the immediately autoupdates to 4.1.45. Please put the current version on the download page Devs notified 4
2017-04-07 Browser plugin bug Browser plugin auto upgrade logs the user out After 13 days of back and forth : It's because you use yubikey and we can't fix it 4
2017-04-07 Browser plugin bug Trying to delete a local "equivalent domain" fails and the vault UI becomes unclickable Known issue, please use Chrome 5
2017-04-07 Site bug Lastpass 4 announcement page video is broken Ya, it's broken 3
2016-08-02 Pocket bug Pocket 2.0.2 crashes with "terminate called after throwing an instance of 'char const*'" It's because you use yubikey, can you disable MFA? 4
2016-08-02 Site bug Lastpass pocket product page has a download button which isn't a button but an image of what the button looks like when you go to the download page. Baffling Still that way to this day 3
2016-06-09 Site bug Download page says version 4.1.7 but link points to 4.1.15a No fix, incorrect 4.1.7 version left on site 3
2016-03-18 Browser plugin bug New in firefox plugin v4 when a plugin autoupdate occurs I'm logged out or I'm prompted with a yubikey prompt mid-session Disable and re-enable MFA and see if that fixes it 3
2016-02-29 Share feature bug Email notification about share updates says to check for checkerboard icon to see change. There is no checkerboard icon in vault Reported to product team 2
2016-02-09 Browser plugin bug Firefox plugin v4 drops characters in vault search field when loading and causes full browser freeze for 3 seconds on vault load You have too many sites in your vault no our problem 5
2015-11-04 Pocket bug Pocket fails on Ubuntu 14.04 with libssl.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file Workaround provided to install libssl while bug is fixed 1
2015-08-10 Site bug Status page redirects to blog but should redirect to twitter status account Fixed after 1 day 1
2015-08-10 Site bug Release notes for 3.2.20 say firefox is supported, but there is no firefox download of that version Passed onto devs 2
2015-01-18 Question How can I update my credit card information Answered after 2 days 1
2014-11-03 Support system problem Adding comment to existing support ticket gets Request Denied Said to try a different browser, I gave up 3
2014-10-22 Site problem Adblock Plus added rule which breaks Lastpass "Share" function Devs notified, don't know if it was fixed 3
2014-08-26 Pocket bug Deleting credential in pocket fails due to API 302 response I commented 2 months later that it was still broken, they fixed it the next day 4
2012-10-25 Browser Plugin Bug Change monospace font used to show passwords as the number 1 and letter l look the same Bug unfixed for ages, at some point it was fixed with no notification 5
2012-04-25 Security question Does malware running on your client result in full lastpass vault compromise despite having MFA? Answered yes in 1 day 1
2012-04-20 Question How can I update my credit card information Answered after 2 days 1
2012-01-04 Security risk How can I use lastpass on my phone and not risk compromise of my data if I lose my phone via a "log me out of all devices" feature on the website? Thanks for the suggestion 2
2012-01-04 Browser Plugin Feature How to I configure a lastpass credential set to identify a given field as a captcha and not automatically submit? You can't lastpass just has a list of common names for captcha fields, if the name isn't in their list they can't tell 3
2011-12-29 Site Bug During outage like today, how can users determine status of lastpass if status page is hosted on lastpass.com? Didn't understand the problem, then suggested using pocket during outages 4
2011-12-17 Security risk When credit card info changes and annual renewal comes up, billing fails and MFA is disabled. Feedback passed onto devs 3
2011-12-05 Browser Plugin Bug Yubikey prompt text is wrong saying to press yubikey for 2 seconds Bug wasn't fixed after 11 months, gave up waiting, bug was fixed some years later with no notification 3
2011-12-05 Browser Plugin Bug Entering URL in tab of vault goes to last site in vault, not what's entered in url bar Fixed and released in 1 day 1
2011-12-05 Browser Plugin Bug Deleting multiple records from vault causes UI glitch where they are re-added due to race condition After 10 months bug was still present, gave up waiting 4
2011-09-24 Browser Plugin Bug Saved credentials were lost Said to try upgrading browser plugin 3
2011-05-10 Site Bug Locked account email states wrong lock duration Bug fixed in 1 day 1
2011-05-05 Outage Lastpass inaccessible because of breach and offline access doesn't work for yubikey users No response 1
2011-05-05 Documentation Bug Pocket instructions for linux users are confusing After 4 months they say devs disagree, no fix 2

Hose clamps for homebrew beer lines

Typical homebrew beer liquid hose has an outer diameter (OD) of 7/16" or 0.4375" or 11mm

Typical homebrew beer gas hose has an outer diameter (OD) of 9/16" or 0.5625" or 14mm

A worm gear drive hose clamp size 04 has a diameter

  • when fully open of 5/8" or 0.62" or 16mm
  • when close of 1/4" or 0.25" or 6mm

Ideally the host clamp is larger than the OD of the hose you're clamping but not significantly larger so that the shape of clamp is circular and not pinched next to the gear when it's cinched down.

This aliexpress seller sells hose clamps for cheap. The two sizes that may be ideal here are

  • Type 1: 8mm-12mm
  • Type 2: 10mm-16mm

You could also buy them in bulk from this seller though they look more expensive