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Minor Strangeness (IHTM)

Cloudbusting said:
I've got something similar - when I google random things I'm thinking about buying my partner then gets Facebook ads for those items, consistently. I don't even have fb, and we're not using the same devices either... :worry:
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Techy says that's because you're both on the same IP address. Google and Facebook are sharing data relevant to that address.

Which ads are sent depends on which companies are paying for Facebook to carry their ads.

So if (for example) I googled new cars and looked at Fords, Techy might get Facebook ads for BMW if BMW and not Ford were currently coughing up.

Could be illuminating if someone were doing dodgy searches! :chuckle:
 
escargot said:
Techy says that's because you're both on the same IP address. Google and Facebook are sharing data relevant to that address.

Which ads are sent depends on which companies are paying for Facebook to carry their ads.

So if (for example) I googled new cars and looked at Fords, Techy might get Facebook ads for BMW if BMW and not Ford were currently coughing up.

Could be illuminating if someone were doing dodgy searches! :chuckle:
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Whilst that sounds like a plausible explanation, I still don't like it! I actually thought each individual device had its own IP address, so it just goes to show my level of computer/digital literacy. :hahazebs:

Thankfully there have not been any awkward situations arising from dodgy searches... yet. :sneaky2:
 
You aren't wrong Cloudbusting: every individual device will have its own IP address (or even more than one) but your router will mask this.

IP addresses come in two general types, public and private. The public ones are getting scarce (so many devices online) so your router is usually only given one public IP address to work with. Routers use a technique called Network Address Translation to map the private IP addresses used inside your local network (your wired or wireless network in your home) to public addresses so that your traffic can be routed across the public internet, and then remaps the response back to your devices private IP address.

The drawback to this approach is that all the traffic appears to be coming from your public IP address which is associated with your browsing history in the way that Scargy described.
 
Here's an utterly bizarre piece of utterly mundane strangeness.
Back when I was a late teenager, me and my friend were obsessed with a film called Nights Of Terror (also known as Burial Ground, and Zombi 3 - it had numerous names...) Could never exactly be called a piece of cinematic excellence, Nights Of Terror was basically about a group of partygoers at a mansion who got attacked and eaten by zombies. Still, there's nothing like watching a 25 year old man attempt to play a small child (who then gets turned into a zombie when his arm is ripped off, and ends up- biting his mother's breast off. Really. Don't ask. The film is far far too silly to be offensive though really) There's no plot, no characterisation, not really any acting - and we found the film hilarious - hence why we ended up watching it numerous times, and got to know the film so well... some of the dialogues is imprinted on my subconsciousness even after 30 years... ('This cloth - it smells of death!' , 'You're getting a raise from me all right, but it's nothing to do with money!', 'Why did we come to the country anyway, to twiddle our thumbs cooped up in a mausoleum' etc etc etc) I ended up with three copies of the film - this was in the late-era of the video nasty - when films were heavily censored - and my VHS copy of Nights Of Terror had quarter of an hour cut - so I ended up buying a pirate copy from someone... but that got lost in the post, so he sent me another one - and then the original turned up - so I ended up with three copies of the film...
So we ended up watching the film dozens of times. We knew the film like the back of our hands. Then there's this one scene where moustachioed hero James decided the zombies can 'only be killed by blowing their heads off!' - which he then proceeds to do from one of the balconies on the mansion. One night as we were watching this scene - as the camera pans into one of the zombies about to get it's head blown off we distinctedly heard something we had never heard before. A weird kind of 'creepy' voice - the kind of voice a zombie might have. 'Am I hearing things?' Said my friend. We couldn't make out what the voice was saying - it seemed to be some kind of nonsense like 'too-fesh-o-nal' - so not an actual word. We soon checked my other copies of the film - and again, on each copy could clearly be heard this weird voice. So it seemed the voice was there the whole time - but we just hadn't noticed somehow. The weird thing about this piece of mundane strangeness isn't that there was a 'weird voice' on the tape we hadn't noticed before (believe me Nights Of Terror is somewhat further down the alphabet than being a 'B' movie... I imagine the voice was the result of some production flaw somewhere along the line) - it's that we both noticed it at exactly the same point - despite having watched the films together dozens of times.
I have it on DVD now, and there's no sign of any voice on that particular scene at all.
 
It could have something to do with our sense of hearing changing over the course of time. Your younger ears might not have noticed the sound originally (which is possibly a reverse of the 'mosquito noise' employed on those special speakers they put outside shops to deter teenagers from hanging around at night), but your ears that are now older are able to distinguish it. Maybe the DVD version has had the audio 'cleaned up' too.
Dunno.
 
Trevp666 said:
It could have something to do with our sense of hearing changing over the course of time. Your younger ears might not have noticed the sound originally (which is possibly a reverse of the 'mosquito noise' employed on those special speakers they put outside shops to deter teenagers from hanging around at night), but your ears that are now older are able to distinguish it. Maybe the DVD version has had the audio 'cleaned up' too.
Dunno.
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Yeah, I imagine that's exactly what happened - was probably late at night when we heard the voice and onmce you hear sokething you can't unhear it... Would be interesting to find the old VHS tapes and see what it sounds like noww though. Not that I have a video player any more.
 
Mr_Hermolle said:
Yeah, I imagine that's exactly what happened - was probably late at night when we heard the voice and onmce you hear sokething you can't unhear it... Would be interesting to find the old VHS tapes and see what it sounds like noww though. Not that I have a video player any more.
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Did you always watch the movie on the same TV and VCR?

It could have been a frequency that one amp or speaker wasn't sensitive to, or something to do with the VCR head for example.
 
Could well have been - had a video in my room and downstairs- I do remember watching it on both at some point
 
Tuesday night my dad was due to go out to the pub with his friend, who has Alzheimers, and some if their old friends who had come to town to visit. In the afternoon dad phoned to make sure everyone had arrived ok (they were staying at dads friends house), the phone call went to a strange recorded message directing him to contact the hospice, (it didnt say which hospice and his friend hadnt been in a hospice). This was on the house phone, he tried on his mobile and mums mobile, same message, he also tried his friends wife on her mobile, but it just rang off, concerned, he drove around to his friends house to see if he was ok, when he arrived everything was fine, he was told neither the wifes mobile or the house phone had rung at all that day.
 
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My sister was sorting out my nephew's book shelves yesterday and found these. No one in the house has never seen them before.

IMG-20210625-WA0000.jpg


My nephew is four.
 
Sitting this morning working on the computer, I heard something reasonably heavy fall onto the floor in a different room. Walked all over my small house with the assistance of the cat who also heard it. Nothing out of place. Waiting to see what happens next.
 
Lb8535 said:
Sitting this morning working on the computer, I heard something reasonably heavy fall onto the floor in a different room. Walked all over my small house with the assistance of the cat who also heard it. Nothing out of place. Waiting to see what happens next.
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A large bird (crow) can make a loud thump when landing on the roof—is it possible this was the source?
 
Lb8535 said:
Sitting this morning working on the computer, I heard something reasonably heavy fall onto the floor in a different room. Walked all over my small house with the assistance of the cat who also heard it. Nothing out of place. Waiting to see what happens next.
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Could possibly have been a bird flying up against a window, if unseen then that can make a person wonder what caused the sudden thump?
Investigate! Any smearing on the window, as sometimes you can see oily traces left by wings etc being bashed against the surface.
 
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CarlosTheDJ said:
My sister was sorting out my nephew's book shelves yesterday and found these. No one in the house has never seen them before.

View attachment 41253

My nephew is four.
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This reminds me of the mysterious buddha statue that appeared in my house! I think I may have posted about in on here somewhere, but a precis of the circumstances...

my daughter moved back home from University,bringing lots of furniture etc that she and her partner had had in their university house. One of the items was a glass fronted display cabinet Inside the cabinet was a figurine of a seated buddha. Daughter subsequently moved back out but didn't have room for the cabinet until recently. I asked her if she wanted the buddha as well, or should I keep him? She denied all knowledge of the buddha, as did all the other children. The figure can't have been in the cabinet to start with - it was horribly mobile and would have slid all over the place and broken the glass during the serveral moves it undertook (and the source of the cabinet was unlikely to have had a seated buddha in the first place).

So she's now got her glass cabinet back, with additional seated buddha. Which, I strongly suspect, she put in there in the first place and then forgot about, but she and partner both say not, and neither have any particular fondness for buddha or buddhism.
 
Last week I was out in* town on my mountain bike when some shitty vehicle approached too fast and too far over, making me swerve towards the kerb.

Swore and wobbled a bit, then I swear I felt a hand on my waist steadying me. Like a parent helping a child learn to balance on a bike.

The moment passed and all was well (except that respectable passers-by heard my disgraceful outburst :chuckle:) and I forgot about it for a couple of days. I then mentioned it to Techy and he said he too had the same experience a day or two before.

How weird, eh! Eh!

I'll add that neither of us was personally supervised by adults as kids when learning to ride a bike and so had no personal experience of being steadied.

*A very English bit of sentence construction there. Our language is highly prepositional. :chuckle:
 
IbisNibs said:
A large bird (crow) can make a loud thump when landing on the roof—is it possible this was the source?
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It's a good thought but it came from ground level. Would have to have been a pretty big bird traveling at speed , and we don't have large crows or jays here. No residue on the windows. However, yesterday morning I did finally clean off my enclosed porch and put out a couple of cement statues of birds on the porch railing mostly because I couldn't think of anywhere else to put them and yesterday afternoon I saw an interested bird land on the railing to check them out, never saw that before. For some reason although I live in a rural area we don't seem to have many birds near the houses, perhaps they have enough to eat in the woods. But the visitor was much too small to have made the sound I heard.
 
catseye said:
This reminds me of the mysterious buddha statue that appeared in my house! I think I may have posted about in on here somewhere, but a precis of the circumstances...

my daughter moved back home from University,bringing lots of furniture etc that she and her partner had had in their university house. One of the items was a glass fronted display cabinet Inside the cabinet was a figurine of a seated buddha. Daughter subsequently moved back out but didn't have room for the cabinet until recently. I asked her if she wanted the buddha as well, or should I keep him? She denied all knowledge of the buddha, as did all the other children. The figure can't have been in the cabinet to start with - it was horribly mobile and would have slid all over the place and broken the glass during the serveral moves it undertook (and the source of the cabinet was unlikely to have had a seated buddha in the first place).

So she's now got her glass cabinet back, with additional seated buddha. Which, I strongly suspect, she put in there in the first place and then forgot about, but she and partner both say not, and neither have any particular fondness for buddha or buddhism.
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I remember your post and saying it again - if it likes living with your daughter that's good. Leave it alone it may help.
 
Lb8535 said:
I remember your post and saying it again - if it likes living with your daughter that's good. Leave it alone it may help.
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It lived with me for quite a while, inside the cabinet. I was quite happy to host it, but now it's moved back, and seems to be quite content.
 
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