back to article Someone please have mercy on this poorly Ubuntu parking machine that has been force-fed maudlin autotuned tripe

What to do when a touchscreen is having a totter? Today's entry in the encyclopaedia of bork features two approaches taken by users, one involving duct tape and a musically inclined alternative. In a break from the usual examples of Windows suffering a whoopsie, the screens serving the car park of an Asda in Falkirk, Scotland …

  1. Steve Foster
    Facepalm

    Huh?

    Since these are touchscreen devices, you'd have thought that a member of staff could have acknowledged the messages and let the relevant software complete it's updates.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Huh?

      Och, it's muir than ma job's worrrth, laddie.

      1. Little Mouse

        Re: Huh?

        'I know "muir" means more, but "Och" doesn't seem to mean anything...'

        1. Alister

          Re: Huh?

          Och: general interjection of confirmation, affirmation, and often disapproval.

          1. Claverhouse

            Re: Huh?

            Sometimes said 'Ach'.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Huh?

      It'll ask for a password the moment you do if it's configured correctly that is.

      1. Claverhouse

        Re: Huh?

        Prolly the name of the store.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Huh?

          You know you're probably right, it'll probably be Tescoxxxx where xxxx is the 4 digit store code you can find knocking about in the store if you know where to look.

    3. lglethal Silver badge
      Trollface

      Re: Huh?

      Staff? Whats that? Definitely not something I find around my local supermarket carpark. They also seem to be hard to find around the actual Supermarket as well. Bloody self service kiosks...

      1. tin 2

        Re: Huh?

        Totally. and especially in Asda. Check out myself on an ignorant machine that undoubtedly will need a harassed and overburdened member of staff come over to sort out at some point? All while having RECORDING IN PROGRESS flashed in front of your face? Don't mind if I never come in your shitty store ever again.

    4. the hatter
      FAIL

      Re: Huh?

      Not the store staf'f's job or equipment, the parking contract is almost certainly outsourced and the operator pays a good price to be allowed to manage it. Store staff unlikely to care that you're using a parking space to go for a walk around the other shops.

      One store locally uses the same sort of scheme - park 30 mins for free, park upto 2h free if you spend £5 in store. Finally got into the habit to check if the machines are even working, before popping in to spend a fiver, as it's broken often enough to let me avoid the extra time sink.

    5. Efer Brick

      Re: Huh?

      Yeah, should take the high road

  2. Khaptain Silver badge
    Headmaster

    Out of order

    See title for grammar nazi fodder

    1. Steve K

      Re: Out of order

      Out off order

      It has been mentioned in the article, from the start...

      1. anothercynic Silver badge

        Re: Out of order

        This grammar nazi approves your message.

    2. ICPurvis47
      Headmaster

      Re: Out of order

      Once saw a printed notice on a toilet door, saying "Out of order". Some wag had crossed out the word "order" and written "ordure" instead.

  3. Captain Hogwash Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Thanks for the tips

    I'd never heard of Trevor Daniel or Pallbearer. I won't be listening to the maudlin autotuned tripe again but Pallbearer absolutely demand further investigation.

    1. Manolo
      Thumb Up

      Re: Thanks for the tips

      Agree. Pallbearer sounds a lot better than the description "loud and shouty metal" made me expect.

      As for that Trevor lad: nope, just nope.

      1. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

        Re: Thanks for the tips

        I don't know if I'd call it particularly shouty, he's singing clean through almost all of it!

      2. Excellentsword (Written by Reg staff)

        Re: Re: Thanks for the tips

        Mr Speed takes a very reductive view of my music taste

        1. Santa from Exeter
          Devil

          Re: Thanks for the tips

          Not Heavy or Shouty enough for me. Now if it had been a bit of StaticX or Killswitch Engage...

          \m/

          1. Excellentsword (Written by Reg staff)

            Re: Re: Thanks for the tips

            Oh dear.

    2. jake Silver badge

      Re: Thanks for the tips

      Strangely, autotune filtered vocals always give me a splitting headache. No idea why. Thankfully all such so-called "music" is crap, so I'm not exactly missing anything by avoiding it.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Thanks for the tips

        How weird Jake, your boring, self involved posts on any Linux thread give us splitting headaches!

        1. Kane
          Trollface

          Re: Thanks for the tips

          "How weird Jake, your boring, self involved posts on any Linux thread give us splitting headaches!"

          How weird Anon, your boring, self involved posts sniping on anything Jake says in a thread give us splitting headaches!

      2. IGotOut Silver badge

        Re: Thanks for the tips

        Jake, you do know autotune has been used for decades on all sorts records, your just pobably not aware of the 99% of times it's used.

        1. jake Silver badge

          Re: Thanks for the tips

          Yes, I know how and where it is used. I can hear it, as can anybody who has an ear for music.

          Now guess why I don't intentionally listen to tunes on the radio anymore.

        2. Fading
          Terminator

          Re: Thanks for the tips

          Autotune is prevalent in many genres now and is frequently used in "pop" where previously you would have had double/treble tracked vocals (thank-you Messrs. Stock, Aitken and Waterman, not). Whilst I don't get a headache from its overuse it does set my teeth on edge.

          Thankfully the likelihood of my favourite tracks requiring "autotune" is fairly minimal as "screaming and yelling" in front of heavy electric guitar riffs rarely needs to be harmonic.....

  4. karlkarl Silver badge

    Why did they set that unit up with a full fledged consumer desktop environment?

    These automatic updaters are a menace. Keep the system on an offline network and all your problems go away.

    1. the hatter

      Working to a budget. When it loses enough revenue to cause problems, they can spend some money to tighten things up. The device needs to talk to the outside world anyhow, I doubt the parking company wants to set up their own network infra.

    2. jake Silver badge

      Full fledged consumer desktop environment?

      Shit, that thing probably has a full developer environment on it. Why bother with a targeted sub-set of the DVD when "install all" is a mouse-click away?

      As we all know, having the full GCC system on a parking kiosk somewhere in the wilds of Scotland might come in handy someday. Might be fun to switch the language to Tagalog ... and the calendar to Julian. They left in the options, so we might as well use 'em, right?

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: Full fledged consumer desktop environment?

        Well, as I'm currently trying to debug a network device which has decided to provide me basically no utilities, maybe we can find a middle ground. I'm getting tired of seeing "command not found" on nearly everything*.

        *So far, commands I expected to be available but aren't include less (and more), uptime, grep, and scp.

        1. jake Silver badge
          Pint

          Re: Full fledged consumer desktop environment?

          Are you working with a subset of busybox?

          Typing busybox at the command prompt should give you a list of commands compiled into your version, along with other info.

          Note that busybox might also be your init! See the link above for more.

          Yes, working with a subset of the tools we all know and love is a pain in the ass ... but most of those devices are built down to a price, and RAM/ROM quantity suffers. The fact that the manufacturer doesn't expect the consumer to actually use the CLI doesn't help any. In a worst case scenario, you might be able to flash a FOSS firmware solution that'll make your life easier.

          Have a beer, relax, slow down, think about it. First, do no wrong.

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            Re: Full fledged consumer desktop environment?

            You are entirely correct. They included enough storage to give me more of my utilities, but they have chosen not to. Similarly, they have chosen to fry logs on shutdown (or they've hidden them really well), which is making my job tricky as I'm trying to figure out why it keeps shutting down and all the log I have is the one from the last time it rebooted. I found a list of all the utilities available to me, but I keep typing the ones I don't have out of muscle memory.

      2. AndyD 8-)₹

        The track has proven popular...

        The past tense of prove is 'proved' - although it seems to be dropping out of use, so I suppose the big-data driven dictionaries will soon omit it.

  5. Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

    Trevor Daniel?

    Not Rick Astley? In a loop.

    1. Kane

      Re: Trevor Daniel?

      "Not Rick Astley? In a loop."

      I know, missed opportunity.

  6. Terafirma-NZ

    Some Positives

    Hey at least its Ubuntu, where I come from people tend to think software is Microsoft and Microsoft is software.

  7. ricardian

    Whilst scrolling through these comment I inadvertently did a right mouse click and was presented with a menu one option of which was "Translate to English"

    1. davenewman

      Why translate? There hasn't bee a comment from amanfrommars in this thread.

      1. Claverhouse

        But now there's a free bee in the thread.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Update

    The face it knows the size of update file would suggest it has some form of internet connection so Im surprised no one fired up the browser and put some pornhub media on it.

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