Un-Regomize + Photo!
Please!
Tech support people play many roles, and The Register celebrates them all in On Call, our reader-contributed Friday column in which we share your tales of adventure. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Horatio" who told us he once planned to spend a long weekend aboard a 95-year-old tall ship that was preserved in its …
During a Charity dress down day, (back to School) I was sent on a mission of mercy to our sister site on the opposite side of the City.
Strolled in an waved at Securiy.
Walked into the Call Centre, found my User, fixed PC and went to the coffee room for a well earned brew.
Stirring my java, a Colleague commented on my attire. I'd been there an hour and not one wag saw fit to crack a joke at the IT Schoolboy's expense.
I visited the UK with my kids and wife a few years ago when they were toddlers. We'd gone to Burger King for lunch as the kids loved junk food.
I arrived back at my parents' place in the car and had got the kids out and sent them in, then got chatting to the neighbour who I'd not seen for many years and who'd known me since I was a kid.
I noticed at times he was looking a bit weirdly at me, but it wasn't until 15 mins later or so when I went inside that my parent's commented they liked my hat. I'd completely forgotten I was wearing a Burger King cardboard crown.
(Where, as they say, my Paul & Storm fans at?)
<p>The ship sailed into harbor
After fifteen months at sea
The captain hit the tavern
With his crew of fifty-three</p>
<p>After drinking up their pay
They staggered through the town
But all the inns and public houses
Turned the sailors down</p>
<p>The captain said "Fear not, me lads
You all can come with me
I live just 'round the corner
And you all can stay for free"</p>
<p>But when the captain's wife awoke
Upon the break of day
They say that you could hear her wailin'
Clear to Bot'ny Bay…</p>
Maritime IT is shocking, not so sure he was in period dress, just dressed for the "live" IT standards...
We all remember Windows for Warships (TM)!
Many boats still use NMEA 0183 (released 1983) to communicate between their instruments, many at 4800 baud.
NMEA 2k (released 2000) is only just becoming the norm, not helped by a few manufacturers doing the classic IT think of making connectors propriety.
I once worked for a "manager of ships" - The Greek dad owned ~80 and managed for others another ~400 odd. The sons ran the business day to day. 400 people had to come to an office so they could be seen "working". Each ship was a separate legal entity so the cash was safe in the event one sank / had an incident etc. The ships ran hooky copies of everything - why spend money if there's no way to get caught, and if you do, the liability stops at the gang plank!
Meanwhile dad was lauded as a a great businessman and placed on a pedestal to be worshipped by the industry.
Hm, I need to find that version of Windows. Windows 2000 UI was very near perfect before "must look like teletubby" came along. Had the classical real-search as well instead of relying on an never-up-to-date index. (Only one tiny UI feature was better in Vista UI, see disable full row select search results.)
You could sort of do that on Vista / Win 7 too.
First thing I did on any XP / Vista / Win7. Not only easier to use, but less RAM and faster.
I have similar on Linux Mint with Mate Desktop now. Sad about Thunderbird and every major Browser ignoring OS Theme and either copying Chrome or Win 10.
Thunderbird 91.13.1 was the last that could do OS theme and that needed massive configuration editing.
UI / UX designers have lost the plot. Grey text-boxes with the label in them is stupid. Variations of grey (with no 3D shading hints) for background, entry, text, labels is an abusive insult. Why do they call this "modern" and laud it. Why disconnect Tabs from the document and have a tool bar in between?
Stupidity of Ribbon, or hiding less used menu items. Or deleting the functionality because telemetry says not used much. Least used things might be very important and because they are not used often need to be always visible in the menu.
Desktop applications styled as if for a 6" mobile is stupid. Android or iOS are both crippled UIs on larger tablets, being designed for phones.
Yep, my mail is still Seamonkey... The closest to "dark theme" is still "Metal Lion", unless you have a better suggestion :D. Sadly the extension "Standalone Seamonkey Mail" is needed as well, so it opens the default OS-browser when clicking on a link in an email. The Seamonkey browser exposes how The Web is more incompatible than ever (even Firefox is locked out very often).
I've tried seamonkey in the past, I forget why and I forget why it wasn't viable. Maybe it was only the Browser or for the HTML editor. I don't remember email on it. I shall try again. I don't care for "dark mode" ( i have a matte scrreen and turn down the brightness) as it reminds me of the 1970s and 1980s. I like the ink on paper look, especially with a dash of Win 3.1x to Win2K 3D shading.
Just download the tar and I'll see what it's like on Mint. Seems odd that it's not in the Distro Software Package GUI, but then Viber and Calibre need installed from download too.
With the current fad for only bothering to write websites for a limited number of browsers it gets more and more difficult for a lot of sites. Even my own NextCloud needs Firefox which is stupid given that SM is built on FF. Just download the file, untar it in /opt and add an entry for /opt/seamonkey/seamonkey to your menu.
The closest to "dark theme" is still "Metal Lion"
Default theme is to use the system theme which is what Mage wanted. Presumably if your desktop theme is a dark theme (anathema to me but we all have our preferences) it would automatically follow.
A recent annoyance is that for the last few releases Lighting (calendar) has become a tab rather than a separate window and I can't see a way to change that.
I tried it. It half works. It displays the basic form, finds the date, loads this weeks event list but does not respond to any controls. Maybe I'll poke about at it some more and see if I can get it working properly. Currently on 2.53.20 SM, It's encouraging to know it still does work, thanks for that Jou.
Another SeaMonkey user here at least on my x86 / x64 Linux devices. After the TB UI was properly trashed recently I have moved over to Claws Mail on my ARM Linux devices. I was surprised to discover that Claws Mail works well on my PinePhones with touch screen input. It is also fast even on the PinePhone.
"Sad about Thunderbird and every major Browser ignoring OS Theme and either copying Chrome or Win 10."
I occasionally use the browser part of Vivaldi and that can follow the OS theme. You can find that with: Help - Vivaldi Welcome tour, then it's the first question.
Which reminds me I should take another look at the Vivaldi e-mail component. Thunderbird mostly works for me but I find it annoying that it keeps all attachments in both the Inbox and Sent files directories which therefore get very large. I much preferred Eudora which allowed you to place received attachments in a separate directory.
Have a good weekend ->
NMEA should be good, in theory, but we've found manufacturer's implementation of it can be shocking.
We were trying to debug why a chart plotter would never show the correct time after startup, even though it was talking OK to the GPS module. Eventually, with the aid of a USB NMEA interface*, we found the issue; the first thing the chart plotter did was send out a request for the correct time, the second thing it did was respond to the request and send it's own time (which was incorrect as it had no inbuilt RTC) which it then read back in! As it now believed it had the correct time it was ignoring the time data from the GPS. We were able to send the necessary commands to turn off time responses from the plotter but surely that should have been the default?
*Getting that working at all was another long story involving an IT specialist, an electronics engineer and someone with a foot in both camps!
'Ere was I, a-hopin' for a tale o' strugglin' against a knot in the CAT o' 5 tails. Droppin' the sorry mess that be comin' out o' the patch cabinet onto t'windlass and 'auling the server rack agin the 'eaving tides o' the treacherous raised floor.
Yah could a'least 'ave spliced the power cord.
Decades-ago medical software quit working, displaying a licensing error on-screen. This was a 24/7/365 emergency call center, and I was called in late at night. When I got there, I made a quick check, then rousted out one of the three garage-shop programmers. After a quick coffee and some questions to me, they deermined yes, there was a problem with the license-checking software, and sent me a workaround license code which I had to manually-enter into each of the nine PCs in the call centre. This worked.
It was Halloween, and I had gone to an Alice-in-Wonderland party dressed as the March Hare, in a blue pinstriped wool suit, a white tophat, with white and pink-inside ears protruding, and a puffy white cotton tail on my ass.
Everyone understood why I was dressed as I was, but ... as I had my hand one the doorknob to leave, I heard a meaningfully-cleared throat behind me, and turned my head to look back.
One of the female nurses gave me a slightly-wicked smile and said, "Shake it."
I don't know how our Horatio restrained himself. I would have been well into a "talk like a pirate" routine.
I can think of a few uses for a marlinspike but decent oak or brass belaying pin could be even more useful for administering some percussive encouragement to recalcitrant devices and attitude readjustment to other tools.
The BBC short animations Pugwash animations from the early '60s are a fond childhood memory.
I was once escorted into a US radar base by a nun in full regalia.
That wasn't fancy dress though - she really was a nun.
A somewhat drastic career change after her retirement from the military, but being on the reserve list, she was called back as a consultant.
But everyone at the base knew her - it was the foreigner she was escorting who got the strange looks!
Two incidents stand out, at one time I was open water swimming before the work day. Nothing like a quick dip in the Pacific to wake up. I kept business wardrobe on the hook behind my office door, so I could rinse off, dry on the way in and change. One day I arrived to find air conditioning out and systems crashed. I spend the morning in a Speedo, t-shirt and sandals putting things back together.
Not actually me but back in the day as young-uns, we was all WITNESS to a very major emergency IT event where a well-degreed IT wizard was on call while out at a club and was REQUIRED to attend any IT emergency no matter the place or time, especially when a C-suite exec phoned! They were even equipped with special giant brick phones that were specifically assigned to the IT department that were always on 24/7.
Being close to summer, when it was both very warm weather-wise and where "Party Time" in the local clubs was in full play, SHE was a late twenties IT wizard very well versed in Unix and Windows Server systems. Of course, it was the one night where she was out at 1:00 am in a club in full party/dance attire dressed to the nines in the most revealing skin-tight clothing and blondest hair one could possibly imagine, and she was pinged to immediately come into the office with no diversions allowed! It also HELPED she was built like a tank with EVERYTHING showing in their MOST SPECTACULAR AMPLITUDE and utter hotness! She turned half the C-suite exec team who raced over to figure out WHY a major electrical and IT infrastructure went down, into a gaggle of STUNNED C*%$#s giving a most delightful view of every personal asset known to womankind!
It was a DELIGHTFUL ten hours to watch all this play out in real-time! She and her team fixed EVERYTHING and we onsite nerd-turd lackeys enjoyed watching every moment of it! Not a male member of us could stand up from their seat afterwards due to a painful, if well-noted men's-folk connotation. Days later she and her team received major commendations in a company newsletter and a big monetary bonus for their efforts that resulted in a significant corporate cost-savings.
My young heart was also crushed a few months later when I found out she was now DATING one of those same senior executives who was at the IT emergency after leaving the company for greener climes AND I was further dismayed/crushed that she eventually married him and had a few children with him. Last I heard via the old-timers IT grapevine was that they were still married after 30+ years but are now both well-off and fully-retired living somewhere warm in south-coastal France. Oh Well! Meh!
V
About ten years ago my Dad had laser eye surgery, he asked me to drive to the appointment as he wouldn’t be able to drive home afterwards.
When he came out with a clear plastic eye patch taped to his face I laughed and said, “is it ok if I tell some pirate jokes?”
He sighed and said, “go on then.”
At which point my mind went blank and I couldn’t think of any!
Perhaps some kindhearted commenters would like to share a joke they would have told under the same circumstances? Replies please!