Posts by JollyJohn54

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

Re: Think of the Grid!

Quite rare. But there's always an exception. The taxi driver down our street charges to 100% at home every night and sometimes tops up at a Rapid mid afternoon in his KIA Soul.

I look at the longest trip I might make on the spur of the moment (visiting grandkids) which is a 120 mile round trip so I'll not let my car (KIA eNIRO) drop below 150 mile range before it gets a four hour cheap overnight charge that adds another 110 miles(ish) range. One charge usually lasts a week for me though.

If anyone finds an $80M F-35 stealth fighter, please call the Pentagon

Re: I could have understood not mentioning it if it was a Starfighter

That joke dates from February 1974 and was written by Robert Calvert. The track was 'Bier Garten' on the LP 'Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters'.

The album was written as a tribute to the dead airmen and Bob didn't hold back his contempt for the German Defence Ministry and Lockheed. With music by Hawkwind and friends some songs from the album became popular but if you listen to the lyrics and understand what's going on ........

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

Re: Solution

The large company I worked for before retiring had an 8 digit employee number. Except it wasn't. It was a 7 digit number with a checksum as the 8th. Once I realised how it was calculated I used it in every program I wrote or worked on that needed the correct identification of an individual and logged the failures.

The log wasn't large but it was big enough for me to think that some people really needed a spellcheck for numbers as well as words.

Honey, can you shrink the plugin? Mozilla allows desktop extensions on Firefox for Android

Bookmarks

I use Firefox on PC and Android and one thing I've always wanted was better bookmark handling on Android. Something really simple and basic like being able to sort the bookmarks into the order that I want them. Will it ever get done? I've requested it so often over the years that one of my email address's and eventually also my IP address was blocked on the Mozilla forums and ideas site.

Maybe, one day, we'll get an add-on that can provide this simple but so useful bit of functionality. I'm not holding my breath though.

This typo sparked a Microsoft Azure outage

Re: Cloud values are shall we say rather terse

I retired in 2014 and now all my programming is for personal use and exclusively in Excel VBA. I had a data source which supplied a simple json string of key-value pairs, dead easy to read and to parse by humans and computers.

Now that data source is supplied as a complex json string, with many nested layers and full of arrays. Not only that but if a value is not available then the key is still supplied. Trying to loop through this mess whilst testing for null or empty values properly has occupied my brain for over a week now. The only way I can read it is to dump the string into an online json parser. Easy to read by humans and computers? No chance! Complexity for the sake of it.

Google wants to target you – yes, YOU – with AI-generated ads

Re: Advert + sponsor block free YouTube

A little warning! Make sure you are actually on GitHub before searching for anything that includes 'STube'. Once seen cannot be unseen! Definitely NSFW.

Go ahead, be rude. You don't know it now, but it will cost you $350,000

Re: A (still) current problem that may not go away

A good place for KEF parts for their older speakers (and many others) is https://www.falconacoustics.co.uk/

I'm currently thinking of replacing my IMF TLS50's (lovely but after 40 years very worn out) with their IMF200 speakers.

Firefox points the way to eradicating one of the rudest words online: PDF

Re: I don't mind PDFs

PDF's are great. I receive them, I create them and I send them. They are totally fit for purpose which is to display a page in the layout that the author desired.

What I don't like is extracting data from them. PDF readers with OCR are pretty awful, frequently ignoring columns and squishing text together. As for similar characters like I,l and x,y and O,0 and various others theres no hope leading to a lot of careful reading and correcting.

This maglev turntable costs more than an average luxury electric car

Monday to Thursday 10pm till midnight John Peel was essential listening.

Friday 10pm til midnight Tommy Vance was equally essential listening.

I kept a notebook in which I listed the music that I'd heard and liked and would spend Saturday mornings in a record shop looking for albums on the list. Happy days!

Charge a future EV in less than five minutes – using literally cool NASA tech

Re: I've been considering an EV for a couple of years...

I've just looked up a journey from Carnforth to Penzance on Google.

It's 400 miles and and should take 6hr 42mins driving time. Assuming he makes one stop for lunch and a charge half way there are 30+ rapid charger sites in the Birmingham area not too far from the M6 or M5. Most of these have more than one charger so he can expect little or no waiting around.

Using an app like WattsUp or ABRP (A Better Route Planner) he could see the state of chargers in real time making it easy to drop in on an available charger.

Adding a second stop around Exeter would give him plenty of charge to mooch around once he arrived.

In a petrol or diesel car you have the problem of water shoshing up into the engine bay and potentially getting sucked into the air intake. Goodbye engine!

Water 4cm deep? An electric car will easily drive through 20cm deep water for as long as you like. You have no idea how well protected the electrics are in an EV.

Charges filed over $300m 'textbook pyramid and Ponzi scheme' crypto startup

Mikhail Sergeev

Interviewer - What other names are you known by?

Mikhail - make money

Interviewer - Say again?

Mikhail - MAKE MONEY

Interviewer - Got it. (writes down Mike Mooney)

Outlook email users alerted to suspicious activity from Microsoft-owned IP address

Password Change Loop

I have 6 MS email accounts, currently all accessed by Thunderbird via pop. The oldest is my Hotmail account, created when Hotmail was new and exciting, up to my latest (something like myelectriccar at outlook) for dealing with all things car related. Electric cars need a lot of accounts!

Last week (13th) I recieved a 'suspicious activity' email on one account which was then locked out from pop. I logged in through Firefox and changed my password. To do this I had to enter my recovery email address (another outlook one) and then get a code before I could continue. I got the code and a suspicious activity email too. So i changed the password on the second account which prompted the first account to repeat the suspicious activity email. That's when I realised this was all just MS sillyness and ignored it.

On the 14th the remaining 4 accounts got the email and were locked out from pop. I decided to leave it a few days before changing the rest of the passwords and setting the recovery email for all accounts to a gmail one.

So far no more problems.