Posts by robinsonb5

Security company hired a used car salesman to build a website, and it didn't end well

Re: "I Could Be So Good for You"

I'm pretty sure both archetypes are already well-represented in the web-design world.

Fedora 43 won't drop 32-bit app support – or adopt Xlibre

Re: 32 bit support

Ironically it's not 32-bit Linux apps I want to keep running, so much as 32-bit Windown apps.

For instance, I have a portable audio recorder which stores audio tracks on SD card in a proprietory format, and a small Win32 application (which works perfectly under WINE) exports the recordings in WAV format. I definitely don't want to keep a Windows install just for that.

Also, if I feel the urge to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein again I'm going to stand a much better chance of running the Windows version under WINE than running the actual Linux binary from 20 years ago - but neither will work without 32-bit support.

Re: Not surprised about XLibre

Even before Xinerama came along you could use two monitors: they were just separate displays - typically ":0.0" and ":1.0". But they would be truly separate, running distinct sessions. You could move the mouse from one to the other but you couldn't drag windows from one to the other.

I actually used Mint 13 that way up until about 2020 - it suited me better than either Xinerama or XRandR. (I could guarantee that nothing would ever open on the wrong monitor when one of them was connected to a different device; I could play a movie on one monitor and it wouldn't disappear when I switched virtual desktops on the other.)

Logitech's latest keyboard and mouse combo is wired, quiet, and suspiciously sensible

Re: What is the issue with keyboard these days?

I'm starting to turn into a bit of a vintage keyboard nerd. Over the last year or two I've accumulated various boards from the 80s and 90s with interesting keyswitches - and all of them feel way better than these horrible laptop-style keyboards.

(I recently picked up an Apple M0116 keyboard with Salmon Alps switches - it's probably 35 years old, it's a dream to type on, and still works perfectly, and with the help of a ProMicro, now speaks USB.)

Re: What is the issue with keyboard these days?

The best use for keyboard lighting, to my mind, is highlighting which keys' functions have changed when you press a layer-modifier key. Other than that, I think of it as a useless gimmick.

Re: Struggling to understand this

So that it looks and feels like a (black version of) a modern Apple keyboard?

<Looks at the IBM Model M in front of me right now...> Yeah, I'll pass.

Re: Why didn't they plug the mouse into the keyboard

About 20 years ago I had a keyboard with exactly that facility, and it was made by... Logitech.

Bots are overwhelming websites with their hunger for AI data

This is becoming a major problem for good old fashioned web forums, too. One I read on a daily basis has had days of downtime over the last few months thanks to the whack-a-mole process of keeping AI scrapers at bay.

AROS turns any PC into an Amiga with USB-bootable distro

Re: Tears of nostalgia

What I find astonishing is that current PCs are literally thousands of times faster, and yet feel less responsive than machines from the late 80s.

(Then you do something like generate a fractal which takes minutes - if not hours - on a retro machine, and which can be done in realtime on a modern machine, and the difference is thrown in sharp relief.)

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

I love my Model M but the older Model F is generally considered superior in keyfeel and sound - if not in familiarity of layout.

I have quite a collection of vintage keyboards now, and my favourites are an Apple M0116 (Salmon Alps), an Oriential Keyboard OK100 (ATW Alps Clone switches - feel great but ping like a kalimba!) and a new-old-stock keyboard with linear Space Invader switches.

Re: "For most, not so bad"... bloody excellent actually.

I hate keyboards that light up spontaneously, but I do have one keyboard which has a couple of different layers accessed with modifier keys - I have it set to illuminate the keys whose functions have changed, just when the modifier is pressed. I quite like that.

Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos

I found I prefer full-size boards - and the best ones are still those from the 80s and 90s.

I use a Model M as a daily driver, but have collected some other vintage boards from EBay over the last couple of years.

My favourite feeling full-size board so far (apart from the model M, of course) is an IZE OK-100 (not the OK-100M, which is a rubber-dome-and-membrane board) - the ATW Alps clone switches feel fantastic, the only downside being that they ping like a kalimba!

My most recent acquisition is an Apple M0116 board, not full-size and needs some restoration - but again the key feel is amazing compared with regular keyboards.

My biggest surprise, though, was an old cheap e-machines (remember them?) keyboard - just a rubber-dome-and-membrane keyboard but the best feeling non-mechanical board I've ever used.

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

My cat has a habit of strolling casually up to the monitor when I'm working and nudging the power button with her nose.

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

partially implement every networking protocol known to man, badly

Not to mention partially implementing each file format / printer protocol badly.

In a past life as a printer, I used a digital print engine which, by way of an EFI Fiery RIP, would print directly from PDFs. As long as they hadn't come from Apple Pages.

But Apple PDFs weren't rejected with an error message, or failure to print. Oh no - it would just merrily spit out pages with much of the text missing.

It's tempting to say "if I had a pound..." but the reality is I lost several for each time that happened!

AmigaOS updated in 2025 for some reason

It might amuse you to google "PiStorm".

Re: Still runs well on 35 year old hardware

Get the battery out at the earliest opportunity - it's probably too late to save it from some leakage, but if the damage isn't too severe that machine will be valuable.

It is a passion project, because - as I understand it - while Hyperion are in fact charging money for it, they're not paying the developers - the devs are volunteers.

Ubuntu 25.10 plans to swap GNU coreutils for Rust

Meanwhile I carried on using PS/2 keyboards and mice because why I would waste one of the very few USB ports on an early USB-equipped PC on keyboard and mouse when there were perfectly good dedicated sockets right beside them?

Re: Bloody Rust

Storage is emphatically *not* essentially free. I really don't know where this pernicious lie comes from, but it absolutely is not the case.

The cost per megabyte may very well be at an all time low - it may not cost you that much to buy a large capacity drive (though they're definitely not free) - but that doesn't take into account having somewhere to put it!

Most laptops have physical space for 1 hard drive. Once that drive is full you have to remove it (if you even can), spend money on a larger replacement (which had better be an SSD, since modern bloated OSes are hideously painful on spinning rust - at which point you're into three figures) and spend time transferring everything across.

Even my desktop PCs each have an SSD boot drive, a spinning-rust storage drive and neither the physical space nor the spare power connectors and drive bays for more.

External drives are a partial solution, but a relatively fragile one with compromises speedwise, and also not "essentially free" for the kinds of capacities that can cope with software like Vivado, or the trend towards everything being containerised. NAS boxes are a more robust solution, but again *definitely* not free.

User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse

Re: they were "hovering" it a few mm above the surface.

> No if that happened on a graphics tablet that outdated be interesting…

Interestingly Wacom graphics tablets (at least the older Graphire and Bamboo Fun ones that I've used) run in a "relative" touchpad-like HID mode if their driver software isn't installed - in which case, needing to pick up the pen and reposition it is a distinct possibility.

(Typing this on a machine equipped with an oldskool ball mouse, by the way - as well as an IBM Model M keyboard!)

Kelsey Hightower on dodging AI and the need for a glossary of IT terms

Re: Stop

Without any particularly special (i.e. expensive) tools an everyday tinkerer can climb at least a few rungs down that ladder-of-turtles. You can go beyond code - look at, understand and modify the code generation, even design your own ISA and emulate it - or better yet implement it as a soft-cpu on an FPGA - all without spending more money than a couple of decent restaurant meals.

That's where I stopped, though. If you want to go one level deeper still then there's always Tiny Tapeout, but to go beyond that you're going to need very deep pockets.

Man who binned 7,500 Bitcoin drive now wants to buy entire landfill to dig it up

Re: Is the needle even in the haystack?

Where I live, the tip (sorry, "recycling centre") has a policy of actively rescuing items which still have some usefulness, and there's a "re-use shop" on-site.

British Museum says ex-contractor 'shut down' IT systems, wreaked havoc

Re: lax procedures

One of those mechanical entry keypads that's never had the combination changed, and now has four particulary shiny buttons?

Ransomware attack forces Brit high school to shut doors

Re: Why should an IT outage necessitate shutting the school

It's almost as though the systems controlling all those things should be air-gapped and not connected to the public internet.

They've only gone and made Doom run in a PDF file

Impressive as this is, it's horrifying that it's possible!

Re: How much ink?

Yup, I've used a number of Fiery-equipped colour photocopiers and "light-production digital presses" (which is what you call a colour photocopier when you want to charge three times as much for it) over the years. The first had a freestanding Fiery RIP like you describe - it was a quirky little box, tapered in odd ways, like a cartoon characature of a small tower case.

The others have all been installed internally (which is a kind way of saying "bolted crudely to the side of the machine").

I have to admit the RIP itself produces excellent results (modulo one version that would choke on the dodgy PDFs produced by Apple Pages) but the Command Workstation is a poster child for software bloat.

Haiku Beta 5 / In tests it's (Fire)foxier / It pleases us well

Re: Linux Lockups Probably Not Due to Swap Management Failure

Even if you're right that memory leaks are the underlying cause here, the parent's point still stands: once a swapstorm starts it's unreasonably difficult to get a Linux machine (or a Windows one for that matter) back under control. It can be quicker to power-cycle the machine than wait for the chain of events between a mouse-click on the close gadget and the application finally terminating.

Even Ctrl-Alt-F1, login and kill the offending process can take several minutes.

(And disabling swap won't necessary prevent swapstorms, either - applications or libraries can still be paged out and re-loaded on demand, which for interactivity can be worse than mutable data being paged out. What's missing is some way of "pinning" UI / desktop environment code as "required for interactivity". I don't know how much better Haiku is in that regard - it may be better simply through having a much smaller footprint and way less complexity.)

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Re: The Power of Fear!

> I even once dented an IBM Model M, but I had to take a sabbatical after that!

I bet that hand still hurts when it rains.

Microsoft coughs up yet more Windows 11 24H2 headaches

Re: Unnamed Manufacturer

> An unrelated question: does anyone here use any M$ peripherals?

I've not used any MS gear made in the last decade, but to be fair their keyboards and mice ranged from pretty good to excellent back in the day.

I still have a couple of Comfort Curve 2000 keyboards, though a lot of those are failing with membrane problems now.

The sweet Raspberry taste of success masks a missed opportunity

Re: Not even the A500 was "switch on and go"

> make everyone nostalgic about the Amiga A600 which I'm afraid is just impossible.

Funnily enough, even though the A600 was widely derided back in the day, it's quite desirable nowadays simply because of its small footprint.

Microsoft hijacks keyboard shortcut to bring Copilot to your attention

Re: No, no and a million times no

Ctrl-C would have been very slightly stupider - and in fact is what I was expecting, given what Copiliot begins with...

Imagine a land in which Big Tech can't send you down online rabbit holes or use algorithms to overcharge you

Re: Can they get rid of other commercial website b.s. too ?

> I'd also like to get rid of Amazon's continued insistence that I have Prime!

Someone I know tried to cancel Amazon Music a few months back. There were that many dark patterns in such close proximity I'm surprised a black hole didn't form.

Gary Marcus proposes generative AI boycott to push for regulation, tame Silicon Valley

Summarization certainly has its uses

My concern with summarization is that it adds another layer of separation between end users and primary sources - and one that offers an oportunity for deliberate distortion and manipulation.

The guardrails built into existing systems - however well-intentioned they might currently be - demonstrate that it's (a) possible, and (b) being actively worked on.

Elon Musk's X isn't important enough to feel the full force of EU regulation

Re: Quantity not quality

> Does that mean although it does have enough (l)users, nobody believes anything posted on it?

The answer is in TFA: "...given that the investigation revealed that X is not an important gateway for business users to reach end users"

Apparently if the platform only negatively impacts regular everyday people, and not corporations, it doesn't matter.

Bank of America app glitch zeroes out people's balances

Re: Cash is king

Having cash on hand is indeed sensible, but you also need to keep it up to date and make sure it doesn't contain older notes withdrawn from circulation.

GNOME 47 brings back some customization options, but let's not go crazy

Anyone else getting excited?

Only three more Gnome text editors till Christmas!

AI-pushing Adobe says AI-shy office workers will love AI if it saves them time

A non-technical person I know is in the process of letting a house to her friend. She was gleefully showing me a few weeks ago how she could use Gemini to write a rental agreement - and was quite dejected by my horrified reaction. She just couldn't understand (a) that the output might not be completely (or even remotely) correct, and (b) that even in the unlikely event that it was, none of us was qualified to asses its correctness. (And that's leaving aside the ethical aspects of how the training data was sourced.)

So yes, it wouldn't surprise me if that ends up being a use case for AI.

Rust for Linux maintainer steps down in frustration with 'nontechnical nonsense'

Re: Other problems

But doesn't that only really apply to large industrial energy users?

Microsoft decides it's a good time for bad UI to die

<Checks calendar>

....

Nope, it's not April 1st.

Hmmmm... is this satire?

Holy moly, I think the author really means it!

Microsoft Bing Copilot accuses reporter of crimes he covered

Re: Title is too long

A couple of weeks ago I had a random email from someone wanting support with a website (set up in 2019) which just happens to share a name with a piece of software I wrote back in the early 2000s.

The email began: "You would not believe the hoops I had to jump through to find your email address. Thank goodness for ChatGPT!".

<facepalm>

Top companies ground Microsoft Copilot over data governance concerns

capturing all the human labor latent in the data and reselling it...

I haven't seen the principle of LLMs described as succinctly as this before, but the sentence:

"Microsoft positions its Copilot tool as a way to make users more creative and productive by capturing all the human labor latent in the data used to train its AI models and reselling it."

displays perfectly why the whole LLM scenario leaves such a bad taste in the mouth: the human labour latent in that data was never theirs to resell.

Chrome dumped support for Ubuntu 18.04 – but it'll be back

Re: Just use Firefox

Unfortunately Firefox (or any software which silently updates itself) leaves you every bit as vulnerable to this kind of problem. The day it silently updates to a version that requires a newer glibc than is installed on your system it's game over. Ask me how I know.

FYI: Data from deleted GitHub repos may not actually be deleted

Re: Yes and no

> Also - as far as I can see it's not actually possible to create private native GitHub forks of public repos in GitHub

The example they cite is when you have a private repo that will eventually become public, fork it to make permanently-private fork and then later make the original repo public. Anything commited to the still-private repo up until the point the first repo is made public, can be accessed from the now-public repo. (As long as you know the commit hashes, that is - but unfortunately they're easily discoverable.)

Re: Yes and no

The one case they talk about where the contents of private repos become publicly viewable is when a formerly-private repo with a private fork is made public.

In that case, any commits made to the still-private fork up until the time the parent repo became public are accessible from the public repo. That runs counter to users' expectations.

(Any commits made to the private repo *after* the parent one has gone public will remain private, however.)

The issue is that people are mentally modelling forks as "that's my copy of the repo, completely separate from the original" whereas in reality the fork is just a different interface to the same pool of blobs. Furthermore, while you wouldn't be able to access commits from another fork in the same pool of blobs unless you know the commit hash, github makes those commit hashes discoverable.

Re: What happens in Repo Stays In Repo

> No it isn't. It's supposed to be a history. In a code repo, the ability to permanently delete past changeset data should be considered a bug or design flaw. The inability to lose history is the whole point.

While that's true, when a user deletes a fork, their expectataion is that the fork is a separate repo which can be deleted in its entirety, history and all. The "obvious" mental model of what's happening is "that's 'my' copy, separate from the original." - but that's not how it's actually implemented.

CrowdStrike fiasco highlights growing Sino-Russian tech independence

I think most of us on this site are old enough that when someone talks about proprietary software being more polished, you can safely assume they mean proprietary software from the pre-Windows 8 era.

Sam Altman's basic income experiment finds that money can indeed buy happiness

I always considered UBI to be too radical to ever catch on.

Then the pandemic came along, and large numbers of people received furlough payments which, if you squint, kind of look like an at-scale trial of UBI.

Now with the world changing so rapidly thanks to new technologies, I'm almost persuaded that UBI is not only desirable but a necessity in the near future. But I think it'll only work if the problem of sky-high rents is solved first, otherwise rents will simply go up by whatever the UBI figure is. I'm hearing people talk of land taxes both as a potential solution to this and as a means of funding UBI. Any way you look at it, there are interesting times ahead.

Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

Re: Rather different

I did once go to admonish a co-worker for riding a pallet truck like a scooter (the quickest way to get it from one end of the factory to the other - but a bit risky due to the lack of brakes) - only to discover it was my co-director!

The Clacktop: A Thinkpad Yoga with a mechanical keyboard

Re: Please...Worry About Stuff That Matters!!!!

I drive no more than half an hour in a single day, and often don't touch the car for a week at a time.

I have a little "runabout" and I'm not that fussed what the seats are like.

If I spent most of my working day on the road I'd want to be damn sure those seats were comfortable.

Re: Curiously, I watched a video yesterday

Oh boy - yes, both keyswitches and keycaps are complete rabbitholes, and there are so many potential combinations that someone selling a product can't possibly hope to cover them all.

Do you want your switches to click when you press them? Do you want smooth linear travel or a tactile bump? How heavy? Do you want heavier springs on the keys that fall under your index fingers?

What colourway do you want for the keycaps? Do you want them made of ABS plastic (cheaper, higher-pitched sound, less durable) or PBT (more expensive, more durable, usually "better" sounding.) Do you want cutesy multicoloured keycaps with Japanese characters or vintage Wyse terminal keycaps (yes, they'll likely fit just fine.)

And that's before you've entered the realms of stabilisers and lubrication.

But with all these options, the one that's hardest to find is the one that actually matters to me: keycaps in ISO / UK layout ("£" on shift-3, backslash cut out of left shift, '#" cut out of an L-shaped enter key - ANSI (with thin horizontal enter key) seems to be all that's served by 98% of the market.

Chyrosran22's videos on YouTube are endlessly entertaining (but NSFW) if you want to see reviews of some modern but mostly vintage keyboards, and a viscious (but well-deserved) skewering of certain fashion trends.

(Typing this on an early 90's IBM Model M.)