Posts by The Organ Grinder's Monkey

Just the Browser claims to tame the bloat without forking

Upvote for "sloperations", though in this context slurperations might be equally appropriate?

Re: A good OS-capable map site

Upvote for the National Library of Scotland suggestion. Really enjoy the way that you can centre it on a location & then use a slider to go back through previous OS etc maps to see how a place has changed over the last few hundred years.

Eg, if this works:

https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=14.0&lat=51.28690&lon=1.18900&layers=6&b=175&o=100

Windows 11 shutdown bug forces Microsoft into out-of-band damage control

Re: So that explains it

Ref hot laptop in rucksack, I wonder if the bug would prevent the emergency shutdown due to overtemp that's usually enabled somewhere in the bowels of the system?

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

Re: As little tale from my former banking life .. (tenuous ATM connection)

Not ATM related, but bank robbery so almost justifiable.

I the early 90s I spent a couple of years working just behind Cricklewood Broadway in London, an area only notable for its substantial Irish population, & being the home of the late lamented Alan Coren.

I was told the following anecdote by several locals separately over the course of my time there, so I assume that it's true, but of course it may just be an urban myth that has gained traction.

One of the banks on the Broadway was on a corner site, and, being one of those beautiful old substantial Victorian buildings that banks & railway companies liked to build for themselves had its entrance door on the corner. A really substantial wooden door in a really substantial & prominent brick & stone surround.

This was the golden age of ram-raiding in the UK (& elsewhere possibly?) wherein scrotes would steal a car & reverse it through the front window of their chosen (usually retail) premises, thus providing both instant access without all that time-consuming breaking-in nonsense, & a ready means of carrying & escaping with the swag.

Three local lads had the bright idea that they could do the same to this bank, as the beautiful double doors were plenty wide enough to admit a car. To that end they stole a Ford Escort estate & welded a very substantial length of RSJ across the width of it just inside the tailgate, & another along the length of the boot floor all the way up to the front seats, making a capital T shape.

They then, in the wee small hours when all respectable members of the citizenry were abed, reversed the poor escort into the doors at quite high speed with, apparently, remarkable accuracy.

And there it sat when the police arrived a little while later, hard up against the implacable doors, with the driver still inside, clutching his neck. Their big mistake was in not "casing the joint" (as I believe the thieving classes refer to it) properly, or indeed at all, before the attempt, for if they had they'd have seen that the corner doors had been bricked up properly on the inside several decades prior, and that a small side entrance was now the one in use.

Re: The Key to Everything

Ref hanging car keys on front door overnight, that's fine if your car isn't desirable enough to attract car thieves AND doesn't have (enabled) keyless entry. If it is AND does, then a Faraday cage away from the side of the house nearest where the car is parked is the basic first step to not finding it gone in the morning. A good quality steering wheel clamp would be step two. Relay theft is a real problem.

Re: The Key to Everything

Excessively heavy key bunches wearing out ignition locks is absolutely a thing. How much is excessive obviously varies with the quality of the lock, & is much less commonly seen in these days of keyless entry etc.

One reason why Saabs having the ignition lock on the floor between the seats was a good idea, though the tendency for the locks to fill up with fluff & dirt (until they put them on a little pedestal) somewhat negated the benefit.)

US regulator tells GM to hit the brakes on customer tracking

Re: Nissan

Given how Nissan's reliability scores predictably fell off a cliff when Renault took over I admire your dogged loyalty, but I am surprised by it.

Re: Privacy respecting safe driving or economical driving app?

From (increasingly unreliable) memory it was Alec Issigonis that suggested that in around 1960. I think it was part of a general suggestion that motorists would become less safe the more comfortable they were, so included suggestions that car heaters were also a bad idea.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Hence the failure of the naval experiment to use ultra high pressure compressed air. Microscopic leaks proved almost impossible to prevent, & were ultrasonic. That wouldn't have mattered if those leaks hadn't also functioned as a highly effective scalpel on any meat-based material that came within range. Imagine walking down a service duct & your arm just falls off...

Otherwise, in 25 odd years in the car trade I never encountered an in-line dryer on a compressed air line except in body & paint workshops. Even in line oilers were rare as it precluded use of compressed air for "drying" cleaned metal parts. The best equipped workshops (so newer dealership 'shops in practice) had oiled & oil-free outlets at each bench. Everyone else just dribbled a few drops of oil into their air tool's inlet periodically, which was perfectly adequate.

Dell wants £10m+ from VMware if Tesco case goes against it

The dealer is, broadly, correct. The safety & environmental requirements for small cars are the same as they are for large ones. Where that can be resolved with "one size fits all" hardware & components, no problem, the cost of development of those parts can be devolved across the entire range of vehicles. The problems really start with the engines in the small cars, which aren't used in the larger ones, so their (massive) development costs have to be recovered purely from the sales of the small car, historically a very low margin product.

I've been out of the car trade now for longer than I was in it, so someone with current knowledge would need to add their ten pen'orth here, but thirty years ago, after paying for advertising (on which Ford spent nearly as much as on R&D at the time) they made £50 profit on a family-spec Fiesta.

ISS stint ends early as NASA aborts Crew-11 over crew illness

Horrible mental image of an astronaut clinging desperately to a fast-moving space-croucher as it whips round in a blur, with an impressive "brown-trout" & several feet of his own entrails flailing in his wake...

Linus Torvalds tries vibe coding, world still intact somehow

I'd just assumed that it was a timely AI-powered autocorrect...

Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

Tech support entropy?

The Microsoft 365 Copilot app rebrand was bad, but there are far worse offenders

Re: MS and rebranding

If only MS Copilot was like the one in "Airplane", then you could just let the air out of it & watch it slowly deflate, never to bother you again.

Copper supplies set to peak just as tech needs more

Re: Hmm, aluminium wires for motor cores?

There's a slew of houses across the UK filled with aluminium-cored mains wiring. I have one such, built in 1964, a previous copper price peak apparently.

Like many old fashioned wiring systems it's generally OK if you leave it well alone, but the al cores do harden over time & become brittle, meaning that simple repairs can turn into cable replacement. Whether that's corrosion or work hardening from the constant 50hz vibration I've no idea, both possibly?

I've encountered plenty of rubber-insulated wiring still in use, but the slightest touch makes it disintegrate. Haven't yet found a lead & fabric insulated cable in service...

The Y2K bug delayed my honeymoon … by 17 years!

"Hey, that sounds like fun!"

Only for certain values of "fun"?

Welcome to Wendy's! Before your order can be taken, you must first reset this kiosk

A Five Guys opened here in Canterbury a few years ago but I've never been. Partly because it's a lot easier not to put weight on than it is to get weight off, but mainly because a mate sent us a picture of a part of the menu when they first opened, & my long-suffering other half took one look & said "my god, the calorie count for a portion of chips is almost my entire daily allowance"

China wants to ban making yourself into an AI to keep aged relatives company

Indeed, given half a chance the average dog will fork anything with a pulse, or furniture come to that.

BOFH: The Christmas spirit has run dry – time to show some chiller instinct

Re: Hot Cross Buns Here

Upvote for toasted teacakes!

UK prepares to wave goodbye to 3G telecoms as tri-hard tech retires

Re: End Of An Era?? Really??

Not just traffic lights, iirc there's a ton of stuff that uses 2G, car park payment machines, card payment machines, wearable medical monitoring eqp't, remote sensing & logging kit for eg water company distribution networks, etc etc. I don't have any professional knowledge of such things so may be way out of date, but I suspect that these 2G devices all fall into the traditional British box labelled "it works, why mess with it?" so I'd be surprised if I'm wrong.

As an aside, our little electric 2016 BMW i3 uses 3G for its obligatory data link, with a fallback to 2G, which, living in Canterbury, a city where 3G never worked, I assume it's used exclusively since we bought it. The only difference that turning off 3G in the phone settings made here was a significant improvement in battery life.

From memory, 2G remote monitoring was something that Voda were the main network for, & it provided a useful income stream for them.

Re: WAP did its job at the time

Circuit Switched Data, superceded by High Speed Circuit Switched Data, or HSCSD on the display of whatever 'phone I was using at the time. Vaguely remember HSCSD being given a different name & being passed off as the latest thing by some networks at the time?

Cornish recycling drive sows confusion among Reg Standards Bureau

Re: Proper Pasty

I remember that "recipe" from British Rail. Thinking about it, BR did run several ferry services around the UK, presumably therefore the Stranraer one was one of them?

Re: Proper Pasty

"Cornish pasties were originally invented to be a complete mean for miners..."

You didn't mention the key part of that fact, which is that the hard crimped edge isn't supposed to be eaten. It's there as a disposable handle to enable miners to eat them with dirty hands without slowly poisoning themselves with whatever you get covered in in tin mines. (Tbh could be an urban myth, but if so is well-entrenched, & makes sense)

An aged friend refers to Cornish pasties as "armoured Scouse" as the filling resembles the local "delicacy" that gives Liverpool natives their nickname.

"Lack"

I see what you did there...

There is no definitive answer to the cream or jam first debate. My solution is based on simple & sound engineering principles, the more viscous material should be applied directly to the scone, (pronounced scone, incidentally) & the runnier one goes on top. Otherwise you'll be trying to stick a sticky material to a runny one, good luck with that, I'll be on to my third scone while you're still fighting with your first.

(Full disclosure, I'm from Kent, so I'm probably not allowed an opinion?)

Your car’s web browser may be on the road to cyber ruin

"Maybe if they firewalled off the infotainment from the automotive parts so that the sat-nav & kids' amusements cannot interfere with the parts that drive the car..."

I havei direct experience of this, albeit 20+ years ago on a, then, several years old Saab 9.3 convertible, so it's from the early days of canbus.

Detailed in a recent comment (which I would link directly to, but I'm ashamed to admit that I don't know how to, so reproduced below. Apologies if this contravenes comments etiquette.

"Further to my gentle rant above about automotive canbus (it's in domestic boilers now, too, apparently) I remember a Saab 9.3 which had had a lot of the customer's money spent on it trying to cure a combo of spurious ABS captions & random stalling. The original dealers had just done what they always do, & thrown a lot of (the customer's) money at it by randomly changing most of the control units in the car, & then pronounced the fault incurable.

We weren't a dealership, but a non-franchised specialist, & kept a yard-ful of wrecked cars that we could borrow parts from to trial-&-error test theories on such problem cars without having to charge the customer 3 or 4 figure sums each time for new components.

Long story short, it was the 6-disc CD changer in the boot that was the cause of both faults. We never really worked out how or why, but replacing it completely resolved all it's problems. Later chats with someone at Saab who had detailed knowledge of the canbus tech suggested that there were several tiers to the canbus implementation in the car, & that there was a hierarchy to the devices on the network. Evidently the CD changer had been given greater status than it needed & when it faulted it provoked a panic response from the central controller rather than being ignored & simply logging a code. Note that the CD changer worked perfectly throughout, whatever the fault it had was, it wasn't a functional one."

.

Re: Watching an old TV series†…

Upvote for anything JG Reeder.

"the modern bright young things mightn't either, I suppose"

not least because, aiui, vast swathes of the "young people" demographic aren't bothering to learn to drive at all, so would be fooled by any age of motor car. (My observations of the way they drive their e-scooters suggests that the roads are a safer place for their absence?)

Did you find that your porn was going out of date?

Waterfox browser goes AI-free, targets the Firefox faithful

Re: THHIITDWAH/HIITDWAH - Good For Scrabble

The medical term is "clock-weights."

Smartphones face a memory cost crunch – and buyers aren't in the mood

Re: At Last! A Silver Lining!

Codeslop, possibly aka (for older British people at least,) "Codeswallop"?

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Re: Reminds me of the time ...

Probably whilst swinging from the chandelier & peeing on the band?

Re: Reminds me of the time ...

Not a cunning linguist, then?

Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

Agreed, especially as I can't see a traditional disc drive surviving for long with all the vibration & banging about it'd receive in a car if still fitted to a tower case rather than a shock-proofed housing?

For everything else, give that girl a coconut!

BOFH: If another meeting is scheduled, someone is going to have a scheduled accident

Re: Talk about flash·backs…

(partial repost)

From a previous life as a Saab tech, I have in my toolbox a 10mm combination spanner with a right-angle bend in it as a reminder never to rush a battery installation. In a moment of inattention I allowed it to touch both battery terminals of a brand new battery (on a 900 so at least 550A CCA) momentarily, & it immediately tack-welded itself in place. In the couple of seconds it took to grab an adjacent screwdriver & lever one end of the spanner off the lead post (thank chosen deity that lead is soft) the spanner was already glowing cherry red & it just bent round as if it were made of hot toffee.

Electric cars no more likely to flatten you than the noisy ones, study finds

Re: It’s not the engine type that makes the car dangerous

Alec Issigonis always maintained that car accident rates would be greatly reduced by fitting a sharpened spike to the centre of all steering wheels...

Re: They really ought to tack "Technology" onto "Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System".

My oldest friend rented a room whilst doing his year in industry from a gang leader on railway maintenance.

He always said that they used to find so many isolated limbs scattered around the permanent way that added together they'd probably clear up most of Britain's missing person list.

Spare a thought for the poor sods that find the rest under the trains when they go in for maintenance.

Re: Perfect article picture!

There used to be a blog written by a London ambulance paramedic, & he related a relevant incident that happened to one of his colleagues.

A car (full of "da yoof, innit") pulled out straight in front of a fast-moving ambulance which had all of it's lights & sirens going. Both vehicles were wrecked, & the car ended up blocking the road. A policeman retrieved the cars key from the driver & went to try & move it. As soon as he turned the key in the ignition the stereo came on so loudly that he leapt from the car clutching his ears. Might have had something to do with the accident...

As irritating as the loud stereos are to me, (living on a busy main road close to a busy level crossing,) it's a new phenomenon that's really bothering me. Round here it's the number of cars that go past trailing a strong stench of grass being smoked...)

Re: "Safety Technologies"

Not just Tesla. Pretty sure that autonomous emergency braking has been mandated on new cars across the EU for several years now? First encountered it on an S-class merc maybe 20 years ago, along with brake assist, wherein if it detected that you'd hit the brake pedal with greater than a certain amount of force AND accelerated the pedal above a certain amount it deduced that you were doing an emergency stop & applied all the brake force it could provide, modulated at each wheel to make maximum use of the available grip. It's disturbing just how quickly a car that heavy could come to a halt when it really has to, something that MB had observed human drivers rarely achieved. Not sure if there was any mitigation system to prevent the plutocrat in the rear from spilling his brandy when the system triggered.

Ref Tyre noise increasing? Not really, no. They make up a greater proportion of the noise that you do hear as engine / transmission / wind noise have all fallen. Most of what you hear near a fast road these days is tyre noise where 20 + years, ago it would mostly have been mechanical, & wind noise from the aero drag. New tyres sold in EU & UK are now rated & labelled for noise emission, rolling resistance / fuel consumption & wet braking. The first two are intimately related. No idea how the noise ratings work in terms of difference between lowest & highest rated, though. (Iirc the difference for fuel consumption is about 7.5%?)

The increased grip surface has been around in the UK since at least the early 80s.Then it was a Shell product marketed as Shell Grip, they even had TV adverts for it.

(Thanks to autocorrect for attempting to make me post "She'll Grip" there.)

In the 70s some premium cars had a dash switch to change the horn sound between "town" & "country" modes. It wasn't so much the volume that changed as the pitch.

A good (& recently deceased) friend, who was also somewhat obsessed with 1930s - 50s British car design, & who lived long enough to hear the various synthesised noises that some EVs make, & be puzzled by them, smiled when I explained them. "Aha, that should make possible an idea I had in the 70s." Essentially he wanted to fit size & class appropriate horns to vehicles, giving them instead a recorded spoken alert rather than a horn sound. He envisaged the finest Bentley saying something like "you there, yes you, would you mind awfully getting out of my way?" whilst a tiny town car might simply go "excuse me, excuse me!" in an excitable & high-pitched tone.

I've experienced traffic in Bangalore & similar places where everyone is honking constantly from dawn 'till dusk, can you imagine how much worse that would be if he'd had his way?

Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts

Re: Does Trump consider '1984' as his aspiration or vision?

American English is already a tame form of newspeak to my ageing British ears...

"Anything you say will be used against you." Something you may have liked or shared on social media a decade ago will potentially be used to condemn you..."

That's not just the US though, is it? That's playing out globally with so-called celebrities & so-called politicians having to issue apologies for things that they said on antisocial media when they were 12. Given that that behaviour seems now to be entrenched as normal & reasonable in the minds of "the voting public" how long before similar practices start appearing at borders of countries that we've always assumed to be rational? (Which is not an assumption that I've ever made about the USA.)

Porsche panic in Russia as pricey status symbols forget how to car

Re: Why, in the name all that's holy..

Those systems are speed aware, they don't immobilise the car until it's stationary.

Re: How time changes things...

It was Bob Marley & d'Wailers when I lived in North London, & there was another alluding to the same stereotype of the typical owner of an older BMW in that area, which I'll not reproduce here.

(Also, these days the typical driver of an older BMW or Audi round here is a steroid-abusing meathead, so it's probably not valid anymore.)

Re: How time changes things...

When I first met my current "carer" she was getting about in a mk1 Clio 1.2

It was in the most basic "pauper" spec imaginable, no PAS, no EW, no CL, etc.

The alternator drivebelt started squealing as they do when old / loose. Usually adjustment is a trivial job, but Renault had other ideas...

I popped the bonnet & searched in vain for the drive belt. It was at the very bottom of the engine bay, completely obscured with other stuff (despite pauper spec, remember). Someone had given her a Haynes manual for the car (cf Mitchell etc in US) & the instructions for adjusting the drive belt began:

Jack up OSF corner & secure on stands, remove OSF roadwheel, remove plastic wheel arch liner...

Keep in mind that on eg a contemporary & similar Vauxhall / Opel / Holden you could have adjusted the belt with one hand whilst holding the bonnet open with the other. If you're paying garage labour rates that difference isn't even slightly funny.

Sadly this sort of design is absolutely typical of French cars, though I've long suspected that it's far worse on the right hand drive versions, presumably still getting revenge for Agincourt & Waterloo?

Similarly, the book time for an automatic gearbox replacement on a Saab 9000 Griffin (front wheel drive, transverse 3.0 V6) was 4 hours, on a Peugeot 605 (similar size & also fwd / transverse V6) it was nearer to 10 hours. That's 6 hours extra labour coming out of your pocket, potentially £600 these days, just to finance lazy design. Friends still in the car trade tell me they're even worse now than they were when I was last on the spanners, (nearly 30 years ago now.)

Re: /me looks at his thirty year old Fiat

Ref 30 yo Fiat, iirc you're living in France Mr B, & presumably towards the south.

A 30 year old Fiat in the UK is something that you move with a dustpan & brush (but which would somehow still be rife with electrical faults...)

Re: Parts v whole car

Ref 30 mins to strip car, you've reminded me of a thing from my years in motor salvage.

Insurers spotted that mk4 Escort convertibles were disproportionately represented in theft stats in East London (UK). That they were trivial to steal was well known (see Fords anecdote up-thread) but E London was way ahead of the rest of the UK.

Long story short, stripped Escort 'shells, would appear in laybys, owners would claim for stolen cars,' shells would be sold as repairable salvage, "kids" would buy them & take them back to a railway arch in E London, steal a complete one, strip it for the parts to rebuild the shell that they'd just bought & dump the now stripped stolen one in a layby, & so the circle is completed.

That circle was only broken when the scrotes got lazy / process became so widespread that they started stealing the reassembled salvage cars, (quite possibly with the purchaser's blessing) that they'd just sold, so the same VINs started to appear over & over on the insurers books. The insurers crushed a batch of 'shells & broke the cycle. Took them a long time to notice, though. No visit to a London salvage dealer's yard in period (early 90s) was complete without pausing to admire & wonder at the long line of perfect Escort convertible shells gleaming in the sun (or rain, most often, this being England.)

Re: What about Jags?

I spent several years dealing in motor salvage, buying damaged & stolen / recovered cars from insurance companies & selling them to dismantlers etc to break for their components.

I eventually had to give it up as buyers working out of Eastern European markets were paying more for damaged cars than UK buyers could get for them either repaired or for their parts when fully dismantled. Specifically they were most keen on high spec diesels from Volvo, Saab, VAG etc, but as Saab & Volvo were my thing it killed my little sideline completely.

(They'd solved the transport problem too, as there were so many trucks coming loaded to the UK & returning empty that they were happy to take a couple of cars home each time for a donation to their fuel costs.)

Re: More cloudybollocks

Ref left keys hanging out of boot lock for 12 hours, a mate once left his house in Witney, Oxfordshire, for a 7 day work trip to the US, & left his front door wide open with the keys in the lock. When he came home the keys, were still there & no-one had set foot in the house, or at least nothing had been disturbed / taken.

Especially remarkable as his house fronted the old A40 into Oxford, & had a heavily-used bus-stop immediately outside the front door.

Re: More cloudybollocks

Ref "BL only used five (iirc) different keys across all the cars they made"

Can't speak for BL, though certainly the lock used with the tiny ignition key that all their cars used into the early seventies would wear to the point that a screwdriver would operate it after just a few years.

When I was at college (hi to all North Staffs Poly alumni) all but one of the 6 people that I shared a house with had Ford's, mid 70s to early 80s.they could all open & drive each other's cars with their own keys, except my 1978 transit, curiously.

Not a uniquely UK problem, as per a post of mine from months ago:

Ref Ford's with interchangeable keys, have they put that right? I remember a demo of the standard issue US police cars only having six key differs across all the ones ever built. I'm not in the US, so don't know what model it was, or whether it's current model, but it looked recent to me.