Posts by The Organ Grinder's Monkey

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

Re: We had an issue with a rabbit

"My daughters rabbit got lose in the house, went behind the TV... "

Could be worse, could have been her Rabbi...

I lived briefly with a disturbingly bright black female cat who had very fixed ideas of where things should be. A housemate was woken in the middle of the night by an odd sound which turned out to be the cat dragging his new pair of Converse boots out of the room by their laces to put them on the landing. After a few repetitions over the following days he learnt to put them there himself for a quiet night.

The same house mate had a sideline repairing valve guitar amps & modifying guitar effects boxes. He wasn't the tidiest or most organised individual so when he complained regularly that he couldn't find this or that component that "was definitely on my bench yesterday" we ignored him. Months later he went off to play one of his regular gigs & on a whim took a different guitar amp to give it an airing. It was an open-back type, (Vox AC30 iirc for those that like such details) & when he laid it on its back in the back of the dear old Volvo 240 there was an odd rattling noise & a cascade of all the missing components, plus a host of other small items, eg Rizla packets, odd socks, biro tops etc all fell out.

She was both a challenge & a delight to live with.

My old ginger peed into our (front-loading!) Panasonic vcr somehow, presumably by reversing up to it, which implies a degree of intent. Shortly after he destroyed an ancient Tektronix oscilloscope by the more conventional method of clambering onto it in the cramped shelf space that it lived in & peeing through the top.

I loved him dearly, but he was a complete fuckwit.

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

Re: Sheer genius!!

I did that in a mates rented furnished flat. It had a basic microwave with a clockwork style knob for setting the run time, & a door open button, that was it, properly no frills.

He was being turfed out as the family wanted to sell up, & he felt, shall we say, less than entirely benignly disposed toward them & their furnishings.

We'd heard that you should never put an egg in a microwave, but only vaguely suspected the reason why.

After warming up with a couple of shite CDs for the dancing lightning display (it was the 80s, the decade that taste forgot, shite CDs were widely available for sacrificial purposes) we put an egg in an empty large instant coffee jar, screwed the lid down tight, put it in the microwave, turned the timer all the way up & retired to a safe distance to see what would happen, but feeling pretty smug that we'd thought up a foolproof way to test the egg problem without making a mess of the microwave.

After about 2 minutes there was a very loud bang & the cooking cavity of the microwave filled instantly with dense smoke, & the machine fell ominously silent.

When we eventually opened the thing, the jar was intact, & the threaded part of the lid was still firmly screwed in place, but the rest of the lid was in small pieces, firmly embedded into the uniform layer of very tough scrambled egg-and-eggshell that now lined every internal surface of the machine. The microwave's mains fuse was intact, & the layer of rubbery egg wasn't going anywhere, so we left it be, never to work again. Apparently it was my fault as he was a musician so couldn't have known that it might end badly, whereas I was a mechanic, so...

He's still a musician & I'm now mainly a student landlord, so karma in action presumably?

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

Re: power, and the power to fix it

For the HV cables I understand that capacitance is an issue when burying them. Wouldn't make any odds to the local LV stuff obviously, but I suspect that the argument went along the lines of "you can bury your local cables all you like but when the HV ones are on the ground you still ain't gettin' no power, boy!"

EU: These are scary times – let's backdoor encryption!

"We are working on a roadmap now, and we will look at what is technically also possible,"

Ah, OK, that's alright then. Once you look at what's technically possible you'll soon see that backdooring isn't possible & forget about this nonsense once & for all.

/sarc.

Windows 11 adds auto-recovery, kills offline setup loophole

Re: Meh

"local account be it must."

You are Yoda's German cousin & I claim my £5.

Musk's xAI swallows Musk's X in ego-friendly, all-stock deal

Re: Don't Fear The Men Standing On The Podium Making The Speeches...

Add to your list the recent Brazilian leader who's name currently escapes me, & I'm not sure about his replacement either. I'm inclined to be most worried not about a vile leader but about the fervour of their supporters. Wonder how Thatcher would have differed in the social media age?

Re: If it quacks like investor fraud...

"no papable evidence"

Who needs evidence when there's money to be made from sustaining such belief? Catholic Church being ahead of that game by about 1000 years as you suggest..?

UK govt data people not 'technical,' says ex-Downing St data science head

In other news, Pope is Catholic & bears really do shit in the woods...

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

Re: [citation needed]

(What comes after Z anyway?)

Gen alpha, apparently.

Re: [citation needed]

"When “Spaz” and “Spastic” became derogatory slurs, the Spastic Society rebranded to SCOPE."

And within about 20 minutes schoolkids were calling their more awkward classmates "scopers".

BOFH: HR's AI hiring tool is perfectly unbiased – as long as you're us

Re: Bachelor of Advanced Pencil Sharpening

Ref "BAPS"

The British Association of Plastic Surgeons might have a tiny problem with it?

Do you DARE? Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing sovereignty

Re: As I understand it..

Shaun Ryder gets two mentions in this week's comments!

(other one was from me I admit.)

Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance

Re: Not so much over a dispatch system, but....

No glove, no love!

Re: Taxi to .....

There's a hoary old rock anecdote about Shaun Ryder, Miranda Sawyer, & the boardroom table at Factory Records.

Factory being wilfully different had a boardroom table that, in defiance of established practice, eschewed such bourgeois notions as "legs" in favour of suspending the thing from the ceiling with cables. That'd be fine if it had occurred to anyone to incline the cables. Sadly a company full of creatives was devoid of such outdated thought & the table proved useless for writing on but interesting for the purpose that the above named used it for in the quite likely apocryphal anecdote. As far as I know they've never denied it, but you wouldn't, would you?

Re: Hilarious

Harddrive?

Modem, if you're my late mum, which I hope you're not..!

Re: Hilarious

Ref flyers.

A lady of my former acquaintance worked for an events & exhibitions services company. They did everything from building the stands & booths to banners, advertising & flyers. They even organised trade shows from scratch if they spotted an unfulfilled demand.

Thusly "Quality in Manufacturing 95"

She'd got as far as ordering the flyers before someone pointed out that "QUIM 95" might be "problematic".

Mortified doesn't begin to cover it. Changed job shortly after & still traumatised when I knew her a few years later.

'Cybertruck ownership comes with ... interesting fan mail'

The wet cambelt is indeed the most extreme example of planned obsolescence ever foisted on an unsuspecting public by a motor manufacturer.

I should point out two things:

1. You don't need to wait for the belt to snap before the engine gets destroyed, the build up of fragments shed by the cambelt as the oil attacks it clogs the oil pickup well before the belt fails & the engine then dies of oil starvation.

2. Ford claim that this doesn't happen if you use their wet belt-specific engine oil. Presumably Peugeot et al make similar claims.

Apple drags UK government to court over 'backdoor' order

Re: British citizen talking here

Ref "use any uk network".

If that's something that would be useful, there is one company offering that service:

https://anywheresim.com/

(I've never used them so don't know if it's as good as it sounds, mainly because they seem only to offer them as a PAYG service.)

Please fasten your seatbelts. A third of US air traffic control systems are 'unsustainable'

Re: Get it Effin' Done

Slightly sad that the "customer success stories" link on the Strobedata 'site returns "not found".

DIMM techies weren’t allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers

Re: TIL

"It depends. In the US, many places, you may own but might not be allowed to hunt."

Surely I'm misunderstanding this, but it looks as if you're saying that in a country where you can buy an assault rifle with your groceries, you need a licence for a catapult?

Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

Re: More than light fingered

In the mid 80s a mate was doing an engineering apprenticeship at Jaguar in Coventry. It was an open secret that one member of staff was building himself a brand new XJS in his garage at home. The bodies were assembled & painted in a remote site & then taken to the assembly site on wheeled dollys on transporters. He'd bribed a driver to leave one of these in a lay by for him. Apparently the car was well on the way to completion, but the one thing that he'd not been able to acquire out of the back door was the leather interior. That was the only thing that seemed to have proper security & inventory.

Obviously this being the 80s "the Jag" was a government ship, with a militant workforce, & so wastage was tolerated as someone else (us, the taxpayers) was paying for it, & management chose their fights with the workforce carefully.

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Re: Refrigerator's Freezer Door

I have my late mother's fridge stored in the garage. Had to drag it into the kitchen for a couple of weeks recently when the 10 year old fridge freezer died suddenly & completely.

My mums fridge is a Prestcold, (manufactured by The Pressed Steel Company, one of those names that implies solid, traditional build) & was bought new in 1956/7 & which was in continuous use until her death in 2021. It looks a bit scabby but I can't bring myself to bin it. Anything that reliable deserves not to have its life cut artificially short. Beginning to worry now about how to make sure it still has a home after I'm gone...

Tesla's numbers disappoint again ... and the crowd goes wild ... again

Re: Them against us. Blindly follow the leader.

"but I suspect that the sort of people who can afford to go out and buy a brand new electric car are also the sort of people who are educated enough and critical thinking enough not to be persuaded by..."

The simple disproof of that theory is that those are the people that buy modern land-rover / range-rover products, consistently the least reliable & lowest customer satisfaction scores of any major manufacturer. Worse than that they tend to be repeat buyers, if any proof were needed that critical thinking & wealth don't automatically go hand in hand...

(That said, I've met plenty of people that own them, & that freely admit that they're objectively awful, but they like them & can afford to put up with their "foibles" which is fair enough, though mystifying to me.)

Google Maps to roll out Trump-approved Denali and Gulf of Mexico rebrands

Re: I didn't vote for him.

You're assuming that he doesn't find a way to declare himself President for life?

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

"But, nowhere will you find a car with the pedals, steering or indicator/wiper controls reversed..."

I was with you until you got to indicators & wipers, & would seek to remind the court that most if not all Japanese manufacturers had their column stalks reversed relative to European (& US?) practice until at least the turn of the century.

Just put a 2000 vintage Subaru Legacy out to grass on a mate's smallholding due to terminal rust. 6 months later I'm still randomly letting people know of my intentions with the wipers in every other vehicle I drive, though oddly I've never tried to clear the screen with the indicators.

Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise

Whilst you are demonstrably correct, in the UK at least, & possibly elsewhere via their website, the TV channel "Talking Pictures TV" is having a reasonable go at disproving your assertion.

(The Edgar Wallace Mysteries, Interpol Calling, Space Patrol, Scotland Yard, Maigret (the Rupert Davies ones from the early 60s...)

Tesla sued over alleged Autopilot fail in yet another fatal accident

Re: driver aids

The Sprog-eyed Fright, can't remember when I last saw one of those in the wild.

BOFH: The devil's in the contract details

Re: Checking the boxes

Ponytail, beard & large breasts certainly coexist.

The National Museum of Computing reboots Bletchley Park's H Block

Re: NMoC -> UK

I've always found that UK & us people discuss road travel completely differently. In the UK we talk of the distance in miles, in the US they seem to think entirely in journey time? Not sure if that goes so deep that US people don't know the distance in mileage, or do but don't find it useful? Given the distances in the US & the variability of traffic here I'm a little surprised that we're not the other way around?

Biz hired, and fired, a fake North Korean IT worker – then the ransom demands began

Re: Double-Deep-Fake-Identity......

Upvote for the "new American spelling" of potato...

Smart homes may be a bright idea, just not for the dim bulbs who live in 'em

Re: "Ask me how I know."

"I have one to save me getting out of a nice warm bed to turn the light off - no smarts at all."

Isn't that what a bedside reading lamp is for?

Muppet broke the datacenter every day, in its own weighty way

Strictly it was neither his gingerness nor his beardyness, nor even his low CofG that was causing the problem, but rather his, shall we say, particular susceptibility to gravity?

NASA engineers play space surgeon in bid to unclog Voyager 1's arteries

Re: Stunning engineering....

Dream on about current Volvos, they share absolutely nothing with their forebears. Two changes of ownership, one of whom were Ford kicked any of that old fashioned "build it to last" mentality into the long grass, no money in that. I have a 1997 V90 that has never once let me down. It lives outside in all weathers (UK), & most of the time that I've owned it (23 years & counting) it has been a builder's van, landlords removal van, kart racing barge (one inside & one on the roof) & I'd still jump in it & drive across Europe without a moment of worry that it'd let me down.

Only now am I having to start doing occasional minor works on it (squeaky window mechanism, leaking vacuum pipes etc) & with every article I read about current / future cars (like the Ford "ads in cars" patent application this week) the more determined I am to keep it going even if it does start to cost me.

Microsoft sends Windows Control Panel to tech graveyard

You can activate your dentist from the car's touchscreen, cool, sign me up!

(My dentist looks exactly like Alan Partridge, but is also the best dentist I've ever encountered.)

HMD Skyline: The repairable Android that lets you go dumb in a smart way

Re: No headphone socket

Former headphone socketless 'phone refusenik here...

I held out for the headphone socket for quite a few years, but then bought a pair of Sennheiser PX210BT Bluetooth on-ear foldable headphones from ebay for about £30ish.

I don't miss the regular chore of having to replace the cable &/or plug of the various quite expensive on-ear 'phones that I'd been using previously, as often as every six months. The thinner than a human hair cables they use now are buggers to solder.

Those Sennheisers have a swappable battery & I keep a charged one in my rucksack "manbag" but very rarely have to use it, still getting a good 8 hours out of the now very old batteries. Charger is built in to the battery so you can charge one whilst using another.

BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies

Re: So true to life

At my long-closed school in Deal, Kent, we had a particular idiot for a geography teacher, whose only really memorable trait was an obsession with Peterborough United FC, and a habit of throwing board rubbers at people. That ended on the day that he threw one at the sporty kid who was fast enough to duck AND lift up the lid of his desk such that the board rubber ricocheted off it on a gently rising trajectory, exited the room through the (closed, single glazed window, this was the 1970s) & still had enough energy to break the windscreen of the head master's car which was parked directly outside. (Toughened 'screen, not laminated, still the 1970s. Citroën GS from memory, for those that like such details.)

UK Royal Mint mining PCBs for precious metals in e-waste recovery effort

The point is that retailed jewelry allows a significant mark up, gold supplied for industrial uses less so.

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Re: Every office has one.

Never have I wished more strongly for the ability to give multiple up votes...

"We'll be taking off momentarily" Really? Grr!

Microsoft whiz dishes the dirt on the Blue Screen Of Death's colorful past

About 20 years ago someone sent me a Microsoft themed haiku that was apparently someone's submission to a competition. I just googled quickly & found it in this short list of them, most of which are beautiful, & should probably be used as MS error messages. They'd be just as informative but much less rage inducing :

http://allowe.com/laughs/book/Microsoft%20Haiku.htm

Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project

As Headley himself hasn't responded, I'll offer (from distant & unreliable memory, which in this age of instant information I should check, but where's the fun in that) that Headley Grange is a large country house rented by several bands in the 70s for rehearsals & recording with one of the two ubiquitous mobile studios of the day (Rolling Stones or Ronnie Lane's).

Led Zeppelin & Bad Company both used it.

Outback shocker left Aussie techie with a secret not worth sharing

Re: 100Amp

Quite a few years ago I encountered three YouTube clips, apparently posted by students from their student house, of them "cooking" a sausage by poking a fork into each end, wrapping the bare ends of some stripped mains cable around each fork & switching on at the mains. After a brief interval a sizzling noise became apparent & the sausage proceeded to cook from the inside outward. IIRC it was OK but a bit under done.

The other videos had them cooking pasta in a kettle & frying bacon on an upturned iron (as in clothes) supported on two bricks. That last was a bit of a fail I vaguely remember, possibly due to the iron being insufficiently level, & the coefficient of friction between the oiled iron & the bacon being too low to prevent the bacon escaping.

Hello to any student landlords in da house...

Any modern battery will likely have a "CCA" figure on its label. CCA stands for Cold Cranking Amps, & is the nominal maximum current that the battery can deliver to the starter motor for a specified duration at the specified ambient "cold" temperature. I can't remember either of the specified values, but you get the general idea.

As an example I need a replacement battery for my 1992 Saab turbo convertible, which never leaves it's dry garage on anything other than perfect days, so is perfectly happy with a low output battery. The existing (now dead) one is rated at a CCA of 550A. I've been "off the spanners" for almost half a lifetime now, so am out of touch with the techie aspects of modern motoring. (Daily drive is a 1997 Volvo V90 which I've had for 22 years & which shows no sign of wearing out. As long as that persists I intend to remain ignorant of CanBus, & all the other "enhancements" of modern motoring.) Consequently I only know that, with all the electrical loads on a modern car battery, esp the capacity to power the mandatory Stop/Start systems, CCA requirements will surely be significantly higher, often solved by many cars now having two full sized batteries I'm told.

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.

Japan's digital minister declares victory against floppy disks

Re: two-thirds of British children aged six to 18 didn't even know what a floppy disk is

Ref BBC station names,

Names were "modernised in 1968 (ish)

" Home" corresponds to current Radio 4, "Third" to Radio 3 & "Light to Radio 2. Radio 1 didn't start 'till after the names changed, mid 1969 I think?

Self-driving cars safer in sunlight, twilight another story

Re: Lower self driving accidents in some scenarios

On a related note, several studies have suggested that motorists behave differently around cyclists depending on whether the cyclist is wearing a helmet or not. Generally that was leaving less room when passing, but also passing at higher speed, following more closely etc.

NASA, Boeing opt to fly leaky thruster as-is for first crewed Starliner CST-100 mission

If it's a film about getting it up that you're after, it'd be Ron Jeremy rather than Ron Howard?

Bad vibrations left techie shaken up during overnight database rebuild

Surely a printers output at a rate of notes? Knots not so much?

'Little weirdo' shoulder surfer teaches UK cabinet minister a lesson in cybersecurity

Re: Situational awareness is rare

At the ONE place...?

What were you doing at the others? :)

Boffins suggest astronauts should build a Wall of Death on the Moon

Re: Next step....

Of you've not seen it, you might find Rollerball an entertaining watch. I've not seen it since the 70s

so I might be giving it more credit than it's due, but the soundtrack had its moments if all else fails.

Miss your morning iPhone alarm? It's not just you, and Apple is looking into it

Re: Being retired

Bladder training as described has a downside, which is that not emptying your bladder when you need to is a leading cause of kidney stones.

People I know that have experienced both kidney stones AND childbirth (only two people I admit, and therefore not a statistically reliable sample I know) tell me that the kidney stones are substantially the more painful experience.