Posts by PaulHayes

UK eyes new laws as cable sabotage blurs line between war and peace

I am the only one more concerned about giant great white sharks biting them?

Want to feel old? Excel just entered its 40th year

2007 and the ribbon interface is where it went wrong for me, so I stick to using Libreoffice Calc as I find it easier to use. Although I'm hardly a speadsheet power user, mostly use them for looking at CSV files.

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

great so how much public money is being wasted on this pointless consultation? You have to follow what the EU does, just like you did with UKCA. To pretend that doing something else is viable is a waste of time.

Thunderbird for Android is go – at least the beta is

Interesting, I'll give it a go. I'm a long-time user of Thunderbird on desktop, even though work have moved to O365 I still use Thunderbird with it as I can't get on with outlook.

I did used to use K9 on my phone but I gave up with it a year or so ago as it got in a state where it kept crashing and even reinstalling didn't resolve it. I had been using BlueMail but I'll try this Thunderbird branded K9, just installed it and setup my 2 personal mail accounts and so far so good.

Cisco is abandoning the LoRaWAN space, and there's no lifeboat for IoT customers

Cisco and LoRaWAN were never a good fit IMO. An open standard goes against the vendor lock-in business model and they were late to the party with a rebadged gateway which was monstrously overpriced and didn't add anything new. I wonder what is happening with the OEM deal they did for LoRaWAN sensors? I wonder if they ever even sold one?

Another issue I think Cisco had in this space is that in my experience, it's not the IT department installing & dealing with IoT. So the "lets spend a fortune on Cisco because all our other IT infrastructure is Cisco" paradigm doesn't work, an IoT consultant will go with something else more cost effective from a more nimble & innovative manufacturer.

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

I have nothing really to add to this conversation other than to put down in writing that there are some people who do like Gnome 3. I've been a fan of it ever since it was released, I like the keyboard-centric navigation of windows, typing in application names to find them. I also use a macbook and I treat that in the same way, on my more recent macbook I had to configure a keyboard shortcut to open Launchpad, my older macbook had a dedicated button for it and I couldn't live without it.

That Gnome 3 removed some customisation options is of no interest to me, I have no desire to change the colours of things. I just find it a much nicer environment to use all day, no screen space is wasted, on one screen there's a small header and on my other screen, nothing at all except the application I have running.

I know a lot of people couldn't get on with it and prefer the windows 95 style of gnome 2 still to their liking but not me.

Still waiting for a Pi 500 and wondering what do this summer?

Re: Point

ok, how about from a UK based supplier who will actually honour any kind of warranty and you don't run the risk of receiving a bag of sand instead of whatever you ordered?

Aliexpress is a minefield for fraud.

Open source Z80 clone seeks to help bring classic chip back from the dead

Re: Off the old block

It's the same in the spectrum and the ZX81 before that, all the IO stuff is done in the custom ULA. They don't use the Z80 support chips either.

the supporting IO chips are end of life too, full list in here:

https://www.mouser.com/PCN/Littelfuse_PCN_Z84C00.pdf

I suspect that new zilog z80s will be in the supply chain for years to come yet. Chances are some chinese made clones will appear as well if and when supply of originals dries up. There's still a lot of embedded kit using these cpus so I suspect there will be demand for cheap clones for some time to come.

For people like me who have some old Spectrum computers, I have a couple of spare z80s lying around already. I think there's enough new and old ones knocking about to keep those computers going for a long time. To my knowledge it's not the CPUs that tend to be an issue keeping those things going but the custom made chips like the ULA in a Spectrum, those are getting harder and harder to find originals, there are a few FPGA clones about instead. So I don't think shortage of z80 CPUs will be a problem ever as the custom chips will be unobtainable long before the CPU is.

The S in IoT stands for security. You'll never secure all the Things

Security in IoT isn't non-existent at all. It's just hard to find secure devices in a sea of insecure, cheaply made devices. All too often people will buy whatever the cheapest thing they can find is and then start asking or complaining about security afterwards. Yes everything available should be made in a secure fashion with secure-by-default principles applied but in the real-world this will never happen and the only way to control the security of what you buy & deploy is to be asking these questions before making your order.

The soon to be enforced PSTI Act might help but I doubt it will make much difference, I can't see how the UK gov can possibly have the resources to start going after millions of Chinese companies and their importers & distributors. Hopefully it'll help to educate the importers and distributors to at least ask the right questions.

Zen Internet warns customers of an impending IP address change

Has no one on this comments list heard of IPv6 yet? ;)

Microsoft pulls the plug on WordPad, the world's least favorite text editor

back in the mists of time when I used to actually use Windows, I used wordpad to open the odd RTF document that I needed to read or edit. This is back in the days of Windows 95/98/2000/XP. I didn't find any other uses for it.

Opportunity NUCs for Asus to continue Intel's mini PC line

I assume all this really means is that the NUC sized PCs Asus already makes will get rebranded?

Intel pulls plug on mini-PC NUCs

That's a shame but inevitable I suppose, less and less money in desktop PCs of any sort.

Our whole office ran on NUCs pretty much from when they came out until about 18 months ago when most swapped to laptops. I'm still using a NUC though and have a couple in use at home (one for work, one for retro gaming). Much better than having a big beige box in the way or some daft LED lit monstrosity taking up space.

RIP NUC

Comparing the descendants of Mandrake and Mandriva Linux

fond memories of mandrake linux, it got me through my degree. I tried RH & Debian at the time (late 90s) but found that mandrake was the linux to just-get-things-done. I feel it tried to do what Ubuntu managed about 8 years later. I later used Debian, then Ubuntu for a while and then back to Debian which I've stuck with.

But mandrake was the first linux I really used to get work done rather than just experimenting with.

Australia to phase out checks by 2030

I clicked on this expecting to read a story about immigration checks all being bounced/refused.

But it's a story about cheques being phased out.

Is the writer too young to remember cheques?

Debian 12 'Bookworm' is the excitement-free Linux you've been waiting for

The important word here is "reliable". My employer doesn't pay me to piss about with my OS all day to make it work, they pay me to get work done. So I'll be sticking with Bullseye for a month or two until any potential small teething issues are ironed out, then I'll upgrade my desktops in the office and at home to Bookworm. I'll start updating test servers at that point and then production ones later on.

I'm a little bit surprised the powers that be at Debian have included non-free firmware and that Nvidea driver though, historically they've been very much against such things, who remembers Icedove & Iceweasel?

Our office used to be entirely Debian based but all staff except me moved to Windows laptops a couple of years ago. It still amazes me how much time gets wasted on issues with the OS (e.g. yesterday a sales person and a member of the IT support team spent half the working day getting a headset working in Teams that randomly stopped the eventual fix seemed to be to install some updates which seemed to take over an hour even though they should auto-update every night).