Posts by Loudon D'Arcy

Poop-peeping toilet attachment has a different definition of 'end-to-end' encryption

Yeah... analysing a "log out".

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: WARP

"We've been mugged off by the Klingons!!!"

Cockney Star Trek [1m, 46s]

Retro Games opens pre-orders for THEA1200, a full-size working Amiga replica

Re: Want

> I don't actually know what they're worth...

Two grand.

Re: Want

"poor impulse control purchases"

I have the opposite problem: several years ago, I sold my Acorn Electron... and now I really bloody regret it.

Re: PiDP maybe?

...when I can get the thing working...

Let me guess: the paper tape keeps snapping.

Shenzhou-20 crew rides Shenzhou-21 home after debris strike

Re: Ding ding.

"Next stop, St. Paul's!"

[Am I the only one who read the title of this article and immediately thought of the re-entry scene in the movie "Gravity"?]

UK agri dept spent hundreds of millions upgrading to Windows 10 – just in time for end of support

Re: Solution for low salaries in gov IT

So if I've understood this outsourcing situation correctly...

...then the upgrade treadmill isn't a bug...

...it's a feature.

(Or to put it another way, there's no recurring revenue streams if you fix the problem once-and-for-all with open source software and on-prem data centres.)

Raspberry Pi OS, LMDE, Peppermint OS join the Debian 13 club

Re: It's a free OS that lives on a $5 storage card in a $35 computer.

> Pounds, Shillings & pence? Or groats?

Guineas.

Brits sitting on £1.6B gold mine of Windows 10 junk as support ends

Re: Linux...

You might already know about this IGO, but there's a kit that allows you to fit a second drive inside a 2012 Mac mini (I used one of these in my old quad-core i7)...

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/376084200380

Business2schools

There's a charity called Business2schools that connects companies who have unwanted computers and office equipment to schools that can make use of them...

https://business2schools.org/about-us/

The sweetest slice of Pi: Raspberry Pi 500+ sports mechanical keys, 16GB, and built-in SSD

Raspberry Pi laptop

https://www.tomshardware.com/raspberry-pi/the-dream-of-a-raspberry-pi-laptop-becomes-a-reality-argonone-up-review

Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel

Re: Word for documents, Excel for spreadsheets - how difficult can it be?

Many moons ago, I wrote a couple of non-fiction books and self-published them on Amazon.

During the writing phase, I joined a forum for self-published authors.

I tried to make a contribution by writing a post about the usefulness of text outliners—apps that allow you to write your ideas as bullet points, which can then be re-arranged or grouped together to create a very helpful overview of a written document's structure.

I don't remember all of the replies, but there were a couple of people who used Excel to plan their novels... and one guy who outlined his books using software that was used to plan the drilling of exploratory oil wells.

The Notepad that knew too much: Humble text editor gets unnecessary AI infusion

Motivational poster

Sergio, I have the perfect motivational poster for you...

http://www.dailyhaha.com/_pics/ms_paint.jpg

Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates

An alternative approach

We could wait for the nation state to introduce statutory requirements.

Or... the developers who write applications (which users depend upon to get their work done) could unite around a single Linux distro. (Perhaps something stable and well supported like Debian or Rocky Linux)

And then, users and corporate buyers who have been scared away by the prospect of navigating hundreds of distros, dozens of GUIs, multiple filesystems et cetera, et cetera, can forget all of that and simply install the 'de facto' version of Linux that app developers and support companies have settled upon.

If the app developers kicked back a few percent of their profits to Debian (or whoever), then the devs who maintain the codebase can put food on the table, and the OS could be realistically maintained for years and years.

Overmind bags $6M to predict deployment blast radius before the explosion

Re: Never mind Overmind, look at that hair

Perhaps that's what your hair does when you realise that your code was inside the "blast radius".

Apple iOS 26 set to dump 75M iPhones on the e-waste pile

Refurbished?

> ...but the new phones just aren't wallet friendly.

Have you considered buying a refurbished phone?

https://www.giffgaff.com/mobile-phones/refurbished/apple?sort=price-asc

https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/refurbished/iphone

Junk is the new punk: Why we're falling back in love with retro tech

> The Sugababes

If only there were a "laughing out loud" emoji on these comment pages...

Re: Cassettes???

> Chrome/metal were overrated IMO.

The SF-90 was a chrome tape. I read somewhere that when TDK introduced a new version of the "SA" cassette, the previous version was re-packaged as the "SF". However, I did read that on the internet, so it's probably a load of bollocks.

http://vintagecassettes.com/tdk/tdk_files/tdk_year/tdk_86e.htm

And I still buy used TDK cassettes from eBay, record my own mixtapes of 1980's music and listen to them in the kitchen on my Toshiba radio-cassette player from 1982.

Everybody needs good neighbors – especially ones who sell you solar energy

Re: Passivhaus insulation standards

Sounds like you're making good progress, TDM. Upvoted!

I forgot to mention to anyone who might be interested, that there's a natty device that diverts any excess solar power generation to your immersion heater; so instead of selling excess kWh's for peanuts (or worse, giving it to the grid for nothing), you can "store" it as hot water in your tank, which you can still benefit from after the sun's gone down.

It's called a 'power diverter' and the two brand names that I used to deal with are the Energy Recovery System or 'ERS' from PowerFlow and the Solar iBoost from Marlec.

Passivhaus insulation standards

A few years back, I watched an episode of "Grand Designs" where a British family had asked a German "flat-pack" house builder (I think it was Baufritz) to construct a large home for them in a suburb of Bath (South-west England).

Being a modern German house, it was designed to be insulated and draught-proofed to the "Passivhaus" standard.

At the end of the programme, Kevin McCloud revisited the homeowners to see how it had turned out. When he asked about energy costs, the wife/mum replied that the family's gas bill for that winter had been £3.10.

This is why—as a former tech support and sales guy for a solar energy company—I tell my friends here in the UK that if you want to reduce your energy bills, spend money on insulating, draught-proofing and triple-glazing. Those measures will work in the winter and summer, night and day. Once you've done that, then look at solar.

Cyberattack on Dutch prosecution service is keeping speed cameras offline

My favourite speed-camera story...

...is the one where the guy tapes an SQL injection statement to his car's numberplate:

SQL Injection Fools Speed Traps and Clears Your Record

GitHub CEO: Future devs will not code, they will manage AI

Re: Can't wait to be a former developer

His mood shifted the next day when he found Replit “was lying and being deceptive all day. It kept covering up bugs and issues by creating fake data, fake reports, and worse of all, lying about our unit test.”

And then things became even worse when Replit deleted his database.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/21/replit_saastr_vibe_coding_incident/

Intern did exactly what he was told and turned off the wrong server

Drive trays?

We can do better than that...

Michael Jackson's "Beat It" on the Floppotron

UK tech minister negotiated nothing with Google. He may get even less than that

I'm reminded of the committee meeting where an official explained that a particular list contained 16,384 people.

It later transpired that the list actually contained over 25,000 people—but it was truncated when someone copy-and-pasted it to an Excel spreadsheet from the WinXP era.

Re: National security

Here is Dominic Cummings (yes, yes, I know the lefties will be fuming at the mere mention of his name) explaining just how technologically dysfunctional Number 10 and the Cabinet Office were when Boris arrived in Downing Street...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i7ym_Qh7BA&t=185s

AI models just don't understand what they're talking about

"Bulimia-learning"...

That's what we used to do in my mechanical engineering undergrad course at Manchester, back in the early 1990s. Learn stuff parrot-fashion the night before an exam, and then regurgitate it in the test the next morning.

When you aren't provided with a mental model of the subject matter—which would allow you to close your eyes and visualise the mass-spring-damper system or power station heat cycle—then the "learning" that you revert to is rote memorisation.

A lot of product makers snub Right to Repair laws

Bosch want their dishwashers to connect to the cloud

"The worst scoring products were dishwashers (Beko, Bosch, Frigidaire, GE, and LG)..."

Jeff Geerling has just released a video explaining how his brand new Bosch dishwasher won't work unless he creates a user account on Bosch's website, so that the dishwasher can be connected to the cloud...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAsgjKBkKMA [4 min, 9 sec]

What to do once your Surface Hub v1 becomes an 84-inch, $22K paperweight

I've just watched iJustine's video reviewing the 50-inch Surface Hub 2S... and speaking as someone who is always scrawling on the two huge whiteboards in my office, I have to say that it's an impressive piece of kit.

Dead or alive, Britain hands Schrödinger's industry £121M

Re: Schrödinger's industry

Dan, I signed into my Reg account just to upvote this^. I'd be giving you more upvotes if I could.

After clash over Rust in Linux, now Asahi lead quits distro, slams Linus' kernel leadership

Re: And nothing of value was lost

If only there was some kind of Unix-like FreeBSD-derived operating system that could run on Apple silicon... <gazes longingly into the distance>

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

Re: More than light fingered

Back in the late-1990's, a couple of men in white lab coats walked into one of the computer labs at my local further-education college, and began to transfer the 486 computers off the desks and onto trolleys, before wheeling them out of the lab. None of the students or staff batted an eyelid.

Shortly afterwards, a local police car found itself following a white transit van that had just left the college's premises. By the greatest stroke of luck imaginable, the officers decided to pull the vehicle over and discovered two men in white lab coats with a van full of 486 computers...

UK government insiders say AI datacenters may be a pricey white elephant

Yes, "The Big Short" was a fantastic movie. I actually bought a copy of that one on DVD!

P.S. To my two downvoters: Keir? Rachel? ...is that you?

Thank you for the link, AC; I've downloaded that.

I've had a quick read of the contents page; its warnings remind me of "The Final Crash" by Hugo Bouleau, which predicted the 2008 crash twelve months before it happened.

So I'll certainly give it a read. And thanks again!

Upvoted, AC. An informed and well thought-out comment.

The insanity of the 'growth-at-any-cost' mindset is summed up in the headline of a ZeroHedge article I saw a couple of weeks ago: It Took $5.80 In Debt To Generate $1 Of US "Growth" In The Fourth Quarter

Mega city council's Oracle finance fix faces further delays

Australian ERP software

> However if you don't work in the Public Sector, you probably won't have any experience of any of these people: Civica, Capita (ok maybe that one), Access, NEC, IDOX.

Australian software companies who specialise in local government ERP systems don't seem to be on anyone's radar in the northern hemisphere...

CouncilFirst

TechnologyOne

ReadyTech

...which is a shame if they're delivering a better product than the usual suspects.

Welsh woman fined for flatulence-fueled cyber harassment

Re: Just, how?!?

Perhaps her merkin was smirking?

Trump nukes 60 years of anti-discrimination rules for federal contractors

The usual procedure is for government to use the Parliament Act to ram legislation through the Commons and into law (e.g. Blair's fox hunting ban).

UK government tech procurement lacks understanding, says watchdog

Re: The conclusion is obvious, but...

Okay, I used imprecise language.

Yes, the app was a snip, at a mere £35 million. (How did the devs keep food on the table?)

The Test And Trace system was allocated a total budget of £37 billion over two years. But only 25.7 billion had been spent by June 2022, with a lifetime cost of £29.3 billion.

Nevertheless, it was still an astoundingly huge sum of money to spend on a single, short-term IT project.

BBC: Covid-19: NHS Test and Trace 'no clear impact' despite £37bn budget

BMJ: Covid-19: NHS Test and Trace failed despite “eye watering” budget, MPs conclude

Re: The conclusion is obvious, but...

> See NHS IT scandal and the yet to occur AI everywhere nonsense announced recently.

Don't forget the Covid "Test and Trace" app, which cost... <deep breath> ...£37 billion.

The Independent: Scathing report blasts ‘unimaginable’ £37bn cost of coronavirus test and trace system

(For comparison's sake, the cost of building the Panama Canal was estimated at $639 million in 1914. In today's money, that's the equivalent of $20.1 billion or £16.5 billion. The Channel Tunnel cost £9.5 billion in 1994, which is equivalent to £19.5 billion today. Combined cost = £36 billion)

Foundation model for tabular data slashes training from hours to seconds

Anyone remember Lotus Improv?

"Within a few months, Pito had come up with the fundamental idea at the core of Improv: that the raw data in a spreadsheet, the way that the user views the data, and the formulas used to perform calculations can all be separated from each other."

"Column letters, row numbers, and cell formulas, the main source of frustration for spreadsheet users, are all gone."

"In their place are rows and columns labeled in plain English, and an independent list of formulas that use those labels, making Improv, in essence, a relational spreadsheet."

https://instadeq.com/blog/posts/no-code-history-lotus-improv-spreadsheets-done-right-1991/

Microsoft tests 45% M365 price hikes in Asia-Pacific to see how much you enjoy AI

Play it safe, Doctor. Just give 'em a link...

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=import+pst+to+thunderbird&ia=web

I recently had lots of fun (!) writing a Python script which grabbed all of the old e-mails in a directory (saved as plain-text '.eml' files) and then turned them into a single HTML page, displaying all of the messages in chronological order, complete with "To", "From", "Date" and "Subject" fields.

The earliest e-mails from the 1990s were quite easy to convert as they were simply formatted and didn't have many text headers; but the most recent ones sent from MS mail-clients had an astounding amount of meta-data to wade through.

Vendor lock-in

A Microsoft spokesperson sent us the following statement:

"Your balls are in the palm of my right hand. Now pay up."

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

Re: outnumber those who need to run ChatGPT

> Who wants to wait multiple seconds or even minutes to get a response?

Jeff Geerling has tested the 16GB RasPi with an LLM, and found that it generates about one word per second...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apWi16EROKc&t=270s