Posts by blu3b3rry

Latest patch leaves some Windows 10 machines stuck in recovery loops

Re: So how much compensation will MS pay users for this?

They are the law, and Windows users are the paid-for QA department.

NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix

Re: It's hard enough remote supporting kit from a few hundred or thousand miles away

I stand (or sit) corrected, thankyou!

It's hard enough remote supporting kit from a few hundred or thousand miles away

supporting something over 15 million miles away is something else. I hope a few of these were on NASA after that success. --->

Also a good reminder that backup systems in the right places can keep stuff going far beyond any conceivable life expectancy.

Microsoft set to pull the plug on Bing Search APIs in favor of AI alternative

Re: "DuckDuckGo, will reportedly not be immediately affected"

Unfortunately so. I was happily using them until they started down the AI path...currently trying out Ecosia which seems promising enough (definitely gives me less crap in its responses than google) although I also read mention of Startpage being decent.

Scammers are deepfaking voices of senior US government officials, warns FBI

Even a basic "dumb" chatbot from 20 years ago responds in a manner more coherent than most of the US gov.

Trump says he has a problem if Apple builds iThings in India

Re: “plants …. China ..”

To someone like Donald those are just "details" that obviously wouldn't be an issue if he had been running Apple. He's perfected the "art of the deal" after all.

Then again given his track record in business, the manufacturing location would cease to be an issue before long.

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Re: Not obsolete if you monotask singlemedia

I have a pair of Raspberry Pi 3b+'s floating around, one complete with a touch display case. The only version of Raspberry Pi OS that runs well on them is the 32 bit legacy version based on Debian Bullseye....I didn't realise Alpine had rpi images available. Think it'll be time for a tinker with those (and see just how zippy we can make my Pi 5)

I've been slowly switching across to Linux for a while with just one Windows 10 machine left in the house now.

One single point of uncertainty on my Windows 10 setup was its old copy of Photoshop Elements 9. Couldn't get the installer to fire up in Bottles so tried out a offline Windows VM using Virtualbox and installed it in there. Perfect? No, but Ubuntu does everything else I ask of it including gaming via Steam. There's always a way to get things working.

I had zero knowledge of Virtualbox until a week or two ago, it was surprisingly simple to set up and get going. I type this as a relative "newbie" who only started using Linux and indeed tinkering with computers in September 2022 when resuscitating my 2011 MacBook Pro from its several year slumber under the bed. Now it's a perfectly good daily driver again.

RHEL 10 quietly leaks ahead of Red Hat Summit

Download link indeed works for me via my account, and all the usual isos are available for RHEL 10 so far as I can see. If you want it I'd grab the iso now just in case the link goes dead....!

Microsoft boots 3% of staff in latest cull, middle managers first in line

Re: Jobsworths

> Truly talented people needn't worry about "being let go".

Sadly not the case in my experience - never underestimate incompetence or malevolence among manglement during those proceedings.

Qatar’s $400M jet for Trump is a gold-plated security nightmare

Re: Musk/DOGE

Musk - responsible for the cybertruck, which drops to bits due to build quality issues and doesn't meet vehicle regulations for a fair chunk of the world

Boeing - did all the FAA checks and balances in-house, producing aircraft that either fall out the sky or have bits drop off while in flight

Put those entities together and the US government will be lucky if the new jets don't shed their wings upon first takeoff.

Maybe they can save money on a flight crew and fit Tesla autopilot to them?

Microsoft facing multibillion legal claim over how it sells software

Anyone that has had to figure out why a family member's M$ Office package suddenly "stopped working" should know that issue well enough.

M$ managed to get my father to "upgrade" his fully paid for version of Office 2016 with a Office 365 freebie pop-up, from my understanding using their typical shyster tactics to tuck away any choice of opting out in a location where it's harder to see. When that freebie subscription expired, it locked him out of the software and demanded a subscription payment.

Unfortunately this was five or six years after the original install and he didn't have the documentation or install disc any more, so M$ was given the finger and the latest Libreoffice installed on his iMac instead. Problem solved, and no more dealing with those bastards.

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

One of the better keyboards I've ever used was rather surprisingly a basic Lenovo branded membrane keyboard that now lives on my bench at work. It felt nice and solid with chunky raised keys, and types very well. We usually use Logitech stuff which tends to also be decent, but the wireless ones can go flaky and lag badly on my system for some reason.

At home is a Mad Catz Strike 4 with Cherry Red switches - was a bargain on Amazon for about £30. Not really my style but it does the job nicely and is a good typer for its price.

Worst? Microsoft Wired Keyboard 600. The slightly older ones were made of unpleasant oily feeling shiny plastic. The newer ones have a rougher texture on the keys yet still manage to feel unpleasant.

Regardless they are like typing on a damp kitchen sponge and make even the crappiest keyboards I came across in the 1990s seem good. My workplace bought tons of them as they were cheap.

Suffice it to say there's now a fairly sizeable stack of the damn things lurking on a storage shelf downstairs because most people can't stand them!

US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired

They're "the good guys" so in this case it's fine, or something. The USA could always decide to invade itself over this of course.

Fedora 42 now an official Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 distro

Given my own experience of using W11 I wouldn't be surprised if there's enough materials for two articles. One writing about your experience, and then the edited publishable version with all the swearing removed....it definitely drove me to some incredibly bad language when I gave something similar a try last year!

The final bookworm-based Raspberry Pi OS update arrives

Re: No love for x86?

It'd be lovely to see it - it works really well on just about anything I've tried it on.

GNOME Foundation's new executive director is Canadian, a techie, and a GNOME user

Re: The question is...

Isn't that the advantage of Linux distros generally, though? If you don't get on with GNOME there are lots of other lovely choices out there - including MATE.

I don't mind GNOME 40 myself with the tweaks Ubuntu provides and that's coming from someone who was used to Windows 10 until a few years ago.

Pretty much any of the mainstream desktop environments are nicer to use than the POS that is Windows 11.

Amazon touts Vulcan – its first robot with a sense of 'touch'

I dunno

I guess I was expecting something a bit fancier than a UR3 robot arm with a custom end effector. Not a bad choice though from my admittedly limited experience with them.

Can't see it being long before the 4hr maintenance window gets ignored and they get run until they fail altogether, just like Amazon treats their human employees.

The 12 KB that Windows just can't seem to quit

+++Mine! Waah!+++

Other excellent ones were "initialise the GBL"

+++Divide by Cucumber Error. Please Re-Install Universe and Reboot+++

GNU Terry Pratchett

You'll never guess which mobile browser is the worst for data collection

Re: I use Brave

"Who cares..... "

Evidently some care enough to write fairly detailed blog posts on it.

"Go through the settings and just switch off anything to do with it and normally you never see anything about it."

I'd prefer a browser that doesn't come with additonal crap that I have to turn off. Or have to turn off every time it updates.

Plus the way Brave handles advertising sounds like you just swap Google servers for their own in terms of data collection.

Similar arguments of “just turn off these settings and remove the stuff you don't want" sometimes get made about Win10/11. IMHO they don't really hold water either unless you have absolutely no alternative

Re: I use Brave

Mh. Brave is owned by crypto bastards.

I thought this link (much shared on here previously) made interesting reading.

https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/

Firefox for Android works well enough especially if you tweak up the privacy settings. I notice far less tailored adverts following me around than when I used to use anything Chromium based.

Apple exec sends Google shares plunging as he calls AI the new search

Google's search results were getting bad enough before being infested with AI.

Truly an excellent example of marketing BS and hype.

Microsoft updates the Windows 11 Start Menu

I can't wait

for ClippyPilot AI to decide for me what my monitor resolution and scaling should be, or indeed where it thinks my monitors are on my desk as opposed to where they actually are.

Raspberry Pi slices Compute Module 4 prices

Re: Relentless price increases are not obligatory

At UK prices it was coming up at £96 down from just over £200.

However you get what you pay for in terms of minimal support I guess if it goes wrong, and I'd be surprised if the component quality was similar to that of a Pi.

Re: Relentless price increases are not obligatory

I picked up a pair of Pi 3B+s that were being thrown out at work, seemingly because no-one knew what they were. The performance they have for their age and specifications is generally very impressive and I'm intrigued enough to consider picking up a 4 or 5 as a tinkering thing. Probably a 5 given they're only about £5 more than the 4 from a local UK retailer with way better performance.

One of the 3B's even came with a 7" touchscreen case and has made a nice little audio player paired to my bluetooth headphones on my workbench. (Yes, I could use my phone but where's the fun in that?)

Teens maintained a mainframe and it went about as well as you'd imagine

Re: Good, but don't do that again

Always the way.

Back in 2017 the if-it-breaks-no-work-gets-done lab PC I was given upon joining my then employer was a Intel Core Solo machine, running Windows 7 32-bit. 1GB of RAM and an ancient 60GB HDD all mounted inside a somewhat battered micro-ATX tower - it appeared to have been thrown together by the IT contractor over his lunch break from bits he had lying around rather than the company buy anything. It also came complete with a rollerball PS2 mouse and a 15" 4:3 LCD monitor....it did the job, but the HDD would usually be going mental with all the swapping going on if you tried to run Outlook / Office and any of the lab software at the same time.

When I went to collect it with the lab trolley, it was sat next to a rather nice and shiny i7-7700k system - 16GB RAM, 500GB NvME SSD, Windows 10 etc.. Plus two brand new 24" Dell monitors and a fancy Microsoft ergonomic wireless keyboard and mouse set. Turned out that was for the ops director (MD's stepson) who I seem to recall spent most of his day reading emails.

The elderly HDD in mine turned out to be very knackered, and died after a few weeks of use - sadly overnight on a test run while generating a lot of rather irreplaceable QC data for our biggest client. Thankfully a week before I'd seen the warnings and already had a ticket raised complete with screenshots warning of HDD failure.

There was some grumbling from my boss about why such important tests were being carried out on what in his words was "junk".

After a few further grumbles I got upgraded to a nice little i5 HP desktop mini (and joy of joys it had an SSD), a similar model now sits at home serving me well.

I've worked (well, more been paid to put up with) around people a few years older than that who panicked when things went wrong, and broke stuff badly.

The worst of it was the attempt to hide the carnage in a nearby cupboard rather than admit fault....

Trump promises protection for TikTok, for which he has a ‘warm spot in my heart’

Re: Ignorant estate agent made president, result for everything is what you'd expect

How can anyone read or listen to this totally senile, nonsensical gibberish and conclude that he's some kind of stable genius?

Of course, someone will be along in a moment with the usual catchphrase "but Biden...."

Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

Re: I believe facts, not Microsoft marketing

Given the amount of data harvesting telemetry present in Edge, Windows 10 and especially Windows 11, I'd say that's been the case for quite a long time.

Brewhaha: Turns out machines can't replace people, Starbucks finds

Re: Dont ever want

As of this week my employer has banished me to the USA for a fortnight. After some experimentation I've managed to get the "cup of joe" style filter coffee maker in the hotel room to make drinkable coffee, although the markings on the jug for a "cup" of coffee are oddly about 2/3 of what I'd expect a cup to be sized as. Also not sure what "donut shop" coffee is supposed to be but there were lots of bags of it on the shelves in Publix.

Coffee from anywhere like Panera, Dunkin etc is effectively a large quantity of brown muddy water that tastes vaguely of coffee - even the dark roast in Panera which is the best I've come across so far out here.

I probably should have packed my french press.

Re: Absolute Shite

Yes, I was thinking more along the lines of the food. The coffee there is just fine especially for the price.

Re: Absolute Shite

Similar chains of thought could apply to places like McDonalds!

Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

Re: I'e already said this

What games are you running?

Not found an issue with just about anything via Proton on Steam so far from old GTA titles to Cyberpunk 2077. All running nicely on Ubuntu 24.04.

I'm typing this on a year or so old Lenovo LOQ gaming laptop (13th gen i5), running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Everything worked out of the box beautifully during the install, and its nice and stable when gaming through Steam / Proton (even if the Nvidia drivers could be better).

It was bought new running W11, which I found I didn't get on with at all. Even compared to W10 it just seems festooned with distracting notifications and adverts for crap I didn't want. It generally felt cramped, cluttered and stressful to use, rather than staying out of the way and letting me get on with whatever I wanted to do.

A few days after the warranty ran out I tentatively booted a live Ubuntu USB and was very glad to see everything work just fine. It runs like the clappers compared to the W11 install, with 16GB of RAM being more than enough. Even the GNOME shell doesn't bother me as much as I thought it would. I've only tinkered around with Linux for three or four years - initially as a curiosity and I still have a lot to learn. Ubuntu's customisation of GNOME seems pretty friendly however.

I appreciate it's not for everyone, but I write this as someone that until a few years ago was genuinely clueless about computers with knowledge at the time that was last relevant in the early 2000s.

Walking into a high street retailer to purchase a gaming laptop and getting confused about the nonexistence of 3DFX and ATI graphics cards was not my finest moment.....

What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack

I worked somewhere where the company quality manual was promptly released for "read and understand" in the DMS for all employees. The DMS software would convert documents to PDF format automatically before raising them as available for signing off.

The whole thing was completely unreadable, being still in full markup redline formatting including comments. The metadata showed it had been reviewed by six of the QA team and the QA director himself...this was two days after a snotty email from said QA director grumbling about how people "obviously weren't reading documents before signing them off as understood"

Re: Be careful where you type

I recall taking on responsibility for a some analytical lab equipment at a previous workplace, including the weekly service routines.

The machine came with a handwritten logbook that had been very dutifully filled out by the previous lab tech, a chap called Alan. It turned out I was Alan's replacement after he had been sacked by manglement.

His maintenance logs were full of things like "Furnace temperature sensor 2B broke, senior chemist insisted on buying second hand replacement. Replacement sensor fitted. Fucking surprise, sensor doesn't work. Replacement sensor stolen from other analyser in test lab B and fitted. Analyser functional with no thanks to idiotic senior chemist."

Apparently this prose would cross over into the way he spoke to anyone within earshot fairly often, which went some way to explain why he had gotten sacked.

AI-driven 20-ft robots coming for construction workers' jobs

I can only agree - hands down its the most rewarding and interesting job I've had.

Plus the number of the damn things that'll need fixing is only going to increase.

My job is to fix robots, so I imagine I'll be okay for now at least.

DARPA to 'radically' rev up mathematics research. Yes, with AI

So how long will it take

....before we get the LLM deciding to effectively do a Bergholt Stuttley Johnson and insist that pi is exactly 3 instead of 3.14?

Decades-old bug in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas finally shows itself

Re: Oh my pile...

Its a fun game. However the words

"All we had to do was follow the damn train, CJ!"

still haunt me.

Tesla's Optimus can't roll without rare earth magnets, and Beijing ain't budging yet

Re: Tech support?

If it's built to the same standard as the Cybertruck, bits will just drop off it anyway.

Trump blinks: 'Substantially' lower China tariffs promised

Mental gymnastics ahoy

The MAGA crowd claim Donald is some kind of "strongman".

This doesn't look like that sort of behaviour.

Elon Musk makes another cut – to his time at DOGE

Hey, wait now....the multiple Trump Casinos were a success story, right?

Right?

Downward DOGE: Elon Musk keeps revising cost-trimming goals in a familiar pattern

Re: Just another Trump lie

All sounds rather familiar from this side of the pond.

I seem to recall during the UK undergoing their own tsunami of stupidity back in 2016 we had a government minister (Michael Gove?) state that "people in this country have had enough of experts" when being asked about economic impacts of brexit. Given that the end result of that sorry saga was Liz Truss crashing the economy, I think we'd have been better off sticking with the experts....not helped by Boris Boozo the Clown removing anyone with any vague competence from government just to make himself look better. All sounds rather familiar, doesn't it?

Evidently the current US administration is well down this same playbook the UK took a few years ago. One difference is that given Donald's health and age I can't really see how he'd complete a third term.

Birds aren't real.

MX Linux 23.6 brings Debian freshness, without the systemd funk

As mentioned above, I'm happily running MX on a 17 year old 2008 era HP laptop. Admittedly mine doesn't have a dGPU and instead relies on the integreted Intel graphics - so I didn't run into the same issues Liam did.

Re: obsolescence in the eye of the beholder

Admittedly I don't tend to keep up with the "who's who" side of things in the linux world, but Norbert P's blog posts (plus the comments underneath them) didn't really paint him or others in particularly flattering light.

As for MX using an old KDE version? Given the other tweaks MX make to the Debian stable base, a more up to date version of KDE 5 with bug fixes would have been nice.

Even more so when the main MX release uses XFCE 4.20 instead of the Debian stable supplied 4.18.

Re: Fiddly?

Been running MX Linux on a very elderly 2008/era Core2Duo HP laptop for a while now, apart from a bit of a play about with Alpine and indeed Devuan.

I found that I could do pretty much everything I needed in a GUI rather than using the terminal post install - that makes all the difference to some users. I dont mind using the terminal for some stuff but its nice to have the choice.

The installer works well enough but isn't the most straightforward if you're new to a lot of this.

Certainly my first Linux install with MX years ago didn't go well at all....thankfully it was on a spare test SSD!

I find it a nice straightforward way to get a lot of milage out of very ancient hardware. Definitely worth bunging them a fiver or so in donation.

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

Re: Linux drivers?

Both of the tower PC's sat near my desk have Asus motherboards - and both run perfectly normally with Linux including the fans.

According to M$'s website the the surface hub v1 has a 4th gen i7 and a Quadro K2200 GPU (which supports DirectX 12) - sounds like it would make a fun if silly games console emulator if that Quadro is up to the task.