Posts by Simon Harris

Shack in flat-pack bric-a-brac lack flap? Whack on this 3D flat-pack app

So that's where my missing dowel went.

Give it back, Muscleguy!

Meatballs

They're still listed on the restaurant page for my local Ikea in Croydon.

All the Ikea stuff I've put together has been pretty simple, although I can't claim any flat-pack furniture (including Homebase and a small amount of Argos stuff and a couple of desks of unknown origin that I've had to disassemble and reassemble at various times) has posed any problems either. The only thing you have to watch out for is the odd missing fitting, peg, etc. However as far as quality goes, there seems to be two levels at Ikea, the decent stuff and the rest. My decent Ikea shelves have held up very well over the past 14 years or so, some of the cheaper Ikea ones have warped horribly.

Route Optimiser?

No, actually what they really need to do is let you build an inventory of all the things that look nice in the Ikea VR app, and then plan an optimised route around the nearest shop where everything's in stock to check them out in the fleshwood/chipboard along with their locations on a map of the warehousey bit where you actually pick up all the flat-packs.

Also, with a report on stock levels of Swedish meatballs in the canteen!

Roses are #f00, violets are #00f. This witty code is a boffinry breakthrough

Computer generated jokes...

... still funnier than Michael McIntyre!

Who's who: 12th Doctor has been chosen, will meet you on Sunday night

Re: Call me old fashioned...

Me too.

I was looking forward to a nice surprise come the Christmas special.

Zuck on this, Twitter! Now Facebook switches on embedded posts

[ f ] off!

Surely it's enough that if I want to see what someone's facebook presence is, I can click that little [ f ] icon that'll usually be on their page somewhere...

... but I don't really want their endless stream of consciousnesswank forced down my throat as soon as I go to their page!

Boffins: We have FOOLED APPLE with malware app

Re: Objective-C runtime

... or possibly dowload all the songs from the web (©2005, Columbia Pictures)

Microsoft Surface sales numbers revealed as SHOCKINGLY HIDEOUS

Re: The purpose of Surface

"If they keep reducing, eventually they will fly off the shelves imo like the Blackberry pads did..."

They do fly off the shelves...

... if the shelves are put up with a 10 degree slope and are covered in butter!

Mine's the one with the spirit-level in the pocket --->

Egad! Could Samsung be cheating in Galaxy benchmark tests?

Re: Proper mobile benchmarking

Time to bring back the Sieve of Eratosthenes from Byte and the 8 benchmark tests from the early days of Personal Computer World!

Only 1 in 5 Americans believe in pure evolution – and that's an upswing

Re: Churches don't really believe in God

Nuns?! Reverse... Reverse!

WAR ON PORN: UK flicks switch on 'I am a pervert' web filters

Re: Loads of scope for malicious hackery here

Now I want a filter in my head for the horrible images that example has created in my brain!

UK parliament presses for pardon for Alan Turing

Re: Hollywood Pressure

Breaking The Code is a great piece of theatre and although based on Turing's life is a bit fictionalised - certainly names are changed and some events created or slightly changed for the theatre - although the spirit of Turing's life is there, I think Hugh Whitemore puts his own thoughts into Turing's mouth too sometimes (of course true of any theatrical production!). It will be interesting to see how authentic the new film will be.

Confirmed: Driverless cars to hit actual British roads by end of year

Journalism.

I think there is a more accurate version of the story...

here, in The Daily Mash

Lasers to carry 622 Mbps Earth-Moon link

more prosaic applications...

like streaming Clanger Porn!

Boffins want toilets to become POWER PLANTS

Re: Truckers' pop

Spending a penny to save almost a penny?

The economics just don't add up!

Explicit shots: China's gorgeous flop-tastic Tianhe-2 supercomputer

Re: But..

A story about supercomputers goes live around 10am, and the first 'Will it run Crysis?' comment is not til 19.37?

What is the Reg coming to? 9 hours for a Crysis moment?

I despair of commentards' tardiness on the traditional Crysis comment!

Re: ORAC

Given the preponderence of wobbly sets on Blake's Seven, a rather too-well put-together relative of ORAC!

What's the Mandarin for ...

... let's play Global Thermonuclear War?

I want to see...

... more flashing lights...

or it's not a real supercomputer!

Apple builds flagship store on top of PLAGUE HOSPITAL

Re: World War Z

"In extreme circumstances, Apple sales assistants can be stopped by removing the head or destroying the brain. I will repeat that: by removing the head or destroying the brain."

Chromebooks now the fastest-growing segment of PC market

Re: Statistics, and damned statistics!

... but what percentage of laptops overall cost less than $300 ?

Apple files patent for refrigerator-magnet iPads

Apple's next patent needs to be

The uncrackable touchscreen...

for when the iFridgeMagnet keeps falling off the fridge.

Daddy-o, you're all wet... baffled by your own kids on the web - survey

Re: YOLO

... and James Bond.

Re: Parents

I'm surprised it's not there yet as a language option on Google Translate!

@Andrew Jones 2 ...

Got exactly the same score, with the same logic to get that one 'wrong' too.

Your own £19 Pocket Spacecraft could be FOUND ON THE MOON

Re: Neat

I always thought the idea of scouts was that to light a camp-fire, you had to rub two of them vigourously together until they did burn up!

CubeSat Mothership...

... sound a bit Borg to me!

Now I understand...

All those AOL discs that landed on my doormat at the turn of the millennium weren't some attempt to sell me a piss-poor internet service, but scouts forming the vanguard of an alien invasion!

That's not so bad as I remember...

My first proper job, some 26 years ago, involved me spending a few days on a trawler in the North Sea one February.

What came back in the nets usually consisted of a mixture of fish and old sanitary products.

Elon Musk's Grasshopper tops 300m, lands safely

Re: vertical landing

"Vertical landing would be a boon if you were thinking of landing your rocket on a planet or moon with little or no atmosphere." ....

.... or runways!

Re: Wonderful!

That's how the spaceship in Salvage-1 used to take off and land.

I vote for renaming the Grasshopper to Vulture.

Cosmic blast mystery solved in neutron star's intense death throes

Re: Brilliantly apposite sub-heading

"I had to Google it though"

Have an upvote for honesty!

Modern-day Frankenstein invents CURE for BEHEADING

Backflips

If somebody had just glued my head onto a new body, I'd be a bit wary of doing anything too acrobatic!

El Reg encounters mObi: R2-D2 for retailers

"These are not the beans you're looking for..."

says mObi Wan Kenobi

Facebook restricts ads running next to dodgy posts

Re: Maybe

I seem to remember a while ago Facebook refused to let the inhabitants of Effin in Ireland say where they were from!

Re: So wait

So we have a choice..

pages with 'nads, or pages with ads.

Judge nixes Microsoft SkyDrive name in BSkyB court ruling

Re: New name for SkyDrive

"LIVEdrive"

or Drive:LIVE... which could be shortened to Drive:L

Re: Infringing how?

Since Sky broadcasts from satellites up in the sky, and The Sky at Night has featured people looking up into the sky, often at satellites (natural or man-made), for over 50 years now, by the same reasoning, shouldn't the BBC sue Murdoch - because obviously people are going to confuse the TV station with the BBCs astronomy programme?

Tethered and vulnerable: Hotspot password FAIL not just in iPhones

default passwords consisting of ... 1234567890

Damn - I was going to use that password!

Microsoft partners seriously underwhelmed by Windows 8.1

Re: The problem...

"He failed to grasp the tablet idea, even though MS had tablet type things for years."

I wish they'd done something with their Courier concept instead of trying to shoehorn the same interface onto everything.

Re: Windows 7?

"I'm sorry but Windows 8 to Windows 7 is not as a car is to a horse. You fail the IQ test."

More like a My Little Pony to a Lipizzaner Stallion.

Sir Maurice Wilkes centenary - 'Flash-Gordon' tech

"CRT's are, of course, valves :), and there are probably still some of those in use in some places..."

Watching one in my lounge right now.

Stock dips as fanbois complain of dodgy Wi-Fi on MacBook Air

Re: Its simple

"Apple have decided that as radio waves are curvy they are in breach of their IP rights and have decided to refuse them access to their equipment."

It's a real dilemma...

broadcast sine waves with their rounded corners and incur the wrath of Apple...

or

broadcast square waves with all those nasty harmonics and incur the wrath of the FCC (or Ofcom or whoever)

Play the Snowden flights boardgame: Avoid going directly to Jail

Re: Why not go high...? (Up I mean)

Or down...

How about a trip across Russia to Vladivostok, nuclear sub to somewhere near the Ecuador coast (probably best give Hawaii a wide berth), and then launched out of a torpedo tube on one of those person carrying torpedoes and left to make his way ashore somewhere secluded.

Strangely, Google maps didn't come up with that solution.

Oops... Google will probably pass on the fact that I looked it up, and the NSA will be on MY tail now!

Sony unveils latest attempt at an Android SmartWatch

Space age...

I want one with the operating system from the Nostromo...

...just so I could call it 'Watch with Mother'

Galaxy S4 way faster than iPhone 5: Which?

I bought a Galaxy S4...

Now I have to talk twice as fast to keep up with the thing...

and nobody can understand a damn thing I say!

We want to put a KILL SWITCH into your PHONE, say Feds

Re: Yeah, its about protecting your stolen phone - seriously?

"The reason they want this is obvious - its so that if they discover a phone is going to be used as a remote trigger for a bomb they can remotely kill it and stop the detonation."

They'd be a bit buggered if the bomb was set to detonate automatically if it didn't get called regularly with 'cancel' codes!

MacBook Air now uses PCIe flash... but who'd Apple buy it from?

Re: it's a chimney

Looks like a giant ferrite bead to me!