Posts by Thomas Kenyon

Putting the B's in bargain basement, Xiaomi staggers into sunlight clutching Poco X3

It's a Xaiomi, so the OS will be MIUI, basically a near vanilla recent Android build with extremely regular updates.

Sure, we made your Wi-Fi routers phone home with telemetry, says Ubiquiti. What of it?

Re: Cloud product talks to cloud

You can run a controller locally. It's a freely available application on their website. (Written in Java). They even maintain repositories for various Linux distributions.

Their mobile App will also talk to this happily.

Re: another workaround to this

There's also an annoying problem that if you trigger a firmware update from the controller, their access points don't update and just stay disconnected until you reset them if they don't have a NATed connection on their default (not VLAN) interface.

Discovered this the obvious way.

Great news, cask beer fans: UK shortage of CO2 menaces fizzy crap taking up tap space

Re: Recapture

Weirdly if the beer is flat, it's most commonly caused by scale deposits picked up in the glass from the glasswasher.

Beer recipies have continuallyt changed over the years (eg. since 2011, the strength of a lot of them have gone down and some have been reformulated to used a mixed gas instead of pure CO2).

To prevent the most common cause of flat beer, the glass washer needs to be regularly cleaned, a water softener needs to be fitted which needs regenerating or regular maintenance (depending on type), especially in hard water areas.

(It doesn't help the weird idea that a lot of bar staff have, that if you want a pint to be fizzy, they need to beat all the gas out of it whilst they're pouring it).

Recapture

Looks like the breweries need to start reclaiming the CO2 generated during brewing again. (In the way that they used to).

Some plants have started to do this (Heineken Manchester where they brew Foster's should be unaffected), but it's strangely uncommon now.

Storage Christmas cracker: My band is called 1023MB. We haven't had a gig yet

Re: I can't wait to see what...

Fielding these calls are even not frustrating when your site only has .25Mbit upstream.

Jodie Who-ttaker? The Doctor is in

Not to mention Hex and Strax. (Although technically Strax isn't male)

UK.gov flings £400m at gold standard, ‘full-fibre' b*&%*%£$%. Yep. Broadband

Re: Not competent?

Some Virgin media installers have historically allowed customers to share a neighbour's drop where there isn't one for their premises.

I don't know if this is now frowned upon.

Your broadband speeds are up by 6Mbps, boasts UK watchdog Ofcom

Not just the countryside

At our office in Southampton city centre, there's no sign of FTTC on the horizon and the fastest sync speed we can get is 3.5Mbit.

Much slower than the nearest village.

Windows 10 shattered Remote Desktop's security defaults – so get patching

Re: RDP with no login?

Isn't RDP with no password the default configuration for Virtualboxes vrdp?

Dell's PC-on-a-stick landing in July: report

Re: Yawn

I know, they're quite common now. I have one that is a webserver and print server.

Sony promises PC-based PlayStation 4 for Christmas

headphones

Coo. A headphone jack on the controller, not seen that since the 3DO. I wonder if it has a DSP dedicated to the headphone jack audio as well.

RISC OS comes to Raspberry Pi

This has been around for a few days now, and there has been a fully functional RISC OS image available for the Pi for ages.

Kickstarter kindly allows Brits to channel 95% of their money through it

I can't help but think that being in the UK means that the first person to put up a notice stating that your money will be invested in getting drunk, will get lots of money.

Jam today: Raspberry Pi Ram doubled

Don't hold your breath, mine finally came around the same time.

CPC have the new model in stock and the price includes shipping (makes it £1 cheaper than RS last I checked).

They also do a QTY discount.

Apple files disappearing-feature iPhone patent

Even Nokia did this

Wasn't there a raft of cheap nokias a few years ago that had a second display hidden in the case that came to life when you knocked it a couple of times, then completely disappeared? I certainly remember seeing a couple.

Populous

A lot of people didn't like the sequel, I loved it and played it right the way to the end.

As opposed to black and white 2 which was a terrible sequel.

iPhone 5: UK pay-monthly tariffs compared

Three also have it on a £34/month deal

Three also have this on a deal that's £2 cheaper (for each deal).

The only difference I can see is that you get 500 minutes instead of 2000.

Still it's £48 off TCO.

Pano does browser-thin virty desktops

Wow, another company inventing the thin client. (again).

Sounds daft, but the Pi would be perfectly adequate to act as a thin client. And that's only £25.

Strong ARM: The Acorn Archimedes is 25

Err, IIRC the MEMC1 could only handle 4MB, which is why on the 16MB A540 expansion, there were additional MEMCs soldered on the board.

Greene King pubs to offer free beer Wi-Fi

IPA

You're all crazy, the only palatable beer Greene King Sells is Old Speckled Hen. Even if they did ruin it when they closed down the Morland Brewery.

IPv6 networking: Bad news for small biz

Re: crazy academic led BS as usual?

IPv6 is available in Windows 2000 as well, you only need to switch it on.

Also I know certain not especially new printers that talk IPv6, I have some xerox printers here that do. (again, only needs to be switched on).

A simple HTML tag will crash 64-bit Windows 7

This all seems familiar.

I remember about 12 years ago a small bit of html that put 4 iframes in a page that referred to itself, managed to take down a Windows 98 machine, a Sun OS machine and a Solaris machine, only machine I tested it on that didn't die was an HP-UX machine running netscape. (The netscape process died).

Virgin Media preps firmware update for glitchy SuperHub

Only reason I'm still on 50Mbit

This is the only reason I'm still on 50Mbit with the vmng300, I long ago came to the conclusion that Netgear kit is substandard.

Dell's faulty PC legal woes worsen (again)

Weird

Am I the only person who has bought a reasonable amount of GX280s that all worked a charm?

I've just taken the last 4 out of service, mostly through age.

Virgin Media to demo 200Mb/s broadband tomorrow

Can't get Cable

If you are surrounded by properties that can receive cable, and you can't, Have you tried getting a spotter round to find out if they think it's feasible?

http://allyours.virginmedia.com/forms/unserviceableLeads.html

The above page can sometimes get one out.

Gigabit runs quite nicely on Cat 5

No need to change your cabling, Gigabit runs quite nicely on Cat 5.

Virgin Media sets throttle on hardcore hogs

10Mbit Upstream Trial taking the Mickey

It does take the mickey a bit having 10Mbit upstream and 200Mbit downstream trials, when in some areas 2000 premises are sharing 9Mbit (total) upstream.

They should fix their network before trying to dazzle people with pretty headlines and waving their collective willys at BT.

Dell accidentally sells 140,000 monitors for $15 a pop

Happened before

Not if there is a disclaimer, something along the lines of advertised prices represent an offer of service and do not constitude a contract of sale etc.

I remember a similar thing happening years ago, where the machine cabe with a 19in CRT screen, if you downgraded to a 17in screen £35 was taken off the price, if you downgraded to 2 x 17in screens, £70 was taken off the price.

Sage waves voluntary redundo plan at staff

Pretense at functioning.

Well finally, as of august, Line 50 will support a proper rdbms (MySQL), so hopefully things are on the up.

I've never understood how Sage got to be so big in the first place, they are practically unknown outside the UK.

Virgin Media switches to Gmail

Gmail

I can't see why they'd be that much difference, you can use Gmail locally too.

Now that they've outsourced their news services and a photo printing service and an offsite storage service, I wonder what else they don't want to do themselves.

Virgin Media to battle modem hackers

Broken Cabs

If you report broken cabs on their support newsgroups, they get forwarded to the relevant people (and even chased up if need be).

Did TomTom test Microsoft's Linux patent lock-down?

Big FAT patent ....

How secure is MS's patent in this respect anyway?

I can't for the life of me remember what it's called but there is a principle in IP law that states that you can't enforce a patent that is designed to fit a product (like you can't enforce the notion of a jacket).

This was used against Nokia when it tried to protect it's patent on snap-on covers.

Surely if the codebase for FAT support doesn't come from Microsoft, then it is merely made to fit an MS product and the patent isn't enforceable.

Or am I missing something?

Red Dwarf touches down in Coronation Street

Better Smeg Than Dead

I thought that when rimmer kneed death in the balls he said. 'Only the good die young'.

I thought better smeg than dead was when they were fighting their future selves at the end of a previous series. (or the cats better anything than that wig).

Linux to spend eternity in shadow of 'little blue E'

Windows vx Linux? Not heard that argument before.

I don't know what you're all talkin gabout, OS/2 will rule the world.

Intel Atom heir in rumor mill upgrade

Call it BBC?

If they call it BBC, then they'd need to be a version that you build yourself.

Portsmouth punts naval boy-on-boy to innocent kiddies

Totty

I have to whole heartedly disagree with Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse, I have been drinking in Portsmouth many times and there are some fantastic looking women.

Nokia E71 smartphone

Wired Car Kit, To the E61i owner

I am also a happy e61i user (well I'll be happier if the battery lasted longer), It's worth noting that the lack of a POP port does not stop anyone being able to make a cradle for it.

The E62 only has a USB port on it, and with the correct kit can be used with a nokia car kit.

Although in all honesty, the sound quality of our (nokia) bluetooth kit is as good as any wired car kit I've tried.

Fujitsu gives Solaris x86 the big squeeze

Fujitsu unix

There never was a Fujitsu unix, but through its (now gone) subsidiary HAL fujitsu built vast UltrasparC-based machines (as many as 2048 processor models) running Solaris.

Kinda proved the Scalable part of the Scalable Processor ARChitecture.

Blighty joins killer robot club with Afghan strike

Planes Crashing

Is this related to the US Airforce remote control plane that has the nasty issue of crashing into the ground/anything nearby if it rains?

Cable cutter nutters chase underwater conspiracies

The True Villain

Please, It's clearly Marcus Brigstocke, or another Irate BT customer trying to kill off a few BT Callcentres.

BT blows £250m on wind power

Poncy middle-class gits.

I think I agree with what I believe Marcus Brigstocke said.

People who protest against the construction of windfarms should be made to have nuclear power plantd in their lofts.