Posts by EL Vark

Joy Division get the Playmobil treatment

Hang on...

Hooky's slapping a six-string fretless playmobass? Nearly ruined the illusion for me. Still, Tony Wilson would've loved this, RIP.

Boffins crack walnut-shaped Iapetus moon mystery

Iapetus just bait...

... left by the mice for the enormous mutant star goat. Cheap way of protecting their investment. Also rather hoping it has a strong nut allergy.

Texas Chain Saw Massacre declared top horror flick

The Sillier Season

It's safe to say, given the jury, and karma, and whatever else, that it's Romero's "Dawn", not the fast-cut Snyder actioner.

Scrolling down the list I was initially aghast at not seeing Romero, and then he popped up, and I was sated. It took some soul-searching to allow that Dawn could be trumped by a couple of the selections, but I'm reasonably content.

The problem with most of the comments I see, which is to say those who made them, is, I think, that of timing. Y'all are probably on the younger side and don't remember the shock and outrage that some of these films produced in their day, which provides them sufficient merit for their relative placement. Still, I'd warrant, if you were nine years old, alone in the house, and hadn't had much if any exposure to horror of any (real) stripe - still scared of the dark and what's under the bed or in the closet - you'd have lifelong nightmares and a radical change of position had you experienced most of the films on the list in such a way. On the whole they appear to represent a reasonable cross-section of "haunted house", "spilled entrails", and more "cerebral" fare. I mean, I never found "Suspiria" particularly scary, but it's beautifully made and keeps you guessing, and I do know some people who found and still find it terrifying.

S'all a matter of taste. Clearly my taste is for the fleshy parts. GAR's my mon. We'll just nod politely at everything post-Day.

Fader pushers mourn Fritz Sennheiser

Thank you and good luck... out there.

Bought a pair of HD 420's to complement my Koss Pro 4/AAA's, back in the day and have had a quiet love affair with Sennheiser ever since. Best two pairs of headphones I've owned and infinitely superior to anything you jam down your ear canals today. If you can find a mint set (of either, though in this case we're mourning Herr Sennheiser), grab 'em. They were ~CDN$100 c.1984 if you need a benchmark, value-wise (the Koss phones weren't much more a few years previous). Next best thing to a pair of Kef's and a megawatt of juice.

Microsoft defends Hotmail's cookie requirement

@Anonymous Coward Posted Friday 13th November 2009 21:09 GMT

GMail is one of the accounts I use. All personal and private correspondence is handled through my primary ISP account. The only information GMail has about me is my IP#, which doesn't particularly bother me. El Reg have it, too, after all. I suggest GMail because it's relatively fast, reliable, and configurable. But, as I say, for anything remotely private or "secure", I have other means. I suggest that it works, too. Eight years with the same account and no spam, yet. Like, zero. Eight years. Are you satisfied or do you have anything else smart to say?

Flush with information!

Standard stuff. Different aliases and p/w's for my umpteen accounts. I browse with everything and it's ne'er-do-well uncle disabled and don't turn them on unless it's necessary, which isn't that often, really. PrefBar has a nice "Clear All" button and SeaMonkey (and, presumably, FF) can be, and is, set to clean the litterbox on exit. Don't forget to flush your DNS cache, though, and nuke your Flash cookies. I have a little batch file called "AutoClean" that automates takes ten-odd seconds to run after every session. As a former original Hotmail user who dumped them thirty or so seconds after the MS takeover, I have no sympathy for any of their users. GMail works well enough and can be set up as a secondary (or tertiary or whatever you require) pop account in your email client.

Mozilla's SeaMonkey 2.0 exits cryptobiosis

Better and Worse than 1.x

As apparently the only SeaMonkey user in the world, I have to say that I'm both impressed and disgusted with 2.0 The negative comments are amusing as they appear to come from people who wouldn't consider trying it, let alone ever having used it from which to draw an informed opinion. That's what Dubya would do, yes?

The principle reason I continued to use 1.x (1.8.something at last count) was that it was the LEAST bloated browser available that mostly worked (I gave up on Opera ten years ago. Today it's free, tomorrow it's adware, the next day it's payware, the next it's free again.., while Chrome is just silly.). The 1.8.x footprint was in the 18MB range. With 2.0, that's soared to ~54MB, placing it in Fireferret territory. However unlikely that "you" might have tried the two RC builds, 2.0 has ironed out some issues and improved loading time, despite the fatter chunk of memory it demands. I have no need or desire for RSS, Chat, or anything Kewl like that, so have no idea how it performs in those areas.My other slightly less principle reason was the email client, from which TBird was cribbed (TBird user and decriers of SeaMonster take note). It continues to work exactly as well as I require. I have next to no use for the Composer client but have found it reasonably useful those handful of times when I have loaded it. Summation: Too fat but a worthy successor to 1.x. And still prettier and generally more configurable than Fireferret.

Electropulse weapon fear spreads to UK politicos

@The Metal Cod

Just one more for you. In 1962 the U.S. conducted an atmospheric hydrogen bomb test in the South Pacific which succeeded in blacking out Hawaii via the EMP. The test was conducted in part to see if that would happen, so conditions would have been somewhat optimized to incovenience the island folk. The U.S. government have some related documents if you perform a concerted search (they're not hiding them or anything, the references are just old and dated and hard to find). So, yeah, such a thing is possible but, as so many others have mentioned, lunatic state/group with nuclear capability who can overcome all of the technological hurdles will probably be more interested in mass death with a nice, Earth-shattering KA-BOOM! than mass inconvenience. I'm skeptical that my computer case would thwart a sufficiently large or local EMP as someone has attested but I'd just as soon not have to find out. I do know that simple lightning can cause all sorts of chaos under the hood under the right circumstances. I love the smell of charred modem in the morning...

12 of the best... mice

Wants me Trackman FX back!

I long coveted and eventually located (on the cheap) a Logi Trackman FX, which properly calls for the index+/-middle fingers for navigation, and has four logically placed buttons. Yes, I have to give it a cleaning now and again but it's hardly the icky disaster claimed by some. Alas it was never fully supported under XP and will probably make Vista/7 explode when the time comes. As much as I'd like to trade it in for an XP/Vista/7 compliant critter, my thumb is reserved for buttons, sucking, and occasional backside insertion when some degree of spin is required. Come on Logitech! Driver me or bring back the FX!

DARPA in Tom'n'Jerry robo-brain quest

Thin end of the wedge

Has Artie Spiegelman heard about this?

Chinese crackers blamed for US power blackouts

No, no, it was us, I admit it.

Within minutes of the lights coming back on, NYC mayor Bloomberg had himself a press conference in which he blamed the entire incident on Canada. I don't recall any retractions or apologies when the trees were made to shoulder the blame, so I'm here to go on record to say yes, it was us. In fact it was me. A conspiracy of vast proportions gone horribly awry, that left me stuck in a hospital elevator for half an hour until the emergency power was brought online. After that I took the stairs when visiting me mum and rethought the whole "take down the eastern seaboard and chunks of the midwest" strategy. I'm really very sorry.

Net wag endorses Playmobil Security Check Point

Hurray for Briggsy!

This first tipped up on BBSpot, so credit some giving to Brian, let's do! He gets "dug" a lot; I suspect that's the somewhat viral origin of the piece. Still dunno why so much Xenu-riffic material is being scooped up with this. Life's a mystery.

Nintendo Wii: the world's greatest console?

Honestly...

There are grown men and women at the place I work who actually own, or plan to own in the immediate future, a Wii, Xbox, or PSx, but none of them seem to know why, apart from hours spent vegetating in front of the phosphour glow or LCD haze. If I were sixteen (or perhaps a bit younger) I might, and only might, understand any of this. I mean, adults slavering over Guitar Hero, or the latest Xbox Elite for it's "120 Gig (sic) hard drive"... I cut the mid-twenty somethings a small amount of slack since they grew up in the console market, sad and pointless as it is. But thirty and forty year-olds (and beyond) not even pretending that it's for the kiddies... Of course none of these individuals know from hardware; the brightest among them just got a used Gateway because he "had to have a three Gig (sic)" see-pee-you, and five-hundred Gig (again, sic) hard drive. He has no idea why, only that it must be really fast so good so he's cooler than his brother/neighbour/dog. I'm presuming it's an AMD processor of some stripe given what he paid. At least he has an excuse, what with being utterly ign'ant, but reg'lar ElReg readers frothing at the mouth over this tripe is just creepy, unless I've been dramatically overestimating both the age and clue-having average demographic.

Yes, there's a point and that point is thus: Wii this and Wii that. Must have, need to have, will have, just got, etc. Ask why and you're met with slack jaws, blank stares, and nothing short of open hostility for trying to peel away the layers in an attempt to understand.

When we used to play entire seasons of "networked" World Circuit Grand Prix over a 14.4k modem, it appealed to our F1 madness, itself a part of our awe for the bleeding edge engineering of the cars and the nearly super-human qualitites of the drivers (back when ol' Nigel could cork himself into a cockpit), but grown people getting worked up about damned silly games and damned silly hardware is damned silly.

Maybe read a book, this weekend, and leave the console under the sofa.

BOFH: Budget cuts

Hang on...

I've only got about forty bucks on me, can I owe you the rest?