Posts by Michael B.

New strife for Strava: Location privacy feature can be made transparent

So offset your bubble then

If you are concerned about people calculating your location place your home location offset from your actual location and add a few other offset bubbles so that your home is not at the centre of the privacy zone.

More stuff broken amid Microsoft's efforts to fix Meltdown/Spectre vulns

Re: I remember the days ....

When was that golden age then? I certainly remember patching taking out machines going way back.

Netflix silent about ridicule as it discusses punters' viewing habits

Re: Amazon affiliate links

Yeah, specifically the Matt and Tom 2nd channel. Though I do thoroughly recommend Tom Scott's channel and especially their QI a like called "Citation Needed" which takes a Wikipedia article that hopefully the panel (same panel everytime) don't know about and ask them questions on it. It's QI without the star egos spoiling things.

Amazon affiliate links

I've supported a few YouTube channels in the past by clicking on the affiliate links and bought things I was going to buy anyway. Recently I've seen a few channels do "The weird things people bought with my affiliate link". Only then did I realise that these channels could get a hold of a list of all the things that were bought via the affiliate link, anonymised, but still a comprehensive list. Somehow this just all felt a little too creepy and I stopped clicking on affiliate links altogether.

Pro tip: You can log into macOS High Sierra as root with no password

They won't, they will point to Windows and engage in Whataboutery.

Please activate the anti-ransomware protection in your Windows 10 Fall Creators Update PC. Ta

Re: chmod go-rw

Not at all. This is stopping applications, that are running under your own privileges, from writing to certain locations that they shouldn't be writing to. In your permissions the malware will still get to write to the user's files.

Microsoft's foray into phones was a bumbling, half-hearted fiasco, and Nadella always knew it

Re: Lack of "cool"...

Stylus? Were you using an old Windows Mobile 6 phone that was 3 -4 years out of date by then? Post Windows Phone 7 you didn't need a stylus and as far as I can remember no phones came with them as they used the multi-touch capacitive display instead.

EasyJet: We'll have electric airliners within the next decade

Re: Well....

Exercise bike? Go for a stepper and you can get them standing upright and therefore take up less space.

Did eye just do that? Microsoft brings gaze tracking to Windows 10

Re: @Michael B. - Masking tape, meet webcam

No they aren't great contributors to Microsoft's profit margins but they still spent money in the form of development time to add accessibility features to support those users anyway. (They'll probably never make a profit on those users ever.) One of the previous versions added Braille reader support and they've been improving and tweaking screen reader support version by version.

Re: Masking tape, meet webcam

No, it's providing a input mechanism for those who can not use a keyboard and mouse with only the use of a webcam.

Skype for Business is not Skype – realising that is half the battle

Re: Skype Lync

Yup. It's just a rebranded Lync. I think the only thing that it has in common with Skype are the letters S-K-Y-P-E

Game of Pwns: Hackers invade HBO, 'leak Game of Thrones script'

It's a book already.

So is there really that much to reveal?

Microsoft hits new low: Threatens to axe classic Paint from Windows 10

Re: What are they thinking?

I *think* he said in an interview that he uses the XP version even on a later version of Windows so his glorious paintings will be safe.

Stop all news – it's time for us plebs to be told about BBC paycheques!

Today's real news

Of course the real news today is that the retirement date has quietly been pushed forward to 68 for those currently between 39 and 47. Proving that today is a great day to bury bad news amongst this BBC salary froth.

Openreach asks UK what it thinks about 10 million 'full fibre' connections

I'll take a not so wild guess and say that those FTTP lines will be solely in those locations that already have VM cable installed.

America throws down gauntlet: Accept extra security checks or don't carry laptops on flights

Re: Laptop rental

Could you really trust that the host Operating System hasn't been stuffed full of keyloggers and Trojans?

DXC Technology puts reluctant office movers on naughty step

Re: 2.5 miles may not sound like a lot

One stop on the Northern Line at rush hour is internationally classified as cruel and unusual punishment.

Windows is now built on Git, but Microsoft has found some bottlenecks

Re: GVFS sounds super dumb

According to the linked article a standard git checkout would take 3 hours and git clone would take more than half a day with their size of codebase. That is what they are trying to get around with GVFS.

Sweaty fitness bands fall behind as Apple Watch outpaces sales

Not surprised fitbit is having problems

If others have had the same problems that we have had with the fitbit syncing app then it's not a surprise that their market has crashed. We've tried syncing across android, window​s and windows mobile and the experience is uniformly terrible. Contacting support is just a long-winded way to get random useless support site articles in your inbox. So, now it's just a one day step counter with watch functionality and we are actively waiting for it to fall apart so we can eventually throw it in the bin where it belongs.

IT error at Great Western Railway charging £10k for 63-mile journey ticket

Re: Taunton to Bridgwater - Somerset Solar Walk

Not all that bad as in there is a lovely footpath, and many roads, leading out of the place.

Taunton to Bridgwater - Somerset Solar Walk

Taunton isn't all that bad as between Taunton to Bridgwater alongside the canal there is a scale model of the Solar System that really enforces how empty the outer solar system is. Also, you can use phrases like "have we missed Uranus" and "Uranus is coming up".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_Space_Walk

30,000 London gun owners hit by Met Police 'data breach'

I wonder how many of these are actually re-enactment weapons as I believe they require shotgun licenses. ( At least that was what one of them told me when he broke character at a bank holiday event.)

Alabama man gets electrocuted after sleeping with iPhone

Re: so much wrong here...

When you're use to properly designed BS 1363 plugs everything else just seems a bit Jury Rigged.

Android beats Windows as most popular OS for interwebz – by 0.02%

Re: Look at the 5 year Windows slide in to obsolescence

Not really. As in all statistics be careful as to what the data actually shows.

1. This is analytics from a company that is on 2.1% of all websites, but we don't how representative those sites are. They claim to report as they see if which gives a report that is only useful in telling you how many people visited their sites. Extrapolation beyond this subset is risky.

2. Adblockers are fairly common on Windows, and very rare on mobile platforms so their tracking codes will not get loaded and not be counted. ( I won't exist for one in their analytics.)

3. This shows percentages and not raw numbers. You can't tell the underlying trends. Did Windows rise, fall or stay the same?

Ford to build own data centre to store connected car data

pfft If they want a real test come to Bristol. The shear number of random traffic lights with random timings will give that system a real work out.

As ad boycott picks up pace, Google knows it doesn't have to worry

Re: Counterintuitive

Actually it's not even for a terrorist group it's the Britain First YouTube channel as indicated by the Britain First logo and text at the bottom of the screen grab. So maybe Google have noticed a correlation between Britain First members and them flooding the Guardian comments pages with crap.

BBC hooks up with ITV, launches long awaited US subscription VoD

From a quick peak at the site via Remote Desktop to one of our US servers I can see a mixture of the latest Soaps ( no Corrie) and a selection of back catalogue material. In the comedy section the most up to date seems to be Gavin and Stacey ( probably to cash in on the success of Cordon) but the majority seems to be 80s and early 90s. (Boon, Keeping up Appearances, Fawlty Towers, Are you being served, Ab Fab etc..)

Basically just a grab bag of back catalogue material but nothing particularly up to date.

Favored Swift hits the charts: Now in top 10 programming languages

Re: methodology?

or if your language of choice has built in help (eg R) then you won't be hitting search engines as often reducing its popularity.

Anti-TV Licensing petition gets May date for Parliament debate

Re: Good going cobber

No, Rupert Murdoch has people to do that for him.

Samsung phones, Apple's iPhones are 'overpriced', says top Huawei exec

Re: In half a year Android can lose half its speed?

It sounds like the old Windows cruft idea that the installation of more and more apps that install more and more background processes that cause a gradual slowdown.

Nokia’s big comeback: Watches, bathroom scales, a 3310 PR gimmick, Snake, erm...

Re: Hello Nokia

They are just a name on a piece of paper in a Motorola ( not the bit that was sold to Lenovo) filing cabinet now.

Fears Windows code-signing changes will screw up QA process

Azure Key Vault

Why try and crack one key when you can have them all at once. Err, no thanks Microsoft but my secrets will remain firmly out of your cloud service.

Millions of Brits stick with current broadband provider rather than risk no Netflix

Quality of Service is probably more important to me

Yes I could switch to somebody cheaper but then I probably wouldn't get the same quality of service or speed that I enjoy at the moment. it's not like Gas or 'lecy where you get the same product so switching to a cheaper provider makes sense. You certainly get what you pay for!

God save the Queen... from Donald Trump. So say 1 million Britons

It wasn't hard to get the most popular petitions as well. https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions?state=all The previous ban Trump petition got 500,000 so he's now over twice as "popular".

CHEERS! Office 2013 now on Wine 2.0

Re: Ooooh...

Fire up a VM and you can run them in the OS they were designed for. Windows 10 has Hyper-V built in.

Backup Exec console goes AWOL

Re: "Function not supported"...

We (briefly) used a component once from a long established player that was a .Net wrapper around a COM component which was a C++ wrapper around a C core. This house of cards was susceptible to any old minor change in DLLs that were not necessarily related.

Fitbit picks up Pebble, throws Pebble as far as it can into the sea

Re: ferkin Fitbit

That sounds exactly the the trouble I've had with them on behalf of my wife and her fitbit. We just gave up on the syncing altogether and its now just a watch cum step counter. She just guesses how her sleep is now the old fashioned way... by how she feels in the morning.

UK.gov was warned of smart meter debacle by Cabinet Office in 2012

Biggest mistake I ever made

I got one installed as I thought that it might show whether or not I was generating or consuming electricity as we have solar panels on the roof. Nope, it still showed generation as the same as consumption so if the meter shows 500W I don't know if that is used or generated. Oh and when we switched suppliers it reverted back to being a normal dumb meter.

Don't do it even if the shiny shiny tech draws you in.

Three certainties in life: Death, taxes and the speed of light – wait no, maybe not that last one

Which particles go faster than light?

London's Francis Crick Institute will house 1,250 cancer-fighting boffins

Re: Eh? #Fail

If it were Photoshop'ed then the man in that photo has been added as well. The back of his head has the same white halo so my bet is that it is a compression artifact due to over-compression, especially when you look at his back.

If The Register made reality music TV, this is what it would look like

Radio Shed - the twist

The twist being once they have assembled their radio they find out that all they can get on their DAB receiver is bubbling mud.

EU referendum frenzy bazookas online voter registration. It's another #GovtDigiShambles

I wouldn't necessarily take the list of people who didn't vote as a cast iron sign of their support or otherwise because there is an agreement called pairing. This is where if an MP on one side is absent then an opposition MP will step aside and not vote to balance things out. http://www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/pairing/

Don't panic, says Blue Coat, we're not using CA cert to snoop on you

Internal Testing my arse

If you were doing internal testing you can just setup your own CA, install the CA cert on test machines and then issue signed certs with impunity. There is no need for a full blown intermediate CA. This is using a nuclear weapon to crack a nut.

One ad-free day: Three UK to block adverts across network in June

I'm not convinced this is a good idea at a network level since there are a number of sites that refuse to show content unless you enable ads, Channel 4's site for one. So blocking at the network level, unless there is a user defined whitelist that is easy to manipulate at the browser level, is probably going to cause more headaches in the long term.

UK's GDS to hire 300 folk. Silver lining: They'll be evicted from Holborn

Hell no, that would put them under an hour from where I work. I'd be able to smell the bullshit from my office whenever the wind is blowing.

At last: Ordnance Survey's map wizardry goes live

Re: Useful but ...

They seem to do a degree of caching. I just viewed my town, killed the app and then put the phone into airplane mode. The app moaned about not having a data connection but the maps I'd just viewed were available.

Sneaky Google KOs 'right to be forgotten' from search results

I think it's personal

When I search for the same string I get a "full" set of results in Google ( about 501 results). I think Google just don't like you.

BT: We're killing the dabs brand. Oh and can customers re-register to buy on our site?

Hell No

Sorry even though they have been running the show for the last decade at least they have been gracious not to shove their toxic BT brand in my face.

I've actually had good experiences shopping with Dabs but as a brand I've had nothing but pain with BT so I shan't be be shopping at the BT Shop. Bye bye and thanks for all the fish.

Something useful from Cupertino?! Apple sees the light – finally

f.lux on PCs does the same

I've been happily using f.lux for a few years now. The transition from day to night modes is so subtle that you only realise that it's occurred when you disable it and your retinas are suddenly burnt out. I really don't know how I managed before with it.

Microsoft wants to lock everyone into its store via universal Windows apps, says game kingpin

Deja Vu

Didn't Gabe Newell come out with the same doom laden prediction when Windows 8 came out? How did that prediction go then? Did steam, Origin and Gog die under the relentless onslaught of the Windows 8 and Windows 10 App Stores?