Posts by John Arthur

For the marketeer that has everything – except a CPU fan

Microsoft Error Messages at their Best

"No keyboard detected!

Press F1 to run Setup."

Perfect!

Don't cross the team tasked with policing the surfing habits of California's teens

Re: Free school meals

No such thing as a free lunch!

Prince Philip, inadvertent father of the Computer Misuse Act, dies aged 99

Re: No TV

I was on holiday in France when Diana died. No, nowhere near Paris. Nor did I own a white Fiat Uno. I was listening to the Beeb radio a few hours after the death and all they were talking about was when the death occurred, what a wonderful person she was etc. I though "Poor old girl. Still she was getting on a bit". It took an hour or so before they mentioned her name and I realised it was not the Queen Mum they were on about.

IBM creates a COBOL compiler – for Linux on x86

Re: [Aside] Storage media

The use of the term pendant is perhaps confined to the UK and refers to an uppity news columnist calling Tim Worstall, sadly late of these pages, as a pendant when she was criticising him for being a pedant. So pendant it is from now on...

Re: [Aside] Storage media

I hate to be a pendant but weren't those large floppies 8" rather than 9"? Yes, I am an old pendant!

A floppy filled with software worth thousands of francs: Techie can't take it, customs won't keep it. What to do?

UK to Netherlands

In the 1980s I used to swap files with a friend in The Hague by posting floppy disks. Posting to The Hague was fine but in the other direction the UK customs opened (and resealed with a note that they had done so) every floppy coming from The Netherlands. We had no explanation; all we could think of is that they were looking for pr0n. The customs guys must have been pretty mystified to find Excel files with directions and distances for our next motorcycle tour of France! I was pretty pleased when we got email!

Re: A cigarette letter was produced with a flourish

For the official that would be une capote anglais then.

Yep, you're totally unique: That one very special user and their very special problem

Re: Where’s The Effing Ignition Lock!?

All the Saabs I have had, about a dozen, have needed to be in reverse before one can remove the key, not fifth. To show how old I am my third car, back in the 1960s, was a Saab 96 which had a steering column change and the ignition switch was next to the gear lever on the steering column. The key could only be removed when the lever was in reverse. I assume that when they moved to a floor shift lever that they kept the same arrangement out of habit.

Re: (Can't...stop...the... voices....)

Not sure what would happen if the NAS were unavailable. My NAS runs 24/7 and failure has not yet occurred. I guess Free File Sync would throw an error message.

Re: (Can't...stop...the... voices....)

I run FreeFileSync daily via Task Scheduler (assuming your mother is using Windows) and set the FFS options to close the program after backup. If you are not in front of it when it fires up you would not be aware it has backed up. Come to think of it FFS is not a good acronym for FreeFileSync. Sorry!

Just when you thought it was safe to enjoy a beer: Beware the downloaded patch applied in haste

I remember that well. Our IT network guy opened the email not once but twice. He kept his job but only because he did not work for me.

Day 5 of Openreach strikes: No use of tech company toilets. No water. Fresh dates outlined

You have just reminded me of my one and only visit to The Nutshell in Bury St Edmunds many years ago. One of the smallest pubs in the UK it had room for maybe half a dozen customers. No space for toilets. There was a BT cabinet a few yards down the road with enough space behind it for one or two people to stand. I imagine the fault rate there was a bit higher than average. The small certainly was!

Telecoms shack in the middle of Scotland put up for auction at £7,500

Curious Place!

It looks a bit small for a telephone exchange building and I see no poles or houses in the vicinity so I suspect it is/was a transmission repeater station for amplifying analogue on buried co-ax trunk lines between distant exchanges. Nice bit of road though! I must have ridden that on my bike a few years ago.

The Great Borkish Breakfast: I'll have a cup of tea, a sausage roll and a side of bork, please

Re: Pie?

I have upvoted you but I really think you might need an OS for it to work. Raspbian anyone?

NASA sends nuclear tank 293 million miles to Mars, misses landing spot by just five metres. Now watch its video

And for us East Pondians

Hats off to Heathcoat Fabrics of Tiverton, Devon who made the material for the parachutes.

€121,000 YOGA Book Android is 'priced right' says Lenovo

Re: Been done before...

The same for secondhand car prices. The last digit often lets the salesman know how long the car has been sitting around so he can work out how much discount to allow.

Healthy 32-year-old offered COVID-19 vaccine because doctors had him down as 6.2cm tall with BMI of 28,000

Re: The reason I lost so much weight in short order?

As an occasional gout sufferer many thanks for that!

You want me to do WHAT in that prepaid envelope?

Re: Club 50+

Here in Darkest Wales we have had these for years. They stop sending them when you get to 74, as I have. I suppose that means I am now disposable?

We know it's hard to get your kicks at work – just do it away from a wall switch powering anything important

Re: Why have the switch ?

Exactly that. Our fridge is built-in and was powered from a switched socket at the back of the adjoining cupboard. Which has various pots and pans in. So one day I notice the light in the fridge does not come on. No noise from motor. So I guess, correctly, what has happened. The socket has now been changed out for an unswitched one.

My bad! So you're saying that redacting an on-screen PDF with Tipp-Ex won't work?

Re: ... and during her funeral

I did too. Our local Laverda dealer was having an open day with test rides. I went with a mate and he went out first. They would not let two of us out together so I had to wait until he came back. Half an hour, an hour, still no sign. Eventually he reappeared, on foot, having run out of fuel a few miles away. They went and fetched it, loaded into the van as it was the end of the day, and disappeared.

Mind you I did have a good ride when she and Chuckles got married. And Cup Final days before video recorders - magic!

You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right? Trust... but verify

Sadly I did not have enough hair to need a hair dryer. Still don't!

Re: "The solution is of course to ban the latter. :/"

Indeed my ex and I owned a holiday cottage in France for over 20 years. We had a contract for, I think, a 30A feed. If we drew more than that the circuit breaker would soon trip leaving us in the dark. The trip also had an RCD rated at 500mA. Enough to stop the house burning down in the case of a fault but not perhaps to save our lives. I added a standard 30mA RCD in tandem

When working in Brazil about 25 years ago I had a flat which had quite a lot of two pin sockets. They were identical in appearance but some had Dymo labels with 220V and others with 110V. Some sockets had no Dymo label. I did not use those.

Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us

Re: A simple answer

One word: Adnauseam

What does my neighbour's Tesla have in common with a stairlift?

Re: EVs = bad for planet, bad for poor people, bad for practicality

Well, as I speak it is around 20.30 in the UK and the current demand for electricity is around 39GW, not 62GW . The grid transmission capacity is not likely to be well over double the demand.

https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk

Where did you get your figures from?

The revolution will not be televised because my television has been radicalised

Re: Better still

Ernest Hemingway: "There are only two sports, bull-fighting and motor racing. The rest are just games"

Panic in the mailroom: The perils of an operating system too smart for its own good

Re: That reminds me..

I normally tax my motorcycle for 12 months at the start of each riding season, about March or April and then claim back the remainder when I take the bike off the road for its winter overhaul and rest. I have been able to tax it online for many years, more than 10 perhaps 15. When I take it off the road I claim the tax back also online. However the system cannot refund it to my card. It sends a cheque which I then have to go into town 8 miles away to pay into my bank. No, I cannot pay cheques in at the Post Office to Nationwide. Grrr...

Three rips up call centre outsourcing contract with Capita 2+ years early

Re: So a piss poor service

"and offshore others to Tech Mahindra in India"

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

Re: Why are sockets switched?

"I can't imagine them being happy to wait twice as long to boil water". Using Ohm's law it just might be 4 times as long!

BOFH: Rome, I have been thy soldier 40 years... give me a staff of honour for mine age

Re: Woohoo

I think it's the other way round "youth and exuberance are no match for old age and treachery"

Key-cutting machine borked sideways after visit from the BSOD fairy locks things down

i would think that the accuracy is as good as the usual manually operated machine. Those cannot be better than 0.25 mm.

What evil lurks within the data centre, and why is it DDoS-ing the ever-loving pants off us?

Re: That said

Shirely the final 't' is redundant. Sh@ should be sufficient!

Another anti-immigrant rant goes viral in America – and this time it's by a British, er, immigrant tech CEO

Re: "popular justice" is no justice at all

"It's just american for hanging"

There is hanging by the state after a fair trial and hanging by a mob. Lynching is the latter.

Faxing hell: The cops say they would very much like us to stop calling them all the time

"Now is the time to confess all with an email to Who, Me"

Have you got a fax number instead?

By emptying offices, coronavirus has hastened the paperless office

Print volume that would fill the area of seven football fields every minute in 2020.

So how long before the saving covers the El Reg standard unit of area, the Wales? Enquiring minds etc....

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes: UK man gets 3 years for torching 4G phone mast over 5G fears

Re: @ Iglethat & "since hes proven that hes a gullible idiot"

If you carry on researching the flat earth theory you may find it is a sphere of infinite radius!

The UK's favourite lockdown cheese is Big and Red but doesn't require a stinking great audit after consumption

Re: Cheddar why?

"Oddly, the number of dairy farms has fallen by ~75% since then."

The number of dairy farms has fallen as the smaller, less efficient ones have gone. The amount of milk produced has increased since the monolithic MMB closed. The amount of milk now going to cheese producers has risen over 36% in the last twenty years and exports of cheese has more than doubled. There has been a huge increase in the number of small artisan cheesemakers. (Blessed are the chessemakers etc.) There have though been large losses in dried milk and condensed milk.

I had missed the fact that tomorrow is National Cheese Day so, as I should right now be sitting in a restaurant in France eating cheese, I have just got out a selection from the cellar and a nice, large glass of red wine...

A real loch mess: Navy larks sunk by a truculent torpedo

Re: At least the O-ring wasn't frozen this time...

The Austin 7 engine used thermo-syphon cooling so no water pump needed. How well that would work with a dustbin I am not sure.

Elevating cost-cutting to a whole new level with million-dollar bar bills

Re: It didn't affect us

Back in the 1960s I was at a service stop on the RAC Rally in North Wales. A BMC Mini came in and needed work on the exhaust so the crew got a mattress off the roof of the BMC 1800 service barge and put it alongside the Mini then tipped it (the Mini) on its side onto it. Quick and simple!

Another week, another bunch of Windows 10 machines punched by a patch

Re: Re. Interesting that you say that

Local Disk C: (or whatever your OS is on), right click>Properties>untick "Allow files on this drive etc..."

Works for me

Things I learned from Y2K (pt 87): How to swap a mainframe for Microsoft Access

Security?

"which meant the whole "give me the second, fifth and eighth character" challenge wasn't going to fly."

A: What are the second, fifth and eighth characters of your password?

B. That will be B, 6 and T

A. staring at blank screen: Thank you for completing security successfully!

Windows 7 back in black as holdouts report wallpaper-stripping shenanigans

Re: MS conspiracy

Of which Hanlon's Razor is just a special case

Re: I went to the bank on Saturday...

No, I have done a free upgrade to W10 using a clean install. Two actually. All you need is the CoA from the original W7

Help! I'm trapped on Schrodinger's runaway train! Or am I..?

Re: Your big mistake was to not download OUIGO app as well

@Phil,

You forgot the joke icon!

Step away from that Windows 7 machine, order UK cyber-cops: It's not safe for managing your cash digitally

As unpaid support for various friends and family I have 'upgraded' several W7 computers to W10 over the last six months. I have been using the W10 ESB USB image which I have not needed to reimage at all. A couple of PCs, with no known product code, I have upgraded in situ. For the others I have done a clean install. All have updated fine and I have never been asked to pay.

Why is the printer spouting nonsense... and who on earth tried to wire this plug?

Re: Dynamo Dan, the Electric Man

Shirley not!

Delayed, over-budget smart meters will be helpful – when Blighty enters 'Star Trek phase'

Re: You learn something new everyday

You learn something new every day. I had no idea it also meant cupboard!

Mandatory electronic prescriptions was the easy bit in NHS paperless plans

Like Da Weezil I am in Wales and suffer from the myhealthonline system for repeat prescriptions. I have found that if you grit your teeth and get past the first page for registration so that you have the page with only two boxes for username and password you can then bookmark that page and come straight back to it next time. If you have a password manager you can get it to fill in the boxes too!

Hope that the team who designed it does not read El Reg or they will doubtless bugger it up.

Consumer campaign to keep receiving printed till receipts looks like a good move – on paper

Re: When I last needed a paper receipt

No, it's for the Fiscal Police to check whether you have paid the full price or done some shady deal with the proprietor to avoid tax. It's not just restaurants either.

It's Friday lunchtime on International Beer Day. Bitter hop to it, boss'll be none the weiser

Re: Cause/relation

>the Czechs have cleared the top spot for 25 years

The only reason that they were not top dogs earlier was that they were shackled to Slovakia, as part of Czechoslovakia, until 1993. The Slovaks drink quite a bit of wine and dragged the Czech figures down. Off to the Czech Republic in just over a week. I must see what I can do to up the figures!