Posts by Tom Smith

London cops trial 'leccy patrol cars

Police Smart cars

I've spotted a (presumably petrol powered) Police Smart car just south of Bristol. I'm not sure how they expect to pull anyone over in it, I'd be too busy laughing at them :)

Shuttleworth gets cloudy with Ubuntu 9.10

amanfrommars

Nice to see the manfrommars is back :)

And the next stupid name for an Ubuntu release, something to do with lemurs surely?

(and NM has always worked fine on the different laptops I've tried it on and my WPA2 network, but then I'm a windows fule and maybe I don't know any better?)

Kensington Universal Notebook Dock

And thumbs up from here

Been using these at work for about a year now (since my boss ordered a bunch of laptops without making sure they had dock connectors...) and they work fine. Training a user to understand which screen is which and what they have to do if windows decides not to enable the extra screen is still a problem of course, but as a universal dock it works well.

iPhone trifecta rumored for 2009

China

You'd have thought that everybody having a GPS in their phone would make Chinese iphone users easier to track by the government...

Where has all the bad storage gone?

WHS

I think Windows Home Server does something like what you want:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/protect.mspx

Although I'll admit that is a bit of a pain in the arse compared to Time Machine, but having a dedicated server backing up your other computers automagically is nice.

London Underground gets emergency phone network

Wait a minute...

A government IT project that's finished ahead of schedule?

It better have been waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay over budget or something weird is going on here....

Online crime maps go live

Bristol

After a good five minutes of looking I finally found Avon & Somerset's statistics here:

http://www.avonandsomerset.police.uk/information/CrimeStats/index.aspx

Although it's only separated into 6 different areas, so theres no looking up which bits of Bristol are nicest/nastiest.

Be Broadband doubles down on ADSL to catch cable

yet another happy Being

We only get 15-16Mb (2.5 up) at our distance from the exchange, and I've got nothing but good things to say about Be*s staff and customer service (had to ring up yesterday after I borked our modem, but rather than the usual "you're not using our firmware, we're not talking to you" I got a sensible and useful advice, pitched right at my level of expertise). But even if I didn't like Be*, anything sounds better than virgin from what I hear from my freinds. 50Mbps? Yeah, but not at a useful time of day, or for bittorrents or anything else you might actually *want* to use the bandwidth for.

Be* might not be that fast, but they've never given me any crap, even when I got a filesharing complaint.

Don't think I can afford the two line premium, but I know my flatmate will be excited...

Apple eats video editing jobs

Jobs?

So media types will loose their jobs eh?

But by the sound of it, IT jobs in media are if anything going to increase, which is nothing but good for those of us in IT jobs (ie most of the el reg readership).

µTorrent for Mac is go

Deluge

Because I'm far too lazy to learn more than one program I use Deluge, as it's open source there's a version for linux, windoze and mac.

Of course because it's open source it only works in Vista every other version increment, but hey, it works.

Nintendo introduces redesigned DS

Who doesn't have one?

I can't really justify this over my DSLite, there's not really any extra features I'd like, except maybe the SD card, but then I've already got a phone with a microSD card slot and internet, so it ain't worth the cash for me.

Mind you, who are Nintendo expecting to sell this to? They've already sold a DS/Lite to just about the entire population of the world already.

Alien head because it's the only demographic left who doesn't own a DS.

Dell confirms 12in netbook? MID? Tablet?

Latitude XT

Dell already make an 11" tablet PC (called the Latitude XT), so I'd expect a very small laptop rather than a tablet, unless they're going to make a more consumer friendly version.

Dell Inspiron 910 mini-laptop to be a hardware hacker's dream?

re: Hackers Dream

To add 1Gb of ram to my Acer Aspire One, I had to remove all of the screws, the keyboard, the metal shield under the keyboard, more screws, and finally flip the mother board out and stick the RAM in.

Then a day later I had to take most of it apart again because I'd disturbed the SSD cable and was getting intermittent read/write errors.

So yes, an easily accessible DIMM slot is a big deal, (and yes I wish I'd waited a few more weeks).

Roberts Stream 202 DAB/FM/net radio

One of a kind?

Um, my Bilk Radiostation can do all of that, it does need a mains cable though, I assume this one has batteries? It's hard to tell from the review, it's called a portable but there's no mention of batteries.

Black hats attack gaping DNS hole

Mistral

217.154.96.244 (adsl-217-154-96-244.mistral.co.uk) appears to have GREAT source port randomness and GREAT transaction ID randomness

So that's alright then :)

and I use OpenDNS at home.

Microsoft Mojave 'outs' secret Vista lovers

It's not _that_ bad

I know this is going to look like trolling, but Vista x64 SP1, running on new hardware, with the eye candy and UAC turned off, is actually not a terrible OS. I've only managed to make it blue screen once in six months so far.

There's even (shock horror!) bit's I prefer to XP.

Everyone else I know who uses it hates it though.

Acer punts £199... er... £220... er... Linux laptop

play.com

Well, I've just pre-ordered a nice blue one from play, which I think means they have to honour their price n'est pas?

Now I just need to find somewhere that will sell me an extended battery.

Dell XPS M1330 laptop

XP

Ok, you can't buy it with XP, but Dell have the drivers on their website. Plus, if you use a Dell windows XP reinstallation CD you won't even be asked for an activation code (I'm guessing it just looks at the DMI)

How do I know? I'm just re-installing XP on one right this minute, that's how.

They also work just great with Ubuntu if you don't like your m$.