Posts by Adam Trickett

Teen interns brute-forced a disk install, with predictable results

Loud thump

At an IT trade show back in the last century, I remember coming out of one of the halls and turning round suddenly because of a loud noise. Someone a few metres behind me had dropped their plastic bag containing a brand new hard disk onto the concrete floor which had made a most impressive noise of steel case meets concrete floor. I can't remember if it rattled after they picked it up, but they did look mortified and I fear the drive didn't survive. Because of the loud noise it made hundreds of IT geeks looked at them, so they had no where to hide...

You've got drought: UK gov suggests you save water by deleting old emails

Re: E-mails are not the problem.

Went to a talk once by the water company explain what they were doing at the village. All the local water comes from a set of boreholes into the aquifer and all the waste is injected back into the aquifer after treating... The local problem was that agricultural runoff was raising the nitrogen level above the safety limit, hence the work that was going to take 18 months and block roads and cause disruption.

Anyhow he went on about how the water companies are strictly regulated by OFWAT, basically they know they need to spend £££ to bring the network up to scratch, but that means passing the cost directly or indirectly onto consumers - the money has to come from somewhere - and OFWAT basically limits what they can charge. So while they defiantly skim of the top for their CEO, they are forbidden from taking on too much debt or raising the water bills to cover investment. The bloke hailed this as the best/strictest regulation and that it was good for us. I thought this is bonkers...

Basically what happened was the government wouldn't invest the required cash when it was publicly owned, and privatised it - but prevented the private companies from raising enough cash to really do the required investments. They were set-up to fail - though I accept that the skimmed off lots of profits for their top people and shareholders in the mean time.

Infrastructure is expensive and no one wants to pay for it, but is happy to grumble decades later when it doesn't work...

Debian 13 'Trixie' arrives: x86-32 and MIPS out, RISC-V in

Mostly good in a dull way

I've upgraded all my systems at home, bar my wife's and the servers. All upgrades were perfect though one had an issue when the Ethernet cable came free and apt managed to skip installing something it should have done. Once I manually added it back all was okay. That was mostly my fault for not properly clicking the cable in. After upgrading I purged obsolete stuff and all the systems are running fine bar one.

The only issue I've encountered relates to KDE and factional scaling on my 4K screen with a Nvidia card. Basically it doesn't work. Some programs behave but some are riddled with artefacts and are basically unusable. A quick google found a QT parameter you can use to reduce the problem, but the actual fix didn't make it into Debian 13, so if you do have a 4K or higher screen and want to use fractional scaling in KDE watch out.

Compared with Debian 12, other than the changed branding, it looks and feels basically the same. There are some nice improvements, GIMP/Rawtherapee can read Canon CR3 files properly - previously you lost all EXIF data on import. Things have bumped up in version, but it's all evolutionary and not very revolutionary - which I think is a good thing.

I'll wait a bit for the servers, as Dovecot has had a configuration format change and that will require attention and if screw up email I will be told off. Ditto for upgrading my wife's systems - again it must work exactly as before but better. Any visible change will generate a complaint.

When hyperscalers can’t safeguard one nation’s data from another, dark clouds are ahead

european-alternatives.eu

The site european-alternatives.eu tries to list local alternatives to US providers. I think the concept of smaller and local providers is gaining some traction, though I don't know how the likes of OVH or Ionos compare against Microsoft/AWS or Google.

I know my virtual servers are locally hosted and by smaller more personal providers, doesn't cost me much and it all seems to work fine.

Long live the nub: ThinkPad designer David Hill spills secrets, designs that never made it

Worst keyboard ever on a ThinkPad

I was given a Lenovo ThinkPad of some sort to use by one client. It had the worst keyboard I've ever encountered in a laptop. The case flexed so much that you could easily find it typing on it's own by just touching the case in the wrong place. I assume it was the bottom of the range though - or at least I hope it was.

When it came to the end of it's life they swapped it for a HP tablet/laptop thingy with a detachable keyboard, which wasn't even as good as a calculator keyboard from the 1980s. I'm sure my client paid through the nose for that laptop abomination, but it was drastically inferior to the Lenovo ThinkPad. They were universally hated as not only were they awful laptops as laptops but their performance was utterly awful too.

I've usually had to use dull Dells, which I've found dependably dull, though my favourite is the one that looked most like a ThinkPad: black, square and chunky.

And now for our annual ‘Tape is still not dead’ update

Re: The whole point of backups...

I once scuttled off a big shed outside Heathrow to do a disaster recovery exercise. I had AIX up and running in an hour or so and SAP and Informix were installed and ready. All I needed was the tape sever to play the tapes back into it. Sadly someone had chosen HP OmniBack running on Windows for the tape solution which meant that I was reliant on the Windows team to bring their box online for the next step. It turns out it was impossible to bring the Windows system up in an isolated way without knowing the magic domain keys which we didn't have access to, and then when pressured, no one could actually provide them...

The exercise was deemed an utter failure, but it was useful in that it proved we'd be stuffed. Later on we moved to a pair of data centres, and could do hot failover from A to B and back again and that worked without the business even knowing. We also had a more robust backup solution and that was still tape based, but not on Windows servers. I don't know if that worked in a disaster scenario, as I wasn't involved in that anymore, but I know the data centre switch worked perfectly.

PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle

I'm sure there is a comment somewhere that says another reason for calling it PuTTY is that it makes Windows useful...

UK tax collector puts half a billion on table for call center services

your response will be ready in about 15 months time...

I wrote HMRC a letter to sort something out and their web site said that they expect to process the letter and I shouldn't send another letter or call them again until April 2026 as that's how long it will take to process the letter I sent them in February 2025. This is something I've been trying to sort out for about 3 years - so I'm not surprised with their last response.

I've no idea if outsourcing will be better or worse, but it's pretty dire at the moment.

Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos

Re: Wish I knew what kind....

I agree that there are a lot of blinged up keyboards and an awful lot of smaller formats. But there are several manufacturers who churn out dull but reliable keyboards year in and year out. I can't comment about several of them as I've not got one of their keyboards but I've considered them. I can say that the Filco Majestouch is pretty good. I've a TKL MK2 and a full-size MK3.

If you don't need a numpad the TKL layout is great as your mouse is quite a bit closer (assuming you're right handed). I got the TKL when my desk was cramped and the full-size later when I had more space.

KDE 3 lives to fight another day as Trinity Desktop 14.1.4 hits the shelves

KDE4 was horrible but later versions fixed most things

When Debian didn't jump ship to KDE4 and stayed with KDE3 for a stable release I felt cheated. However I was happy in the end as I didn't go through the pain of KDE4.0 that other distros did. The later versions are actually okay and I wouldn't want to go back to KDE3 now - though at the time I did like it.

Looking forward to KDE6 and Wayland for Debian 13/Trixie.

Mozilla is rolling Thundermail, a Gmail, Office 365 rival

Re: everyone is using webmail

I wish you were correct, but just because a few sane people are still using real email does not mean that everyone else is. The figures in the article show that web mail is bigger than real email and that's why Thunderbird want a slice of the action.

My wife teaches IT to beginners and for them email = web mail, and that means ISP web mail or Gmail, no one else uses a real email client, even though my wife and I do, and we encourage people to do the same. Last week someone even joked about Firefox and Thunderbird along the lines of "they still exist?" because Google and Chrome dominate so much.

For me web mail is a last resort and I use real client/server email most of the time but I'm in a shrinking minority. Amongst many other people chat platforms seem to be super common, Teams has become a lot more ubiquitous at work, and with my clients Google Chat or Teams is now more common than email for a lot of things - because it's instant and you can do a call with screen share at short notice. I'm not saying that any of this is efficient or better than email and structured meetings - far from it - I'm just saying they seem to be far more common. What's up and Signal etc are also super common and email seems to be withering by comparison.

I'm not advocating webmail or using a chat platform instead of email in any way, shape or form, I just think the battle has been fought and real client/server email lost.

I even refuse to top post in my personal emails, but I long ago gave up that battle at work, no matter how insane top posting is and how incomprehensible it makes reading emails... Things change no matter what you or I think, and not always for the best.

Email is dying

I agree that real email is dying and everyone is using webmail or something different altogether. At work we use Teams more than Outlook, and even though I hate Outlook, it's way better than New Outlook on the web or Gmail, or any other webmail client.

I use IMAP to my own server for my email and prefer KMail to Thunderbird, but my wife uses it. It's sad that people use webmail it's such a poor environment compared with real email but that seems to be the way things are going.

Not sure if Thunderbird are big enough to build enough momentum to get yet another email platform off the ground, the big players seem to have things stitched up.

FreSSH bugs undiscovered for years threaten OpenSSH security

updates

All my running boxes have just been updated. A few sleeping boxes yet to do.

The treadmill continues...

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

Re: Keyboard layout

You can get used to AZERTY just like you did when you started with QWERTY, however it's almost everything else about the keyboard that's utterly insane. The French government acknowledged this and has come supported the new AZERTY which tries to be logical, but I've not seen it anywhere - and plenty of people who buy blingy keyboards by QWERTY imports...

https://norme-azerty.fr/en/

All the computers I encounter except mine are AZERTY and it is infuriating to say the least. All my personal kit is QWERTY/ISO/UK so I'm perfectly happy with it using family computers is painful - even for them and they are French....

LXQt packs Wayland punch with 2.1 release

Re: comparison with KDE

I mostly use KDE, but on lower spec systems I use LXQt, They share a lot of similar things and mostly work the same kind of way. LXQt isn't "KDE lite", but I use it that way. I've found that where KDE would be way to slow LXQt is acceptable.

At the end of the day nothing will make a slow CPU fast, or not enough RAM adequate. I max out the RAM where I can, but I can't make an old CPU go any faster, or speed up cheap/old graphic systems, and I'm not installing SSDs in some boxes it's just not worth it.

Older kit may be unusable with a full fat GUI but can still be used perfectly fine with LXQt.

SAP promises developer 'fusion teams' in cloud low-code environment

It just a bag of bolts

SAP are keen to stop people changing their system souch they can't upgrade them. To stop them they are taking ABAP out of the box and shunting it and everything else into a separate system. The result is an inflexible system you can't change and a bag of disparate bolts some where else you are supposed to interface and do your changes in.

It's all a dog's dinner after it has been through the dog...

Google Translate now fluent in 110 additional languages from Abkhaz to Zulu

Re: TV subtitles

French TV broadcast over DVB-T usually don't contain any subtitles at all as far as I can tell. I know the TV can deal with them because some adverts have subtitles and foreign programs usually come with French subtitles as well as a usually awful dubbing track. The same program streamed via my ISP's TV platform or downloaded directly from the TV company usually comes with subtitles - which leaves me feeling that the French TV companies mostly don't care about deaf people in France who receive their TV via DVB-T.

Anyhow the quality of subtitles in French for French TV isn't great, even with my awful French I can spot errors. For non French programs the real fun happens if you listen to the French dub and watch the subtitles as they generally has the same sense, but clearly the people who did the dub and the people who did the translations for the subtitles didn't check each other's notes as they often use very different language - with humorous result.

Most French TV is dire (the same probably applies to most other countries too) but now and then they have good programs - hence my comment about downloading the original subtitle file and then translating it into English. I initially scan the file to remove the "beeps", "door opens", "knock", "gun shot" etc I don't need them translating. Once I have an American English subtitle, I then have to run though it to convert it to English and remove the glaring errors that Google makes... Once I've removed the obvious (a series of SED scripts) I then read the text to make sure it vaguely makes sense and seems to line up with the image on the screen. Finally my wife and I can watch a program and I've a fighting chance of understanding what's going on - though my wife still finds plenty of faults in the translations...

TV subtitles

I download TV programs with their subtitles and run them through an online service from French into English - it uses Google to do the work. The translation engine really struggles with short natural language dialogue. It consistently makes the same error in language that even the most basic learner wouldn't make. It's better than nothing, but I then need to go through the subtitles and edit them myself correcting a lot of the strange translations. I've found that DeepL has consistently better translations than Google - at least for English to French and French to English - however I can't use DeepL as the back end with the tool that speaks VTT files.

BASICally still alive: Classic language celebrates 60 years with new code and old quirks

Re: PowerBasic, formerly TurboBasic (formerly TurboBasic)

I started with Commodore BASIC V2 (Microsoft) and then used BASIC Lighting on the 64 and some BBC BASIC, but Turbo BASIC was my favourite BASIC anywhere...

TurboPascal used a similar IDE, and Borland's tools were way ahead of anything for years...

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

I don't like Outlook but compared with new Outlook its amazing

I've been forced to use Outlook for decades and I have a hate-hate relationship with it. However I have tried new Outlook a couple of times at work but I couldn't get on with it at all, and went back to classic Outlook.

For me the biggest problems were the very-very poor performance, I've got mailboxes with lots of emails in them, and it was utterly terrible when switching from folder to folder.

The second issue was that the GUI change to web behaviour so the click behaviour is wrong. and you need to relearn what left and right click do, which was just painful - after too many times of hitting the wrong button I gave up and switched back.

Outlook isn't great, and has been my least favourite email client for years, but now it has been supplanted by new Outlook which is actually far worse - something I didn't think was possible.

I also have to use corporate Gmail, which isn't exactly that good either, but it's still a lot better than new Outlook.

I will actually miss Outlook, which surprises me...!

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

Re: Yet

There is fibre hanging from a pair of poles nearby that is now sagging so low that in a low breeze it swings and nearly rubs on the top of road sign... I think it slips more over time, it's a lot lower than at first, so I expect in a strong wind it will sag lower and then start to rub on the top of the road sign, if it doesn't snag completely!

Orange subcontracted the work to the lowest cost bidder and the result is pretty sloppy...!

Easy here

Where I live the fibre is all dangling from poles, and comes down to eye level where the junction boxes are. So as I walk the dog I've often thought all it would take is a pair of garden secateurs, or a decent pair of scissors to cause chaos locally. I didn't realise that people were actually doing it!

Seeing as I'm stuck with piss-poor ADSL as the fibre is stubbornly stuck 150 metres away at the bottom of the lane, fibre vandalisms wouldn't impact me much at the moment!

KDE Plasma 6.0 brings the same old charm and confusion

I think it looks good

I watched a long detailed review from a long time KDE user who said was mostly great, and he showed all the places small niggles have been removed and how slicker an more integrated it is. It's clearly not perfect and there are still annoying issues to be fixed.

He also made a point that while many things can still be changed and your defaults will be left in place if you upgrade, on a clean new install KDE6 will follow the behaviour of Windows to better facilitate their inward migration to the Linux fold - these new defaults may annoy long time Linux users and even KDE fans.

If you didn't like KDE5 then you probably won't like KDE6 as the changes are mostly deep and technical and the surface changes are much more modest in this release. If you do like KDE5 then you should find that KDE6 is visually the same and slightly better, but should be even faster and even more stable than before.

The review seems to start from the position of not liking KDE5 and from that point on can only find fault in KDE6. While I do think it's good to have an outside view on something, I'm not convinced that the review is as helpful as it could have been.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns

AI needs to be telepathic first

I program business software for a living and more than half the battle is trying to get the business to explain what they want. The notion that the business leaders can write their instructions down and an AI could write anything useful is a challenge at the moment. We constantly have to ask questions to get them to articulate what they really want, and they constantly ask for the impossible...

Eventually AI may replace most day-to-day coding, but not for a few years, and even then skilled people who know code will still be required to convert requirements into instructions for the AI to generate usable code.

IBM Consulting is done playing around, orders immediate return to office

WFH is good for a lot of IT work.

Been WFH for just over 6 years now 100%, after working strictly from the office before that for more than 20 years, I found the transaction interesting, but now I've done it I couldn't imagine going back. Our firm is basically WFH now, unless the client wants on site. Our office became an albatross during COVID and we're never going back in.

It doesn't work for everyone and every job, but for me writing code, I like being at home, even if I've basically swapped my commute time for unpaid work. My team is scattered around the globe, so it's not as if we're in the same physical office anyway if we were on site!

IBM are idiots if they want everyone back in the office...

KDE 6 hits RC-1 while KDE 5 brings fresh spin on OpenBSD

To each their own

DEs are very personal.

I personally like KDE best, but I'm happy to accept that everyone else has a different opinion

LXQt is nice enough and I've used the Fluxbox/Openbox without problem in the past too.

I can't get on with GNOME desktops at all, and haven't used most of the others enough to pass comment.

40 years of Turbo Pascal, the coding dinosaur that revolutionized IDEs

Met my wife because of TurboPascal

As an undergraduate I used a copy of Borland's Turbo BASIC for some of my final year project. No idea where it came from but it was easy to use and worked really well.

When I did my postgraduate degree I switched over to Turbo Pascal and taught myself Pascal from a book in the library, and used it for all sorts of things during my degree. My supervisor was doing something in Turbo Pascal and hit a problem, his program would compile but crashed when you ran it. I said I'd have a look at it for him, after I'd finished for the day. It turned out that the compiler must have had a bug, as one valid line compiled okay, but wouldn't execute. If you broke the line in two or restructured it, the maths was the same, it didn't crash. Anyhow my supervisor made my second author on the paper (I did talk other things through with him and not just fix a bug), and as result of that paper I got a job in the US. When I moved to the US, my new boss said the best person in my lab isn't coming with me (he was changing universities), and that best person is now my wife....!

In the US I used Borland Delphi which was good and Turbo Pascal like but with a Windows GUI, which was useful for somethings, but in many respects overkill for what I was using it for.

Ironically I once helped my now wife debug a program in Turbo BASIC, where there was a fundamental error in the code and all the maths was consistently wrong. She couldn't believe that she had found the bug as the program had been used for years and several papers had been published based on the data it processed. However she was right and all the previous datsets were wrong...!

30 years on, Debian is at the heart of the world's most successful Linux distros

Been a happy user for a while

I started with Red Hat Linux (boxed) version 5.2. I played with it for a while. At work we had some early RHEL systems, which were okay. I wasn't going to pay top dollar for Red Hat at home, so started with Debian Woody. Once Sarge came out, I switched full time on all my desktop/laptop systems at home, and my hosted VM. I've been with Debian ever since. Some work machines have been Debian when we weren't paying money for nothing, but they are usually Red Hat or SUSE (though I don't know why as we never actually used the support - it was just because we had to).

I did Red Hat's formal training which did help me understand RHEL better than my previous hacks at it, but I've always got on better with Debian - but that's probably just familiarity.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY OLD FRIEND!

Not call: Open source gurus urge you to dump Zoom

Not used Zoom in ages

Been through a raft of audio and video providers at work over the years. Most of us never use the video feed aspect of any of them though we often share desktop presentations. Can't comments on how good or bad they really are, they all seem to work and Teams seems to be the most popular at the moment and haven't used Zoom in ages.

It's my employers laptop, and their choice, along with the client, I don't get a say.

I personally never use video though because my laptop is in a dock, and is closed and not even particularly near me - a video feed of my feet under my desk isn't any use...

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

Re: Mining landfill?

I believe that there are already mines operating in Dutch landfill sites. I'm not 100% sure what they are extracting, but I believe that the process is currently underway.

The return of the classic Flying Toasters screensaver

BSOD

I remember sitting next to someone who had the BSOD screensaver on their laptop, I found it very stressful to watch...

I do remember the original Flying Toasters, but as others have said, CRTs of the day already had sleep and power down modes, and it was already frivolous.

Used to use screensaver and the GL pack, but can't be bothered these days.

To improve security, consider how the aviation world stopped blaming pilots

Medication errors

I used to work for a medical device manufacturer. Death or injury because a human pressed the wrong button on a device is far too common. In the US it tends to lead to very expensive law-suits, less common in Europe, but in either continent death or life changing injuries isn't something you want to happen.

The business spent a lot of money trying to make the devices idiot proof, and you'd be surprised how ingenious idiots can be. Making software that is safe and not annoying is harder than you'd think. Some drugs are very weight sensitive, so a safe dose for an adult can be radically different for a baby. A device that is configured with an adult's typical weight could be lethal in a neonatal clinic, etc...

I wasn't directly involved in the safety software, but I worked with people who were and saw the papers published in the medical journals. Some of the advice that was given out to medical staff was so bizarre that it's amazing how few accidents there were, but over time, with a holistic approach and moving away from a blame culture, things have improve. Not saying it's perfect, but transparency from all parties is important, and also accepting that even the best people will make errors, so processes need to be robust enough to cope with someone being a factor of 1000 out...

I think we've all seen absurd password policies that don't help security, annoying, but bad polices for medical devices or aeroplanes can kill...

Clumsy ships, one Chinese, sever submarine cables that connect Taiwanese islands

Alert!

One of the first actions of the UK at the start of WWI was cut German undersea cables forcing them to use radio or British cables (by proxy) which made intercepting message easier and controlling the flow of information into and out of Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CS_Alert_(1890)

End of an era as the last 747 rolls off the production line

Crossed the pond a few times on the,

Crossed the pond a few times on various ages of 747. Much prefer a modern Airbus but the 747 was a lot better than the DC-10 I flew on across the US once - that was horrible.

Last time I was on a 747-400, was across the pond with Virgin between Xmas and New Year several years ago. That was like fling in a cutlery drawer, everything rattled and jangled, very unpleasant flight.

Bonne voyage...

Epson says ink pad saturation behind 'end of service life' warning on inkjet printers

Laser is the way to go...

Over 20 years ago I got an Epson Stylus Color 740 (I think) Worked fine for years without any problem. I didn't use it often and when I need it, the carts were often dry. Then one day it leaked black and was for ever prone to smearing after that (I suspect it wasn't able to clean itself properly anymore). I used it less and less, than one day it made a lot of noise and stopped printing altogether.

Swapped it for a mono laser (Samsung - now HP) which has been fine ever since. I never really needed colour printing anyway - though when it worked it was very good, but reliability is far more useful than features you can't use...

My mother-in-law has a Brother all-in-one and that's a horribly unreliable ink-jet. I wouldn't touch ink-jet technology again...

Logitech's MX Mechanical keyboard, Master 3S mouse

Corporate user?

"Then again, this is the sort of keyboard aimed squarely at a corporate user."

Don't know where that is, most firms I've worked for use the cheapest most horrible keyboards that Dell, HP, Lenovo etc supply.

IBM's autonomous Mayflower ship breaks down in second transatlantic attempt

bananas

A mate did a few crossings of the Atlantic as an engineer on banana boats. Apparenty stuff breaks all the time and they had to fix it at sea in their workshop. They could radio for help if things got really serious but in practice that was only ever going to happen if someone life depended on it, in all other cases they made it up as they went along.

I'm happy to believe a computer can manage the basics of navigation and watching all the critical parts of a ship all on it's own, however without some pretty sophisticated robotics it's going to be hardpressed to fix much...

ZX Spectrum, the 8-bit home computer that turned Europe on to PCs, is 40

What fun we had!

I had (and still have a C-64) but plenty of friends had Speccies. I remember typing programs out in both of them from magazines, always fun, to watch your afternoon end in tears...! Sometimes the programs even worked which was interesting...!

The joys of playing games with the strange Spectrum keyboard, or via joystick and some strange contraption to connect it into the Spectrum... I remember Attic Attack and friends - though I was never any good at most games...

Scary to think it's 40 years ago though...!

European silicon output shrinking, metal smelters closing as electricity prices quadruple, trade body warns

Follow the money

It doesn't help that Franc's nuclear fleet it getting old and hasn't been replaced. The new plants are eye-wateringly expensive and running years late, and no one wants to pay for them.... At the moment several reactors are also off line with unplanned maintenance because cracks and corrosion has been found - as I said they are getting old and no wants them to go bang even if electricity prices are through the roof here in France too.

Stepping aside from the nuclear debate, the key problem with high capital projects (nuclear or coal or hydro) is that once you've built it you want to run it to death to get your money back and at the same no one ever wants to foot the massive capital start-up costs which can run into billions and your may not earn a penny for a decade until it's built.

The French tax payer built a lot of nuclear plants and gave them to EDF to run at a profit, but hasn't built any in years and now EDF has gone cap in hand to the French tax payer to be given another new plant - and the tax payer isn't so keen to foot the bill anymore...

'IwlIj jachjaj! Incoming LibreOffice 7.3 to support Klingon and Interslavic

Re: Well done Liam...

I've been here three years, and can communicate with my mother-in-law very much as you say, in the present tense and then improvise. I just wish I had more vocabulary, as I'm always missing one or two words in the sentence that's important and I've no idea what they would be...

Re: Subtitles.

I'm in France and try to watch French TV with the subtitles on, as it helps me along. However the quality of the subtitles is utterly dire, and I now know enough French to notice that the subs aren't the same as what's spoken, sometime alternative words are used so it's not just abbreviations or dropping non-essential words.

The best though are the foreign programs that have been dubbed from foreign to French and have subtitles provided in French. Then the two French versions are not aligned, as if translated by different people, lots of different words are selected, and while the meaning is the same overall, the languages is quite different. In those cases I prefer to listen to it in foreign and read the French subs...

I spend many an hour using Duolingo, and if anyone wants to know if the cat is eating a croissant, then I know that... Local makers club a bit on hold because of COVID which is a real shame as I was just getting into that!

But why that VPN? How WireGuard made it into Linux

Seems to work okay

I've been running it a home between my computers in the house and a tiny hosted virtual server in a data centre for about a year or so. Works perfectly well when I want my machines at home to appear to be in a different geographic location, and for my phone or a mobile system away from the house, when I want to check something at home.

As it stands for a small user it's pretty perfect and no more or less complicated than SSH to set up. Obviously once you have a lot of systems it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of OpenVPN, but then for a lot of small simple use cases it's pretty good. It also appears to be quite a bit more efficient than OpenVPN, which may be an issue if you're stuck with rubbish ADSL connections...

AWS claims 'monumental step forward' with optional IPv6-only networks

Hardly surprising

I was looking for a hosted box earlier this year (as a personal VPN endpoint) and the cheaper offers were all IPv6 only systems, you pay extra if you want IPv4. Thankfully my ISP offers IPv6 at home, so it's not an inconvenience for me.

Hardly surprising that some of the big players would start the push to IPv6, there can't be that much usable IPv4 space left for them...!

A lightbulb moment comes too late to save a mainframe engineer's blushes

Cupboard light

A colleague once told me about an ICL mainframe with a fault which confused the engineers all day until they discovered it was the light in the paper cupboard under the printer that wasn't working...

Two non-Gtk Linux desktops have put out new versions

Re: TDE is a Great fork of KDE3

When KDE4 came out people laughed when Debian stuck with KDE3 for one more release cycle. At the time it felt annoying, but it was the right decision in the end, by the time that Debian moved to KDE4, it actually worked, I'm glad I didn't go through the pain that most of the bleeding edge adopters did...

At the moment I mostly use KDE on my systems, but LXQt is pretty good and nice and compatible and I use it instead on my low spec systems. Sharing lots of Qt apps and look and feel is nice.

Learning app Duolingo sets its sights on the language of numbers

I agree that removing the integrated Tinycards was a retrograde step.

I still use Duolingo, but I wouldn't pay for it, it's not that good.

The adverts are laughably absurd, can't imagine how they ever work...! I'm learning French and I get loads of adds to Learn English from French - because their ad server is so lame as it sees a French IP address....! Deux plus deux égale four?

Japan's bullet trains replace smoking rooms with Zooming rooms

Re: Lagging

Ditto in France. The TGV service is fantastic, fast and reliable, but no WiFI or at seat power in most of the rolling stock. The regional TER trains do mostly have at seat power now but not WifI (at least on the ones I've used), and I think the refurbished TGV and most recent TGVs may now have at seat power and WifI.

We forget that some countries have already started to decommission their first and second generation high speed trains, and are replacing them with third and fourth generations, while the old BR IC125/HST still soldier on and the UK doesn't really have any actual high speed rail at all (other than a HS1).

30 years of Linux: OS was successful because of how it was licensed, says Red Hat

Re: Still have my Red Hat red hat

By chance I was once in someone's house and noted a red fedora on a hat stand. Apparently they had been in marketing a Red Hat in the UK previously. They knew less about computers and IT than my mother-in-law's dog, but they'd kept the hat!

They were please that I recognised the branding - which I suppose was the point of it!

Microsoft's Cloud PCs debut – priced between $20 and $158 a month

Re: Windows on Windows

I can see the point for BYOD people who only work in a networked environment anyway.

Work installs their VPN, Office, and corporate software in the cloud instance. That belongs to work, they secure/manage/run it.

You simply connect to it with your own computer of any type. Work doesn't care what you physically have in front of you, but they can control what's there virtually.

If you don't need or can't use isolated access when there is no network, then for some people that's a sane plane. I can't do any work without access to the servers so for me it makes sense, though it's a bit expensive compared to a bulk bough corporate Dell at the moment...

Thinking about upgrading to Debian Bullseye? Watch out for changes in Exim and anything using Python 2.x

So far so good.

I've updated a few non-critical systems from "Buster" 10 to "Bullseye" 11 and installed a few new systems directly as 11 and it's mostly a very dull (in a good sense) process and everything seems to be the same but with incremental improvements across the board. Annoyingly after no changes for several weeks the last minute fixes have been trickling ever day, but it still feels very good and solid.

Buster was very good and worked fine, so far I've not had any issues with migrating to Bullseye, but I've not touched any of my systems with fiddled exim config yet... All the desktops and laptops are vanilla when it comes to exim, so nothing happened, the actual mail server will need to be dealt with carefully. All the other config changes were minor or I rolled back to standard.