Posts by IR

Cops charge prankster who 'corona-coughed' on aged officer and had it filmed

Shocking lack of alliteration in the Reg for this one. Here's one on me:

Cops cuff clot for coughing the cov in Coffs Harbour.

Beware the Friday afternoon 'Could you just..?' from the muppet who wants to come between you and your beer

Re: I must be lucky then or have better friends.....

I get the blame for breaking equipment they didn't even have the last time I visited.

Good folk of Forfar: Alan Hattel would like you all to know he's not dead despite what it says on his tombstone

Phones work both ways. Why is he waiting around for a call when he could be making them himself?

A fine host for a Raspberry Pi: The Register rakes a talon over the NexDock 2

No built-in dock?

Seems like the main use-case for this is not for a Pi but just so you can use your phone as your main computer. So why do you have to use a cable to connect your phone to it? Why no built in dock or at least an integrated cable?

In tribute to Galaxy Note 7, BBC iPlayer support goes up in flames for some Samsung TVs

Re: My Samsung smart TV has never worked properly...

Mine used to show little ads in the corner of the menu, so I added the ad servers to my router blacklist - now I don't see any. One other good thing is that i can turn off the menu completely in future if all the tv apps get borked and I have to add a smart box.

What could go wrong? Redmond researchers release a blabbering bot trained on Reddit chats

Re: punctuation marks

I was thinking more along the lines of not adding a space before every comma, full stop, and question mark. But what you said is good too.

Did they not bother to teach it how punctuation works?

Game over: Atari VCS architect quits project, claims he hasn’t been paid for six months

Like organising a piss-up in a brewery

I don't see how you can fail to build a retro console for less than $250. A full retropie and gamehat costs less than $100 combined and you just slot them together to make a handheld gaming device with a screen, so an actual custom build of a similar design would cost far less, leaving much more than $150 for game licenses.

That time Windows got blindsided by a ball of plasma, 150 million kilometres away

As a teenager I got a new digital watch for xmas. It worked great up until April, when it would mysteriously switch off every now and then. pressing a button would start it up again, but with everything set to zero. This occurred more and more frequently until the summer, when I realised that direct exposure to the sun was the cause. I had to put a black piece of fabric over it for the rest of the summer and got a new watch the following year that wasn't a vampire.

Skype for Web arrives to bring the world together. As long as the world is on Chrome and... Edge?

Finally

So they have create a browser-based messaging app that only works on a couple of browsers. Welcome to 1998!

Eggheads want YOU to name Jupiter's five newly found moons ‒ and yeah, not so fast with Moony McMoonface

With such a narrow list of candidate names, why don't they just publish it and let everyone pick from that?

Taylor's gonna spy, spy, spy, spy, spy... fans can't shake cam off, shake cam off

Or...

It's probably cheaper to announce that you are doing this, but instead just post a guy at the door for future events who watches out for anyone wearing a fake mustache or obscuring their face in order not to flag the pretend device.

Indiegogo lawyer asks ZX Spectrum reboot firm: Where's the cash?

Given that you can easily buy handheld NES emulation devices for $25, it's crazy that they couldn't mass produce a prebuilt more basic device for 100 quid each.

If you still want a VEGA equivalent then you could build a PiGrrl for $60 plus case, and you'll get the added benefit that it can handle anything up to SNES games. Need to be handy with a soldering iron and a 3D printer though.

US schools' IT systems drop out after weekend firmware update misery

They use the same system for paying staff in my district, which was due to happen next week. So not only were the teachers and secretaries bundled with lots of extra manual work, they didn't even know if they were going to get paid.

Pennsylvania AG sues Uber over 2016 data fail

A little surprising

I thought Pennsylvania Dutchland were Uber allies.

Magic Leap blows our mind with its incredible technology... that still doesn't f**king exist

Re: Sitting on the fence

The article could have been replaced by a single sentence.

"Ze goggles do nothing."

Time-rich netizens marshall ballot-stuffing bots against... Radio Times contest

It's just Tims being mischievous.

WINNER! Crush your loved ones at Connect Four this Christmas

Re: It's not Christmas without a game of...

A new version of Escape From Colditz has just been released as an anniversary edition. Should be easy to get a copy now.

Here's the thing: We've pressed pause on my startup

Re: So uhmm.

This is the second article I have read about RADBOT and I didn't know what it was until I read these comments. I thought it was some kind of joke article series about a vaporware kickstarter project since there was never any explanation of what it was and there were always polls with funny options.

Uber's robo-truck makes first delivery of ... Budweiser in Colorado

It's called Otto? Named after the bus driver on the Simpsons?

Tokyo rebrands 2020 Olympics

The non-symmetry of the new logo is a bit disconcerting. I think it is because it is so close to symmetry, but not quite.

LG’s modular G5 stunner shuns the Lego aesthetic

A lot of things you can add to your phone are already around and connecting via bluetooth. Keyboards, camera operators, joysticks. I'm not sure if there are any non-niche functions that aren't already implemented in third-party devices that will still work with whatever your next phone is.

Brit censors endure 10-hour Paint Drying movie epic

Re: Too easy

The film should really have been a series of one-second-long stills and video clips, mostly of things that are innocent but also vaguely rude things like funny shaped vegetables/rocks/trees. Repeat the same ones a lot. The viewer would have to be paying close attention for the whole time because it changes so much. Add a soundtrack of a repeated song that changes volume every now and then, with some hard-to-decipher whispering in the background. Constantly intense is far worse than boring.

Your voter-trolling autodialer is illegal: The cringey moment the FCC spanks a congresscritter

If something is against the law when it comes to politics, they just get a super-pac to do it instead.

Scorchio! This June was the sixty-sixth hottest on record

Wrong place

If you wanted a hot June this year then you could do worse than Seattle. Broke all the heat records by a long way. Also, the "rainy" city has had almost no precipitation at all for the last few months.

http://www.komonews.com/weather/blogs/scott/June-doesnt-just-break-but-destroys-several-Seattle-temperature-records--311125801.html

Still, not quite as fun as pointing at a very specific place on the globe and saying that for a specific short duration it didn't go into the record books as being hot, as if it is somehow meaningful in the bigger picture.

A pause in global warming? What pause?There was no pause

Can anyone explain this bit:

"According to the UK Met Office’s John Kennedy, the buoy observational data has an uncertainty range of 0.12C. Karl and co simply slapped 0.12C onto every bouy reading.

“Adjusting good data upward to match bad data seems questionable, and the fact that the buoy network becomes increasingly dense in the last two decades means that this adjustment must put a warming trend in the data”"

How does a denser network of buoys with the same fudge factor added make a warmer trend? Wouldn't the trend be the same, albeit ending at the same point but with the fudge factor added?

'iPhone 6S' to push fanbois around with 'Force Touch display'

Pushes back?

Glad to see that they will no longer violate Newton's third law of motion.

Facebook 'fesses up to running an ideological echo chamber

It really doesn't help that facebook will often just not show things in my feed until a day late, like it was specifically hiding it from me.

Google: Are you BIG? Be welcome at the Bigtable, chomp and scoff data

Loving the http://benjaminraynal.com art.

The internet IS a series of tubes. Kinda: A Reg 101 guide to cabling

Errrr

Have you ever had one of those days when you can't tell if an article is a spoof or if you are just too dumb to understand it?

Facebook: Yo 'people'! Zap fake news on our giant ad farm, would'ja?

I guess my dad is going to be a bit quieter on Facebook then.

Soon everyone will be doing it with a strap-on: The Reg's 20 festive wearables

Regular Pebble

I've got a regular Pebble watch. Not as expensive as the Pebble Steel (or any of these other smart watches), and it does everything I need it to - which is really just a basic interface for my phone so I don't have to get it out very often. Control my music player, read texts and emails, start recording GPS tracks, etc. I don't need another phone on my wrist. If I need to do any heavy lifting then I just get my phone out.

What's MISSING on Amazon Fire Phone... and why it WON'T set the world alight

Re: Play store

For most apps, you can use another Android device to access the Play store and install the app you want. Then use something to back-up the app (I use ES File Explorer) so it stores the apk file. Transfer, then just use a file explorer on the Amazon device to install the apk. It doesn't work for everything, and you don't get updates, but it is a lot safer than using other app stores and a lot easier than rooting.

Met Office: 2014 was fifteenth warmest on record

"with the raging heat unsurpassed except in the years 1911, 1947, 1955 and eleven other years over the past century"

I'm going to go ahead and assume that the eleven other years would show that your implication was wrong, or why would you stop there? Not sure how you are calculating the heat of the summer (mean temps of June-August would be my guess) or why you specifically cherry pick that rather than the annual rates, but here is what I got from the top 15 mean annual temperatures (not including this year since it hasn't ended yet):

1945 (15 hottest)

1921

1959

1989

1999

1949

1997

1990

2005

2002

2004

2003

2007

2011

2006 hottest

Our Vultures peck at new Doctor Who: Exterminate or, er ... carrion?

Re: The Master

Sounds more like an excellent opportunity to see how the Master got into that state in the first place. Having Capaldi do it would actually be a bit more interesting than the usual cause-then-effect that they seem to do even with so much easy time travel.

Honey, the satnav app says you're to leave at 6am... Yup. I'll have that coffee off you

I have two routes I can take on my commute. One takes about 5 minutes less, unless there has been an accident, in which case it can take 20 minutes longer. Having this decide which is longer as I leave the door sounds a lot better than my current method of squinting at red and black lines on the traffic map and then guessing which is worse.

How Google's Android Silver could become 'Wintel for phones'

Built-in upgrade name. Like credit cards used to have. Next will be gold, then platinum, then diamond, then blue(?!), then something really weird.

Actually, there is an Arapaho word for 'pliers'

Chaka Demusen Pliers

The confusion arises due to Chaka Demus being a settlement in southern Arapahoe territory which made pliers with a squeaky grip, hence the term Chaka Demusen Pliers to describe this type. They are on record as making a horrendous noise.

No sex please, we're Twit-ish. Vine bans non-educational nudity

Queue lots of people trying to make their porn "educational".

Digital GIANTS in BLOODY battle to put your EYEBALLS in a JAR

FAGAMe?

So with all those letters, including vowels, they come up with an acronym that sounds like gay paper folding.

Are you experienced? The Doctor Who assistants that SUFFERED the most

So giving birth to a timelord doesn't count as meeting one? Or does River not count because her timelordiness was cause by the TARDIS?

Brit inventor Dyson challenges EU ruling on his hoover's energy efficiency ratings

Re: "...help customers to consider environmental concerns..."

"The EU has effectively banned me from using solar heated water to wash my clothes and is instead forcing me to heat water using electricity."

Then plumb in your hot water and tell the machine to do a cold wash.

Amazon Kindle Fire HDX: Bezos dives into tech-support MONEY PIT

I'm waiting until they have the Ascension Sunday button.

Penguins, I give you: The SOLAR-POWERED Ubuntu laptop

All the way home.

Apple drops hints about future low-cost iPhones

Can't wait for the iPhone Shuffle. No screen, just a button that randomly dials someone in your address book.

SAP in search of autistic software engineers who 'think different'

Re: Patch

They've already hired some who do grammar different. Make it harder on the rest who knowledge right grammar.

It's official! Register hack is an alcohol-flushed cave dweller

Neanderthal DNA

Humans have only 1-4% of Neanderthal DNA? Don't we have 97% of a chimpanzee DNA? And 20% of a potato or something? These must be using different ways to calculate the percentage but it's not clear what.

If it helps, I am able to stop my restless legs by getting my feet very cold. Stick them on ice (or in my case the garage floor) for 5-10 minutes and it completely goes away.

FAA: 'No, you CAN'T hijack a plane with an Android app'

Re: I was thinking this was bogus

Aircraft GPS typically output in ARINC 429 words. A429 is unidirectional. Very little room for anything weird at all, at worst you'd invalidate the signal and the aircraft would ignore it, and that's assuming that your device is hooked up to the same transmitter as an aircraft system.

We shall CRUSH you, puny ROBOT... with CHESS

I help run a specialist forum. CAPTCHAs weren't stopping the spammer, neither were the questions such as "Which of these is not a colour? Blue, red, or car". As soon as we switched the questions to being basic things about the specialist subject, we got rid of 99% of potential spammers. You have to put a contact address in there too, because there is always the odd person who wants to join but knows little about the subject yet.