Posts by Richard Ball

Belkin YourType Folio

convertible

I've got a really expensive open-top Mercedes*. (that has a massive fuel tank)

It's very rarely sunny here, therefore I have a rigid plastic roof that came from Halfords. It wasn't very cheap. It clips on top of the Merc, making it a bit like driving a rattly 2-seat saloon-car, but one that is more cramped inside than if I'd just gone and bought a normal car.

It's cool though, because underneath there's my really expensive Merc, and I make sure everyone knows it, and for 2 days of the year I take the roof off to prove the point of it being open-topped. I keep a raincoat in the boot just in case.

*(I haven't. this is figurative.)

Mars rover Opportunity spots WALL-E in crater ramble

re: commemorate

Playmobil

Re: time on mars

Yep.

When are we going to get back up off this stinking blue rock and go back to our cold, red homeland.

Special Projects Burro pops his hooves

What?

No comments about dropping dead donkeys?

Call this a tabloid?

Shame on you all.

(RIP Burro)

Russian satellite beams home 121-megapixel pics of Earth

re Flat Earth

Just a bit of pincushion distortion, that.

Camera too close, messes up the perspective.

Sorted.

Ten... Mi-Fi HSPA 3G wireless mini-routers

Re: E586 and the "security" key

Is the offending pushbutton required for any other, desired, feature?

If not, get a stanley knife and cut the track to the keyswitch. It's a bit invasive but why not - a cut track can always be bridged back later with the old soldering iron.

Re: ZTE MF60 for 65 quid?

Ebay from ShenZhen

SpaceX Dragon, first private ship to the ISS, launched successfully

Re: "within spitting distance of the ISS"

Yes you can spit pretty far in orbit but you need a PhD in celestial mechanics to actually hit something if it's any distance away.

IIRC that was one of the things that qualified Mr. Aldrin to do what he did. (the PhD, not the spitting)

Does Britain really need a space port?

Re: Slightly OT

Might be. Though probably not as significant as the 'eastern push' as you put it.

What I'd be more worried about is the way that Skylon's trajectory got steeper as it climbed, not flatter. Whoever made the film doesn't know what an orbit is.

The Register is rocking on Windows Phone 7

At last

A reason to get a phone that costs more than £15.

China begins work on world-beating MEGA power cables

Re: Long history

Is it DC? I was wondering this, and didn't see it in the report.

Always intrigued by thoughts of mahoosive transistors / valves / mercury rectifiers / whatever they use to tie into HVDC lines.

SpaceX and Bigelow sign deal for inflatable space stations in orbit

Re: 5 star

A space-suit made from a duvet by your mum does not count.

Red faces abound as boffins build gamma ray lens

Re: Paging David Banner

Somehow that puts me in mind of the Candygram and someone punching a horse.

LOHAN enjoys a silicone lightbulb moment

Stuff like that sometimes really froths up when being degassed - it may well have frothed right into your vacuum pump.

I see the beard's coming on well. Jolly good. Promotes creativity etc.

Report: Microsoft tried and FAILED to offload Bing on Facebook

misadventure

Microsoft: "We made this thing to show Google that they're not all that, but nobody wants to use it and it loses money. Do you want to buy it?"

FB: "Er, no."

Look back in Ascii: Computing in the 1980s

Re: Microwriter Agenda

Like the idea of chord typing, but I once learnt BSL so my middle finger is I not O!

(E and U are correct)

Great HR mistakes of our time - Aviva fires 1300 by email

Help?

No.

Nobody goes into HR becaue they want to help people.

Maybe once, when it was called Personnel and you wanted to do honest administrative work, but definitely not now.

They go in now so that they can mess with the humans and thereby save the company money, just like you might mess with the rent or the diesel or the electric bill or the paper for the photocopier. The humans are a resource to be economised on and bargained with and screwed.

HR people get paid as much as they can screw out of the company to make an effective job of manipulating the company's resources.

Hands on with the Nikon D3200 DSLR

Re: And still no built in GPS

I also find that I want to top up my tyres before a trip like that, but I have to have yet another device just to compress some air into them to raise their pressure. When will those idiots in the camera / GPS industries learn, and include this simple feature in their devices?

French perfume house bottles 'Eau de new MacBook'

There will be new smells

Don't try to preserve our crappy 2012 smells: there will be new ones in the future that will be equally tantalising due to their novelty. I just hope they remain good, honest, unavoidable smells from the factory rather than engineered-in strawberry flavour that's been put in at the injection-moulding machine.

Failing that, we should have good meccano / mamod smells put in with our new shinies - that'll surely confuse people. Sewing-machine oil, anyone?

Android Trojan distracts Japanese with anime and porn

less evil?

Is it still less evil? As a person who carries no i-thing, nor any of the other likely-looking shiny devices, I believe I don't have any hidden allegiance.

Now, if I ever do get myself such a device I think I'm going to give my money to the people who charge you directly when you purchase, who sell you a pretty good product, and who run a fairly-secure, fairly-closed system.

As opposed to the people who farm their customers as a source of advertising to sell to the lowest bidder. We all know that they sell the devices and software to make money, and I'd rather pay them myself than have some stragers pay them to steal my data.

(btw I won't be buying media from anyone.)

TED

Re: And again, why?

http://www.ted.com/search?q=advertising

Freeview TV shoved aside for iPad-compatible 4G

Re: Today's sets ?

HD-Ready is a much-abused term.

HD-Ready meant a TV could operate as an HD *monitor*. So it has the appropriate resolution, and it plays the HDCP game. Therefore you can plug it into an HD player / reciever and be happy that it was indeed future-compatible as promised.

They were selling HD-ready TVs long before it was practical to make cheap HD receivers / decoders, of whatever technology or standard. Therefore complaining that they don't receive what is now being broadcast isn't pertinent. Plug them into a new box and they will display it.

Game chain sold

Scrap dealer 'rescues' sunken ship.

Battling remote-control helicopters

Re: We used to do this with ...

We used to run around hitting each other with sticks. Them were the days.

Seriously though, get a proper helicopter like a Honey Bee or whatever.

NB I know the Honey Bee is now old, and it's fixed-pitch so you might debate how real it is, but it is a really good combination of light, strong, cheap and real. Learn to fly something that needs your skill instead of just bobbing about.

Get two of these in one room and they'll fight for sure.

(more fun to be had than with my old Morley Bell 47G)

Giant kangaroos wiped out by humans, not climate change

Re: Same goes for dinosaurs

So there were guys throwing pointy sticks at T.Rex...?

And presumably Raquel Welch was just like standing there watchiing as usual?

BBC iPlayer added to Xbox

So for anyone who's watching Iplayer, i.e. in the UK, that's probably gonna be "HD off" then.

Bring your backups out of the closet! It's time for 'Tape Pride'

Re: rusty?

Thanks for the link.

And yes it was a small typo on my part, not a Chinese knockoff.

Re: rusty?

There was a nice demo on the 1980s channel 4 program "the secret life of..." where he put ground-up rust on some sellotape and ran it through a tape recorder.

That kind of thing inspires budding child engineers to wreck anything with the word Tendberg on the front.

CBS supremo: Apple TV is still dead to me, just like ...

Re: I'm quite fancying an AppleTV box

Oh come on, Happy Days is worth $154.93 of anyone's money.

(anyone in Britain, that is)

Mine is on order, anticipating future installation of XBMC.

NHS claws back £1.8bn from IT project fiasco

million != billion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion

The seven types of online commenter

This is not a type N post

Who are all you people? I don't understand.

When I'm making my yogurt, for how long should I heat the milk? Should it froth up or does that spoil the taste?

Cheers, I think.

Foxconn pay hikes 'driving tech titans into Philippines'

Re: Selective Racism?

It doesn't matter how we think they think, as long as we all still turn up at Amazon etc and buy whatever competitively-priced, big-name kit that we think we 'need'.

A consciencious consumer probably ought to feel queasy about a lot of the stuff they choose to spend their money on. (I have no solution btw)

Lego space shuttle hits 114,000ft

Re: Moving.

Lift is just the force normal to the direction of flow - so there's probably still quite a bit of it if you go backwards - it just doesn't necessarily act in the right direction to keep you up in the air.

IIRC, the Mercury capsule had its C/G on the axis, so it was non-lifty, whilst the Gemini and Apollo capsules had their weight shifted off-axis, and that made them lifty - which meant that if you could tilt them you could steer / fly them where you want to go.

(which technically makes them gliders, but don't bother trying to soar)

Telefonica zaps 100Mbps 4G masts with shrink ray

Any technology that has the appearance of a carriage clock gets my vote.

LOHAN flashes fantastical flying truss

Re: Keeping it Horizontal.

Two imbalanced balloons would still tend to put it off the horizontal to some degree - whereas if you do your rigid triangle and take the (long) strings from each end of the beam up to a single balloon, then it can't help but be properly level.

Re: Re: Horizontal

Yep. And I hope the batteries etc are heavy enough to make sure the launch trajectory (assuming a horizontal beam) is up, not down. If not, it could use a stiff vertical stick at each end of the beam before attachment of the balloon string.

Horizontal

What's the likelihood of that beam actually being horizontal when attached to two ballons?

Good to see that pipe-smoking hasn't died out among the boffin fraternity.

Apple seeks permission to kick Kodak's corpse

eengleesh

their != they're

Swiss space-cleaning bot grabs flying junk, hurls itself into furnace

Re: A re-usable one would be good

What it needs is some sort of gun mechanism to put the delta-v into just the junk, not itself.

I think develop something like a big duvet, spinning, and with inbuilt stiffeners and dampers to keep it in the right shape while it fills up with space-crap and can be deorbited / tracked / boosted / maintained / forgotten about / hidden behind.

Boy burned in Nintendo sensor substitution

...far cheaper to either get the system repaired or....

I shouldn't think he actually planned upon setting fire to anything so telling them after the event that £a > £b, and therefore why do it, is irrelevant bollocks.

And also completely missing the point of TRYING STUFF OUT - but then safety and killjoy are effectively two sides of the same coin.

Steerable bullet aims for mass army deployment

I was going to mention Runaway...

But instead I'll mention the smart-bullets in "Who framed Roger Rabbit". Those were mexican if I remember correctly.

E. coli turns seaweed into ethanol

But this is a solar-powered system.

It is a way of using the surface of the sea as farmland for producing biomass.

Some carbon (and other stuff) takes a temporary role in the storage mechanism, and after you've used up the ethanol you made, the world is more or less where it was before you farmed the seaweed. (how more or less is obviously an important and complex thing)

Certainly worth considering if it means we don't muck about making fuel on the proper farmland that we need for making food.

Acer pulls out Wang, thrusts its wealth at Ho

I came here to say the same thing

But I do wish The Reg would learn to use the word "and" in its headlines.

Two items do not a list make.

Tiny frog claimed as smallest vertebrate ever

Then there would really be substance to the claim that some colours tase different to others.

LG: 1mm bezel on your telly, anyone?

Why stop at 2?

How about 4.4 separate channels, to cater for the average family?

It could even be a mechanism for social repair, to get everyone back in one room at the same time, like in The Old Days when there was sitting down around a table (remember that?) to eat or gathering round the joanna for a singsong or everyone watching Blankety Blank because there was nothing else on.

This could save the world.

Or at least look cool on the wall in the sitting room.