Posts by Tim99 1792 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008
Probably true. My first new car in the UK was a Mk1 VW Golf (an early 1.5 LS with the square chrome bumpers) - Its UK manufactured competitors included Allegros, Maxis, and Marinas. Choosing the Golf was not difficult. I’m obviously a stick-in-the-mud, the current car is a Golf 7.5 - My 4th Golf and 6th VW out of the 12 new cars I have owned.
My house was built 11 years ago in our retirement village. Most rooms have two or more RJ45 sockets all going via Cat 5e cabling to a patch-port comms cabinet in the garage. A couple of the ports were dedicated to an emergency assistance phone. The rest are interchangeable between POTS and ethernet. Newer houses have only half the number of RJ45 sockets, as most of the stuff older people buy (like smart TVs) has WiFi. We have just had the emergency POTS line removed and replaced by 4G cellular devices, as the supplier no longer supports POTS - The line still is used for 100/40Mb VDSL traffic to a central on-site comms room.
True, but much of Covid happened here in the Autumn/Winter. There is a higher proportion of indoor shopping centres in WA where many of us may have caught it. As you know, most of us live in the greater Perth and Peel areas where much of the lockdown happened. The population density for the State is indeed low, but interestingly its localized population density can be quite high: The area where I live has just over half the population density of Greater Manchester.
As an ex UK civil servant, I'm not at all surprised at some of the revelations of the current Covid enquiry...
It’s the State of Western Australia. Australia as a whole had 594/million deaths - The UK is about 7.7 times higher. Obviously it is not directly equivalent, but if everything else was equal to Australian conditions, that implies that ~270,000 people out of 310,000 in the UK would not have died of Covid…
Where I live we are going through another rise in cases, and masks are now mandated again in high risk areas like hospital intensive car and aged care. Different circumstances and different Governments, but the UK Covid death rates are 10 times higher than here at ~460/million here compared to ~4578/million in the UK (government figures).
We had a hard lock down immediately, that also prevented travellers arriving unless they went into isolation; followed by two more. After the lockdown there were mandates on number of people/m^2 in restaurants etc.; but after a short while, masks were not required in the wider community. There was plenty of criticism reported in the (mainly right wing) press, but the (centre-left) Premier's personal approval rating hit ~91%. The election that followed almost wiped out the "conservative" opposition giving them only ~10% of Parliamentary seats. Covid rates remained low until we opened up to external travellers, but by that time ~95% of the population was inoculated.
True, senility kicks in. We only bought XTs if the punter needed local storage and processing. Most of my installs were ATs. We had a Volume Workstation Agreement which allowed a significant discount (30%?). The policy continued at a low level with PS2s, but must of the systems were cheaper "built to specification" from companies like Arch. The diskless stuff was mainly for typing pools, and mainframe access...
I'm retired, and in spite of a learned paranoia, I can't be bothered with some of this stuff. I've simplified my life; and now use an iMac, an iPad Pro, and a couple of Raspberry Pis. I managed to get all my important stuff down to ~500GB (including 20+ years of emails).
For me, I found that the iMac's 1 TB hard drive, an external 2TB drive for recording live TV, and 400GB of iCloud storage work well. The Pi stuff is copied over to the 2TB drive with rsync every night, all of the iCloud stuff is also stored locally on the iMac and everything is backed up nightly onto rotated Time Machine disks - Every month or so, one of the TM disk is rotated off-site. It took about a day to set up and has been running without problems since the start of Covid. The iMac has an UPS (Yes, I'm paranoid). Replacing the iMac a few days ago took less than a day for everything to be copied back and synchronized after a fresh OS install. I also took the opportunity to finally retire all my Windows stuff that had been in Several Parallels VMs - It's copied onto two local and an off site back-up disk; but I'm fairly sure I won't be looking at it again.
BTW, does fingerprint login work reliably for anyone? - It works OK for passwords on websites etc., on my Apple iMac which requires a password for initial account login.
"Is this a joke"? - Probably, but...
I live in a retirement village and the builder used Zyxel modems (bog standard VDSL with no WiFi) to attach each house to our central comms room about 10 years ago. Mine just kept running, with typical uptimes of about 3 months (external contractor remote upgrades?), with no problems at - Until it died last year. The supplied replacement is a cheapish TP-Link with WiFi. The standard installation is in a small metal comms box in the garage (As expected, WiFi Performance is "poor"; so normally turned off).
When my UPS played up, it killed the power supply on a cheap and nasty HP printer (bought as a distress purchase during COVID). It was the only item affected. HP sent a (refurbished?) replacement a couple of weeks later. It failed 3 months later, just after I had bought new ink cartridges. I replaced it with a basic Brother inkjet which is fine - Unlike the HP, it works well without requiring an internet connection.
In my (more) cynical old age I am comforted by Sturgeon's Revelation: "Ninety percent of everything is crud" Wikipedea.
Whilst that appears generally true, one of the good things about retirement is the ability to choose more of the other 10%...
My memory is probably going, but I think the vm_stat version goes back before Apple - Possibly to BSD (4.2?) via the Mach kernel in the early 1980s then via NeXT. Mac OS X has its origins in Next, Mach and Darwin and came out in 2001. The original vmstat probably goes back further to AT&T.
It would seem that Apple were not directly responsible for this at the macOS man page for vm_stat is dated August 13 1997…
Similar to ours (see above), but ours had a propelling pencil or ball-point instead of the models. They came in a large grey vinyl folder, between us we had four (two people, return flights). We have just kept the one, as the others were passed on to young relatives etc.
On a trip from the UK to Australia on holiday in 1987, I won 2nd prize in a BA "Spot the Concorde" competition. It was a bit like "Spot the ball" as there was a grid; but instead of putting a cross where the ball was supposed to be, it was a map grid for the aircrafts position at a particular time. You were give its rate of acceleration to take off, its directions and acceleration to supersonic and its final speed - As I was stuck at Heathrow for 8 hours (terrorist alert) I sat down and did the necessary calculations long-hand, and put my three crosses in one small square. The prize was 12 days in the Doral Miami Beach Hotel, return flight on Concorde via Washington.
In those days there was a special Concorde Lounge at Heathrow which was entered after passing the hoi polloi who were stuck in the normal First Class lounge. The aircraft was small and fitted with low but comfortable grey leather seats. The cabin staff and food were excellent. Mrs Tim99 and I both had excellent Burgundies - A bottle of Nuits-Saint-Georges with the main courses and an un-oaked Chablis with the other courses.
After we landed at Washington, the aircraft was refuelled and we all had to get out. Some passengers disembarked onto a bus that could raise itself to the level of the door, we then got onto a similar raised bus that had seats and refreshments until the aircraft was serviced, and then were returned to the aircraft. Just before take off to Miami the pilot told us that because of the short distance, low fuel loading, and fewer passengers, the aircraft was expected to travel at its fasted scheduled speed over the Atlantic (it did). We were also warned that we would have an unusual take off (because of noise abatement?) and that we may experience some mild disorientation (He meant feeling that we we all going to crash and die). Total time including stop-over was 6 and a half hours. The next day the aircraft flew by the hotel and did a wing waggle - Unlikely, but maybe it was for us, as I didn't see it do it again. The noise was incredible.
For some people, the aircraft may have been an everyday experience. We were sat opposite Robin Gibb (and his wife?). The stewardess asked him if he would like lunch, he said "could they make him a plain chicken sandwich" (of course they could). Mrs Tim99 and I had everything that was going, I still have the silver and grey enamel Concorde propelling pencil that was in my goodie bag.
When XP came out, I immediately configured it to the "Windows Classic" interface (Windows 2000). It was a lot less "shouty".
I set up a customer's peer networked 6-user SQL "server" with it and noted that with its monochrome desktop background the PC used less resources. Lessoned learned, I still use it on a no-internet Parallels VM on an iMac for my old software.
Our last 3 washing machines were made by the same Scandinavian company >>===========>
The first one was good, and we liked it. Its spin speed 1400RPM and lasted >13 years. We replaced it with a similar model, spin speed 1800RPM, the user interface was now mostly electronic - It threw a bearing and lost a counterweight after 7 years. Both models were labelled 'Made in Scandinavia". The latest model has an entirely electronic controller, which when switched on displays "Inspired by Scandinavia" (Presumably made in China?), spin speed back to 1400RPM. The start button (Presumably inspired by U+23EF) worked for me about 95% of the time. Mrs Tim99 could successfully start it about 50% of the time. We called the service agent. They sent a child who waved his phone around near it and "did something" (Short range RF communication?). He suggested that if it did it again we should reset the firmware - I have, twice. Mrs Tim99 can now successfully start the washer about 90% of the time.
I am not optimistic about the machines reliability or longevity...
I bought a similar set (DG Nova 4c) for acquisition and processing data from a scientific instrument. The 25 MB disk was mounted in a desk rack and could be slid out for maintenance. It had a transparent plastic top and the head made a pleasant musical sound when working - One day I heard a very load screeching sound and then everything stopped. The head had crashed, gouged a furrow around the middle of the platter and oxide coating had covered the rest of the unit. It made a great conversation piece until the FE took it away, as you could see exactly how it should have worked.
I live in a retirement village in a part of the world where our Patch Tuesday happens about 8 hours before the UK’s. Many residents have gone with the Windows default download/install. I have managed the reduce the amount of "help" I give to Windows 10/11 users; but I can almost guarantee that within 2 days of the patches, somebody’s printer will stop have stopped working.
The good news is that when I finally upgrade my Intel Mac (that occasionally runs Windows in a VM) I can say "Sorry, I can’t help - I don’t use Windows"…
I prototyped an app I had compiled on a Pi W2 and compared it to running on 2GB 4B, it had about 40% of the performance of the 4B for a few concurrent web front-end connections to a SQLite database. I may have slipped a decimal point, but a quick Google lookup and a simple calculation suggested that the W2 has about 4,500 times the MIPS performance of a DEC VAX 11/750 that I used for similar work in the mid 1980s...
I'm at a bit of a loss here - Maybe I'm just fortunate where I live. I have a VW Golf 7.5, which for me averages about 6 litres/100km. PULP is AU$2.11 today, so to travel 100km it costs me AU$12.66. If I was to replace the VW with a similar size EV like a GWM ORA, I should get about 16 kWh/100km. My mains electricity costs AU$0.26 kWh so adding a bit for efficiency loss that should be ~AU$4:30 to travel 100km, or about one third the cost.
My house has solar panels connected to a local grid where I'm paid AU$0.12 kWh for what I export, so if I charged during the day (I'm retired) the charge cost is ~AU$2:00 for 100 km. If I used a public charger the average cost here seems to be about AU$.50/kWh. My local shopping centre is "free" for a Tesla...
Hi Simon, you might travel in the wrong States :-)
The current Perth urban diesel price is ~$1.98. WA has a Government mandated "Fuel Watch" daily fuel price where retailers must publish prices at 3:00pm and hold them at that for the next day. The worst WA prices I can find today for the State are in the Derby region at $2.50 for petrol and $2.53 for diesel. The major E-W routes (which may have similar traffic to Darwin-Alice Springs-Adelaide) are Highways 1 and 94. The furthest distance between stops is ~350km between Kellerberrin and Coolgardie on HW94 where the average petrol prices are $2.00 to $2.05 and diesel is $2.15 to $2.12. For HW1 the longest stretch is from Esperance (700 km from Perth) to Norseman (a further 200km) where petrol goes from $2.10 to $2.23 and diesel $2.20 to $2.33 - So our usual remote prices are typically 7-18% higher than for urban areas.
I'm retired now and don't travel as much, but the worst case in my VW Golf would be $100.60 (PULP) for filling up in Norseman and coming back 905 km to Perth without refuelling. Many of the people who would do that trip might be in a diesel Toyota HiLux which would cost ~$138.00.
I own several items made (under licensing by a friend) of Tasmanian Huon pine (Wikipedia). The area it comes from is named after Jean-Michel Huon de Kermadec, a C18th French Naval Officer.
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