Posts by ske1fr 104 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Aug 2008
If it's the design where you move the cursor with your thumb, you may get tendonitis in your thumb after a few years. RSI comes in many forms. I had to give up on mice and use a RollerMouse, using my fingertips.
Similarly with keyboards, y'all witter on about IBM clackers, but in time you may find that wide keyboard also knackers your shoulders. A compact keyboard without the numberpad helped me with that by aligning my arms.
In my case, a previous Jazz needed a replacement windscreen/windshield, ok, insurance covered that at a local place, then the insurance company demanded I drive 35 miles to a different Honda dealer for the sensor array recalibration. And then on the day of the appointment they rang me to say the technician was ill! I said "oh dear, I will make alternative arrangements" or something similar and paid my local dealer to sort it out, then dumped that insurer at renewal time.
So does Honda, their E-HEV is theoretically electric hybrid electric vehicle. In practice, the higher the road speed the more likely the wheels are ICE-powered, but for slower road speeds the hybrid train is very efficient. And yet... I'm replacing mine with another brand and EV at that.
I tried the update option, it coughed and failed to complete, but at least it didn't kill the existing 22.04 install. Best to back up your files and pull the chain on the old install. I'm noticing some odd behaviour in YouTube on Firefox, it coughs and freezes playback after about ten seconds, then continues after a second or so. And it refused to run Bitwig, but as I couldn't get that to work without killing everything else in 22.04, I consider that permanently deprecated. This is in Ubuntu Studio.
"... it just has to be built in Japan because their build quality is superior to anything else I've ever owned in 32yrs of driving."
Think again. My Jazz E-HEV is on it's third passenger side wing mirror in 4 years, not because I rubbed it on anything, they just wear out. Known design flaw. Propulsion system is excellent, economical, but even for a four foot eleven woman the middle rear seat is just too uncomfortable. No, not for me, 'er when the MIL is in the front. That plus the shrinkage from the Mark 3 ICE Jazz and other reasons are why I'm seriously thinking of switching to an EV, and not that fugly e:Ny1 with what looks like an even smaller boot!
"The reason startups work is because the people work like hell."
The reason startups work for the founders is that they work their people like hell.
Fixed that for you, Eric. And mate, I was more productive in the years I worked exclusively from home, because I didn't have to go to physical meetings called by pointless pointy-headed attention-seeking bosses like you. Not that I worked for Gurgle, heaven forbid.
"Tables laid out with tabs and spaces. Tabs and spaces to put text down the right-hand side of an image."
Ah, I'm married to one of those. Even more fun giving them a spreadsheet with formulae and finding them overtyping a result with what they think the result should be. In this case LibreOffice Calc...it would be just the same in Excel. Once a typist, always a typist!
In my last post we had 'hot desking', so no one had a designated desk, in the morning you collected your stuff from your designated locker, then played Find A Desk, plus points if it was near your team, then in the afternoon you did it all in reverse. It was a serious time waster/ efficient use of office space, depending on your grade/ attitude. As you can imagine, going from a hot desked office with dual monitor arms singly populated, to home working with a fully integrated workstation (by me) made The Covid Years far more productive...
I'm switching to CityFibre on Tuesday, lately my FTTC through OpenRetch has started buffering, and Zen are happy to switch me to the symmetrical CityFibre connection without penalty. I'll keep the ECI modem in case we move to a non-fttp place. OpenReach should be amputated from BT. Properly. If they're financially viable as an entity then perhaps they could rename themselves Axolotl, or *fish...
Thank heavens it's not like the old days anymore, if it was I'd still be faffing about with Windows. I fail to share this hating on systemd, it just works, and the number of times I've had to fight with a conf file or whatever lately has shrunk to zero. Now if I could just get Bitwig to play nice with Jack and Pulse and Midi...
Bakker Elkhuizen S-Board 840 (recommended by an ergonomist), compact, brings my wrists and forearms into alignment, flat scissor action keys, I no longer need a numeric keypad, the USB sockets let me connect my Contour RollerMouse Red and an old Logitech trackball for when I really need a middle button.
That rubber coating breakdown is real, happens with everything coated that way, you can strip the coating with isopropyl alcohol if you want to keep the device, I expect other solvents will take it off too. Manky.
Ads are really telling you "Our product is shit but you'll keep buying it if we show you pretty pictures and attempt to amuse you", or "We're a big company afraid you'll buy someone else's product so we'll keep waving ours in your faces, suckers". Very, very rarely they'll be selling something useful.
"throttle traffic for anyone who dares to use a VPN... because turn it off and the pauses go away."
Ah, that reminds me of PusNet, and their Deep Packet Inspecting routers, the reason why they were bought out by the Bastard Telecommunications provider From Hell (BTFH). I got out once I could ride without stabilisers. Eventually I achieved satori.
Oh God, that was the one I used to run out of the HiFi shop when it was being demoed, it sounded like breaking glass, Dire Straits bad enough but on that thing, argh. The equivalent Phillips at the time sounded bearable with the same Dire disc, at least I didn't have to run from it. Thankfully DACs and circuitry improved. Linn Sondek...no. 33rpm only back then. I've always been a nightmare to ...'creative sales pitchers '.
I'm involved in trying to help a relative figure out why their water bill has gone from a few tens of pounds a quarter to more than two hundred. Strange, they were in hospital for some of that time,and the loo was blocked for several days, not the cistern leaking, no leaks anywhere in the property. Lift the lid of the meter, and what's all this clear water in there making it impossible to see the meter that was allegedly read a couple of weeks ago? How is an electronic meter supposed to function underwater? No chance. No rain for weeks either...methinks the main is leaking.
We can't while we are leaving the rural (and urban not-spot) broadband rollout to the likes of OpenRetch, and they are refusing to lay fibre until a community-based system gets ready to roll, at which point the area suddenly becomes profitable enough to attract OR's attention. If they're going to be the problem they should attract the attention of a regulator that's more Smilodon than pussycat.
That was where I lost my shit with 'New Who'. Cobblers. Revisionist Daleks? If they had created some kind of anti-gravity generator shirley they ought to have evolved a better mobility device than an oversized pepperpot with monocular vision. I found the original Daleks scary (I was very, very young at the time), the new ones just like manglement in a can.
Ass-backwards. If you're still manually controlling your headlights instead of leaving it to an automated system built into the car and paying more attention to the road, sigh. And to the occasional numpties who flash me at night when my headlights are on dip, yes, these are modern LED headlights, not faded filament bulbs in fogged plastic housings, or better still, one barely working headlight set to full beam, or fog lights on because both headlight bulbs have blown...Every new thing in cars like auto lights on, auto dip, lane departure warning, adaptive cruise, these all seem to address the carelessness of some drivers I see every day. Actually, it would be better if the car wouldn't start at night unless all car lights were in full working order. All together now, to the tune of Guantanamera: "One working headlight! You've only one working headlight!"
Mediatek. Never again. Drove me mad with Bluetooth signsl loss and reconnecting all the time. Replaced that phone with one with Qualcomm and have never had that issue since, this with the same headphones and speakers, and the car. No Apt-X for Mediatek. As for Samsung (I never realised that was how you pronounced it...), had one, hated all the Samsung apps, never again. Your mileage may vary, I hope so.
I cannot imagine how I live my life without regular hits from TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, eBay, I could go on...
I tried Twitter. It was OK for band announcements but it brought out the froth-at-the-mouth-rages, and I realised it was bad for my mental health. And then a MegaTwit bought it, so I GTFA from it. Always get off in Ireland, kids.
I already turned off that nagging Ubuntu Pro shilling (thanks for the heads-up Liam), I'll stick with Ubuntu Studio. It works. Ok, the Nouveau drivers that last about twenty minutes before crashing the box should be taken round the back of the bitbarn and inhumed, but once you find the right Nvidia drivers (in my case) it's fun, I'm learning a lot with it. I think I tried the low-latency kernel option, it went clang and died, so not so low-latency...
Instead of trying to bully your staff back into offices so your pencil-dick manglers (or power-crazed bitches, could be bitches) can feel that thrill of power, why don't you fix your crappy website so when I search for X I see products made by X, not five million kinds of crap made by anyone but X? Here's another thought. What exactly do you think really happens in all those pointless meetings where you think all this creativity happens? It doesn't produce creative insights; it wastes their time. Time they could use to make Amazon useful again, not the pile of shite it is now. Most of my creative moments happened anywhere but in the office.Here's a final thought: CEO? Chief Excretory Orifice, dumping on the workers. No, not a disgruntled Amazon staff member, just a happily retired worker who hated time waster manglers and was lucky 95 per cent of the time to avoid the manglers in favour of the effective managers who could generate high productivity and loyalty.
And relax ...
The companies that bought them – and it was a big-business level of expenditure – could afford to pay for highly trained specialist staff to tend and nurture those machines.
Or entities, shall we say, could use their existing staff with an aptitude, hence I got to feed a Siemens Nixdorf upright freezer-sized box with Sony tapes, reset luser's passwords and stuff in a Framed-Access Command Environment front end, and gradually learn some more stuff like vi and cpio for restoring luser's oops-I-deleted-this-file-can-you-restore-it-from-backup cockups. NT servers were prettier (but carrying too many DLTs up and down stairs can really knacker your thumbs, kids), but any form of Windows never really floated my boat. And then I saw Knoppix, and saw what a POS XP was, and that was that.
I'm so glad I just do deskside and network support for my close family now. I can tell them they're the issue in clear unambiguous terms if necessary. I had to be so diplomatic in an earlier life...and sometimes my inner Bitch Pudding strained to be released. Maybe that should be Conan The Librarian...
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