Posts by Andy Miller

France to replace US videoconferencing wares with unfortunately named sovereign alternative

A quick bit of searching shows this is based on an Open Source project. It's in github and called suitenumerique/meet (it seems)

Print Screen is for noobs: Capture images in Windows like a pro

Re: Capture Text

You are probably correct. I do have PowerToys. I use the window management a lot.

Capture Text

Well, I've learnt something useful today.

However, you've missed my favourite. (Win10. Waiting for the call from IT....)

If you hit <shift>-<Win>-T you get a select tool. Choose an area of text, does an OCR of it and copies to the clipboard. You can now paste (something like) the text into a text based program. Really useful when you want to capture some text from an image.

Make it BIG first, the OCR is as reliable as a ChatBot.

‘I nearly died after flying thousands of miles to install a power cord for the NSA’

One place I worked the Company Chairman had a notoriously way with interviews. He insisted on picking up one poor applicant from the station and driving him the 3 miles or so to the office. At the end of the lane he overcooked the corner and ended up in a ditch. He just leapt from the car, grabbed his briefcase and shouted, "we can walk from here". When he got to the office, he handed the keys to the receptionist, and said "My car's in a ditch. Get someone to tow it out please" and proceeded with the interview.....

Techie traced cables from basement to maternity ward and onto a roof, before a car crash revealed the problem

Re: vlans & other segregation config might have hidden the issue

Don't rely on ancient mariners. They only stoppeth one in three.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Still happening

Early this year a friend shared a screen-shot of his weather app predicting "Snow expected to autumn in the next hour".

User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse

Pies aren't mice either

Reminded me of a co-worker in the early days of Windows 3.0. Working through lunch, he reached out for something vaguely mouse shaped in his peripheral vision, and squeezed his pie into a sticky mess. After that WIMP stood for Windows, Icons and Meat Pie.

Microsoft throws in the towel on HoloLens 2

Re: Still missing the big picture

Thanks, I'll check them out

Re: Still missing the big picture

This is what I'd pay for. I would add:

Allows you to sit upright even on a train or plane, or in a hotel room.

Doesn't need to be limited to 27" equivalent size. Happy for position sensors to allow my whole field of vision to be used.

Would either have to sit comfortably over my glasses, or work without my glasses (I can see perfectly fine to the end of my nose...)

The Apple ones kind of do some of this, but the price! and glasses wearers have to pay out for non-refundable prescription inserts before we even get to try using them....

Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac

Or he'd be stuck in a Clef Stick

This can’t be a real bomb threat: You've called a modem, not a phone

The RAF ate my homework

A friend of mine grew up in Abingdon UK and went to school by bus. One day, on arriving at school he found that he no longer had his school bag with him. Meanwhile, the RAF had spotted a suspicious item next to a bus stop on the edge of RAF Abingdon, sent in a robot and given the bag a couple of blasts with the shotgun....

Server installer fails to spot STOP button – because he wasn't an archaeologist

We had that. I hit it.

TypeScript joins 5 most used languages in 2022 lineup

This week's chart

Who else heard "Whole Lotta Love" as they read all those charged chart positions?

An international incident or just some finger trouble at the console?

Seen similar

Why did I instantly think of the Trotter's clean a chandelier ?

Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it

Just another day

Looping through ***** is standard operating procedure for most companies. Glad to hear of someone clearly labelling it

Happy birthday, Windows Vista: Troubled teen hits 15

Re: "It's amazing how bad that client/license manager is"

" There's no contest to this,"

Bob?

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

Re: Zig, Rust, Rust, Rust, Go, TypeScript, Haskell, Ć, Python, C#, Elixir, Swift, Java, and Pascal

According to the docs on Github "Ć is a programming language which can be translated automatically to C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, Swift, TypeScript and OpenCL C."

A new one on me, but then I'm very old....

Samsung releases pair of jeans that can't do anything except cover your legs and hold a Galaxy Z Flip 3

Trouser version

Surely these should be "Z Flip 3 Pocket Denim 1"?, which sounds like the pools results.....

Facebook may soon reveal new name – we're sure Reg readers will be more creative than Zuck's marketroids

A bunch of mindless jerks...

Sirius Cybernetics Corporation

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

For the Alice and Bob accounts at one company, I always used pictures of Alice Cooper and 'Bob' from Black Adder. So I'd already proven those names to apply to both genders

US Air Force chief software officer quits after launching Hellfire missile of a LinkedIn post at his former bosses

"Security NEVER made anything more performant, available, or reliable." Really?

If you can stop those crypto-currency miners running on your network edge boxes, don't you get a performance boost?

If you can stop ransomware slingers encrypting your data, doesn't your platform become more available?

If you can filter out DDoS traffic from real traffic, don't you get more reliability?

Windows 11 gets chatty as Teams integration turns up

Re: When is an OS....

The original UK Monotony anyway. You can now buy a 'local' set for any village or town of more than about 250 people.

Snakes on a Plane meets The Simpsons as airline creates ‘whacker’ to scare reptiles away from parked A380s

Reuse

Surely this is just a modern use for the famous Australian Bushwacker?

Home office setup with built-in boiling water tap for tea and coffee without getting up is a monument to deskcess

RA

Can I see the risk assessment for something that delivers a stream of boiling water onto your desk when you hit the wrong button, please?

Their 'next job could be in cyber': UK Cyber Security Council launches itself by pointing world+dog to domain it doesn't own

I've been on many Morris related piss-ups, at least two in breweries, and they all have been excellent (as far as I can remember....)

I know quite a few Morris Dancers who are Cyber Security practitioners. I wouldn't expect a Morris side to make this scale of blunder.

Does Samsung want you to buy new phones? Asking 'cos Galaxies now get four years of security updates

Up until now I believe the policy has been two years support from launch, new version of each model once a year. So just before the new model you were effectively getting 1 year of updates. This puts the effective years of support to between 3 and 4 years, which is doable.

A couple of times I'd ignored Samsung as an option, because:

* I needed a phone now,

* the existing model had been out 11 months,

* I wasn't going to wait for the new one

* I wanted more than 13 months of updates.

LibreOffice 7.1 Community released with user-interface picker, other bits and bytes

Re: "Reveal Codes in WordPerfect (remember that?)"

I hung onto WordPerfect for years to keep Reveal Codes. The amount of time I spend these days thinking "Why in the name of all that's holy has Word stuck That content There, and how do I stop it!?". Please, I want reveal codes back !

Debian 'Bullseye' enters final phase before release as team debates whether it will be last to work on i386 architecture

Re: Bullseye...

Great ! Smashing ! Super !

Lenovo reveals smart specs that let you eyeball five virtual displays, with strings attached

I have questions

These could be great for working from home / on the train / in a hotel room / in a coffee shop, but....

Can I fit prescription lens?

How does it sit with a headset?

Rocky has competition as more CentOS alternatives step into the ring: Project Lenix, Oracle Linux vie for attention

I always feared...

The takeover of Big Red by Big Blue would leave users marooned....

Microsoft celebrates undead MS Paint with festive knitwear

Dumpster?

I don't know about a dumpster, I'm seeing Terry Jones as the nude organist from Monty Python.....

After Cummings' Barnard Castle trip, cheeky Britons started using the word 'vision' in their passwords

Re: Just wondering..

I'm told our IT department have explicitly blocked that one

Samsung throws more frugal followers a bone* with cheaper Galaxy S20 Fanboi Fan Edition

Re: 5G for £699

I read the phrase "Samsung only plans to release the 5G model in the United States" several times, trying to reconcile it with the UK price for the 5G version. I think they might mean "Samsung plans to release only the 5G model in the United States". Maybe?

That's how we roll: OWC savagely undercuts Apple's $699 Mac Pro wheels with bargain $199 alternative

Do they do monitor stands as well?

Energizer Hard Case H280S: A KaiOS-powered blower that can withstand a few knocks

Lanyard anchor point?

All very well being waterproof, but if it's 30 fathoms down it's not going to get a signal. In many of it's use cases, I'd like it tethered to me.

I heard somebody say: Burn baby, burn – server inferno!

Re: Tricks of the trade.

I had one colleague who always complained about the heat. One morning he came in early and super-glued the thermostatic valve on the office radiator shut, but still he complained.

At some point he decided to stop drinking coca-cola by the 2-litre bottle full. Soon he stopped complaining about the heat, and actually closed the window....

The self-disconnecting switch: Ghost in the machine or just a desire to save some cash?

Bailiffs

In a previous century the company I was working for wanted to port their software from HP Rocky Mountain Basic workstations to these new PC things. We hired a sub-contractor to assist, which involved loaning them one of the large and expensive optic fibre test machine that we made.

At some point I got a whiff that the subby might be having cash-flow problems, so I suggested to our TD that it might be worth us moving the kit back to our site. The subby could carry on working on it, but in our office. So the TD and I get into the biggest car we could borrow, and set off for the subby.

Shortly after, we are sitting in the subby's MDs office, and the MD was denying that there was a problem, when the secretary pops her head round the door to say that there are a couple of bailiffs in reception. The MD kept the bailiffs talking whilst me, my TD and the subbies software engineer passed our large optical instrument and the subbies development machine out the window, into the car and away....What fun !

Windows takes a tumble in the land of the Big Mac and Bacon Double Cheeseburger

"Is it true some now serve beer?" It certainly is in Naples.

And it's correctly pronounced "MuckDonald's"

Microsoft boffin inadvertently highlights .NET image woes by running C# on Windows 3.11

Re: "Visual Studio is a paid-for product"

"Turbo Pascal didn't make you pay for its dev environment, nor did Borland ever do that"

Apart from confusing the product with the company, my copy of Byte from 1989 shows Turbo Pascal going for £99, or £169 for the Pro edition. They did do a free version later in the Windows era, but that had a limited licence and Microsoft had a similar edition.

Crash, bang, wallop: What a power-down. But what hit the kill switch?

Re: Placement of kill switch and other quirks

This placement makes a lot of sense when you are leaving and turning the light on. When you're coming in and groping for the switch to turn the light on, line of sight is not that relevant. Motion sensors for lights people... At least this story has made me feel better about taking out all the customer support gateways....

Come mobile users, gather round and learn how to add up

Freedom

Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4. f that is granted, all else follows

Well that went well: Polycom sold for the same figure it fetched two years ago

Better than most

At least they got back what they paid for it. Bettr than most folks manage in these cases.

User had no webcam or mic, complained vid conference didn’t work

Re: This one, every time

You must be a wizard. Muggle pictures don't move

How many Routemaster bus seats would it take to fill Wembley Stadium?

I still hear "Olympic-sized swimming pool" in a Welsh accent

Drone perves defeated by tinfoil houses

Re: 410 Shotgun is your friend :)

410 Gone

User asked help desk to debug a Post-it Note that survived a reboot

Re: This kind of idiocy is not confined to matters IT

I recall an undergraduate experiment that required refluxing from boiling petrol. The instruction clearly said to use a water bath. Most of us used the electric water baths. One genius got a large (glass) water bath, and stuck a Bunsen under it. The fumes crept over the edge, and soon his desk, his lab-book and his hair was alight. He was put out before he suffered any lasting damage....

Boss visited the night shift and found a car in the data centre

Elfin Safety....

Not in the server room, but one of my colleagues used to work on his mini in the barn we rented for noisy engine tests. This was after hours and in his own time, so not an issue. Until one winter evening, whilst removing the radiator, his hand slipped and his arm got jammed between the radiator and the front of the car. Luckily, the hand-brake was off, and he managed to drag the car across the barn to the phone, and contact a another colleague who came and extracted him.

Software update turned my display and mouse upside-down, says user

Upside down you're turning me

When I was working for a TV equipment manufacturer, one of the image processing scientists had a film clip that they used for image quality testing. To decouple the image from reality, this was turned upside down. One Friday we went down to his office to see if he was coming to the pub. He wasn't around, but this clip was playing on a rather expensive, broadcast quality monitor. We decided to fix this by turning the monitor upside-down (hard work, those things were heavy). When he reappeared, it took him a couple of minutes to spot what we had done. We all had a laugh, and then turned the monitor back over. Then we realised that the screen had become magnetised, and there were nasty colour fringes everywhere. A couple of degausses helped, but didn't cure it.

What was to be done? We went to the pub. When we came back the monitor had settled, and we were all very relieved.