Posts by Uncle Slacky

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

Re: Priorities

Then tell them they've been eaten by a grue.

BOFH: Just because we've had record revenues doesn't mean you get a Xmas bonus

Re: if only

I think the basement was already being used for the ABBA-themed karaoke party organised by Princesses Nut Nuts and Camilla (allegedly).

'Wobbly spacetime' is latest stab at unifying physics

Re: Try the social media approach

I thought that was the Harry Hill method? I guess leftpondians wouldn't be familiar with him.

FIGHT!

Re: Oppenheim proposes to overcome the barrier with the idea of "wobbly spacetime"

Or as Douglas Adams put it, "Time is relative; lunchtime doubly so."

Re: Understanding

And also tail recursion....

50 years ago, Skylab's accidental rebels put Mission Control on mute

"None of the trio ever flew in space again"

Which has long been assumed to be NASA's "revenge" for them going on "strike".

Tool bag lost in space now tracked by garbage watchers

Also seen in "Avenue 5" where the corpses orbited the ship indefinitely...

GhostBSD makes FreeBSD a little less frightening for the Linux loyal

I have 5 Macs of various vintages, never paid Apple anything and never paid more than about €25 for any of them. The latest one is a 2012 MBP unibody that I got for free, just had to add my own (spare) SSD and memory.

From Apollo to Space Shuttle, Thomas K Mattingly's stellar journey ends at 87

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/893/

India's lunar landing made a mess on the Moon

Re: the law of pointing out a typo

Muphry's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law

Ask a builder to fix a server and out come the vastly inappropriate power tools

Re: iMacs...

Some of the old SCSI drives needed a whack if they hadn't been used for a while (my IIsi had this problem), apparently the lubricant on the spindle would seize up and need a whack to free the disk.

King Charles III signs off on UK Online Safety Act, with unenforceable spying clause

Re: Loneliest place

You'll get 2 to 5 years in chokey if you don't hand over your encryption keys when requested:

"Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 part III (RIPA 3) gives the UK power to authorities to compel the disclosure of encryption keys or decryption of encrypted data by way of a Section 49 Notice. A suspect instructed to disclose keys can be prevented from telling anyone else about it, outside of their legal representative. Refusal to comply can result in a maximum sentence of two years imprisonment, or five years in cases involving national security or child indecency."

https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Powers_Act_2000/Part_III

Word turns 40: From 'new kid on the block' to 'I can't believe it's not bloatware'

Re: four decades on ...

> Sadly not officially free: WordStar

There is WordTsar: http://wordtsar.ca/

> You can still download it, although not from them.

Oh yes you can!

http://download.microsoft.com/download/word97win/Wd55_be/97/WIN98/EN-US/Wd55_ben.exe

First Brexit, now X-it: Musk 'considering' pulling platform from EU over probe

And nothing of value...

...was lost.

What did the VisiCalc fairy bring you for Spreadsheet Day?

Improv seems to have heavily influenced Quantrix: https://quantrix.com/

ELKS and Fuzix: Linux – and Unix – writ very, very small

I didn't know how to do that in Turbo Pascal 5 (no manuals!) so I squeezed a program into 64k by removing all unnecessary spaces and reducing all variables to 1 or 2 characters. It worked, but it was unmaintainable (I didn't care as it was only a summer job).

DiskDestroyer executable size?

How big is dd?

Lost your luggage? That's nothing – we just lost your whole flight!

> the domain owner was indeed Powergen

Snopes says that Powergen Italia does exist as a company, but they're unrelated to the British one:

"The powergenitalia.com domain apparently hosts the web site of a real Italian company (Powergen Italia) which sells specialized battery products."

Reminder

"Genitalia is *not* the national airline of Italy" (from "Not 1982", the NTNOCN annual).

US Space Force wants hotline to China amid rising tensions

> Taiwan, which Beijing considers its property.

Not just Beijing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_China

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Re: Dirt

Bowel Movement Surveyor, shirley?

UK Online Safety Bill to become law – and encryption busting clause is still there

Re: Wasted Talent.

She already knows all about hacking and breaking the law, after all:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/09/bafflement-over-tory-mps-admission-she-hacked-harriet-harmans-website

Textbook publishers sue shadow library LibGen for copyright infringement

Re: Surrender the domain names

Obligatory IT Crowd piracy ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYOlNRYikBw

Re: They are blocked in France

I find Firefox's DNS over HTTPS helps enormously with this kind of thing.

LibGen could always migrate to the dark web, like Z-Library did.

Linux Mint Debian Edition 6 hits beta with reassuringly little drama

32-bit UEFI on 64-bit

> 64-bit models had 32-bit UEFI firmware, which makes it complicated to install 64-bit editions of Linux or Windows.

For those in this situation, this page is very useful:

https://mattgadient.com/linux-dvd-images-and-how-to-for-32-bit-efi-macs-late-2006-models/

(black MacBook 2,1 owner here)

antiX 23: Anarchic for sure, but 'design by committee' isn't always the best for Linux

Re: Proudly antifascist?

Because they don't want to be doxxed and otherwise targeted by fascists.

antiX 19 can run on PII, so I'd expect 23 to be similar. From https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/AntiX_19_FAQ :

> antiX should run on most computers, ranging from 192MB old PII systems with pre-configured 128MB swap...

Farewell WordPad, we hardly knew ye

Re: Kids nowadays ... Sigh!

Now modernised as WordTsar: http://wordtsar.ca/

Right to repair advocates have a new opponent: Scientologists

Re: the DC-8 was a product of the McDonnell-Douglas Corporation.

South Park summarised it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU2EUfinwHo

Just another variation on the useless "lie detector"

Lots more about e-meters here: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dianetics#E-Meter

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

Re: Was that sheep (singular) or sheep (plural)?

Is bork.bork.bork in Sweden?

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

Re: Multics and Pine and Emacs

Reminds me of the message I used to get when posting to Usenet (probably from rn):

"Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send. Please be sure you know what you are doing."

Should go with Free instead if you're in France - they still run a Usenet server (even with some newsgroups of their own for tech support etc.). The web hosting and email addresses sill work, though if you want more than 250 Mb for email storage they farm you out to a third party provider.

Re: Bork! Bork! Bork!

Not to mention alt.great.ass.wheaton and alt.sexy.bald.captains...

Personally I hung out at talk.bizarre and alt.slack.

Bodhi Linux 7 brings Enlightenment to Ubuntu

Re: Debian package ?

If you want the Moksha fork rather than mainline Enlightenment, there are instructions for Debian here (may need updating for Bookworm though):

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2454611-installing-moksha-desktop-on-debian-jessie

Great for netbooks

Or the 32-bit version is, at least - I don't think there were many 64-bit netbooks. I used it for several years on my eeePC 701 4G.

"The Windows key doesn't open the start menu, but a left-click on the desktop does." - if it hasn't changed in the last few versions, pressing Windows key + space bar at the same time also works.

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

Time to revive the ASCII Ribbon Campaign?

I started supporting this many years ago:

http://www.asciiribbon.org/

Intel seems to think Wi-Fi 7 is too cool for old-school Windows 10

It'll have no problem running a current Linux distro, though.

India lands Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft on Moon, is the first to lunar south pole

Russia didn't, but the USSR did...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_programme

Florida Man and associates indicted for conspiracy to steal data, software

Re: The true test will

Except he can't pardon himself from offences against a state, and in Georgia, not even the governor can pardon him.

Re: I like Americans…

Funny ha ha or funny peculiar?

Aspiration to deploy new UK nuclear reactor every year a 'wish', not a plan

Re: John Bull presents Little Englander Nuclear

Or the unofficial national slogan: "Britain: it's a bit crap".

Satnav for the Moon could benefit from Fibonacci’s expertise

Right on Commander!

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

Re: Alien UFOs

Million-to-one chance of that, if you ask me...

BOFH: You can be replaced by a robot or get your carbon footprint below Big Dave's

Or Max Headroom?

Mint 21.2 is desktop Linux without the faff

Re: The best

MX Linux, it still has 32-bit spins and you can install Cinnamon, MATE etc. easily if you want (it's XFCE by default). Alternatively, Peppermint OS (which bears a passing resemblance to Mint) also offers 32-bit versions, based on Debian or Devuan.

Twitter ad revenue has halved since Elon Musk took over

Re: Learning the hard way

My fave:

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” - Warren Buffett

Think of our cafes and dry cleaners, says Ohio as budget slashes WFH for govt workers

"...the world is over the COVID-19 pandemic"

Maybe so, but nobody has told the virus...