RIP Lester.
Thanks for the email chats about rockets and rocket regulation.
55 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Oct 2008
If we all had a unique QR coded tattooed on our foreheads, we wouldn't need any of those boarding pass thingies.
Hmm maybe I'll just wait for retina scans to become the norm.
<fx>picks up phone
"Hello, Tattoo fixers?"
"I have this tattoo I would like to hide...."
I seem to remember setting up an audio sound for the insertion of 3.5" floppy discs into an Apple Mac. Once the user inserted the disc the mac would reply loudly with a sultry female voice "oh, it's so big".
On windows machines we would set the startup sound to be of a noisy couple making love and then make sure the speaker volume was turned up high. Works great for female users who are more embarrassed than men.
Back in the old days of green CRT, you would turn the vertical position knob so that the command line was off the bottom of the monitor or turn the brightness way down so although it was powered up, no display was seen.
About 20 years ago I had a user pop into my cubicle and ask if there was a problem with the printer as every time he printed his document, only one sheet of paper came out. I looked at the sheet of paper he was holding, took it out of his hand, turned it over and gave it back to him.
The printer was defaulted to double-sided printing and the poor guy had spent the last 30 minutes trying to figure out why it only printed one sheet of paper.
The look on his face was priceless and one I shall cherish for many years.
The Mitsubishi PHEV is a similar vehicle as it is also based on the same Hybrid class of 30 miles range as the Audi. I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned in the article along with BMW and Volvo considering the Mitsubishi has been available to buy for six months.
I'm slightly biased as I own one and yes it is damn good so long as you spend most of your time with 30 mile or less journeys. I particularly like parking at the motorway services to get my free rapid charge (80% capacity) although that coffee and doughnut you buy will wipe out the saving in petrol.
Unlike a Prius it has plenty of power and I treat it no different than any petrol or diesel I have driven. I do however enjoy the quieter journeys and the much smoother ride.
I still play both Gauntlet and Gauntlet II on MAME with my daughters and even the neighbours when they pop round for a cuppa.
The game still has legs and having no ending means you just keep going until bored or passed out.
Gauntlet Legends in the arcade didn't seem to catch on and my Mame box doesn't have the horsepower to simulate it properly at the moment. Really looking forward to this new version for the PC.
Who remembers the space themed game that was also similar as a 4 player with health requiring constant 10p input? I forget it's name but in Swindon the local arcade had this and Gauntlet.
Over the last ten years I have watched the quality of HP laptops drop. Everything is now so flimsy and the internal hardware is likely to break at the sneeze over the keyboard.
Every batch of 30 laptops that we order will have at least one DOA upon delivery. Getting HP to take that one away and give us a replacement is like trying to get blood out of a stone. We have had engineers arrive (eventually) to replace the motherboard in a week old laptop.
Our servers are HP in a blade chassis and thankfully this gear is still excellent but it seems to be the only product I would recommend. Just steer clear of their laptops.
Quadcopters, hexcopters and octocopters. Make brillaint camera platforms partly due to their excess thrust left over from using brushless motors.
Yes you can buy off the shelf or better still if you like playing with a soldering iron, make your own. I built my first using a small square of laminate flooring for the center plate and two lengths of 10mm square alloy tubing bought form B&Q. The control board can be pruchased for under 30 quid, add 4 speeed controlers, 4 props, 4 motors, transmitter and recieiver and have the whole lot ready to fly for under £200. Capable of lifting an SLR, I use mine with a Go-Pro as it's more durable when I crash.
Advise you get insureance by joining the BMFA for £30 per year but not sure how you would be covered flying in a built up area. Most model flyers have airfields or farmers fields to fly safe and uninterupted.
Its an interesting area and allows you to mess with Atmel, Arduino and other simple electronics. Just search for "Multiwii" or "kkmulticopter" on the internet to get a taste of what you can do with no more experience than mecanno.
If you reaaly want to see how well they fly in sport mode then search our "warthox" in vimeo.com That guy really can these things to the limit.
Having grown up in the 70s I found my game of choice changed over time. Starting with:
Space Invaders
Galaxians
Frogger
Space Duel
Tempest
Never a real fan of platformers so shootem ups continued to see my coins.
Joust
Gyruss
Xevious
Gauntlet
Quartet
Star Wars
1942
Raiden
Gradius
Nemesis
Last Resort
There was also a pinball machine that fired hundreds of ball bearings at light targets traveling up the sides of the table. You used two handles to rotate your gun barrell to aim at the targets. Anyone remember the name of this table? Would love to own one of these.
Time to dust off mame and my mame console tonight
Draytek Vigor routers have parental controls built in for web filtering but I believe it is a paid for service which is why I have not tried it out on my router. Damn good router but expensive when compared against that free TalkTalk shite.
The problem is, how many parents who are not working in IT know how to configure their router.
When building laptops for parents, I install K9webprotection from Bluecoat. It's free for home use and works brilliantly for stopping kids access areas of the internet. You only need 15 minutes to show the parents how to login and adjust the settings.
www.k9webprotection.com
I had a business account with them for a number of years about five years ago but switched after the usual terrible service. Every quarter I would be sent a letter telling me who my new business manager is.
Well they were never in the local branch and if you rang the so called direct number, all you got was a call centre.
With Natwest the business manager is still the same one. I can go in and say hello and grab a coffee in the branch and when required he has actually visited my office with paperwork that required a signature. I'm sticking with the more personal experience and an online banking system that works.
Started with a zx81 saved from paper round and bought 2nd hand just as everyone started to save for the Spectrum.
Built a joystick adapter to take the Atari vcs joystick which was directly soldered to the keyboard header in the zx81. Sold quite a few of these to friends and family.
Used to visit my schoolmate John and his dad Dave Looker who wrote Zuckman and Frogger for the zx81. They continued into spectrum, Dragon32, and cpc464 games and never looked back.
Moved on to the Texas Ti99/4a whilst the schools had BBC and Econet with Wordwise for the word processor on Rom chips.
The college had Atari ST before the OS was on ROM. Upgraded a few months later.
Started work in 1986 on Sperry (unisys) and Tandem and ended up on ICL, IBM and AS400 gear.
Moved over to Novell in 92 when Ethernet cards were £1000 quid each. Windows NT in 1998.
Now it's all AD, GPO and not so much fun. Can't wait to get a Raspberry PI.
We use "MobileIron" in our company.
Similar to Good Tech where corporate data is help in a separate encrypted sandbox on the smartphone or tablet. If the employee leaves we can selective wipe just the corporate data from the device or completely nuke the device if we are feeling nasty.
Got my two pads on order as I opted for the engraving option.
One for me as since I have had an iPhone for the last 4 years, the number of times I turn the PC on to browse the web whilst watching TV has dropped significantly. Instant on is brillant for browsing during TV adverts.
The second is for my mum who has her 70th Birthday next week. She asked for a Kindle as her mobile library has closed (council cost cutting). I figured the the ipad3 screen would be less eye strain than the ipad2 and as she also likes soduko and scrabble, it would be the better choice. She also paints watercolour so very tempted to add that Autodesk sketch app to the device.
So two new customers here.
I think with the icloud backup, no requirement for itunes, retina displays; that the iPhone and iPad along with the iOS have all finally come of age.
So I have a PC behind my TV running MAME and a couple of home made joystick boards. Baesd on the number of low powered old games that I play (Invaders, Asteroids), it will be interesting to see this board fired up to play Mame.
Then I could build the entire system into the underside of a joystick board.
Take a look at MobileIron. We have rolled this out in our Company. It allows us to manage those iphone and ipads.
Install/recommend apps
Block apps.
Install our own apps (apple dev license required)
Change wifi settings
remote wipe geo locate.
add passkeys and lock the device
MobileIron also works with android devices but I wouldn't bother as the functionality is severely limited until ICS is released.
I do not agree with this. In the UK and certainly in my local area, the bike shops are very friendly and know their regular customers by name. Even when they did not know me, they gave great support on sizing cycle helmets for my children.
What you will also find is that quite a few of the bike brands require you to collect from a shop so even when bikes are advertised on the web, they cannot be delivered. This is part of the contract the shop has with the supplier along with not discounting 2011 model year bikes for the first six months.
Yes some brands can be delivered but Trek and Specialized are (when I last checked) a collect only product.
I guess we all have different requirements but facetime for me is very good.
In the last month I have used it with a colleague to discus a circuit design using the camera pointed at the paper where I could see what he was drawing. That was an hour long conversation and saved a long journey and petrol costs.
As I'm in Spain next month and away from the wife and kids then it will be useful to say goodnight to them each evening. Granted i could do similar over the phone but actually seeing them is a huge plus point.
Also it just works.
I am aware that the messaging client built into the firmware has mail for exchange capability. Just try and use it in anger and tell me that it works for you. In my experience of using the firmware version, it's a dog.
Yes you could by Profimail like the review has mentioned but what company is going to shell out more cash because the messaging client is not up to the job. If Blackberry and Iphone can get it right then surely Nokia can.
Another good phone buggered by crap software.
Just like the E75, you are stuck with the built-in Nokia Messaging suite which must have been written by a complete idiot. It has to be one of the most useless suites for integrating with your MS Exchange system.
With the E71 you install Mail-for-Exchange as a free download and everything just works.
Mail-for-Exchange will not even install on the E72 and the Nokia Messaging suite will crash, fail to connect or even slow your phone down to a crawl.
Stupid Nokia.
Thank god my company bought loads of E71s before they were discontinued otherwise we would be forced back to a Microsoft OS phone to get good email connectivity.