Posts by Phrontis

What's up with IT, Doc? Rabbit hole reveals cause of outage

Chewed flex

Our cat managed to chew through the cable for the Christmas tree lights. Unfortunately it was on the low voltage side and she barely noticed. Wish it had been on the 230V side as she's managing to shred the furniture as well.

Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux natively

Bring back Quattro Pro

I'd really like Quattro Pro back. It used to be so much better than 123 and Excel in many respects. Graphing in particular. I know Corel did it for a while but it no longer appears on their website.

Help, my IT team has no admin access to their own systems

Re: Miracle workers

Yes I tried the UK then the US and finally Germany at which point it came up.

Software guy smashes through the Somebody Else's Problem field to save the day

Re: Why cant you

LG for washing machines and TV's. The German ones all seem to be made in Italy now, if not Turkey and the rest seem to be made in Turkey. If you want your house to burn down biuy Beko; allegedly.

Hmmmmm, how to cool that overheating CPU, if only there was a solution...

Even back then the building should have had a "break tank" with an air gap to prevent the buildings water getting back into the main district water supply. They may have contaminated the buildings own water, but not the surrounding district. A filling valve on a toilet cistern works on the same principle, the water sprays in from the top with an air gap, this prevents the possibility of water back syphoning into the mains water system.

We don't know why it's there, we don't know what it does – all we know is that the button makes everything OK again

Illicit contols

Years ago my boss was really into saving energy and would only allow an air compressor to be run at a maximum of 90PSI. This would have been fine but at the end of the line it was only 83PSI. And of course the equipment wouldn't run correctly at less than 86PSI and if it wasn't running right he would want an explanation why, without any guff about air pressure being too low. We used the contoller to put an offset to the display on the compressor panel, so that the compressor was running at 94PSI, but only showing 90. Great idea. But then the boss came back asking why the pressure gauge on one of the air recivers was showing well over 90. At the weekend when I knew he wouldn't be in, I went round all of the pressure gauges that indicated different to the compressor and took the indication needles of each of them and put them back on so that everything indicated 90. On the Monday he came into the office to say that he'd never seen all the gauges reading the same before. Dohhhh!

Trainee techie ran away and hid after screwing up a job, literally

This post is a screw up in more ways than one.

Who ever did the "artwork" for this post also managed to screw up in a big way as well. The screw shown has a left hand thread on it. I have never seen a left hand thread, pozidrive wood screw before. The image must have been mirrored for some reason. Real big cluster **** from my point of view. Even bigger than the scratched mirror.

Our EXCLUSIVE VID of MIRACLE TECH: Charge your phone in 16 SECONDS – WIRELESSLY

Always have a couple of spare batteries with me wrapped together in cling film. Would never ever consider a phone without an easily replaceable battery and as I have used Windows phones since Adam was a lad, it's a Samsung Ativ S for me.

Best shot: Coffee - how do you brew?

Best way for a caffine hit for me.

A simple Bodum type cafetiere one mug size. Two heaped soup spoons (I know it works for me) of Sainsbury's Continental blend (strength 5) ground coffee. Hot water just off boiling stir, let sit for a couple of minutes and stir again. Let it stand again and stir once more if needed. Once it's stood for a while do a slow press on the filter bar. Enjoy! Then do a second one about an hour later.

Then tea for the rest of the day.

Opera joins Google/Apple in-crowd with shift to WebKit and Chromium

I have used Opera for so long I cannot remember the time (disappeared in a haze of Stella and Hobgoblin) when I didn't. I loved the way it worked when IE didn't and Netscape disappeared, so it must have been in the late 90's. However the way it does not render some pages and now some sites will not even let you use it at all does get worrisome even for a fan like me. I really hope this works out, but I do worry as others have here that the disappearance of another stand alone browser engine means we all in the end suffer mediocrity.

Phrontis

I watched Excel meet 1-2-3, and beat it fair and square

I always liked Quattro Pro it was far better than Excel, especially at graphing, and lotus Improv was so far ahead of its time I think if they redid it now it would take off. Well maybe.

Thing is that everyone uses Excel now so you end up sticking with it, but I cannot stand the fact you need to program it in VB to get anything useful done.

Daedalus

'Poo-powered' Volkswagen astounds world+dog

LPG rather than CNG!!

You need a huge infrastructure for CNG no point in doing it small scale.

I run my car on LPG, CNG is not used much at all in this country. I don’t mind driving around with a tank of 75 litres of LPG (propane/butane) at about 250psi but I am buggered if I am going to drive around with a tank of CNG at 3000psi. LPG is stored in the tank at normal temperature and is not chilled, it liquidises at about 2.2 bar if it is all butane and 22 bar if it is all propane. As far as I know the AUTOGAS sold in the UK is a mix although I do not know at what proportions. I cannot remember ever having seen anywhere to fill up with CNG, I suppose you put in a compressor at home and use the mains gas overnight with a small HP compressor. The main advantage of LPG is you can run a 4.2 litre V8 at reasonable cost. I pay 53p a litre at home but here on hols in the NE it is about 61p a litre. Still better than VPower at £1.20 or whatever it is at the moment. Not so many miles to the gallon on LPG, 17 compared to 22 on petrol so the actual equivalent miles per gallon is not quite as good as you might hope for; but I used to do 25000 miles a year which is a saving at current costs of £2600 a year, this paid for the conversion in 9 months. The other savings over the 4 years have paid for the car. The very best thing about filling up with LPG is there is little tax on it, so I used to vigorously wave two metaphorical fingers at Gordon TWAT Brown every time I filled up.

Phrontis

Virgin Media boosts bottom tier broadband

Free upgrade has to be good. My new on seems OK

I have been with Virgin nee NTL from when the cable first went in the road and we had dial up. Never seen the speed they advertise but normally not far off. Just upgraded to 50Mb service (most I saw with the 20Mb was 16Mb). Have a look here for what I got out of it the other day. http://www.speedtest.net/result/415411631.png. I have to say it seems to work at about 48Mb on anything that can supply that fast, most can't. When I plug my old Netgear router in it drops to 16Mb, so I have a new router on order. Maybe the router was the issue with the old 20Mb service.