* Posts by CT

120 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2009

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First steps into the world of thought leadership: What could go wrong?

CT

Re: "tediously lengthy and needlessly double-spaced humblebrags"

Thanks. It all makes sense now. Except the IT angle, as I'm not even remotely in IT, other than reading the reg in the morning to see what new security breach I need to look out for.

Oh wait, I did post a Linkydink picture of my desk with a motivational mug of coffee on it, inadvertently including my keyboard and mouse. That'll be it.

Yours sincerely, Brian Cant

CT

"tediously lengthy and needlessly double-spaced humblebrags"

Spot on.

Also...

Here are today's top jobs "based on your profile":

Chauffeur, Manchester

Costs Draftsperson, Liverpool

HR Assistant, Plymouth

Customer Care Assistant, London

5 Axis CNC Programmer, Cambridgeshire

One click, one goal, one mission: To get a one-touch flush solution

CT

Anthrax's cover version of Kylie Minogue's I Should Be So Lucky...

...featuring Leonard Cohen on the twanging ruler

Can't seem to find it on the tube of you. But I really want to.

Say what you see: Four-letter fun on a late-night support call

CT

IOL dot com

My partner eventually worked out why someone's email with the domain 'iol.com' wasn't getting through - he had given her the 'aol.com' address over the phone in his customary Brummie accent.

Hey, maybe we should all be cat-faced eco-warriors on our daily video chats

CT

Zoom calls replacing other emissions?

Aren't a lot of these "covideo" calls effectively reducing transport emissions to/from the meeting place?

You've got to be shipping me: KatherineRyan.co.uk suggests the comedian has diversified into freight forwarding

CT

Boringly, winkel = shop in Dutch

and domein = domain obvs.

Start Me Up: 25 years ago this week, Windows 95 launched and, for a brief moment, Microsoft was almost cool

CT

Macintosh 89 badge

Anyone else remember the "Windows 95 = Macintosh 89" badges given out at some Apple exhibition?

Adobe about to pull the plug on Creative Cloud freebie 'at-home' access for students

CT

Remember Quark?

I wouldn't write Affinity off just yet. It took a lot less than 50+ years for the new upstart Adobe InDesign to replace Quark Xpress as the de facto standard page layout tool.

The time PC Tools spared an aerospace techie the blushes

CT

Batch file

After doing del *.* without changing to the A: drive once too often (i.e. once), we ended up writing a batch file 'dela.bat' with the required commands in it, and then training people to use that to wipe a floppy/stiffie. As a bonus, it was easier to type than the series of commands previously used, so not too difficult to get people to use the batch file instead.

Cool 'joke', bro, you could have killed someone: Epilepsy Foundation sics cops on sick flashing-light Twitter trolls

CT

Charges = criminal charges, not postage fees?

Vote rigging, election fixing, ballot stuffing: Just another day in the life of a Register reader

CT

You, too, can play at this game?

See title

Irish eyes aren't smiling after govt blows €1m on mega-printer too big for parliament's doors

CT

Right Said Fred

Have to take the doors off

Need more space to shift the so-and-so

We've, um, changed our password policy, says CafePress amid reports of 23m pwned accounts

CT

11th October!

They've just sent me an email about this, on 11th October!

Jocasta? Jocasta! Don't ram that trolley into the man: New tech promises an end to this scenario

CT

Those turncoat foxes...

"Now all Ford needs to do is identify a way to stop foxes defecting in your garden"

Visions of Red Communist foxes being denied asylum by Ford?

Decoding the President, because someone has to: Did Trump just blow up concerted US effort to ban Chinese 5G kit?

CT

F*** 6G we're going straight to 7G

Reminds me of The Onion's spoof of the razor blade arms race

How I got horizontal with a gimp and untangled his cables

CT

Bent coat-hanger and curtain wire

I think I've still got my official cable-running kit of bent coat-hanger and curtain wire somewhere. Budget would never run to a trained ferret.

Florida man's deadliest catch forces police to evacuate Taco Bell

CT

Not just in Florida...

...but with an annoying frequency, WW1/WW2 souvenir hunters bringing old ordnance into the Paris Eurostar terminal and consequently shutting everything down for a few hours when they go through security.

Users fail to squeak through basic computer skills test. Well, it was the '90s

CT

My keyboard's jammed

User: "My keyboard's jammed, can you take a look"

Me: "Have you been eating doughnuts again?"

Yes, it was literally (raspberry) jammed, with the jam causing the keys to stick in the down position.

Everyday doings of a metropolitan techie: Stob's software diary

CT

Super write-up on the Mac Mini - when I did mine, I looked inside, cross-referred to the ifixit page, then ran away and installed the SSD externally via a FireWire case. Worked a treat. Super-fast now.

Stairway to edam: Swiss bloke blasts roquefort his cheese, thinks Led Zep might make it tastier

CT

See also Les Barker's "Hard Cheese of Old England" for more puns, e.g.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x59VnlXINbE

Why are sat-nav walking directions always so hopeless?

CT

waist-high jungle to save 100m

Thanks to google maps for taking me up a steep path which started OK, but then turned into waist-high wet grass and no lighting. I'd have turned back, but I didn't want to lose the height and then have to climb again with a heavy rucksack. Wrong decision = wet trousers.

In the morning, I saw that it had saved me all of 100 metres or so, bypassing a perfectly walkable minor road.

Austria, since you asked. I'd have used the OS if it was the UK

Deliveroo to bike food to hungry fanbois queuing to buy iPhones

CT

Typo alert... or is it?

"...stand in line to prey at the altar of dreams..."

Hmm, perhaps I prefer the original

How an augmented reality tourist guide tried to break my balls

CT

Seat reservations in bike compartment

SNCF kindly reserved us coach 12, seats 11 and 13, on the intercity train to Boulogne (don't ask). Unfortunately, the numbering in coach 12 started at 21 and went upwards, as the first compartment (presumably with seats numbered 11 upwards) had had all the seats removed to be converted to a bike compartment.

As my other half suffers from saddle soreness at the slightest mention of a bike ride, we picked some random empty seats in the next coach, expecting an interesting conversation with the inspector.

Neither sight nor sound of the inspector for the 1h30 journey, and we could have had a free ride in first class.

We picked the print-at-home option, with two A4 sheets giving a nice large barcode, rather than the app.

OMG! Battle looms over WTF! trademarks

CT

The actual Hull-based range of OMG! products here:

https://www.cpd-direct.co.uk/?i=Search+Results&s=omg

Boffins build a NAZI AI – wait, let's check that... OK, it's a grammar nazi

CT

Re: Am I missing something ?

Minor correction: We already have grammar checkers built in to stuff like Word.

CT

of coarse I did

CT

"At the moment, it can only deal with commas and full stops, the most common and easiest of English's punctuation marks."

If they were that easy how come so many people do without them writing enormous walls of text without so much as a pause as if their taking one deep breath and just letting out a single massive belch of their stream of consciousness ooh look a cat video ?

You have suffered without red-headed emoji for too long. That changes Tuesday

CT

On the other hand...

There are about half a dozen people absolutely ecstatic that

"Intonation marks for Lithuanian dialectology"

have finally been implemented, and they no longer have to take a biro to printouts and re-scan the results from a photo taken on a wooden table.

There is no perceived IT generation gap: Young people really are thick

CT

Saracen and Roland - not surprised at the blank faces, too obscure even for me, and I had a grammar school education with real O-levels AND I remember white dog turds, jumpers for goal posts blah blah

There are 10 types of people in the world, but there is only one Melvyn

CT

Re: If you press litmus paper to Jim Al-Khalili, does it go blue?

The litmus paper gag made me literally laugh out loud. Thanks.

Office junior had one job: Tearing perforated bits off tractor-feed dot matrix printer paper

CT

Re: Ah, the "good old days" ...

We had a "burster" machine, with two rotating knives to slice the tractor-feed sides off, and a device to rip off the perforated sheets and stack them neatly. Made a hell of a racket when it worked, and despite hiding it in a soundproof cupboard, we were all tuned in to the remaining noise, so that any change in tone had us running to the rescue for the frequent hiccups, slips and general paper mangling/automated origami.

The healing hands of customer support get an acronym: Do YOU have 'tallah-toe-big'?

CT

Eyebrows

My other half swears I've got magic eyebrows - walk over, frown at the problem and it goes away.

How's this for a stocking filler next year? El Reg catches up with Gemini

CT

Re: Interesting display. But not a word on the elephant in the room.....

From their website tech specs:

"Removable Li-Ion 4220mAh battery"

but with one caveat

"We are working hard to achieve the above technical specifications for Gemini"

Telly boffin Professor Heinz Wolff has died

CT

Re: Sorry, but...

Or to put it more kindly, "wow, he had a good innings"

Apple’s facial recognition: Well, it is more secure for the, er, sleeping user

CT

PIN numbers

Cut them some slack - PIN number is common enough. And in spoken language it might conceivably eradicate some ambiguity (PIN the number versus pin the pointy thing). Admittedly the context usually gives it away.

And we're using natural language, not a programming language, so it doesn't have to be complete:

- my car's passed its MOT --> MOT test

and it can be redundant:

- 5am in the morning --> 5 in the morning / 5am

- it's got an LCD display --> it's got an LCD

CrashPlan crashes out of cloudy consumer backup caper

CT

Same here, home-based user using it for daily partial backups of current work to local removable drive, no cloud involved.

Bit annoying, as I only migrated to it a month ago.

A sarcasm detector bot? That sounds absolutely brilliant. Definitely

CT

Never mind all that - can we have an AI that converts emojis into proper text? There's just too many now and I don't really want to have to learn yet another language at my age.

This ferry is said to weigh 250 cows. We say that is actually 20,600 Lindisfarne Gospels

CT

Cows/Cowes, IOW?

What's brown and comes out of Cowes backwards?

The Isle of Wight ferry.

And, showing my age a bit,

If Isla St Clair married Barry White, then divorced and remarried Brian Ferry, would she be called Isla White-Ferry?

Tesla's big news today:
sudo killall -9 Autopilot

CT

It seems to be correctly "braking" on the Tesla original article. Unless they corrected it since Reg copy+pasted it?

How IT are you? Find out now in our HILARIOUS quiz!

CT

Re: Cockney Quiz

I think I can hear Bow Locks.

Which keys should I press to enable the CockUp feature?

CT

Pivot 45 degrees

Still more pivot pranks - pivot the screen itself to 45° and move all the desktop icons to a heap in what is now the bottom corner.

Steve Jobs, MS Office, Israel, and a basic feature Microsoft took 13 years to install

CT

Excel, yes a similar problem, non-joined Arabic letters. As well as all the other problems with text in Excel not behaving like text in Word (double-clicks also select trailing punctuation etc.).

What did they use instead? There were specialist Hebrew/Arabic word processors, Mellel was/still is one.

Software engineer sobers up to deal with 2:00 AM trouble at mill

CT

There are still steel mills in Rotherham

see title

Outsourcer didn't press ON switch, so Reg reader flew 15 hours to do the job

CT

I was sent to Estonia in order to fix a font-related problem. Failed to fix it on the spot, but had a lightbulb moment that resulted in days of rework.

BT Infinity ‘working to fix problem’ after three days of outages

CT

Not just infinity

We're on bog-standard broadband, and for the last few days, we have had web pages loading half way, then stopping, only to load instantly the second or third time you try.

Intermittent problem though - just loaded The Register instantly first time, but clicking to get to the comments section took two reloads.

Feast your eyes: 10 'fortysomething' smart TVs

CT

Smart TVs - all we need now are some smart programmes to watch on them.

So, just how do you say 'the mutt's nuts' in French?

CT

But why are we translating it literally?

- surely we need a phrase in the other language which means "something really good", and which is also slightly rude in that language. A literal translation won't carry the positive meaning of the English.

And anyway, how come a description of a dog's gentleman's parts means "something really good"?

Is it by analogy with the "bee's knees"? Which doesn't make literal sense either.

And while we're there, is it a dog's breakfast or a dog's dinner to describe something that's a bit of a mess?

I'm confused. And I'm a translator.

How many translators does it take to change a lightbulb? - Depends on the context.

Dutch doctors replace woman's skull with 3D-printed plastic copy

CT

Re: The Other Half

I'd guess any thickening in the lower half of the head wouldn't be as serious, as it's not compressing the brain.

Apple vows to add racially diverse EMOJIS after MILEY CYRUS TWITTER outrage

CT

Oh no, Unicode Consortium taken over by cats

Looking at the Unicode listing given in the link above:

1F638;GRINNING CAT FACE WITH SMILING EYES

1F639;CAT FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY

1F63A;SMILING CAT FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH

1F63B;SMILING CAT FACE WITH HEART-SHAPED EYES

1F63C;CAT FACE WITH WRY SMILE

1F63D;KISSING CAT FACE WITH CLOSED EYES

1F63E;POUTING CAT FACE

1F63F;CRYING CAT FACE

1F640;WEARY CAT FACE

Tube be or not tube be: Apple’s CYLINDRICAL Mac Pro is out tomorrow

CT

Base model £2,499.00 on UK Apple store

Base model $2,999.00 on US Apple store

Google says "2999 US Dollar equals 1833.69 British Pound Sterling"

US sales taxes can't account for all that difference can they?

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