Posts by Studley

Choose Your Own Adventure with Microsoft 365

> CZECH POCKETS

Patreon patrons: It's password-reset time

Can't even bolt the stable door

Having been emailed to remind me that I had a Patreon account which I'd forgotten that I'd created, I promptly set about deleting the account, only to discover:

1. You have to email them from your account's email address (not useful if you're using inbound aliases);

2. According to this recent Reddit topic, "deletions" are processed manually/slowly and actually consist of putting your account into a private mode, not deleting your data.

Am I securitying proper?

Man buys iPHONE 6 and DROPS IT to SMASH on PURPOSE

Re: iFools

Where money?

Virgin Media blocks 'wankers' from permissible passwords

finian

I've searched the deepest, darkest parts of the internet, and I still can't fathom why "finian" is blocked. Could be a misspelling of the Irish insult "fenian", but the original spelling isn't on the list, so I'm stumped.

As for blocking any passwords that contain those strings? I can only imagine the confusion caused by some of the shorter ones on that list. I can't use Gr33nigl00 for example.

Block lists aren't exactly a new thing, the more heinous crime is that Virgin constrain the password length to 8-10 characters.

El Reg is looking for a new London sub-editor

Re: Top-flight tech tab flagship in babel-blabbing self-supporting sub search

Needs more arbitrary CAPITALS

Google Glass faces UK cinema ban: Heaven forbid someone films you crying in a rom-com

Cinema (n.)

An auditorium where you can watch a blu-ray with hundreds of other people, at an inconvenient time, for the same price as buying the blu-ray six months later.

THOUSANDS of Tesco.com logins and passwords leaked online

Re: complexity

Indeed, I just compiled a list of the most popular. Seems a lot of yummy mummies need some basic education about information security:

10 instances: charlie

6: sophie

5: elizabeth, jessica

4: barney, benjamin, george, joshua, liverpool, louise, november, shopping

3: arsenal, cameron, caravan, connor, dexter, disney, dragon, francesca, hannah, jasper, jessie, kipper, manchester, marmite, michael, rachel, rebecca, scotland, shannon, smudge, stanley, thomas, tigger, tinkerbell, william, willow

(plus additional variations with "1" or "01" suffix)

Revolting peasants force Wikipedia to cut'n'paste Visual Editor into the bin

Bootnote: It's 2013.

Why are we still taking screenshots of text?

Google's Project Glass headman answers most pressing question: 'Why?'

Re: "Now if I want to know, say, the capital of Nigeria,"

The capital of Nigeria is Abuja.

I gained this information through a special offline process known as "learning". No subscription required!

ULTIMATE cuppa contenders prepare to go mug-to-mug

No point in starting this yet

You can't complete the test until you've identified the Ultimate Dunking Biscuit.

If it worsens the quality of my digestive, it's not an Ultimate Cuppa.

Plods probe death threat tweets to MP - but who will rid us of terrible trolls?

Re: but WHO will rid us of terrible trolls?

Besides which, I'd have thought that dealing with trolls is outside the scope of the World Health Organization.

Raid millions of bank accounts. New easy-to-use tool. Yours for $5,000

Scope

"easily infect machines running Windows 8..."

Oh, that's a relief. For a minute there I thought we had a problem.

Man who pulled gun during chess game surrenders to robot cop

Notation

Presumably:

24. Rc8+ AK47?

25. 0-1

No idea what the notation is for a flashbang

SkyDrive on par with C: Drive in Windows 8.1

Re: Now you see it, now you don't!

...But you can still access your files if you upgrade to LiveCloudPlus™! ($10 / £10 a month, minimum 12-month contract)

Who will Dr Who chew in 50th TV do before Matt Smith bids adieu?

"Click if you don't mind a mild anniversary special spoiler"

...Or hover over the hyperlink, for that matter.

Dell explores wearable computing as PC base crumbles

Re: Remember The Homeless WIFI Hotspots?

HoboToGo

Yahoo! May! Buy! Tumblr! For! One! BEELLION! Bucks!

Buy Tumblr > make Yahoo cool

Yeah. Just like dad doing Gangnam Style dance > make dad cool.

NEW ITV Player app IS HERE ... for Samsung fandroids only. Ha ha

If you want to be the best, if you want to beat the rest, fragmentation's what you need.

Microsoft exec: No 'Plan B' despite mobile stumbles

Plan B?

Pfft, even Blackberry can afford Alicia Keys.

(Young urban music joke)

Bioshock Infinite, Devil May Cry, SimCity

Re: SimCity

As somebody who put a lot of time and effort into bug-reporting during the recent closed beta, I'd question how much time the article author spent playing it...

During the three days of beta, EA's servers were knocked offline for 24 hours, meaning that nobody could play at all during that time. At other times there was an arcane lobby system in place, which would only allow a login check once every 15 minutes to decide whether or not we would get the privilege of playing.

Even once you managed to get into the game, if the servers went AWOL then the game didn't handle it very gracefully. At best, the user would just notice some weird in-game behaviour (it wasn't possible to put buildings anywhere on land, because the game thought that all of the land was water). At worst, there was an "Error connecting to Origin" message, with a solitary Quit button, and all progress was lost.

In short: Online games have their place, but forcing online connectivity for a solo gameplay experience is maddening. Also, expect Diablo III-esque failures on release day.

Polaroid plans retail Fotobars to print out your pics

Classic Polaroid technique

Shaking it up, and waiting to see what develops.

BIONIC MAN makes it to top of Chicago skyscraper

Re: Shame his hands aren't mind-controlled

Problem solved then - all he has to do is think about kicking the lift operator!

Shame his hands aren't mind-controlled

They could've pressed the lift button which would've taken him to the observation deck in about 30 seconds.

Classic game 'Elite' returns … on Kickstarter

Re: Risky kickstarter

It's touch-and-go for me, too, particularly given that Braben's last major project (The Outsider, itself heralded by the BBC) seems to now be firmly filed under vapourware. They're welcome to fritter away their own time/money, but I'd rather they were more productive when working on my dollar (pound).

Still, I'm excited at the prospect - however my donation is likely to be a significant percentage smaller than if I thought it had a cat in hell's chance of being delivered.

Nobody knows what to call Microsoft's ex-Metro UI

Metro is also still pretty pervasive in the official Windows 8 UX Guidelines (available as a PDF download at the top of this page) which refers to "Metro style apps" throughout.

The Interface Formerly Known As Metro

Am I destined never to get credit for that? :( cf. 14 August 2012

Google upgrades Gmail interface, now less 'drafty'

Re: How do i turn it off?

Start a new email, click the "More" down-arrow in the bottom-right of the compose pane, and select "Switch back to old compose".

I don't like it either, I don't understand what problem they're trying to solve. There's already an "In new window" button when composing mail, which will allow you to compose your mail in a popup window whilst you do whatever you damn well please with the rest of your display.

Hurricane Sandy blows away Gizmodo, HuffPo, various other blogs

United Nations website offline too

Down for everyone. Conspiracy theories about the hurricane being a man-made weather weapon, like a bad S(ci|y)-F(i|y) Channel movie?

N00bs vs Windows 8: We lock six people in a room with new OS

Windows® 8™ TIFKAM™

Bah, I knew I should've trademarked TIFKAM when I coined it. (It's my second biggest contribution to the English language, after I managed to get Boris Johnson's "BoJo" nickname to stick on his Wikipedia page some years ago.)

Presumably, Miss 8's "hard to get the mouse into the corners" was primarily as a result of running in a virtual machine, as a physical machine will resist the pointer at the corners; still, more empirical evidence that the decision to remove the on-screen Start button was pure unadulterated bonkers.

FISH IN SPAAACE: New 'nauts and piscine pals head for Xmas on ISS

They're clearly...

codmonauts

Dishonored game review

So it does get better then?

So far I've only played through the opening section, up to the first encounter with the Observer (which appeared to involve a Half-Life Xen-style platform section, only this time with magic powers that appear to cut out randomly mid-jump). Much as I want to be sucked in, it hasn't happened for me yet.

Playing the Xbox 360 version with the game installed to the hard drive, the graphics are bordering on terrible at times. Sometimes you'll randomly get stuck with low-res textures, particularly after a reload; you'll be standing directly in front of a wall that's covered in signs/posters and the whole thing will be completely pixellated.

The stealth element seems very touch-and-go, in the opening mission it was hard to tell what guards were reacting to (how far can they see in darkness? how slowly do you have to sneak behind them before they hear your footsteps?) - though it looks like you can earn upgrades which allow you to see how detectable you are, so that might be some help.

And now the Observer has given me... a heart? Something to do with detecting treasure/upgrades? I really want to like this game, but how much further do I have to go before I get to the interesting missions that all the reviews have spoken about?

Oracle offers tiny tools for pint-sized Java devices

Not on Adama's ship

Everyone knows you don't network the frakkin' toasters.

Apple threatens to ruin peace worldwide with voice-controlled iMacs

Re: Old Joke

Or, to expand on the article subtitle:

"Siri, delete my coworker's files"

> searching for Mike O'Worker...

Apple to launch streaming online radio service?

Re: death of app's [sic]

"natural language sets it's own direction"

I hope that was irony. I fear that it wasn't / was not.

Mio Spirit 695 LM satnav review

Re: No thanks, never a Mio again

For relatively small-name players like Mio, you also need to bear in mind that "lifetime updates" are "updates for as long as the company continues to exist / feels like supporting this".

Re: fastest

Yes, that's decidedly odd. My guess is that it's the "fastest" route in ideal road conditions (because it's the M25) but that the actual time shown is accounting for the current traffic on the road (because it's the M25).

Visual Studio 2012: 50 Shades of Grey by Microsoft

Re: So, from the title...

It keeps violently f*cking you, but you keep going back for more.

Nokia hails hacks for New York Lumia WinPho gig

Blurred-out venue?

Maybe they planned to use the Hotel Metro...

Windows 8: Microsoft's tablet-desktop still painful to swallow

I can't believe the shutdown function made it through usability testing, knowing how much Microsoft does.

The most palatable methods seem to be:

1. Ctrl-Alt-Delete, and click the Power button in the bottom-right of the lock screen

2. Use Win-R to open the Run prompt, and run shutdown -f -s -t 0 (or create a desktop batch file to do the same thing)

3. Use the physical power button on your machine (you can teach Windows to do a graceful shutdown for this via Control Panel > Power Options > "Choose what the power buttons do")

I'd love to see some Microsoft metrics which state which of these methods is used most often, and how that compares to the magic invisible charm menus.

Don't get sued or cuffed on Twitter: Read these top 10 pitfalls

Re: Twitter is for twits

That works pretty well if you take "privacy," out of that sentence too.

Windows 8: Download it, then speak YOUR brains

Re: How long does it last?

The Developer/Consumer Previews time-out on 15 January 2013. The Release Preview will time-out on 16 January 2013.

Whether you feel able to use the preview until then, that's another story... sounds an awful long time to me.

Re: trying it now

You probably should've waited a day - currently there's only a Release Preview available, the final (RTM) version is being released to MSDN/TechNet tomorrow.

I've been using the Release Preview in a VM with limited success - mostly because VirtualBox isn't brilliantly compatible with Win8 yet (guest tools are flaky, and - even with 4GB guest / 8GB host RAM - it chugs like a mofo when switching in/out of The Interface Formerly Known As Metro). Dual-booting may be a stabler alternative, though like you, I'd rather not have its ungodly juices dipped too deep into my system.

Ten... console games you may have missed

In fairness, Dark Souls was released on consoles last year, rather than Q2 2012.

Spec Ops was much better than it had any right to be. Ignore the "just another FPS" trailer, it has a surprisingly deep story and a superb ending. There's a multiplayer mode too, but meh, and importantly none of the game's achievements/trophies are tied to multiplayer, so you can ignore it altogether (like I did).

Virgin Media staves off cable punter seepage

Re: The next quarter will be worse

Same here. As recently as last month, it was advertised as "August". It's now "between December 2012 and May 2013", which is about the same as saying "fuck knows".

BIG BOOBS banished from Linux kernel

Re: Bootnote

Also - and it's only my quest for journalistic accuracy which makes me bring this up - Brian McFadden was in Westlife, not Boyzone. *shifts uncomfortably* Can we get back to talking about boobs, quickly?

Gamer fails STAM roll, dies after 40-hour Diablo III stretch

Re: Died of shock

Hour #1: "The servers are busy at this time. Please try again later (error 37)"

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Hour #39: Logged in!

Hour #40: RIP

Microsoft to announce new Office version on Monday

It'll follow the Windows 8 trend

They'll get rid of the Save button, as they've noticed their sample of power-users prefer to press Ctrl-S, and their younger demographic doesn't understand the significance of the floppy disc symbol.

I would use the Joke Alert icon, but a nagging part of me thinks this might actually happen