Posts by Mark #255 463 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
In the UK, the Ordnance Survey's OS Locate app tells you your location, in the National Grid system (you can set it to 6, 8, or 10 digit precision).
Doesn't need a data connection.
Where is the I'd-rather-not-bet-my-life-on-a-foreign-corporation's-proprietary-algorithm-in-an-emergency icon, anyway?
Interestingly (in England), if a student habitually "writes" everything using a laptop in their lessons, they don't even need an official diagnosis of dyslexia to be able to use the same system of working in their exams (GCSE and A-level).
If the school can demonstrate that extra time is needed in exams (generally by doing a mock exam, and getting the student to switch (pen/font) colour at the end of the standard allotted time), then 25% extra time is available.
The school's SENCO should be able to help, if anyone's in this situation.
I recall my university had rooms of PCs (this would be '95 or '96) which had no local hard drive, everything was done over the network.
Given that we were stringing our own PCs together via ribbon cable between parallel ports for Duke Nukem, this was serious voodoo.
...and when you click that "End Subscription" button, you get a page saying how sorry they will be too lose you, pointing out all the aspects of the service you'll lose, asking you if you're sure, and at the bottom of the page (off-screen except on the tallest of monitors), a "yes, cancel".
There's then a further page where the highlighted button is "no, lols, I was joking, keep me subscribed", and the pale, barely visible button is the "godsdamnit, just cancel my fscking subscription already".
I've been caught out by per-user NumLock settings before now, when using a laptop that's normally docked with a proper keyboard.
Unplug it, and when you first log in (on the laptop's own keyboard), the login screen uses the machine default setting (without the NumLock on).
Then, after a morning clicking buttons, go for lunch, come back and get "incorrect password" as you try to log in.
I finally worked out that the lock screen applies the user setting. I always have the NumLock on. But that switches to use the "alternative" (they were blue) values overlaid on the not-enough-keys laptop keyboard - so the right hand of the keyboard was mostly numbers.
Friends were, "Oh Paris, how glamorous!"
Been there, done that.
Three days training in a hotel in Cap d'Ail (literally, cross the road and you were in Monaco), out of season.
Spent a day either side sitting in airports for the only connection of the day.
At least the weather was clement, but that was the only positive.
Amazon still use all the dark patterns in the book to minimise cancellations...
There really should be a "it shall take as many 'are you sure' pages/dialogue boxes/etc to sign up to a service as it does to cancel" law. Can you imagine?
Are you sure you want to sign up? [Sign up]
Think of all the things you could be missing out on by signing up to this service... Click here to continue...
[The actual button to sign up is not on-screen when the page loads, you'll need to scroll down to actually sign up. If you don't click the button, we won't sign you up.]
For the past month or so, my car has displayed a "Service Vehicle Soon" pop-up on the info screen.
Fine, it was going in for a service.
Today, I find that the message actually means something has gone wrong with the car and you should take it to a garage.
To add insult to injury, the garage weren't, by default, going to actually investigate the issue.
Sodding Vauxhalls and sodding Vauxhall dealers.
And the main complaint about Windows is the need to update out of the box?
No, the complaint about Windows is that updating takes so damned long. The last laptop I got with Windows on took about a day to be usable.
In comparison, I updated my desktop from 18.04 to 22.04 (via 20.04) in about 2 hours (and that's mainly because I have quite leisurely broadband).
> * How do you know what it depends upon?Mozilla wrote and compiled Firefox, if they don't know what it depends on how did they compile it? Everything it depends on (libraries etc.) should be in the tarball, with all dependencies relative to the executable ( ../lib for example),
...and then, when a security vulnerability is discovered in a library that a dozen apps installed by tarball use, I get to update them all?
Seriously?
You've just re-invented downloading Windows apps off the Intarwebs.
Package managers are one of the things I love about Linux - I don't have to faff about with ensuring everything's up to date.
On the other hand...
Anker have issued a recall, with enough information so that I can check whether the Anker power bank I got was affected.
If it had been a KAVNEOALDJGT "brand" on Amazon (or VEIJOAWEB, or OAWIEHBKG), would the mfr have cared, would the authorities managed to join the dots?
(Icon just because...)
I guess it depends what else is installed.
I got an upgrade last year, from a dual core 7th gen i5 with 8GB of ram, which had become unusable due to the amount of enterprise crud that the IT department had larded onto it.
Once it had been released to me, a fresh install of Windows 10 without 14 different enterprise-grade pRoTeCt_ThE_CoMpUtEr applications running meant that it's still surprisingly usable.
It's not massively clear from the video, but the laser beam guides the strike towards the tower (since a big metal structure has a much lower impedance than a thin ionised pathway through the air).
This protects the laser and the focusing telescope (they called it a telescope, so I will too) as the current gets diverted away from the ionised path running down to the big ol' death ray machine.
In lightning strikes, there's typically a "small" strike from cloud to earth followed milliseconds later by a "big" return stroke. All the things affected by lightning don't really care which way the electrons are running, just that there's so many of them.
Wayland [...] seems to focus on high refresh rates and banishing display artifacts such as tearing
Just about the only thing keeping me on Windows on my own PCs is gaming*, so this type of work is important if Linux is to be a no-brainer platform to support for devs.
*and if I want to play Fortnite with my son & nephews, then Windows is required
#1: A courtesy car that was an automatic(!) Micra - I couldn't get it out of Park, so had to walk back into the garage/dealership and ask how to make it go.
#2: An oversized (for the UK anyway) 4x4 hire car, that needed refueling, but could I find the fuel cover release? In the end I had to read the manual to find it was on the driver's door, but at shin height.
You're amusingly/worryingly wrong.
At higher frequencies, current tends to concentrate at the surface of a conductor*. This leads to an effective higher conductor resistance and consequent lower current and power handling capabilities.
* This is why multi-strand conductors are better than solid ones for high frequency currents, because there's relatively more surface area. But if you want to transfer power, low frequency is better.
There was, back in the 90s, a copy "protection" annoyance comprising a booklet of short codes. When you started the game it would ask for a random code (page 5, column 3, number 19). The booklet was printed as glossy black ink on matte black paper.
We were so annoyed by this that we sat and typed them out.
Yes and no.
Phonics helps a lot of children to read, but certainly not all of them. Some children just don't learn in the same way as the others.
It wasn't until the "phonics first, fast, and only" strategy was imposed by the DfE that it mattered. Prior to that, phonics was a major tool used by EYFS teachers, but if it wasn't helping a particular child, another method could be used to help them.
And of course, it then turned out that the only phonics scheme that got approval was the one run by folks with links to the people approving the scheme.
If you don't mind me asking, what are the parents doing allowing kiddies under 15 to access the internet full stop?
In case it escaped your attention, for large swathes of 2020 and some of 2021, a significant proportion of schoolchildren needed internet access to log into their lessons.
If you were coming from a "typewriter" world, you're responsible for CR/LF.
And carriage return isn't simply 0x0D, it's a huge lever, on the left of the Carriage (the part of the typewriter that contains the platen [the roller that the paper is wrapped around]).
A typist might well look on the left hand side of the keyboard for the Carriage Return, see the tab, and decide that that's the right button. Which it was, right up until it wasn't.
Knowing a few safety engineers, I suspect that the voltage specification is absolutely intended: if your device is going to operate at 50V and supply 5A, it absolutely ought to be undergoing safety testing.
(As an aside, CE safety standards derive from the IEC, and national deviations tend to arise from historical differences)
Evidently, your CVD is quite mild.
Traffic lights significantly don't rely on colour alone: red is at the top, green is at the bottom.
I'm also red/green deficient, and red/green LEDs are indistinguishable for me: I didn't even realise that the battery chargers* had them. And I've surprised a number of people at work, asking them to check on the colour of a wire sleeve so I don't solder my electronics wrong.
* If you're designing/specifying a status LED for a charger, do what Nikon, and DeWalt, (and many others), do, and have a slow blink signifying charging, and steady to show it's finished.
Me, personally, I would not be happy *at all* if I had to reinstall my OS from scratch every year or two; I would regard that as an unacceptable cost of ownership, even of something free.
Absolutely. My two* Ubuntu installs are on 18.04; when 22.04.1 comes out in autumn, and that LTS is considered stable enough to offer it up to people wanting to upgrade from 20.04, that is when I'll be gritting my teeth and upgrading.
* One of them started out running on an AMD Athlon II X2-270, and had a tablecloth-pulling upgrade to Ryzen; the desktop background for the other has a stylised Pangolin.
And why no get_off_my_lawn.png icon?
having endured, for many years, a much less sophisticated set-up (i.e. applications by email, then phoning on the day to actually get the number switched over, making sure you were plugging into a telephony rather than a LAN socket), we were absolutely gobsmacked when we found that the new phones knew what their number was, and to keep your number when your desk was rearranged (always by TPTB), you just plugged *your* phone into a new LAN socket (any! socket!)
I've recently begun enabling 2FA on a couple of accounts, and, while some bits are quite whizzy (point your phone at the QR code - woo), the recommended steps for ensuring you can still get into your account if your Authenticating Device is lost/stolen/rendered obsolete are somewhere on the "no normal person is going to do this" scale (I do fully accept that I'm not normal).
"Here's a bunch of codes: print them out and keep them safe" seems no more workable than "write the password on the back of an old business card and keep it in the box-o'-passwords"
When we were discussing a remortgage (~10 years ago) with a building society, we asked about the huge hike in interest rates above 70-80% loan-to-value, and were told that, in the event of a repossession, the building society would not expect more than that to be realised due to desperate soon-to-be-evictees stripping the house bare.
Earlier this week, I read this Smithsonian Magazine article about Steinmetz, which includes the same story (with slightly different numbers).
Definitely worth a read with a relaxing post-work beverage
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