Posts by Mark #255 492 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
I bought a pair of nice B&W speakers, and a NAD amplifier, in 1993 (ish). The set-up still provides the sound in our lounge, with a TV, RPi/MoodeAudio and an HTPC plugged into it.
Not going anywhere near anything smart that becomes dumb when the server's owner decides so.
"Linux would have prevented this!" literally true because my former colleague KP Singh wrote a kernel security module that lets EDR implementations load ebpf into the kernel to monitor and act on security hooks and Crowdstrike now uses that rather than requiring its own kernel module that would otherwise absolutely have allowed this to happen, so everyone please say thank you to him
The code did arrive for me, but I was struck by how difficult a process it was: notice the notification, realise that there was a route to object, find that the link didn't work on mobile, think up an objection, remember the email address I'd given them, get the code, enter the code. (Possibly the email address you'd given didn't match what they already had.)
Almost as if they were intent on making the opt-out process as difficult (and brittle) as possible
Sure, but have you seen what the internet looks like these days without an ad blocker. It is completely unusable.
I occasionally get to see friends and colleagues browse to something they want to show me, through an unfiltered browser. I'm flinching, but they're oblivious.
I've gently suggested uBlock Origin (to no avail); maybe it's like kerning, where it's only once uneven letter spacing has been pointed out to you do you start noticing it everywhere...
The last PC I built (Ryzen 5500, so quite recent) really surprised me when I did the first power-up (case open, obviously) and was rewarded with a cycling RGB LED lightshow from the motherboard! I'd overlooked that line of the spec sheet. Since it was going into a windowless case, I looked for the off setting in the BIOS.
I'm looking at the Win10 start menu. It has an alphabetic list of programs (some in folders), it has a configurable space where you can group stuff to your heart's content, and if you start typing it searches for you.
The annoying thing about search is that it's hard to confine the search space to the PC (and they keep changing the sodding registry key), but, having just used a Windows 7 PC the other week, the Windows 10 start menu is much improved.
I promise I'm not trying to start a "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch...
I worked for a university a few years ago, and erroneously got put on a "this person has left, begin $LIST_OF_IT_ACTIONS" list at one point.
Fortunately(!), the first of these actions was to tell me I had 48 hours to save any emails I wanted to since that was how long I had before BIG RED BUTTON time.
Afterwards, they said that part of it was ensuring that foo@[uni].ac.uk addresses weren't abused by folk pretending to be still academic-adjacent.
I remember giving up trying to claim the Pandemic/WfH allowance for office equipment after the 4th or 5th not-quite-in-agreement gov.uk web page telling me how simple it was.
And further back, we gave up trying to get tax relief on childcare because step one was, effectively, "specify how much you'll spend on childcare in the next year - no conferring!"
As you note, sending a varying signal down the track (instead of a static level) allows you to distinguish between <<no train>> and <<train but also interference>>.
Railway signal engineers also had this thought, which is why there are several different types of track circuit which use different frequencies and modulation schemes, none of which suffer from this particular (and known) failure mode that does affect DC track circuits.
The heart of the complaint is that Meta is tracking people, and offers to not do it for a fee; not that charging for a service provided is wrong.
Meta are absolutely within their rights to offer an ad-free experience with a subscription; but that should not be tied to the tracking of their users
This seems like it's your ISP's "all the naughty bits of the internet" content filtering, which would redirect an http:// URL to a block-page, but croaks on an https:// one.
Certainly, BT's acts in this way (it's not like https URLs have been ubiquitous for several years, or anything like that)
Having reached an age wherein I have run out of fucks to give about how I'm perceived, I now loudly decry red/green combos as an accessibility failure (because I'm colour-blind), with the back-up argument of "what if it's printed in black and white?".
Red/amber/[yellow]/white are the colours to use, with solid/dashed/[dotted]/no borders
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.
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