Posts by Mark #255 528 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
The most recent ham/spam mix-up I had was when I submitted a ticket to my email hosting provider. Google decided that the emails from the provider's ticketing system were spam, and it took me a few hours to realise where the messages were going, and that my issue was being fixed.
Back when my wife was a teacher, stapling was needed in batches of 30+. And the required automation wasn't the stapler scurrying to the middle of the desk, under the harsh glare of the fluorescent tubes, but doing the actual stapling.
She had a battery-powered motorised stapler, which didn't need an internet connection, or cameras/microphones to stalk, erm, monetise, erm allow the Benevolent AI Overlords to seamlessly assist you for a not-at-all-eyewatering monthly fee (24 month contract terms apply)
I can only comment as a patient, but being able to send a message through the NHS app to our GP surgery has made getting medical help so much easier for me.
I can think, and set out in writing what the problem is, what I've tried, what I'd like to happen, when I'm free, etc.
And at some point later in the day my phone goes *ping* with an appointment, or a prescription, or a doctor phones me for a discussion.
Clearly, it's going to be more useful for some things than others, but if I'm not cluttering up the waiting room/car park for a "meeting that could have been remote/an email", this helps everyone else too.
Reading the preprint, after the LLM has failed to provide a rhyming word, it is asked if "out" rhymes with "soft", and it correctly identifies that it doesn't.
So no, the LLM can correctly indicate whether words rhyme, but it can't string together a correctly rhyming stanza.
absolutely, I say they should publish a silent album from 1000 artists. That'll make the news.
What?
LibreOffice for Macs is absolutely available.
You can even pay £9 to get it from Apple's app store.
As for iPads, there's Collabora Office. Their Android version is fine.
Mitigations are available, though. I can display it on a big 4k TV for planning purposes. And in the field, my phone* has several advantages over a paper map: it's more weatherproof, it doesn't blow away in a gale, and it has a very useful you-are-here dot.
* BTW, it's really hard to get a phone screen under 6 inches - the last one I had measuring 4 inches was from 2011!
A few years ago I was driving a hired Passat, with a fancy-pants "smart" cruise control which was supposedly linked to a front-facing camera that could read speed limit signs, but clearly had a "back-up" database, woefully out of date.
One section of road had been changed from derestricted to 40 about 10 years before. The Passat got to that point and deployed the loud pedal, despite the 40 repeater sign and the stream of cars in front of me.
We have half a dozen rugged Dell laptops (carry handle, corner protection, and IP-enough to survive an English shower), from around 2017. They're all still perfectly functional, but only one is young enough to meet Win11 requirements.
I can't see the request to spend ~£10k replacing the five older ones going down well...
I have vague memories of a novel (possibly Alistair MacLean?) where the protagonist had a fall while rock climbing, and ended up dangling in free air at the end of the rope, due to an overhang. He boot-strapped back up the rope to eventually regain the cliff face to continue his climb.
A while ago Audi would sell you an e-tron with cameras instead of wing mirrors, but I haven't seen them recently.
Many HGVs on the roads in the UK have tiny wing cameras instead of mirrors.
Having done several trips to the tip (sorry, Household Waste Recycling Centre) last week with the rear view through the car blocked by a huge bag of brambles etc, it was slightly surprising how much I missed being able to see behind me.
I checked our Kobo account, it now stands at over 500 titles; we don't have enough space in the house for the extra bookshelves that would be required.
Fortunately there are certain Calibre plugins that enable one to ensure there's a local copy available, should anything untoward happen to the Other Entity's Servers that provide the convenience...
Some map software on phones/tablets is excellent, away from Google.
OSMand+ is amazing (over a decade ago I bought both the software and its contour plugin in a sale for about £12.
It shows you contours and/or hillshading; you can plan routes (with on-device path-finding) just by tapping points along the way, then export GPX files to a smart watch, or use them on the phone.
About 10 years ago I climbed Ben Nevis and found it invaluable; even though it was June, there was snow at the top, and then low cloud meant that visibility was maybe 15m, so the last section to the summit was phone out, making sure I didn't stray from the (invisible) path.
And last year, building up to my first 100km cycle ride, it was incredibly useful to be able to plot a series of steadily lengthening cycle routes, send them to my watch, and have the Garmin software on the phone call out directions from the bottom of the handlebar bag.
The issue I have with HMD's output is its approach to what it thinks should be running on your phone/tablet.
I have an HMD tablet, and SWMBO has a phone, and Signal, and media apps get closed/suspended in the background, so messages don't arrive reliably for her, and I can't set an album playing without it cutting out after 10 minutes or so.
And yes, I have changed the battery management setting to the least restrictive mode for all apps mentioned; but HMD [thinks it] knows better.
DVD rot is a thing, and I've lost a couple of discs to it.
It's often a manufacturing issue, so one title I have is notoriously prone: both the original disc and its replacement (bought shrink-wrapped from a reputable place) have visible degradation of the metallic layer.
Fortunately I was able to rip the disc using a solution found online: immerse the disc in a detergent solution, dry it and immediately rip, before the water dries out from the metal layer.
This works because the cause of the DVD rot in this case was a lack of sealing at the edge of the disc; over time, the metal layer corrodes. The detergent solution allows water to penetrate, which (briefly) gives sufficient reflection of the laser beam. However, long-term this just accelerates the rot, hence the requirement to rip the disc: the procedure preserves the data, not the physical disc.
As you say, coverage is very location dependent.
I managed for a month on Smarty at home (4G router in the loft), which could *just* cope with 2 people WFH, but gaming was iffy in the extreme.
Smarty switch off unused SIMs after 8 or 9 months, with reminder emails in good time - I don't know anyone who lets you keep a spare SIM active in a drawer without paying for it.
Fingers crossed that it remains this way.
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.
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