Posts by BenDwire

Plex appeal fades as Lifetime Pass jumps to $750

Re: Meanwhile

There's already a setting for that: Settings -> Library -> "Video Play Completion Behavior" and change it from the 95% threshold, to the end of the credits.

Yeah, not obvious to me either, but it's there, and probably why requests (by people who don't RTFM) are ignored.

I too bought a pandemic-priced pass for £75, but don't allow any remote access, so I only use it for skipping opening and closing credits. While it still works then I'll keep using it, but I installed Jellyfin in a VM and pointed it at my library, and it worked fine. That's where I'll be going if/when they wreck it.

Microsoft's ancient icon library still lurks deep within Windows 11

Re: For fun

We had a shared machine in the middle of my engineering department which often had the Pipes screensaver showing. The apprentices used to shout "Teapot" every time one appeared, and yet never understood why I berated them for timewasting ... Back then, just staring at a screen while the computer did all the work wasn't considered a useful role. How times have changed ...

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

Re: 5 year old database?

I've still got the Clipper manuals if you need them ... with the disks.

Windows 11 update leaves Blu-ray and TV apps stuttering

Re: Aside from the Q.A. fail...

Pieces of Nine? In my day it was Pieces of Eight. I guess that's inflation for you ... or have tariffs been imposed?

BOFH: These office thefts really take the biscuit

What, you're too bitter to eat them?

Anyhow, you made a typo with "White Chocolate Digestives". Look at the packet properly, they are simply "White Digestives" - No mention of chocolate at all. Look at other offerings - they too are "White" but not "White Chocolate". Look at the ingredients list if you don't believe me - no cocoa = not chocolate.

The whole industry is gaslighting the general public by selling a white palm-oil and sugar mix instead of proper white chocolate. Sorry to have ruined your day, but you'll never eat them again now that you know.

Privacy activists warn digital ID won’t stop small boats – but will enable mass surveillance

Re: The Muppets

Which just goes to show how completly inadequate government computer systems are, being designed by committee and implemented by a cartel of the usual expensive IT suppliers. Politicians seem to implicitly believe the vendor's sales pitches, so they end up implementing a new system to superceed the old defective one ... rinse and repeat. Brown envelopes may or may not be involved ...

1,200 undergrads hung out to dry after jailbreak attack on laundry machines

Re: Laundry machines

And you think that they won't put ads onto the chargers soon? Even worse, they'll probably download onto the car's displays, and be triggered when you're driving near to the burger shop / supermarket / ammo store ...

Your call is very important to us – which is why we're connecting you to a human

If they can't be bothered, then neither can I

My opinion of the AI usage is that I consider any company using it demonstrates that they can’t be bothered to do the work properly. And if they can’t be bothered to provide what I need, then I can’t be bothered to engage with them. I don’t read AI slop ‘articles’. I don’t listen to AI slop music. I don’t use AI chatbots. I simply take my business, and £££, elsewhere. Surely I’m not the only one that thinks like this?

Classic Psion fan releases proof-of-concept language server for OPL

Re: and one of those Sharp pocket computer things?

I've just found my (boxed) Zaurus while clearing out a cupboard in the 'Man Lab'. Hopefully I'll find my (boxed) 5Mx soon, along with its docking cradle.

As I'm soon moving out, maybe I ought to list them on Fleabay?

Whisper it: FFmpeg 8 can now subtitle your videos on the fly

Any hardware recommendations?

I admit that I have no interest in gaming, and therefore don't know much about GPUs. That said, I do use FFMPEG a lot, mainly convering H264 videos to H265 (for reasons, mainly disc space).

So what are the requirements for this use case? Will a £100 Radeon show a marked reduction in encoding time, or do I need to spend £1000 on a higher spec card? I'm a Debian Linux user, so obviously Vulkan 1.3 support is a given, but what else is needed? I assume more £££ = more speed, but as it's doing maths rather than outputting to a screen, I wonder if a lesser card is good enough.

Anyone?

Ebuyer website bought by Fraser Group plc

My supplier of choice back in the day ...

I used them for everything my small business needed, and was very happy with their service over many years. Even once I hit retirement I still used them for consumables, disk drives and cables for my home network. Like many others I will mourn their demise, and move back to Scan or Novatech, who were also good, back in the day.

Tech support team won pay rise for teaching customers how to RTFM

Or PEBCAK

Problem exists between chair and keyboard...

You've reminded me of a comment I posted on a Linux sysadmin forum while trying to set up a file server

"I'm more than willing and capable of RTFM if someone could point out which FM to R"

IMO open-source documentation in general can be a minefield of obsolete, superceded and badly written information. Yes, I try to give back by improving it where possible, but the world moves far quicker than I can type ...

Re: RTFM

Last century I recruited a replacement Manufacturing Manager to work with my design team, and I was so keen to get someone started to help with the workload that I neglected to listen to my inner voices. The guy got the job purely because he attended the same (engineering) university as me, so he must be good. Right? Right?? Of course reality dawned rather quickly, and I was left to work with with someone who was completely hopeless in the real world. Paper qualifications may imply one thing, but actions speak so much louder; He was always asking for help with even the simplest of tasks, and my patience was worn down on a daily hourly basis.

The final straw came on the fateful day when he asked me how to format some superfluous procedural document, to which I simply said "Richard, RTFM"

As I walked out of his office I glanced back and saw him just staring at the keyboard, and then he uttered the words "Which one is the RTFM key?"

I learned a lot that day and have been far more diligent with the recruitment process ever since.

Problem PC had graybeards stumped until trainee rummaged through trash

But do your dogs then fight over the clippings like mine did? We had the farrier round to do the horse's hooves and the dogs went wild for what he cut off. Thankfully they left my feet alone ...

Re: "Hi, this is networks"

Back in the early 1990's, my lunchtime Doom sessions with my design team caused the entire factory network to slow down to a crawl. The BOFH took a while to work out that it was us causing all the problems (made worse as we were in a separate building) but rather than get all stroppy with us, he simply bought a network switch which constrained the IPX traffic to our local subnet. He was a good guy, and we got along just fine after that.

Gadget geeks aghast at guru's geriatric GPU

Re: Oh, Linus is running a recent graphics card!

You VIEW MP3s? Do you see sounds, or have your headphones simply slipped onto the front of your head?

Joking aside, rich people don't get rich by spending money unnecessarily. If everything works for him, then there isn't really a problem.

(Typed on a 2015 Dell Optiplex, with onboard graphics and a very large pension fund, thank you very much)

Servers hated Mondays until techie quit quaffing coffee in their company

Re: Viglen ?

Oddly enough we had a UV eraser and EPROM programmer ( I still do ... ) but the BIOS chips in that PC didn't have a quartz window, but were simply plastic and therefore much cheaper (Technically they were PROMs, but they kept the EPROM part number which made life easier)

Of course back then it would have involved Zmodem / Kermit and a 14400 baud modem to connect to Viglen's own BBS to get the hex files, but that wasn't offered as an option at the time. People these days have no idea just how difficult stuff could be last century!

Viglen ?

Now there's a name I haven't heard in years.

Back in the early 1990's we had one in my engineering department, and for reasons I've long forgotten, it was unable to recognise a replacement (probably larger) hard drive it needed. I recall contacting their support team (possibly by fax) asking for assistance, and to my amazement they said I needed a BIOS upgrade, and they would put the necessary chips in the post, free of charge! Yes kids, the BIOS was in a couple of EPROMs and couldn't be updated by mere software. Once installed, all was well and the new drive was installed with no further issues.

Because of this experience, I regularly recommended Viglen to anyone and everyone who needed a new PC.

I miss the old days; Real support by real humans. Progress, eh?

Oracle VirtualBox licensing tweak lies in wait for the unwary

Re: I stopped using VirtualBox ...

That's exaclty my use case - one odd Epson scanner that only works under Win7 or XP at a push. Life's too short to mess about when my Vbox images still work fine, and they're only used 3-4 times a year.

Re: I stopped using VirtualBox ...

But it's easy enough to get Vbox working with Trixie, as I still use it now and again. There are a few kludges to wrangle, but it works well enough for me.

BOFH: If you can't beat the AI, let it live inside you

Re: Further fitting FYI

Oddly enough I'm currently using one of those as a door-stop in my home office, as the huge cooling fan I have makes the door wobble in the breeze and knock into my filing cabinet.

When the summer temperatures cool down I'll take it to the recycling centre, and by next year I'm sure one of UPS's will have donated another door stop.

‘I nearly died after flying thousands of miles to install a power cord for the NSA’

Vintage Kit from the 1980's

Articles like this really put me in a bad mood when I realise I used to use such "Vintage Kit" as an undergraduate engineer. No wonder my body aches so much, as I'm obviously vintage too.

(In fact I'm so old that I've even seen some of my product designs proudly displayed in museums. Now THAT was a very bad day ...)

Microsoft offers vintage Exchange and Skype server users six more months of security updates

History often repeats itself

That's an interesting choice of end date: The anniversary of when the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg because all that sailed in her thought she was unsinkable.

PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle

Did we go to the same primary school (In the 1960's)? Becasue that's when I last heard that joke!

Eggheads hold science fair on Capitol Hill to decry funding cuts

Re: Titles matter

Oddly enough, I used to meet Heinz Wolff most mornings on my walk into university (well, the ones I actually managed to get out of bed in time). He was one of the lecturers, and always managed a cheery smile and a bit of banter with us undergraduates. I believe the uni has deservedly named a building after him now.

We were lucky to have a range of programs and TV presenters back in the day who made science interesting, and my inspiration came firstly from "How" and latterly from Tomorrow's World. James Burke was simply brilliant at conveying all sorts of rocket science in a very digestable way. A golden age, indeed.

Re: Titles matter

And there was me thinking that the Americanisation of ElReg.com had taken another step. Is the term "Egghead" more of a USAsion thing than "Boffin"? Apart from the TV program, us Brits tend to use "Boffin" more, but I suspect that's a reflection of our childhood comics such as Whizzer & Chips. Now that was a worthwhile read ...

Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time

Re: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

lysdexia rools KO, eh?

For me, at seven years of age, computers didn't really exist outside of NASA or Bletchley Park. I was a 'old' beer-swilling student when I first encounterd a PET at college.

BOFH: Peeling back the layers of the magic banana industrial complex

Re: Finally someone will realise

Surely the Venn diagram depicting El Reg readers, and Red Dwarf watchers would look like the infinity symbol, or Ouroboros. (See what I did there?)

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

Re: all the plastic parts turn to goo

That's not me doing the thumbing down - I don't give a toss about other people's opinions, even if they're wrong ;-)

Try googling if "ethanol attacks carburettors" and you'll see plenty of results that supports my "specious" claim. You'll even find suppliers making replacement parts for old fuel systems, so there must be some truth to it. Or is snake oil still being sold?

As for my own real world experience, I have had two floats collapse and disintegrate in two different carbs. You appear to have tools that were either designed for modern fuels, or used metal instead of plastic. Yet another difference between the USA and Europe I expect.

Vivre la différence

Re: Honestly

They may run for a while, but all the plastic parts turn to goo when bathed in ethanol. And that tends to be terminal.

In general, fuel pipes and injectors on modern engines are made with resistant plastics, but old carbs never had to worry about such things. Briggs & Stratton will even sell you additives, but they're far from ideal. Synthetic fuels are the only realisitic option, if you can afford them.

Re: Honestly

You've reminded me of the cockup made by the transport department at the time. Whilst they successfully argued against changing all the signs to metric on the road network, no-one paid any attention to the fine detail ... and that is why all our waterways now have speed limits in km/h. The company I worked for made a tidy profit supplying new scale plates for all the existing speedometers.

IIRC the same bunch of civil servents allowed ethanol to be added to fuel as no-one used carburettors any more. Try telling that to my lawnmower.

Re: Honestly

I just remember that 28C == 82F which is too hot to work weather. Beer is required on one side of that point, and lots of beers on the other.

Re: Someone else's mistake?

My first thought is to ask if your name is Dave? But as I never confessed to this error to anyone, how could it possibly be you ...

Danish department determined to dump Microsoft

Re: "don't even understand how to use document styles, let alone VBA."

Actually, MS Works was pretty good at doing what it claimed it could do. I was of the opinion that it borrowed heavily from the Apple 2c word processing /spreadsheet and database package that was supplied as part of the OS in the 1980's; my previous employer had a fleet of those around their offices.

In the 1990's I bought a bunch of Dell machines that had Office 95 pre-installed, and again it did everything we needed it to do, and it also made us standardise on it rather than the assortment of disparate products we had scattered about the place. All was good for a time, and then the internet arrived and everything got steadily worse as it became far to easy to provide updates after shipping, instead of properly testing stuff before release. I miss the QA teams of the late 20th century ...

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

I've told this tale before, but it seems worth repeating here ...

I used to take my wedding ring off when working in the HV lab in my R&D department, but forgot to put it back on before I went home one night. It was the final nail in the coffin for my (now ex) wife who accused me of 'obviously' carrying on with someone at work. That fact that I'd actually managed to get a 880V shock while developing a 3 phase syncroscope did nothing to convince her of the dangers I faced every day, in an attempt to fund her lifestyle.

Oh well, it was a blessing in disguise, but I've never worn a wedding ring since!

.... and two brown marks appear in the steel

And the third on the underwear, I suspect.

Need for speed? CityFibre punts 5.5 Gbps symmetrical broadband at ISPs

From my perspective I wish they would speed up the process of lighting up the fibres that have already been laid. We had fibres pulled through to our local junction boxes months ago, but that's it. No mention on theirs or others websites regarding availability, almost as if it doesn't exist.

Surely someone in the company would like to derive some income from their investment, or don't modern telecomms companies work like that any more?

Thankfully my ADSL connection has become less contended due to Virmin Media also supplying my area, but that's not what I want.

Admin brought his drill to work, destroyed disks and crashed a datacenter

Re: The 3 most dangerous things

3 ticks.

I must be 3 times as deadly as everyone else then ...

Odd homage to '2001: A Space Odyssey' sees 'Blue Danube' waltz beamed at Voyager 1

Re: Even 2001 is light years away now

In a similar vein, I included the words to "Daisy Daisy" within the comments to a last-gasp watchdog reset routine. Many years later I was approached by the guy who took over my engineering department after I'd quit, and he thanked me for the belly laugh that gave him during a code review.

Techies thought outside the box. Then the boss decided to take the box away

Re: Shredder

When I ran a small engineering company, I left a box of tissues on the filing cabinet next to the visitor's chair. It was occasionally used by upset employees requesting time off for famliy issues** but came into it's own during appraisal season. After a while, I put a label on it - " HR Department" as that was all we had.

** The usual bereavements the life throws up, but the most unusual was when one production lady's donkey suddenly died. She argued that she had no parents or children like other staff, so should be allowed time off to grieve. She had a point ...

BOFH: The Boss meets the unbearable weight of innovation

Nobody said anything about the crisps being within their sell-by date.

Mmmm! Musty Basement flavoured crisps!

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Bin there and suffered

The Australians get very boisterous about that sort of thing too. And don't start me on yoghurt ...

In a word, Hollywood. Decades of watching 'movies' has made us bilingual...

Re: Whoops

We use the term "Car" for the London underground 'carriages' as the Victorians were influenced by the New York public transport system, and Americans were heavily involved.

Re: Whoops

Back in the day "Are you going to meet me outside for a fag" raised a few eyebrows ...

Re: Surely simpler to stick with correct English

Don't call me Shirley ...

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: So you forgot how your code worked... hold my beer

I had a similar experience when completing a mountain of paperwork for the EU bureaucrats (back in the day). I had set aside a whole day to do the task, and completed it well before home-time. However, when I came to file it away, I found that I'd already done the work a few weeks earlier. I had no memory of doing it at all, despite it being a complete ball-ache to do.

At that point I decided that I was no longer up to the job of running a company, and chose to retire - one of my better decisions!

Ooh! It's beer O'Clock!

Mars may have vast underground oceans and enough H₂O to make it a water world

Re: hmm

Were you referring to "Music for Space Travellers"? "Blue Mars" ?

(Mind you, good luck humming along to it ... )