Posts by K.o.R

Vodafone: Be in the office 8 days a month or lose bonuses

Re: Be in the office 8 days a month

They want them to be a Day Tripper quite frequently.

FDA clears Google watch feature to call 911 if you flatline

HEV suit then?

*BEEP BEEP BEEP* Emergency. User death imminent.

Dark mode might be burning more juice than you think

Speaking of dark mode, can we have one for El Reg at some point?

Re: Love the aesthetic, but don't use it...

I use dark mode but it annoys me that the use of colour is so minimal. Dark does not mean grey, people!

See: Windows Phone 8. A lovely dark mode with an accent colour.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Re: thought HandBrake would work

I've only ever seen them used on anime to give the option of English or Japanese credits. There was that one series where all the credits and even the main logo were instead rendered as subtitles for the same reason.

What happens when someone subpoenas Cloudflare to unmask a blogger? This...

So you couldn't be arrested for doing so, but the theatre could throw you out/ban you, and anyone injured as a result of you shouting would have grounds to sue you for damages?

Re: First Amendment

That is an insult to Del Boy.

Microsoft hijacks keyboard shortcut to bring Copilot to your attention

Re: Do they even know what users do or how

I can't actually get a window completely off the screen, but the control menu appears by the taskbar button.

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

Interesting, I thought the prevailing opinion on abolishing the clocks changing was to stay on summer time all year round.

Hold my Pimms! Wimbledon turns to tech for line-ball calls

The players won't have any challenges then? Since you'd be asking the kit to verify, er, itself.

BOFH: AI consultant rapidly transitioned to new role as automotive surface consultant

This boss barely bats an eye at casual murder. Probably how he's survived so long and intends to keep doing so.

SpaceX grounded after fumbling Falcon 9 landing for first time in years

I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle.

Microsoft sends Windows Control Panel to tech graveyard

Those options are on the View tab of an Explorer window. If you have the ribbon hidden then yes it requires clicking View each time.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

The "Crowdstrike Falcon Malware scan" option in the right-click menu is so obnoxious. With an icon too!

HDMI Forum 'blocks AMD open sourcing its 2.1 drivers'

Re: I was amazed…

The Wiki article for that has a delightful picture.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Wollmilchsau.png

Closure of Windows 10 upgrade path still catching users by surprise

I thought once you'd activated on a given motherboard it was stored and reinstalling Windows on the same motherboard would automatically reactivate? Tying the license to your MS account was only if you wanted to transfer to a new system?

University chops students' Microsoft 365 storage to 20GB

Re: 20GB?

"Please can I have more storage?"

"Okay" >clickety< "You now have 4MB free."

"So I have 8MB total?"

"No, you have 4MB total."

"Wait wha—" >hangs up<

Microsoft pulls the plug on WordPad, the world's least favorite text editor

Re: EOL characters

> managed with Unix newlines

That reminded me of the most likely scenario of me using WordPad: "This file is too big for Notepad to open. Would you like to try opening it in WordPad instead?"

Windows boss takes on taskbar turmoil, pledges to 'make Start menu great again'

Re: Typing in the start menu

For me it was going to a Windows 7 machine and the Windows key+X menu not being there.

Shock horror – and there goes the network neighborhood

Re: That cat again...

"Enough room to swing a cat in, as long as it was a reasonably patient cat and didn't mind several nasty whacks about the head."

Hacking a Foosball table scored an own goal for naughty engineers

We had at various times a pool table and foosball table at my workplace. They weren't pay-for, I think we owned them outright. Both had rather old unreliable coin mechanisms (set so you didn't need to insert any coins, just push it in to release whenever needed). Over time, the pool table had its coin mech and the tray where the balls ran removed (and a piece of wood to cover the hole, which looked smart enough), and the simple piece of metal that held the balls in the foosball table was flipped over. Both had the effect of potted/scored balls running straight back to the collection area.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

They made a huge mistake when defining everything in terms of metric measurements by not making the inch 2.56mm rather than 2.54. You could go down to 1/256 of an inch without needing any more decimal places. The would have made things much easier, and easier to convert measurements means easier to convert people.

A discounting disaster averted at the expense of one's own employment

Oh no, the computer containing all the fixed information that we haven't actually sent out yet just mysteriously caught fire. What a shame.

Windows 11 Paint: Oh look – rounded corners. And it is prettier... but slightly worse

Re: Screen bloat...

Weird, on my system that only measures ~190px.

Want to check out Windows 11 but don't want to buy a new PC? Here's how to bypass the hardware requirements

I believe you can get a command prompt up at the start of a clean install, then either launch REGEDIT (if it's available) or use REG ADD to make the necessary change.

Seagate UK customer stung by VAT on replacement drive shipped via the Netherlands

I have a standard template e-mail for whenever FedEx charge a handling fee on my incoming package. Works every time.

YouTube axes crowdsourced captioning: Use our buggy speech-to-subtitle code or pay an approved third party

Re: That D&D woman...

Aegisub is the free tool of choice for generating any kind of on-screen text you can imagine.

Don't pay the ransom, mate. Don't even fix a price, say Australia's cyber security bods

Re: Don't pay the ransom.

Got held up at the borderline.

Square peg of modem won't fit into round hole of PC? I saw to it, bloke tells horrified mate

I've cut away the fan grilles on a couple of cases to improve airflow.

I've also bodged together various things mounted on PCI slot covers.

My best work has got to be the combination of 4 hard drives, a metal ruler, some motherboard standoffs, a PCI slot blower fan and some LEGO to mount said drives in a 1U case to make a sort-of massive external HDD.

Google reveals new schedule for 'phasing out support for Chrome Apps across all operating systems'

Re: Codenamed Fugu?

"Poison... poison... tasty fish!"

Re: So, Google is pulling a Microsoft?

Damn right we are!

SpaceX Crew Dragon: Launched and docked. Now, about that splashdown...

Re: weighs 45 pounds

Yeah, I know, but that's the quantity he specified.

Re: weighs 45 pounds

Fifty thousand cubic feet of water.

23. 712. 3. 608. 45. 89. 11. 332. 841. 255. You want more? Cloudflare and pals are streaming 'em live from new RNG API

Huh, and there was me thinking the "lava lamp RNG" was just some bullshit they came up with for that one episode of NCIS: Los Angeles.

JavaScript tells all, which turns out not to be so great for privacy: Side-channel leaks can be exploited to follow you around the interweb

I hate trying to figure out which randomly-named site's scripts is necessary for the site to function correctly. And then enabling one reveals a dozen more, of which one is necessary.

Remember Windows Media Center? Well, the SDK is now on GitHub to be poked at your leisure

Another die-hard WMC fan here. I gave up a couple of major updates back when something utterly borked the thumbnailing process. Maybe it's fixed now, but I don't have the enthusiasm to go back from Kodi (which has its own laundry list of annoyances).

The Reg takes a trip over the New Edge. Mmmm... New Coke with extra fizz

Re: Blocking Auto-Play

I've noticed that too, although the "don't play until tab is clicked" has been around a while. Now I have to start the video manually as well.

How to make people sit up and use 2-factor auth: Show 'em a vid reusing a toothbrush to scrub a toilet – then compare it to password reuse

Re: Wanting to use 2FA is one thing...

PayPal UK is SMS only as far as I can tell.

Banking in 2019: Sure, we'd recommend TSB's online, mobe banking say cowed customers

5% on £1,500 is a good motivator.

Just wish they'd use a PIN Sentry or whatever equivalent on their online banking.

We asked 100 people to name a backdoored router. You said 'EE's 4GEE HH70'. Our survey says... Top answer!

Gives a new meaning to "brute Force hacking".

Your RSS is grass: Mozilla euthanizes feed reader, Atom code in Firefox browser, claims it's old and unloved

I use Thunderbird to view feeds, but it's a pain because you can't easily set login cookies so sites like Twitter constantly bug me about "this post may contain sensitive information".

Unfortunately I haven't found a better program, though that QuiteRSS looks interesting (I'm not too bothered about the mail capabilities of Thunderbird; Mail is always running in the background anyway).

Office 2019 lumbers to the stage once more as Microsoft promises future releases

Re: Hold on there..

Publisher user here, I love it. I'm pretty sure that it hasn't actually had a new useful feature in donkey's years, but if that just means I can keep an old version around to work on its file type then so be it. It all gets exported to PDF in the end anyway.

Nvidia promises to shift graphics grunt work to the cloud, for a price

Re: latency down to a blazing 3ms

Reminds me of the 500-mile email.

Official: Google Chrome 69 kills off the World Wide Web (in URLs)

Re: Leads to more lack of understanding

Displaying extensions (and hidden files) is on the View tab of Explorer's ribbon as well.

Microsoft gives Windows 10 a name, throws folks a bone

Re: What's this Silverlight thing?

@Norman: Ah, yes I had seen that, but I ran into a different issue because WSUS doesn't seem to like letting me add features in that way (see also: JP IME dictionaries and such). I'll give it another go though, as I may have solved that but forgotten that it was applicable to this issue too.

(Unless they've updated it, I still need to go through a PDF printer to make XPS into PDF though. Oy.)

(My comment was referring to how Silverlight is to Flash as XPS is to PDF, not why LO can't open them; I hadn't even considered trying that)

Re: What's this Silverlight thing?

On a related note, I've recently had to deal with people sending me proofs of payment... as XPS files. Which would be fine except none of the Windows 10 apps can read the damn things anymore.

Whoever decided that deprecated apps (Reader) are going to be unable to work at all ("Reader is no longer supported. Go screw yourself."), rather than just no longer updated needs shooting with something very pointy.

I have to send them to our one remaining W7 machine to convert them to PDF.

Virgin spaceplane makes maiden rocket-powered flight

Formatting

Only the word "Unity" should be italicised as VSS is not part of the ship's name; compare HMS Invincible, USS Enterprise, VSS Unity.

It's 2018 and… wow, you're still using Firefox? All right then, patch these horrid bugs

@phuzz Re: Dear Mozilla, there's more to life than security

Because of course they are. It's not like MSI GP deployment is easy and just works, is it?

Office is the real PITA for deployment. Maybe MDT can do something useful for it.

Re: @K.o.R Dear Mozilla, there's more to life than security

Yes, hence my use of the word "official". Frontmotion's is the one I do use.

Re: Dear Mozilla, there's more to life than security

How about an official MSI package?