Posts by Stuart Halliday

Goodbye Blighty: The alternative reality of Quatermass II

They're not PD....

Do yourself a favour. Get hold of a good quality DVD.

Quatermass is a brilliant British icon. Let's hope Nigel makes more of this character available for us to enjoy for years to come.

Samsung Galaxy S3 explodes, turns young woman into 'burnt pig'

My own S3 got hot after it dropped off my car phone holder.

I knew about Lithium batteries and their dangers of being dropped or damaged.

So I put the battery in a ceramic pot in the garden. By morning it had bulged dramatically.

After I was satisfied it wasn't going to blow up, I disposed of it correctly.

Don't drop your phone as the crystals inside the battery can cause a short circuit. Common sense. :)

Report: Android malware up 614% as smartphone scams go industrial

I downloaded a photoeditor app last month and as soon as I used it, realised it was stuffed full of ads!

I uninstalled it immediately. But didn't realise I was supposed to power cycle the phone.

The result I got billed for £15 over two premium rate numbers over a week.

Three only could tell me who these two companies were. No money back.... :(

Damn annoyed that I have no control or recourse...

Who's to be the next Dr Who? Sherlock beats Maurice - says you

Sorry. But did no one watch the last episode? ?

It plainly stated that John Hurt was to be the Doctor. Or was everyone asleep?

Motorola shows off tattoo and swallowable password hardware

Re: But 666 is a wonderful number!!

So the serial numbers skip 6,66 or 666...Problem solved.

Re: Users already have fingerprints

Yeah and you'd leave a copy of your 'password' on every surface you touch. So just how many nano seconds did you take to think of this? ;)

With my kind of luck, I'd get serial number 0666666!

Finally – mind-controlled limbs without brain surgery

Re: A question for knowledgeable-in-neuroscience commentards

Because two different people will have very different stumps (each operation will be unique, therefore risky, very specialised and therefore expensive). But this operation can be standardised, made safer, quicker and the price can come down over time.

Another step towards making Cybermen a reality?

Samsung sends gigabit '5G' signal TWO WHOLE KILOMETRES

Heck what is the big deal? I could do that. Just lend me Jordell Bank dish for a day...

UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now

Re: Ominous...

Forget EXIF. You want to use IPTC.

EXIF is for hardware info. IPTC is the meta tag system you need to use.

Re: Excuse me

Put your images on a web site. Make sure archive.org catalogues it and you have a history of your image.

Also do a trick owners of paintings do. Cut off an edge and put that cropped image out there.

Re: Theft

Jpegs and other modern filetypes have the ability to hold metadata within them. It's just few people bother putting their details in them. Of course it's just as easy to wipe it too...

Any decent graphic file viewer will allow you to edit/read this data.

Irfranview is one golden oldie freebie that's been available for years for example.

I am NOT a PC repair man. I will NOT get your iPad working

Alistair,

I can sympathise.

I trained to be a electronic engineer, then after 10 years of fixing PCBs I changed to the IT side of things.

Sometime around 1995 people started finding me 'interesting' at parties.

It was a strange phenomenon I can tell you. Women actually wanted to talk to me!

I no longer felt ashamed at mentioning I can fix electronics and do IT stuff!

I too was taken aback at the slow but increasing traffic to my door over the coming years by my neighbours, relatives and friends as it dawned on them that here was someone who could fix their problems for free!

So I made it known I charge £15 an hour....Amazing how that keeps the annoying ones away. But the genuine needy person still flocks to my door and I get some money to buy new kit once in a while....

:)

Nvidia, Continuum team up to sling Python at GPU coprocessors

So basically a better Minecraft game?

Drones with freakin' CLAWS grab objects like eagles

New way to go fishing?

Otherwise what is the point?

Attention, CIOs: Stop outsourcing or YOU will never retire

I once actually saved a small million pound Law business from a serious IT problem that could have made the company go bust if their hardware had failed.

At one business I worked for my boss had the cheek to tell me to my face that my job doesn't generate any profit for the company. Odd how they forget that as well as keeping them running, I actually saved the company £20,000 on buying volume licences earlier that year...

Been an electronic engineer, followed by computing. So I think I'm pretty damn good with hardware and software. But Plumbers get paid better in the UK and work shorter hours.

Raspberry Pi-powered Tardis blasts off from 'Blighty's Baikonur'

Re: Shut up you incorrect pedants!

Time lords are telepathic or did you forget?

AMD: Star Trek holodecks within reach

No need for all that technology!

Arthur C. Clarke got it right in his book 3001: A Space Odyssey

Wear a full sense-replacement hat. It replaces all your senses with computer created ones.

So you think you're walking when you're not. It shows your brain what it wants to see. Touch and smell are just as simulated.

So you want to walk down a beach in Japan with your mates, then you just all put on one of these hats and you're there. You want your house redecorated? Just tell the hat what colour you want the walls to be...

Cache 'n' carry: What's the best config for your SSD?

Be nice if my C: SSD would cache my image system thumbnail files off my USB Harddrive?

This would speed up my opening of image directories...

Google reveals TAPE-TASTIC data centre in saucy vid

That's a lot of tape cleaners!

I imagine that cute fridge magnets are not welcome either?

VIA bakes a fruitier Rock cake to rival the Brit Raspberry Pi

I'll wait until a wee ARM board comes out capable of USB 3.0 or SATA 3.0 with 1GHz NIC.

Maybe a cute wee 4 core version as well?

Dixons steps over Comet's bloodied body to nab bonus Xmas sales

You should look at what Maplin Electronics retail shop chain is doing in these hard times?

Staff that know their subject and can give unbiased opinions because they're not on commission.

Lots of ways to buy and collect our purchases. A generous 30 day return policy on products bought by mistake.

They're making a profit and opening more shops too...

Sure, they're a tad more expensive than the Internet shops. But they do allow you to get a product immediately from a local shop or delivered within 90 minutes.

I particularly like the way they'll open a sealed product, let you see and play with it. Try asking Argos staff if you can do that!

The amazing magical LED: Has it really been fifty years already?

LED lighting has other properties that are not so obvious.

They can be made in any size and shape. No more are designers limited in trying to hide that old bulb shape with a shade.

The light given off is polarized so the reflected light off objects looks sharoer and travels through fog further than normal bulbs. So in real world tests, places look dirtier and sharper. Wallpaper and interior designers will have a field day making new designs for us to buy!

Being able to dialup a new colour every day from my LED lamp will open up new markets for paint companies as they make new dyes to reflect polarized light in interesting ways.

:)

Re: Overkill?

You're forgetting that LEDs start degrading as soon as they are made.

Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet creator Gerry Anderson dies at 83

Since when is a electromagnetic solenoid called a 'motor'?

Let's try to be a tiny bit more technically accurate lads?

Police use 24/7 power grid recordings to spot doctored audio

Re: Who holds the reference data?

Let's hope they archived it and signed it with a fully independent 3rd party otherwise they should sack their IT staff.

Won't work for large areas of Scotland. We have hydrodynamic power grids fed from water and wind power....

NASA: THE TRUTH about the END OF THE WORLD on 21 Dec

Just tell these idiots that archaeologists found more of their calendar so the World won't end in December.

Oh what do you mean, they actually did? So why don't these idiots recalculate the end of the World?

Help-desk hell

Shark it

Surely everyone here knows about the Shark/pilot fish web site with hundreds of classic stories going back 30-40 years?

For years they've collected the best IT stories and give out free Shark T-Shirts to anyone who gets accepted for publication. I've had 5...

My personal favourite:

Gave customer the finished custom designed program (on 5 1/4" floppies)

Customer phones up next day. "Can't get the disks to work"

We personally go to his Work and ask to see the floppies he was given.

There they were, nicely ring bond, yes with 2 holes punched in them!

Gave him 2 new ones and told him to keep them safe and undamaged.

So he agreed and promptly folded them in front of me and stuffed them in his pocket!

Assault on battery

Re: if i could be arsed

Oh so we should keep a 300W+ computer on overnight just to recharge a tiny set of AAA batteries?

Sun BELCHES twice, mighty plasma loops miss Earth - NASA vid

Ahh the Triffids are just waiting, dormant in orbit, for the World to go blind so they can feast on our flesh.

Well makes a change from the usual Zombie apocalypse.... 8)

Sandy Island does exist - on a 1908 chart

Wait 2 years, some Hollywood exec. is already writing a film script to explain it...

Why do Smart TV UIs suck?

Make it work instantly

Why oh why can't Media Players and Smart TVs just switch to a service instantly?

No, my WDTV Live box has to load the iPlayer or YouTube and it takes 15-20 seconds.

My Mum won't wait, it's broken she'd say and she'd be right!

I've lost the will to live by the time the box has reloaded it 'app'.

I simply don't bother because I know in advance its going to be a chore...

It's just cost cutting removing all that RAM and using low Hz single core CPUs that could be loading in the background when you're watching something.

This is why we need multitasking, lots of RAM and multiprocessors in as standard.

Why I ask is this blindingly obvious feature to us not getting made by TV manufacturers?

BIONIC MAN makes it to top of Chicago skyscraper

Re: The updated version

In the original Steve Austin book we're told about the steel reinforced internal framework and his ability to swim underwater for much longer due to the reduced need for oxygen.

Sadly this never got into the TV series. But nice to know the new series has it. 8)

Samsung posts record profits as Galaxy sales crush Apple

Battery power

Oddly what made me decide to buy a Samsung Galaxy SIII rather than a HTC was nothing that Samsung did.

3rd parties made an extended back to fit a larger battery. My phone now has battery power that allows me to use it at full capacity for a full day!

WHITE WHALE spent 4 years trying to tell us something, then stopped

sing-along?

Well, I can't make out any words from that video....

Amazon's Virginia cloud data center knocked out – again

We know who to blame

Blame the Cleaner. It's always that wee woman/man plugging in their 2000W vacuum cleaner next to the Router!

LASER STRIKES against US planes on the rise

My grumble is people using lasers in the cinema and more seriously in the car behind me!

Ten external battery packs

Re: What, no AAs?

I've made myself a 4xC cell rechargable pack using 6000mAH Ni-Mh hybrid batteries.

They don't discharge over time like normal Ni-Mhs and they output 4.8V which is inside the tolerate for USB 5V

You can use D cells with over 10,000mAH too.

Re: Replaceable batteries

Personally I'd hate to switch off my phone, remove the back and replace the battery then put the back on again and finally powerup my phone again!

The wear and tear on doing this every day would soon break sonething

Why not simply offer the customer a spare backplate that is 2mm thicker and so will accommodate a higher capacity battery for those who want one?

Makes far more sense...?

Re: I feel lost

If your current phone lasts for ~10 hours on a 2000mAH battery then a simple bit of Arithmetic will tell you how long a 5000mAH external battery will last.

5000÷2000=2.5

So 5000mAH will last for 2.5×10 hours plus your orginal battery.

So 35 hours.

Re: amprere hours

Reviewers need to support their readership and start including the battery capacity and power life in their reviews.

This way manufacturers will see it's an important issue to us.

oops

Surprised you don't mention _any_ of the models that Maplin shop sells. Be nice to see reviewed items that I can see in my local shop!

Made for each other: liquid nitrogen and 1,500 ping-pong balls

Plastic bottom of bin gets forced down so it contacts the floor and jumps up. Pretty basic stuff.

Hotel keycard firm issues fixes after Black Hat hacker breaks locks

Someone phone up the NCIS team. They seem to be able to hack into anything within a few minutes...

Re: Free Fix!!!

Surely with over 200 stores throughout the UK I'd consider Maplin a big retail chain?

New MPEG format paves the way for UHDTV

Once upon a time 425 line TV was called HD...

Just remember that...

<shakes a finger>

Flash Player to vanish from Android store on Wednesday

Wow...think of all those adverts we'll not be able to see!

Gonna drive the advertisers wild! ;)

Korean boffins discover secret to quick-charge batteries

Be nice to have consumer batteries for phones, tablets, etc. that charge faster too. But this announcement just means *if* it scales up to industrial level it'll be 10 years before we see it in action sadly.