Posts by Ol'Peculier

Android 11 Beta 1 leaks on to handful of handsets days after official release postponed

I can already access my cards with a long press of the power button, which also pulls up a menu to screenshot, emergency and power down or restart

Ofcom waves DAB radio licences under local broadcasters' noses as FM switchoff debate smoulders again

Making your mind up

That's ironic, our local community radio station handed back their DAB licence and has just been given the necessary permissions to start broadcasting on FM

Real-time tragedy: Dumb deletion leaves librarian red-faced and fails to nix teenage kicks on the school network

Oh for Bob's sake... I meant Oook, obviously!

Look.

Absolutely everyone loves video conferencing these days. Some perhaps a bit too much

Re: Paris...

Oh Bob, really? I was looking (before the madness kicked in) at a flight to Madagascar that had an overnight layover in CDG.

It can't be that bad... can it?

How many days of carefree wiping do you have left before life starts to look genuinely apocalyptic? Let's find out

I went to my local Morrisons last night and can only have four of any one alcohol product, so am limited to four bottles per brand. They stock a lot of stuff I don't like, so only left with 6 bottles. Yet if I'm a Corona/Stella/Carling/Guinness etc. drinker I can buy four cases. Discrimination against real ale drinkers I say!

It's not the end of the world, and the staff there are coping remarkably well.

Grab a towel and pour yourself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster because The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is 42

Was anybody at the event at the British library yesterday? Fantastic way to spend an afternoon in the company who knew and worked with Douglas, finishing with a cast reading of the second radio episode by people who had starred on the radio, TV and stage shows. Jon Culshaw was even wearing the original dressing gown!

So was anybody at the British library event yesterday? A fun afternoon with a finale of the second episode been read by people who played on the original radio, TV, and stage shows (the rainbow and also the recent your) Was a fantastic way to spend the day. I'll do a proper review of required when I'm in front of a proper keyboard

All that Samsung users found on UK website after weird Find my Mobile push notification was... other people's details

Not just phones, as people are noting. My S5e tablet got the notification, I wasn't aware it even had Find my Phone on it.

Aw, look. The UK is still trying really hard to be the 'safest place to be online in the world'

I can never hear or read "the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport" without putting the long pause in between media & sport from W1A...

Not call, dude: UK govt says guaranteed surcharge-free EU roaming will end after Brexit transition period. Brits left at the mercy of networks

I simply don't see it happening. It's a sure way of loosing customers to a network that continues to allow it.

And EE, who I'm with, also include roaming in Canada, the US, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand so would be a bit bizarre if they decided to shutter it in the EU.

The Foot of Cupid emits final burst of flatulence in honour of fallen Python Terry Jones

I saw him at the Cheltenham literature festival in 2014 on a panel talking about a new book about Douglas Adams and it was so sad to see him struggle. Such a sad loss.

2 more degrees and it's lights out: Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix's toasty mobile bit barn

I bet one of the countries he wouldn't mention is Azerbaijan, I went there for the race last year and EE was tempting me with 5MB of roaming data for £36.

Anyway, I love reading about the stuff that goes on behind the scenes in F1, so more of the same please! I do remember a few years ago Red Bull were advertising for an IT position, with the added bonus of moonlighting as the rear jack man as well.

ACLU sues America's border cops: Tell us everything about these secret search teams targeting travelers

I totally agree. I'm lucky to have some good friends scattered across the US and it's because of them I'm "happy" to endure the immigration process.

And @Michael Wojcik, the Skyline we ordered from was in Oxford...

I've visited the US half a dozen and absolutely hate the immigration theatre. Once I was doing San Francisco to New York by train and road and was asked to name every state I was going to visit.

After saying that, last year I flew into a much smaller airport (Cincinnati Kentucky) and the process was very straightforward, but maybe because I came down from Canada on a regional jet with only about 90 seats so there was a lot less people to process.

And to think the ESTA charge is ostensibly used to promote tourism into the US.

Where's our data, Google? Chrome 79 update 'a catastrophe' for Android devs with WebView apps

The way I understood it that data was been stored whilst the device was without an internet connection, and would be uploaded once a connection was available, so I can't blame the developer here, they were doing what it was intended to do.

Apple tipped to go full wireless by 2021, and you're all still grumbling about a headphone jack

My experience with Bluetooth headphones and video has so far been pretty poor, although that might be down to the processing grunt of my tablet, so to move away from wired headphones would be a very bad thing for me.

Pablo Escobar's brother is Medellín in the foldable phone biz, sniffing out new markets

Can't see it working out, they'll only blow it.

Like a BAT outta hell, Brave browser hits 1.0 with crypto-coin rewards for your fave websites

I've been using Brave for a while, in this time I've apparently had over 330K ads and trackers blocked, 12K HTTPS upgrades and has saved me nealy 5 hours.

It's worth a look, although as the article states the script blocking can bork certain, but not many, sites.

I've had it with these motherflipping eggs on this motherflipping train

Pizza

I was sat waiting for a train to leave Kings Cross when somebody got on with a whole pizza.

I think if he'd offered to sell slices to people that were drooling over the smell he'd have come out with a good profit.

All this reminds me of the trains in Sri Lanka, where hawkers got on at every stop and went round with strange foods. You were never sure what you were eating, but it did taste good!

Re: Making a stink about a.....stink

It's not just farms, Croft motor racing circuit near Darlington got stung by people complaining about the noise, and I think Elvington has had the same problems.

I'm not Boeing anywhere near that: Coder whizz heads off jumbo-sized maintenance snafu

Re: Were you frantically cutting COBOL or adding a crucial extra byte or two to a date field?

Yup, that was me. Getting ready for Y2K. Quoted a shed load of hours to do the job then remembered that parameter. Easy times :)

If there were almost a million computer misuse crimes last year, Action Fraud is only passing 2% of cases to cops

We have a problem with fake sites scraping product content and images from our site and buying expired domains with a fairly recent page rank, so sites like bobsgardensersofsuffolk.co.uk suddenly starts selling clothing.

We get people that have bought our products from these sites and, obviously, they don't arrive so we get asked about them. When trying to talk to Action Fraud about the ability to take these sites down we were told to "contact an IT in order to try and get the site taken down". When we pushed they said "you will have to contact an Independent IT team to see if they can help you somewhere like PC World may be able to assist"

Absolute joke.

Bored and looking for something to do with your fingers? Why not try speed-cubing at a central London pop-up?

A few years ago, walking over a bridge in Central Hong Kong I saw a group of teens sat round a small table with a selection of different cubes (snake, pyramid etc.). They also had a timer similar to those used in chess. It was quite fun to see these guys frantically twisting the things around before hitting the timer.

They are probably trying to break into government buildings now, but hey, different times...

Ebuygumm doesn't break t' Nominet rules, eBay and Gumtree told

There's a shop on Scarborough seafront that is called seabay.com using the eBay font and colours. Amazed they have got away with it for so long...

COBOL: Five little letters that if put on a CV would ensure stable income for many a greybeard coder

I was taught COBOL at my local Technical College as part of my computer studies course. I've yet to write a single line.

On the other hand, I tried to persuade my Dad, who had spent his life mainly writing COBOL applications for am RAF base in the UK to come out of retirement for Y2K. Reckon he could have made a small fortune if he had...

Right-click opens up terrifying vistas of reality and Windows 95 user's frightful position therein

Re: Similar

I was in Cork on a Good Friday once. Not good. Everything, and I mean everything was shut. That was a long day, and we were in the queue on the Saturday morning to make up for it...

Facebook: Remember how we promised we weren’t tracking your location? Psych! Can't believe you fell for that

I upgraded to Android 10 over the weekend, and was frankly astonished about the background permissions some apps had.

They don't now, anthology I feel I have more work to do.

My MacBook Woe: I got up close and personal with city's snatch'n'dash crooks (aka some bastard stole my laptop)

Re: That's horrible.

Years ago I'd been to a match at Newcastle and had taken a 200 1.8L box to use as a seat whilst inside the ground. We left in a hurry before the end of the game and in the rush to chuck our gear into the boot (2 bodies with 600mm F4's and assorted bits and pieces) I left the box on the street behind the car.

Did I mention it had the lens still inside it?

Remarkably, somebody handed it into the police who called the office to say "somebody has handed a large lens in to us that's yours". Boss immediately thought large meant one of the 6's and was quite happy when we realised what we'd left behind. I still wonder to this day how so many people walked past a small box worth the same as a small car without realising..

Take two cornerstones of British life, booze and queues, then squirt them with face scans: AI Bar

Not all bar persons are created equally

But seriously, this does nothing more than what any reasonable quality bar person could do

Unfortunately, those kind of people don't apply for jobs in Wetherspoons, where a system like this could really sort things out. And it seems a country wide issue, as if there is a central pool of people that each pub can choose from.

It's Friday lunchtime on International Beer Day. Bitter hop to it, boss'll be none the weiser

No, nope, nada, not a chance. You couldn't even pay me to drink John Smith's. Theakston's all the way for me, whenever possible.

Spri-Mobile? T-Print? Time to think of a nickname: The Sprint/T-Mobile US merger is go

And meanwhile the USA still haven't got contactless, let alone chip and pin

BOFH: On a sunny day like this one, the concrete dries so much more quickly

Arthur > Ford > Arthur

It's at times like this that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young

Why, what did she tell you?

I don't know, I didn't listen.

Cloudflare gave everyone a 30-minute break from a chunk of the internet yesterday: Here's how they did it

Obligatory quote...

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

Edge-lords crack down on trackers as Microsoft effortlessly kills off PBX phone system, and what's this? Windows Calculator on iOS?

Coverage

Am left wondering why the Beeb decided to remix the coverage whilst the PC was rebooting?

I'm also wondering why the techies didn't just unplug the projector, sort it out and then plug it back in again.

Because they probably needed some - or already had ---->

Must watch: GE's smart light bulb reset process is a masterpiece... of modern techno-insanity

Anybody wonder if the persons other hand was slowly bringing a gun up to their temple and preparing to end all of this madness?

Heathrow Airport drops £50m on CT scanners to help smooth passage through security checks

I have friends there and it was for a meetup of users from a now defunct Douglas Adams forum. I like Cinch, though parking by the river when there is a game on is impossible...

I'm sure I saw something like that when I was going through Cincinnati CVG last year, so it's not new, and that's not a particularly big airport, if you exclude cargo. Looked cool though.

Microsoft Bing is 10: That thing you accidentally use to search for Chrome? Still alive and kicking

Bing maps was good for the birds eye view, I don't know why it was removed from the UK but it was quite useful.

Chinese bogeyman gets Huawei with featuring in EE's 5G network launch thanks to bumbling BBC

Re: EE playing the game again

If you think that's bad, I was quoted £36 for 5mb of data from EE when I was in Azerbaijan a few weeks ago.

Zavvi tells customers: You've won VIP tickets to Champions League final! And you've won tickets, and you've won tickets, and you, and...

Re: On the plus side ...

Or have to go and watch a football match.

I'll get me -->

Strong-willed field support op holds it together during painful customer call

Re: Seriously?

Ah, Government Facility. That's what they are calling it nowadays?

Took me ages before I met people that worked here to work out what CSOS stood for...

Google hits brand slam stamping AMP with more crypto glam

For visitors using Chrome on Android – the only mobile browser supporting this at the moment – to websites supported by Cloudflare,

Seems a lot of work for very little reward...

What made a super high-tech home in Victorian England? Hydroelectric witchery, for starters

And about an hours drive south is Allendale, where you can visit the small and brilliant Sci Fi museum, complete with the controversial Dalek shed...

http://www.museumofclassicsci-fi.com/home/4589856996

Boeing... Boeing... Gone: Canada, America finally ground 737 Max jets as they await anti-death-crash software patches

I'm she that in the early 00s, El Reg team a series of stories about a press flight of the 777 that lost altitude she too the two fly by wire systems disagreeing with each other. Something about them both been developed by the same team, rather than two two separate units. Anybody remember this?

Dear Britain's mast-fearing Nimbys: Do you want your phone to work or not?

Knowing nothing about the subject, is there any reason why you can't put a box on top of a wind turbine? I see a few single fans in the Wolds presumably run by the local farmer, so could they be utilised?

Sure, we've got a problem but we don't really want to spend any money on the tech guy you're sending to fix it

I looked at the cost difference between getting from Glasgow and London last year. It worked out slightly cheaper to fly, but the time spent in getting to and from the airports made it easier to get the train.

Did the same from Montreal to Toronto a few years ago. Much easier (and I had a friend meet me at the station to take me to get one of these ---> )

Not so smart after all: A techie's tale of toilet noise horror

As always, if you have a tale to tell and want to lighten your load...

Don't come running to us?