Posts by Martin an gof

Techie was given strict instructions not to disrupt client. Then he touched one box and the lights went out

Sometimes it really is your own fault

Like the time I kept a few inches of Magnesium ribbon behind after we had cleared the chemistry experiments away, then tried to light it on the one-bar electric fire which was heating what passed for a computer room in that school. Probably good for me that I (assume I) had it touching the properly-grounded metal guard at the moment it also touched the glowing heating element and tripped the power to the whole wing, three classrooms, couple of offices, changing rooms. Yes, for some reason the lights also went off, I was only 14 or so and it was a long time ago so I've never worked out exactly what happened.

And sometimes it isn't. Some years ago we were sitting down to Christmas dinner. Mother-in-law was with us this year. In our house Christmas dinner is sometimes in the evening rather than at mid day, so by now it was dark outside. "Pop" and all the lights went out. Bleeping from the UPS in the computer cupboard. The children just carried on eating, conversation didn't even falter. One of them got up to fetch candles. Mother in law staring at me as if it was my fault. To be fair, I'd just done some major work on the electricals in the house, but a quick glance out of the window proved the whole village was off, and it stayed off for a good few hours until the electricity board managed to plug a generator in. Turns out a tree had brought down a large section of overhead power line.

Not at all an unusual occurrence where we are, hence the children's non-reaction. I think M-i-L blames me to this day though, or at least blames "us" for living in an area where power cuts are part of everyday life.

M.

Singapore eyes barge-based hydrogen power for datacenters

Well, it does depend how you get your Hydrogen. There are schemes in the planning stage I believe where offshore windfarms would channel excess electricity at times of high wind / low demand into Hydrogen, either locally at each turbine or onshore where the power lands. This is "free" electricity (power you would otherwise be dumping or simply not generating) so it's sort of a moot point how efficient the electrolysis and storage parts of the process are.

You then have the option of generating power from the Hydrogen when the wind isn't blowing, enabling your wind farm to be more productive and less weather-dependent, or (for the onshore option) feeding the gas into the gas grid.

Regards this scheme in Singapore, if they have anything like the same problems as were recently reported for the UK (potential data centre usage equalling peak demand for the whole of the rest of the country) then there may very well not be an option to connect to a traditional generating station or the grid. Maybe Singapore is going to mandate that all future data centres add at least as much generating capacity as they will use? Given the stated lack of space to build onshore in Singapore, an offshore solution like this has quite a lot going for it, I would think.

M.

Engineer held hostage by client who asked for the wrong fix

Re: Outrageous

Often just setting off the alarm (no water, gas or powder dispensing required) will release maglocks, except in extremely secure environments.

M.

Lenovo shows off snap-together laptop with removable keyboard, screen, and ports

Re: Sort of impressed

I usually use laptops exclusively with external screens

Or one of these?

M.

(how can you "usually" use something "exclusively"?)

Re: Some time around 1993, I saw a laptop the likes of which are unlikely to show up again.

otherwise the line you wanted will have been scrolled off the screen

But at least it would have been preserved on the roll so you could potentially ask to review it after the lecture. I had several teachers at school who took pride in writing right around the rolling blackboards and of course, wiping the early work in order to make space for later jottings. Maths in particular but on one memorable occasion, history. The teacher was very cross with us for some reason and wrote over four panels of blackboard in the course of a 40 minute lesson - the blackboard had three panels.

M.

Re: Those swappable ports

The add-on screen is attached via a cable, not Bluetooth.

I'm pretty sure Bluetooth has nowhere near the bandwidth to support an external screen. Most "wireless" screen mirroring uses WiFi of some description, and in my experience even that is prone to things like lag. I have trialled an expensive, proprietary (from a big Japanese manufacturer), WiFi-based screen cast/share system. Stand-alone transmitter(s) and receiver, 5GHz WiFi, sets up its own network after scanning for existing ones. The lag is several seconds and the data rate struggles with video in a window and cannot handle full-screen high definition video without dropping frames, the lag also means that audio (if the laptop is plugged directly into the room PA) is completely out of sync with the video. And this in a small room with maybe 5m between transmitter and receiver and a projector which is only 1280x800.

I mean, it works ok from the kids' phones to the living room TV (still some lag though), but it's not ideal. Good for sharing photographs (so long as they weren't taken in portrait mode!) A wire is much better and can also carry power :-)

I've met some non-WiFi solutions that work ok, but then you are probably looking at proprietary use of one of the licence-free frequencies, which quite possibly interferes with WiFi too.

M.

Re: Old fashioned.

I also like the way that the modular laptop is a "chunky 0.94 inches" while the "sleek" T14s is "only 0.7 inches". Granted, that's 6mm or so, but I do find it interesting how this kind of language is used, especially when the "chunky" laptop seems to be 0.16 pounds lighter (or in more understandable terms, about 2½oz = 70g) than the "sleekest" model, and both have 14" screens.

Saw a bit of an old episode of Midsomer Murders last night. Someone stole a laptop. It was an inch and a half thick at least and they had to unplug two chunky plugs from the back; one was a D25 parallel to a printer, the other looked like a D9 serial. No sign of a power lead :-)

M.

Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government

Re: Sugardaddy

Time was (maybe 2018 or so) when you could buy a 2GB passively cooled graphics card for £25 which was more than adequate for general use. I stuck two in a machine once so that it could run four monitors.

In 2020, when the kids were all studying at home I wanted to stick a £25 card in a machine which currently used intgrated graphics, not only slightly improving the graphics performance but also freeing up some main memory for OS use. Cheapest I could find was over £100 and prices carried on upwards almost ever since.

Then again, AMD totally ditched their pre-Zen processors and whereas at one point you could get a perfectly reasonable desktop processor for less than maybe fifty quid, even the oldest, smallest Ryzen is significantly more than that now.

Heck, ten years ago (IIRC) I built an entire computer for my dad – case with PSU, ITX m/b, processor, 8GB, SSD, DVD drive – for under £300. Even allowing for inflation, that's been impossible since 2020 or so. This year, of course, you'd probably spend £300 on the memory alone.

M.

Burger King turns to AI to flame broil employees who aren't friendly enough

Re: Guest Experience

Well done. I missed that.

Big thanks to the staff who dealt with the whole affair very discreetly and professionally.

M.

Re: Guest Experience

5 Guys is $15-$20 per person, but you eat a burger with real meat and lots of it, on real bread, with the specific real toppings you asked for, plus a metric assload of fries.

Worst fast meal I ever had? A 5 Guys in Ealing. At least, pretty certain it was. It was late, we were hungry, aching feet and we just wanted to eat and get back to the holiday let. Cold, unwelcoming building, staff who expected you to know the menu inside out (it was our first ever – and obviously last – time), bland food, and to top it off, one of the party spent the next day throwing up all over Buck House*.

Best burger I have ever had? The Bakewell Pudding Shop, Bakewell (duh!) and to complete the meal, actual Bakewell pudding.

The pudding survives the postal service quite well so, since we are no longer in the area, puddings are occasionally ordered for a treat.

M.

*Tickets to BH were "annual" so this gave them the excuse to revisit later in the year to see what they had missed the first time around.

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

natural language is Turing-complete. Not informally — mathematically

Reminds me of Snow Crash

M.

Worried Europeans can now cut Azure's phone cord completely

Re: Too little. Too late.

since 1980 when I soldered my first ZX80

You soldered more than one?

Why?

M.

Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell

Re: Old Nokia phones

The Act only applies in that sense to public bodies. Private companies are given a choice, but there is often a lot of local pressure (some time ago I posted links to several stories where staff at Sports Direct and Trago Mills had to stand up to bosses who were dismissive, indeed in one case had sent a memo banning staff from talking Welsh even when on break) and it's difficult for a large business with all of its signage-producing staff probably based in London or Manchester or somewhere similar to get things right, hence the problems in Cornwall. People around here (Swansea) got very confused when the self-service tills for "Smaller Shops" and "Larger Shops" at the local Sainsburys were labelled "Ychydig o Neges" and "Llawer o Neges"; quite literally "a little of message" and "a lot of message". It turns out that in some parts of north Wales "mynd am neges" ("going for a message") is the equivalent of "running an errand", but I don't know anyone down here who uses it. It might have been more understandable as "Neges Fach" (small message) and "Neges Fawr" (large message) (or "negeseuon" = messages) but still, the tills themselves do not have a Welsh option, unlike the ones in Morrisons which not only have Welsh on-screen but also have a Welsh voice-over.

Cornish and Welsh and Breton are from the same "branch" of Celtic languages so bear a lot more in common with each other than they do with Scottish and Irish Gaelic/Gallic and Manx. With Cornish it is exacerbated because the repeated attempts at reviving the language since the 1970s have of necessity drawn a lot on Welsh in particular due to (a comparative) lack of written and recorded evidence for Cornish, and a desire to "modernise". My (Welsh-speaking) offspring find the currently favoured flavour of Kernwek quite "ugly".

M.

Re: Old Nokia phones

I have tried navigating in the Vietnamese mode but I could swear the layout and options are different.

That definitely used to be the case on certain cash machines around here. The default English layout had intrusive adverts and graphics, the Welsh was simple and uncluttered. Not so much these days.

It's amazing how many cashpoints and self-service supermarket tills are still English-only. There are exceptions that offer Welsh and usually at least one other language (Polish used to be common) but it's far from being the majority as far as I can see.

M.

Hard drives already sold out for this year – AI to blame

Re: Think of the end game

Making spinning rust look like a NVMe SSD doesn't seem make much sense

This?

Looking at most spinning rust specs, an individual drive can't saturate a SATA2 connection, let alone SATA3, so there is quite a lot of wiggle room :-)

M.

BOFH: Loss adjuster discovers liability is a two-way street

Re: Made me smile

Ha ha, had me splitting my sides, that one.

I know someone who suddenly developed several medical conditions after a particularly bad bout of CoViD. They are now on three different types of medication which were originally prescribed fortnightly, so at £9.90 per item that would be £59.40 per month, or about as much as it costs to fill the car with petrol, a car necessary for work. Fortunately this person is in Wales, so prescriptions are free for all and also over time the regime has settled down and the doctor is now prescribing on a monthly cycle which would have halved the cost anyway, but prescription charges can still be a major worry for some people.

NHS Prescription Charges Information.

M.

Re: What year is it?

And how come I have El Reg open on my work computer on a Friday, but although BOfH is posted Friday, it doesn't show up on the front page - on my work computer - until Saturday or (often) Sunday (I'm working a lot of weekends at the moment)?

M.

Re: Made me smile

NHS prepayment certificate

Only really applicable in England. In NI, Wales and Scotland, prescriptions are free. And they are free in England if you are young and in education, pregnant, over 60, have certain long-term conditions or are on certain state benefits.

M.

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

Re: Trying too hard

doesn't really know what he's talking about but who is skilled enough at making himself "sound" smart. He writes vague, incomplete thoughts but with a type of precision that seems like he's trying so hard that it ends up looking artificial.

I had a recent conversation about novels, and the sorts of books my parents liked and tried to pass on to me. One interesting example was Dick Francis. Dick Francis was a jockey-turned-crime writer and my parents bought all of his novels which seemed to come out annually. Each one was based in the world of horse racing to a greater or lesser extent and followed a formula, in a similar manner to (say) Midsomer Murders.

When I started reading them it became apparent, particularly with the later books, that while Dick Francis knew the horsey world inside out, he was struggling to add interest and often appeared to follow a pattern where he would obviously have spent time with an expert in whatever field he was writing about – glass blowing, computers, photojournalism etc. – but not really understood the subject in any great detail. This became particularly obvious to the teenage me when he wrote about a computerised betting system and, rather than just explaining the principles, actually went so far as to include snippets of BASIC within the prose. Even then, I realised three things:

• the code wasn't wrong, there were no glaring errors
• the code was incredibly naïve
• very few of his readers would care, and would likely just skip over half a page of IF ...THEN statements, within which there were no major plot points lurking which weren't also explained in the prose.

I am constantly reminded of this style of writing when I read AI-generated or summarised text. Just proves there is nothing new under the sun, and we don't need AI to generate anodyne writing; humans are perfectly capable of doing that for themselves.

M.

Re: AI;DR

That is what sub editors are for. It's a shame most publications seem to have got rid of them. There are mistakes on the BBC website now that would have been unthinkable ten or fifteen years ago.

M.

Openreach turns up the heat to force laggards off legacy copper lines

Re: Apples and oranges?

Elderly aunt who relies on her landline (has no telecare just yet) was, once this had been pointed out to BT, sent a 12V UPS which powers both the router and the ONT, should be good for 2 or 3 hours apparently, which is better than nothing though nowhere near the "indefinitely" offered by POTS (assuming the exchange batteries and generator were in good nick).

BT router has an "analogue" port on the back and works well with normal phones. BT router also has DECT built-in, though she can't get the hang of needing to press the "offhook" button when making a call. They are set to pick up automatically when lifted off the charging cradle for an incoming call, but she still tends to rush down to the living room to answer on the "proper" phone, walking past at least one DECT handset on the way.

M.

Help! Does anyone on the bus know Linux?

Linux obviously in favour

One of those humungous LED advertising sites near here was stuck on a Debian login prompt for about a fortnight. Unfortunately, at the side of a dual carriageway (and thoroughly distracting - they ought to be banned) so couldn't get a decent picture of it, though a passenger did try.

M.

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

Re: Teenage boys will be salivating...

laden vehicle transporter

I notice that quite a lot of second hand cars on the transporters I meet on the M4 (new cars have no plates) have gaffa tape over part or all of the number plate.

M.

In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened

Re: North of England? Weather?

Or a mechanic friend of mine based in Cardiff who used occasionally to take calls from insurers, "we have a client broken down in Weston Super Mare. Our system says you are ten miles away, can you get there in half an hour?" It would be impossible today but this was in the days before the Second Severn Crossing was opened.

M.

Once bought a second hand Espace from a Renault dealer. "Belonged to the head of the service department" before we had it.

So a month or so later, when the clutch was becoming very, very difficult, we took it back for them to fix.

And fix it they did, and for another couple of months all was well until one day the clutch basically fell apart.

I took it to my long-standing "back street" bloke who took the thing apart and showed me an array of sheared, stripped and generally mismatched screws. Apparently the casing was held together with 17 bolts of a very particular type, tapered and exactly the right length. Whoever at the dealer had earlier "fixed" the thing had evidently spilled them on the floor and refitted the casing using 17 random bolts he'd recently swept up.

Back street bloke reckoned there were about five (if memory serves) of the original bolts used, 12 floor sweepings.

Needless to say we needed a whole new clutch and then camped out at the dealer with the oily, dirty broken clutch on the boss's desk until they agreed to refund us a reasonable proportion of its cost.

M.

If you're one of the 16,000 Amazon employees getting laid off, read this

Re: Thank you

In the UK at least there are legal requirements to be met for a "redundancy" which involve some kind of proof that the role is no longer required and ban on recruiting to the same (or very similar) role for a certain period of time, but in my own experience there are ways around that which can be used by employers to basically ignore the law.

The case of the P&O ferries "redundancies" a couple of years back is a high-profile example (the company initially claimed they were redundancies but later admitted it was fire-and-rehire), but my own story involved being made redundant and then finding out that about six weeks later they had employed a new person to do effectively exactly the same job but with a different title and one band lower on the pay scale. In the case of that company it would probably have been possible for someone to shop them for pay discrimination too as my replacement was a woman! Of course, nothing was actually done.

M.

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

Re: Xerox Ink

In terms of just the ink, when I bought one for home it was comparable page-for-page with inkjet and slightly cheaper than laser (when using proper branded wax/ink/toner) though of course, over the years, this changed. Letting it go to "sleep" after about 30 minutes of inactivity did make time-to-first-print a bit longer, but took the idle power consumption down quite a bit (in this mode it still kept some liquid ink so it didn't have to go through the whole cleaning process, which is what happened on a power cycle). Putting it on a chunky sine-wave UPS dealt with having to do the whole cleaning cycle after a non-clean shutdown problem, but as I mentioned above, when the drum was life-expired I ended up buying a laser. By that time most laser toner was cheaper than the crayons, and Xerox were abandoning the technology anyway.

Shame, things move on. I don't (really) miss the dot matrix printers I used in the 1980s, though they were brilliant at preparing stencils for the ink duplicators we used for church newsletters and such. I never owned a daisy wheel printer, but I'd be tempted to make room for one if it came up for similar reasons to those which make me miss the Phaser; that is, print quality.

M.

Re: Users and printing devices...

Those two machines I mentioned, I can't be absolutely certain the first one had no oil, but I did some first-line maintenance with it and do not recall ever having to check oil. Then again, it was mid 1990s, and a lot of life has happened since then!

The machine we had at home for about 12 years? No, absolutely no oil. Maintenance (apart from topping up the crayons) was a waste tray that collected ink dribbles (only needed replacing if it actually broke as it could be easily emptied) and a cartridge with some kind of woven paper material (like nappy liner) on a roll which was used (I think) to wipe excess ink from the nozzles. I suppose that material might have been very lightly lubricated, but didn't seem that way when you were swapping it out. The drum was scraped with a squeegee affair. Never had to replace that, but I ended up getting rid of the printer when it needed a new drum (life expired, not actually failing) and I worked out that the cost of the drum kit alone (which might well have included a new squeegee and other bits) was about the same as a new, faster, colour laser which came with toner equivalent to a complete set of new crayons, and of course I needed crayons for the Phaser too.

That laser printer is (erm, finding it difficult to remember) maybe seven years old by now and every time I have to buy toner it grates that the cost of a complete set of (original) toner is about the same as the cost of a brand new printer. The one thing stopping me adding to the needless e-waste problem is the fact that my current printer has a 550-sheet paper tray and last time I looked, nothing currently on offer in the same price bracket had more than a 250 sheet tray.

Tell you what, though. I do miss the slightly raised print from the Phaser. It gave a certain "high class" look and feel to everything you printed, especially on card stock. Its rendering of photographs was not quite as good as the laser, but for text and graphics, hands-down the best printer I've ever used.

M.

Re: Users and printing devices...

I've definitely suffered all of those, the re-use of labels one with an early(ish) Tektronix Phaser printer, which was never quite the same after I'd peeled the labels off. Fair enough in some ways; she was an office temp and had probably never used anything more up-to-date than a daisy wheel printer and of course, as a temp, no-one thought that maybe she would need to be given any kind of induction to the company.

As for the Phaser, the printer in the OA sounds like it's meant to be a Phaser ("large blocks of crayon") but neither that Tektronix model, nor the much later Xerox model I used at home for many years, had any kind of oil reservoir. Sure, they would not have taken kindly to being tipped upside down while operating, but spilling oil? Maybe a tiny dribble of liquid wax from the small reservoirs. Perhaps this was a different beast.

M.

Re: "we never loaned any of our tools to any of the non-IT staff ever again"

...definitely want to know what they were up to before...

And the number of times when someone has come in asking to borrow tool x but when you ask them what for and finally drag a cogent explanation out of them, it transpires that actually they need tool y but didn't know that! The logical conclusion of this is that the person wanting to borrow the tool isn't actually competent to carry out the operation they are intending to because if they were, they would have known which tool to use, all of which then means I often then have to down my own tools and go and do their job for them because it's quicker than waiting for them to come back with the now-broken item and having to do a lot of unnecessary repairs.

M.

Microsoft probes Windows 11 boot failures tied to January security updates

Re: To go with their crap partitioning

So (question for the panel) what is the recommended size for EFI these days? I had a lot of trouble a few years back trying to install OpenSuse on a Windows 7 machine, where W7 had originally chosen 100MB for the EFI, which OpenSuse said was not sufficient but W7 simply would not play if I tried to make a bigger one, even when installing from scratch. In the end I gave up and wiped W7 in favour of OpenSuse.

More recently a W11 machine created 200MB which seems to have coped well, so far, dual booting OpenSuse, but with talk of systemd wanting to install itself in the EFI partition I'm nervous that 200MB might not be enough, long term.

And if I wanted to increase the size, of necessity shuffling paritions around in the process, how would I do that without causing W11 to descend into hysterics as happened all those years ago with W7?

M.

Surrender as a service: Microsoft unlocks BitLocker for feds

Re: Diskpart to delete the recovery partition

Thing is, deleting one Windows partition (and what does the Recovery partition do anyway?) would not have solved the problem because I usually end up with three for OpenSuse (ignoring EFI); one for root, one for /home and one for swap. This isn't the currently recommended way to do it, but having /home on a separate partition (or even a separate disc) has saved me a lot of hassle over the years.

And given the way the laptop is being used by its new owner, I might have to add another partition so that data can be shared between the Windows and Linux sides. Now that the GPT is sorted, that should be fairly trivial to do with gparted from Linux - unmount /home, shrink it a bit, add a new (probably NTFS-formatted) partition, make sure Linux can see it (not usually a problem) then head to Windows and make sure it's mounted there, too.

M.

Re: How can you not use an MS account in Windows these days?

I doubt MS have any access to the machine

Of course, for some time now it has not been possible for normal users to completely turn off the "send usage data back to MS" option. The best you can do is put it at its least-slurpy setting. Not sure how this varies between versions; my install (described above) was for Win 11 Pro.

M.

Re: How can you not use an MS account in Windows these days?

I wouldn't say it was "no trouble", but I, too, have just set up a new (to me) W11 box (first time I've ever set up any version of Windows later than 7) and there are instructions online pointing you to a couple of magic incantations that make it possible. Essentially

• do not connect the box to any kind of network connection while it's going through the setup - this might mean turning off your WiFi if you have an open network, and making sure the machine can't connect to an open network in the coffee shop over the road
• you may also need to drop to a command line at a certain point and type one of a couple of commands, depending which exact version of W11 you are setting up (after which a restart is necessary)
• you then tell the setup "I do not have an internet connection" and look for the option to "create a local account". Neither of these options appears if the machine has managed to find a working internet connection

After that it all proceeds as expected. Another thing worth doing before connecting to the internet is trawling through the entire Settings list and turning off as much telemetry as you can find. Don't forget to do it separately for Edge, and once you have installed Firefox (or alternative browser of your choice) do the same in that. Personally, I then turned off all the bits and bobs which offer recommendations from the store, things which put adverts ahead of searches, and I removed Copilot from the task bar, though I have yet to find a way to remove it from such vital apps as Notepad or Paint. This whole procedure took me about an hour, and most of that time was spent hunting down the myriad of different "please let me phone home" settings, many of which are called things like "improve your search experience" or "help us give you relevant suggestions" or "make handwriting recognition more accurate".

If you are doing this sort of thing on a regular basis then I believe there are ways of automating some of it; Rufus is a name which kept popping up in my searches but I haven't used it myself.

On a tangent, I've been an OpenSuse user for many years and up until now new installations have been fairly simple. The new installer with Leap 16 is quite awful and by default suggests wiping your boot disc (previous versions would offer to shuffle things about to make space for dual-boot) and doesn't even install a desktop!

I mention this, because I wanted the new-to-me laptop to dual boot. So I bought a new NVMe, imaged the existing one to the new (larger) one and checked Windows was happy. Tried to install OpenSuse, and it couldn't use the free space because "this disk can only old four partitions", and Windows was already using four (EFI/MS Reserved/Windows/Recovery). Windows 11 cannot use MBR discs and must use GPT, and GPT is normally capable of 128 partitions. What on earth was going on?

For some inexplicable reason, this Windows installation had limited the GPT to four partitions. It's vaguely possible the laptop originally had Windows 10 on an MBR disc and it was converted, but I still fail to see why the process would deliberately limit GPT in this way. Eventually I discovered that the Linux utility gdisk (like fdisk but knows about GPT discs) has the ability to edit the partition table non-destructively and I put the limit back up to 128 partitions (I practiced first on a disc image). The next boot of Windows obviously detected something unusual because it went through its "give me a moment, I'm just updating" process for 15 minutes or more, during which time it rebooted maybe five or six times, but after that everything seems to be fine, and I was able to install Leap with no further issues other than fighting the new installer as mentioned.

M.

Debian's FreedomBox Blend promises an easier home cloud

I'm currently building a new NAS as the latest in a lineage of home storage units that were all FreeNAS, then TrueNAS Core, even though when that change happened I saw the writing on the wall for the BSD-based version. I thought I'd take the leap to Xigmanas, as the direct descendant of FreeNAS, and although it's a bit "retro" in looks and is a couple of versions behind current BSD, I was warming to the interface until an rsync of some data from my current NAS caused a couple of the discs to "drop off" the 6-disc RAIDZ2 pool. Now, I haven't yet decided if this was a problem with ZFS in Xigmanas or a problem with the SATA/SAS card I've installed, but I thought I'd try TrueNAS CE... which totally fails to install. It complains of a missing kernel! I think what is happening is that the installation USB is somehow trying to load a kernel from the computer's boot disc rather than the USB stick (because other people have had odd problems like that) so I'm going to have to wipe those before trying again. Not 100% happy with TrueNAS; not convinced they aren't boiling a frog. Looked at zVaut but was not convinced it's viable; they had a lot of trouble forking TrueNAS Core and after a flurry of activity early in 2025, there hasn't been any activity on the Git since June.

Other options don't offer ZFS, and ZFS has been very good to me over the years (though the lack of easy capacity expansion is a pain) and I cannot conceive of building a NAS which doesn't store data on dedicated discs so this version of FreedomBox isn't going to be for me for both those reasons - your workaround is just too hacky and prone to breakage I'd think, especially if I tried to combine it with OpenZFS.

If I can work out what went on with the discs dropping off, I'll probably stick with Xigmanas, but it's frustrating that the options are limited and many of the "interesting" ones are somewhat underdeveloped.

M.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: Unbelievable stupidity

Techniquest in Cardiff, which might well be the original "science adventure centre" (current building is their third) has had a rough time in recent years but seems to be going ok at the moment.

Techniquest supplied one exhibit to Magna. When Techniquest started they had to build almost everything themselves and they started supplying exhibits to other places. Since then dozens, if not hundreds of other companies have sprung up to fill that space and Techniquest's development department was closed maybe 15 years ago. This year they are hoping to re-open it.

M.

Re: Unbelievable stupidity

Lottery funding (Magna was largely Lottery-funded) is only ever for capital expenditure. Running costs have to be found somewhere else, and at Magna the first year was good until they decided to increase the prices to the sorts of levels Merlin Entertainment would appreciate. Thing they forgot was that Magna - being in Rotherham which is hardly a place people choose to go to on holiday - had a very high proportion of repeat local visitors. Grandparents with grandchildren on INSET, for example. Putting the price of a season ticket up from the equivalent of two and a half normal tickets to the equivalent of four or five* severely affected these visitors, but the money to keep the place going had to be found from somewhere; and it was quite expensive to keep running for various reasons that were at least partly down to poor design decisions.

And once the visionaries who saw the project through to opening had left for pastures new, the remaining managers were a bit more hard-headed and - and I'm happy to say it at this distance - petty and vindictive. I was pushed out for totally spurious reasons, having questioned the direction the business was taking and a colleague left at the same time for similar reasons. A year after I left, from what I could tell there were only three people in the whole organisation who had been there more than a year.

M.

*it was something like that. I can't remember the specifics at this distance!

Re: Unbelievable stupidity

I've told this before, but it bears repeating.

Magna Science Adventure Centre (or whatever it's called these days) in Rotherham has areas named after the four "elements". In the "fire" pavilion there is something called the Fire Tornado*. A Copper dish has 100ml of kerosene dosed on to it, is heated from below by 4kW for a minute or so (the kerosene has to start vapourising) several large fans are spun up and a spark ignites the kerosene, leading to what can only be described as, ahem, a tornado of fire, coiling its way up the flue in the ceiling.

As you know, while you can get "low smoke" kerosene, even the best of it, in barely-controlled burning situations, is emphatically not no smoke.

In the same room as the fire tornado? Half a dozen (maybe more, I can't remember), projectors (also plasma TVs etc), merrily sucking cooling air in from the room through some utterly inadequate filters, designed to trap office dust, not carbon-black. The first projectors began to fail after just a few months and opening them up revealed circuit boards and optical components covered in soot.

We (or, rather, a colleague) fabricated some sealed ducting with air piped in from a cleaner part of the building. I think the installers helped towards the costs, but frankly it should never have been built like that in the first place!

M.

*last time I looked it was still there, but it's over 20 years since I worked there and things do change. The Fire Tornado was one of my babies and required quite a lot of coaxing into life in the early days. It was affected by atmospheric conditions (the weather), quite apart from all the usual problems you'd expect

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

Re: As little tale from my former banking life .. (tenuous ATM connection)

Not entirely certain when it was formalised, but there have always been different sizes of note, especially from different issuing banks. I'd imagine that the formalisation of sizes started post-WWII at the latest and possibly well before then. Current "plastic" notes also have raised dots to aid identification, but I don't know how well those last! I remember finding it odd as a child that the US would have notes all the same size and shape.

M.

Re: As little tale from my former banking life .. (tenuous ATM connection)

In the UK, notes have been different sizes for some time. Were the cartridges or the selection mechanism not keyed to the size of note?

M.

Fast Pair, loose security: Bluetooth accessories open to silent hijack

Re: Ship it!

Eldest used to get annoyed with one particular boy on the school bus who insisted in playing unedifying music through a Bluetooth speaker. Eldest reslised that the speaker was in pairing mode immediately after being switched on so would try to get in first, and if successful would play slightly more edifying music. Maybe theme tune from Thomas the Tank Engine or sommat.

Annoying boy apparently never worked out exactly what was going on.

M.

S Twatter: When text-to-speech goes down the drain

Top Gear had a bit of fun with Penistone in one episode.

M.

Raspberry Pi 5 gets LLM smarts with AI HAT+ 2

Try setting one up as a webcam.

Are you saying there are problems doing that?

FWIW I've recently finished a project where two Pi5s were used headless with two High Quality Picams to take timelapse over a period of about six months. Images saved both to a network share and locally. All controlled in Python with the standard libraries, power on boots straight into the script and maybe three quarters of the script deals with naming the images, sorting them into appropriate folders per day, changing the cadence according to the time of day and calendar date. The hardest part was working out why it would freeze after (IIRC) 1023 images, not getting to the root of the problem but realising it was some kind of resource leak and re-writing the code to close and re-open the camera before that limit was reached.

The "lite" version of the OS is your friend and other Pi-compatible OSes have similar options I believe.

M.

Affordable housing site goes live with meme-laden test data

Darn, they must read El Reg.

Tried the given address just now and it needs a password.

Any suggestions?

M.

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Re: consumers are returning to physical media like CDs

I wonder if you could sort that with some kind of ion-discharging device and a gentle stream of air?

Re: consumers are returning to physical media like CDs

You forgot the joke icon.

I suppose you might be able to clamp a 45 – with the big hole punched out – in a Laserdisc player, but that's about it. Probably wouldn't center correctly oh, and LDs (like CDs) play from the inside to the outsise.

I have a working LD player. Watched The Empire Strikes Back over Christmas. Takes all sorts of different sizes of optical media and makes a good fist of playing anything pre-DVD, though I tend to play CDs in my BluRay player these days.

M.

Boffins probe commercial AI models, find an entire Harry Potter book

Re: Memorising the Bible

Not even all that far back :-)

Mary Jones (PDF, told in a horribly twee way, also varies from the version I was told as a child, but you get the idea)

M.

Re: Can it improve the Harry Potter books?

I wasn't one of the downvoters, but your post was perhaps a little confused, or confusing? Forgive me if I've grabbed the wrong end of the stick, but because I don't like being downvoted without understanding why, either...

But the language of the text was unimaginative and stereotypical -- the kind of language you expect from LLM homogenization

Guaranteed to rile the fans because here you seem to be saying that JK Rowling's output was no better than an LLM could manage. That's a bit like those people who try to pass off the paintings created by dipping a sheep's feet in paint and letting it walk over a canvas, as "art". Interesting topic of discussion ("but what is art, anyway?") but could be seen as derogatory to (say) Jackson Pollock, to be saying that a trail of sheep footprints is comparable to his, erm, colour explosions.

So no surprise that AI models can reproduce the text.

This is perhaps confused. These models are not reproducing the text because the text is "generic" and, frankly, a room full of monkeys would come up with it eventually; they are reproducing it because the entirety of the text has been "read" by the model at some point and even if it hasn't stored it word-for-word, it will have stored some kind of encoding of it which makes it very likely that specific combinations of words and phrases will be emitted for particular classes of prompts.

Can they do better? If the reproduction is only 95% copied, is that 5% better? Or with even the 5% original and idiosyncratic language rounded out?

Confusing. Without having read the paper, I don't think the researchers mean "the LLM produced a novel which was 95% the same as the Sorcerer's Stone*, I mean, how would you measure that? They seem to mean "the LLM produced 95% of the actual text of the book".

I believe the first line of the first book is

Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

So the difference between "95% the same" and "95% of the text" would be something like the difference between

The Dursleys, of number four, Laurel Lane, were happy to say that they were quite normal, thank you very much

and

Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were normal, thank you very much

M.

*of course, which version was actually ingested by the LLM? Maybe the LLM "read" the UK version, which as well as being called the Philosopher's Stone - a title which references the name historically used for a key object in the story - was edited slightly differently to the Americanised version, which I believe JKR wasn't terribly happy with at the time. Maybe the researchers were comparing the US text with text from the LLM based on the UK version, or vice-versa?

Re: Can it improve the Harry Potter books?

The last film was in two parts, not the last book.

I'd agree that the writing and plotting are not the most challenging, but then the target audience of perhaps 8 or 9 year olds to 12 or 13 year olds* doesn't necessarily need all the existential angst of a PK Dick or a U LeGuin, or the sheer bleak depression of an Orwell.

As for "no learning magic after year three", well, the story was only really "set" in the school, it was not (totally) "about" the school, so expecting the series to be a kind of Mallory Towers or Worst Witch was never really on the cards.

Rowling did do quite a bit of backstory-creation, if not before starting writing then certainly by the time she had a publishing deal. Many consider Order of the Phoenix (book 5) which is probably the longest book in the series to be slow-paced and full of unnecessary backstory or exposition. Others enjoy this backstory so much it is their favourite volume. Finding it difficult to remember that far back, but I seem to remember it was around the time of the release of OotP that one or two people were beginning to work out (with hindsight, correctly) what the conclusion of the series might be, though of course there were hundreds of competing theories and JKR wouldn't confirm or deny anything.

M.

*one of mine read, and recalled, the first book while, erm, something like four years old, because we would not let them watch the film until they had read the book; this had been an attempt on our part not to let them watch the "scary bits" (particularly the end scene with Quirrel) until they were a bit older (and reading the book had prepared them for it). Fat chance. A decade and a half later, continues to be, a massive fan.

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

Re: kernel has a stable ABI?

[Oracle voice]

I think you mean Orac?

M.