Posts by Martin an gof

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

Re: Divers log

I may have mentioned this here before, but the situation is even worse in Welsh, and in certain regions, worse again.

Bear in mind that Wales has two counting systems; there is the normal "decimal" system where "twenty one" is "dauddeg un" (two tens, one) and "thirty one" is "trideg un" (three tens, one) and there is the older system, still commonly used for time and dates where (amongst other things) "twenty one" is "un ar hugain" (one on twenty) and "thirty one" is "un ar ddeg ar hugain"; one on ten on twenty.

For most of us, "50p" in Welsh is "hanner can ceiniog"; half a hundred pennies (or just "pumdeg ceiniog" - fifty pence - of course). But for one of my school teachers it was "darn chweugain" (I think that'd be the spelling); a six-twenties piece.

In old money there were 240d to the £, so half a (money) pound was 120d and one hundred and twenty is, indeed, six twenties.

Took my 11 year-old self a few minutes to work that one out during registration one day. Can't remember why it came up, suspect she was asking us for money for a school trip or something.

M.

Open source AI hiring bots favor men, leave women hanging by the phone

The one, minor, benefit of FPTP is that it rarely results in a hung parliament, a minority government or coalitions. The one (recent) time when we had a coalition in Westminster, the smaller party was totally duped by the larger party and came off by far the worst, though they did manage to get a vote on changing away from FPTP in front of the populace.

There was a Reunion recently about that coalition and very interesting to note that one of the main arguments about "AV" was that no-one knew what "AV" stood for ("alternative vote", by the way, as perfectly well explained at the time) and a second argument was that "the third placed candidate might be elected!".

The problem with PR is that there are so many possible variants and they all have their own drawbacks. The thing you have to balance is whether the drawbacks are outweighed by the advantages against pure FPTP. As you say, FPTP in the UK tends (or has tended to) favour right-leaning parties which can win by small margins in the 'Shires where the electorate is more mixed as against the big cities and industrialised parts of the country which are still left-leaning and tend to vote MPs with large margins. I think this is changing though, given that a lot of traditionally Labour-voting people are very much swayed by nationalist / populist parties and there is a much reduced tie to the labour movement due to the huge loss of manufacturing, mining and similar industries.

Personally, I voted for AV. I've been quite happy with the current part-proportional system for electing MSes in Wales (there were two sets of "constituencies", one set elected 40 MSes by FPTP, the other set selected 20 MSes (four per "region") by some complex method that is near-proportional). In the expanded Senedd at the next election there will be 16, six-seat constituencies electing according to the same proportional system as the regions do at present. I'll see what I think about that after the next election.

M.

Apology not necessary.

We're fortunate to live in a well-insulated house and heating is a minimal part of our, still larger than I'd like, bill. The real culprit in our house is teenagers taking 30 to 45 minutes in the shower every day!

M.

But the Tories did subsidise energy bills! Remember the £66 per month winter fuel payment we all had, and the Energy Price Guarantee?

Sunak defends energy price guarantee

Nof trying to defend the Tories but either the price of energy wasn't as big an issue as you think or (probably more likely) people just have short memories!

M.

Raspberry Pi slices Compute Module 4 prices

Re: Relentless price increases are not obligatory

I've been using N100 based stuff for a while now for prototyping rather than Raspberry Pi boards because they are cheaper (not much cheaper, but cheaper) and a lot more powerful.

Quick look around and I can't make that work at all. The cheapest n100 board I can find in the UK is about £160 and needs a case, RAM, storage and a PSU. Found one article in the US claiming $120 but not the source. The cheapest NUC I can find is also about £160 and still needs RAM and storage. The most expensive Pi5 retails for around £115 with 16GB RAM. Granted the N100-based units are a tad more powerful than the Pi but they're not "cheaper" by any stretch of the imagination.

But I'd be very interested to be pointed at evidence to the contrary - I might be in the market for some cheap, capable, compact computers very shortly and while I love the Pi (and have about 30 of them in use in various functions) there's nothing which says I have to use them, other than the fact that they are built just down the road :-)

M.

Re: Relentless price increases are not obligatory

Or to put it another way (and realising that Pis are actually priced in $, so the exchange rate has some bearing on this), the Bank of England inflation calculator reckons that £30* in 2012 is worth about £42.50 in 2025. You can buy a 2GB Pi 4 for around about that figure these days** which gives you (against the original Pi 1B):

• four 64-bit cores instead of one 32-bit
• each core running at more than twice the clock rate
• eight times as much RAM
• two 4k HDMI outputs instead of one HD, and an upgraded video processor
• "real" USB3 instead of a hacked-together solution using USB2 OTG
• (near) gigabit ethernet instead of 100Mbit
• 5GHz and 2.4GHz WiFi with Bluetooth instead of no wireless at all
• the 40-pin GPIO header instead of 26-pin meaning more connections for projects
• far less propensity to brick SD cards when power is removed without shutting down
• and probably loads more things I've forgotten

To be fair, some of those improvements came with the Pi 2 and Pi 3, but even so it's an impressive list.

For those complaining about the fact that the most expensive Pi is now well over £100, horses for courses, innit? I have an application which ran perfectly well on the original Sony-produced, 256MB Pi Bs. In fact I still have a handful of those in service. The application runs a bit more smoothly on Pi 2 and Pi 3 hardware, but Pi 4 and 5 are complete overkill. Nevertheless, when I need new hardware, I might as well buy Pi 4 which is no more expensive in real terms than the original hardware. My children used a Pi 3 for schoolwork, including during CoViD and I have to say that while doing so took a bit of care on a Pi 3, a Pi 4 or 5 in my experience (though most of my Pis run "Lite" and headless) is perfectly good as a daily desktop machine, certainly with 4GB or more.

My one and only proper complaint? That I can't make video play fullscreen across both monitor outputs of a 4 or 5. I have a couple of applications where this is necessary and I'm having to use x86 machines for this. Quite a minor one in the grand scheme of things.

All in all, and I haven't even mentioned the work of the Foundation which is entirely funded by sales of Pi products, an outstanding achievement. Well done to all.

M.

*I seem to remember paying ~£30 for Pis in 2012, but the linked 2012 article states £23. If price is the key, you can buy a Pi Zero 2W for £17 which compute-wise is vastly more powerful (four, 64-bit, faster processors coupled to four times as much memory***), though it does lose some of the in-built ports

**the 2GB Pi5 is about £4 more

***again, the 2012 article says the Pi B will have 128MB. I think the Pi 1A was supposed to have 128MB with the B always having 256MB (it's been a while since I powered them up, but I'm pretty certain my original-batch Chinese-built Pi Bs had 256MB) but when the 1A was eventually released, it came with 256MB while the B was quickly updated to 512MB.

Liz Warren, Trump admin agree on something: Army should have right to repair

Re: Politicians lack of grip with reality

Years and years ago, dad's car needed a new exhaust. This was a common thing back in those days. The genuine part from the garage was expensive, but not excessively so, but a company down the road offered an equivalent part in stainless steel for about twice the price.

Took the stainless steel part, never changed the exhaust again. Later, dad had one of the first Renaults in the country to be fitted with a catalytic converter, and a mild steel exhaust which quite literally fell apart (rust flakes coming out of the tailpipe after the silencer disintegrated) after about six months and probably 7 or 8 thousand miles. The replacement for that was stainless, by Renault, and since then I really can't remember ever having to replace an exhaust due to wear-and-tear, though to be fair I've personally mostly driven Diesels in that time.

More recently, the wee injector* on my wife's Diesel Citroen died, splurging smelly wee into the exhaust and causing an "emissions fault". Bloke in my usual garage offered the Citroen official part, but said that it was made by Bosch, who also sold the exact same part without the Citroen logo for about half the price. It might have invalidated a warranty, but the car was only three months from the end of warranty anyway so no question which we'd have. Lasted until we got shot of the car a few years later, so had done at least as many miles as the factory-fitted part, probably more.

M.

*otherwise known as AdBlue

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

Re: Canon can't count past 11

only works on a subset of the channels available on 2.4ghz

Think that's bad? I have some Aruba APs (i.e HP kit marketed at SMEs, not domestic stuff) which cannot as far as I know (and I have spent ages trying) be configured to use any channel other than 1, 5 or 11. Corporate uses Meraki kit which is likewise disadvantaged. Either that or IT hasn't set them up right (I do have access to the configuration interface, but only for "emergency use" so I haven't spent too much time looking there).

Plenty of (cheaper) 5GHz kit can only use the first four channels which don't need DFS (or TPC?) meaning that once someone next door decides they really need all 80MHz of those channels to stream 3Mbps YouTube videos to their £1,200 iPhone at 860Mbps your own connection is, erm, "compromised".

M.

Re: I Really hate printers

And on the contrary, I have had the pleasure of working with two "wax jet" printers, as you call them (they aren't dye-sub - re. the previous poster - they're much more like inkjets with properly engineered mechanics and ink that isn't liquid until used). The first was actually a Tektronix model and the only faults I had to deal with on it were thick secretaries feeding label sheets through it more than once.

The second was a Xerox and was my family's main printer for 10 years or more until the cost of a new drum for it, alongside it needing a new set of ink, turned out to be considerably higher than the cost of a new Lexmark laser printer which came with part-filled cartridges which nominally had the same page coverage as a set of wax blocks for the Xerox. It had one fault early on (can't exactly remember what) which was partly covered under warranty and fixed on-site (on my dining table!) for a not unreasonable fixed-fee, but otherwise ran flawlessly* and would probably run again if anyone was daft enough to fit it with a new drum. Its main downside was needing to be constantly powered in order for the ink to stay liquid which enabled a "quick" time to first page of maybe a couple of minutes.

Upsides included the ability to add ink before running out, in the middle of a print job if necessary, and absolutely stunning text output and graphics. Photos not perfect, but good enough, and we had a succession of "photo" printers which did that duty (I'm never buying another ink jet).

We also had a Canon Selphy true dye-sub printer, for 6x4 prints (and a few other sizes). Expensive to run, but great on holiday for those personalised postcards home, and the used cartridges make interesting window decorations :-)

M.

*a couple of years before we decided to replace it, it did develop some really odd symptoms which I eventually traced to a failing SODIMM. I'd added generic laptop memory to it early on because it struggled with full-page photos or complex pages with detailed graphics. The official Xerox part was exactly the same spec, but about five or six times the price. Replaced the SODIMM (that wasn't easy as IIRC it was DDR which was very much out of fashion by then) and all was fine again. So I'm not putting that down as a fault with the printer.

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

Re: Never heard of Romex cables?

In the UK it is not permissible (domestically) to run a combined neutral and earth beyond the service cutout (the main fuse). There are various reasons for this, but possibly the most obvious one is that with three different earthing systems domestically in the UK*, it's safest, particularly from a DIY perspective, if the actual consumer installations are all to the same standards.

M.

*known as:

• TT - Terre Terre or Earth/Earth, where the installation earth is actually connected directly to earth via an earth rod or similar and only phase and neutral run back to the transformer. Very common still with older housing stock, particularly with older overhead cables, though things are gradually being upgraded. The earth in a TT system is high impedance and unlikely to pass enough current to blow a fuse under fault conditions, so a separate safety device must also be fitted which these days is an RCD, and there are all sorts of rules for that
• TN-S - Terre Neutral - Separate, where the installation earth is connected to an earth installation at the transformer, where the neutral is also earthed. This earth is usually conducted over the metallic sheath of an underground cable and can blow fuses without the help of an RCD, though RCDs are mandated domestically for other reasons too
• TN-C-S - Terre Neutral - Combined - Separate, where the installation earth connects to the supply neutral at the service cutout of the installation (and nowhere else), while the neutral is grounded not just at the transformer, but for obvious safety reasons at several points along its path to your house too.

Re: Never heard of Romex cables?

the plasticiser from the plasticised PVC cable will migrate to the polystyrene

Which also "melts" the polystyrene. So the OP's might not have melted through being too hot but by a similar chemical reaction to the one you get if you dribble superglue onto expanded polystyrene.

Some cable clips used with rubber cables were polystyrene (the not-expanded type, obvs!) and when used with newer PVC cables had the exact same problem. I've come across PVC cables seemingly hot-melt glued to nails. In actual fact, polystyrene cable clips melted into a glob with the cable. Of course, rubber cables leached their plasticiser without any third-party help, which is why they had service lives generally no more than 20 years whereas properly-installed PVC cables are often good for 50 years or more.

M.

Need a Linux admin? Ask a hair stylist to introduce you to a worried mother

Re: Experience

I realise you may not be monitoring this, but if you don't mind me asking, where?

M.

Re: Qualifications

I have a degree in Theology, and thirty years in IT

I have a friend who went the other way, degree in electrical and electronic engineering, then spent a couple of years at a theological college and has been an anglican priest ever since.

At least he doesn't panic when the PA system farts, or the church heating needs reprogramming.

M.

Re: Experience

looking at a four year apprenticeship that leads to a full degree

Those things seem to be very few and far between around here. Apprenticeships are reasonably plentiful, but they are very nearly all geared towards those who have left school with the equivalent of three or maybe five GCSEs and lead to qualifications such as an HNC at best. My youngest is possibly looking at a career in engineering of some description, and is heading for a good set of A-levels but adamant about not wanting to go to university, even one which offers a "practical" degree. I miss the polytechnics (I did a four year degree which included 13 months "in industry"), but there are some university courses in a similar vein.

Such apprenticeships as can be found aimed at those with more than a basic education, are almost impossible to research outside their recruiting periods; all you get is a web page which gives the basics and a message "we are not recruiting now". Why can't a prospectus, or at least a course outline be left online all year round?

Then again, spotted a "planning" job yesterday with a rail company, making sure the trains are running to timetable and re-planning "on the hoof" if they aren't. The only academic qualifications required were GCSE English and Maths and the job started on £41k + shift bonus. That's a huge incentive to avoid university if you ask me!

M.

Hacking US crosswalks to talk like Zuck is as easy as 1234

Re: Great hack!

shame we don't have any crossing buttons that talk to you where I live.

I think the real point there is, why does the US have talking crossings in the first place? Much like their signs which light up "WALK" or "DON'T WALK" and therefore require some amount of literacy in English are now incorporating little standing or walking figures – as the rest of the world has been doing since maybe the 1950s – a bleep is much more universal. In the UK we also have a tactile indicator on most crossing buttons, particularly those which do not bleep because they are part of a traffic light system and not really button-controlled at all. This is a little knurled knobby thing on the bottom of the button box which starts rotating when it it safe to cross. Ingenious.

M.

Datacenters selling power back to the grid? Don’t bet on it, say operators

Re: "It requires different equipment and different investments to be done up front,"

Bazalgette did his best. Given the space constraints (two sets of sewers would have been vastly more expensive and disruptive) he oversized the sewer by something ridiculous like three times to take account of population growth, further urbanisation and thus more rain run-off. It's lasted remarkably well. Rainwater in sewers is not necessarily a bad thing as it helps transport blackwater and dilutes it which can make it easier to process at the end of the sewer.

In terms of current practice in the UK, surface water from large housing developments is generally allowed to run into the normal sewers but nearly always requires a Sustainable Urban Drainage Scheme. As a minimum this consists of an agreed maximum release rate (i.e. into the sewer system) and sufficient storage to deal with rainfall. Many new developments are incorporating surge ponds or other such schemes which might also allow rainwater to percolate into the ground. There are new rules about paving too, which mean that many driveways are now built with permeable surfaces which again reduces run-off. In general the rule for individual new builds seems to be "no", so other solutions have to be found.

As a private homeowner in the UK, if you can prove that none of your surface water enters the sewer (for example you have a soakaway or can run-off into a stream or other watercourse) you get a discount on the sewerage part of your bill. Note that if you have a driveway sloping down to a public road this can disqualify you unless it is made with permeable paving or drains into your soakaway.

We have a rainwater recovery system where water from the roof (not from the ground) feeds into a tank and is then pumped into the house to fill the toilets (and potentially the washing machines). Excess overflows into a stream at the rear of the property. Although a lot of rainwater does actually end up in the sewer, this system still qualifies for the discount. Maybe they also take account of the fact we use less mains water.

M.

Re: Grid batteries?

Interesting couple of points there.

Regarding pumped storage, there are plenty of locations where small- and medium-size stations could probably be sited without too many environmental objections (NIMBYs aside). Don't ask me to name any though! However there is a cost implication so the calculation needs to consider cost and reliability of supply. I'm told that it's near impossible to make a pumped storage station run at a profit when taken stand-alone, so privatisation was bad for this aspect of the grid and whole-grid planning possibly works better.

A bit like bus services.

Back in the 1960s / 1970s there were plans for two stations on the scale of Dinorwig. The second was to be on Exmoor somewhere. Not entirely certain why that was binned, but possibly because gas plants were coming on line, which are much faster-acting than the coal and oil plants which were the bulk of our generating capacity back then so there wasn't so much need. I wonder why this idea hasn't been revived.

Regarding requiring renewables to implement storage, there is some movement on this front. Wind in particular often runs at a surplus and the grid has to issue orders to switch turbines off, or "dump" the power. There is additionally the problem that Scotland produces far more energy than it has capacity to export to the rest of the UK. An HVDC cable is already running down the west coast and there are plans for two (I think) more down the east coast, but still some companies are looking to store surplus generation. Batteries could work for this but a possibly more scalable alternative is to use the surplus generation to electrolyse water and store the Hydrogen. Hydrogen could potentially be pumped into the gas grid but I think the more common suggestion is to store the Hydrogen for later use in fuel cells or in gas turbines to generate power when the wind isn't blowing.

M.

Re: Grid batteries?

The difference is scale. If I have done my internet searches correctly, the UK's largest battery has a capacity of 266MWh and a power output of about 150MW. Compare this with a relatively small pumped-storage station such as Ffestiniog, which can store over 1.1GWh (that's 1,100MWh) and generate 360MW. Once built, the major components last for decades (Ffestiniog was first opened in the 1960s) while batteries, erm, don't.

A mere stone's throw from Ffestiniog, the UK's largest pumped storage station is of course Dinorwig (at least, I always understood it to be the largest). It stores over 9GWh of energy and can produce over 1.7GW at full whack.

The main downside of pumped storage is that while very much faster than thermal or gas plant to get running, they are still several orders of magnitude slower than batteries - tens of seconds rather than tens of milliseconds.

It'd be interesting to see a construction cost comparison per MW and MWh, and a similar lifetime cost to include maintenance. I'm sure the figures are out there somewhere but I haven't seen them.

M.

Re: Virtue

It's not just the capacitance. Under ground (or under water) cables need insulation that overhead cables generally don't, and they also usually need active cooling. Thus the construction of an underground cable is hugely disruptive, even compared with pylons, and they can be more expensive to run and maintain.

There is also a huge problem with what the public thinks of when you say "pylons". For example, someone I know lives near a proposed pylon route taking power from the substation which connects a windfarm to a distant grid connection point. As far as they are concerned, the company involved is proposing 60m tall towers carrying six cable bundles across the hilltops and visible for miles around. The sort of thing you see for 275kV or 400kV lines. In actual fact the company is proposing a 132kV connection, which can be delivered on much shorter pylons, mostly in the valley floor with some (not much) underground, and they've even compromised and downrated from a dual circuit (six cables) to a single circuit (three). Yes, of course it's going to look "different" in the landscape but it isn't as bad as some people make out.

M.

White House confirms 245% tariff on some Chinese imports not a typo

Re: What can you expect

US version of Ben Elton in the 1980s

It's like he's trying to do an impression of Ben Elton from the 1980s. He even looks a bit like him. Would do well to lose the laughter track though, or actually deliver his invective in front of a live audience. And I may be mis-remembering (after all, I was still working out my own politics during the Thatcher era and heavily influenced by the wrecking ball the Tory government was swinging through the industrialised Britain I lived in) but I don't remember Elton being quite so personal. Such of his comedy as I was allowed by my parents to watch seemed more to rail against the system, the politicians who ran it and the (largely) "city types" ("yuppies") who benefitted from it rather than the personal traits of any one or two specific individuals.

For a recent, decent example of a decent comedic rant in front of a live audience, please listen to Mark Steel's two minutes on this week's News Quiz. The whole thing is worth a listen, but the bit I'm referring to starts from about 1m in and there's a more personal-aimed rant at 6m or so and various others through the programme.

M.

Mapping legend Ordnance Survey releases blocky Britain in Minecraft – again

Re: Slated...

If you are interested in that kind of thing, Big Pit is well worth a visit while there are still some honest-to-goodness ex-miners leading the underground tours. Plenty to see above ground too, and lots to do in the area (brewery, steam railway, ironworks at Stack Square) which makes the effort to get there (I'll admit it's a bit of a treck) well worthwhile.

M.

Re: Meanwhile, Ordnance Survey...

Meanwhile, there is OS Open Local.

M.

Re: Out of date

Basic things like roads built 40 years ago. A footbridge over a river built 25 years ago.

...and a paper map bought 35 years ago?

Bit difficult to update a paper map, but they are fascinating to look at – I've taken custody of my mum's vast selection now that she can't see them properly any more.

On a slightly more serious note, when you buy a paper map these days you also get the digital version. Is this a "one off" thing, or do they strive to keep the digital maps up to date?

Anecdote I might have told here before. Many years ago I unexpectedly (as in, I was there with other people, not even aware said acquaintance was in Wales) met an acquaintance from university at an Indian restaurant in Cardiff. We were both a couple of years in to our first jobs after uni. He explained that he was working with the OS, digitising their drawn maps. I said that this must be absolutely fascinating.

"Nope," he said, "utterly mind-numbing!"

M.

Trump kills clearances for infosec's SentinelOne, ex-CISA boss Chris Krebs

Youth Demand

The real story here, as I see it, is that Youth Demand is an offshoot of Just Stop Oil and nothing to do with the Quakers at all, unless some members were Quakers.

They had actually threatened to "shut down London" so while heavy-handed, it was probably necessary for the Met to do something about them!

The BBC interviewed someone from the Quakers, on Today if I remember correctly, some of which is contained in this article.

M.

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: hot plug

5A at 240V (assuming your heater was rated for 240V rather than 230V) is about 1.2kW, so setting the heater to 1kW should have been fine, particularly if your mains was actually nearer 230V.

As for lamps, generally, "normal" ("GLS") bulbs were supposed to have a section of the wire internally as a very low-current fuse - check for an extended section of glass covering one of the legs. I always understood that when the coil breaks an arc will form across the ends and this arc can migrate down the feed wires, bypassing what remains of the coil and becoming, effectively, a short circuit. This fuse section will blow to stop all the lights going off when one does.

I don't think I remember ever having a standard GLS bulb blow a plug or a circuit fuse/MCB, but plenty of "special" lamps did. Those ones called "candle" lamps seemed to be particularly bad, and more so if they were a cheap brand. Possibly they didn't have the built-in fuse section for reasons of space. Modern CFL / LED lamps are a mixed bag. Some have onboard fuses, others just seem to burn up a section of the power supply circuit board!

Although 3A (720W), 5A (1,200W) and 13A (3,100W) (all at 240V) were the normal and readily-available sizes of 1" plug fuse and (I believe) were/are the only ones in the BS and therefore BS- and kite-marked, it's not too difficult to find other values in the same format. I've made use of 1A and 10A fuses in the past for various reasons. If you take a 1" fuse apart before it has blown, the thickness of the wire goes a long way to explaining how BS1363 plugs get hot when operating near their rated load. The rest of the plug is chunky enough not to notice 3kW if all connections are properly tightened, but the fuse does get quite warm. I've seen some very cheap (and probably shouldn't have been BS/CE/UKCA/Kite-marked) moulded (i.e. not rewireable) plugs with melted fuse carriers because an inappropriate plastic had been used for the heat generated.

M.

Re: Power cycling bigger kit is not a hobby I would endorse

And yet one of Dyson's reasons for promoting leaving the EU was the limitations on vacuum cleaner motor power.

I always found it amusing that he moaned and moaned about the power draw of mains cleaners being limited...

...and then he started touting battery-powered cleaners as being "better" at cleaning than the mains models. I've yet to see a battery cleaner running at anywhere near 1kW.

M.

Re: Power cycling bigger kit is not a hobby I would endorse

reduce the voltage supplied

Nowadays marketed as "Voltage Optimisation". It relies on equipment being supplied with lower voltage actually using less power, and works ok for incandescent light bulbs (they get dimmer), "iron" balast fluorescent tubes and certain types of electrical motor. Maybe the original run of BBC Micros which used linear power supplies - less power lost to heat in the regulators, assuming there is still enough voltage that the regulator can operate correctly.

It does not work for thermostatically-controlled heaters (e.g. kettles, ovens, toasters) because they use less instantaneous power but make up for that by operating for longer (the kettle still has to boil, the toast still has to brown; it just takes longer to get there*).

But the key thing is that it makes absolutely no difference at all for anything running a switch-mode power supply, i.e. practically everything these days from a humble LED-based desk lamp, through the beefiest of servers, to the huge motors which run the cranes.

We had a company try to sell us such a system some years ago - when we still had some fluorescent lighting and some non-interter drive motors. They claimed 15 - 20% savings were possible (IIRC) with a minimum guarantee of 7%. I said that was impossible and pointed out why. They did some calculations and decided they couldn't guarantee 7% after all.

Expensive kit, disruptive to install. Much cheaper and more cost effective just to replace lights, motors etc. as they age. In some circumstances also cheaper and more cost effective to replace kit early. For example, when I started here, customer-facing computers were Pentiums with SCSI HDDs and took something like 80W from the wall even when "idling". Replacement machines were Core2, then AMD A8, and the idle consumption quickly came down to under 20W IIRC (haven't measured it for a while). Being switch-mode supplied, of course, VO wouldn't have made a jot of difference anyway.

M.

*in fact there is probably a (very) small but (likely) measurable increase in energy use for a lower power kettle as the things are not often well insulated and there will be more (time for) heat loss as it warms up.

When even Microsoft can’t understand its own Outlook, big tech is stuck in a swamp of its own making

Re: Outlook

How about Messenger Pro?

Re: There once was a time...

It was the Done Thing at the time. Acorn had a very detailed and well thought-through style guide (PDF) for RISC OS too. More information and links on the RISC OS Open website.

M.

Re: Usability is a bug, not a feature, in this world

My old boss told a tale that his father used to do contract work for the Royal Navy. As an example, he designed a control panel for some vital system or other.

Instead of neat rows of identical switches and dials, green or red indicator lamps and neat printed labels, he ended up with a mess of a panel with varying sizes and shapes of knobs not installed in a grid and dials and indicator lamps of all shapes and colours.

Because when the lights have gone out or the room is full of smoke or the ship is listing at 35 degrees, if you stretch out your hand for the (I dunno) "release the dogs" control, you don't want accidentally to hit the "open the sea cocks" knob. Touch and muscle memory will instantly tell you if you've found the correct thing, or not.

Bet no one would dare design a desktop like that!

M.

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

Re: I definitely need new glasses

My work week is essentially Friday to Tuesday at the moment. Nearly every Friday I come in, switch on the computer, boil the kettle while it boots, load up Outlook and Edge, start reading and replying to emails from the people who can't understand why I'm not reading emails on Wednesday or Thursday and then, usually as I'm right in the middle of a reply, maybe with a spreadsheet open for reference and several tabs open in Edge, a little box pops up - not a "Windows" box, but from some third-party update manager our IT department uses - telling me that it needs to close Office apps in order to update and will do so in five minutes unless I click "postpone".

So I have two options: race to finish the email before the timer's done or click postpone.

If I click postpone there is no option to "try again in 1 hour" or "click on this button when you are ready", you just have to wait for the box to pop up again, a seemingly random amount of time later, and again, nearly always while I'm in the middle of something important and not during the two hours I spent away from the desk on the "shop floor" as it were.

And then if the update requires a reboot, you might as well walk away from the computer for half an hour or more.

Why this blasted bit of software can't pop up within two minutes of starting the machine, while the tea is hot and undrunk and I've not started any serious work I don't know, and as for having to shut apps down in order to update them, or reboot Windows and spend hours looking at "updating" before shutdown, "updating" before bootup, then a reboot and another "updating" before getting control back! Coming from a personal use of Linux I have really become appreciative of that system's ability to update even running apps in the background, with the final stage of restarting an individual app or rebooting the OS for a kernel update left up to me. I can work all morning while the system updates under me, then reboot the machine at lunchtime perhaps.

M.

Re: Schrödinger's firmware situation

It's the classic case of the last 10% taking (at least) 50% of the total time. Personally, I'd say the last 10% takes 80%.

For example, I needed a simple Raspberry Pi-based app for timed opening and closing of relays. Half an hour, including testing and bugfixes for a basic version, another couple of hours for one which did different things according to the day of the week or the date (no relays required on Christmas day, for example). Not counting the odd bug which only appeared on certain dates or after a certain amount of uptime.

Making the on-screen display "pretty"?

Two days. And another day of tweaks a couple of weeks later.

Making it easy for someone other than myself to update the timers?

Erm... still working on that one, three years later.

Same sort of thing happens at home, so I've learned to overestimate. Yes, I can definitely mount slatted shelving in the airing cupboard and fit a folding door. SWMBO has a stack of fresh bedding and towels piled up on the landing and expects to get them neatly put away before tea time. Even with a willing (and able) minion to help, the job actually takes a very long day, by the time I've been to the DIY store (oh, and picked up groceries as well), measured, cut, mounted, eaten lunch, had several cups of tea etc. etc. Would have taken even longer, but this is the third folding door I've done now, so I don't have to waste half an hour with a magnifying glass trying to decipher the badly photocopied instructions. Without the minion the job would definitely have run over into the next day.

When it finally became time to stop using the downstairs loo as a spare storage cupboard and fit it out as a loo (we already had the loo, the sink, the taps etc.), I had to break it gently to SWMBO that her estimate of one long day, or a weekend at most, was at least 50% out. It took three very long days in the end, even with minion help.

M.

User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse

Re: Confused Mouse

Tudur Owen did a skit on Alexa for The Now Show (now sadly defunct) some years ago. Very funny and in 2018 I posted a link. Unfortunately that YouTube link is dead and I can't find another. Anyone have any luck?

M.

Framework guns for cheap laptops with upgradeable alternative

Re: So they made a desktop that's LESS repairable/upgradeable??

I'm sure someone else has thought of this, but isn't the answer to the non-upgradeable RAM problem to hark back to the Amiga of old?

You buy the system with a fixed amount of directly-connected RAM which works at full speed, but maybe you could be allowed to add more memory in the conventional manner later, even if it's a bit slower. It's still going to be faster than paging to storage and if this were to become a "thing" then OS support for perhaps moving foreground tasks to "fast ram" and shuffling background tasks (or those with low memory access requirements) to "chip ram" could offer the best of both worlds; very fast memory for ultimate speed but less pressure to max it out at purchase time and affordable upgradability using standard memory modules for long life. OS schedulers already do very clever things with processors which have multithreading and/or big.LITTLE type architectures so surely it's not that big of an ask.

I'm not sure how the memory bus works in these chips, and it might not be workable if doing the above means providing two entirely separate memory buses on the processor package, but it's a thought, eh?

M.

BOFH: The USB stick always comes back – until it doesn't

Re: Even worse ...

Thing is, we are all so used to things like SSDs (certainly in desktop-like scenarios) essentially lasting "forever" that we are surprised when the occasional one just dies.

I had a Samsung Evo 860 M.2 SSD in a Windows machine, the machine was five or six years old but had had a very easy life until a couple of years before failing and the SSD was nowhere near its expected TBW when the thing just died. Like it wasn't even plugged in. Doesn't register in an external M.2 reader either. About as capable of storing data as the similarly-sized paper bookmark I'm using at the moment. No real data stored on the device, just the Windows install and some working files, but bloomin' annoying nevertheless, and quite unusual. It's the first and so far still the only M.2 format device I've ever lost, and I can't honestly point to more than one, maybe two, SATA SSDs which have retired themselves, and that's a mix of devices at quite a lot of price- and performance-points.

I have an identical M.2 device, bought at about the same time (might even have been in the same order, can't remember now) which is in a much more heavily-used machine and is still going strong a year later, and another in a machine at home. I'm keeping an eye on them though.

M.

As Amazon takes over the Bond franchise, we submit our scripts for the next flick

Re: I'm all for suspension of disbelief, but...

Have you seen Russian police officers? my kids were incredulous when we saw Steve Rosenberg's report on TV last night.

Article from which that image is taken, in case the ichef.bbci URL doesn't work for some reason: Rosenberg visits Tver.

M.

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Re: HP/UX go pop

Work was a country house in a village

Computer Concepts of Artisan, Impression, Laser Direct fame?

I still use Xara Designer Pro. Or will do once I have something running Windows again (though maybe it's time to give it another go under Wine).

M.

Re: "built to survive minor accidents"

holes & silkscreen markings for the interference-suppression components, but no such components fitted

Which takes me back to the story about the original batch of Raspberry Pi from China. They failed EMC testing because someone at the factory took it upon themselves to swap the ethernet connector "with magnetics" for one without, presumably cheaper to purchase and therefore increased margin on manufacture, though the Pi people were very circumspect in their non-allocation of blame.

Manufacturing hiccup.

M.

Re: "built to survive minor accidents"

In my first "proper" job, I had been changing some PP3s in items of test equipment.

Finding a couple that were utterly flat, and barely raised a tickle on the tongue-test*, just for the "art" of it, I plugged them together to make a kind of monolith on my desk.

Ten minutes later as I was in the middle of something else entirely, there was the most almighty <bang>. The batteries didn't fly too far, but that day I discovered that PP3s are constructed from six smaller cells in series. The one which had exploded had six clear plastic cells stacked one on top of the other containing a liquid-soaked fibrous material, some of which was now on my desk, the one which hadn't (but which I opened up to see), had six cylindrical cells (like AAA batteries but a lot skinnier) stacked next to each other.

M.

*of course, while the tongue-test is great for 6V (e.g. PJ996) and 7.2/8.4/9V batteries (e.g. rechargeable and primary PP3s), it's not so good for 1.5V batteries which "barely raise a tickle". In other words, the fact that I felt anything at all from these PP3s should have warned me that there was some power left...

Short-lived bling, dumb smart things, and more: The worst in show from CES 2025

Re: A washing machine

We have a small LG machine that does the same thing. Note that it is nearly always with bathroom kit - mats, towels, flannels. These things, particularly if you have children, are likely full of whatever soap you use in the bathroom, so the bubbles are partly from that. One way around it is to put the machine on to a cycle which does a pre-wash, and do not put any detergent in the pre-wash drawer. This (or a separate rinse-and-spin) will wring most of the soap out of the offending articles and - bonus - probably allow the washing powder to do a better job on the main part of the cycle.

M.

Re: making an essential appliance too damn complicated

Little realised fact; there is nothing particularly magical about -18C. It was set at that value for domestic "four star" freezers quite simply because...

-18C = 0F

(well, as near as a bimetal strip in a freezer can manage!)

M.

US watchdog sticks probe into 2.6M Teslas over so-called Smart Summon crash reports

Re: It is an ASS...

Near-relevant xkcd.

M.

Re: Darwin Award

Isn't it a prerequisite of qualifying for a Darwin Award that you have not yet procreated? By that count it looks as if Musk is ineligible.

M.

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

Re: AND / OR

where the word for "first" is based on 0, "second" on 1 &c., but haven't found much evidence

What you mean like where in the US, the building floor level with the ground is the "first" floor whereas in the UK it's the "ground" floor, effectively the "zeroth" because if you go up one floor you'll find yourself on the "first" floor, which in the US is the "second"?

I mean, not counting certain buildings which due to topography have a "ground" and an "upper ground" and/or a "lower ground"...

M.

Former NSA cyberspy's not-so-secret hobby: Hacking Christmas lights

Re: "that's not really allowed in the UK"

There was an occasion when one particular manufacturer only made an iOS app, and only one phone could be registered to an aid at a time. This was so obviously useless for a: those who either couldn't or didn't want to buy in to the Apple ecosystem and b: parents of aid-wearing children, particularly as they got older and also wanted to control the things themselves that they were very quickly informed of who the actual customers were and (I believe) now the app works on Android as well, and you can register three or four phones for control.

Then again, I'd prefer it if there were ways of doing this which did not need an app...

M.

Re: "that's not really allowed in the UK"

You don't have to pay. It could be revolutionary for hearing aid users (perhaps finally unseating the 100-year-old induction loop, and I'm looking at it seriously to replace my infra-red systems) but...

...but, there is hardly any actual kit out there to buy, even two (three?) years after the specification was standardised.

M.

Re: Just stop flashing!!!

A colleague bought 10 identical strings of lights for work, from the same supplier at the same time. Outwardly they look identical, but while nine of the strings come on when you apply power using the same settings you used last time - possibly weeks ago - one string always comes on at "flashing mode 1" and requires seven firm pushes of the button to get it to steady state.

From the top of a ladder.

Some time later, same colleague bought another dozen or so strings of lights for another area. These blasted things do not come on at all until you climb a (taller) ladder and press the button seven times.

This is why whenever I buy lights for home, I buy the type which does not have a little module to make them flash, and why I was cross when my wife decided this year she needed another set of lights for outside, too late for me to order them from CPC, went down to ASDA and bought a flashy-flashy set which has to have the button push done, every flippin' time we turn them on, and as the button is in a waterproof box that is a pig to open, that turns out to be a job that isn't often done.

M.

Re: "that's not really allowed in the UK"

Auracast.

M.

A New Year's gift from Microsoft: Surprise, your scanners don't work

Re: Scanner not working?

Seeing an Epson scanner on that list, never used it under Windows but two things I miss from the Epson app in OSX now that I'm exclusively Linux is the ability to shove four strips of negatives (or a dozen 35mm slides) in a holder and have the thing auto-select and scan the individual images, and the very simple "click on a white bit" facility for correcting the colour balance of faded images. Can't find a way to do those under Linux though I admit it's been a while since I looked. Ours is a Perfection V750 I think?

Other than that, for basic scanning, Linux was a doddle - plug in and it works. Printers with Postscript and network sockets never seem to cause trouble either, though I do prefer to configure IP addresses and such manually for them.

On OSX it was even relatively easy to scan some old 110 and 126 negatives and my dad's old 2¼" transparencies, that's a bit more "manual" in Linux. The OSX app died with our Core Duo (not Core 2, so OS updates were quickly impossible) Mac Mini.

M.

HMD Fusion: A budget repairable smartphone with modular flair

Re: nanny-ing software

I have a Motorola phone running Lineage, and it still seems to kill background apps wihout reason, meaning I often miss Signal messages (for example) until I next "open" the phone. So maybe it's not a manufacturer thing, it's likely some function of the underlying Android, along with the pitiful excuse for a battery monitor they foisted on us a couple of updates ago, nowhere near as useful as the old one.

M.