Posts by Martin an gof

Smart speaker maker Sonos takes heat for deliberately bricking older kit with 'Trade Up' plan

Re: Plastic blister packs

Friend of my father's who makes, locally, a high-quality, multi award-winning food item. Big supermarket chain which claims to support small local producers. Stocks said item for a few months to see how well it sells, it does ok.

Refuses to continue stocking item unless small local producer 'rents' space in their freezers, or supplies his own freezer to every shop in the area, and sells at a price determined by the supermarket with costs of promotions (price reductions) fully born by the producer, not the supermarket. Also tries to impose ridiculous invoice terms - can't remember now, but 90 days springs to mind.

It's how capitalism works.

Small local producer still makes a decent living selling direct to local cafes and restaurants and is slowly opening a number of ice cream parlours in the most unlikely places and making the most unlikely volume of sales :-)

But he will never go national unless he can play by the rules of the big guns.

M.

Not exactly a security flaw, but eldest (and others) got so fed up with a school 'mate' inflicting his choice in music to everyone on the bus by bringing a BT speaker with him every day that he took to scanning for the device as soon as said eejit was on board, pairing his phone as soon as possible and playing such classics as Abba, Fleetwood Mack and the theme from Thomas the Tank Engine.

Apparently this worked for quite some time (weeks) before aforementioned twit worked out the only way to stop it was to switch the speaker off, but of course switching it on again meant a race to see who would connect first :-)

M.

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

Re: Overselling it

you don't treat the possibility of no aircon by having no aircon

Why not? If you can build an appropriate solution without resorting to forced cooling, that's an awful lot of saved cost, weight and potential problems. A bit like insulating your house. Do it properly and you can get by in a typical British year with ambient heating (incidental gains from sunlight, body heat, appliances) in the winter and ambient cooling in the summer.

A typical British house however needs dozens of kilowatts of heat for six or nine months of the year.

Think about graphics cards without fans, underclocked processors, SSDs instead of spinning rust, 'industrial spec' (or even military spec) components instead of 'commercial'.

No idea if any of these techniques are used (loss of computing power comes to mind) but if you can get by passively, why not do it?

M.

Behold Schrödinger's Y2K, when software went all quantum

Re: RISC OS Y2K no time soon

I worked that one out at the time, and surprised a few people. It also turned out that the Psions were pretty good - not quite as far in the distant future as RISC OS, but far better than certain other systems.

M.

El Reg presents: Your one-step guide on where not to store electronic mail

Re: No Limits!

I'll have to look into WebDAV, but the first thing I understood on the "how to" pages for PiWiGo is that it runs atop a web server (never set one of those up before, but how hard can it be?), and that you have to "upload" or "import" files to PiWiGo. I'd rather point it at my existing NAS share, which runs to a rather ridiculous 330+GB of photos and 2.1TB+ of videos, nearly all of which are self-generated "family memories" (i.e. very little downloaded content). There's a load of other stuff too, which takes the total up to somewhere around 3.4TB. It's quite a lot to have to re-organise :-)

On a related but off-topic note, whatever happened to "decent" large 2.5" HDDs? I went for 2.5" when I first built the NAS many years ago for reasons of neatness - I found a lovely Startech 4x2.5" caddy which fitted into a single 5.25" bay, initially with a mirrored pair of 300GB, then with four 1TB in the ZFS equivalent of RAID 6 (2TB online), then with six 1TB drives giving me 4TB online, which was as many as I could physically fit in the small case I'd bought, and needed an extra SATA card to give me the 6 ports I needed.

Now I need to upgrade again. All those years ago I had assumed that 2TB discs would be common by now, but they're not. Or, at least, you can get Toshiba laptop discs and WD Blue discs of that size, but WD Red? Seagate Ironclad (or whatever it's called?). Nope. So I can't follow my original plan of swapping out the 1TB discs for 2TB discs and letting the thing rebuild and I'm left with a dilemma; do I buy the laptop discs and see what happens (speed isn't really an issue)? Buy a bigger case and reconfigure the thing for 10x 1TB discs? Or buy a bigger case and move to 3.5" discs?

M.

Re: No Limits!

I have tens of thousands of files in the "media" folders on my NAS. Both Nextcloud (IIRC) and PiWiGo insist on having your media in their "private" folders. No thanks.

I've been using KPhotoalbum and it works very well, except for the index-in-XML thing which both makes it very (very) slow to load up with as many files as I have and is kept in memory so you can't have two or more people updating at the same time.

There is a .db file created as well, and I believe there was a GSOC project to move from XML to SQL or something, but unless I've missed something, this part has not been completed.

M.

Re: No Limits!

No, I meant 'filing system' in the 'filing cabinet with marked and labelled drawers' sense. People still need to keep information organised, and computer Filing Systems make this difficult, at least for many kinds of information.

In the absence of an easy, well-organised filing system, a pile of 'stuff' with a search function is the next best thing. Email offers this, most standard computer filing systems - which can't search for anything except file names and maybe date - do not.

The problem with content management systems is that they are rarely suitable for everything. I've started using an indexing system for my home photos & films. Leaving aside the fact that it uses a single XML file for the index when it really should be using a database, it actually works quite well.

It wouldn't be so good for organising the paperwork relating to our recent house buding project though.

M.

Re: No Limits!

I think the point is that email is not a general purpose filing system. If you have important emails or (in terms of "size" limits) attachments, they should be put somewhere more permanent and appropriate.

On the other hand, if your only alternative is a bog standard shared folder on the network drive I absolutely can see how even Outlook's truly awful search facilities are better. Judging by what I've seen though, content management systems are very hit-and-miss, and are often inappropriate for, or simply inaccessible for "normal" users. If there's no usable alternative, people will continue to rely on email.

M.

Re: Deleted

The problem here is that it's exactly as easy to read an item from the deleted folder as from any other folder. It should be harder.

Which OS is it that lets you see which files are in the trash can, but won't let you use them directly, requiring that they are restored to their original locations first? Wouldn't that be an appropriate way to deal with deleted items in Outlook too? More often than not things are in the trash can because some limit or other has been reached in the main mailbox. Being forced to restore them would help people think about whether or not they are necessary.

Combine this with some kind of non-turn-off-able auto expiry of deleted items (only).

M.

Y2K? It was all just a big bun-fight, according to one Reg reader

The small, round parcel of delight is also often topped with some demerara sugar, although we understand that the things are available without such a topping. Such a variation is an abomination in the eyes of this hack, but your mileage may vary.

Take a look at the picture heading the article. No sugar, no "flaky" pastry. That is a proper Eccles cake.

Well, that's what I've always thought...

M.

A sprinkling of Star Wars and a dash of Jedi equals a slightly underbaked Rise Of Skywalker

Re: 1977

Yes, we liked Solo too. Perhaps not as much as Rogue One, but it was a reasonable film and we really don't understand the ire that's thrown at it.

I think the thing with Empire - the reason that a lot of fans like it but that it wasn't the most successful of the franchise - is precisely that; it's a fan's film. I came across a similar thing with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - the book that is, not the film - it's a huge book and a lot of people find it boring, but fans love it because while it isn't a rip-roaring adventure and doesn't have a totally satisfying conclusion (a bit like Empire) it does fill in a lot of gaps and makes you think "oh, right, so that's why s/he is like that" and it gives you a few clues as to where the story might be going in future instalments, without giving the whole game away.

M.

Maybe we're just odd. We hated Inside Out - most of the film was pretty much as expected, fairly predictable, but the conclusion was simply wrong. How on earth that thing has earned rave reviews I'll never understand.

There are only three Star Wars films.

Nah, I'm with him here. Rogue One was a worthy addition (slightly iffy CGI Leia aside) and I'm afraid I got to the end of the first third of RoS thinking 'what would Gareth Edwards have made of this?' It's a shame, as some of the stuff they did should have been set up properly in the previous installment, and there were several plot threads in this film which - had it been anything other than a Disney film - could have resolved in far more satisfying ways.

Definitely an exciting film though and yes, I will be adding the BluRay to the collection.

Interesting to note that even my obsessed children, who left the cinema on a definite high, woke up the following morning with slightly confused looks on their faces and lots of 'why did they do /that/?' questions.

M.

How do you ascertain user acceptability if you keep killing off the users?

Re: Well

A previous boss used to take the paper streamers out of party poppers and fit a sprout instead. Choose one of the correct size and it would launch across the room quite nicely

M.

BOFH: 'Twas the night before Christmas, and the ransomware struck

Early BOFHs - mostly pre-PFY - used to be a bit more 'internal monologue' so the PFY isn't essential for exposition, especially one who has been there for some time and could be expected to have learned from the master...

M.

The time PC Tools spared an aerospace techie the blushes

Re: Windows 3.1

create a Win311 folder and xcopy all the floppies into it

In a similar manner (and I'm sure I'm not the first or last to have done this) I got bored feeding floppies (was it 3 for DOS and 7 or 8 for WfW 3.11?), created a boot floppy which included a minimal DOS, NE2000 drivers and Netware client, and found that I could have half a dozen new PCs installing DOS and Windows 3.11 near simultaneously - if slowly - from the discs I'd xcopied to the server.

Simpler times.

M.

Vivaldi opens up an exciting new front in the browser wars, seeks to get around blocking with cunning code

Re: Barclays

Probably not connected, but I've come across a couple of websites recently that don't work in Firefox for "no apparent reason". It often turns out to be some hidden (iframe) content which requires script to run that NoScript is blocking, but which doesn't show up on the menu bar NoScript menu. Of course, I don't have NoScript on other browsers. It's only when you dig around and find the correct site to "allow" that the whole thing springs into life.

I first met this kind of symptom on shopping sites, which use Arcot or Sagepay or Worldpay or similar in a "hidden" window to verify your card details. Unless you already have those sites allowed the transaction will fail.

M.

Deadly 737 Max jets no longer a Boeing concern – for now: Production suspended after biz runs out of parking space

Re: Alternate 737MAX design kludge

Only on the Trident 3

I meant on the image I posted, which was the clearest I could find but was, as you say, of a later model with an extra engine, which sort of proves the other problem with central engines - difficulty upgrading to versions with bigger fans. Somewhat similar to the 737's problem!

M.

Re: Alternate 737MAX design kludge

Why did they not put a small duct on the back of the engines

If you compare the Tristar, the Trident (that one has a fourth engine), the 727, the DC10 and probably many others, you will see that the ducts are on the intake side of the engines, not the outlet. There's probably a reason, I wouldn't know. Interesting question though.

But I don't think it would solve the problem anyway, I have never given it much thought, but the real question is, where is the actual force acting? Is it at the point where the hot and cold gasses exit the "inside" of the engine, or is the fan like a big propeller with the force it creates acting at the blades? Or a bit of both?

M.

Re: Is it a good idea ...?

Bolting engines onto an airframe that was never designed to cope with said engines

This is the bit I never understood. The ground clearance was already marginal in the previous generation (witness the odd-shaped engine intake cowls) so wouldn't any sane company have been looking at that compromise as a stop-gap, and furiously redesigning the aircraft to take the larger engines which would obviously become available in the future, or perhaps designing a completely new aircraft in that capacity / range bracket?

The stated reason at the time was to maintain compatibility with existing airport infrastructure - something to do with door heights - but is that really a problem?

From a layman's point of view, sticking the engines forward of the wing and unbalancing the aircraft is only marginally less radical than bolting them to the back and flipping the tail upside-down.

Whatever happened to the MD-90 / 717?

M.

$13m+ Swiss Army Knife of blenders biz collapses to fury of 20,000 unfulfilled punters

Re: Stop backing gadget products, you twits

Just out of interest - I presume you also have problems in Pencoed, so is it that you have more problems in China, or just that it's easier to deal with a company a couple of hours' train ride away?

As an aside, I work for the National Museum of Wales and use quite a lot of every generation of Pi, mostly as low cost video players. Our curator of Modern and Contemporary Industry has "accessioned" one of my original model Pis, though he hasn't yet got around to putting it in the display case next to the Dragon and the Electron...

M.

Re: Stop backing gadget products, you twits

even when things are working perfectly they will decide to randomly swap things without telling you

This is exactly what happened to the Raspberry Pi when they were manufacturing the first batch in China, though they called it "accidental" at the time.

After that, of course, they moved production to Wales.

M.

Why is the printer spouting nonsense... and who on earth tried to wire this plug?

Re: Why didn't the earth leakage detector trip?

Domestically though (I realise this is slightly OT) the regulations now more-or-less mandate RCDs on everything, and because they are also now emphasising "discrimination" - where only the problem circuit should be disconnected - RCDs which cover multiple circuits are discouraged. The easiest way to comply is to fit RCBOs (combined RCD and MCB) for each circuit, but that doesn't half bump up the cost. A typical MCB used domestically can be had for under £3 or not a lot more for a known-brand, but RCBOs are ten times that cost and now, they're suggesting that surge protection devices also need to be fitted, initially covering multiple circuits.

M.

Tesla has a smashing weekend: Model 3 on Autopilot whacks cop cars, Elon's Cybertruck demolishes part of LA

Re: I Can't Stop Myself

Firstly, Autopilot makes it sound like that used in aircraft.

That's probably the key thing. It "sounds" like it should be autonomous, so a few people (probably only a very few) will assume it is autonomous.

Aircraft autopilots are mostly not much more than cruise control: They maintain speed, heading and altitude, even if those carry you into a building or mountain.

That's as maybe for a light aircraft, but (simplistically) commercial aircraft can perform the equivalent of selecting a postcode in the sat-nav, pressing 'go' and sitting back and watching. A Hawker Siddeley Trident performed the first fully automatic landing way back in 1964.

M.

Motorola's mid-range One Hyper packs 64MP cam, huge screen and – ooo – 'Quad Pixel' tech

the quality on a phone is good enough that there's really no point to most compact cameras these days

Not sure why the downvotes because that's the real story. As is (far too) often quoted - the best camera for the job is the one you have with you. Before phone cameras I used to carry a disposable film camera around with me and the images were fine. Apart from the lack of decent flash, a typical phone camera produces images at least as good as and usually better than the images from those cameras.

A half-decent compact camera can still outperform many phone cameras in my opinion, but it's also true to say that few people would carry one with them everywhere while these days people do carry their phone everywhere.

Some very clever software goes into phone cameras these days to make up for their hardware deficiencies and given other constraints (a modern phone has to be "thin") it's always going to be easier to add pixels than to improve lenses, fit a larger sensor or a proper optical zoom. Those pixels can then be combined in creative ways to emulate better lenses or other things.

It's an interesting argument about larger pixels because while a typical SLR has physically larger pixel wells which can collect "more light", don't forget that these wells are overlayed with a colour filter which means that colour resolution is lower than luminance. If you bin four tiny phone pixels you effectively create one larger - genuinely RGBG - pixel. Ignoring the part played by the lens, you could argue that a 20Mpixel SLR has a (real) luminance resolution of 20Mpixels, but a colour resolution of only 5Mpixels while a 64Mpixel phone sensor which does 4:1 binning has a real luminance resolution of 16Mpixels, but a colour resolution of 16Mpixels too.

I'm definitely not of the persuasion that I should ditch my SLR, nor even my compact cameras, but over the last few years I have begun to be impressed with the images produced by phone cameras, though admittedly not from those which are in the price range I would consider for my next phone.

M.

123-Reg is at it again: Registrar charges chap for domains he didn’t order – and didn't want

Re: I had the same experience with 123-reg.

Mythic Beasts? The Raspberry Pi people use them and do lots of exciting things with them so they can't be awful.

I have a couple of domains registered and DNSsed with them and they've been ok so far.

M.

Re: 123-Reg customer records are just broken

It's a good job my credit card had expired

Don't count on that sorting everything. A few years ago someone skimmed my debit card and set up a small Continuous Card Authorisation (Netflix, IIRC). My bank spotted a large unusual payment (online shop) and alerted me, so we cancelled the card, but the CCA carried forward to the new card and I didn't notice until some weeks later when checking a bank statement.

I didn't have any other CCAs on the card, but apparently this is normal practice.

M.

Bandwidth weirdness at TalkTalk has customers fuming at being denied on-demand I'm A Celeb

Re: Talk Talk?

Some smaller ISPs resell TalkTalk in the same way that others resell Openreach. My small ISP, which I am otherwise quite happy with, does this.

Odd connectivity issues have been a problem for some time and very difficult to diagnose. Some websites seem to be affected while others are not, and those which are affected aren't always.

For example, last week I tried and failed to log in to my Amazon account even though I was able to browse and fill my basket quite happily beforehand. I had to re-do the order from scratch using my phone's connection. The week before, I had huge problems even loading up the front page of CPC which isn't normally an issue.

It seems to be an https issue - something goes wrong, data goes missing and the browser sits there for ages spinning away until eventually giving up, occasionally with some kind of 'secure connection failed' message.

Sometimes - only sometimes - clearing cookies gets things going, but only until the next time.

M.

That's Microsoft price: Now you can enjoy a BSOD from the comfort of your driving seat

Re: Why on earth...

Imagine this were GNU/Linux

Tried that with one recent display, but developers willing to work under Linux are rare. The bloke who developed this one particular interactive insisted that the code would be portable so long as he compiled it against Mono instead of .net. Or something, I'm not that kind of developer myself.

An additional problem from our point of view is the whole administrating thing. Although I use Linux desktops and laptops both at work and at home, it's all effectively stand-alone. Neither I nor my "other half" at work have serious admin experience with Linux, and apart from a few head-scratching issues, Windows domains and user profiles "just work".

2030 is worrying me on another count though - I'm in the process or building a heating thermostat on Arduino, and it seems as if it uses 32 bit time...

M.

Re: Why on earth...

even robust touchscreens came with [...] windows drivers only.

Needed to use an Elo touchscreen with a Mac at work (don't ask). USB connected, no drivers, but we found a nice man in, erm, Brighton I think (look, it was a while ago), who deals with this sort of thing as a living and he was able to provide a multitouch driver once we'd fed him enough beer tokens. Elo didn't mind.

Given that this implies he either has access to manufacturer info or has managed to reverse-engineer the interface, it's not difficult to suppose that the same could be done for any OS.

That said, we have other kit with similar problems. We have "projected capacitive" touchscreen panels which only have drivers compatible with XP, so we can't upgrade those computers without also upgrading the panels, but the software running on those computers won't talk to the version of the driver which comes with the newer panels so we can't upgrade the panels without also having the software re-written.

In other words, upgrading to W10 would - as a minimum - mean buying new and expensive specialist touchscreen panels and having the running software re-written, probably from scratch because the original contract 15 years ago didn't include source code. In the meantime, when computer hardware fails we re-install XP, but even that is becoming a problem now as some motherboards don't have XP drivers available for such essentials as the network chipset.

It's not really fair to lay all of the blame on the hardware manufacturers or on Microsoft; at least some of it is due to the contractors who probably guessed this would happen and looked forward to a nice little earner at some future date, and to the managers at our end who didn't programme any kind of refresh into the budgets - even just from year 10 would have helped!

M.

Explain yourself, mister: Fresh efforts at Google to understand why an AI system says yes or no

Re: Tainting of Training Datasets etc

"while the 'enemy' images were grainy"

That's a nice idea but I don't believe it

I said "if I remember" :-) - the point I was trying to make was that this sort of thing, i.e. of "self learning" algorithms learning the wrong thing because of poor training data, has been known about for decades. I mentioned the 1990s because in my (admittedly poor) memory I heard the story sometime between university and my first proper job and I remember thinking that getting a computer to recognise any kind of image reliably was a bit of a feat - my final year project at university had involved trying to digitise an "edge" in an image from a video camera.

A company with Google's resources and 25+ years of research papers to build upon should have learned from other people's mistakes. Yes, it's difficult. No, there are no shortcuts.

M.

Re: Tainting of Training Datasets etc

The tanks one has been around for ages. I'd almost swear I remember being told that story back in the 1990s when computers started to become powerful enough and cheap enough to dream that they might one day be usefully employed on this sort of task (think - automated defenses).

The way I remember it was that the system was supposedly trained to distinguish between 'friendly' and 'enemy' tanks and when it failed in real life they discovered that all the images of friendly tanks had been well-lit, uncluttered images while the 'enemy' images were grainy, often taken on dull or wet days, so the model had boiled it down (essentially) to sunny = friend, rainy = enemy. Of course, back then it wasn't called 'AI', it was an 'expert system' or somesuch.

I wondered at the time whether getting a system to recognise a 'whole' was really the right way to do it, when recognising 'parts' might be easier and the recognition of the whole can be based on the parts recognised and their physical relationships.

Maybe it needs additional inputs as you suggest - IR is a good start, and radar. The military already have tracking systsms for missiles that use these senses in 'intelligent' ways. Combining with depth information would also provide additional data points.

Judging by what I see in cars though, the goal seems to be to pertorm recognition on the least amount of information possible - often images from a single simple camera. The speed sign recognition system in my wite's car is proof positive that this approach doesn't work, even in exceptionally simple and limited use cases!

M.

High-resolution display output or Wi-Fi: It seems you can only choose one on Raspberry Pi 4

Re: and this is why

Because you were too shy, here's a link.

NEC Raspberry Pi Compute module

M.

In Rust We Trust: Stob gets behind the latest language craze

Re: Do...While

Please forgive the cluelessness, but isn't do...while the same as repeat...until, just with inverted loop-end logic? If so, is there a reason earlier languages such as Pascal and BASIC had repeat...until constructs before while...wend? Perhaps it's because the underlying code for while...wend requires a convoluted jump out of the loop? Imagine doing it with only BASIC's if...then and goto, or in assembler. I.e. repeat...until is

• .start_loop
• Do something
• If test not true jump to .start_loop
• Do something else

While...wend is

• .start_loop
• if test true jump to .end_loop
• do something
• jump to .start_loop
• .end_loop
• do something else

Which is probably optimised by a compiler into a repeat...until anyway :-)

M.

After 10 years, Google Cloud Print will finally be out of beta... straight into ad giant's graveyard

Re: Just when I had something vaguely resembling a use case…

Bit complex for Joe Public to set up, but with a networked printer and a half-decent router it shouldn't be impossible to enable port forwarding and connect directly to the printer over t'interwebs. I went one step further and have a LAN-LAN VPN between me and the parents, but it's the same principle I think?

M.

'Literally a paperweight': Bose users fume at firmware update that 'doesn't fix issues'

Re: How did we get here exactly? HDMI strikes again

it's still tricky to implement

Tell me about it.

I have a reasonable Pioneer AV amplifier acting as the "hub" in my TV/HiFi system, but I have a problem on switch-on. We normally watch TV through an ageing Humax satellite receiver on an LG television. The TV switches on pretty quickly, as does the amplifier, and then sits there saying "no input" while the Humax takes about a minute to get going.

At some point during this process the TV sends a signal down the HDMI (ARC) cable which forces the Pioneer to swap from the "SAT/CABLE" input to the "TV" input so, even once the Humax has booted, there's still no picture or sound and you have to swap the Pioneer back to the correct input.

Interestingly, when I first put this system together this didn't happen. Instead, when watching DTT via the TV with ARC into the amplifier, the TV would randomly decide that ARC wasn't the done thing, and re-enable its (awful) internal speakers. I think I may have done a firmware update in the first year which seems to have solved this problem, but caused the second.

Thank goodness for the Logitech multi-remote.

M.

Re: There’s a reason people say

I'll say upfront that I've never been a Bose fan, ever since I first met their 802 "PA" speakers back in the 1990s - you know, the ones with the eight small drivers and a massive bass labyrinth in an oddly-shaped box that didn't work properly unless you powered them from Bose's own amplifier which included some very tricky EQ.

The Bose home products I have heard certainly have an "engaging", "appealing" and "big" sound when you first hear them, but after a while they begin to grate on me, and there's no way I could justify the cost, personally.

I wonder if iFixit has ever taken a look at these headphones. If I'm going to pay that sort of money for a pair of headphones I'd hope that they were at least repairable, but then again I'm not the sort of person who shells out a grand for a totally unfixable phone either. As an example, Beko is not exactly a "premium" white goods brand, but I have to say I've found it a much more satisfying experience getting sensibly-priced replacement parts for Beko kit than for "better" brands over the years.

In a similar vein, I didn't think the Beyerdynamic DT100 (and siblings) headphones that were the "industry standard" in broadcasting for many years were particularly brilliant headphones but every single part was replaceable, from the cables (which plugged in) to the drivers, to the headband padding and foam inserts. Very useful in a studio context.

I'm fascinated that Bose was able to offer you a trade-in, but the very fact that they could, without question, does make you wonder what their margins are :-)

Most of my HiFi kit comes from Richer Sounds - who do now sell some "lifestyle" stuff, but still have the good quality basics - and most of my PA kit comes from Studiospares, who seem to have people on the end of the phone who actually know what they are talking about and don't turn up their noses when you buy a mix of Sennheiser and Behringer kit*.

M.

*Sennheiser radio microphones - because they're rather good, even in their cheaper forms, and Behringer X32 mixers because likewise. I even had one client send a tech spec. which forbade the use of Behringer kit, but encouraged the use of Midas kit, despite the fact that the small digital desks are, in fact, near identical other than the price (slightly different form factor, very minor pre-amp differences and a promised 96kHz "firmware update" that never seems to have materialised).

Intel end-of-lifing BIOS and driver downloads for dusty hardware

Re: A 20-year support cycle

Just how much demand is there for 20 year old Intel motherboards?

I still have a few machines in service that are almost that old, but they're Gigabyte motherboards.

Some of them still have 10k Maxtor SCSI HDDs too, these are original fit so the same age. They're all running XP (no external access).

No, not really critical things, we can replace them fairly promptly in most cases, though there are one or two which have rather ancient hardware attached which we have not made work successfully on the machines we're currently building. There is a power saving argument for updating too. The original systems, fitted with 3GHz Pentiums, consume somewhere north of 120W even when idling. Our current fit takes less than a quarter of that, though it ramps a bit under load.

M.

Huawei's first Google-free phone stripped and searched: Repair not too painful... once you're in

Re: Still no Moron Mode

The phone will still be held portrait anyway?

Yeah, but there's enough pixels in those sensors for the phone to record 1080 or even 4k video in Landscape, whichever way around the phone is held. For those occasions where Portrait really is wanted, make it an option on the camera menu, but one which reverts next time it's used.

Or maybe always record Landscape but "pretend" to record portrait. There could be an extra bit of meta information in the file which tells the phone to play back in portrait (i.e. chopping out the middle bit of the Landscape image), but if you send the file to the BBC their players will ignore it :-)

M.

Teachers: Make your pupils' parents buy them an iPad to use at school. Oh and did you pack sunglasses for the Apple-funded jolly?

Often seems to be because a particular model of calculator is both sufficient for the task and (crucially) not so clever that it's banned from exams. The schools here though do seem to say 'a calculator such as /x/'. Interesting that the standard calculator when I was doing A-levels was a Casio FX82 and the current standard for GCSE - is an FX85, which sounds like just an updated version but is actually a far more capable unit with dot-matrix display and 'natural order' calculations and step-through of entries and costing (relatively speaking) probably half as much.

M.

When the IT department speaks, users listen. Or face the consequences

Re: Piss poor IT management

Lessons will not be learned and thanks will not be given.

I take your point, and I've never worked in a support role in an organisation large enough that I don't know each user quite well, but there is a dividing line - somewhere - between efficiency and following the rules, and vindictiveness, and in my limited experience many of these situations start out with a user popping up and uttering the immortal line "it's the only copy of that file and I need it for a meeting tomorrow", so you will already know or suspect that there isn't a network copy.

Obviously there are complications if encryption is in place, but without that, simply slotting the old drive into a USB interface and firing up quick-and-easy tools such as PhotoRec, GParted or even SpinRite can recover quite a lot. dd first if you want to be extra safe.

It is also my limited experience that the sort of user who still doesn't take notice of "best practice" after nearly losing files, won't change their ways even if they actually lose files. This is why (as others have pointed out) redirected home folders are a boon. They do have their own issues, but making as sure as possible that all data is kept on a network file server takes file security responsibility away from the user and plonks it firmly in the lap of IT, who should know what they are doing.

In the meantime, even a small number of files recovered from a dying HDD (or USB stick or SD card) can turn someone's day from utter disaster to survivable. SD cards are a particular example as unless you own a high-end camera which takes two cards and mirrors them, or a clever camera / phone which automatically syncs to a cloud service (roaming data charges aside), most people will spend an entire holiday relying on their memories being kept safely in a small easily-damaged or lost sliver of plastic, metal and Silicon.

M.

Re: Piss poor IT management

If the computer won't boot, or the hard drive itself has problems (bad FAT, physical damage, etc.), how would you intend to copy My Documents?

By that count, how would you intend to reformat / reimage? Under those circumstances there's no way - short of specialist services if you are very lucky - to get the data back. The drive is disposed of and a new one fitted. However, in TOA,

Philippe "sent a support dude who promptly reformatted her drive during the evening and reinstalled all for the next day.

which implies that the drive was actually ok and with a little care, files could have been recovered.

It's one thing to teach a user a gentle lesson, but real life means that outside of Simon's writings we shouldn't be vindictive.

Like the time a user presented me with a non-working 3½" floppy disc containing the only copy of some (to her) important files. Turned out that not only had she spilled hot chocolate on the thing, but had then left it in the desk drawer for a week, drying out.

One sacrificial case and a gentle wash under the kitchen tap later and IIRC I recovered all except one of those files. Gentle lesson taught (one file to recreate manually), genuine service rendered (my reputation enhanced) and, of course, six months later it's all forgotten :-/

M.

OPPO's Reno 2, aka 'Baby Shark', joins the deepening pool of high-spec midranger mobes

Re: OK, if the unfortunate title of this article is going to cause me to have this song on my mind

Everything from ..."&list"... onwards is unnecessary.

People send me Amazon links similarly. Everything after "/dp/<long number>/" is unnecessary.

M.

Socket to the energy bill: 5-bed home with stupid number of power outlets leaves us asking... why?

Re: Seems fine to me

It belonged to my wife's grandfather. One of a set of three; The Universal Home Lawyer Illustrated, The Universal Home Doctor Illustrated and The Handy Man and Home Mechanic, subtitle Home Repairs Decoration and Construction Illustrated by Odhams Press Limited. Can't see an obvious date but it "feels" like it was written between the wars, possibly some time in the 1930s. It's not earlier than WWI because it mentions gas-filled Tungsten filament bulbs which I believe were not available until the mid 1910s. It's probably not mid 1920s, during WWII or immediately after WWII because books of those periods tend to have heavy emphasis on economy and "making do". It can't be later than the early 1950s because domestic electrical systems are not standardised in fittings nor in supply parameters.

There is no author named, only a foreword by "The Editor". It may be a collection of articles previously published in other formats, and a quick web search seems to imply that there were other editions of the book with the same or similar titles. Most of those I found bear little cosmetic similarity to the book on my shelf, but I did find images of the book here, or at least there were at the time of writing.

M.

The "accessibility rules" as you put it (Part M of the Building Regulations - see section 8) don't mandate specifics as far as I can tell, but the regulations and IET guidance is to fit all accessories (e.g. socket outlets, switches etc.) in a band between 450mm and 1200mm above finished floor level. In practice in houses this means that for rooms without sockets above worktops, all sockets end up with the bottoms of their faceplates at 450mm and all switches end up with the tops of their faceplates at 1200mm :-)

M.

I'm not sure how they manage ground loops.

Balanced audio and where that's not possible, liberal application of "DI" boxes.

Absolutely never by "lifting" the earth wire in a mains plug, though it has to be noted that a lot of audio kit is double insulated these days and doesn't have an earth anyway.

M.

Re: Seems fine to me

Lead sheathed. The conductor is probably Copper. The Copper conductor is rubber insulated, and then there will be waxed paper or cotton covering that with a Lead sheath on the outside. Quite a common wiring system in the first half of the 20th century in the UK, possibly into the 1950s.

I have a very interesting book that not only tells you how to maintain a "small gas engine", build a dolls' house, construct a chest of drawers, install a long-wire radio aerial and develop film, but also how to "install the electric light", with a discussion of the different types of supply available including accumulators - and how to recharge them - d.c. and a.c. systems with various frequencies and pressures.

It's a fascinating read.

M.

Re: Show us the circuit breakers!

Commonly called timber frame in the UK. The timber studwork, when combined with a sheet material such as plywood or OSB, forms the structure of the house and the bricks on the outside (or boards or tiles or render or whatever) is simply decorative. Likewise the internal face - almost invariably plasterboard - is purely decorative. Cutting holes in this plasterboard for sockets and switches does not affect the structural integrity of the building at all, though you may need to be careful if the wires to those sockets run in the insulation.

The panels are usually built off-site so on-site construction can be very quick. The end product will not be any cheaper or more expensive (as a rule) than a more traditional block-built house and will enclose a very thermally "lightweight" space which heats up very quickly.

Even in a block-built house, the internal skin is often covered with plasterboard. This is usually fixed using the "dot and dab" method where blobs of plaster are splatted onto the blocks and the board is pressed on top of these blobs. This has the severe disadvantage that if the details aren't done properly you risk a gale blowing through the cavity thus created, quite probably defeating any insulation in the wall itself.

Our house? Traditional wet plaster on block. No plasterboard in sight. Even upstairs where the partitions are stud, the stuff is to be covered with Fermacell which is just better.

M.

Lots of sockets

I was wondering where to put this comment.

whoever wired up my kitchen also went OTT with the sockets. my kitchen only measures 10 ft x 7ft but has 10 power outlets. Plus a 'cooker' socket.

Is that 10 doubles, or 10 sockets? Being in the middle of a house wire at the moment, the IET recommendations (table H7, p 192 in the current On Site Guide) for sockets do seem slightly overkill. Kitchens, for example? Up to 12m² the recommendation is for a minimum of six double-socket outlets, not counting any socket on the cooker control unit. They seem to assume that appliances will have separate outlets, though this isn't mandated. Kitchens up to 25m² should have at least eight double outlets and larger kitchens should have ten or more. Socket outlets above kitchen worktops should be spaced no more than 1m apart.

Similar stories for other rooms. The living room is interesting - between 12 and 25m² the recommendation is for a minimum of six double sockets, plus an additional two double sockets in the part of the room where the TV is to be placed. In other words, our 14.8m² lounge - not a massive room - has ended up with a pair of double sockets (i.e. four sockets) in each corner and another double to make up the numbers.

With a house built almost entirely of block, and no plasterboard anywhere to be seen, that was a whole load of back boxes to sink. Still doing it in fact.

M.

Heads up from Internet of S*!# land: Best Buy's Insignia 'smart' home gear will become very dumb this Wednesday

Re: Mass extinction?

how recording said freeview programming will stop being possible, due to the lack of server support on the other end of some non existent cloud server

Aah, but we've already been there.

The first and second generation DTT (DVB-T) boxes, OnDigital or ITVDigital branded, could only receive "now and next" information once the EPG servers were turned off after ITVDigital went under and the system was taken over by BBC / Freeview. Likewise, I had (have - in the attic somewhere) an early Freeview PVR - a Thomson device - which used an EPG broadcast by a third party, rather than the official one (there was a technical reason - something to do with it being a 15 day EPG rather than just 8 days I think). When that third party folded, the PVR didn't become completely useless as it was still able to receive broadcasts and to do "instant" recordings, but the EPG stopped working so it was impossible to set a recording for any programme not in the current "now and next" list without setting a manual timer, and the start-when-the-programme-actually-starts (and stop when it stops) function was absent - it was like going back to a VCR and having to set all recordings to start 5 minutes early and finish 10 minutes late, just in case.

So no, it didn't stop working, but using it became much more tedious.

On the other hand, my Sony BluRay player started off with a load of online functions I didn't want and continues to work even though the servers which provided them have long since been switched off. The only thing I missed was the Gracenote lookups, but we play music elseways these days.

BluRay players are an interesting case though, as they have to have a list of keys in order to play protected discs. Many firmware updates are simply updating this list of keys and it's possible - though I haven't actually come across a case myself - that either a firmware update will remove a key that's necessary for playing a disc you've bought, thus rendering that disc useless, or that not having new keys installed in a firmware update (because the player is no longer supported) means that the player refuses to play newer discs.

M.

Re: Somewhat curious...

But shutting it down is a one-off cost and probably a tax-deductible "loss". Keeping servers running is an ongoing cost. Because (I believe) there was no subscription, just an outright purchase, keeping those servers running relies on a sort of pyramid scheme where new purchases pay for the upkeep of existing devices. Eventually it must all come crashing down.

As others have said, there's no easy way out of this if vendors insist on lock-in. Open protocols would do it, so long as someone is willing to make the effort. A subscription model would do it, but how many eejits - even the sort that seem to fall for these things all the time - would fall for "pay us £5 per year per light switch"?

M.