Posts by Martin an gof

This could be our favorite gadget of 2017: A portable projector

Re: Relativity

It is odd that a $500 device with only 720p resolution would be described as "outstanding".

As others have said, 720p is more than enough for most purposes (1024 x 768 and 1280 x 800 are still the most common resolutions among "boardroom" type projectors) and if you are going to project onto a painted wall or the side of a marquee, you really, really won't notice the difference between 720p and 1080p at the sort of sizes you can sensibly get from this unit.

What matters much more is the brightness, and although it took me a while to find it (the Indiegogo page has the figure), 350 lumen isn't going to get you very far in the daylight - I seriously doubt

It works pretty well in anything but direct sunlight

unless you are looking at a small image. For typical classroom use, for example, I would always recommend 3,000 lumen as a starting point.

Couldn't find the info - maybe this isn't a standard discharge lamp? Maybe it's LED?

M.

Re: How much...

I'd have though that with projectors now being commonplace the price of the bulbs would have come down accordingly , to the point where you dont just buy another projector.

We use a lot of very expensive projectors at work, but I was looking at a smaller, cheaper more portable unit for another purpose recently. Spare lamps from most manufacturers seem to tend to be between a third and a half the cost of the new projector.

M.

Pixel-style display woes on your shiny new X? Perfectly normal, says Apple

Well, if that's "normal for OLED", then I don't want a "normal OLED" screen thanks.

Swings and roundabouts. LCD displays have lots of annoying issues too; blacks never quite being black, inconsistent backlighting being just two of the more annoying ones.

Plasma TVs, some tube TVs and OLED (I believe, though I haven't seen more than a couple in a shop) solve(d) the black and the backlighting issues but introduce others, notably burn-in.

We have several plasmas at work; one spent the first four months of its life playing a video game and despite being used for the five years since then to display a good variety of "normal" video, the burn-in is still evident.

Another played video for the first few months, then spent a year playing a slideshow where there was a lot of white/black border. When it went back to video the burn-in was obvious, but after a few months it reduced. A couple of years later and it's difficult to spot, unless you have an all-white image.

My 20-year-old widescreen Trinitron TV at home died almost exactly two years ago and the LCD that replaced it wasn't as much of an improvement as I'd sort of expected.

Early OLED suffered (I believe) from poor life of the blue LEDs; over a (relatively) short period of time (a few thousand hours) the output from the blue LEDs would reduce considerably more than that from the red and the green, leading to a colour shift that could only be corrected up to a certain point. I have no idea if they've solved that particular problem with current panels, but it sounds as if they haven't.

I have similar compromises with projectors. Working at a museum where displays are on for about 7½ hours a day, LCD projectors (where the image is projected through LCD shutters) just don't last more than three years. LCD panels and their associated dichroic colour filters have rated lifespans of maybe 8,000 hours and failures are horrid colour casts and colour blotches.

DLP projectors are much more robust, and I have single-chip units which have done well over 22,000 hours with hardly any maintenance and are old enough now that even were I to want to replace the colour wheels, potentially improving colour rendition and contrast, the spares are no longer available. Also at this age the DLP units start to have stuck pixels.

LCoS projectors are marginally better than LCD, but in our experience not significantly longer-lived.

BUT, when new, there is no doubt that the image from LCD (and particularly LCoS) is actually easier on the eye than that from DLP, though I have to admit here that I don't use any three-chip DLP systems and I am sensitive to the "rainbow effect" that I know other people can't see.

Nothing is perfect, unfortunately. You have to make your decision based on what is important to you. Personally I'm hoping that OLED lifespan improves within the next 5 to 7 years, which is when I expect to need to buy a new TV for home.

M.

Those IT gadget freebies you picked up this year? They make AWFUL Christmas presents

Re: freebie USB sticks

THIS is the only acceptable shape for a usb stick

Well said, totally agree, but can you point me in the direction of such sticks that don't say "Kingston" on the side and either fail after a couple of months, or last for ever but have write speeds that wouldn't tax my old Viewdata modem?

Generally quite like Kingston stuff, but I've bought a load of this-shaped Kingston stick; the USB3 ones didn't last at all and were only marginally faster than the Viewdata-rated USB2 sticks.

M.

Fresh bit o' Linux to spruce up that ancient Windows Vista box? Why not, we say...

Re: nice to see...

A number of people in my LUG have gone back to Debian in recent years

My own take on the matter is that I tried Debian in the days before Ubuntu and was put off Linux for several years. This as a complete and utter noob, long-term RiscOS user who was trying to find something to use that was a: not Windows (because I like to be contrary) and b: not Mac OS (because I'm not made of money).

Ubuntu gave the idea of an easy-to-set-up and easy-to-use Linux distribution something of a kick up the backside, and while it may have gone a bit weird in recent years I would say that it has made other distributions - Debian-based or otherwise - buck up their ideas. I'd put Raspbian and Mint into the "good influencers" class too.

That said, outside of my Pis (and I have several dozen between home and work) I tend to use OpenSuse. A decent 32-bit OS might make me revive my EeePC, which was latterly running 32 bit Mint, but was retired from frontline use about a year ago.

M.

NHS could have 'fended off' WannaCry by taking 'simple steps' – report

Re: What went right elsewhere?

Wales did not seem to be as badly hit and they are part of the same NHS as England

No they are not. Health is one of the devolved areas and NHS Wales is completely separate (as far as I'm aware) from NHS England. From what I see, the structure is a lot "flatter" than in England, with seven Local Health Boards, rather than innumerable tiny bodies.

Funding, however, is subject to the whims of the UK government which effectively means the English government. Health is one of those areas where it sounds as if Welsh (and Scottish etc.) MPs should not have a say on English policy (the so-called West Lothian question), but as I understand it the Welsh government grant as calculated by the somewhat out-of-kilter Barnet Formula is directly related to spending in England, thus if English MPs decide to reduce NHS funding in England, a proportional amount is removed from the Welsh Government grant, even if the policy in Wales is to maintain or increase funding for the NHS. Money then has to be transferred from other budgets.

Education is another devolved area where the structure is different in Wales to England.

M.

What went right elsewhere?

This attack seems to have hit England hard, but not the other devolved areas - my wife works in the NHS in Wales and although they did endure some "lock down" (emails in particular were blocked for a while) they didn't have the major disruption seen in England. Wales is just as cash-strapped as England, so what did they do differently?

Also slightly annoyed to hear an "expert" on Today this morning basically blaming XP, when in this instance is appears as if it was W7 that suffered the most.

M.

Car trouble: Keyless and lockless is no match for brainless

Re: Possible Solution

And the doors locking themselves while I'm driving? No way. I'd be servicing that. What happens if you roll the car and need to get out

On the few cars I've driven with the auto-lock feature, it was easily disabled. In the car I currently drive, it involves holding the manual lock/unlock switch (on the central console) down for a few seconds, whereupon a small beep informs you that something has changed. Modern cars also have a "safety" feature where it is possible to open just the driver's door. I think the idea is that if some miscreant is chasing you, you can get in the car without them being able to climb in through another door.

Getting out isn't a problem as you do not need to unlock the doors from the inside - just operating the handle unlocks them(*). Doesn't solve the problem if emergency services are trying to open the door from the outside, but I believe many / most such cars these days have locks that automatically open in the event of (say) airbag deployment.

As for child locks, the modern method is far preferable to the old method of a lever on the door catch. With the electric locking systems I've driven recently, there's a switch somewhere to engage the child lock, so it can be disengaged by the driver when appropriate. I, too, have had a door opened by a child when driving, though in my case it was about 40mph and quite frankly the child was in no danger at all due to being - you know - strapped into a proper car seat. Any child old enough to know how to take their belt off should be old enough to be taught never to open the door unless it is safe.

M.

(*)unless deadlocked. Auto-lock systems never deadlock doors AFAIAA, but beware of doing what I once did (but realised pretty quickly) of leaving (older) children in the car to pop over the road to a cash machine and without thinking giving the remote (would never leave the key in the ignition) the double-click which causes it to deadlock. If they *had* needed to get out, they wouldn't have been able to.

Re: Possible Solution

I thought Japanese manufacturers were supposed to be ahead of the game in terms of electrics?

You perhaps forget that they are now in some kind of joint ownership deal with Renault. Might have something to do with it?

M.

Credit insurance tightens for geek shack Maplin Electronics

Re: You cant have it both ways

I used to work for Watford Electronics, albeit when they were computer component box shifters rather than electrical component suppliers.

It was the bit in between where they excelled - turning those components into genuinely useful stuff, such as their 8271 and 1770 disc interfaces for the BBC Micro, "sideways" ROM expansion boards with battery-backed RAM etc. I even had (probably still have in a box somewhere) a WE handheld 4" wide scanner for my Archimedes - ok, so they didn't make the scanner head, but they did design and build the interface card.

Box shifting is a mug's game...

M.

Re: You cant have it both ways

You cant lament the passing of a store selling legacy gear, whilst at the same time arguing you can get the regular stuff "cheaper online".

It's a different model I suppose, but Screwfix seems to be doing ok in having real shops that match their online prices, and Richer Sounds has been doing it for years. The difference between these two and the likes of Maplin may simply be in the style and locations of their shops - Maplin went for high-profile town-centre and out-of-town locations, big shops with everything on display. Richer Sounds and Screwfix have small shops in cheap locations.

At one point Richer Sounds made a big thing of the fact that their London Bridge store held the world record for volume of sales per square foot of shop, I wonder if that's still the case?

I do lament the passing of the "old days", of companies like Maplin, Watford Electronics, Cricklewood Electronics (still going I believe), but things change. I think it started going downhill when Maplin stopped putting creative paintings and accompanying descriptions on their catalogue covers though!

M.

Pixel 2 tinkerers force Google's hand: Secret custom silicon found

Turning off mobile data tends to make a difference to battery life if you are somewhere with a weak or patchy 3/4G signal

True, the 2G/3G/4G radio adapts its power output. That was part of my point, but the other part (that I didn't really expand) is that things like social media apps tend to cause the radios to wake up more often, or for longer.

On the other hand, is a smartphone still a smartphone if you turn off all the things that make it smart?

M.

try running it for a few days with mobile data turned off

My old first gen Moto G (jailbroken, all social media apps expunged) will easily last 7 days with WiFi, mobile data, GPS and Bluetooth off. I have been known to get 10 days out of it, though that's getting more difficult now that it's ageing.

Turning mobile data on doesn't make a huge difference unless I start using it. It's noticeable that if I do a bit of web browsing with Opera, even when finished battery consumption is greater than it was before I loaded Opera. The same is true if I use WiFi instead. In order to return the thing reliably to power-sipping mode, I not only have to turn the radios off, but reboot the thing.

M.

NetBSD, OpenBSD improve kernel security, randomly

Turn entry points into mere trampolines to the real code.

Forgive me for being thick, but hasn't that been "a thing" for decades? Even the BBC Micro did this (established "indirection" locations which could point to a routine anywhere in local, or even remote - e.g. second processor - memory), and I got the impression it was established practice back then.

Yes, yes, I know it's a distant, distant relative of the randomisation being talked about here, just brought back memories :-)

M.

Apple Cook's half-baked defense of the Mac Mini: This kit ain't a leftover

Re: Put an SSD in your Mac mini

Remember to do the shuffle to enable TRIM though. It does make a difference long-term.

M.

Re: Too late

Would you replace a 8 to 10 year old Mac with a 3 year old Mac? No.

Why not?

If you're considering the mini line, you're looking for a cheap option that's good enough, and the 3 year old model fits that.

I think the point is that a 3 year-old model is already part way through Apple's lifecycle. If value for money is the consideration, rather than absolute lowest price, then by not buying a "current" model, you have effectively reduced the life span of the device. Apple is quite ruthless about ditching older models - that is, from OS updates and security patches.

M.

Boss visited the night shift and found a car in the data centre

Re: What did he do?

Working at an ex-steelworks, re-purposed into something much more "friendly", a colleague built a pulse jet engine and attached it to a go-cart frame he also built. He had to buy in his own stainless steel, but most of the other bits, including the half-empty bottles of gas, were found lying around the site.

It did work, though it was a pig to start. We found that the best way to start it was to light it on gas and let it warm up, then upend the bottle so that it was running on liquid, while also blowing air through it.

Still not sure how we managed to get the specialist welding gasses past the accountant :-)

M.

Elon Musk says Harry Potter and Bob the Builder will get SpaceX flying to Mars

Re: I am now sat at work humming

The original stop frame animation was. The newer CGI version is shit

You could say much the same about Thomas the Tank Engine, yes I know the first few series weren't "stop frame"...

M.

Essex drone snapper dealt with by police for steamy train photos

Re: New Steam Engines

The "decades of public fundraising" claim is bit dodgy too

Not really - they are still raising funds to buy the tender which is currently leased from the company that made it. The boiler was made in the former East Germany because they have experience in modern boiler design. It's welded and stainless steel IIRC, which should make it last a lot longer than a traditional boiler, and best of all the Prince of Wales (the p2 in the links above) that they are building is designed to use exactly the same boiler pattern so they will be interchangeable.

My son, a big steam fan, actually put some Christmas money towards buying a few small bits for the Prince of Wales.

A couple of weekends ago we met Tornado and Flying Scotsman at the Barrowhill shed. Impressive (apart from FS's whistle, which is frankly a bit pathetic)

M.

Re: Fair cop?

I imagine a lot of that work, at greater speed and area coverage could be done via helicopter.

Have you ever seen National Grid inspecting power lines by helicopter? They come around here occasionally and it's almost like being at an aerobatics display.

M.

FCC Commissioner blasts new TV standard as a 'household tax'

Re: OTA TV

Since the switch to the ATSC standard and digital TV in the US and in Canada, the range of the OTA signal is significantly less and also the picture is either perfect or blocky at times

That's odd, because one of the arguments for choosing 8VSB in the first place over the COFDM that everyone else uses was that it (apparently) works better in the fringe reception areas. One selling point was that you could get the same coverage as with analogue but using 25% of the transmitter power.

One problem is that the single-station nature of the US market means fewer actual transmitters. Most of the rest of the world is replete with smaller repeater or fill-in transmitters, and one of the reasons this works is because the cost is shared.

I have no idea if this will work, but (Google Streetview) this (at the back of the car park) is a tiny repeater station serving no more than a hundred houses at Van Terrace.

In the UK Freeview (terrestrial) and Freesat (satellite) are utterly subscription-free (unless you count needing a TV licence in the first place) and where Freeview doesn't cover, Freesat does for the price of a 40cm or 60cm dish and a receiver. Some TVs have both DVB-T (Freeview) and DVB-S (Freesat) receivers built-in. Subscription services are available if you're that way inclined (sport and movies, mainly).

Apart from the waste-of-space low-bitrate "+1" channels, digital TV is working pretty well here.

M.

Re: 3D

4K DOA? Haha I actually intentionally downscale 4K content. I don't want to look at people under a microscope. 4K is great for car chases

Personally, I'd rather spend the bandwidth on true 100Hz progressive scanning than on upping the resolution. High frame rate video takes a little getting used to, but it makes a much bigger difference to fast-action sequences than does a few more pixels.

M.

Re: DVB-T2

As for why, no idea

My impression - apart from the "not invented here" aspect - was that DVB (and DAB) requires that broadcasters give up their individual transmitters and operate, or buy space on, a shared data pipe, known as a multiplex. Each multiplex delivers a fixed amount of data to the receiver, and that data is split up between a number of channels, some of which might be television, some audio-only (radio), some data-only and so-on. It means that small broadcasters are able to enter markets they were previously barred from because all they have to do is buy a sufficient amount of data from the owner of the multiplex.

In contrast, ATSC is designed to be used by a single broadcaster, perhaps with a few subsidiary stations.

But the US terrestrial broadcast market has always been very different to the European market, particularly with regard to the lack of single country-wide broadcasters, and the sheer amount of thinly-populated space. US cable is different again.

If you like, if DVB (and DAB) is a socialist solution, ATSC is the capitalist answer.

M.

Re: generations

I'm tempted to call BS on this. I'm in my 70s.

To be fair, you're obviously slightly unusual as you are reading El Reg.

I don't know many of my various 70+ year-old friends and relatives who wouldn't be fazed by this. I do know one or two who would manage, but they have the eminently sensible attitude that if it doesn't "just work", it's rarely worth doing(*).

Switch TV on, select BBC1, watch Countryfile. Works every time (unless the Magpie's playing see-saw on the aerial again).

Switch TV on, find the menu option that allows you to run the YouTube app or the iPlayer app or whatever, wait an age while it connects (if it connects at all), tediously type something into the search box, hope that what you want comes up in the first page, select it to play, wait another age while the thing starts loading and buffering and then, insult to injury, two thirds of the way through the programme the blasted thing stops working and it's too much hassle to reload it and find where you were in order to catch the end.

My parents have a STB that allows them to scroll "backwards" through TV listings. Sounds fantastic, but they still have the "wait while it connects and buffers" problem and also the problem that not all broadcasters are on the system, and not all programmes are on the system.

Until the thing is as quick and reliable as Ceefax used to be (and Ceefax wasn't particularly quick), it's all sort of "meh" to them.

My mother-in-law, on the other hand, won't even have an internet connection in the house, not even if it meant she could make a video call to her BSL-using daughter, or her distant grandchildren.

:-)

M.

(*)I have to admit here that I do have many older acquaintances, whom I only know through a mailing list, who are quite thoroughly tech-savvy

Re: 3D

Is 3D really still regarded as a selling point?

3D was a "nice to have" when it didn't add more than a few quid to the cost of a TV. Passive systems had their problems but they worked really well and in particular the glasses were cheap (and compatible with RealD cinemas).

We have such a TV at home, and a reasonable selection of films. The main problem we find is that you have to "watch" a 3D programme - it's impossible to have it on and do something else at the same time.

As far as I'm aware there isn't a single manufacturer offering a 3D TV in the UK domestic market at the moment, so I really don't know what we'll do when our TV dies. Perhaps by then it'll be back in fashion.

3D seems to be hanging on in cinemas, the problem there being that they charge too much extra. People might be willing to spend it for a big action movie, but 3D adds relatively little to a RomCom.

At work we show occasional films to the public. We have a licence which allows us to do so, so long as we don't charge. Some of these are 3D and while people don't seem to be put off by a 3D film, unless it's a special event they don't seem to go out of their way to attend our 3D screenings.

We are in the middle of a system upgrade at the moment. Our existing passive 2-projector system is being replaced by a 1-projector system. The polarising filter for this system retails at around £4,000 ex VAT.

M.

Re: Is anything ever obsolete?

Someone should have designed the ATSC standard to last a bit longer.

I think the problem here (and it's not specific to ATSC, I could also mention DAB and DVB-T) is that until the mid 1980s, analogue was all we had (or at least all that was practical) and there was very little you could do to improve analogue TV without also consuming oodles more bandwidth. Japan had Hi-Vision while Europe had PALplus and D2 MAC, none of which really took hold.

From the 1980s onward, the mandatory SCART socket on televisions began to make people realise that their ordinary TVs were capable of extremely good pictures - some home computers could send RGB to a SCART socket, as could some video games consoles, and of course, eventually, DVD players. I have a theory that one reason DVD took so long to get going was that left-pondians didn't have the advantage of an RGB connection via SCART. With US TVs mostly only having composite or s-video connections, the picture quality improvement of DVD over VHS and particularly Laserdisc wasn't as apparent as it was to us Europeans. I know some US TVs had "component" inputs, which would have done the trick, but few DVD players had component outputs I think.

Where was I?

Oh yes, the difference now is that since digital processing of video has become relatively trivial, it's also trivial to keep making it better. A few years after one standard is set (say, MPEG1 layer 2 for audio as used by DAB) another one comes along which offers either higher quality for the same bitrate or the same quality in fewer bits, or a lower decoding burden meaning it runs better on low-power devices, or all three at once. The same is true of transmission standards, as exemplified by the differences between DVB-T and DVB-T2.

Somebody pointed out the well-managed transition from analogue terrestrial broadcasting in the UK to digital, but they failed to point out that there is a digital-to-digital transition under way as we speak. In some ways this is similar to the ATSC to ATSC-3 transition, but the difference is that DVB-T forces broadcasters to work together (effectively, many producers share one transmitter and thus one method of transmission) while ATSC was set up specifically to allow individual broadcasters to maintain sole control of their own transmissions.

In the last very few years, streaming has become a practical delivery method too, and this also alters the landscape. If traditional broadcasters are not to wither, they need to adapt, and adopting new transmission methods, particularly if they enable easier integration with net-connected services, could be useful.

Alongside the improvements in technology of course has come a vast reduction in the cost of receiving equipment. Even back in the early 1980s, a normal (for the UK) size colour TV probably cost in the region of a week's wages for most middle-class people. These days, when you can buy a connected, full HD TV for under £200 - even a newly qualified teacher can earn that in a couple of days - the TV has turned from a "consumer durable" expected to last perhaps 10 years alongside the 'fridge and the oven into a commodity item and manufacturers are able to produce them at such low prices partly because they expect repeat business every 3 to 5 years.

That's my 2p anyway, sorry if I'm late into this argument!

Oh, you also said

entertainment TV got by quite well at 480p resolution for quite a while

Firstly, it was 480i - there is a big difference between interlaced and progressive scanning and secondly, those of us in 50Hz countries actually had a few more lines of resolution (for home-grown programming anyway) at 576i.

M.

Western Dig's MAMR is so phat, it'll store 100TB on a hard drive by 2032

Re: Why not SSD Drives?

10 times lower

What is this fashion with the above? What's wrong with "rust is one tenth the cost" or "flash is ten times the cost"?

Grump.

(not blaming you, blahblah, particularly - it seems to be a very common thing these days)

M.

I love disruptive computer jargon. It's so very William Burroughs

Re: Not metric

> I can spot American writing 1.6km away

They use miles in the US of A.

WHOOSH!

Instructions:

• click on the above link
• type "1" in the "Miles" box
• click on "calculate"
• learn something

M.

I'm sure that Welsh, Cornish and Breton have similar-but-different mutation rules (so Cymru becomes Gymru etc etc) but I know even less about that branch of Celtic languages.

Welsh certainly does

The oft-quoted thing about mutations is that they are beneficial to the spoken language; they help the flow, and may well be one of the reasons non (Celtic) speakers consider these languages, particularly it seems Welsh, as more poetic or tuneful.

As a Welsh-speaker, the one thing I would say is that when spoken, people rarely bother too much about whether you have got the mutation exactly correct (other than a few cases where it grates). It's written Welsh where they get all het-up about it.

Welsh, particularly spoken Welsh, is almost obsessive about removing letters, phonemes or even whole syllables. If you were to write Welsh as she is spoken the apostrophe on your keyboard would wear out very quickly. Na, 's dim ishe mwy, 'dw i 'di ca'l llon' bol'

As regards vowels, the thing that English monoglots fail to recognise is that while we call "AEIOU" vowels, even English actually uses other letters in a very vowel-like way. Take "Y" as an example. The simple English words "by" or "cyst" or "dry" or "fly" or many, many others contain no vowels, except that "y" is used as a vowel. Welsh, of course, acknowledges that fact and adds "W" and "Y" to the list of vowels.

Some English friends of mine were startled on moving to live in Wales by an apparent lack of vowels in placenames - take Ynysybwl ("Uh-nis-uh-bull"), just north of Pontypridd as an example, and note the number of nearby places with a limited number of English vowels in their names.

M.

Mattel's Internet-of-kiddies'-Things Aristotle canned before release

Re: Teddy Bears

There is one story where the AI does pretty well at raising a child, up to a point.

Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age".

M.

Support team discovers 'official' vendor paper doesn't rob you blind

Re: I first heard this story back in the early 1990s.

As Martin said: avoid whenever possible.

Just to add context, a few years before my story I was working at Magna Science Adventure Centre in Rotherham. Pretty much all of the sewage has to be pumped off that site and the place was replete with Saniflos (which were always going wrong - they are not designed for use in public loos) and also had a large "industrial" macerator / pump set in the basement underneath the main public loos.

The day the place opened (fortunately I started there a couple of weeks later) this unit failed, and with thousands upon thousands of visitors thronging the place suddenly there was "stuff" coming out of the loos that should have been disappearing down the pipe.

One of my colleagues was tasked - by the company which installed the whole system - with climbing a ladder to access an elbow in the 4" that they suspected was blocked.

A couple of turns of a screwdriver later, and suddenly every radio in the building erupted with (I am told) a scream like something out of a cheap 1970s horror flick, as the whole vertical stack emptied its contents over my colleague.

Could have been predicted, I suppose, but for that and other reasons I (and my traumatised colleague - hello Matt if you're out there) have a severe mistrust of the things.

Oh, and Saniflo itself is a French company I believe. French plus electrics plus water. Enough said.

M.

Fixed with tape

What have you fixed with sticky tape?

Not IT related, but when I worked at a radio station, one year management decided that we all deserved a night off, and so they would organise the Christmas bash by hiring in everything - in the past we'd supplied our own PA gear and often on-air talent would do DJ duties.

Everyone gathered at the local golf club, only to find that the hired-in DJ had non-working kit, so muggins 'ere, the "station engineer", was asked to investigate (so much for an evening off). The only tool at my disposal was a Victorinox (I've carried a basic one since I was about 15).

Long story short, the problem turned out to be a dodgy audio lead between the mixer and the amplifier but of course while our portable kit came complete with a selection of spare cables, the cheap DJ had nothing. And we were miles away from base so it was a bit pointless to nip back to the office for a spare cable, or even a soldering iron.

Ended up fixing it with the foil from a packet of fags(*) and some good old-fashioned Sellotape that the barman happened to have. Lasted all evening :-)

M.

(*)Said fags happened to belong to our only vaguely famous on-air talent, a bloke known as Bobby McVay

Re: I first heard this story back in the early 1990s.

The grey plastic pipes had been glued together

In the days when I was a self-employed electrician I once did a job at a house where the tradesman before me had been a plumber, installing an en-suite into the master bedroom. Said bedroom was at the front of the house while the plumbing was at the back, so he installed a Saniflo macerator / pump. (note to readers, if there's any way at all that you can avoid a Saniflo, please, please, please do so, the things are nothing but trouble. Horrid, messy, smelly trouble).

Anyway, the twit had presumably not read the instructions and instead of using solvent-weld pipe, he used push-fit. A couple of flushes later and the elbow where the horizontal pipe turned vertical, fortunately outside the house, popped right off and the contents of the Saniflo were sprayed all over the rear yard.

M.

Or a 20p micro-switch testing for physical presence

But a microswitch per slot isn't just n times 20p, it's also all the associated wiring and the connected logic to read each slot individually.

M.

UK lotto players quids in: Website knocked offline by DDoS attack

Re: Oh well

Or then there's the case of my wife who was given a handful of Premium Bonds as a birthday present 50 years ago, and has never, ever had a single payout.

At least the capital is safe, all (I dunno) ten Shillings of it :-)

M.

Vibrating walls shafted servers at a time the SUN couldn't shine

the days before the the universal 100-240V power supplies when US vendors fitted a "Eu PS" which should have been called "Eu PoS" in their gear to sell over here

I worked in radio in the 1990s, and we used cartridge machines for playing jingles, adverts etc.

Apparently, just before I started, they had auditioned some machines from a US supplier who, instead of fitting them with 240V motors and 240V transformers to power the electronics simply wired the 110V motors in series with the 110V transformer and hoped for the best.

It sort of worked, until the current spike caused when the pinch roller hit the capstan and started pulling tape past the heads, at which point all sorts of nastiness ensued.

During my time there we used much better machines by Sonifex (YT clip), which had proper transformers (with mu-metal shields, to be vaguely relevant for a moment), proper power conditioning circuitry and low voltage motors.

I have a stack in the garage - anyone want one? Big stack of carts in the attic too?

M.

Is this cough cancer, doc? No: it's a case of Playmobil on the lung

I'm the same age as this patient, and I know I inhaled a small piece of Lego around the same year.

Maybe it was something about the year because in 1977 (I think) I accidentally swallowed a 5p (shilling) piece that I was supposed to be handing over as subs for Boys' Brigade.

For some reason I was x-rayed at one hospital, but driven across town to a different hospital to have the thing removed. The x-ray showed it was not very far down, and the surgeon confidently told my parents it would be a matter of no more than an hour to get it out.

Four hours later, my parents getting extremely agitated, it turned out that the journey had shaken the coin down. From what I gather, once they couldn't find it in the place shown on the picture, they basically had to feel for it gently, using longer and longer endoscopic type tools. It was reasonably well wedged; if it hadn't been they would probably have left it to make its exit naturally...

M.

Bill Gates says he'd do CTRL-ALT-DEL with one key if given the chance to go back through time

Re: BREAK

Strictly speaking, BBC Master machines also had a SHIFT+BREAK combination that performed a hard reset.

Nope, all BBC micros used BREAK on its own as a soft break, leaving data in memory, and in the case of a BASIC programme you could then type (IIRC) "OLD" and get your programme back. BREAK was intended in these circumstances to be used when your programme mucked its error handling up and ESCAPE got stuck in a loop (other methods of locking up are available, and I've probably done all of them).

CTRL-BREAK was always the "hard" break, which essentially rebooted the machine ("duuuur, bip") and cleared memory. SHIFT-BREAK, by default, caused the machine to try to load a boot programme from whatever was the current filing system. This was most useful with floppy discs and was the standard way of starting software.

There was a set of jumpers near the cartridge slot in the model A & B, one of which allowed you to reverse the action of SHIFT-BREAK so that the machine would by default always try to load from the filing system.

The Master series (not sure about the B64 and B128) had some SRAM or NVRAM or EEPROM or something (I seem to remember batteries?) that did away with the need for the jumpers (*configure...) and also had a little plastic cam that could be turned with a small screwdriver and jammed the BREAK button up, so it couldn't "accidentally" be tapped.

Brings back memories...

M.

Behold iOS 11, an entirely new computer platform from Apple

Re: Optional

Sounds like the school is broken and needs to be fixed or replaced.

Best of luck.

School attended by my offspring has signed them all up for Google Drive (etc.) without even asking. Now they are expected to use it to complete assignments from home.

What a shame their main computer is a Pi which doesn't quite manage to make Drive work...

Then there's selling (presumably) my mobile phone number (again without asking - my number is on record purely for use as an emergency contact) to a commercial company which wants me to sign up to some kind of proprietary twitter-like thing so that the school can "keep in touch", something it could do just as effectively by other methods but has a pretty poor track record of doing so.

I could go on...

M.

BoJo, don't misuse stats then blurt disclaimers when you get rumbled

Re: Words not stats

Control is the key

Maybe, but some of us - frankly - trust Westminster to do sensible things with the money even less than we trust Brussels. The amount of "objective one" (or whatever it's called this month) funding that has flowed into parts of the UK that will simply disappear (note there have been no clear promises from Westminster about carrying on this funding) post Brexit is embarrassing.

What I haven't seen yet is a proper calculation of the real net profit / loss of stepping outside the club, even one that makes assumptions about things like tariffs that haven't yet been decided (though I think More or Less did something around the time of the referendum?). Whatever the actual figure, one thing for sure is that it will be substantially less than £350M/wk. My guess is that it'll be below £100M, but I'm basing that on nothing more than a gut feeling.

M.

Bespoke vending machine biz Bodega AI trips cultural landmine

Re: No need to worry

In rural France they're becoming common for selling farm produce.

In rural (or not-so-rural) UK they usually have an "honesty box".

M.

Apple's 'shoddy' Beats headphones get slammed in lawsuit

Re: LMFAO

Regarding Sennheiser, they have some really quite good (wired) headphones under £50, and given the beating I tend to give my headphones, that makes a lot of sense. I'm a Sennheiser fan in general, but they do seem a bit two-headed at times, the kit is mostly very good but some of the prices are possibly a bit much; I'm thinking here of the radio microphones we use at work.

M.

'Don't Google Google, Googling Google is wrong', says Google

Re: Don't Google Google, Googling Google is wrong

Anybody else got Flanders and Swann's The Reluctant Cannibal running through their head?

Errr... yes, see my post a couple of hours before yours.

How come you get more upvotes?

M.

Re: That'll confuse users

Don't Google Google

I thought the rest of the quote actually referenced Flanders & Swann: The Reluctant Cannibal

M.

Gerund

Of course, the ultimate authority on the Gerund is Molesworth

M.

Google to kill its Drive file locker in two confusing ways

Re: What about Chrome OS?

I'm still a bit confused from this, over whether Google Drive (as in "your drive in the 'cloud'") is staying available

The same applies to all those schools who have invested in truckloads of Chromebooks. Can't see Google dumping them. Not immediately anyway.

M.

Apple bag-search class action sueball moves to Cali supreme court

Wasn't there something similar in the UK with Sports Direct?

There have been several Sports Direct stories, even quite recently.

I imagine that this story on the BBC may contain a reference.

Then there's this one from just a few days ago on a different, but similarly "Victorian" attitude.

M.

Smart streetlight bods Telensa nearly double full-year revenues

Re: Why?

didnt they do a similar thing with cats eyes

Yes, and a right nightmare they were too. Flickery-flickering in my peripheral vision as I drive up an otherwise dark road. There was (is?) a set on the A446 near The Belfry (Lichfield road) that I used to suffer regularly.

I don't get on well with LED car lights either, though some are better than others with a higher refresh rate.

M.

Re: Why?

goodbye to mains leccy costs.

but hello to cleaning costs and replacement costs, if the lifespan of those solar-powered speed signs is anything to go by...

M.

UK ministers' Broadband '2.0' report confuses superfast with 10Mbps

Re: Available but not realistic

There's a gulf between "available" and "worth paying for".

Which is exactly the point made in the last-but-one paragraph of the article, and something that I and others have mentioned here several times over the years.

Regarding 4G, I'd be wary of anything based on a shared medium. Do you really want to rely on a decent 4G connection, when the school bus is late and there are a dozen teenagers waiting at the bus stop outside your premises?

I've just found an interesting bit of kit by TP-Link that might help some people in these circumstances, if they have a friendly "someone" within a few km that can actually get decent speeds and (crucially) line-of-sight. TP-Link's CPE range of outdoor WiFi kit claims reach of up to 15km under ideal conditions, while the WBS range can apparently manage 50km with a suitable antenna. The units are not expensive (the CPE510 I've just bought for a specific project is around £50ea) - install your net connection at your friend's place and bung a device on the roof. Plonk the other one on your own roof, job done. Set your router up with a 4G modem or just old-fashioned ADSL as backup.

M.