Posts by Martin an gof

Boeing just about gives up on the 747

Fastest trans Atlantic

I thought that record was still held by a VC10 - might have been mentioned on that City in the Sky programme? The ever-reliable Wikipedia seems to confirm it... sort of.

M.

Flight sim records show MH370 captain practiced 'flight' near search area

Re: My personal contribution to "odd" flight sim behavior

I've not played with flight sims since the pre-VGA days, but like probably everyone else, one of the first things you do is try flying under a bridge

Talking about pre-VGA, in Aviator on the BBC Micro, flying under the bridge was a required skill - there's a picture of the bridge on the game cover.

M.

Re: I'm a flight sim enthusiast

he was a trainee pilot who was practicing

I believe that the John Finnemore sitcom Cabin Pressure had quite a lot of storylines taken from reality (I believe his brother or perhaps his father is/was an airline pilot). In this case the episode Helsinki comes to mind - search for the words "flight simulator", they're about a third of the way down the the transcript.

M.

No, the VCR is not about to die. It died years ago. Now it's VHS/DVD combo boxes' turn

going via RGB worked fine.

But you don't get RGB out of a video recorder.

The best way to get rid of Macrovision IIRC (where it did interfere with AGC) was either to find an old VCR which had manual gain controls, or to invest in a "Syncblaster". Or those into home video might have had a video mixer with a digital frame store which had the same effect.

M.

Re: I think I was waiting for the VHS to be invented!

Mackross (sp) Cardiff

Maskreys on Whitchurch Road?

Image on Google Streetview (never tried to send such a link before - not sure if it will work).

I remember going in there in the late 1980s or early 1990s to buy a carpet with my mum only to find that the carpet salesman was the original owner of my mum's house. We had to be very careful speaking to him because the carpets he had fitted were absolutely dire 1960s turquoise/black/purple "Paisley" type pattern. Mum and dad had got rid of those as soon as they could afford to.

M.

Re: Ah...

When plus codes turned up programming got a lot easier and the machine was quite good at noticing time changes by itself

That was down to the broadcaster though - they had to transmit a matching code for every programme, which the VCR looked for and used to start / stop the recording. Generally speaking the BBC got this right, ITV sometimes did (I used to wonder if the codes had to be triggered manually at their end because they were often late or early or just didn't happen), but I had problems with S4C and Channel 4, though the latter was almost certainly down to a weak signal; you couldn't reliably get teletext from C4 either. Don't know about Channel 5; didn't get that until digital TV came along.

M.

Re: Stop making me feel old

turn any old VCR with a SCART plug into a tape drive for data storage

In the days before DAT and HDD recording, a similar device made by Sony was used by some recording studios to record digital audio onto VHS. We had one at the radio station I worked at. If I remember correctly it could do 16bit / 2 channel / 32KHz or 14bit / 2 channel / 48kHz. It worked well enough if you used good quality cassettes and stored them sensibly, but was obviously an evolutionary dead end right from the outset. Looked pretty on the monitor though :-)

We had people using tape right up to the moment the machines were retired, and long after HDD recording had become affordable - we had one of the first Soundscape machines, which was a 2U box containing some electronics and 2x IDE hard drives which used a bog-standard PC ('286 or higher I think) for control. It was a small fraction the price of competing systems which relied on fast computers with specialised sound hardware and SCSI discs.

The problem with VHS is that it is analogue. I had an interesting discussion with my 14 year-old just yesterday who had dug out some old Thomas the Tank Engine tapes (first series) and tried to play them. Yes, the VHS player is still working, yes I have connected it up correctly to the new TV we bought last Christmas, yes the sound works but no, the TV won't sync to the slightly wobbly signal off tape - the sound continues but the picture blanks every few seconds. Feeding the VHS output through an external re-sync device sorted that, but now he's talking about buying DVDs of all the tapes he has, and what I want to know is why can't a modern multi-standard TV lock on to a slightly wavery signal from an old VHS tape?

I think it's time I started transferring all those old Hi8 tapes to the computer. I have enough storage now, and I still have a working camera. What I don't have is a video capture device for my Linux machine. Any recommendations? My boss at work has a Blackmagic H.264Pro I could borrow, but it only comes with Windows and OSX software and as far as I'm aware it doesn't work under Linux, though I have only spent 30 minutes testing it.

At least my DV tapes are easier. With a working camera and a Firewire connection, it's as simple as an incantation to dvgrab.

M.

Brit chip biz ARM legs it to Softbank for $32bn

Well I just read a story about this buyout calling ARM a "supplier to Apple",

And on Today this morning that was practically all they said in the news bulletins (the business bloke was slightly better). There was no mention of the absolutely vast range of stuff that has at its heart one or more ARM cores, just "iPhone and iPad".

Shoddy reporting.

M.

Re: Apple will never own ARM (again)

The fact that ARM's board are recommending this deal to their shareholders suggests that

it suggests that their legal obligation to do the best by their shareholders over-rides just about any other concern. This is such a large premium over the current market value that I don't think the board had any option but to recommend it, whatever their ideals may be.

Today was reporting this morning that they are promising to double the UK workforce in the next three years or something. I find that impossible to believe, and if it did happen I can foresee all sorts of organisational issues and cashflow issues that could ruin this almost lone-surviving jewel of British technology. I can see how ARM could do with a bit of a cash injection to accelerate their plans, but I can't see any reporting on how this might happen.

Bad news all around. Possibly even worse than the Cadbury's thing.

M.

P.S. slightly biased, I speak as someone who still uses an Acorn RiscPC (StrongARM) on a daily basis

If we can't find a working SCSI cable, the company will close tomorrow

Re: Penknife. Pure and simple, basic Swiss Army Knife.

When are you ever going to need a Philips screwdriver these days?

When are you ever going to need a corkscrew? It's getting very difficult to find corked wine these days.

The advantage of the Philips is the T-shape the penknife makes when you open it. Although it's easier to unscrew rackbolts using the big flatblade, sometimes they're so stiff you need the extra leverage that the T-shape gives, just to get them started.

Oh, and a torch, as someone else mentioned. In my case it's a simple Petzl Tikka headtorch. I've had a number of others, but this thing is tough and the batteries last well. The light is bright, but not blinding and the beam is wide-ish, rather than the useless spot you sometimes get with cheap LED lamps.

M.

Re: Full marks for extra experience!

It might be worth getting a list of what bits of kit people carry with them 'just in case' and what bits have saved the day more than once.

Penknife. Pure and simple, basic Swiss Army Knife. Specifically one of these.

Ok, it won't cope with fibre termination, but it'll do just about anything else from emergency punch-down resetting to dealing with rack bolts to "field modification" of (say) ceiling panels. I won't pretend it's as good as the "proper" tools, but it stays permanently in my pocket and has saved me more times than I can say.

M.

Linux letting go: 32-bit builds on the way out

Re: Fair Enough

My personal hope is someone will make a battery and screen that you can shove a RaspberryPi in...

Pi-top

HTH

M.

Re: Thinks Bubble

The first chips to support 64-bit were in 2003 / 2004. Do you really have chips older than a K8 or Pentium 4 running around in active service?

Replacement machines to usurp any machine of this era are literally junk-heap material now.

But as someone pointed out earlier - netbooks. Yes, there were netbooks with 64-bit capable Atoms, but the majority of netbooks produced in that short period when they were very popular are both 32-bit and usually limited to 2GB maximum RAM.

You would really struggle to buy anything looking like a netbook these days. "Replacement machines" are not "junk-heap material".

Obviously the reason you can no longer buy netbooks is because nobody wants to buy them so the manufacturers stopped making them. My EeePC may be eight years old, but it does well enough for web browsing and occasionally something more creative (I've used it for MIDI sequencing, Arduino development, writing essays) and it certainly has a more usable keyboard than most fondleslabs or convertibles. If there were a direct replacement I might actually be in the market within the next couple of years, but there isn't.

With the launch of Leap (42.1) last November my Linux of choice, OpenSuse, ditched 32 bit support and I moved to Mint for the EeePC.

M.

Obi Worldphone MV1: It's striking, it's solid. Aaaand... we've run out of nice things to say

Re: Nagging works

A keyboard would be a deal-maker for me. I have been looking at the BB Classic, but at that price and with the prospect of the thing not actually being around for much longer, perhaps not.

What about a dual-sided phone with a proper keyboard and screen good enough for calls and texts on one side, and a larger (but not too large) touchscreen on the other for browsing etc?

Or a flipper or a slider or any one of a huge number of phone formats that seem to have disappeared off the face of the planet?

I don't care if it is a mm or two (or five) thicker than the current iPhone, and I don't care if it's a few grams (or tens of grams) heavier (it'll be easier to hold and less likely to be dropped). I don't even care if it doesn't have a dodecacore many-GHz processor, 3D graphics, so many screen pixels you can't see them even with a magnifying glass, or a couple of dozen megapixels in the camera, so long as it works. Throw in a decent battery and sell it for a sensible amount of money...

Perhaps take a low-end smartphone as a starting point and add the keyboard? How hard can it be?

M.

I've just installed Cyanogenmod 12

on my original Moto G, which is by modern standards a pretty low-spec phone, to replace 4.4.4. This is (very nearly) the same version of CM as that shown in the screenshots. I've never run CM before, and getting it on the phone in the first place was a little fraught. However, a couple of observations:

Starting up was difficult as Trebuchet (Android launcher?) kept crashing. I managed to disable it, and then the phone worked. Trebuchet seems to have re-enabled itself but hasn't caused problems yet.

The Google App toolbar / search / voice thing can be removed. I think I just "disabled" the Google App.

I have found the standard Android keyboard to be sluggish (often typing two or three characters ahead of the display), even though I also used the stock keyboard previously and had no problems (other than a general dislike for onscreen keyboards). I think I've solved that one by turning off suggestions, which always got in the way anyway. Otherwise speed seems fine.

I have been unable to recreate the battery life I was getting before. By dint of turning most of the radios off and disabling a swathe of data-slurping apps, I was previously able to get between 7 and 10 days of use out of the phone on a charge. Since installing CM and doing the same things, the best I have managed is four days, which even if I might have been "playing" with the settings a bit more than I used to, is pretty awful.

M.

Singapore Airlines 777 catches fire after engine alarm

Re: A close call?

there was an engine fire on a FlyBE plane

Since we seem to be into links; AAIB Monthly Bulletin, June 2016 (PDF, 1.9MB). It's the first report.

Fascinating, detailed explanation of what happened, why particular choices were made and what have been the consequences.

M.

Re: like that's a good thing?

Links etc welcome

City in the Sky, episode 3, Arrival about 30 minutes in.

I'd imagine that the reporting isn't necessarily "real time", given the number of engines in flight, but could be close enough to real time to be useful. After all, even if it's only a few dozen bytes of data every minute or so, you could get some very useful information from that. Quite what the communication system is I don't know, but given that aircraft these days seem almost always to be fitted with satellite communications, and of course there's the ACARS system running constantly, it should be doable.

Also interesting to note that their monitoring system seems to be running on Excel ;-)

M.

Time to re-file your patents and trademarks, Britain

Re: MD a Trade? WTF?

Plumbing can be a lucrative gig and is hard to offshore

But it is also cut-throat, undervalued and risky. I used to be a self-employed electrician (Part P) and while the hourly rate looks good the pitfalls made the job as a whole (i.e. single trader, domestic only) pretty tiresome:

• Clients who expect free consultations and call-outs at any time of the day, night or holiday
• Quibbles about the smallest things; "yes, I know I agreed to X, but now I don't like it"
• Quibbles about the "making good" (always the hardest part of the job in my experience)
• Constant, constant pressure to cut corners and "bend" regulations, particularly the amount of time it can take to make all the required tests, checks and peripheral updates before and after a piece of work
• Keeping up to date with those regulations
• Keeping testing kit maintained and calibrated
• Professional body membership fees
• Insurance
• The ever-present "my mate says Y, so when you say Z you are wrong"
• Late payment of bills
• Difficulty getting lines of credit with suppliers as a small company
• Ridiculous bank charges for taking credit / debit cards (when I was doing it, a portable terminal cost about a day's work in rent every month)
• Customers who can now go to Screwfix and buy the parts at the same price as you can. When I started I was able to buy things slightly cheaper than "the man on the street", add a small markup such that they were still cheaper than B&Q or Homebase and make a small profit. When I finished, this was almost impossible and indeed I had several jobs where clients insisted on supplying all their own parts

There is still money to be made in the business, but realistically you need at least a two or three man team who can tender for jobs or contracts with housebuilders, landlords and housing associations. The odd-jobbing domestic electrician (and plumber I suspect) is under pressure and the only people who can afford to do it are those who are willing to work at the lowest rates, cash-in-hand and perhaps bend the rules slightly. It's possibly worse for electricians because people seem to understand "must be Gas Safe registered" and accept it much more than "must be certified by a Part P registered electrician".

M.

(rant over - I got out and got myself a salaried job some years ago)

I think the Airbus thing is different - it's not an EU project, it's a commercial venture. The main problem will come if Airbus can't easily move people around the factories, or if tariffs intervene. They already deal with currency fluctuations...

...or if it just becomes too much hassle to put the A380 wings on a barge. I also hear that the runway they use for the other components is barely long enough and can't be extended. I'd think these two issues would be bigger drivers for a move (and that could be a move within the UK) than most other things.

M.

any company producing goods in the UK may start looking to relocate - it won't be a sudden thing but it will certainly start weighting decisions on where companies invest in the future

Are you saying, for example, that next time Ford is deciding between (say) Spain and (say) the UK to be the production centre of the new model (say) Fiesta, Spain will get the work? Sounds about right to me.

M.

And what about the Cornish Pasty?

With reference to a recent story, if patents are a potential problem, what about protected regional status for food items?

M.

Re: "Never was so much lost by so many due to one stupid decision"

That would be to have joined in the first place?

You can argue that, but you must realise that it is an entirely different thing to say that we should leave now.

Had I had the vote in 1973 I may well have voted 'no', but then again with the mess the country was in and the raw memories of a war that had finished less than a generation previously, it probably seemed like a good idea at the time. It would have been a much more difficult decision.

This one was a no-brainer. Pulling out now is a much more difficult and fraught process simply because we have had 40-odd years of integration in the intervening period. On top of that, much as I really don't agree with the amount of power the "financial markets" have over us, the fact is that they do, and because of that we are probably in for a five to ten year period of stagnation at best with those of us still with large amounts of working life ahead of us struggling even to do something as basic as obtain a mortgage. However "broken" the EU is, and however slowly reforms happen (and they did happen) it simply can't be better to run the risk of returning to the UK of the 1970s at best, or the 1920s at worst?

Anecdotal evidence (i.e. a neighbour) from around where I live says that in the run-up to the vote people simply stopped looking at houses to buy. Estate agents' footfall fell to near zero. The evidence so far is that it isn't improving since the vote.

I know several people who voted Leave. Some of them are beginning to realise what they did. There is far less "crowing" about the result than might have been expected.

M.

Raspberry Pi 3 tops SBC poll for self-brew hackers and Linux folk

Re: Meh

Or - and this one has hit me several times with Pis that I'm using to play videos on loops - it's simply out of space. Tab-completion stops working when there's no free disc space.

M.

Fedora 24 is here. Go ahead – dive in

Sub pixel patents

Fedora 24 also features some revamped font rendering tools that put it on par with Ubuntu's font rendering even though, for patent reasons, it still doesn't ship with support for subpixel rendering.

I didn't realise it was so complicated. Acorn introduced "sub pixel font rendering" back in the late 1980s IIRC, though it wasn't specifically intended for pixel-accurate digital displays. I'd say it was maybe ten years before MS launched ClearType, and I well remember the hype around it and wondering what all the fuss was about. I doubt Acorn was first with the idea, but they were definitely years ahead of Microsoft.

I still run a RiscOS machine, partly because it is much "easier on the eye" than even the highest resolution Windows or Linux desktops, and I prefer to use it - when possible - for word processing for that reason. Is Acorn's "sub pixel rendering" different to Microsoft's and therefore not covered by the patent? Was it sufficiently dissimilar that it couldn't be used as "prior art" to invalidate the patent? Or is it just that RiscOS is too small a fish to bother the lawyers?

M.

Apple pollutes data about you to protect your privacy. But it might not be enough

Re: The third way...

I assume, if my phone is on, my location can be inferred

The question is though, by who. If you have just the cellular radio on and have turned off WiFi, mobile data(*), GPS etc. then realistically the only people who have an idea of where you are are the telco and any government-sponsored spooks who ask them nicely. The accuracy of this kind of location data varies enormously depending on cell size and whether or not the telco makes use of triangulation data. If you are worried about your telco knowing where you are then it's time to ditch the mobile phone altogether.

Me, I use my phone as a phone. If I need data I will turn it on for the time I need data. Likewise GPS. I have never signed up for Google Play and have disabled all the data-slurping apps I can. This has done me reasonably well for a couple of years with the added benefit of a battery that lasts between 7 and 10 days in normal use. Turn data on and that can halve, halve it again for WiFi, and if GPS is active the battery barely lasts a day.

But I understand that lots of people actually like constant tweeting and suchlike. Just can't understand why :-)

M.

(*)an interesting side-effect of turning mobile data off - on my phone at least - seems to be that it then prefers 2G to 3G networks, which in some circumstances can lead to more stable connections for - you know - proper "phone" stuff like talking to people. Oh, and without data, MMS messages are blocked...

Should we teach our kids how to program humanity out of existence?

Re: Re "Now the chips are down"

Now the Chips are Down at the BBC (1h20min).

The other big influence was the book The Mighty Micro, later turned into a series on ATV. I picked the book up at a second-hand stall some years ago and it's an interesting read.

M.

Re: "Coding" ...

Gee, when I started programming they just threw me a manual and let me figure it out myself. FORTRAN 1, machine language, etc

Yes, but back then we were satisfied with barely-formatted output on a CRT or a dot-matrix and there was no requirement to have the thing interact with the user using little clicky boxes in a resizable window on an underlying complex OS, or host its own webserver so it could be fiddled with from afar.

When I did Computer Studies 'O' level, a bit of input validation and some clear text was all that was required for the programming tasks. The BBC BASIC manual was invaluable. Nowadays the "working" part of the task is almost secondary - the first objective is that it looks good.

And I am blowed if I am going back to low-level system calls to set up and decorate a window and deal with all the "events" that might happen to it, when I can just use some pre-written, pre-tested, nicely-documented library instead and concentrate on the stuff that matters.

In my first "real" job I wrote practically the whole operating system (if you could call it that) for a handheld device from scratch with no libraries other than a floating-point library. Frankly I could have done without the FP library too as I had about 24k of ROM to play with and a large part of that was taken up with the onscreen text. The screen? The "best" model of the device had a 2x16 lines of 5x7 dot matrix characters.

These days the thing would be expected to be a Bluetooth-connected device that sent readings to an app on an iOS or Android tablet, and rather than spending six months working out how to do clever things with the low-end hardware to give it the capabilities of devices costing five times as much, I'd be spending most of that time working out how to draw a pretty picture and wondering why the BT connection kept dropping.

Ugh.

M.

Re: Programming or coding?

Were you a PE teacher in a previous life?

Sorry, no :-) I did teach (primary) briefly, but I was rubbish at it so I went back to engineering.

We had to do Gantt charts as part of my engineering degree (business studies!). I still haven't recovered, and I still haven't found a real-life use for them that can't be done more easily in another way(*).

On the other hand I did quite enjoy flowcharts and Boolean algebra and binary maths when I did my A-levels. It turned out to be the last year those subjects were mandatory in A-level computer science for that particular exam board.

M.

(*)That said, we're about to embark on a huge project at home. This is the sort of thing that Gantt charts are supposedly designed for. I might give it a go.

Or I might not.

Re: "Coding" ...

How is the BBC Microbit thing doing in schools?

The MIcrobit was supposed to have been sent out to schools already:

Excitement Grows

Cip Olwg (Welsh)

(the latter, filmed in February, says the roll-out will happen "this term". My Y7 child hasn't heard any news yet and is getting worried that the school will decide to hand them on to next September's Y7 pupils, which he would be livid about.

Various suppliers have the thing available to pre-order now, which implies it's probably in a container on the way from China:

CPC

Pimoroni

The Pi Hut

M.

Re: Programming or coding?

The problem I found with many IT people was that they could only think in serial steps

Hmm, good point. Perhaps I shouldn't have said "steps", but rather "units of work". If you can't identify individual units of work in a problem it's difficult to get the problem solved. Once you have identified units of work you can then work out which ones are dependent ("I can't do this until I've finished doing that") and which ones are independent ("These two actions can happen at the same time").

The beauty of something like Scratch is that each block of program is effectively independent and this sort of thing comes naturally.

For the rest of us who grew up with linear Z80 or 6502 assembler, awful Sinclair BASIC or the vastly better BBC Basic, it's a big step. Maybe we should be teaching combinatorial logic, Boolean Algebra and even Gantt charts at primary school...

M.

Re: Programming or coding?

I only wish the Blue flashy 'weapon' actually had real lasers

Never had a Bigtrak myself, always coveted one.

The boys, however, do have one of the (smaller) modern re-creations. It came with a Nerf-gun style accessory. There is nothing like a bit of wanton destruction to motivate an 11 year-old. Set up a Lego model or a pile of no-longer-used building blocks or a row of minifigures and see how much of it you can program the Bigtrak to destroy given just four "missiles" and a limited amount of program memory.

I agree with Mr. Dabbs that "logic" is the first hurdle that must be overcome, and children really seem to find it hard breaking problems down into steps, but the way to do it is to give them motivation.

In the case of the boys it was a Bigtrak and destruction.

In the case of my youngest girl it was the crushed-upon teacher at school who ran the afterschool coding club. Said 7 year-old came home from school one day, fired up a web browser and "programmed" from scratch (not with Scratch, but something similar) a "collect all the apples" game in about 15 minutes, complete with score, re-spawning apples etc. I watched her do it. The only things she imported were the images!

I'm re-doing the heating at home. How's this for incentive? Each bedroom will have its own heating zone and a thermostat, probably constructed from an Arduino. If they don't learn how to program it before the winter, they'll freeze :-)

M.

Wales gives anti-vaping Blockleiters a Big Red Panic Button

Re: Strange Sign

Lead carbonate is, and has always been, more expensive than flour.

You're probably right - it was the first thing that came to my mind. The principle stands though, in the absence of regulation all sorts of things were added to foodstuffs:

Adulteration of Food. (see also link at the bottom of that page)

Here's a Punch cartoon:

The Use of Adulteration

Oh, and 'lead' isn't a proper noun.

Isn't it? Isn't Lead an element alongside Copper and Oxygen and Hydrogen and Neon and all the other things we usually capitalise? (Well, I usually capitalise, anyway)

M.

Re: Strange Sign

do they actually just contain whatever shit some Chinese factory owner thinks might sell

Which is why I don't understand those who don't want them regulated at all. Some regulation is actually good. It stopped people bulking out bread flour with white Lead for a start!

M.

Brexit threatens Cornish pasty's racial purity

Re: Heathens!!

- If the result of the referendum is a vote to leave, Cornwall should declare independence, become a nation state in its own right, then join the EU.

Which made me think.

Accepted wisdom is that Scotland, Wales and certain areas of England (parts of The North, the South West) are generally more pro-EU than the rest of England, yet the bulk of the UK population lives in the South East. An "exit the EU" outcome has been suggested as a possible trigger for a further Scottish "exit the UK" vote.

Why don't we Britons / Celts (don't lecture me on the history, I'm using them as shorthand for Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria, Scotland, Northern Ireland, peripherally the IoM) just club together and vote to leave the UK at the same time, forming some kind of commonwealth-of-ex-UK-nations and rejoining the EU? Much more sustainable than going it completely alone?

M.

Disclosure: my ancestors on one side are Cornish (though probably not him as there's no evidence he ever had children) and on the other side are Welsh. I have lived in Wales for about 95% of my life so far.

England just not windy enough for wind farms, admits renewables boss

Re: Storage, obviously

This map is interesting. I have an older version which has much more detail, but this is the best one I can find now.

I have found my older map online - at the BBC for some reason. Here it is (it takes quite some time to render on my machine).

This report from National Grid is also interesting reading, though not as pretty :-)

M.

Re: Storage, obviously

There are stations in the UK and I believe other places around the world where water is pumped from a lower dam to a higher one during times of less demand, and then used to generate power during times of higher demand. As safe as any hydro station and potentially far more efficient than wind.

They could even (shock, horror!) be used to even out some of the variability of wind, solar, wave power. Grid storage is a big issue, and pumped storage such as the UK's biggest installation is a good potential (hah!) solution. It wasn't the first, but it's by far the biggest. If you happen to be in the area, an older station can be found in Ffestiniog and there's a good view of the generating house from the Ffestiniog railway - zoom in on Tanygrisiau reservoir near Blaenau Ffestiniog on this map. There are several other small stations dotted around Snowdonia if you know what to look out for, and there are more in Scotland. This map is interesting. I have an older version which has much more detail, but this is the best one I can find now.

When Dinorwig was being planned my grandfather was an accountant with the NCB and a shareholder of Brown Boveri, and very interested in this sort of thing. If I understand the old information he left behind (he died when I was 10, so we never got the chance to talk about it), the CEGB was interested in Dinorwig to even out the demand peaks (the Corrie ad-breaks) which nuclear (at that time it looked like we'd eventually get the majority of our electricity from nuclear) can't cope with.

The interesting thing is that they originally planned two such stations, with the second being in the south west (Exmoor? Dartmoor?) somewhere. While Dinorwig really helps cover the demand peaks, these are less of an issue these days with less nuclear, less coal and more gas, which can react much more quickly, though nowhere near as fast as pumped storage.

The second station was never built. Perhaps it would be a good idea to build that second station now, perhaps even identify two or three additional sites (there must be some good locations in Scotland or Cumbria)? While I am totally in favour of new nuclear stations, the fiasco over Hinckley C makes me think that in the short and medium term perhaps adding a fleet of pumped storage units would be cheaper, quicker and less prone to NIMBYism.

M.

turbine(s) in domestic water supply pipes

Except that the energy you extract has to come from somewhere. You will notice that your loos may take longer to fill, your shower will certainly be less powerful and to counteract it the water company pumps have to work harder - using more electricity.

Here's an interesting experiment which illustrates losses and just how little power is generated by small "turbines". Take two identical computer fans (the sort of thing we all have lying about, surely?). Connect the power leads together. Blow into one of them and notice how it is impossible to make the other one move. Try it with a can of compressed air, and notice how the second fan will move, but barely. It's quite good fun doing the same experiment with an incandescent torch bulb, especially with a class of children and comparing the result with that obtained from a 1.5V battery or two.

M.

Re: Tidal?

people with enough free space can achieve an economic return on solar, even without subsidy

Citation Needed

The last time the BRE did research on this, the cost per kWh was around 40p for solar PV, which is significantly more than the general price of domestic electricity, let alone the price that CCGT can generate at. I can't find it in this report (2007) but I distinctly remember reading that payback without subsidy was of the order of 20 years for domestic systems which have a lifespan of perhaps 25 years (for the panels, probably less for the inverter). I dare say that's improved recently, but I've not seen any research proving it. Given a high installation cost and the uncertainty of subsidy levels over governments for PV, I'm almost certainly going to install Solar Thermal (just an example) on the limited amount of suitable roof I have. It can be a DIY job, the raw cost is relatively low (even factoring in a "dual coil" cylinder) and the payback should be much quicker than PV.

M.

Re: Tidal?

Swansea tidal lagoon would be closer

Because I can see the site out of the window, here are some links:

Tidal Lagoon Swansea Bay

Funding boost

All is not rosy

I also saw an analysis somewhere that claimed their figures for generation were out - they would not be able to generate for as long on each tide as they claimed. However, the idea of a chain of tidal lagoons around the country, taking advantage of staggered tides, is interesting and in some ways the Swansea project is too small.

Gotta be better than the Severn Barrage which would not only have wrecked the tidal mudflats upstream, but stopped for ever the awe-inspiring Severn Bore.

M.

In-flight movies via BYOD? Just what I always wan... argh no we’re all going to die!

Re: "All they have to do is ensure the Wi-Fi is secure enough to stop Reg readers from...........

Actually, I didn't think Red Dwarf X was too bad, and my boys, who were introduced to RD when they were perhaps 10 and 12, quite enjoyed it, though I think their favourite episodes all come from series II to V, with the notable exception of the "Rimmer Experience" scene from - erm - series VII?

Put it this way, we are all looking forward to series XI and XII :-)

M.

Surface Book nightmare: Microsoft won't fix 'Sleep of Death' bug

Re: Still copying Apple

Wary of this turning into a Monty Python sketch but...

...my 85 year-old dad, who had never so much as picked up a (computer) mouse in his life, was so motivated by FlightRadar24 (he's a bit of a planespotter) that on his birthday this year he started learning. He has a wireless keyboard with touchpad (which isn't the easiest of things to use) and a computer running OpenSuse connected to his TV which by default loads up with Firefox full screen, homepage set to FR24. Every now and then I go over for a coffee and introduce him to something new - tap-to-drag or pinch-to-zoom or the BBC News website or the fact that it's networked to the printer upstairs* so he can print pictures of aeroplanes off. Maybe email next?

Old dogs can learn new tricks.

M.

*Mum's a couple of years younger and has had computers since the 1990s, starting with an Acorn A3010 and graduating onto a PPC Mac with OS9, then a MacMini with OSX, then another. Tired of Apple abandoning OSX I'll probably shift her to OpenSuse too in a couple of years when the MacMini needs replacing.

Re: Sleep and Hibernate have always been iffy

In around 3 years of using MacBooks I can only recall one time the MacBook hasn't resumed successfully.

Do MacBooks tend to sleep or hibernate on lid close?

I have to say that I have had problems with OSX devices, both losing monitor configurations (e.g. "forgetting" that there's an external monitor attached, or re-setting resolutions, commonly defaulting to 800x600) and losing WiFi. Getting WiFi back usually just involves turning WiFi "off", waiting a bit, then turning it back on again (and re-registering if it's a public network). Getting an external monitor back often requires a log-out, log-in or even a reboot.

What I have not had with a MacBook is a machine that won't wake up at all.

Perhaps it's this "it works fine for me so there can't really be a problem" attitude that is afflicting Microsoft. Perhaps with the sheer volume of complaints they will now acknowledge that something needs to be done.

MS will lose Surface customers to Apple

Maybe, when Apple catches up with the form-factor, and iPads can run Outlook and Office ;-)

M.

Re: Sleep is used by many!

Before I start, I am not a Microsoft apologist and I only use Windows because I have to at work. I have never had a Windows machine at home, and even at work my main "work" machine dual-boots Windows and OpenSuse. However...

Sleep and Hibernate have always been iffy (also @Zoot)

While sleep really, really should work on a $3,000 laptop, and it really, really doesn't seem to be a problem on anywhere near this scale on other hardware, you are both correct. Sleep has never been 100% reliable, ever. Hibernate has been better, but I've had problems with both on scores of machines with dozens of different configurations from oodles of different vendors (including many self-built) using chipsets from Intel, AMD and others and motherboards (for this may actually be a BIOS issue?) from goodness knows how many manufacturers.

Guess what, it can also be a problem on the Linuxes I use (Mint, OpenSuse*) and on OSX and (possibly) iOS, as well as Windows (not a user of 10 or 8, but I have had problems on both 7 and XP - before XP came along, sleep and hibernate were simply not worth using at all). I have even had what I can only describe as a sleep-related problem on my Android phone where just occasionally if it has been to "sleep" for a very long time, it reboots when you try to wake it up.

Putting a device to "sleep" (whatever that really means) will often cause it to forget network connections, particularly WiFi (requiring a disable, re-enable of the adapter), sometimes cause it to forget display configurations, occasionally cause desktop or application crashes and I've recently even seen it disable Wake on LAN functions (though to be fair, this latter problem also manifests on a "proper" shutdown, and the computers in question shouldn't ever enter sleep anyway).

So, Zoot, I feel for your downvotes and I accept I'll probably get a few myself.

But to go back to the start. While this is a long-standing occasional problem almost everywhere, it should not be something that happens almost every time! Someone at Microsoft needs to find out what is happening and sort it, or if they find it's a hardware issue that can't be mitigated in software they need to give Intel a kick up the backside and issue a recall / replacement / repair notice.

M.

*Both my OpenSuse machines desktop machines will "crash" in quite significant ways if you try to put them to sleep, but both come back from hibernate pretty well. The OpenSuse laptop has issues with startup and shutdown (it can sometimes take 2 or 3 minutes to shutdown), but sleep seems to work ok.

Citrix bakes up Raspberry Pi client boxes

I suspect both options are not quite ready for mainstream yet to run as dual large screen. And may be a drain on resources making other stuff slow

As both options use the GPU they do not stress the processor, but they do increase contention for the shared memory, so this may well slow things down. Quite how much, I couldn't tell you as I've never tried it.

While the DSI option is relatively new, the VGA adapter has been around for some time so if you are interested you can probably find quite a lot of discussion online. In fact the articles I linked above would be a good place to start.

M.

Re: > "The Pi has HDMI and composite video outputs but they are exclusive"

AFAIK this is so for Pi 3

Just to clarify, before Pi 2 there was a 3.5mm stereo tip-ring-sleve (TRS) jack for audio, and a separate RCA, "phono" socket for composite video. The Pi 2 dropped the phono and moved the composite video to the additional ring of a tip-ring-ring-sleeve (TRRS) jack which also carries the stereo audio. This is a standard connector as found in many other devices. Yes, the same connector is used on the Pi 3.

M.

HDMI and composite will output the same image, but you wouldn't want composite for a computer monitor if you could possibly avoid it anyway. The Pi has other options for attaching additional displays. I believe that two-screen output using the GPU for both screens is possible using either one of these or one of these so if it were a make-or-break feature for a small network client, it wouldn't be beyond a company like Citrix to make it work.

M.

The ‘Vaping Crackdown’ starts today. This is what you need to know

Re: About time

I'm tired of seeing vapers flaunt their filthy addiction in public. It's a disgusting habit as is smoking.

While I don't agree with your tone of voice, I'm sympathetic to the sentiment. I rejoiced when smoking in a public place was banned, and I'd quite like to see the same happen to vaping, and yes, I do understand that it is "not as harmful as" smoking. If a smoker can transfer to e-cigs and gradually wean themselves off the addiction, that can only be a good thing.

However, if anything, vaping in a public place is more antisocial than smoking because the cloud seems to hang around longer and vapers have no qualms about blowing the stuff in the face of every passer-by. And with the sheer variety of "flavours" around, the mix of smells can be quite nasty.

Living in Wales, I might get my wish.

And don't get me started on people vaping or smoking while driving (should there be a hands-free law?), with the window down, in slow moving traffic, right in front of or beside my car. The number of times I've had to close the windows and turn on the re-circ.

At least vapers don't chuck their butts out of the window. More than once I've had one of those, still lit with half an inch of tobacco left, lodge itself under some part of my bonnet and cause noxious fumes to enter the air intake.

M.

Nokia offers up 10 Gbps HFC demo

Re: "Symmetrical"

Backing up your SMB's files to a cloud provider

I have often wondered how "cloud backup" was viable for SMBs, or even domestic users with a lot of media to protect, simply from the point of view of time to upload (though assuming incrementals this is less of a problem than it might be), and then time to download the whole lot in the case of an emergency full restore.

At home I have ADSL2+ with sync speeds around 8Mb/s down, 1Mb/s up (not bad for a distant semi-rural exchange, though throughput is less) and at the moment just over 1TB of data that's worth saving. Saving that to a remote server would be rather slow.

It does begin to become viable at network speeds of 50Mbit/s and over, I suppose. In the UK even the much-maligned BT offers "up to" 76 / 19 for £40 per month on its "business Infinity" product (a fibre-to-the-cabinet product). Similar packages are available from third parties, for example The Phone Co-Op, which is a reseller.

M.

(linked to TPC not because I'm a customer - though I am - but because the website is much "cleaner" than the BT one)

Label your cables: A cautionary tale from the server room

Re: It was Working Yesterday.....

1. Of Course it was working yesterday, otherwise you would have called me yesterday - you moron.

Really? It was already "broken" ... since a week or two, but...

Not just computers. I used to work at a radio station and once got a call about 10pm from the guy whose show was just starting, "half the desk isn't working". He flat refused to transfer to another studio, so I had to go in and try to fix it "live".

Turned out that the twit on air before him had tipped half a pint of cider in the desk, but had soldiered-on rather than calling me out when it happened. Yes, there was a very strict no-food-or-drink policy, yes, it was that person's last live show before leaving.

As it happened, that was the very newest desk in the station and the control surface was just a control surface - a pot, a couple of switches, a fader and a connector. No electronics. All the electronics were in a rack, well away from the cider, which had flowed through the faders and switches, out of the drain holes and all over the "talent"'s trousers.

Conductive plastic faders wash very well under the tap, and I only had to replace a few wipers.

Back on topic, labelling was paramount at the radio station, helped by the copious use of multicore cables that were numbered and coloured as manufactured. I have brought that culture of labelling with me and I rarely travel anywhere without a marker pen :-)

M.

Spaniard live streams 195km/h burn-up

Re: I found...

are you going to stop mate? Are you? Press your brakes! Don't hit me after I've just avoided the accident in front of me!

Doesn't even have to be that. I was stopped at traffic lights on a 40mph road. Handbrake on, about a car length gap to the car in front - maybe a bit more. Bog standard safe. Two kids in the back.

Car behind was stopped.

Car behind that was stopped.

Car behind that, didn't.

Last car hit the next car, hit the next car, hit me. My car went forward by about a foot, no more. The two cars in the middle had been stopped, too close together and with handbrake off. I don't think the lady at the back had been speeding, but she certainly wasn't concentrating, and as for the two dolts in the middle...

M.