Posts by TheMD

The US Army recruits WALL-E Chris H as its next-generation bomb disposal robot

what kind of operating system does it use?

( just won £100)

Brit voucher biz's signup page blabbed families' details via URL tweak

Bunch of numbers

The article mentions that the link contains a "Bunch of numbers". Sounds like they are using short or sequential numbers.

The verification links generated needed to contained random codes of sufficient length and then this would be fine;

After all, a link in email to verify the email address is done by most sites...

This THREESOME is a HANDFUL: It’s the Asus Transformer Book Trio

Re: Just wish @ jason 7

pretty well apparently

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=27815

Roomba dust-bust bot bods one step closer to ROBOBUTLERS

is it a torch?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6mMY-kZkH4

Apple: You'd want hi-fi streamage from us, not poor-people Wi-Fi audio

Re: Bluetooth

Seems BT support is pretty complete:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3647

Suspected freetloaders to face piracy letters in 2014

Re: If its so widespread AND illegal

Democracy: two wolves and a sheep deciding what for dinner

Ten... inkjet photo printers

HP Photosmart Premium

I've had one of these large hp printers for about 6 monts - and it is very good overall. Photo quality is great and under moderate use the ink seems very economical. Iv'e used up the low volume cartridges that came with the printer and about a third of a set of high capacities ones (roughly £40) in this time. Id estimate i've printed about 150 pages of text/light graphics, 30 A4 photos and maybe another 20 standard photo. To get results that resemble the image on the screen i have to lighten the image by about 10% before printing. I don't know if it's possible to calibrate the printer with the screen to do this automatically. Tbh - although the output looks good - it is often quite different to the image on the screen :-/ any advice on this would be appreciated.

Previously i had a predecesor of the large canon in the review (from about 3 years ago.) I was very disappointed with it. I couldn't get good output from it on most jobs no matter what i did, and and the ink ran out eye wateringly fast. I'm sure the HP cartridges last 3-4 times longer than the canon ones did and it's east to get reasonable output.

For the me the duplex scanning was what clinched the deal but although it works okay and is very reliable it's also quite slow. Worse, the document management/ocr software that comes with the printer is poor so i don't use this as much as i would have liked to.

I would like to be able to put a stack of paper bills, statements etc into the tray and come back to have it all nicely ocr'ed and catalogued but the current process requires too much manual intervention to be worthwhile.

As much as i like this printer, here's a couple more bad point.

1) The shiny black plastic has lots of small crevices where dust gathers - it's hard to clean and it always looks very dusty. The plastic is also quite flimsy though - not so much that it would break, it just feels cheap and poorly fitted. I'm also sure it would cost a fortune to replace if any of the pieces broke.

2) The printer shakes and rattles like mad when printing, especially in fast draft mode. I have it on a light Ikea desk and the desk and printer shake so much so that in quick draft mode vertical lines come out jagged. nasty.

Still i like it a lot, in fact it's one of my favourite gadgets - maybe it's just that it has a very non apple personality :-)

Cryptocard gobbles tasty, dead number puzzle startup

This is somewhat more secure than an onscreen keyboard because there is usually more than one pattern for a given passcode. You would probably have to observer several instances of the grid/passcode to gain the pattern. Still, it's only slightly more secure than a regular password.

Femtocells, not 4G, will solve spectrum crisis

how come 23 comments got posted before someone remembered

...that r = 10, pi*r^2 != 50

Sony Ericsson intros Xperia minis

Mini x10 pro

I have had one of these for the past few months and it's my favourite smart phone so far (had a nexus one as well as an iPhone 3g and 4)

It is the perfect size and is cheap enough not to worry about it scratching/breaking. The physical keyboard is a killer feature in such a small phone and the camera and sound-quality are well above average. It's a little slow sometimes and the battery life isn't great but I work in an office so don't really mind.

One niggle: the headphone/set socket is incompatible with apple style headsets.

Still, I'm pretty sure I'll be upgrading to the new one at the end of the year.

Ubuntu Firefox shuns Google for Yahoo! search

Ubuntu Business

Ubuntu is a business built on OSS - doing this sort of thing goes so far against the spirit of that that it is laughable. They loose all credibility - for ever.

The primary reason most people even bother experimenting with Ubuntu is the ethical aspect - which has just gone completely out the window.

I can change the search provider on IE too.