Posts by David 132

ASUS recalls motherboards that flame out thanks to backwards capacitors

Re: It was fun when I saw that happen

Dunno if you’re trying to call me a liar, but that’s what happened. I can only relate what I saw…

Re: But, but …

It is. Do you see any mention in the Asus story coverage of an ongoing Klingon invasion? Nope? There you go then. Reverse your polarities with confidence. Make it so.

Re: It was fun when I saw that happen

I recall two capacitor-related incidents from my time at school, oooh several decades ago in the late 80s.

The first was when our young, hip, down-with-da-kids Physics teacher (Mr Fisher, if these increasingly senile memory cells don’t lie) was teaching us from the front of the room while idly fiddling with a rather large electrolytic that he had in his hands. Eventually the inevitable occurred and he touched the two fly-leads together, which led to a large spark, singe’d fingers, and a classroom of boys all learning the word “fuck!”, which of course none of us innocents had ever heard before. Nope.

And the second was a year or so later, when we were actually learning about capacitors. One of my chums seated on the back row of benches behind me obviously thought it would be fun to connect every electrolytic he could get his hands on together in series, then charge the two ends of the chain from the lab 12v bench supply.

Suddenly there was a loud “BANG” and we all turned round to see Bloggs Minor sitting there with an innocent expression as wisps of capacitor material drifted slowly down and settled on him like dandruff. The teacher for that class, who was infinitely more world-weary, just rolled his eyes and carried on with the lesson.

Ah, happy days. A big “hi” to anyone reading this who thinks “gosh, I saw that, I think I was at that school…”

Offering Patreon subs in sterling or euros means you can be sued under GDPR, says Court of Appeal

Re: On the other hand...the corollary

No. Triganic Ningis. Which explains why the energy market is a little dysfunctional lately.

Microsoft rang in the new year with a cutesy tweet in C#. Just one problem: The code sucked

Re: Video..

Gah. Upvoted. I get so furious when I google “how to fix $error” and the top 10 results are youtube videos. I don’t want a video! A simple numbered list of steps would be more than enough, have more clarity, and save megabytes of download!

Can’t decide whether to use thumbs up icon, for you, or exploding nuke icon, for my current state of mind. Let’s compromise and have a drink. Cheers.

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

Re: Pronouncing...

Arnold Rimmer, is that you?

Some errors fill the screen. And some come from the .NET Framework

Re: the .NET Framework

> BASE jumping with a parachute you bought on the web ... oh wait, they delivered a Barbie parachute only 6 inches wide.

Ah, I see you too have used Wish.com!

A proposal to beat below-the-belt selfies: Crowdsourced machine learning using victims' image stashes

FWIW, we're not really talking about men's rhea here, more men's front.

And by way of light-hearted counterpoint… SMBC.

Re: a nice, friendly duck

Oh my indeed, especially when you consider that a Bay is a colour variant of horse.

By the way, a rhea is a South American bird with long legs.

...and OP forgot the apostrophe in "Men's Rhea". Still not sure what the intent was though, nor why the law should be obsessed with a male-owned long-legged South American flightless bird. But then, I'm not a lawyer.

Me too.

"Is that normal?"

"What, taking pictures of it and showing them to your mates? No it isn't!"

Can you get excited about the iPhone 13? We've tried

Re: So...

If you had a chainsaw made by Apple, ...

...the chains would only cut applewood, and certain other approved materials that bore the "designed for iChainsaw" logo.

But the chains would at least look fabulous. Rounded corners, made from ultra-thin, ultra-light exotic alloys. Oh, and prone to getting bent and scratched easily. Fortunately there'd be a vast industry of protective covers for your iChain blades.

Belgian defence ministry admits attackers accessed its computer network by exploiting Log4j vulnerability

Re: Belgian has a defence ministry?

...aided by Tintin?

You shoot the rocket once, you have to make a plane fly for years.

For some reason there's a Tom Lehrer ditty about Werner von Braun that comes to mind here!

Tesla disables in-car gaming feature that allowed play while MuskMobiles were in motion

Re: Removing distraction = good

A good friend of mine did that, albeit somewhat less spectacularly, in his company Transit many years ago, somewhere near Whitchurch Shropshire. He was fine; the van was never quite the same afterwards.

It's the day before the grand opening but we need a firmware update. It'll be fine

Re: Friday rule

Yes, there's a maltitude of puns here. As the number grows ever-lager, I am starting to get bitter.

Please pay for parking – CMOS batteries don't buy themselves

Re: Paid parkng Tesco....

That seemed an appropriate purchase for being in Slough

Ah yes.

"Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough...

...I still haven't practiced pronouncing it enough."

:)

Who you gonna call? Premium numbers, but a not-so-premium service

Re: back in the day

you would probably not want to share the lavatory with them afterwards.

Did it... happen often in that company... that people would share lavatories?

I mean, I remember myself in the early 80s having to endure TP that had the texture and absorbancy of greaseproof baking paper, but even back then in those coal-fired, benighted days, we got a lavatory to ourselves...

Re: Wrong number

What, you still use the phone for that? Whatevs, grandad... email, surely?

> Subject: Fire

> Dear Sir/Madam,

> I am writing to inform you of a fire, which has broken out at the premises of...

Microsoft Paint + car park touchscreen = You already know where this is going

Re: No one has mentioned...

You're surprised that it has Paint?

It's Windows, being used for an embedded ePOS scenario.

I'm pretty certain it'll also have Candy Crush on there, along with Paint3D, Store, OneDrive, Mixed Reality Portal, and all the other shite shovelware that MS foist on even "Pro" variant users.

Anyway. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and peace and goodwill to all men - even Microsoft marketing managers.

(My chosen icon is a roaring log fire, as I look out my window and see 5" of snow all around. I'm pretty sure I just saw four small children following a faun and a lion across my front lawn, too...)

Wi-Fi not working? It's time to consult the lovely people on those fine Linux forums

Re: "first read the fine forum thread until the end"

Oblig XKCD.

Re: Doctors waiting room?????

The original and closest Doctors was in a different STD code area.

Well I've heard of medics' notes codes like PAFO or NFN*, but this is the first time I've heard of codes for STDs. Are you sure you want to admit to having those?

(Pissed And Fell Over; Normal For Norfolk, in case anyone's wondering.)

Re: Machine that weighs less than its operating manual.

About 30 years back, an educational institution not too far from here and dispensing knowledge pertaining to agriculture

(Edit: Hmm, I see from your comments further down that you're actually in the Netherlands. So my guess of Cirencester is probably a little off, by several hundred miles. Oh well. Still mad about the Tunnel House, though.)

So how is Cirencester these days? I'm very sad that the Tunnel House closed permanently - that was a nice place.

(Aside: Hmm, I see too that the Royal Ag College now has delusions of academic purity and has renamed itself a University. Hmmm.)

Police National Computer not pwned by Clop ransomware crims, insists Home Office

Re: I would like 100 upvotes for Christmas please.

>the vote will only become active if you stand in a bowl of custard facing East while singing Des O'Connor's Dick A Dum Dum, for Christmas.

Ah, the old Christmas traditions are the best, aren't they? wipes away sentimental tear

Re: I would like 100 upvotes for Christmas please.

I upvoted you. But be aware that my upvote would otherwise have gone to a very worthy post by a starving Guatamalan orphan, who was counting on the additional electrons to buy medicine for his desperately sick grandmother.

I hope you feel satisfied, you monster.

Dutch nuclear authority bans anti-5G pendants that could hurt their owners via – you guessed it – radiation

Re: Rocky atoll for sale

I do have a small amount of sympathy for homeopaths.

A very, very, small, very diluted amount of sympathy, shown briefly to a bottle of water, the water then being further diluted, but still - of course - demonstrating "memory" of the sympathy, right?

Re: They're an unncessary expense anyway.

Yes, but I bet you're not especially worried about 5G now, are you?

Ergo, the remedy has worked!

Re: DO NOT DO THIS!

Yes, I knew that. I was attempting to be humorous. Will learn my lesson and never try again.

Re: DO NOT DO THIS!

What the hell were they doing feeding pop rocks and Mentos to a pig? Poor creature!

Re: Rocky atoll for sale

You've reminded me of the - probably apocryphal, but so what - delightful tale of the mob of angry paranoids who demanded a meeting with the cellular comms company that had erected a new tower in their neighborhood.

The rep from the cellco attended the meeting, and listened patiently as resident after resident related tales of woe - of sleepless nights, dizziness, rashes, sneezing, pustulent boils, rains of sheep and outbreaks of Gnats.

He expressed his sympathy and commiserated with them all, and closed with words to the effect of "After all you've experienced, I can't imagine what will happen when we actually connect and switch the tower on..."

They're an unncessary expense anyway.

The absolute best way to make sure that 5G will no longer bother you is much simpler.

1) Eat at least 1.1Kg of bicarbonate of soda. Yes, it'll taste unpleasant but this is a natural remedy, and the worse they taste, the better for you they are, everyone knows that. If you find it difficult to swallow, try adding a drop of homeopathic Aqua, the smaller the better.

2) Promptly drink a litre of white vinegar.

Trust me as a person whose post icon has goggles and a sensible haircut. This will prevent you being bothered any more by 5G and, what's more, will protect all the rest of us from you too. And I can guarantee that it doesn't involve covid vaccinations and, what's more, is something that the Government doesn't want you to do.

Diagnosis confirmed: Oracle has a case of healthcare cravings, bought Cerner for $28.3bn as the cure

Re: Voice Digital Assistant

Well, Oracle are well known for charging an arm and a leg for their products...

The monitor boom may have ended, says IDC

Re: Thank you, Laura!

I believe the term used should have been "shrunked", but I'm not going to loose my temper over one rouge word...

(Note icon before descending into spittle-flecked rage--->)

An important part of car rental finances is sale of cars when they get too old for rental

Yeah but at what frequency does that ever happen?

Re: Impressive???

Most of the ones I've seen are just some variant of 1080p - either re-cased 1920x1080p panels, or absurd aspect ratios with a bajillion horizontal pixels but still the same 1080 vertical that I had on my first LCD monitor in about 2002. To get usable vertical resolution - ie, usable for more than watching Youtube - $500-600 seems to still be the ballpark.

I'm currently rocking a 3440x1440 Acer X34, which I have to say is a good monitor, except for the fact that it really doesn't play nicely with my crappy AMD graphics (craphics?) card, and will lose sync just about every time the screen resolution changes. Doesn't have any problems at all with the Intel graphics on my other PC, so.. *shrug*

Fans of original gangster editors, look away now: It's Tilde, a text editor that doesn't work like it's 1976

No, but it is available from within Systemd.

Re: Sledgehammer to crack a walnut

They're also absolutely delicious covered in chocolate.

Macadamia nuts that is, not pedestrian crossings.

I've just been reading the Apple Human Interface Guidelines that were so kindly linked to in the article, from 1987.

For some reason, I now have an overwhelming compulsion to pick up the mouse and say "Hello, Computer" in a Scots/Canadian accent.

I remember that DOS Edit was always much faster at loading in large files (and binaries, for string searches) than Notepad.

Google Chrome's upcoming crackdown on ad-blockers and other extensions still really sucks, EFF laments

Re: A better approach

Would be to murder the top 1500 people at Google, burn their houses down and exile their families to Antarctica

Oh great. Another wishy-washy, soft-on-crime, bleeding-heart liberal.

Do it. It's super easy. Just a cheap low-cost RPi or Intel NUC, and configure your DHCP server to point to it as your DNS server. Game-changing.

Re: Why do people stil pay attention to anything Google says

Like politicians or public servants.

Don't pay any attention to what they say.

Watch what they do.

Re: /etc/hosts

Indeed. To use a relevant analogy, why hard-code your page appearance in HTML? It's not 1998 any more. Use style-sheets.

(Yeah, I know. I am the Bergholt Stuttley Johnson of coming up with analogies.)

Re: I usually use Firefox.

Although of course, Firefox pushing DNS-over-HTTPS has nothing to do with stymieing DNS-based adblocking, and is all about user privacy. Yup.

I've found that most of my frequently-used sites are fine without JS. The awkward exceptions are Allmusic.com and TheTVDB.com (which, since its last redesign, seems to deliberately load its content from the sketchiest-sounding domains possible).

Ironically, even the bay that is piratey seems to work better without JS (and with uBlock Origin, NoScript and Pi-Hole all in force) than those two above.

Re: deal breaker

Seconded for Pi-Hole. It's a game-changer and much more powerful than the /etc/hosts solution.

I lost power at my home earlier this morning and for a while my Pi-Hole DNS box was down along with the rest of my network. Browsiing on my phone over cellular was miserable. So many adverts!

Re: Mozilla, so careful

It's a good browser despite Mozilla's best efforts, not because of them, alas.

Don't make an iOS of yourself – Apple's patched its OSes, you know the drill

Frankly, I plan for my last words(*) to be something along the lines of "...and please look after my bullion and artwork, it's all stored at... *gack* *splutter* *gurgle*"

(*- assuming my actual last words aren't something along the lines of "don't be daft, you don't get poisonous snakes around here, of course I can pick it u.....")

Ooh, an update. Let's install it. What could possibly go wro-

NT's demands for CPU performance, memory and disk space always reminded me of that scene in Smokey and the Bandit where Little Enos is giving the Bandit money.

"I'm going to need a new car..."

(doles out a few hundred dollar bills)

"A speedy car..."

(doles out more bills)

"..speedier than that..."

(with a look of disgust, hands over even more money)