Posts by David 132

Not looking forward to a greyscale 2022? Then look back to the past in 64 colours

Groinuary?

Re: Theres nowt wrong

But its hard work when the boss turns round and asks "Anything to add Mr Cockroach?" and I say "fuck...my last city just got nuked"

Bonus points if next time that happens you’re wearing a single leather glove and sitting in a wheelchair.

Re: 64 colours?

To answer your question, why don’t you google “calvin and hobbes rule 34”.

Or rather, don’t. Some illusions are best left preserved.

Re: Colour options

*cough* Dazzle Camouflage *cough*

Re: Angel Delight

We are all lying in the gutter, but some of us are pointing and sniggering at the things that float past us.

Re: Angel Delight

Try the emergency backup dog's milk while you're at it. Lasts longer than any other kind of milk, does dog's milk.

Re: what the French expression for “mosh-pit” might be

Except that if you call it un mosh pit, you'll have the Academie Française gunning for your hide.

Re: To be fair on BMW

I know you know this, but the point of the colour description on the DVLA doc is to help law enforcement. A copper pursuing your fleeing vehicle (whether it’s you or a TWOCer driving it) is hardly going to radio in to HQ, “this is car 54, I am in pursuit of a puce car, it’s like fuschia but a shade less lavender and a bit more pink…”

Ceefax replica goes TITSUP* as folk pine for simpler times

Re: Pong

And it starred in one of the best music tracks of that decade!

Re: Funny dots!

Oooh. Definitely one of those smells so evocative, yet so hard to describe to the young’uns who’ve maybe never even seen a valve.

Thanks for giving me a Madeleine moment there.

Re: Pedantic - slightly inaccurate

Macrovision I think. Ugh. Hated it at the time but like pretty much all copy-protection systems it was doomed to fail.

Re: Bring Back Telnet (or VT100/ansi via SSH)

AFAIK Monochrome is still up & running - not over telnet any more but I SSH’ed into it just a few weeks ago, as I do every so often for nostalgia’s sake.

> ssh [e-mail]

What’s scary is that almost 30 years since I first used that BBS, I can still muscle-memory the key sequences to get to particular sections.

Re: I miss the jokes

I never worried about those. I have an official licence from the Ministry of Housinge.

…on a related note, I have to give the Aussie press credit for last week’s “Want a rapid test? …Play the Poms” headline. Bravo, guys. Albeit through gritted teeth.

Watching the numbers tick by

From the article: The user would press those on their remote to be taken to the relevant page with more subdirectories – after a few seconds of watching the number at the top tick over to the right one.

Well yes. Unless you had a sub-optimal signal due to being in a Welsh valley, or it was raining (but I repeat myself…) or the pigeons had knocked the aerial skew-wiff.

…in which case you’d key in your desired number, watch the index number in the top-right corner tick upwards.. upwards… …and right past your number without picking up the page. So you’d watch it go round again, in hopes that this time it would get it.

After a while you’d think “huh, boring ol’ ceefax, I’m going to go out in the garden and play keepy-uppy ‘till The A-Team comes on”

Re: Rented TV's

Rumbelows.

(to throw another "no, not that Larry" into the mix)

And “no, not the shopping centre just outside Reading” too.

Re: I miss the jokes

> I've no idea how their comments made it from the users' living rooms onto the tellybox though - this was way before email and SMS were a thing. Did you have to physically send them in by Royal Mail?

Duh. What do you think the TV Detector vans were for?

Surely you didn’t believe the government propaganda that they were to detect licence evaders? No! They cruised up and down the nation’s streets, their sensitive microphones listening for people yelling at their TVs. If the aforementioned yelling was a Teletext Reader’s comment, it would be taken back to Broadcasting House by the detector van.

Time to party like it's 2002: Acura and Honda car clocks knocked back 20 years by bug

Re: GPS week rollover

no one's got lost because of it

…that we’ve heard of…

What if you’re Sammy Hagar?

Re: GPS week rollover

Indeed. They are perfectly seriously discussing keeping the airframes updated and flying past 100 years old.

Re: GPS week rollover

At risk of validating Muphry’s Law (not to mention invoking Godwin’s), may I point out that it’s usually written as “grammar nazi” not “nazi grammar”?

I mean, the latter evokes mental images of a classroom full of jackbooted stormtroopers, repeating by rote “for you ze war is over”, “it is DIE Britischer Swine, nicht DER Britischer Swine”, “i before e except in Heil” etc etc…

Ah, the Wonko the Sane approach?

I have to say that the digital clock in my 1993 Nissan farm truck keeps perfect time. Takes a licking and keeps on ticking, as the old advertising slogan had it.

Re: Satellites?

You’re too kind. But give Randall Munroe the credit, not me.

Re: Satellites?

Yep this is definitely a Honda-side problem.

To steal an XKCD joke, if I may: Epoch Fail!

DIY Sinclair clones: Left it too late to back the Next? Build your own instead

Re: Great article

Well yes, for kids whose mummy and daddy had far too much money, yes.

BBC B circa 1985: £399

Spectrum: £99-£175 or so depending on model.

I had a peer at school who, when he turned 17, got a brand new Land Rover 90 from his doting parents. I bet he had his own Beeb at home.

…the bastard.

Re: I'm still waiting for...

Yes but as I recall, it launched far too late - by that point the Amiga and lesser 16-bit machines were widely available and popular. It was rather like someone launching a really, really cool portable CD player… years after the arrival of MP3 players.

I backed the Next Release 2 on Kickstarter.

We’re all still waiting for delivery… Henrique and his team are doing an awesome job trying to work around the global chip shortages which are just a nightmare. Currently hoping that delivery will be not too far away (Aug 2021 was the original target).

Notes on the untimely demise of 3D Pinball for Windows

Except that MS don’t “do” easter eggs any more. I seem to recall the discovery and subsequent press coverage of a complete flight simulator hidden in Excel ‘97 was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Remember Norton 360's bundled cryptominer? Irritated folk realise Ethereum crafter is tricky to delete

I miss Ghost. Back in the day it was brilliant for cloning Windows machines. Unlike Clonezilla (at least at the time), it had no problem cloning to a larger or smaller drive.

Symantec bought Ghost and it just turned to a bloated mess.

Re: Opt-in, my arse

Your suggestion is sensible, logical, and would give end-users fair control over their devices.

So it’ll never, ever happen.

Jeez Pascal, I’m not one to need trigger warnings, but a spoiler alert might have been wise there…

Mozilla founder blasts browser maker for accepting 'planet incinerating' cryptocurrency donations

Re: Lisp

Other languages have code-checking bots, or detecting-stackoverflow-copy-and-paste bots.

Lisp has Violet-Elizabeth Botts.

(Yes, that’s my coat there. The grass-stained one with the gobstoppers and catapult in the pocket.)

Re: Expanding horizons and equations

> [e-mail] is almost the archetypal email address!

I work for a large company that, as expected, uses that format. Everyone, from most-recently-hired intern up to CEO, has firstname.lastname@ as their email address.

Except for one colleague of mine, who has firstname@ as his.

How he achieved this I don’t know but I believe it had something to do with working for the IT department at juuuust the right time a few years ago…

Fugitive mafioso evaded cops for two decades until he was spotted on Google Street View

Re: working … under the name of Manuel

Bit of a come down. From white-collar Mafioso to lowly manuel labour.

Google Chrome 97 relaxes privacy protection just a little to help out Microsoft

Re: Not minimal

I thought I should let you know that thanks to your highly custom keyboard layout, your post appeared on this forum as

“I love Google SO MUCH. They’re my BFF and I can’t imagine a world without them!!!!l

It takes more clicks to reject their cookies than accept them, so France fines Facebook and Google over €200m

Re: A Google spokesperson said...

> But not as evil as Zuck. I will not use his companies' products ever.

I’ve never meta person who would.

Alexa and Webex to hitch a ride around the Moon on Artemis I – what could possibly go wrong?

Re: W_T_F ?

From Youtube I learned that you can do just about anything with a banana - evidence here. (don’t worry, safe for work)

Re: W_T_F ?

cut out the loudspeaker->microphone diversion? (which wouldn't work in a vacuum anyway)

Well, the obvious solution is to cut off the microphone, cut off the speakers, and solder the mic feed directly to the speaker wires.

Come on people, it’s rocket science.

Heart attack victim 'saved' by defibrillator delivery drone*

Re: Doctors...

But probably not Thousand by Moby.

Unless you’re attempting to revive a hummingbird.

Re: Doctors...

15%? These days it costs an arm and a leg.

You wood not believe what a Japanese logging company and university want to use to build a small satellite

Re: Cubesat

Once it collides with V’ger, yes.

Re: You know what else is made of wood...

*For the life of me I can't think of a suitable acronym ;-)

No. Me neither. ↗️

Re: think 15,700mph in low Earth orbit.

Then think : "millions of splinters travelling at that speed towards you"

Who let Detritus fire his Piecemaker?

Like the moon.

Re: Wood?

Cardboard and cardboard derivatives are out. Or the front will fall off.

Reg writers and readers, you disappoint me

As I write this there are 78 other comments and not one person (unless my browser’s Find function is lying) has made the obvious “Captain’s Log” pun.

AT&T, Verizon delay 5G C-band rollout over FAA fears of passenger plane radars jammed by signals

You’d have to get a ghost lawyer. And you’d lose, because courts respect the letter, not the Spirit of the law.

Re: Altimeters

> greatest near airports where the planes will be closest to the ground

…you hope.