Posts by Martin-R 106 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jun 2010
I think every B2C company I've worked with over the last 25 years has had a change freeze in the run up to a busy period - that's just business as usual. Bringing it forward and applying it "with immediate effect" is a little unusual but then for a retailer, TBH I'd expect it to be in place by now!
One of my wife's work laptops had the power button at the back right edge, just where you naturally held the machine when pushing in the power lead on the back left edge... you can imaging the cursing as you rush to plug it in before the battery dies and promptly turn it off. Fortunately that batch also had batteries that swelled noticeably in a few weeks so it soon went away!
In various jobs over the years, the default corporate policy has always been cheapest flight, hotel etc, even if it means I lose more billable time to travelling than was saved by not taking the more sensible flight, hotel etc... I have found though that if the client is paying anyway, they're often happy to recommend, if not actually book, somewhere for you. So once "up north", what I was expecting from the price to be a pub B&B turned out to be a country house hotel, and I was greeted at the desk with "oh, we've upgraded you to a suite" :-) And in one European city, where the client's offices as basically in the local version of Slough, I found my hotel was in the local version of Covent Garden, next to the opera house and near the parliament. We *like* that sort of client...
Having just finished cleaning up my mum's PC again (she installed some supposed-PDF viewer by accident), I have to agree - let's keep the walled garden secure. If you want to be able to sideload stuff or use different app stores, just use Android and leave my mum's iPad in peace
I need a laptop for when I travel but most of the time I WFH and then the laptop stays shut and a pair of 27" monitors does the job nicely. It's somewhat frustrating that for most laptops, to get dual monitor support you seem to have to go to a high end screen I hardly ever use!
Great system in principle but lousy implementation even with the cloud data... Binned it a while back, switched to Drayton Wiser which is far more flexible and works locally - no cloud required. It also offers nice add ons such as connecting a smart meter to the system so I can see actual usage and cost in the app.
And another vote for Eufy doorbell and other cameras - just works, local hub, no cloud
I think it's more "went righter" than "went wrong". They will work to a range of outcomes from each burn and eight will (probably?) have been the worst case. If you look at the JWST coverage, they ended up with a lot more fuel for station keeping than the 10 year baseline thanks to a very precise launch and mid-course burns - see https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb/Precise_Ariane_5_launch_likely_to_extend_Webb_s_expected_lifetime
Could you hear me shouting at the radio too…?
I know people who were looking at something like this about 10 years back and the key arguments were, yeah, small reactor less efficient than big, but
1) small reactor much easier to build and manage
2) if you 20 50MW reactors it’s easy to take one off line each month for maintenance rather than losing 500MW for a year or more
As to the technology being unproven, I just assumed RR would be delivering something based on the submarine reactors they’ve been building since about 1966
I say this as someone who lives about 5km from several nuclear reactors and 7km from a recently decommissioned coal plant - I know which worried me more!
The problem is having staff skills and time to support it. I was lucky to have staff who could & would go the extra mile when I went off-piste with the curriculum (eg the biology teacher who just happened to have her 2m handheld in school for me to borrow the day I told her my ham radio licence came through - first QSO at lunch time from outside the science block :-) but that was a while a go and funding has got tighter since then (and curriculum much more prescribed). There are some schemes out there which will stretch the brightest without too much staff input, eg UK Mathematics Trust offer mentoring for their challenges, but you're still dependent on the school's awareness of such things - and then of course the volunteer mentors.
Oh if only... I was recently locked out of my business banking for 10 days due to a 500 error while they'd been telling other people with the same problem there was no problem... Posting the error message from the Chrome developer console to their Twitter support desk at least got them to admit there was a problem, but it took several more phone calls and them physical posting me a 'magic word' to get it resolved :-(
Hats off however to the Ocado developers who put their recruitment links in the console complete with Ascii art of the logo :-)
My "calendar of record" is the iPad... The *many* Gmail calendars I'm interested in reach it via one Gmail account, and my multiple exchange accounts are configured on it too. It seems to work pretty well - certainly much better than trying to show Gmail calendars in Outlook, let alone something rash like trying to see all the Exchange calendars together in Outlook without ticking multiple checkboxes that won't stay ticked next time you visit!
Somewhat amusingly, the iPad also seems to be the best place to use Teams... at least there I can easily switch between accounts instead of having to log out and log back in again as on the Windows Desktop client.
If you bumped up the electric field enough for it to actually zap them, not sure I'd want to go in the room myself while it was on... But maybe you could put an electric charge on the mosquitos and then a high enough magnetic field would deflect them all out a window?!
Can’t be bothered with baiting them any more, just installed a call blocker. Once I’d remembered to white list the kids (they always call my mobile rather than the landline, except that once…) it’s been pretty seamless. And from the reduction in calls in the logs, I think some of the scammers may have blacklisted *us* :-)
Chrome supports multiple profiles, they just open in new windows rather than different tabs. Works a treat for keeping all the different O365 accounts separate (and that increasingly includes for voluntary groups as well as work clients)
The frustration with the Teams client for Windows however is quite justified... Outlook is sitting there quite happily supporting six different Office 365 accounts simultaneously, letting me receive emails from any of them and send with little more fuss than a dropdown to select the account. Teams on the other hand is struggling with my work account and one client 'guest' profile; to support any more requires major logging out and and in again. Ironically the best client I've found for Teams so far is on the iPad...
From reading the AHF paper, it would appear that these implants have a 'magnet reversion mode' that triggers a certain behaviour when a doughnut magnet is placed over the device. Normal phones have 'little to no risk' of interference but the Magsafe alignment magnets are in a ring that appears to do more than a passable impression of the doughnut magnets - 3/3 devices for their in vivo tests vs a previous study that found none in 148 patients with an iPhone 6
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