Posts by Martin-R 106 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jun 2010
8GB Pi 4 Model B is showing as £73.50 inc VAT. chuck in an SD card and PSU and I guess we're at ~£85 a pop, plus the mess of extension leads for the PSUs. So if you're only doing something short term, or experimenting with say a cluster, then may be it is worth it. 'Course if you do buy them outright, you have to be wary of the damn things breeding - I seem to have 3 running full time at home doing various jobs plus the one I tinker with...
To which I can add "have you turned it off and left it for four weeks?" Power shower stopped working after a couple of power cuts in quick succession. "The Internet" says yeah, can happen, turn it off for an hour, it'll reset. Nope. Left if off 24h. Nope. Decided to survive on feeble shower for a few weeks as bathroom needs completely refitting anyway. Chap comes out to do survey and estimates, turns it on, works... aargh!
Mostly I'd agree with you - in the last year my laptop's lid has really only opened for access to the power switch. But in normal times I'd have to visit clients one or twice a week so then I do need a laptop. Running a laptop and a desktop and keep everything in sync (even with all the cloud tools) is more grief than I can face, aside from the expense of two machines :-(
Also open to suggestions on a small screen laptop that will drive two external monitors - I don't need a QHD touch screen when the lid is shut, but all the smaller ones I've found seem to only support one external monitor
My least favourite remote access tool has a helpful popup with words to the effect of "this will disconnect your session" followed by an OK button and only an OK button. No it's not OK, it's far too easy to click the button that ends the session accidentally, give me a cancel button!
I also love applications where closing a record with unsaved changes usually says "do you wish to save your changes first?" and at other points says "this will discard your changes, do you wish to continue?" - but at least there are yes and no options in both!
My kids' recent experience of STEM degrees (Maths and Engineering) is that the vast majority of final year projects on offfer have some element of ML or big data, and have done for a few years, so it's no great surprise there's more interested in straight ML/AI/Big Data degrees
I had three instant credit store cards in *almost* my name turn up over a few days. Trying to convince the issuers to talk to me about store cards that weren't for me was a farce (which caused much hilarity in the open plan office), and I later found that the credit checks that had been done against my almost-name and address had DOB and time at address wrong. One of them was even done after I'd spoken to that issuer's security team about the first dodgy card... Make me wonder what you have to do to fail a credit check - be honest, probably :-(
Forget beer consumption, if it's late at night and you're already tired, you probably shouldn't be driving yourself into the office anyway, let alone home again a few hours later! I've done enough first flight out/full day on site/last flight home trips to know there's no way I'm safe to drive home, so the company can pay for the cab both ways or I'm not going.
... something to stop ******* Teams et al deciding to turn down the mic gain half way through a call? Zoom seems to have picked up this habit too.
And of course what Office really needs is yet another way of tracking to do lists and tasks that doesn’t integrate with all the others it already has :-(
The Common User Access Guidelines were a wonderful thing... and from IBM rather than MS, though MS followed them for a long time. I was working on OS/2 and Windows applications in the first half of 90s and everything working consistently across apps and OSes was great, unlike today where half the time you're not sure if that's a button or a link or just a bit of text :-(
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access for a bit of history
I noticed the speed limits had appeared for the UK (well Oxfordshire at least) on Saturday, but no current speed - and the limits were hopeless, showing 50 or even 30 for long stretches of the A34 with a 70 limit. I've never noticed Waze being far off - given the common owner I'd have expected better.
Broadband is usually very good, but daughter's phone and data signal has been getting worse and worse lately. Suspected SIM so requested a new one, you can guess how that worked out :-( She needs a reliable phone, now with EE!
They keep telling me to register for an EORI number despite the fact that these appear to relate only to goods and we only sell services. Now we’re to get one automatically as so few businesses have registered for one - I wonder how many of those that have not registered are in the same boat as me?
As best I can tell, remote IT services won’t be too badly affected but $deity help us if we need to go on site (visas?) or if you’re doing something that requires recognition of qualifications
Glad it wasn't just me that could find the change password option! I finally worked out that you could log out, then at the login screen use 'forgot password' to reset it.
However I already *do* use unique passwords for each site so I'm not entirely buying their third party websites argument...
The phone service provider is probably not a good analogy as they have interoperability; VHS vs Betamax might be closer. One might be technically better, but if all your mates are using the other, you can't swap tapes... The great benefit to me of Facebook Messenger over all the others to run the (non work) stuff I need to do is that there's a critical mass of the people I need to talk to on there, and there's a very low barrier to entry for anyone else joining the fun. If I have to start sending stuff out in WhatsApp, Instagram, Signal, Twitter... as well it just becomes too much to manage.
Check out Domesday Reloaded... The BBC created a huge modern Domesday Book on laserdisc, a format which promptly failed to take off, and within 20 years the national archive was running a project to reverse engineer the files to get the data off. While I do have multiple local backups of everything, the advantage of the cloud is that the storage medium is transparent - I don’t need to know if it’s on spinning rust or SSDs as long as it works, and actually services like iCloud help with the multiple local backups - stuff just syncs across the phone, laptop, iPad. The same can’t be said for all the backups I have on Zip Drives :-(
I've worked with a pair of 27" 1920x1080 screens for about 3 years now and love having all that extra screen estate - but I think a pair works better than one big one as apps can easily go full screen on a single monitor. Using Remote Desktop across both screens, the host sees it as one big monitor and you realise how awkward it would be. While you can work around it with the various tile options (I dual boot MacOS and Windows 10) it's still quicker to just maximise a window - and you also void the 3 foot wide menu and task bar problem!
"Why do you want feature X?" is always a really good start. All to often it's because they actually find it easier to do something by printing or exporting to CSV than doing it in the application where they're supposed to. Sometimes this is because it really is hard in the software, but often as not it's because no one ever showed them how to do it properly. Recent case in point: someone wanted a couple of extra columns in a report. They were in fact already available but no one had explained to this person how to change the displayed columns (and they hadn't thought to try right click on the column headings, perhaps because it's not the obvious design paradigm people used to the idea think it is...)
A week in and it's failed only once, and that was with strong lighting directly behind me. I've tried adding hats and sunglasses, even a scarf, and it seems to still let me in. Of course that could just mean it's not very secure too but plenty of other people have been interested in it this week and failed to get in! I guess the test will be to get my brother to try the hats and sunglasses too when I next see him!
I've just replaced a prehistoric heating clock with a Hive unit and smart plugs are on their list of add-ons, but I still can't see much use case. For me the biggest missing piece with all of these is a (secure!) API so people can start to extend things. For example, Hive lets me set what time the heating comes on and the target temperature, it knows the (forecast) outside temperature and it logs the inside temperature. Why not join up the dots and model the "thermal inertia" of the house so I can have what I really what, which is a toasty bathroom at 7am by firing up the heating at the appropriate time according to the actual temperatures. Similarly I want an easy way of telling it that I have to get up an hour earlier than normal tomorrow, rather than having to change the schedule then change it back...
Isn't this just another example of disruptive technology going up against the incumbents? Surely the sat nav has long since done away with the need for The Knowledge, and yet it persists as a barrier to entry.
I support the idea of reviewing the regulations, but many of the proposals seem to be deliberately aimed at clobbering Uber rather than providing an improved service to the public. Yes to ensuring minimum levels of insurance, vehicle safety, criminal records checks.. but how does the requirement for a confirmation five minutes in advance actually make the service better, or allowing drivers to only work for one operator?
I've worked mostly from home for much of the last 12 years, as has my wife (she actually started doing a couple of days a week at home to ease the child care when I was working away all week, and 'forgot' to go back to the office when finished that gig!) We got the kids used to the idea of when they can and can't disturb us (for non-urgent stuff!) very early on, and it's worked very well for both of us. We're both good at going to see seeing colleagues when we need to and Skype etc mean people can get hold of us easily when they need to. The family benefits are huge - we actually see each other for lunch most days, we both see the kids in the morning and after school, we get to parents evening on time and relaxed rather than after the two hour dash home... The only major downside is it's too easy to end up working long hours or checking emails late at night - but I'd still rather be working at home till late than in the office till late then having to travel home
Modern cars already have all this info floating around on the internal network so you'd think it wouldn't be hard; the problem is that beyond the basic emissions related stuff available through the OBD-II port it's all highly specfic to each vehicle and encrypted to boot. I've seen a lot of work done on the Discovery 3 that had to be completely redone for the not-obviously-radically different D4; a cynic might suggest the manufacturers do this deliberately so each garage has to buy that manufacturer's own diagnostics kit for each model :-(
I *think* the existing BMW version defines crash as "airbags deployed", which seems like a pretty good starting point. Even if the car is still drive-able, I imagine the shock of being inside when they go off probably means you're not in a fit state to do so for a little while!
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