Posts by Dave 126

Galaxy S10's under-glass fingerprint reader, quelle surprise, makes mobe a right pain to fix

Re: Screen burn

That's the thing: the phone ups the brightness of its own accord - into the red area of the brightness slider - in sunlight. Whilst I was aware theoretically of the risk of OLED burn-in, the phone displays no warnings so I'd assumed that its firmware was designed to mitigate the risk - akin to the firmware in OLED TVs that mitigate the risk of burning in images of broadcaster logos etc. In other circumstances the phone does a very good job of combining the history of my past manual brightness adjustments with the ambient light.

Once Samsung replace the screen I will indeed be more cautious, and that'll be easy because it was only the one app, a game, that has left burn-in artifacts. I guess it comes from taking the occasional break from work to smoke a rollie and play a strategy game for ten minutes feeling the sun.

Re: Why I get disposable phones

I owned a brand new Huawei once, bought half price at an EE shop for £35. It was surprisingly fine at calls, WhatsApp, maps, browsing etc, and if I dropped it I didn't worry.

Now I have a pricey phone that lives in a tough case with a tempered glass screen protector. It's survived many drops into concrete, but a bit of worry is still there.

Re: Screen burn

You can but ask. I'm due to take my S8 in to have the screen replaced after going through the online chat process. They ask you to go to hardware test mode and describe the burn artifacts when the screen is displaying different solid colours, and they ask if your screen is physically damaged - but not if you rooted your phone.

My burn resulted from a single game, presumably from me playing it in sunlight occasionally when the phone itself ramps up the display brightness. Had Samsung been more conservative with the adaptive screen brightness *and* you had disabled such a safeguard by rooting, then they might have grounds for refusing to fix your screen, but they weren't and you didn't.

Re: I'm no fan of Samsung...

Yep, it's hard to fathom how the user will break the sensor without breaking the screen first. If the sensor malfunctions of its own accord then it can be replaced at Samsung's expense under warranty. This can be done within a day at a Samsung service centre, so if you live anywhere near a big city you don't even need to send the phone away.

Prodigy dancer and vocalist Keith Flint found dead aged 49

Re: Keith Vaz, it's on you now

Mark and Iggy are disqualified on the grounds of not being called Keith. Ditto Ozzy for the same reason.

Keith Vaz, it's on you now

I mean, we've lost Moon, Floyd and now Flint, so the onus of Keithly hellraising shirley falls upon the Honourable Member for Leicester East.

All the tributes from other musicians, such as Suede or the Chemical Brothers, emphasize that he was a chatty, friendly, gentle character.

Re: The Prodigy never again scraped the same level of chart-topping success

Topping the charts in 2018 ain't the same as topping the charts back in 1998 or whenever.

That's not knocking The Prodigy's recent efforts (of which I've heard good things), just an observation about the music industry and wider pop culture.

USB4: Based on Thunderbolt 3. Two times the data rate, at 40Gbps. One fewer space. Zero confusing versions

Re: USB colour coding

Well, Apple played nice with FireWire (aka iLink or somethingorover) and have helped the adoption of USB C and Intel's Thunderbolt.

Re: Use Case?

Audio hardware works better on a stream based protocol than a packet based protocol.

But yeah, external GPUs, external displays, single cable docking... it opens up lots of possibilities.

Super ~Street Fighter 2~ *USB* Hyper Turbo Edition

SpaceX Crew Dragon: Launched and docked. Now, about that splashdown...

Re: "At 4m wide and 8.1m high"

Can't you just use empty washing up bottles?

"You'll need a washing up bottle, but make sure it's empty first so check with whoever does the washing up. You'll also need a pair of scissors with a sharp point, so you'll might need to ask for help."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/joinin/bp-post-of-the-week-rocket

Re: Make them an offer?

A staging post might be handy for resupplying consumables such as fuel, water and food... not sure how the ISS would help there.

Boffins put the FUN into fungus by rigging yeast to squirt out the active ingredients in cannabis

I can't be the only one who has suspected this would happen for some time - the progression of genetic science has more or less obeyed Moore's law. That's not to diminish the fine work of these researchers who have encountered hurdles and overcome them.

Yeast being yeast, it's hard to see how this can be put to use at scale without the lab assistant or cleaner accidently on purpose taking some spores home with them.

What is scary is imagining the day when an off the shelf tabletop machine lets a mediocre and ill intentioned individual take the genes from a high mortality virus and put them into a highly contagious air born virus.

Why are there never free power sockets when my Y-fronts need charging?

Indeed. Savers in Cyprus had 50% of everything over €100,000 confiscated a few years ago. The USA did something similar with people's gold in bank vaults a few decades back. If you're in a politically unstable state and need to emigrate, you'd want some way of taking your money with you. In turbulent times people haven't been able to trust fiat currencies and have put their money into gold or diamonds.

As the value of commodities goes up, people look to up the supply. Whilst Bitcoin eats electricity, using gold instead has people digging mines, polluting rivers and investing in asteroid mining companies. Neither gold nor bitcoin is ideal, but we can't casually say Bitcoin is worse than the status quo.

I guess at least the asteroid mining has the ability to supply us with industrially useful minerals in addition to gold (gold is useful in industry, but we already have far more than we need for purely practical applications)

Another way to make money from the ability to capture and move asteroids is: "Give me 3/4 of your GDP or I drop this mountain on your capital city! Mwahhahaha!" [Strokes cat]

The other day I found a 1M USB A Male > USB A Female cable. Joy! It makes it so much easier to use and charge things at the same time once I've plugged whatever flavour of Male to Male cable into it. I think it came with a Logitech wireless mouse, one of the fancy power hungry darkfield ones that needs charging once a fortnight as opposed to once a year.

Danger mouse! Potent rodents 'see' infrared after eyeballs injected with nanoparticles

The authors cite the following paper for the molecules they use:

Amplified stimulated emission in upconversion nanoparticles for super-resolution nanoscopy

Yujia Liu, Yiqing Lu, Xusan Yang, Xianlin Zheng, Shihui Wen, Fan Wang, Xavier Vidal, Jiangbo Zhao, Deming Liu, Zhiguang Zhou, Chenshuo Ma, Jiajia Zhou, James A Piper, Peng Xi, Dayong Jin

Nature 543 (7644), 229, 2017

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:8Nj0yJ10RQEJ:scholar.google.com/&scioq=&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3D8Nj0yJ10RQEJ

The problem depends upon the end application. If it's to allow a soldier to see enemies in low light then I wouldn't have thought it matters whether they're seeing infrared converted to avisible wavelength or if they're seeing that visible wavelength in the raw.

Foldables herald the beginning of the end of the smartphone fetish

Re: and want plenty of storage (say microSD).

Samsung have SD card slots and though the screens are tall 2:1, and their new UI (on the Galaxy S 9, coming soon to the S8) is supposed to place a lot of the virtual buttons at the bottom of the screen to be easier to reach with one's thumb.

Re: FAD ALERT - A modern day flip-top

Of course for displaying text then having two screens next to each other, akin to two facing pages in a book, is nearly as good as a single screen. It's the display of video or images that is spoilt by a bezel between the two screens.

The MS Courier featured two screens separated by a hinge. The use-case its team were pushing was using two apps at the same time - the example they gave was a browser on one screen and a scrapbook on the other, for easy copy-paste (or rather, drag n drop) from one screen to the other.

There was also a two screened clamshell Android by Weird Sony that actually made it into shops.

LG are bringing the concept back with a second snap-on screen for their latest phone.

> The candy bar was never a good design for a phone, the flip phone was always superior.

Can you expand upon that? Just curious.

Re: cynic

My Phone looks like it has a broken screen but the visible cracks are just in the glass screen protector. I'll replace it if the cracks get worse or more dust gets behind it, but til then I won't bother. The pricey screen beneath is pristine.

It might be that the phones with cracked screens you see amongst your friends are merely phones with cracked screen protectors.

Re: FM Radio?

I think they missed your irony Steve.

Personally I don't miss having FM radio on my phone, since I either have the phone signal to stream Radio 4 live or I am in a vehicle with an FM tuner. Most Radio 4 content I listen to after broadcast in the Radio iPlayer app so I can pause it when needed. The only music station worth listening to most of the time, Radio 6, is not on FM.

Occasionally when camping - away from data signal and battery charger - I'd like to sit back and listen to FM... but not so much that I've dug out a discrete FM radio receiver. Somewhere I've got a SanDisk Sansa Clip with FM radio but the dang thing is so small I can't find it.

The US version of my phone has Qualcomm innards and its hardware FM receiver can be activated with an app. My European version uses Samsung's homegrown silicon which can't pick up FM.

Yeah, I can travel places easily without a smartphone, but to do so requires a bigger gadget called a car. Public transport is just so much easier to use if you have a smartphone to see timetables, or call a cab when it transpires the bus service is evidently unaware of its own timetables.

I do take your point though about people's attention. I use a social network called a pub.

Re: cynic

There's evidence that phones are more durable today.

Re: Can we please

The Moto Force Z2 has a shatter proof screen, takes snap-on removable batteries (without requiring a power cycle) and with an attached battery will be thick. So that ticks all your boxes save the FM radio.

I say, that sucks! Crooks are harnessing hoovers to clean out parking meters in Chelsea

Re: Where did they get the power?

Oh yeah Juan, I now see Ryobi and Makita, and likely others, make vacuum cleaners that take their respective 18v batteries. Hmmm...

Any builders out there know how well they suck compared to a Henry?

Re: Start up money

Can't these aspiring dealers use crowdfunding?

http://www.27bslash6.com/guaranteed.html

Re: Where did they get the power?

That's a good point. I guess they're using a 12V DC to 240V AC inverter from their car's fag lighter socket. Sucking coins from a box wasn't part of the vacuum cleaner test matrix in Which? last I saw, so I don't know how well a cordless Dyson would work (and the batteries on those don't last long on a charge, and don't appear to have overcharge protection circuitry so leaving them in their wall mount means the battery is next to useless after 9 months.

In any case, if you're stealing coins having your vacuum cleaner be transparent is a bug not a feature.

> "We also now know from local police that this is funding further criminality in London, from drugs and trafficking to possibly violent crime,"

Am I missing something? I'd have assumed that the only reason to deal drugs and traffic women is to make money. How is it that they require subsidising?

This has got hints of Fox News reporting that Movie Piracy Funds Al Qaeda!

Lenovo kicks down door of MWC, dumps a stack of sexy new ThinkPads

Re: 13.3" display in a 12" chassis

UI elements should scale correctly these days. Windows was slower than OSX to put the foundations in place, and even after MS sorted it it took 3rd party application Devs to do their job properly - Adobe were notably slow, for example. There was a chicken and egg situation for ages regarding high res application support and the availablity of high res laptops, and it's only been in the last few years that laptops have shipping with high res displays.

Whether you benefit a high res display depends upon your workload, but it's invaluable in CAD and image editing.

Merely watching videos benefits more from high dynamic range than it does high resolution.

400-bit FHD display

I suspect that might be a 400 *nit* display, a measure of brightness. You might have a display boasting 10 bit colour space, but never anything near 400 by an order of magnitude.

This ain't a criticism - my phone autocorrected nit to bit as well :)

Spooky! Solar System's Planet NINE could be discovered in the next NINE years (plus one to six), say astroboffins

Planet 9 is not believed to be on the elliptic plane that the orbits of other planets follow.

Professional astronomers have no difficulty in believing that Planet 9 might exist, and that it is more than plausible that it could be hiding on a weird orbit. They are also happy to point out that they don't know that it exists and are open to other explanations as more data comes their way.

They're more excited about questions than they are answers.

Re: It's Dark out there.

" Why the smeg didn't you see this black hole Holly?!"

"Well, the thing about black holes, their defining characteristic if you like, is that, basically, they're black. And the thing about space is that is, well, it's black, you see....

Insane homeowners association tries to fine resident for dick-shaped outline car left in snow

Re: My tale of woe and dread

Sheeiiiit, even UK traffic wardens are normally more understanding that occasionally cars won't start, due to a flat battery or lost keys or whatever. Often leaving a nice note behind the windscreen is enough, or just ringing the council or parking company responsible.

Re: Fake news!

I read the article before looking at the actual photograph. I was imagining that the accused woman had performed some sort of maneuver such that her tyres traced the shape of a couple of adjacent circles with two lines extending from the tangent of their intersection... much like the recent case of the bored USAF pilot whose GPS log revealed him to be drawing a sky cock.

LG's new gesture UI for mobes, while technically interesting, is still a little hand-wavy at the mo

Re: Gestures

Mouse gestures aren't finger gestures, stylus gestures or indeed 3D space gestures a la Leap Motion.

Your conclusion is reasonable though; the Leap Motion never caught in in a big way. The Reg's Mr Dabbs said he might take a look at one at the time, evidence toy didn't have the time or a test unit.

It might be handy for people who use tablets in their kitchen for reading recipes, or for other situations where the user's hands are mucky.

You can use foot pedals for iPads for 'turning over' virtual pages of sheet music.

It's always tricky to sum up all the niche use cases. Indeed, some were doubtful about tablets themselves because they couldn't see a single killer app, yet what transpired was tablets were used for many niche things.

> LG sells excellent TVs based on its own display panels – we expect a decent true foldable will appear eventually

LGs OLEDs are excellent but their OLED phone screens were a bit dodgy in Pixel phones. The assumption is that the difference lay in TVs and phones using different substrates

Long phone is loooong: Sony swipes at flagship fatigue with 21:9 tall boy

Re: Ratio for video masochists

But was the person filming an escaped chimp in the zoo doing so to send to a news broadcaster or doing so to send to her friends who are more likely than not to watch the clip in portrait orientation?

That said, I would sometimes like to be able to film in landscape whilst holding the phone in portrait - it's just more comfortable and secure to hold that way.

LDAC

Sony contributed LDAC to the AOSP a couple of years back and so a good many phones support it. What is missing is a good range of Bluetooth headphones that support it, though Sony's widely esteemed (usually rated a bit higher than Bose's Quiet Comfort ) XM noise cancelling headphones do.

'God, Send Mobiles,' the industry prayed back in the '90s. This time, 5G actually has it covered

Re: Coverage? We've heard of it.

As I understand it, the frequencies for 5G are better suited to providing more cell towers in a smaller area, meaning that lots of people in a small area can access more data.

There is also talk of using 5G in place of the 'final mile' (or final ten yards) to get high speed internet to people's homes instead of digging up roads and gardens, so perhaps the smaller villages that don't yet have fibre might see 5G.

I may be wring here, so if someone more qualified can make the case for 5G please inform us!

Azure Kinect: All-seeing 3D camera shenanigans for everyone ... except consumers

Re: It already did

Measuring a single distance accurately can be very useful (laser range finder). Capturing an entire room as a point cloud (laser ToF 3d scanner) and then easily taking that data to create DXFs to send to the CNC router at your local timber merchants... very very useful.

But yeah, very handy for trade folk, hairy arsed or otherwise.

Fan boy 3: Huawei overhauls Air-a-like MateBooks

Re: Well, I might give it a closer look

Just be aware that only the Pro version supports Thunderbolt 3, so the junior version isn't suitable for connecting to external GPUs ;)

Re: What is the point ?!?

Most Windows laptops have 16:9 screens. This doesn't, which is a step in the right direction. Reviews of last year's Matebook range were very positive, so what's a nicer, cheaper option?

This image-recognition neural net can be trained from 1.2 million pictures in the time it takes to make a cup o' tea

Re: El Reg mugs ...

I rather fancied a Special Circumstances mug that Elon Musk tweeted a picture if, but I can't find one online. I'm sure the millionaire has the resources to have mugs made to any design he wants though.

Re: You can't make a cup of tea in 90 seconds

I was going to suggest using a pressure cooker to raise the temperature of the water above 100 Deg C and thus shorten the tea brew time, but as some clever soul on Reddit has noted it takes pressure cookers a few minutes to get up to pressure.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tea/comments/27pcx9/tea_under_pressure/

It all hinges on this: Huawei goes after Samsung with its own foldable hybrid Mate X

Re: Er, and the OS and UI ?

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/11/get-your-app-ready-for-foldable-phones.html?m=1

Re: Just give me a front and a back display..

OLEDs use little energy for a little bit of lit screen, would probably use more energy than eInk in direct sunlight. EInk might use energy in the dark if it needs to be backlit.

Probably best using the space an eInk display takes up by just fitting a bigger battery instead, unless the user really likes reading books on the move yet doesn't consider the bigger screen of a specialist ereader worth the bulk.