Posts by Lxbr 25 posts • joined 12 Aug 2010
Can anyone with experience of both say if this environment is 'better' / 'worse' than Cygwin? I use Cygwin (including the Cygwin/X server now, since we lost support for Exceed) as my Linux-style comfort environment on Windows 7, and will probably have to update to Windows 10 at some point.
It's easy to get mixed up between David Davis MP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Davis_(British_politician) or http://www.daviddavismp.com/
and David Davies MP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Davies_(Welsh_politician) or http://www.david-davies.org.uk/
- the article has the bio correct for Davis (Univ. Warwick, now Secretary of State for Brexit - also ex-21 SAS Territorial interestingly), but you have spelt it Davies, which is wrong.
As far as his politics goes, he has more in common with the right wing of the Tory party than any other part, and he has been a Eurosceptic for years before Brexit made it fashionable (which puts him on the right for Tories). However he has not gone with the right wing on many topics such as privacy and surveillance, torture and rendition, and at least some aspects of human rights legislation. You might say he is on the "libertarian right" rather than the "authoritarian right" though I'm not sure that is an accurate reflection of his positions.
I was very worried when I saw that report, and if the Tory sitting MP hadn't increased her majority to 10000 I'm not sure what would have happened (as you say, those 'several hundred' ballots going missing were more than the majority in 2010). It seems I've gone from living in a high marginal to a fairly safe Tory seat (which historically, before Evan Harris won in 1997, Oxford West & Abingdon was for a long time).
I fully agree that it is unacceptable for people to be denied their right to vote. I think it should be a criminal matter (criminal negligence anyway) if this happens.
However, the article mentioned that it "threatened the legitimacy" of the election - that simply isn't the case (in Hackney).
Both Hackney North and Hackney South are pretty solid Labour seats, so unless ~10000 people are affected this won't affect the legitimacy of the results. It would be unfortunate if this sort of thing happens on a large scale in any of the more marginal seats, but I haven't heard any reports of that happening.
As well as the microdrive interface, the Interface 1 also had a 'proper' RS232 socket and a ZX Net socket for Sinclair's proprietary Spectrum (and later QL) LAN setup. Me & my Dad once networked about 10 Speccies together, mostly to see if we could - there was hardly any software available that actually used ZX Net. I believe the limit was 64 nodes on the LAN, probably someone once did that many for a laugh.
I can access all my previously downloaded stuff in the comixology client on my iPad - so there is a copy in there unless you delete it (they do take up quite a lot of space). I think the main complaint is people not being able to get their weekly pull-list of new titles - because all the servers crashed trying to hand out free Marvel comics.
One lunchtime I was helping out in the school computer lab. Two students were sitting side by side on two PCs, one a bit of a bruiser, the other a more shy and retiring type. The larger boy was messing around, swiping his mouse cursor around the screen. It happened that he drove the mouse to the right-hand edge of the screen and therefore lost track of it (since it was the usual left-pointing arrow shape). Coincidentally at about the same time, the boy to his right moved his pointer from the left-hand edge of his screen into the middle. The bruiser immediately jumped up and threatened to thump the other boy for stealing his mouse pointer, luckily I stepped in between them and managed to mollify him by moving his pointer back to the middle of his screen, though he remained convinced that the other boy had somehow managed to nick the pointer...
I was surprised when I saw the Mondaine clock show up in iOS6 - it is so obviously similar to the classic Swiss railway clock design, which is very well known (at least among design people), and the Swiss Railway licensing guys are well-known to be litigious about people using the design in any way, that I assumed that Apple had actually licensed it already. I can't believe they thought they would get away with ripping this one off.
The Nokia 7110 had the best ever single feature in it's spring-loaded slide-down cover. I used to spend hours just hitting the button to open it, then sliding the cover back into place with a lovely chunky click, pretending I was a cool haxor dood in the Matrix*. Probably spent longer doing that than actually talking on it. I was sure that the spring would eventually break or pop out, and sure enough it did, but only after several years of abuse and after I had bought a new phone anyway. Nokia had some good build quality back in the day.
(* Yes pedants, I know that was a mocked up version of the 8110 in the film, but no-one could tell the difference down the pub.)
Even more than the content (if you could figure out what they were saying), the style that the Twitter post was written in was offensive - it was the worst sort of business school waffle, with bullshit 4-quadrant charts (to make it look as though 3rd party Twitter-posting clients are just an insignificant part of the software using the API, of course). I would have more respect for them if they just came out and said that in 6 months they were going to cancel the API keys of all 3rd party full clients. This is clearly what they want to do, but their plan seems to be to nickle-and-dime the 3rd party developers to death with fiddly API guidelines - presumably this is so, when the Tweetbot and everyone else finally give ups, Twitter doesn't look like the bad guy - "Hey, we gave them a chance, but their client was making 61 requests every 90 seconds instead of the 30 every 45 seconds that we said they could have..."
Unfortunately my HDR FOX T2 died just over a year after I got it. It was a great box while it was working, UI was nice, particularly good at picking up low strength Freeview signals, and the picture looked somehow better than my TV built-in decoder, but I'm avoiding them till I get positive evidence their quality control has improved.
Just out of interest, does anyone who is interested in buying ebooks actually go in a bookshop? I think I've been in one once since I got my Kindle (Xmas 2010). I can see people going in a bookshop and checking the barcode on Amazon, then ordering the physical book from them because it's cheaper, but if you mostly buy ebooks, do you spend a lot of time browsing a physical bookshop?
The keyboard on the 3G Kindle is pretty much useless even for the two main uses anyone ever has for it - entering WiFi passwords, and going to a specific location in a book - because the keyboard *has no buttons for numbers*, which have to be entered using a soft keyboard navigated using the 4-way rocker control.
The 1G and 2G Kindle keyboards at least had buttons for numbers, but I can't see anyone typing out anything significant on them.
Don't know about the OTA update (my box isn't picking it up either), but the update looks to be available for download from the Humax support site now:
http://www.humaxdigital.com/uk/support/downloadcenter_model.aspx?category_seq=182
- note I haven't tried installing it myself yet as I wanted to see a few reports from people who had (just in case it rendered the box dangerously unstable, as has happened to me with the old PVR 9000).
It doesn't say unlimited on the linked page, it says 1GB? Can't really complain that they're selling it as unlimited. Most of the networks do a 1GB/month plan or similar now (which is enough for me, though obviously if you are tethering it wouldn't be) - 3 also has a SIM-only deal at £10 per month for 1GB, rolling contract, which seems like better value than this tariff.
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