* Posts by Pen-y-gors

3782 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2010

Now Europe wants a four-million-quid AI-powered lie detector at border checkpoints

Pen-y-gors

@Alister

It worries me that you might have both saliva and blood traces in your underpants - not to mention a kidney!

It might be someone else's saliva? And those Farmers can be a real pain in the whatsit.

Pen-y-gors

I hope it was a good lunch.

Looks like some politician or senior EU civil servant has been entertained to a very boozy lunch with a snake-oil salesman.

Woman who hooked up with over 15 spectres has found her forever phantom after whirlwind romance and plane sex

Pen-y-gors

Re: Carpenters have a saying

or... several olives short of a pizza

Pen-y-gors

Re: "Amethyst Realm", really?

Amethyst is actually not a terrible name for a girl

Ruby, Emerald, Pearl, Amber, Beryl, Coral, Jade, Chrysoprase, Topaz...and Cubic Zirconia of course.

Strange that Diamond doesn't seem to get used as a name.

Pen-y-gors

Re: Part of me is amused . . .

Yep.

And, on This Morning next Monday, we'll be talking to an Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, who will be telling us of his plans to invade Russia. On Tuesday we'll be interviewing Mr Elwood P Dowd and his six-foot tall pet rabbit, Harvey. Then on Wednesday we will be speaking to the widow of an African dictator who has $62 million (SIXTY TWO MILLION US DOLARS) that she is trying to find a safe home for, and on Thursday our guest explains how he can cure cancer over the Internet on receipt of £1000.

Goodnight Kepler! NASA scientists lay the exoplanet expert to rest as it runs out of fuel

Pen-y-gors

Re: Fuel? Why no solar panels?

There were good reasons. But with hindsight, given the beast weighed over a ton, couldn't they have gone for an 8-gallon tank instead?

Pen-y-gors

Re: But why were the transmitters shut down?

I think the fuel may be needed to keep the transmitters aligned, so even if it kept transmitting it's only little green people on Mercury who'll hear it.

Congrats from 123-Reg! You can now pay us an extra £6 or £12 a year for basically nothing

Pen-y-gors

I've used Fasthosts (used to be UKReg) for years, no obvious problems, prices okay.

BT, beware: Cityfibre reveals plan to shovel £2.5bn under Britain's rural streets

Pen-y-gors

Re: Rural streets?

Peterborough: 200,000 people living within 5 miles of city centre.

Where I live: 2000 people within 5 miles. There ain't 200,000 people within 50 miles!

But somehow we seem to have FTTP, and Openreach didn't even have to dig up the streets (overhead).

BepiColombo launches, Russia ponders next lift-off, and 50 years since Apollo 7 got its feet wet

Pen-y-gors

Soyuz best-before date?

I understand that the Soyuz at the ISS now needs to come home before its components rot, but couldn't they send another one up empty to replace it? There are several docking ports if I remember rightly, so send an empty Soyuz up as 'launch one' pending re-certification for manned launches, and bin the one that's starting to look a bit furry.

Or are they short of Soyuz capsules?

Cops called after pair enter Canadian home and give it a good clean

Pen-y-gors

Re: Milk in Bags?

Used to be quite common in the UK - decades ago. I seem to remember UHT coming in plastic bags. That was in the days when normal milk came in glass bottles, before they invented plastic. Last time I saw bags of milk was on Alderney about 30 years ago.

UK defence secretary ponders £50m hit to terminate Capita recruiting contract

Pen-y-gors

That would also require having people in the Civil Service capable of writing contracts that protect the interests of their employer.

I think a wider change is needed. So much incompetence and poor judgement in government is covered up because details cannot be published as they are "commercially confidential". These are contracts between the contractor and the public. All contracts, prices and terms for public sector work should be published. If they don't want light shone on their murky world, don't bid.

Take my advice: The only safe ID is a fake ID

Pen-y-gors

Re: Names are just weird...

I've been told that the surname of "English" is most likely an Irishman, and the surname of "Irish" is most likely from England. Go figure.

Well, duh, obviously! How else would it work? Englishman moves to Ireland in the 17th century. Locals just call him John the Englishman. Centuries later his Irish descendants have contracted it to Sean English.

You get the same in Wales with people called Sais or Saes or Sayce. Ancestor was English. It would get very complicated if everyone in Hemel Hempstead was called English Dave or English Mary or English Jeff or even the occasional Bangladeshi Ranya.

Pen-y-gors

Re: Also

I am irritated by my friend who called her daughter Niamh, and pronounces is Nee-Mah

There is a strong case for calling in Social Services to rescue the child from further damage.

Pen-y-gors

Re: It's all the rage!

I think Round the Horne ones were better.

Daphne Whitethigh

Celia Molestrangler

Chou En Ginsburg M.A. (failed)

J. Peasemold Gruntfuttock

Buffalo Sidney Goosecreature

and so many more... many, many more.

Pen-y-gors

Re: Starbucks and Foodbanks

The expression started when I used to add to the food bank basket in the supermarket every day at the end of my daily exercise walk. Now I do a weekly drop of agreed staples that benefit from buying in multiple packs.

We've gone a stage further - a group of people contribute cash, and our community shop then uses that to buy at wholesale prices in bulk from the cash-and-carry (who actually deliver). You can get a lot of Happy Shopper stuff in bulk for the price of big-name brands singly.

Of course, the fact that we have to even consider how best to give to food banks shows the evil of our present government.

Pen-y-gors

@AC

we've done this for years for Chrstmas cars

Wow, you're generous. Can I be your friend and put on your Christmas car list please? I quite fancy one of those new Hyundai Kona EVs if you can manage that.

Pen-y-gors

Re: A different name for every site?

Unless there was a daughter in there so you could get Glod Glodsondotterson.

I think the Icelanders actually spell it dóttir. But that wouldn't work because the name is made up from the father's or mother's first name + son / dóttir - so you could have Glod Glodsonsonson whose father was Glodsonson Glod, or you could have Glodetta Glodettadóttir but Glodetta Glodsondóttir tends to imply that Glodetta has had some very significant surgery.

I still think the President with the best name ever was Vigdís Finnbogadóttir in Iceland.

Alexa heard what you did last summer – and she knows what that was, too: AI recognizes activities from sound

Pen-y-gors

Boffins?

@ma1010

These people give mad boffins a bad name. Why can't they just concentrate on the good old hold-the-world-to-ransom-with-nuclear-weapons-in-a-volcano approach and leave our privacy out of it?

Pen-y-gors

Confusion?

But it could be fun trying to confuse Alexa.

Many moons ago a friend got a BBC sound effects tape and had fun with the message on his ansaphone - sounds of police sirens, helicopters and shooting in the background, to a gentle voice-over of "I'm afraid I can't get to the phone just at the moment, please leave a message"

Would Alexa call the plods if it heard shooting?

Pen-y-gors

But on the bright side...

at least it's not from Microsoft. Could you imagine this combined with Clippy?

<fx>sounds of regular bouncing bedsprings</fx>

Ping! It looks like you're trying to make a baby. Would you like some help?

Cabinet Office: Forget about Verify – look at our 3,000 designers (and 56 meetups)

Pen-y-gors

Any actual system architects?

...or security specialists? or systems designers (not just pretty UI)? or coders? or testers?

Powerful forces, bodily fluids – it's all in a day's work

Pen-y-gors

Re: Just the Usual...

@Crimperman1996

I never did find out what he did to get that much water onto his desk.

Are you certain it was actually plain H2O?

Pen-y-gors

Re: Just the Usual...

@GlebP

Reusing paper?

When I started my first IT job way back in the last century (1979) we had filed listings of all the operational programs printed on the good old continuous green-and-white lineflo paper.

I was somewhat baffled to discover that some of the pages had printing on the back as well. Seems the former assistant PHB had decided that to save paper the used listings should be fed back into the printer, after sellotaping the batches together to make a boxful.

A few years later I actually bumped into the guy at a Green Party conference. I just smiled.

Pen-y-gors

Re: Leaking barium enemas

<Madeline Kahn voice in Blazing Saddles> Oooh, it's twooo, it's twooooo!</fx>

Samsung Galaxy A9: Mid-range bruiser that takes the fight to Huawei

Pen-y-gors

Huawei v10 view

Been using one of these for a couple of months. Very similar spec, charges in 45 minus, very little in the way of unwanted system apps. £419. Probably cheaper by now. Samsung have a lot of work to do to compete at that price point.

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave me tea... pigs-in-blankets-flavoured tea

Pen-y-gors

Re: Tea

However I think we should all form an alliance and destroy the poncy so-and-so's who drink hot water with nothing in it.

I have a friend who drinks boiling water with milk in it!

Pen-y-gors

Re: Maybe they could get the fucking basics right, first ?

Eggs in boxes of 12 I can cope with, although nature intended them to come in sixes.

But which satanic marketing firm decided that 15 was an acceptable number of eggs in a box?

Pen-y-gors

Re: Sprouts

Agree about the bacon - even vegan food is better with bacon sprinkles.

And the sprout is God's anointed vegetable, closely followed by savoy cabbage. I understand that some people don't really rate broccoli, and most would agree that kale and turnips are for cattle, not humans. (N.B. Neeps with haggis of course aren't what the English call turnips, but are actually Swedish Turneeps, or swedes, which are lovely)

Of course the potato is in a category of its own.

And celery is Satan's favourite vegetable.

Pen-y-gors

Re: Tea

I think we need a campaign for real tea.

Just as the meat-growers are campaigning to ban calling anything 'milk' which doesn't come from a mammal's udders (so no Soya, almond, oat, rice milk etc) we should insist that only the leaves of the Camellia sinensis can be used to make tea. Preferably black tea, not this poncey green stuff. If you want other strange flavours call it a herbal tisanne.

It can only be drunk with milk (sugar optional) or, if you're European, lemon.

For real ethnic diversity yak butter would also be acceptable.

And don't get me started on flavoured coffees - the world does not need christmas pudding flavour coffee. And if you want almond-flavoured coffee just add a slug of Amaretto.

Pen-y-gors

Re: Crimble Free Zone?

It's reasonable to have a small selection of Festive Greetings cards on sale in late Nov, so that people can catch the cheap post for Australia. Advent calendars can go on sale at the same time (and should not include chocolates, gin miniatures or other treats behind each door). Then it's nothing until a week before Christmas, that's plenty of time to buy presents. And a total ban on Christmas music except in association with Christian religious observances.

And no New Year sales to start until Jan 1st.

But otherwise, I'm fine with the whole season.

SpaceX touches down in California as Voyager 2 spies interstellar space

Pen-y-gors

Re: Lack of Astonish!

I have no earthly idea why any (not-rich) person would buy a brand new car and pay the VAT and massive depreciation.

I think it depends on the car. Expensive flash things it doesn't make sense. My nearly-30-year-old Porsche 944 cost me £2500, and a few grand since then on maintenance.

But for the everyday car, it's often a good deal to buy a fairly basic thing (Skoda Fabia?) for new for maybe £10K (and the dealers offer some good cash deals!) and then drive it carefully for the next 10-15 years. Depreciation under £1K per year. Or buy a low-mileage one that's 4 years old for £6K, so again costing about £1K per year.

And buying from new you know who has sat in those seats!

Pen-y-gors

Re: Lack of Astonish!

Over 10 BEEELION miles from home, and still working. Now, if we can just build cars to have the same MTBF

Pen-y-gors

No more planets?

"frankly, there is little point in keeping cameras that were designed to look at planets activated when there are no more planets to look at."

But, but...there could be a Death Star lurking out there, just waiting for us to relax our vigilance!

HMRC rapped as Brexit looms and customs IT release slips again

Pen-y-gors

Re: TL;DR

@AC

Slightly fucked, regular fucked, extra fucked or proper fucked

All of the above?

Pen-y-gors

Don't panic!

But now the work is under increased pressure to meet the tighter deadline and to handle a surge in declarations – this could rise from 55 million to as much as 255 million after Brexit.

No, it won't rise like that. That figure assumes there will still be solvent businesses in the former UK wanting to import or export. Bar the drug smugglers and small-arms dealers (have to protect my stash of baked beans and long-life hummous).

So no need to rush guys.

Blueprint of modern construction can be found in a tech cluster... of 19th century England

Pen-y-gors

Re: Wow! Go Shrewsbury!

And if you like flowers, then in late July, at Wem (not too far away) they have their Sweet Pea show. A total sensory overload!

Pen-y-gors

Oh yes!

A few years ago I spend a couple of weeks in a cottage in Bishops Castle, in the courtyard of the Three Tuns Brewery, and about 20 yards from their pub. Ah, bliss! Several other excellent pubs in the town too, and the beer is absolutely marvellous.

Pen-y-gors

Wow!

I visit Shrewsbury from time to time, and will definitely try and visit.

When I moved into my cottage it had a couple of Coalbrookdale stoves - a Much Wenlock for hot water and radiators, and a Little Wenlock for heating the sitting room. Lovely. The fun bit was when I found an old invoice for when the mine offices next door were being built in the 1850s, and showed they bought a stove from Coalbrookdale as well. The invoice even notes how it was delivered - no Amazon prime! Railway to Rednal, then Canal to Newtown, then by cart to Machynlleth to be left at a slate quarry to be ollected for the last stage on another cart. (This was before the trains)

Shame they no longer exist!

Google actually listens to users, hands back cookies and rethinks Chrome auto sign-in

Pen-y-gors

Would there be a market...

for a random-background-surfing add-on for Chrome (and other browsers)? Something that quietly runs, visiting random webpages (SFW) and following links, patterned on human habits. That wouldn't stop the Google slurp, but it would bury your real connections in a smoke-screen of cruff.

Pen-y-gors

Re: Options

How many users have I been browsing the interwebs?

How is it I only discovered 'backspace' today?

Pen-y-gors

Re: Google still know everything about almost everyone, regardless of a switch.

@JohnFen

Out of curiosity, with all those blocks, what exactly do you use t'interwebs for? Pinging servers for fun?

Couldn't give a fsck about patching? Well, that's your WordPress website pwned, then

Pen-y-gors

No excuse really

I am not a fan of Wordpress, largely because of the security issues.

But it can be used in a way that is probably not noticeably less safe than most other systems.

1. Install a decent security plugin, and switch on all the options (I've been use All in One WP Security) - that will block a lot of nasty attack vectors, and also set things up for AUTOMATIC UPDATE of WP! Jesus! How difficult can it be!

2. DON'T install those tempting little plugins from god-knows-where. The ones that will turn out to have an interesting hole, 3 years after the sole developer died in a terrible tragedy involving cold soup, a rhododendron and stolen bitcoins.

3. Only use WP for fairly straightforward sites, ideally brochureware. If it's going to be running e-commerce, look elsewhere.

4. And if you're paranoid, look out for some really solid hosting. I run a number of shared hosting packages, but keep the WP sites on a separate package so any successful attacks can't access more important stuff.

Never mind Brexit. UK must fling more £billions at nuke subs, say MPs

Pen-y-gors

Dear Papua New Guinea

Please, please give us a free trade agreement on good terms or Port Moresby gets turned to glass.

Love n hugs

L Fox

You know, it might just work. Well, more likely than his other plans

Pen-y-gors

Scotland?

Of course, Scottish students don't pay any tuition fees if they study in Scotland.

Damn that evil SNP!

Pen-y-gors

Re: Simplistic solution to two problems

I see what you're thinking, but the way to low-carbon energy doesn't involve creating nuclear waste. Similar skills (good engineers) could be utilised to develop and manufacture tidal, wind and solar power. Scotland is already a world leader in research, and an excellent location for tidal. Let's make it a leader in actually making the things!

Pen-y-gors

Useful rule of thumb

When your SSD/HDD is getting full, you look for a few large, unwanted files to delete, rather than thousands of tiddly ones.

So, and I'm thinking out loud here, if we don't have a magic money tree and need to cut back, perhaps dropping a few large items of unnecessary expenditure could help to balance the books. As a start we could save £53 billion by dropping the WMDs, and god knows how much by dropping the National Plan for Economic Suicide. Oh yes, and no more magic bungs. More sensible than closing lots of public toilets and care homes.

Then we probably COULD spend £350m a week on the NHS. Curing people not killing them.

Oh yes, and of course, go for an independent England so there's no need to 'subsidise' Wales, Scotland and NI any more.

Bouncing robots land on asteroid 180m miles away amid mission to fetch sample for Earth

Pen-y-gors

Wow!

Seriously impressive engineering. How come there is less coverage of this than similar (but less complicated) European and USian projects?

Deliveroo to bike food to hungry fanbois queuing to buy iPhones

Pen-y-gors

@disgustedetc

I think the situation is different to your auntie (gawd bless 'er). A Cliff Richard 'gig' to use the modern parlance, has a strictly limited number of tickets available, and demand may well exceed supply, so queueing may be the only way to be sure of getting a ticket.

Apple phones are not in limited supply. Demand will not exceed supply, at least in the medium term. On the day, perhaps, but who cares about a day, or a week, or a month wait? I assume they have a working phone already, so it's not as if they are cut off from the world and society. It's just wanting to be one-up to queue on day 1. Wanting a new Apple gadget may be basically reasonable (or may not, we all have views on that) as is wanting to see Cliff Richard.

Queueing in the rain to spend sillty money just to show off is not a healthy thing. If they really like Apple just get a refurb 6+ for £250 and give the other grand to charity!

London tipped to lead European data market. Yes, despite Brexit!

Pen-y-gors

Re: Where?

@Phuzz

While I suppose it's not incorrect to say that it is the capital of England, it's not an independent country any more than Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland are.

yet

I'm tempted to have a decent flutter at Paddy Power on whether England will be a sovereign, independent state again within ten years, for the first time in many centuries. Get rid of those blasted Celts! Viva la Revolutión Inglés! #indyengland.