Posts by Oblivion62

BOFH: The evil guide to upgrading switches

...wait a fortnight after the point 1 release...

Re: Virtual Friday BOFH

Painting bloody Easter eggs? Eating walls?

Everyday doings of a metropolitan techie: Stob's software diary

Re: Kudos

The Samsung software also doesn't clone any partition other than the first, leading to needing to copy one's D partition by Other Means. Which, if you've followed the Approved Process, means mounting the old drive somewhere else, unattached to the original machine (because some drive identifier or other has been illegally copied, meaning you can't stick it in an external thingy and connect it via usb3) and copying it across the network. Or starting again and using Acronis or Paragon or that thing with too many vowels and a single M or anything else that your search engine of choice tells you to use.

Programming in the Middle Ages: Docker makes a lovely pair of trousers

Re: Black is Black

Crazy? No. Security conscious.

Of course you remember they used to print copyrighted manuals on blue paper so you couldn't photocopy them and pass them round? Same thing.

BOFH: Free as in free beer or... Oh. 'Free Upgrade'

Re: Sorted

"Then carefully deliver something else no matter what settings you've used."

...that's almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea^H^H^Hthe page you first thought of.

BOFH: Thermo-electric funeral

Re: The only tool you'll ever need...

I lived in Leicester, once. There, sledgehammers were often referred to as "Birmingham screwdrivers."

I associate percussive maintenance most often with early 1990s Seagate hard disks. But then, I am also ancient enough to remember 8" 160k floppy disks, hard sectors and the days when you could resurrect lost files on CP/M disks with a disk sector editor called du.com.

And sometimes a razorblade.

For real precision work.

Mind you don't slip.

Oh crap. Pass me another trainee, Dave? Ta.

BOFH: Press 1. Press 2. Press whatever you damn well LIKE

Re: It all comes down to this...

I commend ZMPP to the attention of anyone who wants to play interactive fiction on their Android.

Re: It all comes down to this...

That may have been it. (There was a very unofficial HHGG adventure, not licensed, that I first encountered on a Commodore PET in about 1980, and successfully ran on a C64 a few years later, but I don't remember much about it now.) But the Infocom version (written, like LGOP, by Steve Meretzky with much assistance from the Sainted Douglas) started very like that except I think the analgesic was in your pocket. I DID finish it, unlike Leather Goddesses (which amused me by being playable at varying degrees of sauciness referred to as TAME, SUGGESTIVE or LEWD.)

OMG. I'm a text adventure geek. I... I hadn't noticed...

get coat. wear coat. exit.

It all comes down to this...

I probably still have the copy I bought that ran in CP/M on an Amstrad CPC6128. I certainly still have my 19-year-old CD containing everything Infocom ever did (except the Hitchhiker's Guide, sadly.) (The ISO of it is currently mounted two feet from my right elbow, I'm nearly ashamed to admit.)

But Infocom were responsible for the Zork series, not Colossal Cave.

<sigh> the hours I've wasted inside WinFrotz...

...I wonder if I can find a usable z-machine interpreter for Android... now there's a project.

Another chance to win a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive

Early adopters said that the sticky antennae on the new wearable octo-band phone were too itchy.

BOFH: Don't be afraid - we won't hurt your delicate, flimsy inkjet printer

Erm. Doesn't line 20 just print the value of X to the screen? Any printer that vibrated hard as the monitor scrolled numbers was probably being used by the finance director and his secretary for "dictation"...

Verity Stob and the super subjunction

Did nobody else notice...

"...hoards of peevish academics" I suppose /could/ be correct as written, but I'm almost certain that what the otherwise impeccable Ms Stob meant to type was "...hordes of peevish etc." Although I grant that the concept of thousands of academics, gallumphing towards one across a convenient steppe, waving laser pointers and clad in their trademark battle tweed is such an unlikely image that perhaps, after all, the image of a large, hidden cellar full of dusty desks is more reasonable.

What's that? Tired? Oh well, that's completely understandable.

(And I always treasured pTerry's assertion that the use of multiple exclamation marks is a sign of a sick mind.)

In defence of Comic Sans

We'll, my dear wat's_on...

So does punctuation, my dear chap. Grocers' apostrophes get people even more indignant than the inappropriate use of Comic Sans.

I should say, from back in the days of my typographical training, that serif typefaces tend to be more readable than sans serif ones, because the serifs add shape and distinction to the letters, assisting the brain's job in following the flow of them and translating them into words.

Despite this, I have never deliberately used Times New Roman (I know that's a split infinitive. It's an artificial stricture imposed on language by Victorians with too little to do on those long winter nights. Deal with it) at any time I have had any say in the matter. I suspect it's something to do with the way techies' brains are wired -- doctors are similar, I gather -- and we have finally managed to impose our views on everyone else, by virtue of having control of the only allegedly "personal" computers people think they own. Mwah-hah-hah-hah. <cough>