Posts by Red Sceptic

Chemists concoct nail polish that lets clawed humans use touch screens

From my own observations, people with long fingernails seem quite adept at developing ways of operating touch screens of many kinds without too many problems. Sure, it may not *look* pretty, and the "tap-tap" sound can be (to me) a little annoying, but this doesn't look like quite the big problem that Desai and Lawrence make out. But if they can make some money out of it, why not?

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Re: Prankers

I have a t-shirt with "All your base are belong to us" printed on it. Always amusing to see who reacts to it when walking around - no one under about 50 in my experience.

New boss took charge of project code and sent two billion unwanted emails

Re: Regomize as "Nick"

Not sure how many of us here are old enough to get that reference - but I did! Nice one!

(For anyone wondering, search Wikipedia for Nick Leeson.)

Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time

Matilda ...

... is that you?

UK unveils plans to mainline AI into the veins of the nation

Bring back Steve Bong!

With such great articles as "My #95Theses of #Digital", "Project Gollum: Because NHS Caring means NHS Sharing" and "A statement from Steven P Bong concerning alleged CV inaccuracies" truly a man for our times!

Reddit CEO thanks AI for helping the site finally turn a profit

“ We've reached out to the company to learn more about its plans for all that profit, but haven't heard back.”

Spez is too busy counting his money.

BBC weather glitch shows 13k mph winds in London, 404℃ in Nottingham

It was fun to send my friend in Florida a screenshot of the BBC weather app showing hurricane force winds in Covent Garden this morning (he’d already told me his family had all weathered their real hurricane just fine).

RIP Michael Fish.

After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?

No good deed …

… goes unpunished.

On Call’s Greatest Hits, as voted for by you, the readers

Saving this for later

To read with -> at my leisure.

Confession - not in ‘real’ tech support but frequent recipient of ‘how do I …?’ tech questions from f+f just because I happen to know slightly more than them and I’m quite patient.

Love this column (and ‘Who, me?’ Of course)!

BOFH: The Boss is right, the applications of AI are truly staggering

As ever, a beautifully crafted story - one thing builds on another, tension increases as we wonder what will happen to the boss, and all the pieces come together at the end.

Simon, this is a small masterpiece that should be part of the GCSE English canon!

Have one! ->

NASA engineers play space surgeon in bid to unclog Voyager 1's arteries

This is an utterly lovely movie - inspiring, awesome and deeply moving all at the same time.

The devotion, ingenuity and sheer brilliance shown by this team of engineers is wonderful to see, and shows what humans are capable of. A great antidote to all the other stuff that’s going on in the world. Pale blue dot stuff.

Thanks for spreading the word about it, Michael!

Python script saw students booted off the mainframe for sending one insult too many

Trip down memory lane here with all the punched cards - thanks for posting this!

Techie made a biblical boo-boo when trying to spread the word

Re: Lord!

That would be an ecumenical matter!

Plane tracker app FlightAware admits user data exposed for years

Just why …

… would a flight tracking app need anyone’s SSN?

Client tells techie: You're not leaving the country until this printer is working

Re: Came Close...

Oh Glenn Miller!

A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H, I got a gal in Kalamazoo

Don't wanna boast

But I know she's the toast

Of Kalamazoo-zoo-zoo-zoo-zoo

Re: Closest experience I had

Wasn’t previously aware of (am right-pondian, didn’t remember) this blackout, which has its own Wikipedia entry - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 according to which:

The blackout's proximate cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, which rendered operators unaware of the need to redistribute load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage.

Thanks for the story!

In celebration of Curiosity's successful landing on Mars

Unlike Boeing, I’m guessing* that NASA is not over-burdened by MBAs shoving in their sixpen’orth about how stuff should/must be done. Amazing, but not unsurprising, what engineers and scientists can accomplish in the right culture.

* evidence base includes but is not limited to no need to be concerned about the share price.

Cigarette break burned out a huge chunk of Africa's internet

Re: Ahh a manager who is telling the truth

Transparency in organisations is a rare thing.

Boeing Starliner crew get their ISS sleepover extended

Re: What are the astronauts doing?

“Smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back by … oh hang on a moment!”

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Re: super thread drift.. but..

Also so you don’t blind the people in the car behind you with your brake lights.

(But if you’re the last car in the queue, keep an eye on your rear view mirror to activate the brake lights to warn an approaching vehicle that you’re stationary.)

BOFH: Well, we did tell you to keep the BitLocker keys safe

Re: recovery workshops in, uh... Belgium?"

Belgium is a win all round - wine, beer, excellent local food. And chocolate to bring back to keep the folks back home sweet too.

Bring it on!

The Clacktop: A Thinkpad Yoga with a mechanical keyboard

Re: Not Ian Fleming ... much older

Upvoted for Biggles reference.

Stop installing that software – you may have just died

"All your base are belong to us"

Qilin: We knew our Synnovis attack would cause a healthcare crisis at London hospitals

Simply criminals

They’re in it for the money - dressing this up as politically-motivated is purely cynical - maybe it helps the sleep at night? Of course, they’re likely to be acting with impunity under a krisha (Russ: roof, metaphor for protection by someone with ‘influence’) of some kind, but that ain’t politics, it’s just bad actors.

Voyager 1 makes stellar comeback to science operations

Must see

There is a great video about the Voyager project and the team behind it.

“It’s Quieter in the Twighlight’ is a 2022 documentary which shows how “ In an unremarkable office space, a select group of aging engineers find themselves at the leading edge of discovery. Fighting outdated technology and time, Voyager's flight-team pursues humankind’s greatest exploration.”

https://itsquieterfilm.com

PC makers hopeful that Chromebook refresh cycles about to kick in

Daughter’s Chromebook has now been in use for 3 school years (UK secondary school = high school in US).* She’ll hand it in this coming September and the school has switched over to Surface Pros, for reasons we have not had fully explained to us, but she’ll be pleased to see the back of it, not least because of the browser-based versions of the Office apps.

* It’s stood up pretty well apart from one battery replacement and losing 50% of the screws on the bottom of the case, idk how.

Seething CEO shoulder surfed techie after mistaken takedown of production server

Angry upvote

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

A great read - your bursar sounds like a top geezer!

Japanese Yakuza boss charged with nuclear trafficking by the US

Dinsdale

Luigi Vercotti. : So I decided to set up a high-class night club for the gentry at Biggleswade. With international cuisine and cooking and top line acts. And not a cheap clip-joint for picking up tarts, that was right out, I deny that completely. And one evening, Dinsdale walks in with a couple of big lads. One of whom was carrying a tactical nuclear missile. They said I'd bought one of their fruit machines and would I pay for it?

Second Interviewer : How much did they want?

Luigi Vercotti. : Three quarters of a million pounds. And they went out.

Second Interviewer : Why didn't you call for the police?

Luigi Vercotti. : Well I noticed that the fellow with the thermonuclear device was the chief constable for the area. Anyway, a week later, they came back, said that the cheque had bounced and that I had to see... Doug.

BOFH: Hearken! The Shiny Button software speaks of Strategic Realignment

Resignation note

Lovely ending - an appropriate alternative to signing in blood.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

The Regomiser …

… played a blinder there - “Edmund” indeed!

Did he find himself Tenzing up a bit as he talked to his remote colleagues?

CISA boss swatted: 'While my own experience was certainly harrowing, it was unfortunately not unique'

Re: Thought Experiment

Dystopia

Manchester's finest drowning in paperwork as Freedom of Information requests pile up

Police Slow

Is that an instruction or a statement?

When is a privacy button not a privacy button? When Google runs it, claims lawsuit

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

The number’s up for 999. And 911. And 000. And 111

“That’s easy to remember!”

Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file

Immediately made me think of Atom Heart Mother - but that’s my age.

Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun

The Sun?

Came for Kelvin MacKenzie reference - was disappointed.

Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins

Stereotype at best

When I worked at a provincial RG university in the UK, the work of university staff was universally headlined in the local rag as “University boffins [create/discover/{other verb}] …”.

And at school, those who - whether by dint of natural aptitude, hard work or both - excelled at STEM subjects were universally dubbed as “boffs”.

Neither usage seemed to be particularly gendered.

PC tech turns doctor to diagnose PC's constant crashes as a case of arthritis

Since this was good old Blighty and Kevin was dealing with a RAF chap, I’m quite sure that he dived, not dove.

Why does this particular past tense so irritate me? That and “fit”?

Sysadmin infected bank with 'alien virus' that sucked CPUs dry

No good deed goes unpunished.

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

Re: "just" static

You made a Leyden jar, a precursor of the capacitor. These can store a significant quantity of electrical charge at high voltages - corona discharge can be seen from these in some cases.

Consider yourself lucky that you were able to write and tell us about this.

Keeping printers quiet broke disk drives, thanks to very fuzzy logic

Came here for the shag pile / Wang comments. Was disappointed.

Keep your cables tidy. You never know when someone might need some wine

Leg pull, surely?

I’ll see myself out …

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

Re: Sarah? Is the Moderatrix back again?

We live in hope …

Heineken says there’s no free beer, warns of phishing scam

In Victor Borge voice

Reaches the parts other scams cannot reach.

Brute force and whiskey: The solution to all life's problems

Re: Feck!

So that would be an ecumenical matter!

Seriously, you do not want to make that cable your earth

Re: Bee-sting ?

That’s the thing about names.

The IBM System/360 Model 40 told you to WHAT now?

Re: how did that escape?

Thank you for the Monday morning @Pratchett reference! Duly upvoted.

We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?

Practise [sic] makes …

Usually see “practice” used as a verb (accepted use across the pond, of course).

Don’t ever recall seeing “practise” used as a noun. Another Register first?

Have one of these ->

Infosec chap: I found a way to hijack your web accounts, turn on your webcam from Safari – and Apple gave me $100k

Not holding my breath

“ If someone at Apple would like to comment, you know where to find us.”