Posts by Dave Pickles 290 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Sep 2011
As a student* I had a summer job in the development lab of a firm making consumer electronics. The workers in the factory next door were almost all female. There was a standing instruction that under no circumstances were we to go into the factory alone; we should have at least one other male engineer with us and if possible be accompanied by a factory supervisor and shop steward.
* yes it was a long time ago.
I've been seeing problems with mail from TalkTalk for a couple of weeks. Their outbound mail comes from virtual servers in the domain tt.xion.oxcs.net, however they seem to have added more VMs recently but have forgotten to add them to DNS (or have reused an existing IP address causing a host mismatch), causing my picky MTA to bounce their mail.
Party Line - the two phone wires ('A leg' and 'B leg' I think was the terminology) were connected to two houses. In one the bell and dial were wired between A leg and ground, in the other they were between B leg and ground. Hence dialling and ringing could be handled separately but the speech circuit was common.
Win-11 is no longer identifiable by the User Agent string on http(s) GETs, it always returns "Windows 10.0" (maybe M$ were afraid that takeup might be a bit slow and didn't want to provide ammunition for their detractors). There is an alternative "Client Hints" API available but Firefox refuse to have anything to do with that. I assume that StatCounter have found another way to collect the OS version information.
Why can't chargers work like ATMs?
I don't need an account with every bank to get cash from their ATM. The money is taken from my home account.
The electricity companies could issue an electricity debit card; energy I extract from a roadside charger is added to my home electricity bill at the same cost as if I had plugger the car in at home.
Obviously the charger supplier will have to be paid, this could be done on a time basis in the same way as car parking.
I run Arch Linux on Raspberry Pi, currently kernel 6.1.64. Last weekend I discovered the root filesystem (on a USB SSD) was read-only due to a corrupt journal. Thinking that the SSD was faulty I copied the contents to other media and got it working again. It now seems that this kernel bug is likely to blame.
The latest kernel for the Pi on Archlinux ARM is 6.1.66. So do I install that or wait for 6.1.67? I think I'll wait.
I've just retired my Acer C720 Chromebook, which has been my backpack companion for just short of 10 years. Back then it was possible to flash a custom BIOS (SeaBIOS?) and then install a standard Linux distro. I gather it's not so simple now.
The only thing wrong with it is a lack of memory - 2GB (soldered-in) is very limiting nowadays.
Something that doesn't seem to have been widely publicised is that it is not possible for a website to distinguish between Windows 10 and 11 using the User Agent string. Naturally there is an alternative which is vastly more complex and only available for the Chrome family of browsers, but it means that measurements of Win11 uptake need even more than the usual pinch of salt.
In the early 70s I had a summer job at a major manufacturer of colour TVs. At the time all TVs used the RCA shadow mask tube which had three electron guns in an equilateral triangle (the Trinitron was invented later to get round the RCA patents). Sets for the UK were built Blue Gun Up, those for the antipodes were Blue Gun Down (ie the CRT was installed the other way up).
