Posts by The_H 85 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Sep 2011
It's not a "success" in anything like the same way as the first ever launch of a Saturn V was a success. I certainly don't recall one of the success criteria for Apollo being "it didn't trash the launch pad".
Let's be honest, if the thing had blown up whilst still being fuelled Rocket Boy would still have called it a success.
... doesn't mean I can get a 5G, 4G or even (gasp) 3G signal.
Here in the barren wastelands of East Yorkshire the very fastest signal I can get - if I'm lucky - is 3G. At home, just a couple of miles from Hull, I get 1 bar of 4G. Most of the time it's just GPRS or EDGE. I can get a better signal in the Kruger National Park in South Africa, 30 miles from the nearest street light. (I know, because I've done it).
Luxury.
We had a Teletype 33 in the maths storeroom, connected to a proper phone with a dial via a modem the size of two shoeboxes, which was linked for one hour a week (4.30 - 5.30pm every Tuesday) to the Humberside County Council mainframe in Beverley. I've still got my O-level punched paper tape.
Nine times out of ten trying to dial up all we got was "HCC Computernet will not start". How we ever passed was a miracle.
Just before I left (1982) they ended up with one Commodore Pet 8032 and they started teaching kids to program in CESIL - anyone remember that?
Daughter bought a pair. I tried them and honestly, they can't hold a candle to my cheapish JBL Tune110BT's. Which themselves are cheerful but hardly hifi, compared to my normal work-wear (wired) Sennheiser £40 earbuds.
The Apple ones look good, but only until you put the things in your ears. Anyway, every time I sneezed or coughed, they fell out.
When I'm doing serious listening it can only be my HD700 References, but then I'd mention vinyl and my lovely valve preamp with NOS 60's Mullard tubes and lose the room.
I can actually see the bright lights of the Belmont transmitter from home (okay it's distant, but they're there), but our DAB signal both at home and work are absolutely unusable.
iPlayer Radio was fantastic, but they've shafted that and now we have the so-called "BBC Sounds" app which appears to be the sort of project that a work experience kid would churn out. Dreadful UI and half the features of iPlayer missing.
Bad enough but when your radio station of choice is BBC6Music and is *only* available on DAB or app, it's kind of limiting.
I dunno, you'd think they were trying to reduce listenership so that they had an excuse to close 6 down, or something. They tried once before.
There is absolutely no point in reasoning with people like this because they simply do not have the common sense to understand the concepts involved.
Coming on here though - where the average IQ is stratospherically higher than your usual Youtube commenter's - and trying to persuade rational, intelligent people with dribbingly crackpot theories; it's doomed to failure and ridicule.
Best remember the old saying: better to keep your mouth shut and let everyone think you're stupid, than to open it and leave no doubt.
Never steamed.
Halve your sprouts, put in an oiled baking dish little-bald-headed-man side up. Sprinkle pancetta over, drizzle with pure maple syrup, a bit of balsamic vinegar and olive oil, and bake gently until caramelized.
Absolutely awesome, and I've won over a lot of sprout haters (including my *very* fussy daughters) with these.
Merry, Jolly etc.
It kept me enthralled as a kid, and the same spacecraft keep my kids enthralled 40 years later. That's quite something.
I think the best thing about Voyager is not that they've worked flawlessly for 41 years - they haven't - but that in working around the problems, they've added an immense amount to our nuts'n'bolts knowledge of long term space missions. I worry that all of this expertise will be lost in the current US political climate.
If anyone likes a good read, the Haynes Workshop Manual for Voyager is fascinating - worth the price for the blueprints alone.
Raising a glass to all of those visionaries who "filled it to the brim".
If an artiste - let's say Mike Goldfield - leaves his record label - WontGoAllTheWay Records - in a huff and signs to Pony Music, WontGoAllTheWay loses the rights to his future music. They can't create it; they can't sell it. That is fine.
What it doesn't mean is that WontGoAllTheWay Records will then visit every record shop in the country, remove all unsold records, and then visit every house and remove every SOLD record too.
Yet that is exactly what is happening here.
It is theft. No ifs, no buts, no weasel words. (And don't bother pointing out the legal niceties of licensing; that's just another way of saying "extortion")
Here goes:
Mars class planets: things you can land on
Jupiter class planets: thing that are clearly planets but which you can't land on
Pluto class planets: things too small to be planets but look like planets and are fascinating in their own right
Earth class planets: things you can land on but wish you hadn't once you meet the inhabitants
Space debris: everything else
(Inspired by Miles Kington's "Nature made ridiculously simple")
I've had my Hotmail account since pre-Microsoft days, so I've got a very useful first.last username. I cannot recall the last spam email I got in the inbox - the junk filter is very good indeed. Compare that to my "came with the ISP" email account which I have never used for anything at all (except that my invoice invariably is sent to it)... it gets dozens of spams per day. Only my ISP could have given that out. Same with the iCloud email which came with my imposed-on-me iPhone. Never used it, full of spam.
Not everything which Microsoft do is automatically crap.
Shameless plug: come pay Hull's Ferens Art Gallery a visit, they've got an exhibition of original Clangers, Pogles, Bagpuss (the Mouse Organ!) and a few more (including the sets and original filming equipment). On until 29th July. Free entry.
https://www.hull2017.co.uk/whatson/events/clangers-bagpuss-co/
I ignored the ads in print magazines too. Take PCW which was the thing back in the day. Did any advertiser honestly think that I was going to plough through a couple of hundred pages of ads to get to the content? Because I didn't. For a while they put in a cardboard subscription form just before the real content which only served as a handy bookmark.
The advertisers paid, 99% of the world ignored the ads, and everyone was happy.
It's the same on Sky+. Never, ever watch the ads. That's what fast forward is for. But I, and the advertisers, are reassured that they're there for a dull moment.
Postal mailshots? That's what the paper recycling bin is for. It keeps the printers in work, but nothing else. Cinema ads? No point, hovering outside the screen until just before the movie starts is an artform which I've developed to a serious skill.
The only difference between the 1980's and now is that advertisers seem to want to be assured that if they lather my screen with clickbait, loud autoplay videos and irrelevant "personalised" offers, that I'm going to read them. Wrong.
Me and Maplin go back a long way. To about 1978 to be precise. Those were the days of "PO Box 3, Rayleigh, Essex SS6 8LR". The catalogue better than any reference book. The flimsy separate price list. The coloured vouchers you got with each order (which could be exchanged for more bits). The photos of all staff in the catalogue, from Doug to Ivy the tea lady. The two shops in Southend and Hammersmith.
Maplin had a brilliant mail order business. They could have built on that, over and over, and when the web came along they could have made a modest mint out of it. Instead, they took the retail shilling, opened up a multitude of - let's be honest - tat bazaars, and the rest is sadly now history.
There were some genuinely great people at Maplin, so thoughts go out to them all today. And I'll raise a glass tonight to the old days, where between Practical Electronics and Maplin I wasted enough pocket money to get me where I am today.
My parents bought a house back in 1976 which had previously been a doctor's surgery. The cellar was full of medical records, xrays, old bottles of stuff and pile upon pile of drug companies' advertising blotters (yes, they were a thing). We didn't go to the press though.
And as for the paperless office... some wag once pointed out that it'll happen around the same time as the paperless lavatory.
When did banks get to tell their customers what they can and cannot buy?
For ages. Last year I tried to withdraw £2,500 from my current account (HSBC) at my regular (big town) branch - there was hugely in excess of that in the account (and a decent sum in the associated savings account) - but they refused point blank until I could "prove" what I wanted the cash for. I've banked with them since they were the "Listening Bank". I even went to school with the cashier!! It was pretty bloody annoying, I can tell you.
I'm far from the only one to have suffered from this - look online, you'll be amazed.
The banks hate cash or anything they can't control themselves.
I'd love to know where they get some of this stuff.
I recently had an iPhone imposed on me by my employer. Created an iCloud email address that I have used for absolutely nothing, and it's a weird combination of letters and numbers that I'll never remember. The only time it was ever used was on the brand new, out-of-the-box iPhone's setup screen... but by the end of the same day it had *hundreds* of spam emails in it. That email address somehow got out of the iPhone universe... and not thanks to me.
"It was a quite deliberate act of incredible stupidity, by an idiot who didn't think through what he was doing."
And on that basis maybe we should include in the same category: idiots who smoke in bed; people who insist on riding motorcycles at 100mph on narrow country roads; anyone who goes up Helvellyn in trainers; anyone who takes to the oggin in anything less than 40ft long (with twin motors), etc etc
Personally I don't think they should have called the fire service. If I'd seen what was going on I'd have called in good old Photonicinduction. "I ain't 'aving it!!!" to add a few kilovolts to the situation. Problem solved, one way or another.
It's not easy. I tried blocking as many of the sites as I could at router level, which worked a treat until one of my dear 15yr-old's friends showed her what hidemyass.com could do about that little ruse. We went through a spell of confiscating all tablets, smartphones etc (gave her a crappy old Nokia for emergencies) but unless you confiscate all their friends' tablets then they're still going to see stuff at school etc.
Last straw for me was just the other week, youngest (13) was sitting next to me watching some crap American dance thing on YT. Clearly not legit (picture messed with and sound fuzzed to get around content ID) but otherwise safe - until about 20 mins in and it changed to footage of a cat being doused in petrol and set on fire. Yeah, the real thing. She's still not in a good place after that.
Someone needs to realise that despite the lawyers' weasel words, YouTube ARE PUBLISHERS. The individual uploading a video doesn't do anything to put it on my screen. YouTube store it, index it, archive it, distribute it to servers around the world, curate it into "Mix" collections, recommend it "for me" and stream it wrapped in adverts (or so I'm told... but then I use Adblock). If that's not publishing then I don't know what is.
All manner of stuff is cooled / heated using fuel and oil. Seem to remember the good old Saturn V ran the liquid oxygen / kerosene through tubes around the outside of the F1 engine bell to keep it cool too.
You'd be surprised just how much gear you'd find in an airplane fuel tank!
Impressive enough that you can work out that a tidgy bit of rock a few billion km's away is going to pass in front of a star which is several light years further off.
More impressive that you can then work out the angle that's all going to happen at, so that it's visible from earth.
But getting a 747 to precisely the right place, above a rotating, orbiting planet, at precisely the right time, so that you can photograph the damn event happening... that's jaw-dropping. Makes what Kepler does seem like a doddle.
Beers all round to the people involved (and especially the one who said "Yeah, we can do this"). Me, I just hope I never get beyond being totally and utterly gobsmacked at this sort of thing.
We've got a proper telly but cannot remember the last time it was switched on.
YouTube (made bearable thanks to Adblock) gives me stuff like Photonicinduction; AcapellaScience; BigClivedotcom; Tom Gavioli; Techmoan; The 8-bit Guy. I've discovered Wintergatan and his amazing marble machine, Godowsky's studies after Chopin for left-hand only, and Kennedy Steve. When I want to laugh at idiots trying to skateboard down handrails, FailArmy it is. I could go on.
I don't feel a shred of guilt about Adblock, Google get enough ££ off me as it is. I look on YouTube as their way of saying "thank you" for all the data they slurp off me.
Unfortunately Rudd 'n' May just don't understand encryption.
So let's assume the law is passed, backdoors inserted, and messages decrypted. Your freshly exposed cleartext message reads "Just off to the shops, I've got the list, I'll pick up a curry on the way back, anything else you want?"
You tell me if that's an innocent probationary co-hab off to Asda, or a coded message meaning something a lot more sinister.
The whole XH558 story is ending sadly. Apart from the farce of its final flight, the poor thing's now in storage and the visitor centre closed "pending an exciting new development" that... well let's face it, is pie in the sky at the moment.
The 737 is quite a plane though - a nearly empty one on a near-sea-level runway is an awesome airplane to take off in.
Anyone stupid enough to fall for Apple's rip-off technique deserves exactly what they get. For years now they've been peddling behind-the-curve hardware and charging premium prices for it, but of course the iFools (aided and abetted by a salivating press; every new bloody iPhone gets a free, prime-time advertising slot on the BBC News for example) just think Apple can do no wrong.
Just keep that particular sub-set of society safely away from me - a 'B' Ark springs to mind - and if Apple want to extract as much money as they can from these sheep and impose ridiculous restrictions on them, then fine by me!
Oh, grow up. As if every major city doesn't have drugs. I've lived just outside Hull for 40 years and wouldn't have a clue where to "shoot up" - and have never seen anything being dealt in the streets (apart from dodgy Christmas jumpers, but that's another matter).
It's not as bad as people make out. Calling "City of Culture" a "Vanity Project" is missing the point that it's all about inward investment and tourist £££ - and already there's been rather a lot of that. And as for internet, yep - I'll go home tonight to my rather tasty 250MB/s non-throttled Lightstream service, which I doubt a lot of non-Kcom customers will do.
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