* Posts by Rob G

7 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Oct 2011

Helsinki Syndrome: Ubuntu utterly fails to boot on metro

Rob G

Re: Good news?

Actually, they show transport service updates as well as news and weather. And the odd ad. The Linux build is actually managed by the transport company rather than JCDecaux.

A Notepad nightmare leaves sysadmin with something totally unprintable

Rob G

Notepad got Net Nanny's knickers in a twist

Going off on a complete tangent here...

This reminds me of when I was just a boy getting to grips with Windows 98 and the world via a 56k modem on the new "family PC", the Pentium II 300 beast it was. My mother decided one day to install 'Net Nanny' software to monitor and limit web usage. This got old very quickly. CTRL-ALT-DEL task list was no match for the Nanny and I didn't want to just plain delete it. I wanted it to conveniently "break". What to do? Why, open random files from the Net Nanny program folder in Notepad and write garbage in them, of course! A reboot later and the deed was done. The Nanny called in sick.

It didn't take too much longer after that for me to gain real knowledge and use third-party process killers. Eventually it just got uninstalled, my mother admitting defeat, at a time when she would scold me for "using the computer too fast".

This was one of many things that exasperated my poor mother who was just trying to make me do my homework. From the taking away the keyboard - the mouse alone was sufficient along with charmap.exe and copy and pasting via context menus. Taking away the mouse - well, there's the Mouse Keys accessibility feature. Never understood why she never took both away. Year or two later after a week of work experience at British Telecom, I came home armed with scrap phone sockets and cable and installed an extension phone socket in my bedroom (I'd also picked up a crap Pentium 133 laptop by that point). I got rumbled at 1 AM when my suspicious mother picked up the phone and got an earful of modem. A small eruption occurred across the landing and then my bedroom door was almost launched into space. But it became the norm anyway - my sisters didn't have to fight with me to play games on the PC I had been hogging all evening, while I was discovering what the UK's IRC-based warez scene was all about. Finally, during one particularly critical exam revision period, when my mother had removed all computers from the house entirely, she found me on the roof outside my window with a PMR radio from Argos blethering with a mate down the road.

Help! I bought a domain and ended up with a stranger's PayPal! And I can't give it back

Rob G

So while not exactly the same cause as the original story, the effect is much the same. I have a gmail address from back when gmail was in beta testing. As such, there are many other people (mostly in the US) with my initials and surname that think they have my email address, forgetting all about the '69' or whatever that's on theirs. Because of this, I regularly get signed up to all sorts of sh't. PayPal accounts, hotel loyalty schemes, online banking and the latest, Sling TV, who I couldn't even contact because they block any access to any part of their website outside of the US. I eventually got through to them via Facebook and they cancelled the account. I also receive many forwards and emails from individuals and companies thinking I'm someone else. These emails often contain sensitive information from medical institutes and government departments. I also get a lot of church group stuff. I learned that replying to them to ask them to stop is a waste of time because they have no clue how to co-ordinate removal of someone from a reply-all thread and instead try to suggest I join them if I start getting irate. On occasion I will reset passwords and change email addresses or close the account, but I try not to be too much of a d'ck about it and consider the impact of doing so. Yes, I could just put all the stuff to junk mail, but I want these people to learn.

I just wish all services insisted on an email verification link or code being sent. I really don't care how inconvenient it is (including for myself) but I think it's absolutely stupid not to do it. I also wish they went a step further and had a "This was not me" link to just fast track the whole thing. Companies just don't want to take this stuff seriously, they just want new users to be able to sign up as fast as possible.

The safest place to save your files is somewhere nobody will ever look

Rob G

Hiding files from The Mother

In my early teens I stashed all my files in a folder on the shared "family" Win98 PC called C:\~SYSRMT32, a system-y sounding name which was also set as hidden. This seemed like a good idea when I first created it as a 13 year old, as a means to stop my mother poking around my stuff. At the time, my mother hadn't quite fully realised that my problem solving skills at least matched, if not surpassed, the abilities of the Inverness Computer Center from which the PC was originally purchased, and so if there was any issue with the PC, she would take it there. Some time passed and a HDD upgrade was required, and so off the PC went, along with my instruction to make sure that the disk was fully copied to the new one. By that time I was certainly capable of doing such an operation by myself, and I have regretted not pushing for that to happen ever since. For when the PC came back, my files were gone. I quickly phoned up the shop and asked them if I could have the old drive back. They said it wasn't possible. I asked them why, and explained that they hadn't copied everything, and got nothing but an angry response that I shouldn't store files in hidden folders, and that I was an idiot for doing so. They had done little more than drag the contents of the old drive into a folder called "old", with the Windows explorer default view of not showing hidden files. I handled all PC upgrades and maintenance from that point on. But I have still lost all of my early PC creations, and to this day still feel a little bitter about it. In hindsight I should have pressed them much harder about the old drive.

Lochs, rifle stocks and two EPIC sea gates: Thomas Telford's Highland waterway

Rob G

I remember...

...Sitting in traffic in front of the Tomnahurich swing bridge in Inverness for a good 10 minutes of my driving test (I passed).

Vivaldi and me: Just browsing? Nah, I'm sold

Rob G

Interesting this comes up today as I was just re-visiting Vivaldi last night. I want to use it over Firefox but unfortunately I still find the font rendering under Windows too blurry for my taste (a problem with all Chrome-like browsers since they ditched the GDI font rendering, forcing DirectWrite).

Panasonic HM-TA20 underwater camcorder

Rob G

Sounds better than the Playsport

So the price is certainly hiked somewhat but at least the audio is better than my (original) Kodak Playsport, which features a very crap mono mic. Apparently the newer one is slightly better in that department but still mono. A plus for the old one is the fact you can swap the battery out.

The stereo sound from the sample video didn't seem that bad at all.