Posts by gcarter

25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then

Night Shift

I remember the roll over to 2000 Anno Domini with some miff

Was annoyed with our neighbours ripping off fireworks at midnight, because I was in bed trying to sleep before my 2am shift started!

Yeah yeah, it was the start of a new day, week, month, year, decade, century, millennium but come on guys, am trying to sleep!

The company I was working for at the time, distributed data for the oil and gas industry, and part of my job was to wait for reports and stuff arriving from North Sea oil rigs at specific times during the night.

A quick conversion to PDF, flinging my expertly curated 'portable document format' into a custom built Lotus Notes database, mash the replicate button and job done!

I recall feeling quite smug when everything worked as expected and rolling my eyes at all the fuss the company made to the build up.

The thing which pleased me the most about that shift, was my Casio Databank watch had rolled over to the year 2000 without a hitch.

Apple hit with £3 billion claim of ripping off 40 million UK iCloud users

I've no qualms with paying for extra storage per se, and as a family of x3 who all use apple products, its nice to keep everything nicely backed up.

(hey those endless iMessage meme's need to be backed up somewhere for posterity)

A slightly off topic irk was about a year or so ago when my misses got a new 1tb iPhone for Christmas.

She likes to keep her photos on device and backed up, so purchased a respectable 2tb storage plan from Google. (google photos is just awesome)

So far so good I hear you say? Well yeah, albeit for the fact that after she got the phone and despite multi and subtle prompts to disable 'save to iCloud Photos' were ignored, all of a sudden the reasonable 200gb (£2.99 a month) family shared plan I had in place, was gobbled up despite my insistence to turn off the bloody iCloud backup slider!

No problem, just grab her phone and turn off the iCloud backup right, after all everything backed up to google photos (it was I checked)

But there was mind f**k in the way... disabling iCloud photo backup prompts "Do you want to download a copy of your iCloud photos to this iPhone"? and says "Photos and videos that have been used to save space will be removed from this iPhone."

However she was worried that photos may be lost and manual removal of iCloud Photos was a logistical nightmare. I insisted that everything was backed up to google photos and she should delete all of the photos from her phone and thus iCloud backup. Noooo came the reply, I don't want to delete photos from my phone, and am scared that turning off the iCloud backup would result in lost stuff.

Ugggggh, I had no option but to upgrade the family iCloud account to the next step up... 2tb (£8.99) a month!

So now, her photos and videos are religiously backed up to iCloud and google photos... yay!

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

When I saw the article, It made me hungry and placed a click n collect order to my local Gloucester branch

It was delicious :-)

PS - No issues using the app to order

Charging your iPhone literally costs Apple millions as Batterygate saga slams shut

Totally agreed with @aerogems...

... luddites who took offence of not being told their ancient phone was being optimised behind the scenes... how dare you 

Bloody yanks using every possibility to sue!

Starlink's rocket speeds hit a 50 megabit wall for large downloads

So the ABZ country boy is downloading entire seasons of "Scottish Midget Porn" and is now bitchin its been slowed down?!

I suppose those country boyz don't have much patience when it cums to getting their fix!

What will be hilarious, is when the Starlink admins pick up his complaint, look at the logs and see the nomenclature (scotty_midget_pr0n_s01e01.mkv)

of the cultured content he is downloading at the time of the "throttling event" .

Working from home could kill career advancement, says IBM CEO

Myself, was employed with a local insurance company before COVID and lockdown hit in their IT department.

The lockdown allowed for remote support to be honed to perfection.

When the UK government said... right boys n girls, back to the office we go, admittedly my employer provided quite a flexible WFH option to staff, but it did still require office attendance for a day or so during the week.

COVID had a knockoff effect of the businesses turnover however, and they had to make redundancies.

Fair enough I suppose, however the IT department issued a scoring system to make any redundancies fair. One of the scoring criteria was "time in office".

... problem was I developed a minor health issue during lockdown which reduced my mobility somewhat, preventing me from heading into the office.

Lo and behold my "time in office" score was 0 which basically meant I was made redundant.

Wasn't all bad though, I got a juicy redundancy payout and found a WFH employer offering a higher salary then I was on.

Dropbox drops 16% of staff, points finger at hard-up customers and AI

Re: Cloudy file storage app

My thoughts exactly!

When they first came on the scene 16 year ago (bloody nora that long) it was wonderful to have a free offering to back shit up and yeah to share larger files which were impossible to email.

Problem was, the big boys took note aka google and Microsoft, who provided the same kind of thing but offered more storage!

Fast forward to present day and the dropbox monthly plan for the jo public costs £7.99 and you get 2tb for one user

Microsoft 365 family monthly plan costs £7.99 and you get 6tb of total storage across 6 separate accounts, and the full suite of registered office apps to boot!

No offence to dropbox, but you got beat, now go throw your toys out of the pram and go become pig farmers!

British govt tech supplier Capita crippled by 'IT issue'

When I worked for Crapita several years ago in the Cheltenham offices, I had a facepalm moment, where I needed to book a doctors appointment.

However on contacting my local doctors surgery, was advised I was no longer a patient!

Shocked, I asked why, only to be advised that they had written to me advising that if I wanted to remain on their patients list, that I had to confirm my intentions to do so.

(was because I rarely needed to go to the doctors)

On checking the next day, it turned out that Crapita / my employer, had screwed the pooch with the NHS letters not arriving for several thousand patients (myself included)

That was one of the final straws in my career with this crappy company!

Yandex plans to break up with its Russian motherland

Image Search

one more note for Yandex image search...

https://yandex.com/images/

... its an absolute joy to use and navigate in both a pc based browser and mobile browser. Google should take some tips from their image management

Oh and its a lot easier to found (wink) certain image types also ;-)

Smart fridges are cool, but after a few short years you could be stuck with a big frosty brick in the kitchen

Gilfoyle Hacks Jian Yang's Smart Fridge

https://youtu.be/A48AJ_5nWsc

Blundering London council emails unredacted version of notorious Gangs Matrix to 44 people. Data ends up on Snapchat

Fine culture

I understand that organisations / companies etc need to be held accountable for when they're are breaches like this one.

Unfortunately nowadays, its becoming almost a cultural thing... fine the hell out of anything, everything and everyone!

Look at all of the companies popping up to cash in on this "fine culture" PPI fines been the most notable.

Facebook blames 'server config change' for 14-hour outage. Someone run that through the universal liar translator

Cleaner unplugged something

Probably a cleaner in the server room and unplugging something to plug in their Henry vacuum!

It’s baaack – Microsoft starts pushing out the Windows 10 October 2018 Update

https://i.imgur.com/9f7GApF.jpg

Apple breathes new life into MacBook Air with overhauled 2018 model

Im not sure what to make of this release to be honest

I own both the...

MacBook Pro 13" with touch bar

Macbook 12

As stated in the presentation, it hits a lower price point then the Pro & 12 whilst providing a retina screen.

What I find slightly annoying is that its overall depth is the same as the Pro model

Depth: 8.36 inches (21.24 cm)

ok its a little lighter but hey...

I see this as a comprise more than anything

Its basically a slightly lighter 13" pro without Touch Bar

Would make sense to kill off the non touch pro model considering the new air is pretty much the same

What would have been sweet, is if it had the same svelte case as the MacBook but with a 13" screen

At last! Apple admits its MacBook Pro butterfly keyboards utterly suck, offers free replacements

Re: Stop shilling

Not really, up until a few years ago was and I guess still am still an avid pc user. However as I work from home and remotely in general, I needed something uber portable to work my magic with :-)

However when I'm in the mancave, I have the Mac hooked up to an external monitor and on a stand... hence the external keyboard and mouse.

Im getting bored of the Mac haters, and the constant drivel on virtually every tech site out there, jumping on the bandwagon to moan about the latest keyboards.

I've used the

* Macbook 12 (2016)

* Macbook 12 (2017)

* MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (2017)

They are great to type on! Sure they take some getting used to in the first instance, and the 2nd gen butterfly keyboards on the 2017 models feel more tactile.

Whilst they are not as robust as the older models, doesn't mean you hammer the hell out of the keyboards just to prove a point! I keep my clean and where possible, for example when Im working from home, will use an external bluetooth keyboard.

Remember peeps, the internet nowadays seems to be just for the haters / those who have had problems (minority) ... where are the people saying actually guys, these machines are pretty sweet?

How often do you go online to see how good a product is?

Oh and I typed this anti-rant on my Macbook 12 (2017) whilst sat in Starbucks :-)

MacBook Pro petition begs Apple for total recall of krap keyboards

One of the "downsides" about articles like this on the interwebz, is they only show one side to the user experience...

Granted, people take to the web when things go wrong, but how many people take to the web when they are happy with a product?!

I've used both the previous design MacBooks and the new butterfly keyboard.

Granted it takes some getting used to and granted there seems to be cases of failures rearing their head now that the new mechanism is in a lot more peoples hands nowadays...

With articles like this, they seem to bring out the haters, and #metoo crowd!

I for one am one of those "happy / no problemo" users.. my MacBook 12 (2017 model) is my daily driver and use it out and about, for work and leisure purposes and no problems :-)

I digress...

The argument of how apple are dealing with any hardware failures aside... my reason for replying is again, how many people are out there, who do have and like the new mechanism and have had no faults / failures?

Lloyds Banking Group to hang up on call centre staffers

Service Desk Offshore!

https://media.giphy.com/media/3xz2BzdAi4GON2GryE/giphy.gif

So you want to roll your own cloud

Loving the writing style in this article, am pushing x10 lols and head nods in the first handful of paragraphs!

I thought I could build an empire from my ikle self hosted wordpress blog several years ago... and then got fed up and went to work for a large faceless conglomerate!

New York to draft in 250 IT contractors because state staff 'lack talent'

The company I work for (C*pita) have this in reverse! They have IT gurus employed and then get rid of em, drop the salary for the roles and hire taletnless monkeys!

#beancounteraholes

Roku 3: Probably the best streaming player on the market ... for now, at least

I will admit though, out of all the devices / companies on the market offering streaming devices, I have the most respect for Roku....

For me, it boils down to your household eco system and subscriptions

... we have had roku, chromecast and apple tv and all have their advantages / disadvantages

In our household we download most of our content (haters gonna hate) and for casual viewing we subscribe to netflix. Furthermore we have a predominant apple eco system in our house with MacBooks, iPod, iPhone and iPad.... apple tv allows for seamless screen casting from all of these devices and is pretty snappy when it comes to netflix streaming. So again for our needs, the apple tv is the obvious choice

That said, and as the article discusses, our experience with Roku was the best when it came to all out content and apps, but again in our apple eco-system a no go when it comes to seamless casting of on device content to the big tv.

PS - When are Roku and Kodi (formerly xbmc) gonna get into bed with one another, now that would be a match made in heaven!

Apple unveils hints of Monday's new-product announcements

Ipad mini with retina screen... its the only thing people are still crying out for

Review: Samsung Series 5 Ultra Touch Ultrabook

As soon as I saw the resolution, I stopped reading!

Ironically I'm sending this reply from my beloved HP Pavilion DM1 which has a 1366x768 however on a 11.6" screen, its the sweetspot. Oh and the display folds horizontal on mine too.... battery lasts a good 8-9 hrs :-P

But yeah, any screen larger than 11.6" should not have 720p rez :(

Netbooks projected to become EXTINCT by 2015

My contribution to this article is that whilst I agree that netbooks have had their day, small form factor laptops have not...

Im writing this reply from my beloved Dual Core HP Pavilion DM1 with a 9hr battery life, 11.6"inch screen and 730p resolution (1366x768)... I frequently use it to stream 1080p movies (XBMC installed) to my spare room LED tv...

Again, netbooks are on their way out yes, but not because of their size, because of their low resolution and overall underpowered graphics and processors

How an Amazon engineer's slip-up started a 20-hour Netflix cock-up

/me shakes his head from side to side and ads another handful of movies to his couchpotato / newsgroup queue... can't beat locally stored content :-)

Its an irony how us web pirates have a more robust solution than the poor souls who choose to go legit ;-)

Mobile operators mourn death of embedded 4G

Re: I thought so. So here they are again!

Tethering here in the uk on the three network is a joy.... I use the payngo plan.... every time I topup with £15 amongst other benefits I get unlimited / all-you-can-eat data transfers, which is perfect for tethering!

On a side note, there is also the wonderful connectify application for windows 7 users

http://www.connectify.me/

Which allows you to share an existing wifi connection on your laptop to other devices, for example if your logged into a coffee shops wifi where you need an account, this can be shared with other devices without the need to share your login details.

Again another reason why tables with their own 3g/4g built in will go the way of the dodo

Rock'n'Roll Racing

Re: This game cost me a fortune!!

I still play this bad boy at least once a week on my (cough) softmodded xbox running amongst others the snes emulator. Sometimes tempting to google the cheat codes though and roar round the tracks tooled up to the hilt!

Fragmentation bomb wounds Android in developer war

Who Cares

From a user perspective, who cares! Just ride the android gravy train as long as you can, and when something better / more popular comes along... jump ship!

Although saying that, where the frig is the tomtom satnav app for android!

Friggin apple fan boyz win this time!