Posts by PhilBuk 366 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Nov 2012
Been using El Reg for years and never knew that archive link. That’s a life saver! Thanks.
Used to fix the front page with ublock filters but that’s too hard with this new front page - the divs are the length of a small novel!
Oh, and the redesign is utter crap!!
Phil.
Worked for me too thanks to massgrave.dev. I was a bit worried about the LTSC IOT version being US-only but the activation tool, HWID, provided on the massgrave,dev website switched the locale to US, coverted LTSC to LTSC IOT and then switched the locale back to GB! Done this on a desktop, a laptop and two VMs. The in-place upgrade did not work on an old laptop on which Windows Update had never worked. Best to make a copy of the system disk first - just in case.
I now have support that will last for about ten years.
Phil.
A lot of this info about the early days of Windows came from an interview of Raymond Chen by Dave Plummer, an ex-DEC and early Microsoft engineer. His youtube channel is well worth a look - https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage - there is also a long interview with Dave Cutler, the architect of VMS and Windows NT.
Dave Plummer has also admitted to setting the size limits for Fat32 drives.
Phil.
As an ex-Cave Dive (UK), I can assure that trying to use a mini-sub in a cave sump is a very bad idea. Most fatalities in cave diving are due to the diver losing their way and running out of air. Visibility in quite a lot of caves is quite poor to start with and a sudden wrong movement could stir up silt and mud reducing visibility to the point that you feel you are swimming in tomato soup. We usually followed guide lines that had already been laid or, if exploring, reeled out as we swam along.
The main rescuer of the Thai cave rescue produced a book which described the rescue. One section of cave that they had to travese with the children was one person wide - about a foot - something a sub would not fit through. In addition to size problems, there is the guidance issue - a sub would have difficulty following a guide line. So the whole idea was a waste of time and not worth considering.
Phil.
p.s. Open water diving scared the shit out of me - I got agoraphobic!
I'll second this. The presenter is a training pilot for his airline and provides detailed explanantions of incidents along with simulations (from FS2020) to illustrate them. He also has a related channel, Mentour Now, which discusses industry issues and technology - there is are a number of videos concerning Boeing's past and current woes.
Phil.
I can't see a change of direction coming from Mark SugarMountain any time soon. He has one idea, and one idea only - a Meta walled garden - with Meta users wearing Meta VR systems logging into Meta servers and interacting with Meta's marketplace. Did I mention fun? No, I didn't. He's very stubborn and will just keep pushing this idea until he runs out of money or users, sorry, product.
Phil.
I wear glasses all the time in VR (Steam Index). I'm 67 and have astigmatism, different prescriptions in each eye and the usual age-related long-sightedness. I normally wear varifocals but find them a bit strange in VR. What I did was to get my optician to make up a pair of glasses with my vanilla prescription without any sort of magnification for reading, VDUs, etc.. To keep the cost down, I just got two new lenses in an old frame.
The glasses work fine, the picture is clear except at the edges where the frames can be seen (vaguely). The frames fit in the Index with no problem. Prior to the Index, I had a HTC Vive Pro which was also OK, in fact, it had more room than the Index.
Summary: glasses are OK as long as the frames are not to large.
Phil.
Was involved in a Cave Rescue once where the patient, a young girl who had fallen 30 feet and injured herself, was asked by the first contact team leader if she wanted her parents informed. She replied in the negative because "her parents were quite old, in their 50's, and it would be quite a shock."
The members of the rescue team exchanged surreptitious glances among themselves. The youngest person on the team was 49.
Copy the XP version into Win 7 - it still works. It doesn't have the 'improvements' that made the Win 7 version useless such as 1.5 line spacing that would revert every time it was restarted. Always use it for those text files from *nix systems that don't have terminating line feeds like DOS.
Phil.
Oh. And no fecking ribbon.
