Posts by Trygve Henriksen

BOFH: When the Sun rises in the West and sets in the East, only then will the UPS cease to supply uninterrupted voltage

Hobnobs sounds good about now...

FBI paid renegade developer $180k for backdoored AN0M chat app that brought down drug underworld

Re: Trojan Shield?

You need to read up on the classics.

Trojan war, and the wooden horse the Greeks used to gain access to Troy.

BOFH: I'm so pleased to be on the call, Boss. No, of course this isn't a recording

Re: Duplicate Asset Tag numbers!

Both HP and DELL are willing to sell you pre-labelled computers if you order enough of them.

All they need is the Logo, text and a number range.

They'll even email you a list of serial numbers and the corresponding asset tag as they ship them.

and those are slightly more secure than what your Dymo or Brother labelprinter can produce.

The future is now, old man: Let the young guns show how to properly cock things up

Re: Back door in to the comms systems

That or an Epson PX-4 or PX-8 would be my guess.

Wonderful machines.

The HX-20 only runs at 0.6MHz, but it feels blazing fast because it's a Dual CPU system.

The swift in-person response is part of the service (and nothing to do with the thing I broke while trying to help you)

And this is why every server should have ILO, iDrac or similar tech installed.

Volunteer-run pirate Manga website attacked, loses hashed passwords, has ‘nobody’ to fix the mess

Re: which rather diminished publishers’ chances of securing distribution in nations outside Japan

For one series that I was interested in years ago(can't remember which now), they sold the European publishing rights to a French company. Which of course only made a French edition.

I don't really bother with Manga any more.

What gets translated to Norwegian usually ends up 'age shifted' to fit young kids even if the contents is 'somewhat more mature'. And Japanese puns are almost never explained, but instead horribly 'remade' into whatever the translator thinks is funny.(It never is)

To have one floppy failure is unlucky. To have 20 implies evil magic or a very silly user

Re: if it works...

It uses sensors, and they are definitely IoT. And if you use IFTTT scripts, thne it's all online. Yeah, there are people who do that.

IoT is a tool(the same can be said about most of the designers of the devices) and automation of some sort is usually the goal.

Re: if it works...

I know of one good reason to invest in some IoT or at least some proper home automation...

I read in a forum that one guy had set it up so that when he sat down in his favorite chair in the evening, his TV came on and the lights adjusted for best possible viewing comfort.

BOFH: Postman BOFH's Special Delivery Service

Re: Still laughing..

I'm sorry, but most of the stuff I have is in working condition...

Well, a couple of portable computers, supposedly once used on an English Navy ship doesn't work, but with 3 of them, I might be able to get one to work...

I think one of my SUN workstations need a new HDD.

One of my Psion S3a machines has an issue with the battery compartment, and the same with the S5...

My Canon laptop with built-in inkjet is broke... literally. Crappy hinges...

If you have something nice and working, then I can be found as Gadgetman over on the berlingoforum.com

Just create a user, and respond to one of my many posts about my car. It's old and French, there's alwys something...

Re: Still laughing..

That's Trygve Lode. Cool guy, but not me.

Re: Still laughing..

I wouldn't mind one, either. Of course, I collect vintage computers...

Amazon coughs up $62m to shoo away claims it stole driver tips, cut pay rates without telling them

I have a Kindle...

And since I'm in Norway, we're supposed to use the US site for Kindle books. And it won't even stop suggesting books that when I check them out are 'not for sale in your region'.

How do you save an ailing sales pitch? Just burn down the client's office with their own whiteboard

Also kniown as the 'Where's that Cisco Power Lead? F! it! Where's my Dremel!'

I hate those leads.

And when I see it on some new kit, I just think 'oh boy, some engineer wannabe skimped on the cooling again'.

Backers of Planet Computers' Astro Slide 5G phone furious after shock specs downgrade

Re: Peak Planet

Grab a USB-C to HDMI adapter and use your TV...

Or a Radio adventure?

http://www.doctorfloyd.com/

One of my favorites.

Windows might have frozen – but at least my feet are toasty

Re: Laptops?

No serious manufacturer calls them Laptop any more. They don't want a lawsuit when some scmuck fries his wedding tackle...

LibreOffice 7.1 beta boasts impressive range of features let down by a lack of polish and poor mobile efforts

Re: poor mobile efforts

Or it has gone horribly right, and the person in question has a Planet Computers Cosmo...

Colapsing headings(Outline) and text styles. Reminds me of the word processor on the old Psion S3 series PDAs.

Who knew that hosing a table with copious amounts of cubic metres would trip adult filters?

Re: Nearly got away with it

They knew what they were doing, and probably giggling when they created the folder.

Tech support scammer dialed random number and Australian Police’s cybercrime squad answered

Re: I love these scammers

I've done the half-hour chat, too... I was on the bus, so didn't have anything else to do anyway.

I did the 'old keyboard, no Windows key', and 'those keyboard shortcuts doesn't work', then 'I don't have Internet explorer, can I use Netscape isntead', and finally, 'that side doesn't have a version for OS/2'...

When you're On Call, only you can hear the silence of the clicks

Re: I screwed the pooch with the OC pager.

Should have coated it with juice from a Jalapeno or something...

There ain't no problem that can't be solved with the help of American horsepower – even yanking on a coax cable

Re: The other side to IBM cables.

I have made it a rule that any time I visit one of the locations I'm responsible for, I always check the Server room for wires that can be removed. Some of them are from the 90s, so there's a bit of a crow's nest still to get rid of, but I'm slowly getting down to the subfloor...

Help! My printer won't print no matter how much I shout at it!

Re: HP

I have a 2100 at home. It print and prints and prints...

I gave my sister a 6mp a few years ago after it had been retired from use. It still works fine. The Jetdirect EX card I had set up, though...

Re: HP

The HP LJII was probably the most indestructible thing you could buy back then... before surplus T34 tanks became available...

the only exception was the 'd' Doubledecker version. May the soul of its designer be buried in a landslide of old HP toner cartridges to suffer eternally!

The LJ4 in comparison was Plastic Fantastic.

Not that we didn't have users who could destroy a LJII, it just took a bit longer.

Always pulling at the sheet as it slowly emerged from the top would do it.

He was a skater boy. We said, 'see you later, boy' – and the VAX machine mysteriously began to work as intended

Re: Static

And my first was a 386sx 16MHz, with 2MB RAM, 42MB HDD and both 3.5" and 5.25" diskette drives.

It had a 14" monochrome CRT, though. Because I couldn't afford a Colour monitor at the same time.

Typical '80s IT: Good idea leads to additional duties, without extra training or pay, and a nuked payroll system

Re: Oh good grief....

Yes, all DAT were like that. It's the stress from the rapid spooling operations that stretches the tapes.

8mm tapes and VHS also had this issue.

I AM ERROR: Tired of chewing up your RAM? Razer tells gamers where to stick its special gum for the RGB crowd

There's already a chewing gum available for the super-caffeinated dorks that's always chasing framerate rather than original contents...

Lotte's Black Black.

Physical locks are less hackable than digital locks, right? Maybe not: Boffins break in with a microphone

Re: My lock's fine then

Jingling keys would make a different sound than pins pushed by springs, so in theory it might be possible to filter for the correct frequencies. In practice, probably not.

But just inserting and pulling the key very slowly ould make the pins slide along the ridges instead of jumping, so that should also work.

One reason NOT to jingle your keys is that hackers can already make duplicate keys using a photo taken from long rane with a powerful tele lens.

Damned if you don't and damned if you do.

You *bang* will never *smash* humiliate me *whack* in front of *clang* the teen computer whizz *crunch* EVER AGAIN

Re: With great power comes great incompatibility

Never buy an UPS with a 'regular' outlet. Get one with C14 outlets, then connect servers or whatever with C13 to C14 cables.

If you have any 'regular' outlets in the server room, they should NOT be connected to the UPS. And they should be as far from the racks as possible.

Whoa-o BlackBerry, bam-ba-lam: QWERTY phone had a child. 5G thing's newly styled

Re: The sliders never had decent keyboards

The Planet Computers Astra(on IGG now) is a slider keyboard model, and 5G.

If you can make do with 4G, there's their Gemini and Cosmo units.

I reccommend the Cosmo, though. Faster, good camera, good sound, backlit keyboard...

I have a 12" DELL 2-in-one machine, and before that I used a DELL 7240 Ultrabook. Neither of them were usable for writing on the bus or otherwise 'less than perfect' workspace.

(I have a half hour bus trip every morning and afternoon... )

The 6 and 7" 'mini laptop' segment?

Quite a few of those have really sucky keybaord compared to the Cosmo and Geminis.

Pen Test Partners: Boeing 747s receive critical software updates over 3.5" floppy disks

Re: King's Quest

10 minutes?

I bet you had a C64.

We managed to get some of our more popular ZX Spectrum games transferred to the Microdrive. 48KB in less than 10 seconds!

(You had to load the game from tape, stop it after the basic part had loaded and before the MC could load, rewrite the BASIC to use the Microdrive, save it to MD, load the MC and save it too, to the MD and hope that it worked... )

Re: Honestly..

Nothing wrong with tape...

Unless you used DAT or Video8 tapes...

DAT was never designed for the strain of multiple Fast Forward and Reverse that the tape system will be subjected to during a Write and Verify operation does.

Now, an old Tanberg SLR tape... is probably close enough to bulletproof that the pilots might consider lining the door into the cockpit with the tapes...

Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating their data

Once upon a time the most popular Word Processor on the PC was Lotus 123...

Because the tabbed format made it easy to visualise where the text ended up when you printed it later.

Re: I must be missing something...

We need a 'CSV 2' format, with first line containing 'CSV2', the second containing formatting info, the third containing the labels fior each field, and a 4th line containing 200 commas...

The data, from line 5 and down, will all begin with a comma.

That should make such a complete mess of Excrement's import function that whoever is using it can't help but notice and will be forced to take action...

Add a 'CSV2_CSV2_CSV2_CSV2' line every 100 line or so, with a random number of commas before it to screw with autogenerated field widths...

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

Re: Which is why I always turn off email sigs...

May or may not have been sent from my Quantum Computer.

Oh sure, we'll just make a tiny little change in every source file without letting anyone know. What could go wrong?

Re: Mail Storm

Why are you writing 'Exchange 2003 clusterfuck'?

Isn't that like writing 'Fat grease'?

Oh what a cute little animation... OH MY GOD. (Not acceptable, even in the '80s)

Nope, not ZIP

I'm sorry, but Zip drives started at 100MB, not 40.

I will assume that you meant the slightly older iOmega Bernoully drives. They had a 40MB version.

PC printer problems and enraged execs: When the answer to 'Hand over that floppy disk' is 'No'

Re: Ah IT 'managers'

The annotated version, I hope?

And yes, for us ho work IT support, that book is even more essential than a TCP/IP or Unix bible.

If you don't LARP, you'll cry: Armed fun police swoop to disarm knight-errant spotted patrolling Welsh parkland

You got off easy...

Here in Norway we had this:

https://youtu.be/K27Tayaxavc?t=19

Square peg of modem won't fit into round hole of PC? I saw to it, bloke tells horrified mate

Re: soft modems

As someone who found hat they didn't even spend the $0.10 to install a diode to protect against reverse voltages on the power connector on their laptops... I used to tell people that they were slightly less painful than being poked in the eye with a rusty fork.

A paper clip, a spool of phone wire and a recalcitrant RS-232 line: Going MacGyver in the wonderful world of hotel IT

Re: About ten years back

Should have used a much longer cable so that they could make a few more crossings and zigzags across the room. Just one crossing isn't enough to bother anyone.

Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent 'misleading data' being shown to pilots

Re: Windows Server 2000

How did they get NT4 to run for 42 days before crashing?

Planet Computers has really let things slide: Firm's third real-keyboard gizmo boasts 5G, Android 10, Linux support

Slip sliding away...

I remember all the smartphones with slide-out keyboards...

That never really worked. The contacts lost contact, the slide mechanism jammed or broke.

My Gemini is mostly collecting dust. Sorry, but it's too slow to run the apps I want.

My Cosmo hasn't shipped yet...

and now they want to push this disaster-in-waiting onto the market?

That awful moment when what you thought was a number 1 turned out to be a number 2

Re: PD?

Unfortunately, back then 'Professional development' meant something like 'we pay our programmers enough that they don't have to dumpster dive'....

About the same as what it means today, really...

Checks?

Oh, I remember those!

No, actually, I don't. Never used one.

Theranos vampire lives on: Owner of failed blood-testing biz's patents sues maker of actual COVID-19-testing kit

Do you still have any coins containing silver in the USA?

If so, 30 of those would be the correct amount.

Not exactly the kind of housekeeping you want when it means the hotel's server uptime is scrubbed clean

Re: Lockable outlet?

Why not just get these:

https://www.panamax.com/product/max-wall-power-signal-bay-15a-code-compliant-extension-system-MIW-XT

Most vacuum cleaners and electric drills doesn't come with a C13 cord...

Re: The cleaner did it.

Two big flaws in that situation.

1. You let the monkeys work unsupervised.

2. You had regular power outlets.

You won't find anything but C13 sockets near the server racks in my Server room.

(Distribution rails, connected to large 32Amp sockets under the raised floor. )

What's inside a tech freelancer's backpack? That's right, EVERYTHING

Re: "my backpack can weigh between 8 and 14kg"

Have you SEEN the S60?

If you hear a crack, it's the rim of the tank that cracked...

Re: "my backpack can weigh between 8 and 14kg"

I put my phone on silent if I'm in a meeting. Anyone who NEEDS to contact me then can email me, Skype me(text only or I'll force reboot their PC) or even use Teams chat.

My portable(no serious manufacturer calls them laptop anymore because they're afraid of being sued when someone burn their wedding tackle) is a DELL 2-in-1 hybrid. Takes less space than a block of A4 paper, and easy to grab with me if I have to go outside.

Hello, support? What do I click if I want some cash?

Re: Not surprised at all

Did the Boys in Green ever thank Barclays for not letting them do such a serious mistake as signing up with them?