Posts by ColonelDare

Meet Pi-CARD: Serving up a digital assistant on Raspberry Pi

Excellent idea!

How about a wearable v2 that will remember where I left my car keys?

What strange beauty is this? Microsoft commits to two more non-subscription Office editions

Re: Trying To Stem The Tide Of Defections To LibreOffice

Not just your own personal opinion. Mine too :-)

The Raspberry Pi 5 is now available ... if you pre-ordered

Re: Looks good so far!

>...and running slightly coo[l]er

While waiting for my Pi5 I have upgraded my Pi4s (several) to Bookworm and notice my old 1.5Ghz Pi4 behind our lounge telly runs both smoother and 10C cooler on both YouTube and BBC iPlayer.

Keep checking the mail box.... :-)

Mastodon makes a major move amid Musk's multiple messes

Re: Shame about Mastodon

Each to their own.

The loose and flexible nature of the fediverse means that surely some instances will come, fail and go. Others will expand and thrive, not to become the dominant, and only, king beast owned by some detestable billionaire of a dubious nature.

If the instance I am on becomes hosted or occupied by unpleasant people of malintent then I can go somewhere else and block them out, just like a town pub or meeting place that I no longer enjoy. This is the strength of the underlying design where migration is easy and optional which the commercial beasts put up road blocks and walled gardens to prevent.

As a side note I also _like_ the lack (by design) of encrypted DMs. I don't need this and would use something else if I wanted to send you my bank details, also I presume it discourages perverts and insurectionists using the system.

Google veep calls out Microsoft's cloud software licensing 'tax'

If Microsot were like booze, I'm happily tea-total!

15 years ago I stepped out of my college lecturing job and vowed I would never use another M$ product [the UK ICT and Computing A level syllabuses were awful and the implementation at my college was no more than just training students to use M$ products - it was just training, not education in the wider sense].

15 years later a Venn diagram of 'my computer usage' and 'Microsoft' would be two non overlapping circles.

(Assuming we ignore any web sites I visit, or vending machines & petrol pumps I use that run on Windows behind the screen - I can't help that.)

Ampere heads off Intel, AMD's cloud-optimized CPUs with a 192-core Arm chip

Always hopeful

Will it fit in the Raspberry Pi 5?

Microsoft switches Edge’s PDF reader to pay-to-play Adobe Acrobat

I agree

After all PDF stands for Portable Document Format. Having used OpenLibOffice for 10+ years and avoiding all lock-in ecosystems I won't go near anything subscription based.

Godfather malware makes banking apps an offer they can’t refuse

Oh my!

I'm going to get my cheque book and paper statement ring binder.....

OpenAI, Microsoft, GitHub hit with lawsuit over Copilot

I wondered why M$ paid $7.5 billion for it. I should have guessed.

[icon] leaves Github

This maglev turntable costs more than an average luxury electric car

Re: Egoteric?

8000$ ? Shouldn't that be something like:

7000/ap + 100 $. Where ap = age of punter.

Some years ago while demoing a signal generator to a bunch of young physics students I asked them all to hold theirs hands up if they could hear the tone and to drop them when they no longer could.

Carefully winding the frequency knob up until I got to 'silence' then stopping - I looked around the class to see every hand still up.

Anybody what to buy a nice pair of tweeters?

Data tracking poses a 'national security risk' FTC told

Re: Spelling!

I'm a retired enginer who married my English teacher wife 48 years ago to help me out with all the wordie stuff - and I still can't spel proper!

She's not too good at the numbers tho, so what a team, sharing the skills and still together. :-)

EV battery can reach full charge in 'less than 10 minutes'

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

Just swap it out again at the next station.

Like lemonade bottles when I was a kid - we didn't own them nor get attached to them, we just used them for as long as the juice lasted then got another one.

The wild world of non-C operating systems

Qdos anyone?

Happy days wrestling with my first multitasking operating system. A quantum leap [pun intended] in possibilities for me having just progressed from a hand-coded assembler 'monitor' program running on a home-brew Z80 machine.

I was super impressed but didn't get too far, however I believe a smarter guy than did:

Linus Torvalds interviewed by Jeremy Allison

NASA's Curiosity finds signs of ancient life on Mars. Or maybe not. More data needed

Re: Welcome to the 21st century

> WTF are miles?

According to the Reg Standards Converter: 25.1467 Devon Fatbergs.

That is of course based on the Sidmouth fatberg, not the more popular Devonian Plymouth fatberg which at only 164ft is a more convenient size for everyday use.

References:

BBC's Colossal 210ft Sidmouth fatberg

Other notable fatbergs

Bullseye! Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS scores an update with 'less closed-source proprietary code'

Just wondering...

"This means less closed-source proprietary code...,"

With their 10th anniversary not far off, I wonder [hope] whether the liberation from none copyright code might open the way to launching some RISC-V based open source hardware? With an onboard RP2040 Pico to add to the fun, maybe?

Oh - and we'll need the Python bindings for libcamera which are still in the works I believe.

Thank you RPi Team and roll on February 2022! :-)

'Quantum computer algorithms are linear algebra, probabilities. This is not something that we do a good job of teaching our kids'

Re: "Why not include critical thinking as well?"

yes, but I mean.

Re: "Why not include critical thinking as well?"

And 99.99% of the population have an above average number of legs*

* Not a smutty joke but statistically true, give or take a few decimal places.

Raspberry Pi's trading arm snags £33m investment as flotation rumours sink

I got worried...

.. when apt update started pinging Miicro$oft's servers.

Doesn't seem to do it now - maybe they realised they had frightened the horses?

Facebook: Let us tell you WhatsApp – we don't want to pay that €225m GDPR fine

Signal anybody?

NASA comes up empty on Perseverance rover's first Mars sample drilling attempt

Re: I just don't get it.

...I agree with St_Oddball and would add:. Don't forget the money all stays here on Earth, only a small bit of kit ends up elsewhere.

Chromebooks fighting for mind share at PC makers with higher-margin Windows 11 machines in the lead, says IDC

Exactly.

Re: Chromebooks? Noooo!

> Chromebooks are useless unless you log in.

No, not true. Linux apps run just fine off line (LibreOffice, Gimp, FileManager, Terminal, Clementine, Thonny=>Pico MicroPython etc etc)

Writing this on Firefox, logged on = True # else I couldn't post this reply.

Amiga Fast File System makes minor comeback in new Linux kernel

> Maybe he'll stay home and play with an Amiga instead.

Wasn't he more of a Sinclair QL man?

As I was - he just took it all a bit further than me! ;-)

In 1986 the 16yo produced: Linus Torvalds Sinclair QL software GMOVE

Proof-of-concept open-source app can cut'n'paste from reality straight into Photoshop using a neural network

Re: An Open-Source app...

Sorry AC, I was just asking - can I use GIMP? Many of Photoshop's functions _are_ available in GIMP, but not having Photoshop (license/OS nor experience) I was wondering if I can use GIMP instead (?).

The article does not explicitly say so - so can you be more helpful please?

An Open-Source app...

> "...and then transfer that image over the air almost instantly into Adobe Photoshop"

What about GIMP? Just asking.

Ethernet standards group leaves its name in the dust as it details new 800Gbps spec

Re: Insane Speed

But you need to allow for exponential growth with R>1 ....

Hang on a minute...

That's the complete works of Shakespeare in 8 microseconds. Eh?

..... and I used to think 1200 bps off my cassette recorder was clever!

Official: Office 365 Personal, Home axed next month... and replaced by Microsoft 365 cloud subscriptions

Re: Office 2007 has been serving me well for over 10 years

I agree with the 'no recurring charges bit", but for me the OO upgrade was in c.2008, and LO a few years later.

Absolutely no regrets. :-)

One for the super rich fanbois: Ultra-rare functional Apple-1 computer goes on auction

Not bothered

I'll stick to my Nascom1. British thu and thru, 1k Ram and fully programmable in hex Z80 assembler - and only £200 list price (PSU extra) .

What's not to like about that then, eh?

AI-predicted protein structures could unlock vaccine for COVID-19 coronavirus... if correct... after clinical trials

Re: The cynical among us will see this as a marketing stunt.

My bad - finger trouble - Yes epidemiologists, I do know the difference!

I married an English teecher some years ago but I am still hopeless at pruf reeding ;-)

Re: The cynical among us will see this as a marketing stunt.

Let's be skeptical, but not cynical. Cynicism is a feedstock of the antivaxers.

So here's to all the efforts of the epistemologists, data modellers and clinicians who are doing their best at this time. Have a beer to keep your spirits up (but not too many just yet).

Er - sorry, I forgot to mention the politicians....

No backdoors needed: Apple ditched plans to fully encrypt iCloud backups after heavy pressure from FBI – claim

Interesting....

If/when the Senate decide to subpoena witnesses' texts and emails they might find some interesting leads...(?)

Ho hum!

Step away from that Windows 7 machine, order UK cyber-cops: It's not safe for managing your cash digitally

Re: Awkward

And so were the tills in PCWorld last time I looked (about 2 weeks ago).

-> Just don't use them for money and you'll be alright?

And now for this evening's space weather report. We've got a hotspot of satellite-wrecking 'killer electrons' in the outer Van Allen belt...

Explore at your peril

Van Allen belts. Human activity, ...., can also create artificial Van Allen belts that can last weeks or years around Earth too.

That's the works of Lord Asriel and his experimental theology, I'd dare say.

Following the wild, roaring success of its Snapdragon 8cx Arm laptop chip, Qualcomm's back with the 8c, 7c

Dear Santa....

Can I have one too, in my Rasberry Pi 5c+?

Pleeeeese.

Linux kernel is getting more reliable, says Linus Torvalds. Plus: What do you need to do to be him?

A plain simple...

Thank you, Linus. Much respect!

The OS is 'no longer' important to Microsoft, and yet new Surface kit has 3 Windows flavours

Re: Sounds like an admission of defeat

> XP was fine. Vista was a hard no. .....

<smug grin> Raspbian now does most of what I need on the desktop. </smug grin>

Occasional help from its more powerful relatives does the rest.

Raspberry Pi head honcho Eben Upton talks thermals, stores and who's buying the kit

Re Hogging the Television

"....hearing stories of younger users hogging the family television with their latest and greatest software creations."

Lovely to hear, but I reduce such problems by running a Pi 4x4 behind both of our TV's (kitchen and lounge) and politely moving aside when live TV is in demand and just quietly carry on doing what I was doing by VNCing into the Pi from my Chromebook.

Super flexible, maintains domestic harmony and leaves my desktop PC quietly gathering dust [quiet as it's mostly 'off' these days].

And, btw, running the /root partition from a USB3 240GB SSD makes it even more able to sideline my PC ;-)

Cheers Eben...

Samsung Note10+ torn apart to expose three 5G antennas: One has to pick up something

Re: Make them repairable...

Something like this?

UK parliament sends snippy letter to Zuck and his poodle Clegg as it seems Facebook has been lying again

Re: Quantum Truth

or the Sum of all Lies?

Cambridge Analytica didn't perform work for Leave.EU? Uh, not so fast, says whistleblower

Re: No One Cares

[Deep sigh]

'Every nation gets the government it deserves' Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821)

So what's new?

Too hot to handle? Raspberry Pi 4 fans left wondering if kit should come with a heatsink

Re: I prefer my Pi(es) Hot

Custard surely?

Hell hath no fury like a radar engineer scorned

Re: Can this inform the 5G debate?

I mentioned my friend's views on vaccines (!) to my daughter who is a research nurse at a prestigious UK hospital and she earnestly told me:

"But the statistics clearly show that people who have been vaccinated are more likely to get Alzheimer's."

[Long pause]

"Because they didn't die from Cholera, Diphtheria, Hepatitis. Malaria, Measles, Polio, Rabies, Tuberculosis......."

Can this inform the 5G debate?

I have a friend who is bothering himself, and everybody nearby, about the dangers of the 5G role out.

Recently he sent me a link to a company (rfsafe.com) headlining "5G Network Uses Nearly Same Frequency as Weaponized Crowd Control Systems" and pages of stuff showing we are all doomed....

The clue in the article is about the power, not the frequency, surely? After all the water in the tea he was drinking was virtually the same water used by Weaponized Water Canons isn't it.

BTW how's Harry's health these days?

Smash GandCrab: Free tools released to decrypt files scrambled by notorious ransomware

What's the problem??

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UEn:7uub}bZ55Ti&0w"&75avS05.=0^_%wn0j+5

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b+H fj/Sg%Q~UOr1g?d=5#^ T6D-j}gn7$vH%F]u

Z|Mjk;&qoC[M7bE,`"nMbz(k"JVh{%5:@<,,L9?j

Pt'jJp_!'yu&@[1lep& 13zz_eXr+6;kP~nAN/_5

aV|((".#NoxwBv9,WSQx<-BC%4.%Y}+{l@vC~NMu

kaZmxghHy5)]d>kPmpbYI0aE]W'6ps /p@8(6|tt

u+\#xq@.$~!iHmT'1YO?6;L(IFP_}NCb$IJ =@vG

"nMbz(k"

Halleluja! The Second Coming of Windows Subsystem For Linux blesses Insider faithful

Gosh!

They are catching up with my Raspberry Pi.....

Like using the latest version of Microsoft Office? Love Offline Files? Not for long!

Re: There's another way

I used to use (and teach) M$ Office until 2008 when I left my college job. I chose never to use any M$, or other closed proprietary product, ever again and haven't.

Later I moved from OpenOffice to LibreOffice seamlessly (at no cost) and things just keep getting better. Whilst I still run LO on a decent PC for heavy stuff (eg editing a 30+ page community magazine), most tasks I can now do on my cheap Chromebook (running LO under Linux Apps for ChromeOS (beta)), or even on my 24/7 Raspberry Pi behind the kitchen telly.

Cheap, flexible and reliable <glances at M$ in the rear-view mirror and smiles.> :-)

It's 2019 and a WhatsApp call can hack a phone: Zero-day exploit infects mobes with spyware

Just musing.

> This exploit would be perfect for a nation's spies keen to pry into the lives of persons of interest.....

Gavin Williamson?

Thought you'd seen everything there is to Ultima Thule? Check this out: IN STEREO!

That was so weird...

I was sober and still seeing double.

A couple of pints and it was all clear again. A nice view of a distant relative.

A few more and the Imperial Death Star was clearly visible.

Thanks Kewl for the tip. BTW I found it easier by saving the image in a new tab [right click]. That way there is no web page to distract.

All good and well done to the boffins who pulled it off!!

Now a few more and it might be animated in full Technicolor...........