Posts by Wanting more

Epson says ink pad saturation behind 'end of service life' warning on inkjet printers

Canon too and in a 10 year old printer

My 10 year old Canon inkjet printer died last year. So I took it apart as you do, hoping to find stepper motors, precision ground bars etc. No stepper motors any more, just normal motors and end limit switches.

But was disgusted to find a big nappy in the bottom of the printer that was saturated with most of my expensive ink. Obviously the head cleaning that the printer seemed to do every time I turned it on was sucking ink into it.

Have now switched to a laser printer (Xerox B215) which can't do pretty photos, but so far I think this one toner cartridge should last me a few years as I'm a light user and probably only print <500 pages a year. I've had it a year now and toner still says 97% .

Linux may soon lose support for the DECnet protocol

DECNet new fangled...

Last time I used a VMS VAX I was connected to it via a serial cable! Early 1990s

How a crypto bridge bug led to a $200m 'decentralized crowd looting'

Re: There're kidding, right?

Yes everyone knows it should of been 0xFF instead

Miscreants aim to cause Discord discord with malicious npm packages

nuget too

We had an incident here where one of our developers accidentallyinstalled a Nuget package from a dodgy publisher (not Microsoft but a very close spelling). The package seemed to be from Russia. It was several months until this was noticed and the code had been deployed to test servers.

Dell's rugged Latitude 5430 laptop is quick and pretty – but also bulky and heavy

Re: "At 1.97kg and 33.6mm x 340mm x 220mm it is heavy and bulky."

Same here. My Thinkpad T340 weighs in at 2.1Kg, but with a SSD upgrade in it it's still good enough for most tasks.

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

Re: College Tales...

Our T-connectors were double shrink wrapped to help deter tampering and accidental disconnections. Seemed to work quite well, doesn't stop anyone really intent on damage though, but then they could just cut the cable, you just can't prevent everything.

Creator of SSLPing, a free service to check SSL certs, downs tools

Re: Pingu

We still have a Windows 2000 server to run VB6 builds on. Heavily firewalled and running on a VM. But one day VMWare will update things and Windows2000 will no longer run any more, then we are screwed. We're currently on the 3rd project to replace the old VB6 system.

We also have some "irreplaceable" DOS software attached to a specialised scanner, but that runs on Windows 10 64bit in DosBox though, so fairly modern!

Dev rigs up receipt printer to spit out GitHub issues

PI Pico would be tricky

The RP2040-based Pi Pico would be tricky to use, I'm sure it could talk to the printer ok, but getting it to go onto the internet and collect the information from GitHub wouldn't be possible without extra hardware to give it ethernet / wifi. The other Pis are basically linux boxes with all that stuff built in and either an ethernet jack or wifi built on board.

He ain't heavy, he's my brother: Bloke gives away SpaceX ticket because he was over weight limit

me too

I just scrape in under the weight limit, but expect my high blood pressure and asthma (problems with altitude?) might still exclude me. Maybe also the lack of vast amounts of disposable income...

Earth to Voyager 2: Standby for connection – after we tip this water out of the dish

Wouldn't work in England

The dish would spend most of the time being tipped up!

It's 2021 and someone's written a new Windows 3.x mouse driver. Why now?

We're still running some DOS applications that talk to a OMR scanner on the parallel port. I managed to get them working in a 64bit version of DOSBox running on Windows 10. So they'll be around for a long while yet (until they can't find parts for the physical scanner on eBay).

The Ministry of Silly Printing: But I don't want my golf club correspondence to say 'UNCLASSIFIED' at the bottom

Re: Amateur Opera Society Newsletter

Yep at least 20 years ago. The same era we used to get a memo (not an email!) about not using the computing facilities for personal use.

Amateur Opera Society Newsletter

I remember being called to the big boss's office by his secretary who was having trouble re-formatting a document. Turned out it was the boss's Amateur Opera Society newsletter and as I was helping her the boss walks in and asks what I was doing etc. At least he had the decency to look sheepish after.

LAN traffic can be wirelessly sniffed from cables with $30 setup, says researcher

HTTPS etc.

Most traffic will have some sort of encryption applied to it now? Most traffic on my network would be HTTPS web traffic, or SMB 3.0 traffic. I also upload backups to AWS and Azure and both those will be encrypted. I'm sure GCHQ and NSA could snoop on it if they wanted though.

Not too bright, are you? Your laptop, I mean... Not you

me too

I once spent at least an hour trying to get the wifi on my laptop to work. Turns out there was a physical switch (black, labelled in black on a black background) that turns off the wifi somehow, but doesn't report the fact back to Windows (The adapter was still enabled, just didn't get any signal). I must of bumped the switch off without noticing as it was working fine previously.

Dammed annoying.

Pi calculated to '62.8 trillion digits' with a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc chips, 1TB RAM, 510TB disk space

Re: Engineering approximation

Better err on the side of safety and call it 4. Or maybe just 10.

The web was done right the first time. An ancient 3D banana shows Microsoft does a lot right, too

Re: Maybe Windows 3.1 was a sweet spot?

I'm running 5.0.1 I seem to remember it came free on a cover disk.

For a quick image crop, or resize or downscale colours (how long since I had to do that!) it works quickly without fuss.

SSD belonging to Euro-cloud Scaleway was stolen from back of a truck, then turned up on YouTube

encryption?

Have they not heard of encryption at rest? For any disks / data leaving the organisation I'd expect that to be standard / mandatory.

'No BS' web host Gandi lives up to half of its motto... Some customer data wiped out in storage server meltdown

me too

We also had a corrupted ZFS filesystem this week. We had a 40 hour outage of our main business database. Diagnosing the issue, then perform rebuilds / database restore and roll forward the db transaction journals, then checking / testing. Fortunately we had the required backups etc.

Experimental 'insult bot' gets out of hand during unsupervised weekend

costly in paper

We had a cobol report that had a slight bug in the code. It sent the malformed report to the printer. 18 boxes of paper later (at 5 reams per box) the operator decided that something was probably wrong and killed the print job. Next morning the print was delivered back to the office on a large overflowing trolley, fortunately it wasn't my bug. It was simplex printed so we had plenty of spare scrap paper for the next 10 years.

Microsoft Visual Studio Code replumbed for better Python taming

Re: 'IntelliSense autocomplete system'

I've avoided using Resharper so far as I know someday I know I'll be without it. With every release MS add more and more features to the IDE anyway.

Software changed the world, then died on the first of the month

Ah yes...

23 years ago when I was first starting out as a programmer I wrote an extract to populate the mainframe from the new shiny system that we were developing. I came in one morning to find that that weekend's mainframe processing had all errored and it was all because of my extract had fed bad data to the system (it was the products database that everything else depended on).

Fortunately after 20 minutes of investigation it turned out that I had followed the specification precisely and it wasn't my fault at all. The designer who had wrote the spec and was of supposed to have done the testing got the blame instead. I had no knowledge of the old mainframe systems and there was no way I could of spotted the potential problem.

‘I crashed a rack full of servers with my butt’

my worst mistakes

I was supposed to be refreshing the test products database from our live database. Both databases were on the same host. I accidentally mixed up the database names and refreshed the live database with the test data. At least the backup system worked to restore the data when I realized what I'd done. Fortunately this was 15 years ago and most of our workload was batch with a few screens for data maintenance. If I did this now it would of affected online websites and whatnot. The databases were moved on to separate hosts soon after.

Another time I was coding a database trigger so that on delete of one record it would delete some child records in another table. Unfortunately I missed the where clause from the child delete and it emptied the entire table of records. Furthermore the tester didn't catch the issue (it had deleted the record they were expecting and they didn't notice that all the rest of them had gone also). However it was quickly noticed when the code ran on the live database for the first time...

S is for Sandbox: The logic behind Microsoft's new lockdown Windows gambit

Re: Sorry

I have actually been to a p**s up organised by Microsoft UK in a brewery. It was TechEd evening event in Amsterdam at the Heieken Experience, the beer flowed well and I enjoyed myself, we got some freebies too (Beer glass, key ring beer mats).

Flubbed hardware fix knocked out 911 calls, T-Mobile US cops big fine

$247m profit on a turnover of £29bn? yeah right

I wish I could afford their accountants to reduce my tax bill too...

Config file wipe blunder caused deadly Airbus A400M crash – claim

I'm glad the code I work on will never kill anyone. At worse it'll lose a bit of money / reputation for the company, but that's it. Can't be nice for the guys who worked on this.

NASA 'nauts complete another EPIC SPACEWALK to route cables around ISS

Re: Routing cables?

Wasn't that what went wrong with Odyssey / H.A.L. ?

What an ACE-HOLE! This super-software will whip you at poker, hands down

I'm dubious with the fact it was trained against itself. Yes it might play the perfect logical way, but playing against humans is a different kettle of fish altogether and is what makes poker interesting. It might be able to play billions of hands and come out ahead, but what happens when it just plays 30 hands against a human?

Ex-Microsoft Bug Bounty dev forced to decrypt laptop for Paris airport official

Good job...

...she didn't have an icon for minesweeper on the desktop

Mysterious STAR set to appear on Christmas Eve above Blighty: The ISS

I had a good view in Milton Keynes, but to be honest the planes also in the sky at the same time looked better with their flashing lights.

The Great Smartphone Massacre: Android bloodbath gathers pace

mine is fine

My Samsung S3 is "good enough". When I bought it I paid £285 (Oct 2013) which I felt was too much at the time. I'm certainly going to keep it a few years. I don't want a bigger phone (pocket limitations) and this one seems to work fine, so no temptation to spend more money to update to S5 etc. So no more money from me for quite a while and I know I'm not the only person out there who thinks the same.

Mobe battery flat? These ELECTRIC PANTS will pump things up

Inefficent

Isn't inductive charging inherently lossy? So given the limited supply from a battery surely it makes better sense to have a physical connection to the phone to transfer the power.

I do love my QI charging mat for my S3 though, but that's plugged into the mains. It sucks 1.5Amps from the charger, but the phone only charges at 750ma when sat on the mat (approx) if you plug the phone directly into the charger it definitely charges faster. But for overnight charging that doesn't matter and the convenience outweighs the inefficiency for me.

Japanese finally produce a ROBOT which isn't DEAD INSIDE

Can it get me a beer from the fridge / put a pizza in the oven and bring it to me in the living room? I don't want it to have emotions or tell jokes. Then do the washing up and tidying up afterwards. In short I want Kryten Series 4000 mechanoid.

Britain'll look like rural Albania without fracking – House of Lords report

But...

Linux is still better than Microsoft Windows...

Bravo on the quality of comments on this article!

Heroic Playmonaut wowed by LOHAN's bulging package

Is there going to be a test flight before the high-altitude run? There's a lot to go wrong in there so a shakedown might be useful.

Also looks like there's space for a copilot (or sexy stewardess).

Vertical take-off and laughing: Space Harrier

Blackpool for me.

I remember playing this all afternoon in an arcade in blackpool on a school trip circa 1987. I pretty sure I had the C64 version at the time and was blown away by the arcade machine. I assumed it was hydraulics moving things about not motors, was certainly very effective.

More like this please Reg.

Author Iain (M) Banks falls to cancer at 59

Oh god.

First Pratchett now M. Banks. not going to be reading much in future.