Posts by Andy Taylor 395 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jul 2007
This happens often with my customers who have rarely used MFA set up on their main inbound number, the one that is answered by an IVR.
Usually they have to temporarily set the number to call an extension to receive the code.
Why the verification can only done by phone I don't know - looking at you, Microsoft.
Many years ago we had a 2.4GHz wireless TV link in a house we were renting. For some unknown reason the aerial socket was in the smallest bedroom on the wrong side of the house.
Every time next door's microwave was turned on the TV signal broke.
I recently attended a talk on nuclear fusion where the speaker, who had worked on the Joint European Torus in Oxfordshire, told the story of the time something unexpected happened during an experiment that resulted in the entire device shifting a few mm. The JET lab got a call from Oxford University's Seismology Department asking if they had been running an experiment. The movement of the torus had thrown all the University seismographs out of alignment.
This was famously how the first iPhone demo made sure the handset wouldn't crash. That and swapping between phones during the demo.
The iPhone was announced months before release, which was very unusual for Apple. Normally it's "here's our new product, available today/tomorrow/2weeks from now"*
* not counting the vapourware charging mat and Apple Intelligence for which we are still waiting.
I would imagine that the user unlocked their phone with the password on the working version of iOS then updated it to the broken one.
Since the update process reboots the device, it will disable Face/Touch ID and require the PIN or password to be entered to re-enable it. This was now an impossible task because of the missing character.
Plugging in to a computer would not work either because that requires the PIN/Password too.
The only way out is a factory reset and then restore from backup.
Back up your data folks.
See also: Strap On (fnarr fnarr) and Strap Off, referring to the anti-static wristbands which must be worn at all times except when working on live equipment.
Repairing machines, had several shocks from touching iMac power supplies which were helpfully installed board side out with no insulation, so you couldn't easily see where the mains connection was.
I have used the term appeasement engineer many times.
I'm still sad I can't find the BOFH quiz where some of the answers were "I have everything I need in the car" which was an excuse for the engineer to go back to their car and drive away, quickly.
IIRC there was something about recognising an experienced printer repair person because they would have the scars from getting their tie caught in the rollers.
I grew up in West Reading and school lessons were regularly interrupted by the scheduled LHR>JFK journey. Concorde was so loud you couldn't hear the teacher.
I was fortunate to get the chance to pilot the Concorde simulator when it was still at Filton and the cockpit was moveable. They had recently upgraded the visual system from a map and camera (no really) to a computer display. I got to take off from JFK, circle round and land again (with assistance from the instructor).
This simulator is now at Brooklands in a static configuration. "flights" cost from £335 for 15 minutes at the controls.
Having spent many years in support, the most valuable lessons I have learned is to pitch your conversation to the customer's level of experience/knowledge, to ask the right questions and never to assume that the first line checks have been completed.
More than 20 years ago I worked at a large NGO that had outsourced its IT to an external supplier. Computers were so locked down you couldn't even install a new printer without assistance from support.
They put trainees on our helpdesk and moved them to other accounts as soon as they became competent, replacing them with other newbies. The only thing you could reliably get out of them was the weather forecast for the next day or so - the helpdesk was located to the west of our office.
I eventually set my laptop up to dual boot into a copy of Windows I could actually control myself.
It's not particularly thin where the camera is, is it?
The "trick" appears to be to put as much as possible in the thicker part near the top, make the battery as thin as possible and then trumpet the thickness of the thinnest part.
It's more or less what they did with the early Macbook Air models, although they didn't have a massive bulge.
Mend-it Mark is a repair genius. Also check out his "banned" video which resulted in a copyright strike because he had the temerity to accurately describe the innards of a £25k amplifier as no better than a student project,
I've told this story before, but back in 2012 whilst working on a Fruit Store opening in Germany, we learned the hard way that TVs designed for the US market don't routinely come with universal power supplies. A step-down transformer had been shipped with the TV but was missed out. I was impressed that the TV lasted several hours before failing. I don't remember it going bang either.
We had an identical TV couriered from another Fruit Store on the other side of the country to ensure we had the complete window display working for opening day.
Once place I worked had a strict procurement policy - all computers had to be purchased by the IT department who had no budget left when we wanted a machine.
So we ordered the components and built our own "data logger" industrial machine which if I recall correctly cost about 3 or 4 times the price of a single PC at the time.
I came here to mention this one, a clear case of a bogus copyright claim just because someone was upset their little audiophool product was exposed as not being worth a 1/100th of its retail price.
Also there was a recent case where the content creator got a strike on his 10s audio intro so got a fully licenced recording to replace it yet still got another strike
And some time ago the BBC went after the excellent FranLab because she posted NASA video which the BBC had used in an old Horizon programme. The issue here being that all NASA video and images are in the Public Domain.
The entire system is broken, which is why many content creators are using alternative platforms (looking at you Big CLive).
I think my fastest ever fix which was not one of the above was a site visit to an old CD ROM network server which had multiple physical CD drives which were not being read. Every single disc was covered in a thin layer of dust and a simple eject/wipe/insert for each drive was all that was needed.
Not any more, most modern systems do not need a prefix to be dialled for external calls.
Best practice for phone systems is use 4 digit extensions.
If the customer insists on 3 digits, ensure numbers are all between 200 and 899 to avoid any conflicts with emergency services/special numbers such as 101, 105, 109, 111 etc.
"The Titanium PowerBook G4 was the Apple laptop that broke the curvy plastic mould in favour metal rectangles. Polycarbonate, albeit white, would live on for a bit in rectangular Macbooks and iMacs, colourful polycarbonate having a last hurrah in the iPhone 5C..."\
All the plastic MacBooks cracked, every single one. 2006 models around the edge of the keyboard, unibody machines around the Ethernet port and display hinges.
This was also the method for the original Concorde simulator. I visited Filton in 1991 and had a go in the simulator (take-off, circle, land at JFK airport) with the more recently installed computer generated display. I only needed a little help with the landing.
The computer room was mostly taken up with the older physics simulator part of the system (complete with paper tape readers) with all of the graphics being handled by a single rack in the corner.
"Then they got on with the rest of the play (which was actually really good)."
This must be a different play to the one I remember then, a play so boring that I once missed a lighting cue as I hadn't noticed the actors had all gone off stage.
The most interesting thing about it was programming the shiny new computer lighting system to "flicker" some candle bulbs for added realism.
Alan Turing’s sole contribution to Colossus was
recommending Tommy Flowers (who actually designed Colossus) as a Suitable
Person to look at the problem. Turing made valuable contributions to the Bombe machines which help break Enigma. By 1943 he was at Hanslope Park working on speech encryption (Delilah).
Starship was trialled in London but first operated in Milton Keynes where there were around 200 robots last time I checked. Now also in Northampton, Cambridge, Bedford, Leeds and Manchester plus other countries including Finland and Estonia.
I came here to say this too. Applause.
Re. the old school upgrades, many computers back in the day were made to a particular specification and then crippled to reduce performance after demands from marketing/sales.
Often an "upgrade" to an old mainframe was to *remove* whatever was slowing the machine down.
I'm sure I have posted this before but when working at an about to open fruit store, we discovered the hard way that not all TVs have universal power supplies. It was for a window display and had been shipped from the US *with* a power converter but was plugged directly in to 230V. The most remarkable thing is that it lasted nearly a whole day before failing. A replacement was sent overnight from another store at great expense.
Appeasement Engineer
"Because he's NEW and ALONE, he's what you call an appeasement engineer, the new guy they send so they respond within the 4 hour guaranteed response period. (Things are getting better and better) Your average appeasement engineer is about as clued-up on computers as the average computer "hacker" is about B.O, and their main job is to make sure the power plug is in and switched on, then call back to the office for "PARTS". The really keen ones will sometimes even take a cover off the equipment and pretend that they see this stuff all the time. I wonder what sort today's is...
DP Review informed my first DSLR purchase in 2004 (Nikon D70) and all subsequent purchases.
I stopped reading or contributing to the forum when I got bored of the "measurebators" and CAG (Camera Acquisition Guys) but still drop in once or twice a week.
Imagine selling your entire Company A system because Company B announced a slightly better camera then selling the entire Company B system to switch back when Company A makes the inevitable upgrade to beat company B's offering...
There are other sites, but I'll miss DPReview.
I am pretty sure I have told this story before. My dad managed the telemetry systems for Thames Water in the 1980s back in the days when they had a 24/7 control room where a duty controller would watch over their domain *and take calls from the public* as well.
At some point the decision was made to install air conditioning and a suitable unit was plumbed in and commissioned. A week or so later my dad went in to see how they were getting on.
"This new airconditioning is rubbish" was the response. On probing further, he established that it was blowing hot when they wanted cold and vice versa.
Further investigation revealed that they didn't understand the controls. They thought the snowflake icon meant "when it's cold" and the sun "when it's hot", not "blow cold air" and "blow hot air".
My dad moved the control to the correct position and all was well again.
Another story from a little later - I used to do a bit of contracting work for Thames Water (thanks dad!) and was asked one day to visit a water treatment works where their shiny new SCADA system wasn't working too well. On arrival I found a PDP-11 sitting in the middle of the main control room which was a massive glass walled room which wouldn't look out of place in a Bond film, but was not air conditioned. The ambient temperature was that of an average greenhouse.
I quickly realised the issue was the poor PDP was overheating, this was fixed by installing some portable cooling, I forget exactly what they did, but it was enough to reduce the machine's temperature to within the operating window.
All the 200x Nvidia powered MacBook Pros were affected and Nvidia paid the bill.
I replaced hundreds of logic boards on up to 6 year old machines when I worked at the fruit store.
One of the Apple-centric YouTube channels featured an early prototype iPhone. It had a plastic screen similar to the iPod Classic - that would have scratched so easily.
When I worked for the fruit shop I worked out several “short cuts”. One particular model of the all-in-one desktop machine shipped with defective hard drives and we had to replace a significant number of these.
The official process involved completely removing the LCD panel to access the drive. I worked out it was possible to simply unscrew the display, unplug one cable and then tip the display onto my chest while I swapped the drive. It saved so much time and reduced the chance of damage to the screen as well.
