Posts by TheFiddler

Gmail is secure. Netflix is secure. Together they're a phishing threat

Guess this has some benefits

So if you register [e-mail] you can then work your way through many free 30 day trials all by working a load of dots through your email address.

Get ready for laptop-tab-smartphone threesomes from Microsoft, Lenovo, HP, Asus, Qualcomm

Sounds a lot like most of the reasons I backed the Planet Gemini, only this thing is stuck with Windows and won't fit in my coat pocket. It'll be interesting if you can replace Windows on them with Linux and make them a potentially much more useful machine.

Total War: Warhammer, Blood Bowl and other Games Workshop table-to-screen delights

One of the best games they ever made...

... was Confrontation, and they gave the rules away in a few copies of White Dwarf back in the day. Once my friends and I discovered that it lead us to drop the rest of the GW titles thanks to it's fast gameplay and developing your gangs. We tried Necromunda when that came out, but it felt too dumbed down from the original, but at least it's release meant we could get proper models for the game rather than adapting models from other things to play it.

Jolla chief quits: Fawning Putin lickspittles to take over?

Re: Jolla hardware and Sailfish software.....

I have to agree, as someone who also got their Jolla from the first crowdfunded batch I've been very happy with it and felt no need to replace it in the interim. I also have a Nexus 4 as a company phone and the thing just feels clunky compared to operating the Jolla.

It's a shame about the lack of native apps, which I think are stalled somewhat by the ease of installing android apps and using them.

I'm keen to get my hands on SFOS 2.0 but am currently resisting the urge to activate early access, still hopefully the tablet should be here soon enough anyway.

I wish Marc Dillon well, as under his leadership Sailfish OS has rolled out as a lovely operating system to use which for me feels much more natural on a phone than the alternates. Hopefully he'll be as successful in his future endeavours.

Jolla cuts hardware biz loose to concentrate on Sailfish licensing

Re: Which?

I got the impression that "hardware partners" would be taking care of the manufacturing.

Who wants a classic ThinkPad with whizzy new hardware? Lenovo would just love to know

Am I the only one who likes the new keyboards?

I actually like the new keyboards, I've got a T430 for work, and have a Thinkpad Yoga for home use, prior to that an X120e which was perfectly comfortable to type on despite the slightly smaller keyboard size. I've still got a Z61m that my wife was using as her daily until recently and an X61 tablet that I keep around as the software that my wife's embroidery machine uses doesn't work on anything beyond Windows XP and the tablet eases the design work. Jumping from chiclet keyboard designed thinkpads back to the oldskool ones I definitely feel that the chiclet keyboards are a step forward. Though I do find myself using an old style Thinkpad usb keyboard on my desktop, it's not that much different to justify the cost of upgrading to a newer chiclet style one.

That said I'll agree that the chassis doesn't feel as tough on the newer ones and the size of the pointless touchpad on the new ones is far too large leaving me palming the mouse around when typing unless I disable it. Which with integrated buttons on the one on my Yoga meant lots of faffing with my xorg configs to disable it and keep the buttons working. I'm glad the wife's new X250 has the proper buttons back for the touchpoint. I'd also love a better resolution 16:10 screen, the screen on my old Z61m still looks cracking even at it's 'low' 1680x1050 resolution. Battery life on the wife's new X250 is amazing, it really does go all day from an overnight charge, something like that in a tank-style thinkpad would be awesome.

Sailfish OS tablet is GO: Fans stuff cash into Jolla's cap in hand

Looking forward to getting mine.

I backed the phone at the start, in part because I liked the OS and preferred how it worked over Android and iOS in it's Nokia incarnations. Sailfish is a wonderful user interface and I much prefer it over everything else I've tried. The only thing I didn't like was that Jolla didn't produce a keyboard other half and have had to wait for the kickstartered TOHKBD in order to get one.

Either way, the preview snippet intrigued me, I was kind of hoping for a new phone with updated hardware. So I watched Marc Dillon's piece at slush and was a bit disappointed with the launch of a tablet. Didn't really fancy it but when I saw the specs for $189 it seemed rude not to. Time will tell whether it'll be a well used device or dust catcher though. In the short term it will nice to see how Sailfish translates to the tablet form factor and screen resolution.

BBC: We're going to slip CODING into kids' TV

How do they plan to keep interest

As someone who has been programming for the last 2 decades and quite enjoyed the time spent, I'm strongly aware that it's not exactly a spectator sport. In fact I'd go as far as to suggest someone typing seemingly random strings of crpytic text into a computer may fall into the category of dull. So I'm struggling to see how they can put together shows that will compel kids to copy the on screen programming that is taking place. The app programming seems a good suggestion but it's a far cry from some copy and paste from a magazine onto your BBC Micro that hooked us in the 80s.

Got a one-of-a-kind N9? Get ready to adopt Meego's baby Sailfish

Still waiting for my Jolla despite ordering on the 28th. Impatience may see me putting this on my N9 later.

Barclays Online OFFLINE: UK bank site, mobile app go titsup for the evening

What I find more amusing is wanting to change to Natwest after their fail earlier in the year, and multiple times last year.

Jolla's Android-aping Sailfish OS smartphones to land in November

Looking forward to this

Feeling the need to replace my N9. Not through any real need, just for a newer shinier shiny. The thing stopping me so far is that both Ios and android have such clunky feeling UIs in comparison to the N9's and the multitasking is abysmal. Jolla should hopefully provide me with a device I can use without swearing at it when trying to use it.

Pop OS X Mavericks on your Mac for FREE while you have LUNCH

Re: Not good

I'm assuming they'll be wanting to kil the Hackintosh community off in the same way they killed off the hardware clones in the 90s. I can see forcing downloads through the Apple store as a good way of doing so rather than letting the Hackintosher's getting their grubby mits on DVDs they can then hack the contents of to boot on the unclean machines.

Lumia 2520: Our Vulture gets his claws on Nokia's first Windows RT slab

Linux

Has anyone succeeded flashing these Windows RT tablets with a Linux distro? The limited Windows RT apps may be a pain but a linux desktop with the accompanying healthy amount of available applications and that battery life would be awesome for the money.

Nokia shows off camera gimmicks to PIMP YOUR PICCIES

Finally those cop shows can be realistic...

...where they randomly sharpen bits of the photos to see what's happening in the background.

Techies with Asperger's? Yes, we are a little different...

Re: Noise pollution

That sounds a lot like me. Too many people talking at once, noisy pubs/locations etc and I just totally zone out of the conversations as it takes far too much effort to isolate the voice stream I want to be concentrating on unless someone has a very distinctive voice. On the flipside I've really good hearing and can hear the high pitched whine of switched power supplies, to the point that trying to get to sleep I wander round turning off phone chargers etc as the whine is too distracting. I'm glad to hear other people suffer from this issue.

Icahn to Cook: 'Buy back $150bn of Apple's stock, or tell me why you won't'

Someone stop this guy

They need to come up with a way to stop this guy "investing" in businesses and trying to tear them down. Maybe if we called his behaviour business terrorism he might get a visit from the nice men who read all our internet traffic.

Ubuntu 13.10: Meet the Linux distro with a bizarre Britney Spears fixation

Re: @ Pete 2 - Reversing Moore's Law

Have to admit, shortly after the release of Unity I sat down and tried each of the main *buntu release DEs and Gnome3 with a view to finding which is best. I gave each DE a week as my daily user and eventually settled on Gnome 3 as my favourite, ironic really as they decided to create Unity rather than move to Gnome 3. On the flip side I do rather like the Unity phone GUI.

Anyway, the point is more that there's a lot of variety out there for people to use, so much so that I see little point in complaining about one distro's direction as there's alternate options for you to try, Unlike with Microsoft where if they decide to change something you either like it or lump it.

Valve aiming to take the joy(sticks) out of gaming with Steam Controller

"The Steam Controller also uses a central high-resolution touch-enabled screen that can display maps, allow users to scroll through menus, or just add extra buttons as needed for individual games. "

Sounds like they are taking the concept of the old Jag Pads and updating them from a button-grid and game based overlay to something more modern. Still won't have me surrendering my keyboard and mouse though.

Samsung unveils Galaxy Note 3: HOT CURVES – the 'gold grill' of smartphone bling

Want to differentiate?

Then give me a proper keyboard built in like the old Nokia Communicators, not something like those crap blackberry keyboards but a decent sized for speedy 2 thumb typing. People seem happy to accept larger phones again so I can't see it being that hard to market.

Valve shows Linux love with SteamOS for gamers

Problem with consoles

The problem I have with consoles is that in the living room they are then fighting against the other members of the house desire to watch TV. There's also that the joypad is a poor control method compared to keyboard and mouse. My PS3, once replaced by a shiny new blu-ray player, actually got more gaming use hooked into the monitor that my gaming rig uses. Granted that still wasn't a huge amount of use, but it was mostly bought for it's blu-ray playback.

Leading from this I can't see the draw for a Steam console as it faces the other console drawbacks and the majority of people already in the Steam ecosystem have gaming PCs already set up for it which will no doubt run better hardware than a low cost SteamOS box would cost. The only vaguely good side to this I see is the chance that they may use this to push Linux porting to more developers, which as a Linux gamer would be nice to see.

Ubuntu penguins strain to squeeze out bug backlog by mobe OS deadline

It's lacking a lot

I've been running the developer preview on a Nexus 4 for a month now. At the moment all that's really working right is the phone and SMS. The built in facebook and twitter feeds have never reliably remembered my account information and many of the other apps seem to open a white or black screen and never finish loading (at least not with my patience). The most glaring omission at this point is the lack of an email client and I can't see hide nor hair of one in the core apps section at Ubuntu's website so the Gmail browser-window-app is pretty much all you have. At least an ability to show if you have unread mail in your mail would be nice. I do like the UI though and that feels rather polished and nice, I'm interested to see if they can bring the rest of the OS up to the level in the next month.