Posts by RobDog

Keeping yesterday's computers ticking takes more than nostalgia

Re: Interesting Resource...

Adrian’s Digufal Basement too highly recommended

LinkedIn realizes its users have been bathing in AI slop, offers a shower

“I’m proud and thrilled to announce…”

Either…

- that I’ve come back to work after maternity leave and looking forward to getting on with the job I’m paid for

- that xyzcorp has deigned me worthy of employment and I’m looking forward to working with a great team I’ve never met and here’s a list of butt-kissing credits naming the interviewers

- that xyzcorp gave me a great interview and I’m grateful for that chance even though I didn’t get the job but maybe they will not reject me a second time if I post this

- that I’ve now moved on from greyfaced role at xyzcorp ‘looking for a new challenge’, anyone willing to take a chance on me because I’m panicking but also don’t believe in applying for jobs, instead believing my own hype in how important I am in the belief that people will reach out to me and that LinkedIn is the be all and end all of modern recruitment

And finally the worst part…

Getting an email that claims ‘Someone has messaged you in LinkedIn’ only to login and find it’s some stupid nonsense as.

It’s rubbish. It’s nothing like what it purports to be. And for $ A MONTH.

A requiem for Optane, Intel's KV cache killer that could have eased the RAM price crunch

Same here

A HP budget laptop I bought has it installed. I never knew until I had to reinstall it and needed special drivers.

Manager showed off his DOS prowess – with a command that wiped data

Re: Oops

Yep there you go

Re: Oops

Strangely enough, I heard this apocryphal tale about 38 years ago when I first started working in IT, only it occurred at a conference IBM were hosting and featured a new board for the PS2 or something.

Swiss train maker tells ransomware crooks to get off at the next stop

Re: Probably the best response

Its not as if its its old news though is it? Parts bin and cross-model parts use has been around forever. GenZ is just discovering it and expressing their faux indignation just like with everything else that seems to offend them.

Support newbie figured out how to avoid all-nighters, and his colleagues hated him for it

Re: Weekend update

Pager, not lager

Weekend update

I worked for a company on a team of 6 and joined the weekly on call rota except we had one pager we to hand on each Monday morning, But for some reason, the on call period started Saturday night for 7 nights….so e.g. a weekend away was impossible for two people as this weekend was disrupted, plus the person with the lager would get paged on Sunday when they were no longer on call.

My first week, I asked ‘why are doing this? Why isn’t on-call running from Monday morning?’

The murmuring did not include any valid reasons why. We changed the following week.

Microsoft intros tech that rebuilds dead PCs without requiring local copies of Windows

Re: Mac FTW?

Just because you can’t remember it doesn’t make it arcane, it’s 3 keys in combination as far as I can remember which makes them impossible to press accidentally or by resting items on the keyboard. Works absolutely fine on my Intel MBP.

Microsoft once used its own brand of 'Lego' to optimize Windows

Where are the rest?

Was Dave Plummer the only person at Microsoft? Where are the others? He seems to have written everything?

Techie expensed a bag of oranges and then juiced up a stupid security incident

A Goalkeeper’s Revenge

Brilliant reading from my youth. I bought it for my son. Spit Nolan made him sad.

Marketing demanded IT add website feature that was already working

Re: Been there, done that

Theft by any other name.

Plex appeal fades as Lifetime Pass jumps to $750

Serviio for the win

Stays in its lane - serves your media. You can have remote access to your media via the web for $30 licence fee.

PowerPoint punishment sent users into an infinite loop after lunch

Back to the future

On a Saturday, there was fun to be had in WHSmith with the C64 on display, by knocking up a quick BASIC program which showed the same as the power on display (memory and Ready prompt) RUN it, turn up the TV volume to 11 then wander off to skulk a safe distance to observer. As soon as a customer hit a key, then all hell would break loose - scrolling message, flashing screen and border and whoop whoop noise. Confused and flustered customer and possibly staff who had no idea how to resolve. Hahahaha!

Magnificent irony as Meta staff unhappy about running surveillance software on work PCs

The irony is delicious

For a guy to object so strongly to having his picture taken and used, whose main business was based on scraping pictures from face books, is breathtaking in its hypocracy.

Linux 7.1 will have an optional new NTFS driver

Re: Ownership nonsense

Never heard of this one, not once.

Obsolete Google nag drowns out vital bar information at Swedish concert hall

UKOGB world famous and going for years

Hilariously funny and very clever and entertaining. Well worth a view. They seem to be always touring.

Re: The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.

The UKOGB are far, far from sleep-inducing boredom. I’ve seen them several times and their act is extremely funny, entertaining and clever. Well worth a watch.

Contractor quaffed his way through Y2K compliance while the client scowled

Lunchtime o’ booze

The company in the City I worked for had its own Brasserie, with fully stocked bar, and you could book private rooms with waited service for ‘clients’. My first day there with my new team, we went to lunch and got absolutely spannered in the Brasserie bar. Not the only time. It’s gone now. The City now just looks like any other town centre.

Norway's Consumer Council takes aim at enshittification

Re: Brilliant

It’s much, much funnier that BOFH, which is hardly funny at all

Apple's budget-friendly MacBook Neo is bursting with color and compromise

Re: Down with the cool kids

How does one ‘refurbish’ a Mac exactly?

1 log off from iCloud

2 wipe and reinstall MacOS

3 remove the stickers from the lid and

4 wipe the outside with a damp cloth

Done. Add 200 quid to the price you bought it for.

Isn’t 13 the minimum age here?

An 8 year old speaks

Break free of Ring's servers, earn a five-figure bounty

Just dont buy Ring

I have a TP-Link door bell that only saves data either locally (or optionally to its little hub). Wireshark confirms this, nothing sent upstream. Cheaper and under my control. Yes ok, I know the stories around TP-Link.

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

He did a good job with that one

I remember from my days in desktop support, mid 90s, there were definitely monitors with paperclip chains on them in the Marylebone Road office of a now defunct department store. I never asked why but I distinctly remember them

Microsoft veteran explains the one weird trick that made Windows 95 restart faster

Can’t avoid POST

If you mean POST in the way it’s widely understood ie memory checks etc then that option to run short or full POST is set in the BIOS and is run by the motherboard. WindOWS 95 never had access to the BIOS to alter that or anything else.

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

Re: The Key to Everything

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch_recalls

Re: The Key to Everything

Your mechanics had good judgement, here’s why

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch_recalls

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

If you've ripped CDs then the tag content...

....is down to you and easily remediated, but you'll have to burn new CDs.

audiograbber is a great bit of CD ripping free software I've been using for years that gets the CD info from freedb

mp3tag is a great bit of mp3 tag editing free software I've been using for years.

Techie turned the tables on office bullies with remote access rumble

Re: Neat trick

I stopped reading BOFH years ago because it’s rubbish

Keeping Windows and macOS alive past their sell-by date

Re: You don't need a "part 2"

Everyday Windows users don’t understand Linux and can’t sort themselves if something goes wrong.

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

Banking, your early morning call sir

Yep I supported the dealing platforms for a small but high-profile bank for this event. Months and months of prep, upgrading the many bespoke applications that had been running for years. They put me up in a hotel up the road at considerable expense as you’d imagine. I was a little keyed up about things, not the technical side but the reporting upwards side if anything went wrong…5am on site start… I went to bed nice and early and didn’t touch the mini-bar…and at 1am some dickhead pulled the fire alarm…we got evacuated and had to mill about outside for an hour. Obviously no chance of any more sleep so I showered and went in at 4am to witness - nothing. They noted my attendance and thanked me for my service with a generous OT rate. I’m still working for the same company.

What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

Your 4 downvotes

They say it all. The people who downvoted revel in that jargon crap and gatekeep Linux for themselves

Re: Happy Mint user here

So you haven’t actually ditched windows then

Re: I disagree almost entirely

Microsoft has clearly been in cahoots with Intel for years, each telling your you PC is ‘old’ and somehow slowed down (because Windows patches were written to do that over time) to get you to buy a new one, which feeds both their profits. It’s obvious even if I can’t prove it.

Re: re : Chromebooks "are the path toward the desktop."

“ It wasn't easy, but I figured it out,”. THAT is the reason why Linux has not yet made a big impact on the desktop market, consumer or business..

Less is more

Few distros required with fewer bewildering options, and some of the persistent issues fixed once and for all. There’s too much variety and that makes it unappealing to the non-tech, while will need a personal techntommanage their desktop for them. And, dare I say it, it just isn’t consumer friendly. I’ll get hammered for that but we are all tech people who thrive in the challenges in tech, it’s why we do the job. Punters don’t want that, they just want things to work, and Linux desktop just isn’t friendly enough for them.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Definition of mothing

In this case meant ‘nothing…i recognise or deem useful.’

Standard user practice, better get used to it.

Windows 11 needs an XP SP2 moment, says ex-Microsoft engineer

Must be more than just him

Surely others helped write Windows. Where are they?

Old-school rotary phone dials into online meetings, hangs up when you slam it down

Re: I have some old phones

Those sound like Don Martin sound effects from MAD magazine

AI: The ultimate slacker's dream come true

Exam passes by learning answers not the subject

Makes me sick.

So does ChatGPT and CoPilot, enabling people to fool people that the are doing a job they really have no entitlement too, because they haven’t put the effort into learning the subject. Call me a dinosaur but I avoid it like the plague in my daily role, unless I am conforming to my own standards.

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

Way too many

“ There are an almost ridiculous number of Windows-style desktops on Linux”

Yes there are, and too many distros, and those two facts hinder the take up of Linux.

Also, Linux has the problem that if something unexpected happens whilst e.g. installing something, the way back out to repair or replace it uninstall is very often unclear at best and at worst a mish mash of ‘techie’ geek nonsense. It’s what makes Linux appear the reserve of nerds but their sneering, competitive you-know-nothing-i-know-more-than-you attitude is equally unhelpful.

I use MacOS Windows and Linux in equal measure, since all of them were invented. I don’t have a preference, but Incan see why Linux isn’t more popular than it is.

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

I’ve got them all

Win, Lin, Mac I don’t care I’ll use whatever to it’s strengths and I don’t let any of them define me.

‘IT manager’ needed tech support because they had never heard of a command line

She knew lots about comp-uters

Opening emails, clicking, reading emails….

Get paid like a prime minister to tame Home Office IT chaos

Too big for one person

That is all

'Trained monkey' from tech support saved know-it-all manager's mistake with a single keypress

Yep managers like that

Encountered them over and over, seems to me they can’t compete with years of solid technical knowledge and their only weapon is to belittle and condescend.

Peep show: 40K IoT cameras worldwide stream secrets to anyone with a browser

Re: It all wears rather thin

From Blackadder on German spies:

“Filthy Hun weasels fighting their dirty underhand war! [And, fortunately,] one of our spies Splendid fellows, brave heroes, risking life and limb for Blighty…”

Techies thought outside the box. Then the boss decided to take the box away

Re: Shredder

Given that dogs on average have a life expectancy of 12-15 years, when you take on a pet dog you’re basically committing to watching it grow up and die, more than likely well before you do. Looking at it that way, KNOWING that at some point you’ll be saying goodbye to an unconditionally loyal being that just loves you from day 1 - why would anyone sign up to begin with? Crazy. Didn’t stop me.

LastOS slaps neon paint on Linux Mint and dares you to run Photoshop

Re: Linux is never Windows.

My mum doesn’t care, as long as the tools she needs to do what she wants, are found where she expects to find them and look how she expects they will. So putting a Linux on her PC that looks like Windows is fine with her and me, if it saves her a few hundred quid.

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Re: Is this all Yorkshiremen?

“You try telling that to the young people of today - they won’t believe you!”

Re: "Home users don't use Illustrator, Photoshop, Xcode or Autocad or one of those hundred..."

Then you’re back to suffering Windows but an older crashier version