Posts by Misky

Samsung Galaxy S7: Big brand Android flagship champ

Awesome Phone

I've had my S7 Edge for a few weeks now and can't fault it. The instant focus and low light shots make that camera prefect for my use.

The always on clock does have a night mode that can be timed when to move in or out of night mode. On night mode you get a very dull clock, date and battery life on the edge of the phone, and it works perfectly in the dark. Personally I have this on all the time as I don't like the way the big clock jumps about.

I moved from a Note 4 to this and the device is much smaller but the screen real estate is practically the same.

One massive bonus of the S7 comes if you buy the Gear VR... SO much better at tracking than a Google Cardboard or the poser plastic ones, plus the integrated controller works superbly (although you will need a proper games controller for some of the games.

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

When Health and Safety videos get corrupted...

iPad Air2 Screen Sensitivity problem

iPad Air2 Screen Sensitivity problem

Well here’s a strange problem. Lots of people are complaining (including me) about the fact that the touch sensitivity of the screen on the iPad Air 2 goes haywire when the device is being charged. A lot of people have found this only happens when they use a 3rd party charger, however a few (myself included) have found this with the supplied Apple charger. Take the device off charge and the screen works perfectly, plug it in and it becomes all but unusable.

Apple seem to be completely ignoring this issue.

Here’s a thread on the Apple site about it:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6636867?start=45&tstart=0

They really are going to help Android sales with this one…

Sir Terry remembered: Dickens' fire, Tolkien's imagination, and the wit of Wodehouse

So so sad, he was truly a small god.

Boffins grasp Big Knob, get ready to go ALL THE WAY at the LHC proton-punisher

Re: What's the Fucking Point?

But there is the slight chance that Clarkson and Hopkins might breed in the ensuing collision, the fears of the LHC creating a blackhole that engulfs the earth and ends humanity is mild by comparison.

Jaguar F-Type: A beautiful British thoroughbred

Re: Fast cars?

I know the feeling, my daily runner is a Marcos Mantis, you basically sit just next to the back wheels and the rest is several meters of bonnet. It's a magnificently impractical car (even though the boot is huge and great for shopping).

With the F-type it’s nice to see Jag have finally got something that can match the V8 Vantage in looks and style after so many failed attempts.

Apple 'hires' the 'A-Team' from car titans, they DO SAY: Let's modify the 'van'!

iCar

or is it the iVan? Either way it will be great for a year, then they'll upload a new OS that will slow it to half the speed. So now you have to buy the iVan2.

But then is that any worse than a Google car that will listen to everything you say and keep pinging up adverts as you drive along?

ATTENTION SETI scientists! It's TOO LATE: ALIENS will ATTACK in 2049

The Reply...

"Hay humunz, totes amazeballs tu here from yuz!!!!! Seez yuz soon Gliese 581 xox"

Secret Service on alert after drone CRASHES into White House

Just a large Air Vortex Cannon will do, and no collateral damage. Literally blow it out of the sky.

Switch it off and on again: How peers failed to sneak Snoopers' Charter into terror bill

WOW!

I'm honestly shocked by the fact that these people have stood up and openly said "I don't know anything about this, I'm totally ignorant of what this is and have no idea of the ramifications, I'm a clueless buffoon with a knowledge of the subject that would embarrass a dead fetid badgers ass, but “terrorists”, so make it law".

Stop the world I want to get off!

It's 2015 and default creds can brick SOHO routers

Top Solution

Unplug interweb, go live in cave.

Or just assume like I do that the LAN/WLAN is already compromised and secure everything to a level worthy of the data it holds. Then have a plan for when it all goes wrong.

Having a families worth of phones, laptops, tablets, TV’s, Media stations at home, all hooked up to a WLAN, you have a myriad of potential attack vectors that someone can use. The wife opening zero day viruses in phishing emails, dodgy apps little jim-bob downloads on his iThing to cheat in Minecraft, darling Sarah handing out her Google-drive password to mates to share her mp3’s, through to someone hacking your ADSL router. So many routes in, it’s safer to assume you’ve already been compromised in some way and go from there.

SCREW you, GLASSHOLES! Microsoft unveils HoloLens

Better Than Life, here we come!

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: 1.5 MILLION SCOVILLE masala omelette

Blair's 6 A.M.

Having played the "who bottles it first" going up the scale of extreme chilli tasting, I did get to Blair's 6 A.M. I can honestly say I didn't just go blind, I actually went deaf trying this stuff. I kid you not, I actually had ringing in my ears for about 5 minutes! If you don't believe me, give it a go. Your body literally goes into shock and start to close down non-vital senses. I can also say I have no intentions of trying the hyper rare Blair's 16 Million Reserve…

Icelandic brewers knock up whale 'nad beer

Well it's not so removed from most beers. Isinglass or Fish Swim Bladders are used in the concotion process of most beers and wines these days to get rid of the cloudy look. Nom nom nom

SpaceX in ROCKET HOVERSHIP PRANG: 'Close – but no cigar,' says Musk

And we have Splatdown... damn.

Still a very good effort considering the task they are trying to accomplish. This is the kind of thing only private enterprise could have come up with. Can you imagine any of the space agencies agreeing in a concept meeting to and engineer who says "The rocket goes up, separates, then drops back to earth with pinpoint precision, but wait it gets better, then it hovers and lands on a boat!"... "OK thanks for the presentation Frank..." *hushed whisper* "is he still taking his medication?"

Sony post-mortem: Obama lobbies for new legal powers to thwart hackers

So this was (if believe the bollox) an illegal act, committed by an unfriendly government state on a company that basically left the keys in the front door with a big sign saying "please rob me", and the solution is to make more laws about privacy for students? Right....

NASA closing on fix for Opportunity rover's 'amnesia'

New OS huh?

Just wait for the new version to install and then they find out the interface is buggered and theirs no Start button... Patches ahoy!

Car-crash IT: HUGE write-off for Universal Credit - PAC

Job?

So where do I go to get a job, collect £600,000,000, to provide a half-baked database, then get away with it by making a monkey in a suit say "it'll save BILLLIONS"?

It's like legalized fraud on and epic scale!

Virgin Media customers suffer YET MORE YouTube buffering blues

Still a happy chappy

I've been hooked up since the old Blue Yonder days when they knew what customer service meant. However even now it's VM I've had very few problems. Admittedly I don't bother using their DNS, and only use their router as a passthrough to a proper router.

Yotaphone 2: The two-faced pocket-stroker with '100 hours' batt life

Fantastic idea!

What a brilliant concept. This phone deserves to do well. If it weren’t for the fact I love the big screen size of my Note3 I’d be really interested in one of these.

As has been said it would be great if someone came up with an Eink phone cover to replace the back covers of phones to replicate this idea. But then I’d guess it would be a bit fiddly to hook it in as a second screen for most phones.

I just hope this doesn’t die a death and some of the big firms licence the concept to come out with their own version. Having an Eink back on a Note3 size device would be incredible!

Seagate adds FIFTY PER CENT more capacity to new NAS drive

Great News

As someone who rather stupidly built a home media server using WD Green drives (both drives in the mirrored pair failed on the same day... Doh), these things will be fantastic. Currently I'm running on the last gen of the Seagate NAS drives, and have had no problems. OS on an SSD and a few of these for storage works a treat.

They are fast enough for media data store type tasks, and now big enough too at 6TB. The ones I have are nice and quiet too, which is important in the home. The ineteresting thing is the NAS optimization, basically it just makes the spinning rust more reliable for 24/7 running. I did read an article on it when they came out, but can't remember the specifics.

A few of these may well be on the Chrimbo list.

Evil US web giants shield terrorists? Evil spies in net freedom crush plot?

In fact....

All the Government and huge media outcry has manage to do is tell terrorist exactly how TO communicate. Forget encrypted email, keep lowkey and use Facebook, we'll never find you then.

So Mr Snowden

It would appear that you are correct that the spy agencies have these lovely data collecting tools, and do it would seem, use them. Just a shame for them that it’s pretty much impossible to collect ALL the data flowing on the internet (They’d have to turn the UK in to one massive SAN) and have no real means of searching that little bit of data they do scoop up.

It seems that the chances of some nosy bod in GCHQ having read your latest twitter update about the yummy sandwich, is practically zero.

Big Brother simply isn’t big enough or bothered enough to be watching you.

What's MISSING on Amazon Fire Phone... and why it WON'T set the world alight

Target Market?

So you get a midrange phone that hooks you in to the Amazon eco-system and only the Amazon eco system, replaces a standard interface with a "learn how to use it all over again" interface and charge a premium price.

Who are their target market?

Even in the States they couldn't find enough people who wanted "One o' them 3D phone-i-ma-jigs"!

Technology quiz reveals that nobody including quiz drafters knows anything about IT

Odd Choice

What an odd choice of questions. From the obscure Browser question to the inane iPhone question. Did they write hundreds of question on raffle tickets then pick 12 out of a hat?

No more lies, T-Mobile US: Download speed caps magically vanished on speed test websites

Shocked? Not really

I was shocked by the fact I wasn't shocked by this news. It's a sad indication of corporate culture today that treating customers so badly is expected. It's just incredible to think there must have been high level management meetings where the aim was specifically to deceive their customers. The very people that hand over hard earned cash to make their corporate fat profits. It’s sad that you can bet that most people will just accept it and won’t move to another provider.

It’s one of the reasons that I make a point of walking away from companies that provide shoddy services. And why I’m pleased to work for a company that truly believes in being the best for customer services and looking after the customer. It’s a rare thing in this day and age.

Gran Turismo 6: Another glossy, gorgeous Mario Kart on steroids

Meh

Again they left out the Marcos Mantis. Even TOCA had that most beautiful of cars in.

BT network-level STOCKINGs-n-suspenders KILLER arrives in time for Xmas

50 Shades of inappropriate content

So would a simple freedom of information request leave you with a list of every p0rn site on the planet right now? And I wonder if they come with ratings?

What about other content? You can get all the p0rn you would ever need from Torrens, Newsgroups, to name but a few. Then we move on to the question of the written word? Will we see Amazon banned for selling 50 Shades of awful writing or Google Play for hosting free samples of such books? Who exactly decides if site x is smutty but site y isn't?

Will this lead to divisions in the classroom? Only the smarter, more IT literate kids getting their thrills online, the rest have to find it the old way, railway sidings, or under the bushes?

Good luck Snap Chat...

Coroner suggests cars should block mobile phones

Drive loud convertibles

Simple answer get a Marcos Mantis like me. Being convertible and sounding like a Spitfire taking off, there is no way you can use of phone, hands free or not! Admittedly a simple drive to work would quickly become a Darwinian death ride from hell. But hey at least no one would be on their phones.

OH what a LOVELY, well-rendered WAR: Yes, it’s 'Call of Duty: Ghosts'

Just like the iPad Air

It's just like the iPad Air, it's just another CoD. A bit more polished round the edges and comes with a free dog. But it's not going to learn any new tricks.

iPAD AIR WORLD DEBUT: Our Australian team gets an early fondle

Hmmmm

Well I've had my iPad 2 for a couple of years and still find it great (if annoying when I want to play flash videos, yes, yes, there's an app for that, but still). But I'm not a fanboy, as I ditched my iPhone 4s for a Galaxy S3, then Note II, and now Note 3, because they were just better than the iPhone.

Sadly Android based pads haven't quite made it to that stage yet, and the iPad Air still seems king of the hill. Just a shame there is no slot for a MicroSD, and apart from weight, size, screen res and a smoother scrolling experience, (none of which will make a huge difference to my life) there's nothing really new. (and please don't say anything about the camera, you look ridicules holding a pad up to take photos)

Come on Samsung, Sony and the others, I don't want to buy into the Rotten Fruit Merchants for my next 2 years on contract, but it's looking like I may have to. And Apple, ok I know adding an SD slot would mean you couldn't charge the huge markup you do on the internal memory levels, but it would have made me a lot more happy about choosing the Air.

How I BLEW my co-workers' HEADS OFF ... without going to jail

Active Directory

Oh the joys of being an AD admin, making a little OU here and their, adding a lovingly tailored GPO to it and dumping your mates computer and user accounts into it!

The next day when he boots his laptop to discover the startup theme is the entire Magic Roundabout theme tune, then enters a world of nightmares when he discovers everything has moved, changed, or just isn't there any more.

Ah such evil delights :)

Oh the days

Well back in the day it was superglueing a stack of AOL CD's together to make a rather nice office hockey puck.

The second liners used to play Black Jack to see who had to do "The Call From Hell" that day.

Wrapping EVERYTING on someone's desk (inc. monitors, mice, fans, pens, everything) in newspaper before they came in. Filling umbrellas with holepunch clippings, removing the balls from the mice (yeah that old), moving all the wireless mice to different peoples desks.

Then we discovered low powered Airsoft guns (not the high power ones, we discovered they break LCD's :/ ), oh the fun of datacenter battles.