Posts by EddieC

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

BASIC on home PCs came later for me

I first learned BASIC on a PDP-10 that I connected to via teleprinter. Wrote a pretty decent Pontoon game on it. Gave me a real leg up when I started at University with learning Fortran, then at work writing COBOL for a living. What cured me of using GOTOs wasn't Dijkstra, it was trying to understand deliberately obfuscated code written by a paranoid alcoholic for a voice response system which used EVERYTHING.

Microsoft admits Outlook crashes, says impact 'mitigated'

Hardly a surprise

I'd be grateful if they could hold off on fixing this until Friday evening, it would greatly improve my productivity for the day.

Spam is back with a vengeance. Luckily we can't read any of it

Most of my spam is in French

When I check my spam folder it is always at least 50% in French. No idea why. It's been that way for nearly a decade. It is the only language other than English I've ever been taught, though as that was over 4 decades ago,I barely know it well enough to read any more, though now thanks to the spam I know the names of a lot of French supermarkets and banks.

Help, my IT team has no admin access to their own systems

Re: snips, we don't need no snips

As I recall, the hardware upgrade involved removing a jumper from a board rather than cutting a wire, and the associated Upgrade Part consisted of the empty foam-lined cardboard box that the removed jumper could be put into before being returned to stores. Saw one of those being done back in the day.

The rocky road to better Linux software installation: Containers, containers, containers

Minutes rather than seconds?

That would be a positive feature for me, at my age I need more loo breaks.

The Reg's desert XP-ocalypse aversion plan revealed

Paint.net not Gimp

Paint.net has much less of a learning curve than The Gimp, it's free, and it does everything most users need.

+1 for 7-zip and LibreOffice.

Kobo Arc 10HD: The bookworm's fondleslab?

So no built-in PDF app

But it does have the full Google Play store, so I'd have the choice of Adobe Reader for Android, PDF Reader, Foxit Mobile, or the open source Android PDF Viewer. Most of these have free versions and doubtless there are others. Or you could go for a suite that also does PDF, such as Polaris, OfficeSuite or DocumentsToGo. If you can't find a PDF app for an Android box with Google Play, you're not really trying.