Posts by legless82 56 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Dec 2013
When I last bought a keyboard around 5 years ago I thought my requirements were pretty straightforward.
- Fullsize
- White backlight
- Cherry Brown switches
Amazingly, the Das Keyboard Prime 13 was pretty much the only one I could find at the time that ticked these boxes. 5 years later I'm still very happy with it.
Almost - it was the other way around.
Ford's European Golden Goose is the Transit. It's basically bankrolled the company for at least 3 decades. And it was the V184/V185 Transit programme that funded the Puma engine development to replace the York 2.5DI 'banana' engine used in the previous generation. Transit then launched with the Puma around 4 months ahead of the CD132 Mondeo back in 2000.
Launch capacities were 2.4L (for the RWD variants) and 2.0L for the FWD variants. The 2.2L version came later as part of Euro-4 related development.
Source: I'm grey enough to have been on the Puma programme team (and subsequently the Lion V6/V8 and aborted V10) c.25 years ago now
what the actual problem was.
The numbers that resulted didn't seem to make sense even when running through some conversion, so I can't help but wonder if there's a really crude flat file involved in the data interface where either the column order changed or some separators got missed.
It'll flash the speed limit at me and give me a gentle, but irritating 'bonging' sound if I'm going above the speed limit. It won't do anything more than that though.
Now, I generally have no problem with this if it works as intended, but I have found the following problems:
- The GPS data seems to think that a local road has a 30mph limit. It doesn't - it's a 40mph limit and has been for at least the last 10 years
- The GPS data also seems to retain what was a long-term, but temporary, 50mph limit on a section of the M1 that is on my commute. The fact that the limit was there for some roadworks that haven't been there for a couple of years doesn't seem to matter
- A local road runs parallel to the West Coast Main Line. At one particular point, the camera picks up the 125mph speed limit board on the railway line. Not so bad for speed limiter purposes, but alarming if I have the adaptive cruise control in full reactive mode
- The camera also has a tendency to pick up the speed limit roundels on the back of continental lorry trailers
Fortunately, disabling it is a simple 2-button press when I start the car, which I've now committed to muscle memory
No, I mean private driveway
Even if you restrict it to private driveways, you're still talking over 60%, making those who can't charge at home on a private driveway the minority group here.
Nevertheless, there are options out there even if you can't charge at home. One of my colleagues is in this position yet still has an EV - he uses a combination of workplace charging and rapid charging at the local supermarket when he's doing his weekly shop, and not had any problems yet. The infrastructure is growing.
This is viable to a very limited number of people who are in privileged position to have a drive way or a dedicated space for their car where they can charge it.
The 'very limited number of people' being c.70% of the UK population who have off-street parking, you mean?
Imagine having yet another, completely unnecessary thing to do in your day, to add to the pile of things you have to do. This is a non starter. 30 seconds sounds benign on the surface and perhaps sometimes you can do this ad hoc, just put some shoes on plug it in, done. But it's something you have to have on your mind.
I've driven EVs for 4 years and c.60,000 miles now. This is a completely baseless argument. I've never had to 'remember to plug it in'. It's just something that I do when I return home at the end of my journey. Get out of the car, plug the cable in (takes <10 secs), open the boot, grab my bag and lock the car. It just becomes part of the parking up routine. Plugging the charging cable in isn't something you do as an isolated activity.
When I wake the next morning (while it's recharged overnight at 7.5p/kWh), I have a full battery again and can go wherever I want. I can guarantee I've spent far, far less time in the last 4 years plugging a charging cable in compared with having to make visits to petrol stations. I've also only ever had to use public charging precisely once - on a day where I needed to cover 350 miles in a single day. Popped into a motorway service area on my way home, plugged it into a GridServe charger and by the time I'd gone for a toilet break and my wife had bought a coffee (approx 15 minutes), I had the additional 100 miles of range I needed to get home and I was on my way. It literally didn't take me any longer than if I'd stopped without needing to charge.
Even as late as 2003, I was one of only 3 people of my 65-strong degree cohort to get a first. On reflection, at any objective level, the additional work needed to get that over the 2:1 just wasn't worth it. It was just as a consequence of studying a subject that I really enjoyed.
Now, it's got to the stage where graduate employers are specifically asking for a first.
It's typical Musk hyperbole that's led to this. Ask the average person in the street, and they'd probably tell you that Tesla i the leader in this type of technology.
Back in the real world, in this household we have a Tesla and a lowly VW Golf. Contrary to popular opinion, the Golf's driver assistance systems are ahead of those on the Tesla, and I wouldn't even trust those for any hands-free driving.
Possibly somewhere in academia / public sector.
I worked for a university 15 years ago that was still very much a Novell house - Netware / NDS / GroupWise / NPS.
To be fair, apart from GroupWise being awful, the rest of it was fairly stable and performant.
I have a fairly high-end Logitech wireless mouse, which I was about to return due to its horrible lag and jerky motion, until I pulled the Unifying Receiver out and just connected using my machine's onboard Bluetooth.
Since then, no issues at all. It's been perfect. Since I can't remember the last time I used a machine without built-in Bluetooth, it makes me wonder why they even bother with that horrible receiver.
I've been on Zen's FTTP for a couple of years now without any problem.
About a month ago, the connection dropped, and looking at my router logs it was full of PPP timeouts. Called Zen, went through troubleshooting with someone who knew what they were actually talking about, and they determined an Openreach fault.
First Openreach droid turned up, looked at my ONT and declared that because the PON light on my ONT was a steady green then there was nothing wrong with the Openreach side of things and refused to investigate any further. He logged a response back to Zen saying that the fault was with my equipment.
I spoke to Zen, and they escalated within Openreach and a second chap turned up a few days later, ran some tests and declared there to be no issue at all between my house and the exchange, and disappeared.
I called Zen again and explained the quandary of my Schrödinger's internet connection, that was apparently simultaneously fault-free and non-functional, and they escalated once more within Openreach.
A couple of days later, I had a call from Zen to say that Openreach had discovered a fault in one of the network switches connecting the FTTP head node to the backhaul connection, and the switch was tagged to be replaced in a couple more days.
Sure enough, the connection came back a couple of days later, and Zen gave me around £75 as compensation for the lost service.
Now, I don't know how my experience would have differed with other ISPs, but having had dealings with Virgin Media and Plusnet in the past, I have doubts as to whether I'd even have been able to talk to someone sensible, let alone get it resolved.
It's not an irrational dislike. It's because it's simply wrong.
Ourself, yourself, myself etc. are all reflexive pronouns. This means that they're only correct when the subject and object of the sentence are the same.
i.e.
"I dressed myself" is correct. "You dressed myself" is not.
Personally, I blame The Apprentice.
Despite having as much in common with Java as my shoes do with an Amazonian tree frog, the very fact it's called JavaScript means that recruitment sharks are unable to comprehend the difference between it and Java.
Getting a stack of JavaScript CVs on my desk when I'm looking for Java developers and vice versa is a perennial problem for me.
About 10 years ago I was involved with what was then the largest private sector IT project in Europe, and involved a 'clone and go' approach to a business unit being sold off from a large multinational to another multinational - both large household names.
There was a team of us frantically scouring eBay and bankruptcy auctions for months trying to get all of the kit together to build an infrastructure identical to what already existed in the parent company. Some of it was running business-critical accounting and manufacturing scheduling systems, and was running on kit that had been out of production for over 15 years in some cases.
I remember rejoicing on one day when I found a bulk-lot of various capacity 30 pin SIMMs for sale. They were rare even then.
I still lament the passing of my Blackberry Passport - it's still the best device I've ever used even in the face of later Android and iOS kit.
Much as I'd like this to succeed, I can't see it doing anything except be a pale imitation and flop in the marketplace (much like the original, sadly). Through necessity, it's using Android, but the whole UI experience and ecosystem of Android neither expects nor particularly supports the use of a physical keyboard. The experience will be too compromised for most users to put up with.
My 2016 vintage Oneplus 3T shipped with Android Marshmallow, and has had OEM upgrades to Nougat, Oreo and Pie while I've had it, and all reasonably soon after Google launched them.
The updates stopped with Pie, but that's 4 major OS versions it's had support for.
As it stands, I'm just going to keep using it until it dies, because I've yet to find anything that a new model would do significantly better.
I even sent it back to Oneplus last year for a screen replacement and new battery, and only paid about £80 for the privilege.
Microsoft are in an unwinnable game here. Their past legacies of monopolising the desktop market have come back to bite them. They have such a broad spectrum of users, compatibility and support expectations, hardware and software platforms that they cannot possibly hope to develop and support it in a way that satisfies everyone.
Look, for example, at the furore at the ending of support for XP after 12 years, or the ending of Windows 7 support after 10 years, and the expectation from users that any application they've purchased or written in the last 30 years will continue to be executable by the latest version of Windows.
Contrast this with Apple, who have never supported any flavor of MacOS for longer than 4 years, and will readily drop compatibility support for even relatively recent software and hardware without so much as a murmur.
It's the games that Microsoft played in the 1990s to win the corporates that have come to bite them hard. Those same corporate customers expect their software to work for 10 years or more, and this is the problem they've made for themselves.
Me too.
I got a Oneplus 3T shortly after launch back at the end of 2016. It was delivered on Marshmallow, and has had 3 major OS updates and is now on Pie.
Admittedly it's not going any further than that and Oneplus have now ceased updates for it, but not bad for a device getting on for 4 years old.
It developed a fault with the camera about 6 months ago and Oneplus repaired it FOC too. While it was with them, I had them replace the battery (for the princely sum of about £30) and it's as good as new now.
It's still performant enough for my needs, and I'll just hang on to it until it dies or I kill it.
But a lot of the mechanical keyboards on the market had lairy designs or gaudy RGB backlighting. I like gaming, but why marketing departments think that means I want my PC to look like a 1990s Dixons stereo system I'll never understand.
In the end I bought a Das Keyboard Prime 13. Keys backlit in a nice neutral white, Cherry MX Brown switches, aluminium casing and a USB passthrough. It's a joy to type on, and it was only £85.
Every large corporate I've ever worked at basically runs on Excel.
Give people fancy ERP, analytics and BI tools and all these will ever get used for is to create data extracts to be manipulated in Excel.
Its always at best the second best tool for the job for anything, and users like its familiarity.
The first thing I did when I bought FTTP through Zen is to terminate my copper line.
It still sees quite a lot of use for inbound calls for my wife's business, but I ported it to VoIP through Andrews & Arnold for £1.20 a month. Zen's standard-issue AVM FritzBox router has a built-in DECT base station, so I just re-paired all of the phone handsets to the AVM router and everything (on the surface) acts exactly as it did before.
The whole message of the advert is a sad reflection of consumer habits these days.
Service? Quality? Performance? None of this matters. It's all a race to the bottom on price.
It's the same with everything. Broadband. Cars. Clothes. Furniture. Pretty much anything. Joe Public forgets about anything other than number on the ticket, and other than a few select vendors, everyone (including those who used to make good quality stuff) churns out horrible tat with only skin-deep quality because that's all that matters to the majority.
I'm not sure that the OpenReach guy's statement around the areas being prioritized for FTTP is correct. I live in a reasonably-sized market town in the Midlands (population c.70k) that's had FTTC for around 7 or 8 years.
Recently, OpenReach descended on the place and FTTP is now available virtually everywhere in the town (and that's after being one of the areas that was trialled for G.Fast too).
To an outsider, there appears to be little logic or reason to the areas being chosen. Presumably, it makes sense to OpenReach somehow though.
Oneplus score well here too, albeit without a physical UK presence.
I dropped my 3 year old Oneplus 3T and smashed the screen. I opened up a web chat with their support team and they arranged for it to be shipped to their service centre in Poland. While they had it, I asked if they'd replace the battery with a new one too.
I was without my phone for a total of 3 days, and for a OEM-original new screen and battery I was charged only £90. They also replaced the camera free of charge because it was reporting a hardware fault.
Nearly 3 and a half years ago, I bought a cheap (by the standards of similarly-specced devices) OnePlus 3T, which was delivered on Android Marshmallow. OnePlus pushed subsequent OS updates to Nougat and Pie when they were released, and they released Android Oreo for it about 6 months ago. It's still continuing to get security-related patch releases even now, almost 3 years after production stopped.
If a small (by the standards of the other players in the market) Chinese firm can do this, why can't everybody else?
in CompSci from a top 5 university.
The syllabus was extremely thorough, teaching everything from the low-level electronic architecture, through assembler and higher-level languages, including problem solving in some slightly oddball languages such as Haskell. A strong emphasis was placed on sensible use of design patterns and optimisation. There was lots of maths, along with many, many hours of logic, formal specification, networks etc.
As you would probably expect, there were many people on the course who I considered to be extremely intelligent and had a natural talent for what they did.
It was only during my final year though that my mind turned to employment, and it's only natural at this stage to start mentally sizing yourself up against the competition - the other people on the course. Sure - there were people who could run rings around me on the course, but I came to the realisation that there was a good proportion of the course group that I considered virtually unemployable. Clever - undoubtedly, but they lacked either the self awareness necessary to perform well in a corporate environment, or they lacked motivation to work on anything that they didn't find personally interesting. There's jobs out there for people like this, but those people aren't what most employers are looking for.
It was thinking along these lines that made me plump for a Blackberry Passport.
Leap of faith maybe, and an evidently dying platform (not least down to the fact that 'analysts' have been claiming since 2011 that BlackBerry wouldn't last the next 12 months and you'd be unwise to back it), but sadly it's probably the best mobile OS I've ever used.
I say sadly, because the likelihood of me being able to replace it with another once my Passport eventually shuffles off its mortal coil is close to zero.
I'm not sure how they can fix their device business.
It's been woefully mismanaged in terms of getting the right devices out there at the right time, and actually making the market aware that the devices exist. They've burned their relationships with many of the carriers, meaning even less exposure to the consumer. Many of the people I speak to are not even aware that Blackberry still exists as a business and that they are producing devices still. Even fewer know about the BB10 platform, and still think that Blackberry devices are pretty much the same as the Curve they owned 7 years ago.
The real shame is that their devices really are better than ever. I currently use a Blackberry Passport as my personal device, having switched from a Galaxy S4, and it's the best device I've ever used. It's certainly a better device than my work-issued iPhone 5S.
It seems at times that they've pulled a masterstoke of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
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