Posts by myhandler

Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

A very good email client for Android is "FairEmail"

Open source, well maintained and focussed on privacy.

Meta's SAM bot keeps 'em separated as it isolates voices and instruments from audio clips

Re: Resolve

Noise removal is not the same thing at all.

I'm surprised at the uninformed comments on here.

Stem splitters have been around a couple of years and are now in a lot of products e.g. Apple's Logic (pro audio workstation software).

Far from perfect but can split a pop tune into guitar bass drums vocal with the rest as one track

UK digital ID plan gets a price tag at last – £1.8B

They insist on two documents as a cross check - much like 2FA

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

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

Integrated calendar wasn't available in Tbird back when the OP's story was set.

It also took Mozilla several years to get it running reliably when it was finally integrated

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

Maybe this is the first test by AI to see how panicked the humans get.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is so popular that almost no one will pay for it

Re: The Freemium pricing problem

So you put a value on your text but you don't put a value on the artist who created the images it stole from?

We're all going to be paying AI's Godzilla-sized power bills

How long till it suggests burning the books to spin the turbines?

AI gets more 'meh' as you get to know it better, researchers discover

Right, so not unlike using the I Ching to get a different viewpoint?

Windows 10 refuses to go gentle into that good night

Every time I tried to apply for the extended service "feature" it said:

"Sorry this service is not available, please try later"

Google, Meta and Vodafone want smartphone-makers to reduce their bandwidth bills

But the phone manufacturers make the default video resolution HD or 4k and none of it ever needs to be seen at that resolution.

Ok not none, 0.0001% might need high res.

KPMG wrote 100-page prompt to build agentic TaxBot

If this base level work is handled by AI how will the new hires acquire the in-depth knowledge and experience they need?

Real estate agents use the power of AI to command plumbing, layout to disappear

Re: Real estate double speak

nestled - every damn place is nestled

Reddit is people! Which means its search might not be so damaged by AI slop

Re: Have you ever searched for anything on Reddit ?

There are several science specialised topics where I've found helpful and well informed contributors.

Stay away from popular culture and opinion based arguments and it can be very good.

Quora OTOH is pants.

Problem PC had graybeards stumped until trainee rummaged through trash

User complained her computer kept switching off randomly.

I went to see her at her desk, I noticed she was a fidgeter, then I noticed she had long pointy shoes and she was nervously swinging her leg.. just enough to hit the mains plug in the wall and momentarily cut the power.

Kaseya CEO: Why AI adoption is below industry expectations

What world are we in where the guy feels he must apologise for having a Breughel on the wall?

The moral of the piece being a jest at the two legged ape's vanity.

Surely you and your boss don't work for Musk?

Brain activity much lower when using AI chatbots, MIT boffins find

It is EXACTLY the art of writing, or the task of explaining to someone else, that makes facts stick.

I read science books, as I'm sure a lot here do, but it doesn't stick at all well unless I make notes.

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Re: Radiology room colours

Well yes, reductio ad absurdum can always be demonstrated.

But I recall out of date and useless PPE material being a major news item a few years ago

Europe plots escape hatch from enshittification of search

Re: UDM14

I think you mean "verbatim" , found in the Results dropdown, which is itself hidden till you click 'Tools'

And yes Google are tools.

BUT you can't make it the default AFAIK

Several years ago you could but effing Google stopped that, "Oh no, we can't make things easy, our mission is to spew garbage at you"

Still browsing like it's 1999: Fresh tools that keep vintage Macs online and weirdly alive

I'd rather have my LC475 back than my Quadra 840 AV - or even my G3

Specsavers takes off the Oracle glasses, sees better ERP options

I went to a branch in a Surrey town and said "Why don't you look up my prescription from last year, it was done at the Chiswick branch?"

"Oh no we can't access anything else"

So the sytem isn't very integrated.

The franchise owner's daughter thought she was the boss even if she was only in a sales role and went round supervising everyone.

Watching it got very annoying.

UK's first permanent facial recognition cameras installed in South London

You're forgetting the special Met filter that removes "all our mates"

Vivaldi bakes Proton VPN into browser to boost privacy

Opera's had a free VPN for several years. Not that fast but it works

A closer look at Dynamo, Nvidia's 'operating system' for AI inference

Shouldn't the headline be:

A closer look at Dynamo, Nvidia's 'operating system' for AI interference

Frack to the future? Geothermal energy pitched as datacenter savior

Much simpler to use geothermal for residential heating. It has to pass more regulatory hurdles and a lot are closed loop so the circulating injected water never leaves the underground pipes.

Here's a scheme up and running in Wandsworth London:

https://www.sseenergysolutions.co.uk/news-and-insights/case-studies/wandsworth-riverside-heat-network.

They also have to remain under the property footprint so they don't extract heat from their neighbours' land.

Cloudflare's bot bouncer blocks weirdo browsers

Re: power without responsibility

@John Klos - yes I don't know what I'm doing at all - the site does over $10 mill business p.a. so something is ok

Re: power without responsibility

I manage a medium size site and putting it through Cloudflare was the solution for stopping the multitude of DDOS bot attacks.

It has its uses.

Tech jobs are now white-collar trades that need apprentices, not a career crawl

Re: Communication "Preferences"

You and I can read much faster but many people prefer a video.

I've recently been documenting a porject and have written a 36 page PDF with plentiful screen grabs.

I've now had to do videos for the damn thing.. and you know what.. they do show a lot of steps in much better ways - the watcher can follow the pointer and see exactly what happens.

But I don't make stupid jokes, play silly jingles or put up images that are meant to elicit laughs. There's no sponsor, no begging to subscribe and I keep them as short as possible.

Text for the bright ones, videos for everyone else (lol)

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

Re: "Blackcurrants" or "Currants, Black"?

Did pineapples get queried?

Loken: An easy interactive way to better looking websites

As a DAW user and owner of a hardware modular this sounds both interesting and curious, even if he's overstretched his metaphor.

Crimelords and spies for rogue states are working together, says Google

Pot meet kettle

Doctor Who theme added to national sound archive to honor innovation, longevity

Re: his composing skills, which he used to create the theme for Steptoe and Son

Ah, but the Steptoe and Son tune inspired Syd and the Floyd's Interstellar Overdrive

Re: A question of arrangement as much as attribution

No mate, it's the melody and overall structure that gets the royalty not the arrangement.

Ron G was very impressed by it.

It did. I heard it the second week and yes, halfway through the programme I hid behind the sofa.

Black and white was much more scary.

I read that Ron was astonished by what Delia had done and thought she should have half the writing credit.

Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Re: One good sanction deserves another

US bad, Russia to the power of muchivich worse - does that help?

WordPress bans WP Engine from sponsoring or participating in user groups

A 40k project on Wordpress? Wrong platform mate.

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

I've always thought that if it can't fart, doesn't throw up when it's drunk and doesn't see friends and family die, then it's no better than a big telephone direcotry - if you remember those.

Study backer: Catastrophic takes on Agile overemphasize new features

Don't blame the software people, blame the marketing droids.

Users call on Microsoft to update Outlook's friendly name feature

Re: Headers anyone

Fair Email is a *very* good Android client

Shows full sender address by default

Allows mulitple accounts

Has an anti tracking ethos

Has worked perfectly for me for over 5 years

Indonesia blocks 2.5 million pieces of gambling content, minister says it's not enough

Be nice to see online gambling banned here too. A scourge on society.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Um, what the hell is Cloudstrike?

Is it installed on servers or end user machines?

My PC did a BSOD yesterday but I don't have Cloudstike so must be a coincidence.

My PC has done two BSODs this year, none for years before that - it's not easy to find the cause.

Thunderbird is go: 128 now out with revamped 'Nebula' UI

Or the absurd default 'search' - it uses stemming so if you search for 'wedding' it will return any mail with Weds in it - that widely used short version of Wednesday.

Stemming can't be disabled.

So you have to use the "control shift f" search feature and enter a load of filters before it will do a search.

The date field in those filters defaults to "Date is" whereas 99.99% of real life searches you want "Date from".

Then it has a horrible way to remove a folder or sender from your search results, so it can easily take a dozen clicks to filter down to a usable list.

It's like nobody ever at Moz has used Thunderbird to do real emailing - any long term user will tell you the search is garbage.

Smartphone is already many folks' only computer – say hi to optional desktop mode in Android 15 beta

I also use a desktop PC with no mic or camera - if I need to show my PC screen I log in to meetings twice - once on phone and once on PC

PowerToys bring fun tweaks to Windows 10 and 11

Re: I’m a Mac Emigrant

Are you sure Pagemaker ran on OSX? I think it was dead a while before that - a vile program compared to QXPress.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

I spent several years working in Singapore thirty years ago.

All the taxis had speed warning systems. Inside the vehicle a little bell would go .... ping .... ping .... ping - and a light on the roof would blink so the rozzers could stop them.

As a passenger you got used to the incessant ping, it's not a big deal really.

Hong Kong authorities halt alleged smuggler shifting 596 'high-end' CPUs to China

All your chip are belong to us.

Beijing wants more outfits like Temu teeming around the world

All your base are belong to us

-Thoughts of Chairman Winnie

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Re: Software is hard...

>>On the other hand, I've seen several 'impossible' projects deliver eight/nine figure returns in short time with tiny teams. Done well, with a good team, it really, really works.

Yes because a small team has very little comms and management overhead - they can talk to each other.

The top person probably also trusts the colleagues not to need constant checking.

But a team of two or three in *separate* locations exponentially multiplies the coordination required and the possibilities for misunderstandings and borkage.

Evidence mounts that Venus has multiple active volcanoes

It's also amazing they had it stored on cd-rom.

I wonder if they had backups.

Forget feet and inches, latest UK units of measurement are thinking bigger

Re: What the hell is a meter?

At last - we finally know the inspiration for Lovely Rita

Why Microsoft's Copilot will only kinda run locally on AI PCs for now

Yes me too, first ad crap spam I've had direct on screen. Still on W10. Bastards. Yes that's right, you lot at Msoft. I don't want distractions. FO