Posts by Lazlo Woodbine

Apple said to be removing charger, headphones from upcoming iPhone 12 series

To be fair...

...who actually uses the bundled earphones anymore?

Same with the charger, bundled chargers are weedy, best to buy a decent 2amp multiport model to charge multiple devices from the same socket

By emptying offices, coronavirus has hastened the paperless office

My employer has saved £6,000 in printing and £20,000 in postage in 3 months.

I guess as a school we do more printing than a lot of businesses, but now the senior management team has seen we can deliver lessons entirely electronically and not print anything, I can see them removing most printers from site

Google and Parallels bring Windows apps to Chromebooks, in parallel with VMware and Citrix

Re: 'On the way to the cloud'

I find Google Docs to be better than browser based word.

I've not used either of their spreadsheet apps for anything other than basic tables with calculations, no complex formulas or lookups, although I'm sure they've improved over the last few years

HTC breaks with tradition to push out 2 phones someone might actually want to buy

32mp selfie camera

Why?

Instagram max resolution is 1080 x 1350, Twitter has a max file size of 5mb, most images tend to peak at 3000 x 2000, Facebook compresses images horribly and reduces them to about 1800 wide.

Ex-eBay security execs among six charged with harassing, threatening bloggers who dared criticize web tat souk

Re: The Moral of This Story

Exactly my thoughts...

Bloke rolls up to KFC drive-thru riding horse-drawn cart only to be told: Neigh

"the safety of our guests is really important, so we can't allow horse-drawn vehicles in our drive-thrus."

Did they offer any explanation as to why the safety of their "guests" would be impacted by a horse-drawn vehicle?

Some say the horse shit, but is steaming recycled grass any worse than diesel & petrol fumes spewing out as they queue for an hour?

Huawei's latest smartphone for the UK market costs £1,299. And yes, that's without Google apps

We had a security company put a traffic analyser on our network for a month to see what naughtiness the kids were up to.

They were terribly disappointed that there was absolutely nothing nasty to support (well, there wouldn't be, they're hardly likely to waste effort cracking through the firewall when we've got a phone mast on the hill and unlimited data allowance) but what we did notice was just how much traffic went from Huawei phones back to China.

We also noticed the treadmills in the gym were also contacting Taiwan with 300 byte packets every 15 seconds...

Re: It's a marketing coup

No point having an install to SD Card option when the P20, P30 & P40 don't have any kind of SD card slot.

I don't know if this is the case with Honor phones

Frenchman scores €50k compensation for suffering 'bore-out' at work after bosses gave him 'menial' tasks

Re: Sooo....

But if they ran a skills audit they may find a potential Sysadmin and move people around.

Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro: £250 mobe still able to deliver value in a brutally competitive niche

Re: Headphone Jack

The IR blaster on my P20 is a godsend at work for testing projectors and TVs in classrooms when teachers have locked the remotes in their desks

Laughing UK health secretary launches COVID-19 Test and Trace programme with glitchy website and no phone app

Be interested in knowing how they're going to contact me, I'm ex-directory and both my mobile and landline reject withheld numbers - a consequence of my details being leaked by Talk Talk...

UK.gov splashes out on 40,000 new devices amid COVID-19-fuelled homeworking boom

Office 365

If Government departments are already using Office 365 why do they need extra licences? Doesn't a single licence allow for use on 5 PCs / Macs and 5 devices?

Microsoft doc formats are the bane of office suites on Linux, SoftMaker's Office 2021 beta may have a solution

I'm assuming the writer was confused.

There is a one-off purchase of Softmaker Office Pro available, it's £86.99 and offers a very similar version to Softmaker Office Pro NX annual licence (£44.90 a year) but obviously you'll be stuck with the version you buy, no annual updates.

https://www.softmaker.com/en/softmaker-office

Guess which cloud giant Zoom picked to handle millions more video calls? Bzzt, wrong answer: It's Oracle

Re: Dont piss others off

It says it right there in the article, Zoom use AWS, Azure and now Oracle...

Microsoft decrees that all high-school IT teachers were wrong: Double spaces now flagged as typos in Word

Re: Isn't it just a historical anachronism?

It kind of is configurable, just tell Word's grammar check to ignore it the first time you get the wiggly blue lines

Dumpster diving to revive a crashing NetWare server? It was acceptable in the '90s

Re: I'm pretty certain I've heard this solution before ...

There was a story involving CD trays a while back.

This one is where someone accidentally powered down the wrong server, so his solution was to remotely eject the CD tray of the server he was about to power down so he knew which one it was when he walked up to the rack

Re: A long time ago

Many years ago my cousin's exhaust broke, she was having to drive back to her husband in Germany the next day, so my brother took the bottom of a baked bean can, slipped the two broken bits of exhaust inside, packed the ends with fibreglass and sealed each end with jubilee clips.

Get it fixed as soon as you get to Osnabrück he told her.

5 years and almost 100,000 miles later, when they came back to the UK the bean can was still in place.

She said it sounded better with the can, but there was a strong smell of burnt tomato sauce for the drive over the M62 to the ferry...

Elevating cost-cutting to a whole new level with million-dollar bar bills

Had a similar head scratch situation whereby a customer would be in the process of buying something when the stock would suddenly disappear from the inventory mid transaction.

This was back in the early nineties, we were a catalogue store not unlike Argos, the customer would select an item, the sales person would enter it into the till, process the order and the item would be picked from the stock room, but occasionally the item would disappear from the inventory between the software finding the item in stock and then processing the sale.

We had the IT people in several times, they couldn't locate the glitch, and the disappearing item would always reappear the next day after the End of Day routines were run.

Then, one day the software guys were on site with all kinds of gear when they at last spotted the stock disappear from inventory, and they saw just why it happened, it was when the store manager walked past the server room when on a call on her analogue cordless phone.

They swapped her phone for one of the new fangled DECT phones and the problem never reoccured...

After intense scrutiny, Zoom tightens up security with version 5. New features include not, er, spilling video calls to network snoops

It might say version 5.0.0.0 on the file details, but when launched after updating it's showing 4.6.12 (20613.0421) on the splash screen, and the file version is 4.6.20613.421 when I check in Users/ AppData/ Roaming

Capita to place bit less sauce in outsourcing execs' share awards packets

How do they manage to lose money?

They must be the most inefficiently run company in the land, because there's no way they should be losing money with the billions a year they're extracting from taxpayers

In case you need more proof the world's gone mad: Behold, Apple's $699 Mac Pro wheels

I was hoping for some forged alloy rims

Someone get Ice Cube to present a series of Pimp My Cheese-grater (or maybe we need to drop that final vowel these days)

Watch out, everyone, here come the Coronavirus Cops, enjoying their little slice of power way too much

Re: Wear face protection?

He's in San Francisco...

Ofcom waves DAB radio licences under local broadcasters' noses as FM switchoff debate smoulders again

Re: But........

You can get pretty decent DAB adapters for cars, I've got one from Aldi because my 2012 NIssan doesn't have DAB when my 2008 Mini did. No idea why cars built 12 years after DAB became reasonably widespread still didn't have it built in.

With regards to blackspots, there's one on the M6 close to Lancaster University, always seems to drop out at a fairly important line in The Archers...

Cops charge prankster who 'corona-coughed' on aged officer and had it filmed

Shame there's no offence of "Being a complete dickhead" on the statute books

A guy did this in the UK, he's been charged with aggravated assault I think, but the punishment will almost not reflect the severity of his actions.

NHS websites will no longer burn up your mobile data allowance, say Brit telcos

If you're self isolating probably an idea to SORN the car until this all blows over, obviously it would need to be parked off road for this to be legal.

As far as I can tell the DVLA have not issued any guidance on this as yet

Hello, sub £-100 Moto: Lenovo punts 6.1-inch display e6S at low-cost crowd

Re: A burner phone fail

Can't you do that with the same card you would be using in the ATM once you find one that's free to use?

Eight-core 3.8 GHz CPU. 12 TFLOPS GPU. 1TB NVME SSD. 16GB RAM. Not a half-decent workstation, it's the new Xbox

Re: Storage

Did you notice this bit "1 TB Custom NVME SSD"?

Microsoft Teams gets off to a wobbly start as the world and its cat starts working from home

It had a serious wobble last week as every school in the world tried to use the assignments feature to set homework last Thursday

Google reveals the wheels almost literally fell off one of its cloudy server racks

Re: A few pounds saved often leads to a few hundreds pounds spent later

The set of 4 x 300kg casters is for a rack with a total weight of 300kg, we'd reasonably expect them to cope with a bit more than that, but not 3x the rated weight

A few pounds saved often leads to a few hundreds pounds spent later

We used to get this all the time, a customer would buy a rack full of servers and UPSes then after spending the best part of £100k on the kit, they'd buy the cheaper 300kg casters, "because we'll only push the rack once"

Then a year or so down the line they'd complain the rack has tipped, and we'd say, "well, you do have almost a tonne of kit in the rack standing on wheels rated to 300kg, what did you expect to happen"

So they have a few hours of downtime while they strip the rack out and fit the heavy duty casters, if they're lucky, because sometimes the rack buckles at the edges when it tips, so they have to either sit it on the floor and never move it again, or buy a new floor for the rack, or a new rack...

Butterfly defect stripped from MacBook Pros, Airs by Q2 2020, reckons Apple analyst

Re: I liked the butterfly keyboard..

I've just been going through a box of leads at work, in the box was a serial to PS/2 adaptor connected to a PS/2 to USB adaptor, so I dug out an old keyboard and lo, it worked...

Grab a towel and pour yourself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster because The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is 42

Re: About to be re-released on vinyl

Haha, thank you, I was misinformed, but this triple album does sound interesting as I've never heard the full cast album recording

https://recordstoreday.co.uk/releases/rsd-2020/ost-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy/

About to be re-released on vinyl

This year's Record Shop Day release list includes a brand new remastered vinyl release of the radio series amongst the array of naked cash ins designed solely to relieve hipsters of their cash...

Australian privacy watchdog sues Facebook for *checks notes* up to £266bn

Re: Is this the new tax grab?

I realise that's the case, it's a damn shame GDPR couldn't be applied to activity between the law passing and it coming into effect, because then we could have snagged 4% of Facebook's global turnover...

Re: That could hurt

The fine for those activities has already happened, £500k, the maximum the ICO could impose

Re: Is this the new tax grab?

This is hardly a case of fining someone for what seems a normal business practice, when the whole world has taken action against Facebook for this egregious breach of data privacy.

What's different here is that Australia are going for the throat here, potentially fining them enough to cause some serious hurt, rather than the 30 minutes or so profit the UK managed to snag

More than a billion hopelessly vulnerable Android gizmos in the wild that no longer receive security updates – research

Embedded devices

Where I work we have a gym with half a dozen treadmills, they have a nice colour display for health apps and the like.

When you dig below the surface you find out these devices are simply big Android tablet running KitKat, so long out of support, but still being used to connect to the internet,with users browsing, watching You Tube, doing their Facebook (really, in a gym?) and even phoning home with telemetry data, all without a single security update since they were installed, brand new, 18 months ago...

Broadband providers can now flog Openreach's new IP voice network in bid to ditch UK's copper phone lines by 2025

They run fibre to the Openreach cabinets, you can't send Power Over Ethernet down fibre.

Re: Beware of the REN

I believe REN is no longer an issue these days unless you have a phone with a physical bell or fancy lighting (I used to have a phone with both a bell and fancy lighting, it was REN 2), cordless handsets draw no power from the line, and the base station only draws the voice signal, no power for the speaker or microphone.

This is my main concern, as I live in a rural area with a gloriously unreliable power supply.

After Storm Desmond we had no power for the best part of 4 days, so the nearest mobile masts lost power after 4 hours, we had to drive to Morecambe to get a mobile signal from across the bay in Grange...

I've not had a phone bill in years, I just get a text off my supplier saying your bill is xxxx and it comes out of my bank on a certain date, if the bill is any different to what I expect to see I can log in and check.

Come kneel with us at UK's Cathedral, er, Oil Rig of the Canal: Engineering masterpiece Anderton Boat Lift

This is why I come here

I find this kind of technology fascinating.

You can see how everything works, but the work involved to build these things is amazing.

Raspberry Pi goes 2GB for the price of 1GB in honour of mini-computer's eighth birthday

Re: Better options

You can knock the fiver off, the Chuwi ATOM PC has 4 USB ports, two front USB 3 and two USB 2.1 on the back.

Still wouldn't touch it though, the Chinese systems sold via Amazon with very poorly worded descriptions rarely match their claimed spec.

I saw a couple of 2tb USB sticks a few weeks ago for about a fiver each, loads of people complaining they'd lost their precious data, what do they expect buying this crap?

Shipping is so insecure we could have driven off in an oil rig, says Pen Test Partners

Re: That's not unreasonable

Most of the vulnerabilities stem from staff usage, if the staff are doing personal browsing on the command & control network then it's not always going to end well...

Best buds? Apple must be fuming: Samsung's wireless earphones boast 11 hours of listening on a single charge

Re: How do they handle areas with masses of Bluetooth traffic

Yep, was streaming Spotify, and yes, at £45 they're a bargain, especially with their customer service, they replaced my first pair with even needing me to send them back for testing

Re: How do they handle areas with masses of Bluetooth traffic

Ahh, that sounds plausible, thanks

How do they handle areas with masses of Bluetooth traffic

I have a pair of Anker bluetooth earbuds and have generally been happy with them from the point of view of battery life and sound quality.

The only problem I've encountered is when I walked through the crowded concourse of Euston Station last week and my earphones kept cutting out, only starting to work again when I got outside and away from so many other bluetooth devices.

Not a Genius move after all: Apple must cough up $$$ in back pay for store staff forced to wait for bag searches

Similar happened to me

Back in the day I worked for Littlewoods, all shop staff used to work 8:45 to 5:45, so staff were in place before the shop opened and after they closed for tidy up and where felt necessary, bag searches.

Then some beancounter decided they could save 30 minutes per person per day in wages by making everyone's contacts 9:00 to 5:30.

So now there's no staff to tidy up at the end of the day, and all the staff piss off with the last customer, or you have to keep them back unpaid for bag searches, which caused a lot of friction with the union as you can imagine.

On a related note, it was fun once when police arrived to arrest a temp worker we had in one shop and the manager was begging with the police to let her stay for her whole shift because we'd paid her agency in advance for a full day...

Parks and recreation escalate efforts to take back control of field terrorised by thug geese

"Flying hellbastards"

You owe me a new keyboard...

Tech can endure the most inhospitable environments: Space, underwater, down t'pit... even hairdressers

Securely packaged

I used to work in the repair department for a large, now deceased PC builder, we'd get PCs delivered back to us in all kinds of dodgy packaging.

One time though, a builder had a great idea, he sat the PC in a box then pumped the box full of cavity wall insulation foam, set like concrete, the PC was secure surely.

Well he forgot to put the PC in a bag, so the foam seeped into all the vents before it set.

We unfortunately had to send it back uninspected...