Posts by Lazlo Woodbine

Trump tariffs turn techies topsy-turvy as US braces for PC tax

Re: Idiotic tariff nonsense

Hawaiian coffee is amazing, but terrifically overpriced.

Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time

It's constant installing and fiddling with computers that makes them crash.

If memory serves, the PC was running Service Release 2 of Windows, and separate installations of Word and Excel, nothing else was installed during that time, because he simply didn't know how to install software - he barely knew how to operate the mouse.

He did save his work in completely random places, prompting calls for me to find the letter or spreadsheet he'd just saved, which wasn't fun with Windows 95's crappy indexing system...

Nope, he just turned off the monitor at the end of the day

Back in the dim and dark late 90's, the company I worked for decided to enter the digital age and planned to install online "workbenches" so we could enter sales data into a shared spreadsheet and place stock orders direct with suppliers.

These "workbenches" were Wyse dumb terminals connected to head office via an ISDN line.

My manager at the time was a total luddite who had never even used a typewriter, nevermind a computer. So, prior to the arrival of the Wyse terminal, I installed an old PC in his office with Word, Excel and a web browser so he could practice.

As this PC only had a modem rather than ISDN connection, I plugged it into an unused phone line and set him up with one of the "free" ISPs that used 0845 numbers to collect payment.

Everything went well, and the manager overcame his fear of the digital age.

Then the phone bill arrived, and it was really quite high, well into 4 figures.

I checked the charges for each line and found he'd managed to connect to the internet, but at no point did he disconnect until I removed the PC ready for the arrival of the Wyse terminal, he'd racked up about 6 weeks worth of per minute charges to an 0845 number that charged about 5p a minute at the time...

NASA tests shrinking metals to help it find more exoplanets

Why is the acronym for Habitable Worlds Observatory HBO?

Senate decides free rein for AI companies isn't such a good thing

Re: He only wanted his digital twin to play without restraint

The orange one has the vocabulary of a toddler, so he definitely isn't a Large Language Model...

British IT worker sentenced to seven months after trashing company network

Re: Surprisingly, at my employer...

Back in the early 90's, when I worked for a high street catalogue retailer, I sacked a saturday lad I'd caught smoking in the stockroom.

I asked one of the staff to walk him up to his locker then escort him off the premises.

This was clearly too much effort, so the lad was allowed to make his own way to his locker, which he did via the server room.

The servers, bizarrely, were the only computers that couldn't be locked, and the lad used one of them to change the bin locations of all the products in the store to one shelf on the top floor.

It took me well over a week to manually fix the locations of all the products, as the bin locations weren't part of the nightly backups.

This "feature", along with the un-lockable servers, were later fixed once my store manager reported just how many sales we'd lost due to not being able to find stock...

Fresh UK postcode tool points out best mobile network in your area

The map tallies closely with the Ookla mobile phone coverage map for my area.

It does claim I can get good coverage on O2 indoors and outdoors.

Ahh, but that doesn't account for the cavity insulation, which has essentially turned my house into a faraday cage, no mobile phone signal indoors, and my WiFi doesn't leak into the garden unless I leave the balcony door open on the first floor so the router beam the internet outdoors...

Re: Mobility

The map doesn't lock after you've entered one postcode, you can also enter where you work, or scroll around the areas you spend most time.

Don't shoot me, I'm only the system administrator!

Re: Land of the Free - to be shot

I'd rather not have to kill people in the course of my duty...

I remember reading a blog from a systems admin team during Hurricane Katrina. Truly scary stuff, especially the tale of moving a couple of barrels of fuel for the generator from the car park to the roof with heavily armed gangs of looters roaming the city...

Visiting students can't hide social media accounts from Uncle Sam anymore

It's interesting how freedom of speech absolutists are so upset when people exercise their freedom of speech...

Frozen foods supermarket chain deploys facial recognition tech

Re: Collapse

Your comment was spot on until the bullshit in the last line. Incitement to murder is not "hurty words"

Huawei chair says the future of comms is fiber-to-the-room, which China has and the rest of us don’t

Re: FTTR? Really?

In my last job, we trialled some Ubiquiti kit that let us run fibre to the desktop, which gave us 10gig to every desktop in the room.

We trialled it in the IT office, obviously, and noticed zero benefit over the original gigabit connections, so decided not to roll it out to the rest of the site.

We left the kit in our office as each unit gave us 4 copper connections to every desk, so it was handy when rebuilding PCs

Logitech's latest keyboard and mouse combo is wired, quiet, and suspiciously sensible

Re: Why didn't they plug the mouse into the keyboard

Indeed, but the spare port was also handy for USB sticks...

Why is someone downvoting people commenting about Logitech kit that's still going strong after years of use?

Does someone have an axe to grind and can't cope with good news?

Re: Why didn't they plug the mouse into the keyboard

Would be nice, as long as they're better than the USB ports on the old Apple keyboards, which ran at USB 1 speeds...

I've had a K780 for a few years now, and it's still going strong.

LibreOffice adds voice to 'ditch Windows for Linux' campaign

Re: As I've said before

I don't understand why you've got a downvote for a genuine question.

I bought the Pi500 because it's the computer in the keyboard, it's ideally packaged to pop in a bag with a mouse and a Micro-HMDI cable and work anywhere there's a screen.

I also like how it's reminiscent of the home computers of my distant youth.

Re: As I've said before

I've got a Pi500 as my second PC, I use it with a 15" FHD screen I bought for about £80 in Aldi's middle aisle, it's an almost perfect computer for light office tasks and web use.

My only problem is I seem to have one of the models where only half the spacebar works reliably, so I have to hit space with my left thumb, not my prefered right thumb...

Google's unloved plan to fix web permissions gathers support

Re: How about no...

Which is OK, but how does your OS go about deciding which websites have access?

Doomed UK smartphone maker Bullitt Group finally liquidated

The staff wouldn't have seen any of the money, it would have all gone to banks or HMRC, missed wages are a long way down the queue

User demanded a 'wireless' computer and was outraged when its battery died

Re: Phone down

When I worked in PC repair, we had a laptop sent in with an all caps note attached saying we were not allowed to power the laptop up, or examine the hard disk.

The laptop belonged to a best selling childrens book author and contained their next book.

The service centre manager contacted the owner, explaining there was zero chance we could diagnose the problem without booting the laptop, the manager was treated to a foul mouth rant, followed by a warning that booting the laptop would result in a visit from her lawyers.

We returned the laptop unrepaired, with a print-out from the warranty contract detailing how they had already given us express permission to power up the device in order to diagnose the issue, if they wanted their laptop repaired, please return it with a note confirming they agree to our terms and conditions.

We never heard from her again...

Apple-Intel divorce to be final next year

My last Mac Mini was a 2012 model that I sold for £200 in 2024.

the new Arm Mini's are built just as well, so should last just as long.

£600 may buy two Wintel PCs, but the Mac Mini will easily outlast them both and give you money back when you sell it after a decade or so...

Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'

Re: Not those Boomers.

Same for me with the M6.

It's a constant hum as the cars zoom past about 100 yeards from my house.

You only really notice it when the traffic stops because of an accident.

First lockdown was very, very weird, absolute silence for a few weeks, I could hear mice scurrying in the fields for the first time ever...

Re: Not those Boomers.

I'm guessing Concorde sounded like an Avro Vulcan. I heard one of these at an airshow once, and loud doesn't quite cover it when a Vulcan pilot hits the afterburners...

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

Peter learnt everything from our dad... he being the one who tilted a cab forward before checking everything lose was fastened down, cue driver's TV tumbling from the bunk and through the windscreen.

Still, dad was the only man in the country who could fix the gearbox on the first ever ERF vehicle when it failed on it's 75th anniversary run, so dad, who was born the day the first ERF rolled out of the factory, was called from his 75th birthday party to fix it...

My brother's wedding ring saved his fingers, literally.

We was a truck mechanic back then, and was working on an engine with the cab jacked up, when the hydraulics holding the cab up suddenly failed, the cab fell down onto his hand. Luckily for Peter, his newly acquired wedding ring took the brunt of the force.

The ring needed cutting off, whcih was a much simpler task than sewing all his fingers back on.

Techie traced cables from basement to maternity ward and onto a roof, before a car crash revealed the problem

My last job was at a large boarding school that had buildings spread across the village where it was based, these buildings were connected back to the IT department using fibre or CAT6

When Barclays closed its branch, our facilities department decided to buy it and use it as their office.

There was no budget to physically extend the network to this building, so we decided to use a wireless bridge, with one end of the bridge on the outside of the nearest boarding house, the other end on the outside wall of the new office.

We fired up the link on a Saturday afternoon and everything was hunky dory.

The staff moved in on the Monday and chaos ensued. The network was dropping at seemingly random intervals, checking the logs didn't tell us anything, so the staff were willing to live with random drop-outs, except sometimes when the network dropped, the printer died, needing a reset.

Eventually, we decided to sit in the office and wait for a drop-out, to see what was causing it.

The cause was farmers' hay wagons, they were high enough to block the signal as they drove past, and if they were stuck at traffic lights, the network was down for long enough for the printer to demand a reset.

That weekend we hired a cherry picker and raised the bridge on poles, which stopped the drop outs, and provided a resting place for a peregrin falcon while he watched for mice in the school grounds...

Regulator sues product comparison site alleged to only compare products on which it earned commission

Re: Product comparison site alleged to only compare products on which it earned commission

But they generally compare from multiple sources, not just a single company

Admin brought his drill to work, destroyed disks and crashed a datacenter

I used to sell large-scale CCTV systems to casinos and the likes. As a tiny offshoot of a US globocorp, we were only allowed to sell Dell storage arrays, but I remember one customer insisting on using HP after watching this advert.

I asked him if he'd ever heard of active shooter incidents in UK datacentres, he said it didn't matter, he wanted to be ready if there was one...

Techies thought outside the box. Then the boss decided to take the box away

We have an office we call the goldfish bowl,for similar glass wall reasons.

It's strictly speaking the student attendence officer's office, but she hates it because of the glass walls.

Instead it's just used to store the students' medication and confiscated phones and airpods...

Trump announces $175B for Golden Dome defense shield over America

"When we say we're going to save everyone's lives in a crazy world"

The crazy world that's just getting crazier by the day because of the moron in the White House...

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Surely simpler to stick with correct English

A US pint is 473ml, an Imperial pint is 568ml

When I went to school 473<568

Trump says he has a problem if Apple builds iThings in India

All Tim needed to say is "you misheard, we're building in Indiana"

There's no way he'd know any different...

Uncle Sam pulls $2.4B Leidos deal to support CISA after rival alleges foul play

Why would anyone consider tendering for US government contracts at the moment?

They've pulled so many policy u-turns since the Orange Felon returned to office, there's every chance anything signed will be torn up before then end of the day.

US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired

If any of this shit went down in another country, the US would invade to "restore democracy" / "seize mineral rights" (delete as appropriate)

If Google is forced to give up Chrome, what happens next?

Because Chrome at the moment does not present any AI shit to me, Chrome owned by Open-AI would force AI into everything it does, or they'd get no value from the purchase.

Sell to Open-AI and I'm fairly sure I won't be the only person to remove Chrome from all my devices, as there's no way I want anything to do with AI...

37signals is completing its on-prem move, deleting its AWS account to save millions

Re: I have this Debian server at home...

I've got a Mac Mini at home, its day job before I aquired it was a file server for the art classroom at my last school. It had been running for a little over 10 years without being updated or powered down.

It's now my file server at home, and has been running for 3 years after I updated it to Catalina...

NASA JPL boss bails for 'personal reasons' as budget cuts bite

Re: Next JPL boss

Do you understand what Next means?

Any Trump appointee would be next but one...

Re: Next JPL boss

From the actual article "will be replaced by JPL veteran David Gallagher"

Re: Mars Sample Return

By having him catch it during re-entry?

'I guess NASA doesn't need or care about my work anymore'

But... DEI has absolutely f**k all to do with the story, you just shoehorned it in because you're clearly obsessed.

You do you...

Re: Excellent Freudian typo!

A fortuitous typo, you are free to use it as you wish...

Wow, you managed to turn my post about petty cost savings into a rant about DEI, well done, Vladimir is pleased with your work...

Open Document Format turns 20, but Microsoft Office still reigns supreme

Re: That UK Gov Manadate thing

Odd, because all UK Gov documents I download, at least from the Department for Education are PDF or ODF, increasingly only PDF files are available

Teens maintained a mainframe and it went about as well as you'd imagine

My last job mostly involved fixing printers and projectors at a large independent boarding school.

The school was spread across many acres, with buildings dotted around the town. One of the boarding houses was almost a mile from the IT office. Thankfully, as this house was mainly occupied by rugby players, they made little use of IT, so we were rarely called up there.

One day I was summoned there. I remember it was cold and wet, and I cursed the house master every step of the way up the muddy path.

Upon arriving, I was ushered into the library, this was a little used room, which was a shame, as it was oak panelled with a real fire. Standing on a card table in the corner was a Brother laser printer with all three lights flashing. It was only a paper jam, so easily fixed whilst enjoying a cup of Taylor's Italian blend coffee, which all the houses served, and was one of the many perks of working at this school.

5 minutes of swearing and scuffed knuckles later, I retrieved the jammed paper. It wasn't printer paper, it was a sheet from a lined A4 refill pad, and unless this printer had a remarkably accurate "barely literate teenage boy's handwriting" font, the paper had been written on before feeding into the printer.

I put the printer back together, tested it and reported my success to the housemaster, he thanked me with a bottle of 19 Crimes, another perk of working at that school...

Microsoft to preload Word minutes after boot

Nice, but...

I hardly ever use Word at work. I do, however, use Excel. So Excel load will be impacted because the system is busy loading an app I almost never use...