Posts by Lazlo Woodbine

The myth of fingerprints: The Xiaomi 10T Pro is well-rounded, but it's definitively a sub-flagship handset

Re: Resolution

It's not just the lens, it's the sensor size, phones use a sensor that's only a few millimetres across, the 100mp Hasselblad sensors are, if memory serves 33 x 45mm

Windows might have frozen – but at least my feet are toasty

Reminds me of my college days

My college got a shiny new IT suite when I was doing my HNC, 20 lovely beige boxes, all lined up on a long bench.

Each box had a vent on the left and a fan on the right, so cold air in one side, and hot out the other.

As they were all lined up nice and neatly PC 2 sucked in PC 1's hot air, and gave hotter air to PC 3.

Anyone guess what happened about 30 minutes after they were turned on for the first time?

World+dog share in collective panic attack as Google slides off the face of the internet

Re: The hard part…

Within the realm of Access Control, 'Fail Safe' means the lock opens when power is lost, 'Fail Secure' means the lock closes when power is lost.

Capita finally finds buyer for education software biz, private equity Montagu to pay £400m

It isn't, and this is why the stock market keeps crashing every generation or so.

The Huawei Mate 40 Pro is so mired in strangely hardy glue that the display shattered during iFixit's teardown

Re: I did it Huawei

Given the number of people I see with smashed screens, I guess most of their business is screen replacement

Apple aptly calls its wireless over-the-ear headphones the AirPods Max – as in, maximum damage to your wallet

Yep, I have Sennheiser HD600s of similar vintage, they sound incredible, but only really for use indoors, and they need a decent headphone amp to drive them properly

Re: $900 for Bluetooth headphones.

Most smokes these days are closer to £10 a pack, so more like two months worth.

Re: Primarily because UK prices include VAT

If we didn't have EEC mandated VAT you can bet your life we'd have some other kind of sales tax by now, and possibly in some stupid way like the US were prices are listed without tax so you get a nice surprise when the time comes to purchase

You're going to need to unwrap and rewrap those Pi-400 holiday gifts. There's a new Raspberry Pi OS Update

Re: Never too young....

The article does say the Pi400 update took an hour, so for those of us on rural 'broadband' I guess we can double that...

Let's check in now with the new California monolith... And it's gone, torn down by a bunch of MAGA muppets

Second great commandment

These so-called Christians always forget the teachings of their chosen imaginary friend

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

This is the first and great commandment.

And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Matthew 22:37-40

That is unless they do actually hate themselves and are transferring that hatred onto their neighbours as some kind of incel defense mechanism...

Nokstalgia: HMD Global introduces yet another homage to the past – a 4G rework of the Nokia 6300

I had a 6020 as my work phone for a while, I much preferred the little joystick over the 4-way keypad

Let's... drawer a veil over why this laser printer would decide to stop working randomly

Similar call to our Prep School site, the printer in the Boarding kitchen office wasn't working, it's 10 miles down very rough b-roads to get there, but it's not too far out of the way that I can't do the run on my way home, so I said I'd be there about 6pm

No, she says, I need it fixing now so I can print menus, so I get in the car, 40 minutes later I'm stood looking at a Brother printer with a power lead sitting in the paper output tray.

Err, that's the printer power lead, I point out

Yes, I have to unplug it to use the fan heater

Don't you think your printer will work better if you plug it back in

She didn't even blush, just blustered about it being a rough day etc etc...

You only live twice: Once to start the installation, and the other time to finish it off

Re: Carry on up the Khyber

It was a very interesting few weeks, but interesting in a way that I won't be rushing to relive...

Carry on up the Khyber

Travelling around Northern Pakistan in the early 90's.

The trip stared well when the x-ray machine in Karachi airport died, so they just let us all leave without checking anyone's bag, because it was too hot to bother with that kind of malarkey.

We got the train up to Lahore, the carriage behind was attacked by genuine horse riding bandits, the guards fought them off and we carried on north.

One of our group decides a few days later to pay an ex-UN guy to take us to Afghanistan to see some buried Russian tanks he'd heard about, so we get a train to Islamabad and from there head out in a battered ex-UN Land Rover and make a totally illegal incursion into Afghanistan.

We didn't find any tanks sadly, then on the way back we heard some gun fire, but thought nothing of it until the land rover starts juddering and our guide notices we've run out of diesel.

We coast down hill into a village, where we spot several extra holes along the side of the land rover, one of which was the fuel tank.

The villagers patched us up with chewed khat, gave us chai and mutton curry, then an elder rolls a barrel of kerosene over and they siphon a few gallons into the perforated Land Rover.

We thanked our friends and left, as we drove away from the village our guide casually says "so, how did you enjoy your time with the Taliban?"

Office 365 for the iPad will feel a little more desktop-ish now Microsoft has tossed it trackpad, mouse support

Re: Madness

Did you see where I said laptop?

The smallest usable laptop we have around work is a Dell Inspiron 5000, it's still bigger than my iPad and case, plus my iPad can be charged from any USB port, whereas the Dell needs its power brick or a 45w USB C charger.

The Surface devices are nice, but the Go isn't as smooth to use as an iPad and actually more expensive than the basic iPad, which is all I need.

I'm not an Apple lover, but the iPad is exactly what I need for writing on the go

Re: Madness

I've found my iPad to be the perfect portable writing tool, so much easier to pop an iPad with keyboard case into my backpack than even the smallest laptop & PSU.

The Office 365 Apps on iPadOS are more than adequate for general writing tasks, but having to switch from keyboard to touchscreen is way more frustrating that keyboard to mouse.

Samsung to introduce automatic call blocking on Android 11-capable flagships

Re: Seems to be being rolled out already...

And I'm still on Android 10

Seems to be being rolled out already...

This was enabled on my work Galaxy A21 yesterday.

As I never use it for calls, instead using the work 3cx App I'm not sure if I'll get to test it

NASA hires Nokia to build first 4G network on the Moon as part of plan to boldly go back to lunar surface by 2024

Re: 5G

Probably because they were worried a load of QAnon 5G weaponised bats idiots would burn the base station down...

Quick thinking and an explanation for everything – key CTO qualities

Terrifying video wall

I was once at a trade show at the NEC.

We'd finished setting up our stand, so I wandered around the stands with some colleagues.

We stopped at the biggest stand at the show, marvelling at the just completed video wall, it must have been 30m by 10m, simply huge when you're stood right in front of it.

The engineer had wandered off for his break, what he didn't realise was his laptop was still connected to the video wall, and the whole of Hall 1 of the NEC was soon treated to the finest wares Pron Hub has to offer, most of which is not something you want to see when you're standing so close to a 30 metre wide screen...

Robot wars! Scandi automation biz AutoStore slings patent sueball, claims it owns Ocado warehouse tech

Re: Pinching ideas

Got to say we did that once, we borrowed a CCTV swan neck wall mount off the manufacturer purely so we could measure the thread to get a local metal worker to duplicate it, then we sent one of the copies back.

We realised our mistake a couple of days later when we found the original on the warehouse shelf.

Remarkably the manufacturer either never noticed, or didn't care we'd sent a copy back

UK privacy watchdog confirms probe into NHS England COVID-19 app after complaints of spammy emails, texts

I didn't get a text or email, I guess that's because it's so long since I visited my GP I bet the mobile number on their records is for an old Nokia in a drawer somewhere

Bill Gates lays out a three-point plan to rid the world of COVID-19 – and anti-vaxxer cranks aren't gonna like it

Why "create" a pandemic to create a vaccine to implant chips?

Why not just add the chips to the flu jabs we get each winter?

Or maybe they already are, and that jab I had last winter has made me think there's a pandemic...

Help! My printer won't print no matter how much I shout at it!

Re: HP

Porters because I currently have a knackered knee, so carrying a 25kg printer from one building to another the best part of half a mile away isn't really ideal.

Now your point is?

Re: HP

I have absolutely no idea why, but we have a number of HP PageWide inkjets. They're decent quality, but the fuel is hideously expensive.

Last week one of our more shouty teachers demanded we fix his printer, during lockdown the heads had become so bunged up they could not be cleaned, even after many clean cycles, so I arranged for the porters to move a printer from a currently empty office to this guy's office, asking them to leave the broken one behind so I could retrieve the nearly new, £110 a pop ink tanks for later use.

I trotted along to the office to change the network settings to the new printer and the old one was gone. The porters had taken it and tossed it in the waste electricals skip, >£400 of ink, gone for ever...

Competitive techies almost bring distributed disaster upon themselves – and they didn't even find any aliens

Free WiFI

I remember back in the day I worked for certain low rent PC manufacturer who also owned a Tier One ISP.

The network guys one evening noticed one server was unusually busy, and had an unexpected port open to the world, so they went to investigate, found a network cable where there shouldn't have been one, traced the cable up through the roof space and out through a vent onto the roof, where they found an AP beaming free WiFi to the estate over the road...

My crow soft adds audio transcription to premium Word Online... Only joking. It's pretty good if a bit on the slow side

Re: Added dictation

Dictation yes, Transcription is different, as there'll be different people speaking from different parts of the room, this is a much tougher task

Space station update: Mystery tiny but growing air leak sparks search for hole

Are they going to fix it with a blob of chewing gum or cornflakes & milk, both are pretty strong adhesives once dried...

Apple re-arms the iMac with 10th-gen Intel Core silicon

Re: “nano-texture glass option”

They're definitely trolling their customers

Re: Their older hardware is good enough (and that's the problem)

I'm currently running a late 2012 21" iMac as my main work from home machine, if I need a bit more beef I have an i7 Mac Mini Server, also late 2012 with 16gb RAM and a new SSD. I don't run the Mini as my main machine as it's only plugged into a regular 24" monitor that's not as pleasing to the eye as the iMac.

I also have a thunderbolt cable to make the iMac appear as a second screen for the Mini if I need dual displays.

I'm due a work laptop upgrade soon, I'm actually holding off the upgrade to see the new Arm MacBooks, as they may come within budget instead of an HP Probook

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

Re: Which is why I always turn off email sigs...

I especially hate the long signatures that include a block about thinking before you print the email.

Especially ironic when you do have to print the email and the signature block is the only text on the second page

This week of never-ending security updates continue. Now Apple emits dozens of fixes for iOS, macOS, etc

Huge updates

Why does an update from MacOS 10.15.5 to 10.15.6 involve a 2.96 Gb download?

Can't MacOS just patch the affected applications without downloading a fresh copy of the OS?

I guess huge downloads like this are fine in the world of fibre broadband, but I'm still on 8 meg ADSL out here in the sticks...

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...