Posts by Lazlo Woodbine

You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will

Re: Forcing regular change is counterintuitive

That's kind of my point...

Forcing regular change is counterintuitive

There's a site I use for work, they force a password change every 60 days.

If that isn't bad enough, I only use the site once a term, so I have to change the password every single time I use the website, and I cant use any previous passwords.

I imagine most people just type something random into the password box, then use the forgotten password routine when they log in again 120 days later...

Google Cloud suspended customer's account three times, for three different reasons

Re: I don't even trust Google with basic email

Every couple of weeks I dip into the murky depths of my gmail Spam folder, and it's years since I've found a non-spam email in there.

I've had my Gmail account for 21 years now, and collect a lot of spam, and not a single false positive in years.

Maybe I'm lucky, maybe you're unlucky...

How do you solve a problem like Discovery?

Re: The obvious solution is...

Use Trump's new "ballroom" as a launch pad, then everyone's a winner...

Microsoft puts Office Online Server on the chopping block

I asked the question, and Softmaker got back to me.

It's possible to deploy their subscription based Softmaker NX on a Chromebook using the Linux subsystem.

Something for me to play with during Half Term I think...

I do like Softmaker Office, it looks good and has 100% of features most people need.

What I would like is a version that works on a Chromebook, as that's what I use when I'm out of the house...

Apple's ultra-thin iPhone flops as foldable iPad hits a crease

Considering everyone puts their precious iPhones in ugly plastic cases, what exactly is the point of the iPhone Air?

SpaceX is behind schedule, so NASA will open Artemis III contract to competition

Re: The outcome:

I can think of three crew members where that wouldn't be a problem...

Anti-fraud body leaks dozens of email addresses in invite mishap

Ever heard of BCC?

I was a member of a large national campaigning group, we hand about 500 local branches, each branch had a chair and a data protection officer.

One day I got an email marked urgent, the email was about a similar org that had had a data leak, so it was reminding us of the importance of keeping personal data secure.

Naturally, the email was sent to our personal email address, not our organisation address, and everybody was in the To: field, exposing the personal email address of every single chair and data protection officer.

I used the reply all feature to tender my resignation...

Windows 11 update knocks out USB mice, keyboards in recovery mode

Re: PS/2 keyboards unaffected..

I had a HP PC at my last job that was Win 11 compliant and had PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse. It also had an RS232 port.

I don't believe it was a special build, we had about 40 of them delivered just prior to Lockdown 1

Trump's anti-sustainability agenda comes to Eurozone

Re: TDS

We're supposed to believe wikipedia now?

Re: TDS

OK, so your beloved leader abolished DEI and commenced recruiting the absolute least qualified people for the job.

Kash Patel was a tiktoker for christ's sake, and now he's the head of the FBI. His only qualification for the job is he wrote some kid's picture books about Trump...

Windows 95 was too fat to install itself so needed help from the slimmer 3.1

Two whole floppy disks!

For MacOS Tahoe I had a 10.98gb download on Sunday night, then another 10.98gb download on Monday night.

No idea why I had the second download, because Apple don't like to keep their customers informed.

Damn good job I'm on fibre or I would still be downloading the first update...

The sweetest slice of Pi: Raspberry Pi 500+ sports mechanical keys, 16GB, and built-in SSD

This looks very nice, and one hopes the whole of the spacebar works on these models, rather than just the left as experienced by many Pi 400 & 500 owners.

The price is pretty reasonable too, cheaper than the new John Lennon Power to the People boxed set...

Solar flair: Logitech's K980 Signature Slim keyboard runs on rays

I have a similar Logitec keyboard, I'm not sure of the model number, it's got a number keypad and works with 3 different devices via bluetooth if that helps.

Anyway, it's had the same pair of AA batteries for a couple of years now, so I'm not really concerned about battery anxiety, especially as in an emergency I'll just borrow a pair of batteries from a TV remote control...

Bored developers accidentally turned their watercooler into a bootleg brewery

Ahh, we did take pictures, but they didn't help much.

Those Pagewide printers were really well built, with hundreds of screws holding them together. Which is why it took half a day just to gain access to the printhead.

During lockdown, while the school site was mostly empty, the IT team were still required to be on site to fix any equipment we couldn't fix remotely.

As you can imagine, we'd soon fixed everything that was easy to fix, so boredom led us to start work on some of the backburner jobs, like cleaning the heads on an HP Pagewide printer.

After hours of work, and the removal of much skin from our hands we managed to get to the pagewide print head and gave it a good clean, then we decided to see if we could completely dismantle it and rebuild it.

Let's just say we succeeded with part of that task, rendering the printer to an aluminium frame and plastic bin full of parts. The rebuilding part was less successful, so my colleague took away several motors which he used to build a robot water sprayer to rid his garden of pesky cats...

Office 2016 and 2019 face October 14 execution date

There's a Filter function in Excel 2021 that's a huge timesaver for pulling lists of students into registration group tabs for making custom class registers. I have the only copy of Office 2021 in school just for that function, everyone else has the all but identical Office 2019.

Playing ball games in the datacenter was obviously stupid, but we had to win the league

At my previous workplace, a boarding school in Northern England, two of the physics teachers decided it would be fun to play squash with a Super Ball, which is the same size as a squash ball, but much harder and much bouncier.

After a few minutes play, the ball had worked up sufficient speed to reach escape velocity and punched right through the armoured glass wall and narrowly missed a passing PE teacher.

I'm not sure what the physics teachers thought would happen, but destroying a very expensive squash court probably wasn't it...

Air Force buying two Tesla Cybertrucks so it can learn to destroy them

Re: Questions will be asked.

Was this over the car park, or a scheduled demonstration?

Tech bro denied dev's hard-earned bonus for bug that overcharged a little old lady

Re: Lawsuit culture

The money was taken from a credit card, it was returned to the credit card, absolutely zero harm left outstanding, therefore no right to sue in any normal country...

Servers hated Mondays until techie quit quaffing coffee in their company

Re: Condensation

Yeah, around the rest of the roof space the cables were separate, but whoever fitted the APs in that corner decided to share the same run as the power for the chillers.

Re: Condensation

I spent 6 months working in a cheese wholesaler while they went through the process of installing Red Prairie warehouse management system.

Their warehouse was a 70,000 sq ft fridge, and we needed to install 16 APs for the WiFi to enable the portable barcode terminals to stay connected down the long aisles.

One July day, the hottest day in memory in that part of the UK, the warehouse pickers started to complain about their terminals not connecting in one corner of the chiller. After checking the network, we found 4 of the APs were off, so me and the network guy donned hard hats and hi-viz bibs and ventured into the roof space of the chiller to check on the cables to the APs.

Matt walked ahead of me checking the CAT6 cable run with a torch. As we approached the corner with the dead APs I heard a yelp and a string of profanities.

It seems the chiller units were working so hard to keep the big chiller below 3°C, the power cables were very hot, and they'd melted the CAT6 cables to those APs, and burnt Matt's hand as he tried to move it out of the way.

The solution was running more cables and putting a thermal blanket between the network cables and the chiller power cables...

UK VPN demand soars after debut of Online Safety Act

Interestingly, Twatter is blocking even remotely objectionable content even when using a VPN. There doesn't appear to be a way to demonstrate to Twatter that I'm over 18 either, as they're apparently going to do this automagically at some point in the future...

Retailer Co-op: Attackers snatched all 6.5M member records

Well, they've only just arrested the alleged perps, so we'll have to wait until after the trial...

Re: funeral parlors!

They've long been called funeral parlours in much of the UK, the only thing wrong is the spelling of parlour...

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...