Posts by Lazlo Woodbine 381 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Feb 2014
When I was a mere wippersnapper, the bus station in town alighted upon this same tactic, blaring the kind of easy listening tripe that even Smoth FM and Radio 2 reject as too smaltzy.
Unfortunately they didn't count on the kids actually enjoying the noise once it escaped the crackly distorted PA speakers, so the 30 or so youths who were causing problems became 60 or so when their industrial music loving friends arrived to enjoy the distorted Mantovani.
You really don't get it do you.
Employers see someone willing to put in that mythical 110% and they get them to do 115%, but do they pay them extra, do they bollocks. Employers have the same mindset as the phone scammers who share the lists of people who fall for their scams.
Don't fall for the scam, do the hours you're paid for, because every minute you work extra is additional cash in your bosses pocket, not yours...
Doing exactly what you're paid for and what your contract stipulates does not equal being a plodder.
What working to rule means is working the hours you're paid for, not doing unpaid overtime, not coming in on your days off without additional pay, not working through your holidays.
In other words, doing what your employer is paying your to do.
I had a colleague who work from home from the middle of February 2020 for health reasons and still hasn't returned to the office.
We boxed-up all the contents of his desk and put it in storage. There's every change he's written some AI type script to do his job and he's now in the Bahamas. If that's the case I say fair play fella.
The ST was used in many recording studios because of it's clean MIDI interface, I saw a picture of Norman Cook's studio recently and he still has on.
The Amiga on the other hand had great graphics, so was used for video work. I seem to remeber the Chart Show on ITV used an Amiga 3000 for the graphics
When I was in school back in the 80's, our Chemistry teacher was in the habit of ducking below his bench as soon as the lesson ended and light up a crafty between lessons fag.
One day Sir had pissed of one of the kids, so as the lad was leaving the lesson he ran his hand across the teacher's desk, turning on all the gas taps.
Let's just say that was the last time that particular teacher lit a cigarette in his classroom...
I guess one of the beauties of the new Epson printers that use a bag of ink, they can't lie about being out of ink, you can tell when the bag is empty.
The same is ture of the HP Pagewide printers, you can tell when those cartridges are empty because they weigh almost nothing when out of ink.
We've just swapped out all our lasers, a mix of Xerox Phaser colours and Brother monos for Epson inkjets
We even swapped out the two big Toshiba bulk printers that do all the fancy foldy, staply, punchy things to booklets for a pair big Epson injets.
Genrally I'm finding the Epson Workforce Pro in my office to be quieter and quicker than the elderly Xerox Phaser colour printer it replaced.
The colours aren't as vivid though, but I'm not printing photos, so it's not an issue.
The thing I found most interesting is the big bag of black ink is supposed to last 50,000 pages, and works out at a shade over 2p a page if we buy the genuine Epson part, so I imagine that cost will plumet once we find a compatible supply.
On that note, I printed over 1,000 pages on Wednesday (we email the school reports home, but teachers are old school, so like a printed report on their desk for parents' evening) and it barely made a dent in the ink level bar, so I'm assuming the 50,000 page figure may be close to true.
I've had this printer for 3 weeks now, so I can't attest to its reliablilty or longevity, but I'm happy with it at the moment.
That's what I do, intital letters from each word in the first line of a song, substitute symbols and numbers for letters as appropriate
You then have a 12+ character password that's all but gibberish, but reasonably easy to remember.
Just don't pick a song by a band people know is your favourite.
I read this on Friday and decided to try a Chromebook.
Seeing as I was trading my old phone into CEX I decided to use the credit to buy an Acer Chromebook. Not great spec, but it's all metal like a MacBook, it's got a Full HD touch screen, and runs Chrome OS well enough for my needs.
From my initial testing I think this is my long sought after perfect on-the-road writing tool, especially as it charges using USB C, so I don't need to lug around the bulky PSU, instead I can use a compact 45w Anker USB-C charger.
From experience in planning back-up supplies, the power from the generators is usually only supplied to certain circuits. So for instance CCTV keeps recording, but the monitors are not powered.
This would mean kitchens would have no power.
That's not to say the staff won't have hidden a kettle in a room that does have power, just in case...
I guess this is my point, telling people they can save £275 a year by turning your TV off at the wall is giving them false hope.
For instance, my TOTAL electricity bill last year was £235 and I have two TVs and a 32" monitor on standby, how does that work even if the unit cost was 50% what it is now.
Another rubbish one I saw yesterday is the myth you'll save £20 a year if you turn your router off at night. A quick look at my router specs, which I assume would be the same for most people as I have one of the standard Thompson routers, shows it will cost around £20 a year to power the router 24/7 at current prices (34p a unit) so I assume it uses all that power between midnight and 8am if turning it off over night will save me the same £20...
I always wonder about the maths behind these reports.
Yesterday I read a report from a consumer organisation about power saving, they claimed that a TV uses 1.6Kw/h when on standby, so switching it off at the wall would save £275 a year,
A simple check of my TV's manual (Hisense 55U8HQ) shows it uses less than 0.5w/h on standby, so assuming it's on standby 20 hours a day, I will save a total of £1.25 turning it off at the wall based on my current billing rate...
I've tried FreeOffice and found docx compatibility to be sketchy at best when given a reasonably complex document.
I quite like the free online MS Office but it throws up one very annoying issue, the site where I upload my work doesn't like the docx files it creates and really mangles the paragraph formatting. No idea what the problem is.
All I have to do to fix it is to open the office online document in desktop Word and then reupload it and the file is fixed.
Google Docs is also fine, and produces a docx suitable for uploading, but Docs really struggles with a file over about 90,000 words - or it does on my Mac Mini with 16gb RAM...
I've tried various MS Office alternatives, and nothing seems to be quite as good as MS Office for me personally, and seeing as I don't have to pay for it as I have an Education licence through work I usually just go back to using MS Office.
The last one I tried was WPS Office and whilst I found it looked OK, it has the most inaccurate word count I've ever encountered.
The document I was working on was 250,000 words or thereabouts, Word and Google Docs argued about which side of 250k we were, but they were close. WPS Office on the other hand reported over 275,000 words and I can't find any reason why it's so far out,
I will try ONLYOFFICE when my new computer arrives at the weekend.
When I worked in the service department of a PC maker, our work PCs were a few generations old, runing NT 4 when we were shipping PCs running XP.
That was our work PC:
Everyone in the department also had a second PC under their desk strictly for lunchtime and Friday afternoon gaming that was made up from the finest parts stripped out of returned PCs. These PCs ran on a separate gigabit network when the office PCs were still on 100mb if you were lucky, and they also had an unfiltered internet connection for game updates,
Priorities...
"the board can be equipped with up to 64GB of DDR4 ... by way of a pair of SODIMM memory slots"
The second slot appears to be invisible in your attached photo.
Also, last time I checked a Pi 4b board was about $30, the cheapest of these boards is over $800, so you're kind of comparing a Dacia Sandero with a Rolls Royce Phantom, not really the same market segment at all...
I tried a couple of Beta versions of Chrome OS Flex (via USB 3 sticks) on my 2012 Mac Mini, they worked fine, once I'd fed in my Google account everything just worked.
The full released version though hung after I'd entered my account and flat out refused to boot fully.
Maybe they don't support 10 year old Minis, which is fine I suppose, but it's odd that the Betas were fine but not the final version
I tested Flex beta on my old 2012 Mac Mini and it worked fine.
Yeah, it's a Mac Mini Server, so it's rocking a chunky i7 with 16GB of RAM on an SSD, but it's 10 year old hardware and ran fine.
Still not sure why it exists though, when Linux Mint runs well on the same hardware and offers more scope.
When I worked in CCTV some companies systems still used 30 year old tube cameras built before the days of CCD & CMOS sensors, not great quality, but they still did an adequate job.
These things should be classed as appliances with an expected life measured in decades, not the sort of stuff that gets relegated to the attic or tip when something a slightly different colour is released...
Not really the same, as PCs running XP and Windows 7 would still continue working once MS stopped supporting the platforms, A place I worked last year still had several standalone PCs running XP as the devices they controlled had no drivers for Windows 7 or 10.
By the sound of things, Hive products wull simply stop working after the cut-off date.
Your mention of pouring glue into the USB ports reminds me of the time a customer sent his laptop back for repair because he couldn't plug in his USB stick.
Upon inspection all his USB ports had been filled with glue, I informed him of this and he said "yes, that's to stop my son plugging in USB sticks, I got a virus last time he did that."
I said, "so, you poured the glue in yourself to stop your son, and now you're sondering why you can't plug USB sticks in."
This is when the penny dropped, I told him the glue had damaged the motherboard and it needed replacing, he wasn't happy with the bill, so I sent it back unrepaired
I've got a Nokia X20, it doesn't kill background Apps and I still get at least two full days from a batter, often three workdays and charge it on the third night
No idea what the other phones are doing if they kill apps and still can't get a couple of workdays out of a battery...
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