Posts by algol60forever

OTF, which backs Tor, Let's Encrypt and more, sues to save its funding from Trump cuts

Re: You don't understand what "debt" means...

Yup. Remember December 29, 2006. That's when we finally paid off our war debt to the US. Thanks for bailing us out.

Apple has locked me in the same monopolistic cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

Re: If you want a general purpose computer ...

IMO, it's been probably decades since Which's aim was to help consumers - now it just gives them a limited choice of stuff they've been given to try.

Pretty much like any on-line car magazine.

As for Apple - well - I've had pretty much every bit of kit pass my desk since the 80's and the frustrations of using it never went away, from

development platforms to networking and servers.

Now they've got a solid 'business' model there's absolutely no chance of change. Can't sniff at $162 billion in cash, can you. I call it the Apple Tax.

LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab

Re: All you need

I think 'tool' is the operative word.

EU buyers still shunning pure electric vehicles, prefer hybrids

Re: Plug in hybrids

'Fraid not. Overtake parked vehicles on a normal road with white markings without signalling first and you'll be wresting the wheel before you know it.

Ditto switching back to inside lane of motorway with nothing behind you other than the truck you've just overtaken.

I believe the Renault system allow a permanent switch-off when setting 'personal' preferences. Not sure what the crash testers thought about it.

Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right

I seem to remember Apple doing user test on mice and one bright spark picked it up, turned it over and proceeded to roll the ball around with his finger.

Musk burns bridges in Brazil after calling for senior judge to be impeached

Re: Brazil vs US

No. Orange is the New Black. (I'll get my coat...)

We never agreed to only buy HP ink, say printer owners

Re: Ford, kinda !

I'm pretty sure I read a tale of how the accountants at a major Euro car firm decided to force the supplier of drive chains to let the stamp last more than a week before replacement. It meant that if you got the Friday+1 stamped chains your replacement cycle might only be 15k miles and not an expected 70k. Cue catastrophic failure. (Could have been VW, I can't say).

Amazon has repackaged surveillance capitalism as reality TV

Re: Wildlife Camera

It seems that Amazon acquired Blink in 2017...oops.

IoT biz Insteon goes silent, smart home gear plays dumb

Re: Only just started with Home Automation

I wrestled with HA and OpenHab but settled on Domoticz. It seems to have just enough smarts without reaching for a forum or manual immediately. It will operate very nicely with your Zigbee kit and it has a LUA scripting setup for event management and a mobile app.

Den Automation raised millions to 'reinvent' the light switch. Now it's lights out for startup

Useful home automation

Following a burglary (200 others taken into consideration when they caught him) we had an alarm fitted. You pay £25/month for not a lot that eventually failed - 'it must have been a moth, sir'. Threw them out but kept the dummy wall box. I got a Homewizard (now bought by Smartwares) and added a door switch, PIR, a smoke alarm and a couple of plug switches. The app also allowed third party devices like cameras to be integrated. You can program the system to take daylight hours into account and set the system to 'holiday' when you're out. It paid for itself in about 12 months. The app has seen a few updates and the SMS messaging works fine and I use Tasker on the mobile to monitor email and SMS for high-priority messages. I definitely would repeat the process if the company failed and I certainly wouldn't recommend a standard alarm service.

We have a winner! Fresh Linux Mint 17.1 – hands down the best

XP users start here...

I'm reasonably sure that any XP users will not be able to upgrade to a later win OS simply because their equipment will not pass the hardware check. I tried it on my AMD64 HP desktop about 18 months ago - it failed miserably. Now, I have Mint 17 on this, Debian+XFCE on my server and Xubuntu on my even older Acer laptop. Now, if I could just decide on a replacement toolkit for a Access-based app my wife uses....

Sticky Tahr-fy pudding: Ubuntu 14.04 slickest Linux desktop ever

Upgrading XP to 8 - that'll be a new computer, then.

This is the reason I've moved my hardware over to Linux. I can't upgrade XP, even if I wanted to, since 8 will not install - despite having business-class machines with 64bit processors and plenty of ram. Linux has proven incredibly stable, responsive and easy to manage. My laptop now boots in 45sec and shuts down in 15sec (Xubuntu). I suspect the majority of users are put off by the plethora of distributions and don't realise how simple the installation and migration (to other distributions) has become.