Posts by Andy Non

Google updates timeline for unpopular Privacy Sandbox, which will kill third-party cookies in Chrome by 2023

Re: Search engine revenues

I bought some ratchet straps a month ago, now the YouTube home page keeps offering me videos about the bloody things.

For a true display of wealth, dab printer ink behind your ears instead of Chanel No. 5

Ditto that. I dumped HP inkjet printers years ago due to the extortionate price of ink and their blocking use of third party inks. I happily use a Brother laser printer now. Its only black and white but don't really miss colour for my needs. It is vastly cheaper than HP ink. No more blocked nozzles either and similar problems.

Tech support scams subside somewhat, but Millennials and Gen Z think they're bulletproof and suffer

Re: Sad

I had a strange one the other day. All I could make out in his opening pitch was the word "broadband" due to his fast speech and very heavy Indian accent. He then asked me how I was today, to which I replied "fine" and he hung up on me straight away, which seemed bizarre and a little extreme. I hadn't even started to bait him.

Ditto that, my record is keeping a scammer on the line for 45 minutes and getting him to phone me back twice more.

Depends on what mood I'm in and if I'm at a loose end for a while, but it is certainly fun baiting them. I take the view that while they are talking to me they aren't conning someone more vulnerable.

I get far less of the "Microsoft Support" calls nowadays. The most common one is "We've renewed your Amazon prime". I'm surprised people still fall for that one, it is becoming old and repetitive now.

As for calls about my "recent accident" I lead them down a long winded story culminating in the fact I was hit from behind by a flying elephant.

Engineers' Laurel and Hardy moment caused British Airways 787 to take an accidental knee

The engineer's careers

will take a nose dive.

Windows 10 to hang on for five more years with 21H2 update

Re: okay...

Linux Mint does all I need, used it for nearly a decade now. The one Windows 10 computer left in the household belonging to the Mrs will likely be upgraded to Mint too before long the way Windows is going. She's always moaning about how slow it is to start and the amount of time it takes installing updates.

Try placing a pot plant directly above your CRT monitor – it really ties the desk together

Re: BOBSMEDS

Not an electric shock, but at my college's open day, the electrical engineering section had an experiment running with a large washer levitating around a bolt. Fascinated, I wondered how much force it would take to move the washer and grasped it firmly to find out... and branded my fingers. It was BLOODY HOT!

Been there done that

Many years ago we kept a spider plant in a hanging basket above the (CRT) television set in the front room. One day the inevitable happened while I watered the plant and water ran out of the bottom of the pot and straight inside the TV set. There was a little cracking sound and the TV died. I face palmed at my own stupidity.

The lights go off, broadband drops out, the TV freezes … and nobody knows why (spooky music)

Re: French water meters

There may be higher standards with new builds in France, but this was an old stone and cob farmhouse in rural Normandy. It had electrical wiring that looked like Napoleon had installed it and an illegal fosse septique (spelling?) that just consisted of a large tank that a local farmer came around and emptied occasionally, spraying the contents onto his fields, overflow from the tank ran into a nearby stream. There was no gas supply to the property, that is quite common though, and we had to buy gas cylinders from the local garage. There was no broadband and the phone line hung off a couple of the poles into a field for the cows to play skipping with. French telecom/Orange wouldn't fix the line as they said "it still works". My internet consisted of 22k dial up. So much for the services. Despite that we did enjoy our ten years living in France. :-)

French water meters

When we moved to France I was asked to give the local water company the meter reading. I couldn't find the meter anywhere. Eventually they sent someone around to get the reading themselves. It turned out the water meter was deep under a concrete manhole cover submerged under two feet of dirty water. The guy had to bail all of the water out to get to the meter to read it.

Giant predatory ancient insects pioneered mobile comms 310,000,000 years ago

Re: Wings...

Yes, it would make you a fly by night.

Revealed: Perfect timings for creation of exemplary full English breakfast

Re: add condiments to taste.

"Both. On opposite sides of the plate."

I once tried putting it on opposite sides of the plate, but it made a real mess of the table cloth.

Fried eggs

The Mrs taught me the best way to fry eggs - do them in a separate small frying pan and put a (glass) saucepan lid on the frying pan. Cook on a low to medium heat once the bacon is partway cooked. Done this way the white cooks all the way through without leaving a slimy layer of uncooked white on the top but the yolk comes out runny, as desired.

YouTube's recommendation engine is pretty naff, Mozilla study finds

Re: But....

Personally I log in, which doesn't help as it knows the films I've already watched, it shows the red progress bar all the way along on every film, so it must think I'm there to watch the same films over and over rather than offering any new ones of the same genre.

It's kinda like reading a monthly magazine which you happened to like, so the publisher keeps sending you exactly the same edition of the magazine every month.... That's not too bad an analogy, because for some reason, in the YouTube trending news section it keeps offering me an article in the Sun about flooding from eight months ago. For one I'm not a Sun reader and two, why does YouTube keep suggesting very old news?

The search feature is equally bad

I like to watch "sci fi short film" but the search algorithm isn't smart enough to suggest films I haven't already watched at the top of the search list. I'm lucky now if it lists any unwatched films anywhere in the list, I can only stumble on them by accident now. Net result I visit YouTube much less.

YouTube's recomendations are crap

If I watch a short film, it thinks I must want to watch it repeatedly. If I click that I'm "not interested" one of the options is that "I've already watched it", well YouTube knows that already as it shows the red progress bar all the way along the film, so why does it keep shoving the same videos at me all the time. Maybe I'd like to watch something different, for a change you know or are there only a dozen short films on YouTube?

ICO survey on data flouters: 50% say they receive more unwanted calls than before pandemic

Re: Someone's personal data is being misused

I feel vindicated for opening the letter. If I'd thrown it away, the scammer would definitely have won and sooner or later I may have had a knock on the door from bailiffs seeking this person. I just don't want that hassle. On the other hand I wasn't going to walk all the way to the postbox to return it to sender if it was just junk mail.

In my opinion, mail addressed to someone who moved away many years ago and is marked private and confidential is suspicious enough to warrant investigation.

Someone's personal data is being misused

Yesterday we received a private and confidential letter addressed to someone at our address who had moved many years ago, long before we moved here. Being suspicious, rather than chucking the letter I opened it, apparently the person's request to have a £300 credit account with the NEXT store had been approved. This appeared to be obvious fraud, so I returned the letter to sender, marked NOT KNOWN AT THIS ADDRESS. Either the person who used to live here is trying to scam NEXT or someone else is. Either way NEXT isn't using due diligence in vetting potential scammers.

Land line calls

We never use our land line or give the number to anyone, so all the calls to it are scams or wrong numbers. 99% of them are from call centres: Amazon prime renewal or my bank card has been used fraudulently or my internet service provider is going to terminate my internet or its about my recent car accident or there is a virus on my computer.

If I've got the time and inclination I like to wind the callers up and play along for as long as I can feeding them fake information until they finally realise they are being bated - I kept one guy on the line for 45 minutes. I give them an address that is nearly real (there is no house with that number on the street name I give them), I consistently give them the same incorrect date of birth and false full name etc. There must be quite a dossier building up about this non-existent person at this non-existent address.

The number of calls is going down though, spoilsports, they must slowly be adding our land line number to a black list of numbers not to call. :-(

Ransomware-hit law firm gets court order asking crooks not to publish the data they stole

Re: D'oh

I say! They would never do such a thing, it just wouldn't be cricket!

Radioactive hybrid terror pigs break out of nuclear hellscape home and into people's hearts

Creating a movie

could be a swine and the end result boaring.

I'll get my coat, mine's the one with the glowing pork scratchings in the pocket.

The splitting image: Sufferer of hurty wrist pain? Logitech's K860 a potential answer

Re: Price

Easy enough to convert:

$350 = 43,477 Icelandic Krona

$100 = 12,422 " "

Go to L: A man of the cloth faces keyboard conundrum

Re: Font recommendations

I always liked Comic Sans... I know, I know, I'll go around the back of the bit barn and shoot myself.

Water conditions in Jupiter's clouds could support 'life', say astroboffins

I for one

welcome out new Jovian overlords.

London Greenwich station: A reminder of former glories. Like Windows XP

Re: leaking memory like a sieve

Maybe minecraft had taken up crypto-mining?

UK competition watchdog launches investigation into fake review epidemic across Google and Amazon

I tend to read the most recent reviews first to see if there is a negative trend over a period of several months. Fake positive reviews tend to be grouped together over a short period.

What you need to know about Microsoft Windows 11: It will run Android apps

Re: What . . . why?

Looks like the wife's elderly Windows 10 laptop wont be upgraded to 11, but rather to Linux Mint.

Mark it in your diaries: 14 October 2025 is the end of Windows 10

If it's only used for web browsing, it sounds ideal for an upgrade to Linux Mint and the browser of your choice.

Mayflower, the AI ship sent to sail from the UK to the US with no humans, made it three days before breaking down

Re: "With no one onboard to fix it"

Time to worry when the AI has the capability to repair or upgrade itself.

Linux gods at last turn their gaze to Pi 400: Computer-in-a-keyboard receives mainline kernel support with v5.14

Re: Surely...

Didn't know whether to upvote you or blow you a raspberry.

If HAL did digital signage. I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that...

I've figured out the cause of the problem

I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours

Re: I'm sorry...

I honestly think you ought to calm down; take a stress pill and think things over.

Apple, it's OK. Seriously. You don't need to blind your iOS 15 engineers to prevent leaks

Re: I Look Forward.....

Exactly. One new feature having a knock on effect on another new feature that neither team could foresee as they were oblivious to the interaction.

Thanks, boss. The accidental creation of a lights-out data centre – what a fun surprise

Re: A&E light switch

"my finger falling off at the time"

So the door got you anyway. ;-)

Twitter’s new subscription service costs the same as a cup of coffee a month – though much less stimulating

Lovely plumage.

I hope you aren't implying said avian was nailed to its perch?

How many remote controls do you really need? Answer: about a bowl-ful

Re: My television wants me dead, or just gibbering in a 'special' ward.

I can relate. I too own a Sony Bravia "smart" TV. Unfortunately it is as smart as a sack of rocks. It would only record one program at a time to an attached USB drive. It was very iffy at recording anyway, sometimes skipping the program entirely then showing it would record it a negative amount of time later. On one occasion all on its own it decided it wanted to record a ten hour long program in the year 2173. Most annoying of all, the integrated TV guide (called something like MyGuide ?) would only work if I disabled the feature to record programs. I gave up on the "smarts" and bought a Humax box, using the Sony Bravia as a dumb screen now.

Unfortunately, the TV on/off button on the Humax remote has now stopped working so I bought a so-called replacement remote. Except it doesn't have a button to turn the TV on/off, so now we've got an extra remote but still need the Sony one just to turn the TV on and off. Sigh.

Snakes on a Plane meets The Simpsons as airline creates ‘whacker’ to scare reptiles away from parked A380s

Re: Call that a snake?

I can just imaging the snake shouting back "The toilet is engaged."

Brit retailer Furniture Village confirms 'cyber-attack' as systems outage rolls into Day 7

I hope Furniture Village

aren't taking this sitting down.

Boeing fined $17m after fitting uncertified sensors to 737 Max and NG airliners for 4 years

That's just... where's the mind bleach?

Man found dead inside model dinosaur after climbing in to retrieve phone

Re: First kill

Bit unjust, he was only pulling the dinosaur's leg.

Just what is the poop capacity of an unladen sparrow? We ask because one got into the office and left quite a mess

Small guage chicken wire?

Bit of mesh on the inside to keep the blighters out while the window is open?

I've been having a similar problem with pigeons lately. I keep a bowl of water outside for our dogs to drink. The pigeons have also been drinking from the bowl too, which I didn't mind in the least until recently one pigeon decided it was fun to perch on the side of the bowl, have a drink, then turn around and shit in the water. After putting up with the avian anti-social lout doing this every day for a couple of weeks I ended up moulding a bit of chicken wire to sit around the bowl and over the edge of the rim. Success, the pigeons no longer land on the rim or drink from the bowl. It was either that or serve the pigeon an ASBO.

New IETF draft reveals Egyptians invented pyramids to sharpen razor blades

We need a good negotiator to get them to agree to part with their skin in exchange for a nice woolly jumper. ;-)

Re: Patent 91304

I made a model pyramid as a kid and tried it on one of my dad's blunt razor blades. Needless to say it didn't work. Basically it was a load of bollocks.

A think-tank is needed to resolve the problem of how to extract crocodile skins to make leather strops.

Ransomware victim Colonial Pipeline paid $5m to get oil pumping again, restored from backups anyway – report

There's money in

oil ransomware. Way to go to encourage more of it.

Rude awakening for O2 customers after network runs surprise test of emergency mobile alert system

They need to make the text alert louder

I couldn't hear it over the noise of the nuclear explosions outside.

App Tracking: Apps plead for users to press allow, but 85% of Apple iOS consumers are not opting in

Re: May not be directly related...

Exactly. I never see any ads on YouTube and I've binge watched hundreds of short sci-fi films over the last few months. Not one ad.

Amazon says it destroyed two million knockoffs in 2020, a fraction of the amount it ships

It's not just Amazon's market place sellers

I've had a few items from Amazon's third party sellers over the years that turned out to be terrible quality / knock-offs despite rave reviews on Amazon and Amazon have always refunded me. But more worrying are items sent directly from Amazon themselves; a case in point being a Sony Playstation 4 dual-shock controller. It "looked" legitimate but was faulty straight out of the box. I sent it back and got a refund and flagged the item as possibly counterfeit, but never got any feedback.

You can listen right here to the whir of a robot helicopter flying on an alien world

Re: "Sounds below 80Hz and above 90Hz have been turned down in volume"

Yes, but you'd probably need to adjust your audio settings to erm... filter sounds below 80 Hz and above 90 Hz. I'll get my cost.