Posts by AJ MacLeod

Canada orders Chinese CCTV biz Hikvision to quit the country ASAP

Re: "Canada’s government will stop using any Hikvision products it finds"

What's so "frighting" about this new firmware?

Xlibre fork lights a fire under long-dormant X.org development

Re: Until you need it...

Upvote just for WindowMaker - boxy but good! Can't really imagine using anything else on my main PC.

Tiling terminal multiplexers for the console connoisseur

Invaluable

I used screen for several years (including the serial capabilities) and can't quite recall what persuaded me to switch to tmux - possibly the much reduced attack surface. Either way tmux is invaluable for me and I often connect in to my main PC from my phone (using termux) or laptops. I have used more modern alternatives including Zellij but am not convinced by them. A particular annoyance in Zellij is that you can save your session (groups of tabs and the commands run in them) but more often than not it won't work after you update to a more recent version.

Zellij is much better at self-documenting/ hand holding, though a very quick web search will tell you how to accomplish those commands in tmux or screen that you only use once in a blue moon and hence always forget the keys for.

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Re: I get the concern, but …

The FF container tabs thing works very well and is probably FF's best feature in my opinion. So convenient when your job(s) involves wearing multiple hats or you have to regularly log in to the same website as several different people. Or even just limiting the amount of data mining certain websites do.

Re: I still use it, but...

I'm surprised, to say the least... which OS is this on? How many tabs? I'm no fan of Mozilla Corp but use Firefox on numerous machines and can't recall the last time it didn't automatically restore all tabs on startup. In fact on the PC I'm typing on now I have a cron job to kill Firefox each evening (hardly necessary but saves memory bloat etc) and it starts up again each morning perfectly. I appear to have 48 tabs open at the moment, in case that's relevant.

I would be willing to bet that if they fired the entire top tier of management and spent those salaries on hiring some decent developers to address long standing bugs and user feature requests both Mozilla and Firefox would be in a far better state. Those at the top of all these big corporations are nothing more than leeches, parasites contributing nothing of value but draining away the valuable lifeblood.

Thunderbird is go: 139 follows closely on Firefox's heels

For a GUI mail client it's OK

But I had calls yesterday from desperate people for whom this update ruined their day. I'm all for options, particularly when installing from scratch, but when someone has a working application they are used to the layout of it's at the very least extremely bad manners to randomly muck that about without any warning or their consent.

Personally I hope never to have to live without notmuch again so until TB can handle notmuch as a backend I'll stick with neomutt and aerc

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

Re: The best keyboard...

"DIN" plug (AT) isn't a problem - you can (I do) use an AT-PS/2 converter plugged into a PS/2-USB converter

Re: You're not entirely correct

I'm sure someone else out there is genuinely using one still older, but the one I'm typing this on is dated 02-10-1986 (part 1390136). I quite like the look of some of those expensive mechanical keyboards that have a volume knob at the top corner but there's no way I'd sacrifice my buckling springs for one.

My dad used to use Cherry keyboards and I could never really see the attraction - they certainly made clicky noises but for me were not any improvement over a decent membrane keyboard. When I first dragged this Model M out of the shed (only a few years ago actually, to see what all the fuss was about) I was instantly converted. I genuinely make fewer typing mistakes and the buckling spring sort of catapults your fingers back to where they need to be - hard to describe, but feels just right. I don't share my office so noise doesn't matter (though I do often get comments from people I'm on the phone to if I'm typing in the background!)

Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos

Was that one of those Lenovo keyboards that has a kind of pen shelf at the top and blue-grey function / enter keys by any chance? I was so impressed with one on a PC I was setting up for someone else that I went out and bought one myself and used it for quite a few years. That style of keyboard was eventually replaced by the very worst PC keyboard I've ever had the misfortune of using (and that's saying something.) A significant percentage of the replacement model had faulty keys right out of the box, usually around the left shift area.

Microsoft updates the Windows 11 Start Menu

Re: Take my hat off to MS

Not odd at all, it's just that far too many people have got used to the idea that stabbing at a greasy little hard-to-hold slab of easily broken glass is an acceptable user interface.

On Linux scrcpy does what you want with an Android phone (mine has to be plugged in via USB but I believe others can be connected via WiFi.) Doesn't require any extra software on the phone.

Rustdesk should also work (and probably more easily) - I've only used it with the phone as a client rather than the desktop but I'm sure it works both ways.

Re: Take my hat off to MS

I fairly often link my phone to my PC - wouldn't use any MS provided software for it though. Scrcpy lets me copy/paste between my Linux desktop and the phone, and use my rather nice keyboard to type longer messages on my phone (which for some reason seems to be lacking an AT keyboard socket.)

Microsoft to preload Word minutes after boot

Re: Been there, done that...

I have several laptops running Linux and not one of them uses systemd (somewhat ironically I look after quite a few servers which do, and it has not infrequently caused me great pain.)

Google goes cold on Europe: Stops making smart thermostats for continental conditions

Who could have predicted this?

Oh yes... anyone with any knowledge of the IT industry. I am the one of world's greatest sceptics of all things "smart" but the need to improve our home's heating setup was too great to ignore any longer and I "smartened" it at the end of last year.

Obviously all proprietary systems like Nest were out of the question, no components were permitted if they required any kind of proprietary app or 3rd party server to operate.

Our combi boiler is 25 years old and was run off a basic programmer/timer with only two on/off periods and separate controls for hot water and heating - no thermostat other than the basic wax ones on rads.

The old programmer was replaced by a Shelly relay, with two big physical buttons to turn on/off heating and hot water manually if desired (buttons have LEDs in them to indicate state, regardless of how it was triggered.)

The radiator valves were replaced with the inexpensive but decent Sonoff TRVZB valves; room temp/humidity sensing nearly all by the ubiquitous, dirt cheap and reliable LYWSD03MMC devices (flashed with a custom firmware to remove the need for any stupid proprietary stuff.)

All of the above is tied together by Home Assistant running the BetterThermostat addon which means it can be controlled by phone with the app, or any device with a web browser. A simple script turns on the boiler if one or more rooms needs heat and turns it off a few minutes after no room needs heat. The boiler runs far less than it ever did and yet every room in the house is at an appropriate temperature at all times - all of it is accessible from anywhere (through my own VPN) if required, but none of it requires any third party service and even if home assistant became inoperable for some reason we can still manually turn the heating on and off.

The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2

Re: PS/2?

This one came out of a skip over 25 years ago...

PS/2?

Typing this on a Model M from 1986 - plugged into an AT to PS/2 adapter plugged in to a PS/2 to USB adapter. Works great!

Hm, why are so many DrayTek routers stuck in a bootloop?

Re: Inscrutably bad router

Have you seen how many flaws have been found in Netgear devices? DrayTek are clearly not perfect but there's a reason the vast majority of SMEs I've dealt with use their routers and it's not price. "Vibes" are really not a good way of choosing IT equipment where the important stuff is invisible... I've nothing in particular against Netgear, if I only have the budget for bargain basement stuff I will use it but there's no way I'd use one of their routers over a DrayTek.

Re: What a balls-up!!!!

Seems a bit of an over-reaction in my view. Every manufacturer has vulnerabilities show up now and then but DrayTek release plenty of firmware upgrades even for pretty old routers and which in my long experience have rarely introduced new problems. I did recently switch to a router running OpenWRT at home (it's Mikrotik hardware but RouterOS is diabolically irritating in places and they seem particularly bad at introducing new problems with firmware upgrades.)

I love OpenWRT, the flexibility is incredible and "unattended sysupgrades" bring the upgrade procedure more in line with what I'm used to, but even there I was left with no PoE output after the last firmware upgrade. I don't see myself boycotting DrayTek any time soon, their upgrade processes are as good and as reliable as I've seen - which really matters when you might be several hours away from the physical device.

Eight days later, Microsoft Outlook users still struggle on iOS devices

Re: Dump Outlook and replace it

While I agree completely with the sentiment, this appears not to be about the "outlook" iOS app but the "outlook" mail service itself even using the default iOS mail app. Why anyone continues to use Microsoft for anything email related I have no idea - of all the major providers they seem to be easily the worst for reliability.

101 fun things to do with a locked Kindle e-reader

Re: Why do these things still exist?

They exist for the same reason that nobody really prints books as small as a normal phone screen. Also, they exist because most people who read books don't like their batteries running out every second chapter. Also they exist because staring at a bright backlit screen is very uncomfortable after a while.

Until last year I did the same - Nook Simple Touch, bought ridiculously cheap when they were dumping their stock here. It started to literally fall apart last year though, the rubberised plastic over the "buttons" has started to crack and fall out so I bought a Pocketbook Era to replace it. The Era is lovely, but the Nook is still entertaining my daughter who reads books faster than I can download them!

Amazon have lost my e-book business for good - I fairly often bought books on Amazon to download and read on my Nook / Era, but no chance now. I never trusted them enough to buy a Kindle and I suppose they've just proved me right.

How Google tracks Android device users before they've even opened an app

Re: Banking apps, Use a browser

This was the bank I changed to! In every other way they are vastly superior to my previous bank (who actually paid me to leave them)...

Re: Banking apps

Doesn't help here, each session has to be authenticated within their app.

Re: Banking apps

You can't open an account without a smartphone... in their defence their app works well and their banking service has been light years ahead of that I received from the traditional bank I used previously (until they closed all their branches within an hour's drive from me.)

Re: Banking apps

I'd love to use a browser, only in order to do so I have to use my bank's app on a phone to confirm the login every time (take a picture of the QR code on screen.)

Microsoft trims more CPUs from Windows 11 compatibility list

Re: Goodbye Windows 11

To be fair, LibreOffice is just a recent descendent of StarOffice. I don't often use an office suite but have had to use LO quite frequently over the past week and it's impressed me with how well it has rendered Excel, Word and even WordPerfect documents other people have been sending me. I have used it fairly infrequently since the Star Office days and it's one of the few pieces of software which has genuinely improved over that timeframe.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

I stopped bothering with HP servers when they decided that firmware updates would only be available to people with a current warranty... that might or might not be the case now but I'm never going to bother to check.

Mind you, even back then it wasn't worth the stress of messing with HP's website, I just emailed my requirements to a reseller who came up with the goods.

Avaya hangs up on users with fewer than 200 SaaSy contact center seats

Re: 200 Seats

I know they do, I can go and see them at their desks if I so desire...

Hyperoptic customers left in dark as power outage takes down systems

Re: UPSes are a common feature of...

Funnily enough one of my more dramatic (OK, terrifying) UPS failures was also with a big Dell branded APC rackmount UPS... those have some very large capacitors in them which make very loud noises when they are unhappy. When you're the only one in the building (and it's not your building and you can't get to the main power switch without leaning over the exploding UPS) it's even more exciting!

I do have some experience of bigger Riello UPS - not sure on capacity off-hand but they're the big floor standing units on castors (with a train of big batteries on castors too). Had a couple of them fail too (in a non-exciting manner) but to be fair they're working in a pretty warm and not particularly dry environment.

For all that, the most scary for me was the much smaller 1500VA APC I previously had looking after my PC... I noticed a weird acid kind of smell when I came through the door one morning, eventually traced it to the UPS which was too hot to touch for more than a split second. Somehow I managed to rip the cables out and literally threw it out the door before it set fire to anything; the batteries had been boiled to death and were swollen enough to have become one with the case of the UPS.

I haven't a lot of confidence in these devices for some reason!

Re: UPSes are a common feature of...

I realise the scale is slightly different but I got sick of UPS self-destructing a couple of years ago and switched to my own cobbled together setups.

My office is powered through a Victron inverter with szeable LifePo4 batteries and a couple of decent solar panels; it runs everything in the office off the solar if enough sun, failing which it uses the grid or seamlessly switches to battery power if there's a power cut (I have the heaters on smart switches which turn them off when the grid drops out).

The internet feed is from a different building so it has its own even more cobbled-together (but reliable) arrangement; another 12v LifePo4 battery which feeds the ONT via a buck converter and also the router (and from there a WAP) through a 12v to 48v PoE injector. The battery is permanently connected to a Victron smart charger which is set to keep the battery at "float", when the power goes off everything just carries on running from the battery and when the power comes back the charger automatically brings the battery back to the correct charge.

I'm very happy to be rid of very expensive and yet unreliable UPS with hopeless run times and prone-to-cooking lead acid batteries...

UK tax collector's phone service 'deliberately' bad to push users online, say MPs

If the online systems worked properly I wouldn't have had to phone them at all. Completing my tax return a few weeks ago I realised their calculation was wrong - it didn't take into account marriage allowance and so was claiming I owed them ~£250. After trying the utterly useless chatbot service I resorted to the phone; after being on hold for an interminable period (more than an hour anyway) I did get through to someone who was helpful, ran the calculations and agreed with me that their figures were wrong.

The solution? Submit the tax return with correct figures but wrong calculation and wait. "The system" should detect that it's wrong, recalculate and send a letter with the correctly calculated value!

By a strange coincidence said letter just arrived an hour ago. Imagine how much time and money would have been saved if the online system simply did the calculation correctly in the first place - over an hour of my time on the phone and researching online; the whole conversation with the HMRC guy, the printing and postage of the letter - all completely avoidable.

Adélie Linux 1.0 – small, fast, but not quite grown up

Re: It's one of the *only*

Glad it's not just me... this is perhaps the very most stupid phrase currently doing the rounds and it irritates me like nothing else. Either it's "THE ONLY" or it's "one of the FEW". It's really not that complicated.

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

Re: re: A keyboard and mouse not only work better and faster

Yeah - loads more effort required to hold your hand up in an awkward position to smear your greasy fingerprint onto the screen. If only someone could invent some sort of pointing device that just sits conveniently on the desk, on which your hand could rest...

D-Link tells users to trash old VPN routers over bug too dangerous to identify

Re: Is there no product liability at all?

It's the SNP way... do exactly the same as what Westminster does but at least slightly worse or more inefficiently

Academic papers yanked after authors found to have used unlicensed software

Re: So if they licence the software they can resubmit the paper?

It's CFD, they can't be sure the data it outputs is completely correct anyway...

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

Re: I disagree

As someone who lives in what most people would consider the far North of Scotland I completely disagree. By this time of the year it's dark at getting up time anyway, changing the clocks makes virtually no difference. On the other hand, now that the clocks have gone back it's practically dark by the time lunch is over - it's plain stupid. I'm all for going GMT+1 all year round or even +2.

Also, as someone who never wears a watch but can mostly tell what time it is anyway through long practice, the changing of the official clocks mucks up my body clock for days at both ends of the summer.

Western Digital releases firmware fix for SSDs blighted by Windows 11 24H2 BSODs

Re: Western Dataloss

Hard to tell whether Seagate or WD were worse for HDD failures, but to be fair I've used quite a lot of WD's SSDs without any issues so far.

Microsoft veteran ditches Team Tabs, blaming storage trauma of yesteryear

Re: What I don't understand

Come on, think about this for a minute. NOBODY needs to agree on how big a <tab> is - that's the beauty of them! All that matters is that one tab is one level of indentation, two tabs are two levels of indentation. If you like your indents to be the size of one space, that's fine; configure your editor to display that and use tabs. When I have to look at your file it'll look as perfect to me as it does to you, as my editor is set to display tabs the way I like them. Everyone wins. I genuinely don't understand why people find this so hard to grasp...

It's exceedingly trivial to get the desired size of tabs, any usable editor can be configured to display them any size you like. The whole purpose of tabs is to aid with aligning things consistently - spaces should be mere separators between words and if they were sufficient tabs would never have been invented...

That doomsday critical Linux bug: It's CUPS. May lead to remote hijacking of devices

Re: CUPS seems to be turned off on Macs

I don't trust Apple or their judgement...

Lebanon now hit with deadly walkie-talkie blasts as Israel declares ‘new phase’ of war

Re: What I’ve learned about this from the French media

It's the French... they couldn't possibly just call them what everyone else does, could they?

250 million-plus unused IPv4 addresses should be left alone, argues network boffin

Ionos do a basic unlimited bandwidth VPS for £1/month (plus VAT). All you need to do is choose a bare bones Debian image and install Wireguard. There are scripts available if you don't want to do it manually, eg wireguard-install. I did that myself a few weeks ago as I'm (still!) waiting for my new ISP to allocate a static IP address to me and it works fine - the client setup couldn't really be easier, particularly if your device has a camera to scan the QR code...

Openreach pitches its tent as Ofcom preps review of broadband market rules

I can only go on what I was told by the manager on the ground overseeing the altnet's rollout - and given the physical evidence that they've had their equipment in place ready to go for nearly a year I don't see why he would be lying. He also told me that OR were being so obstructive about connecting up the next nearest village that they dug in five miles of their own fibre in order to get that village online in a sane timeframe.

These are not small towns, they're small (some would say tiny) villages - Openreach simply aren't interested. Frankly they should have had all the cities and big towns done years ago, but instead they've just sat on their heels enjoying their privileged position for as long as possible. Of course they have their legal obligations but we all know there are always ways and means of ensuring that they break these whilst maintaining plausible deniability.

If it were up to Openreach, I doubt we'd have FTTP any time in the next decade. Thankfully an altnet got our (small, very rural) village ducted up about year ago and we finally got connected a week or two back. The 3/4 year delay was due to Openreach being obstructive and not permitting the altnet access to the exchange in a timeous manner.)

Now we have over 300Mbs both directions and could pay more for up to 2 gig both ways if we wanted it - no thanks to Openreach!

Zuckerberg says Biden administration pressured Meta to police COVID posts

Re: Aim that blame thrower

The article specifically states that the government pressure was in 2021 and from the Biden administration - how much clearer would you like it?

Re: the next one

Look at the downvotes... and the total lack of facts to refute your points. It seems from many centuries of evidence that the majority of people are fine with being lied to by the relevant authorities of the day, happy to avoid any kind of critical thinking of their own - and then crowd round and batter down anyone who dares to posit something that conflicts with the official "truth".

The Government was entirely wrong to pressure them - as we now know, the majority of Government "facts" which were ruthlessly pushed were completely false and much of the so-called "misinformation" that was being censored was in fact true.

LibreOffice 24.8: Handy even if you're happy with Microsoft

Re: If only there was a replacement for outlook...

Outlook is also very far from free - probably a fair bit more than whatever the Thunderbird add-on costs. There is also the slight issue that Microsoft have a stated aim of killing off Outlook in the near future (the "replacement" New Outlook, a completely different animal - is already being foisted on people.)

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free

Re: Interesting, but ...

WordStar 2000 had a component called PC-Outline which I think did what you are talking about... it also allowed you to display all the control codes in the document in a very usable manner.

Re: high class trolling

Where did anybody suggest that vim and LaTeX would be good for everybody? I just said what I now use, having left WordStar 2000 behind in the 90s...