Posts by Contrex 162 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Oct 2014
Disclosure: rail fan since age 6... but there are Tube timetables! London Transport used to publish them in book form when I was a lad, I've still got the maroon Metropolitan Line one I was given free at a ticket office in 1965. Nowadays they are on line, and your wife's colleague could, for example, see that Monday to Friday there is a Bakerloo services northbound from Oxford Circus at 10.09½. There was one at 10.05½ and there will be one at 10.13, and so on. They try to stick to the times as much as possible, but there can be delays or disruption, and the public perception of the Tube as a 'turn up and go' service is a valid one.
As someone aged 74, and, I guess, a 'boomer', I do get tired of people assuming that I and my cohort are Daily Mail-reading fascists. My wife was born in what is now the Makerfield constituency, and although she likes Andy Burnham well enough, she (like me) wishes he could be clearer about Gaza and rejoining the EU. We have quite a few friends who feel similarly.
I scored a used Lenovo M900 Tiny desktop with 8 gb RAM and a 250 GB ssd for £100 from eB** because I wanted a replacement for my R Pi 4 that has been my home NAS for 7 years (it works fine, just fancied some hardware to play with). It was advertised with Windows 10 but when I started it there was Windows 11 Pro. That soon got replaced by Debian 14. Everything is just peachy. 6 USB 3 ports. I still have 2 Pis if I get the urge to make a robot or a weather station.
My dad was a distribution engineer for the London Electricity Board in the 1960s, and had to visit South Africa House to advise on an upgrade to their 11 kV transformer in the basement. To get in the building he had to go through an airlock arrangement of that type, with then-unusual CCTV monitoring. At the time South Africa was a pariah nation for well-know reasons.
Compressed air can be very dangerous to human health. There is a fairly well known case of apprentices who, for a prank, fired a blast from an airline at a lad who was up a ladder with his, er, back towards them. He died at once from intestinal shock. Another thing I would not do is use an airline to clean under my fingernails, due to the danger of embolism, in fact I would take care not to spray myself full stop.
OMFG. I retired not long ago from the MOJ, and part of my role was drafting certain types of internal policy documents which were to be promulgated (that's what we called it) over the name of the Lord Chief Justice, Head of Tribunals, or the Lord Chancellor. One quite important one took 18 months to push though, partly because of petty alterations demanded by various branches of the ministry, often due to stupidity, ignorance of grammar or spelling, etc. I can only imagine the shit-show heading towards justice system users (victims?), clients, stakeholders, office-holders, and so on. Considering the trouble we had with Atos.
When I worked in central Bristol pre-pandemic, I used to go in the 'Spoons near my office for a 99p bean-to-cup coffee. I got to know the staff a bit, they were very friendly. One day I mentioned the owner of Wetherspoons being in favour of Brexit (I wasn't!) to one bar guy. He said 'Tim Martin is a f***ing w**ker!' very loudly, and all the other bar staff cheered loudly. Sad news about Ebuyer. I bought my last two desktop PCs, my Lenovo laptop, mine and my wife's Motorola phones, and a bunch of SSDs, SD cards, leads, etc from them over 15 or more years.
That's typical of sensory deficit. I was born with very poor vision in my right eye; it's not really that I can't see things to the right of me; they **aren't there** till I turn my head slightly. My grandmother was convinced that 'these days everybody mutters', and I'm beginning to think she was right.
Re the 'tiny LED displays' - the display on the desktop calculator my team of 5 shared in 1975 at Avon County Council finance dept had green vacuum-fluorescent digits, and it looks like the ones in the linked picture are using Nixie tubes, fashionable now for clocks I believe, sort of retro-steampunk?
if this is a true story, your father was lucky. If he was not made to wear wellies there was a failure by the others. There would have been a 'voltage gradient' in the ground, radiating out from the point where the cable touches the ground surface. This can be hundreds, or thousands, of volts per metre, and since the length of a pace can be a metre or a large fraction of one, that's a voltage difference berween one foor and the other, enough to kill humans or animals such as cattle. Power workers in America and maybe elsewhere are taught to either stand with their feet together or 'bunny hop' away from downed lines.
I don't believe that the coiled filament of an incandescent bulb would produce enough magnetic field to affect a CRT monitor that way. Look at the wire gauge and number of turns a degaussing coil needed. If the story is not BS, as are a lot of 'tech anecdotes' I suggest perhaps the lamp arms and base were made of steel that had somehow become magnetised, or as with one such lamp I had, the base was weighty because it had a 240 volt to 12 volt transformer, and the lamp head had 12 volt bulbs, with a base the same as older car side light bulbs. But I'm still doubtful. PS - I just took a magnetic compass to a lit filament desk lamp. No deflection.
Ever since reading his columns in Byte ijn the 1980s I've disliked Pournelle. He was a Trump supporter and, apparently, a belligerent alcoholic. He didn't endear himself to the people running ARPAnet in 1985. They gave him unofficial access and asked him not to reveal that in his column; he mentioned it anyway, then he got nasty with them, so they locked his account. He threatened to use his contacts and influence to make life hard difficult for them, claiming he was being discriminated against for his politics and not his own entitled attitude. A fascist jerk.
I find it an interesting and worthwhile challenge to resolve such queries without humiliating the person I'm helping. Saving their feelings, it's called. An interpersonal skill. Ways of doing that can include wildly exaggerating how common the problem is, inventing a hardware or problem ('I need to realign the camera'), or, in the case of the mouse, just visibly using the mouse the right way. Many people have unseen disabilities like dyspraxia and it is nice to be kind to them. In my experience, males outnumber females in this regard.
When I was young I worked in an electronics factory on Quality Control, inspecting and testing finished circuit boards one of the fun things we did was to unsolder a certain electrolytic capacitor, scrape off the red blob on the casing that identified the positive terminal, use a red varnish pen to make a blob by the negative terminal, and solder it back on the board, reversed. Then slip it into a colleague's queue of boards to be checked. The drill was, first inspect for wrongly placed or missing components, then put the board on a test jig and apply power. Usually the cap would let go after a minute or so with a loud POP and a cloud of smoke, but one made a sound like a pistol shot and flung its innards about 20 feet. Very stupid, almost certainly gross misconduct, mostly tolerated by the management, but if someone had lost an eye then ther perp might be for the high jump (if they could be identified; the whole prank idea arose because an example of that capacitor was supplied to us wrongly marked). It was interesting to see the 'Swiss roll' interior of an electrolytic capacitor all unfurled.
"She was also said to be unaware that her actions were illegal and refuted the prosecution's accusation that the messages were sent with malicious intent."
I really, really wish people would not use 'refute' (prove to be false) when they mean 'deny' (claim to be false). I suspect Dr Robert Burchfield, Chief Editor of the Oxford Dictionaries, was right when he 'gloomily saw it possible' that the distinction between 'refute' and 'deny' may become even more blurred 'in the next decade or two' (he was speaking in 1980).
Weren't there Dell systems that were a dreadful trap for the unwary, in that they used standard ATX power connectors, but wired in a non-standard way, such that if you replaced either the PSU or the motherboard, but not the other, with a non-Dell item, first power up would always kill the board? And maybe the PSU too? Dell proprietary (non-standard) ATX design, I think you would call it. Around 1998-2000.
In 1985 I had an add-on 3.5 inch floppy drive in a case, for a Sinclair QL, that used to malfunction (Disk read/write failures) after you moved it until you tapped it in one particular place. Turned out the one-man-band making them had not actually soldered the connector onto the power cable properly, just dabbed the terminals and bared wires with the iron.
I also had the same types of problem (bad solder joints that flexed) 20 and 25 years later with two different models of Shuttle small form factor PC.
The update server is still up, and you can download a tar archive of the Windows installer for 17.5.1
https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/ws/17.5.1/23298084/windows/core/VMware-workstation-17.5.1-23298084.exe.tar
I just did it, and in the newly installed Workstation, clicked 'Help' in the menu bar, then 'Software Update' and was offered 17.5.2 build-23775571 which downloaded and worked fine, along with drivers, etc.
By the way, I suppose we won't now be needing the free licence serials that bloke on Github has been allowed to give away for a while now?
I don't know if it's a thing about plumbers' merchants, but my local one in Bristol is like that (willing to rip open a pack for one washer to help a customer out). I'm sure a lot of the reason is that they are nice (it's a family business) but also they probably, and rightly, reckon that any time someone in a 50 mile radius asks that customer if they know a decent plumbing supplier, that's the name they'll remember and pass on.
