* Posts by Douchus McBagg

100 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jan 2015

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Truck-size asteroid makes one of the tightest fly-bys of Earth ever recorded

Douchus McBagg

hmmm. i think that translates from American to British as 1x Bedford Luton?

a step up from a transit, but not as far as a 7.5tonner

Hear us out: Smartphone lidar can test blood, milk

Douchus McBagg

Re: So what you're saying is.......

to be fair, you can do that already just by asking them to hold the phone as though they are on a phone call.

if they do that single duplex send/receive thing where they hold the phone flat out in front of their face hole and make noises into effectively the charge port... i think you can see where i'm going there.

no need for an app. some people are just born to be pushed off the train.

Why Nvidia sees a future in software and services: Recurring revenue

Douchus McBagg

Re: turn on car features, such as driver assistance, through subscription services.

on the queens public highway.

however, on your own private property, you can do what you like.

Something 4,000 light years away emitted strange radio bursts. This is where we talk to scientists for actual info

Douchus McBagg

i especially like the word "Magnetar" and i wish to use it more in conversation.

also, sounds like some 70's prog rock band

anyway top boff job everyone!

Employers in denial over success of digital skills training, say exasperated staffers

Douchus McBagg

the last training i had was nearly a decade ago. That was SCCM 2012, so i got a week out the office to drink free, but average coffee and eat those expensive biscuits - you had to be quick as all the chocolate chip ones were gone by 8:45.

it promised so much it almost felt like one of those infomercial things "it slices! it dices!, it can cook a perfect roast dinner!"

we were all so fired up for it when we went back to the office that the inevitable happened.

the project was tinned.

since then i've done n amount of things. mobile iron to intune migration, local AD to azure hybrid deployment, thin to fat clients, fat to virtuals, blah blah blah. with no "training".

if you have a brain, and internet access, "don't panic(tm)". someone somewhere else has probably done the exact same thing you're trying to do, and logged a support ticket on a vendor forum somewhere or in spiceworks.

so now to the point, same deal. the PA's and Office service teams won't touch the conferencing kit in our event spaces, unless i've hosted "training sessions". this effs me off as i've specced it up and had it programmed so the damn thing would have a single button interface of "if your having a meeting, press this button" - with no training myself.

thats the difference between us and 'norms'. is how much you panic, or just get on with it when presented with a new situation.

i've still got my Solaris Admin 1&2 books on the shelf as a reminder of better times, and all my microsoft training manuals gathering dust and making sure the bookshelf doesn't float away. i really should throw them out, but we're thinking of getting a log burner soon....

If anyone can explain why Jupiter's Great Red Spot is spinning faster and shrinking, please speak up

Douchus McBagg

scream if you want to go faster

you know that thing where you spin on a chair with your arms/legs out and and when you tuck them in you go faster....

is it just doing that and going "WHEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!"?

Lightning speed – how fast is that again? Virgin plugs in another 102k to superfast broadband

Douchus McBagg

My parents are out in the sticks had to suffer 1.5/2down and 0.5up for years. are now getting their payback as they have gigaclear FTTP, on the lowest tier, and that's 100down/100up with no issues for the last few of years. they could go gig up/gig down, but they "don't see the need" to pay for it.

they've certainly not had any snotty letters on downloads; as i think i've been dumping about 2TB a month (when i remember to kick off an offsite backup), onto a server i've got stashed at their house, and they've not noticed anything making their netflix/iplayer stuff glitch.

I've been running on Plusnet with my own static IP (£5 one off charge), 80/20 speed, and they've not complained either about the 2TB a month upload from my house.

while Virgin offer drool worthy speed. i'm skeptical about contention ratios if that's even a thing with cable, "unlimited" limits, and historically their upload speeds have always been pants.

User secures floppies to a filing cabinet with a magnet, but at least they backed up daily... right?

Douchus McBagg

Re: back in the day..

oh yes, the long weights. yeah i think my dad got me some of those. were they the British Standard long weights, or the Original Imperial long weights?

i'd look at him with an "Oh Aye?" when he asked in case he was actually full of BS.

Douchus McBagg

"gluten free air" i like it! make a note darling, as i wish to use it in future conversation.

anyway, 5.25" full height scsi disk in an external box hanging by it's Centronics connected scsi1 lead off the end of a desk,

yes to obligitory 5.25 and 3.5 floppys with hole punch damage. some working still, some not so lucky.

more recent, 30inch screens mounted on their vesa plates mounts with only two short screws. probably half a turn of thread on each actually biting.

and rack mount kit held in with two bolts finger tight and a lot of luck.

and the "classic" live server still running on UPS power, it and the UPS being hand carried by three blokes in the back of a cab across london. the UPS "A/C disconnected" alarm bleeping and still managing to get it racked and stacked at it's destination with 100% uptime.

Getting a tip off from someone about a mate of a mate's firm gone under and they'd just bought a shed load of new kit - and the loss adjusters are on their way. Three (funnily enough, the same), blokes, large bags, cash machine, pull as much cash as possible, cab across town, tell the cabbie to sit and wait, run in, "Hi, I know so and so, apparently you need to loose some hardware, and we have pockets full of notes"

I think we managed to strip mine the place of all 27" screens (£40 each), all 4TB drives (£40 each), all SSD's out of the servers (£20 each) all the new radeon 6850's (£20 each)... in cab and gone.

Good times.

If you do anything or just generally live long enough, you'll see and do all kinds of things.

BT Tower broadcasts error message to the nation as Windows displays admin's shame

Douchus McBagg

hah :)

i'll put a vote for "Guru Meditation" with honking big blinking red boarder. at least it would have been helpful to low flying aircraft...

'Numpty new boy' lets the boss take fall for mailbox obliteration

Douchus McBagg

KYC - Know Your Client

KYB - Know Your Business

KYA - Kover Your Arse.

Is your kid looking at GCSE in computer science? It's exam-only from 2022 – Ofqual

Douchus McBagg

pffft, does it matter any more?

Borland "Turbo" pascal on an RM Nimbus 80286@10Mhz (the three "fast" machines in the lab), and the rest being the older 80186 version. could they even run windows or was it MS-DOG only? I remember "lemonade stand" and "trains".

compute the science out of that you little squirt and realise how good/easy you have it now.

I had to inter-op between that crap at school, and Hisoft pascal on my home A1200 68EC020@14Mhz using PC formatted DD 720kilobyte floppy disks.

ah the days of performance parity/sparring between 68k and x86. with Mips, Sparc, Alpha, and Power etc, being ethereal god-like cpu archs. that you only read about.

My dad would be all, "where's your homework?" and i'd just hold up an unlabelled disk (that was actually part of a zip-spanned copy of wolf3d). He'd just throw his hands in the air in despair. good times.

little did we know it would all boil down into the hard nugget of consumerist locked out crap. How do you inspire kids to give a crap enough to get their hands dirty now, when they just have to shout at alexa?

The Large Hadron Collider is small beer. Give us billions more for bigger kit, say boffins

Douchus McBagg

Re: Bigger than the SSC was going to be

yeah I thought this amusingly.

i'm surprised they don't plan for something bigger tbh, but then started to wonder when the curvature of the earth and movement thereof would come into play. so. just next level that sh1t and plonk it all the way round the planet.

or next step, so as not to annoy nimby's and avoid the inconvenience of oceans, put it in space at a decently high orbit?

added bonus of you can power the thing by nuclear without anyone freaking out... apart from the bit about putting nuclear material on rockets to get it up there... or having a potential nuclear launch platform in spaaaaaace… hmmm.... this isn't working out too well...

how big's the moon?

Microsoft points to a golden future where you can make Windows 10 your own

Douchus McBagg

shutup10

spybot anti-beacon

gpedit.msc - computer config/admin templates/cloud content/"turn off Microsoft consumer expiriences"

anyone got anything else?

iFixit engineers have an L of a time pulling apart Apple's iPhone XS

Douchus McBagg

I'm just waiting for ZX

Fast food, slow user – techie tears hair out over crashed drive-thru till

Douchus McBagg

Re: Ahh, memories...

have an upvote! i'd forgotten those little classics :)

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=blackadder+goes+forth+phone+problems&view=detail&mid=63D00818FB024225332463D00818FB0242253324&FORM=VIRE

Top tip? Sprinkle bugs into your code to throw off robo-vuln scanners

Douchus McBagg

my distinguished chaff bugs have little code monocles and top hats. My chav bugs strut around broadcasting "oy oy" in an IP frame at random and turning any code comments into Burberry ascii

Do Optane's prospects look DIMM? Chip chap has questions for Intel

Douchus McBagg

i've been waiting for this since the first experimental Dimm loaded scsi SSDs

persistant ram is going to need a whole new programming model to be used effectively I feel.

storage is ram, and ram is storage. do a reboot/power off-on and just wait for the CPU to come back on line and carry on as you were. your machine is effectively going to be "on" from the first OS install to the final switch off. apps get loaded into memory and stay there. 512gig on a dimm? no paging? no "disk"?yes please!

BSODs gonna be a pain though.

HPE supercomputer is still crunching numbers in space after 340 days

Douchus McBagg

the only SSD's I've seen fail have been in win7 machines where the users (who of course, knew better than anyone else) had enabled scheduled defrag after being told not to. But hey, they know best.

Still running a stack of Intel 320series 160gig jobs as the backend store for a load of VMs. bought in a load of cheap Lite-On 128s and 256s to upgrade all the 200-odd spinning rust equipped lappies in the fleet. All new kit is NVMe equipped. spinning rust relegated to mass storage duties in the datacentre.

how would you rad harden an SSD? you'd have to re-cut the flash chips individually on a different substrate? wrap them in depleted Boron-11? dunk it in water?... oh wait...

Love the "Radish" PCB prints. used to be an easter-egg hunt; opening kit. Find the dev's names printed in the circuit traces, or song lyrics, or jumper pads/pins labled "free beer"...

You can take off the shades, squinting Outlook.com users. It has gone dark. Very dark

Douchus McBagg

well that didn't take long

its almost like you can set a timer for someone to take their own personal use case and make it Microsoft's fault that blahblahblah boohoo whinge windows7 ftw.

did you read the article about how its outlook.com? nothing to do with windows, nothing to do with office, or internet explorer, or edge....

I dunno why its taken so long for this dark mode to become more pervasive. any chance of a version of the el'reg site that's not like staring at a 60watt bulb? :D

From toothbrushes to coffee makers to computers: Europe fines Asus, Pioneer, Philips for rigging prices of kit

Douchus McBagg

I gave up on "expensive=good" power tools a while ago. It just seemed to mean that it'd get nicked, or lent out on "permanent loan" never to return. now I pick up store brand gear and if a motor burns out, just throw it away. Annoyingly, my £40 cordless drill is still going strong to the point where it feels like its going to be a family heirloom.

same for laptops. fancy bag/slip/skin = stolen in the near future. shonky bag = forever friend.

don't underestimate the power of a coffee ring or two and a dent to reduce the thievability of gear.

Douchus McBagg

Actually I think Phillips and probably other big names had Maplins - and also i'd hazard a guess curries/pcworld; by the short and curlies on this. As suspiciously, their in-store pricing was exactly the same as on line.

Infact Maplins had a slight edge here because of their repeat purchase discounts. you know, 5% off if over £20 spend, 10% off if over £50 within 7 days, 28 days... I can't remember... anyway, all academic now...

'It's legacy stuff brute-forced in': Not everyone is happy with Citrix's cloud

Douchus McBagg

this is shit-tricks we're talking about here...

Vodafone emits new wearable ... kid-trackers

Douchus McBagg

but think of the children!

while paying us a monthly subscription...

otherwise you are a bad parent! BAD PARENT! NO COOKIE! HAVE YOUR KIDS TAKEN AWAY INTO SOCIAL SERVICES! unless you pay £30 a month per device with a £17 connection fee.

honestly. there is so much crap out there purely marketed at parents, making them even more stressed out and to near border line have a mental breakdown from, "are they doing the right thing?" - and then this shows up. nice one world, well done.

Every step you take: We track you for your own safety, you know?

Douchus McBagg

gate times.

more than once I've pulled and been asked to pull the gate times for myself and others to prove a point, or help them out of a hole created by manglement. Anything that lends itself to more "Bofh'ish" behaviour or evidence, ends up with "oh sorry, the landlord reset the security system last night and that data has gone", and a quiet word of education in the basement carpark. or the said car park doors closing too quickly on relevant mangelment's shiney new Porsche, (it didn't buff out) - old IR sensor problem, car was too low... they also don't like matt painted rangerovers/bmw's either funnily enough...

if you have to swipe in, out, or through a building, you're tracked. it's how the facilities guys know to knock the gym access off your card a month after you signed up and done you're health assesment, but make sure the vending machines are well stocked with Yorkies and Dailymilk fruit and nut. No, how you keep putting on weight is a mystery.

also the little rotating dome cameras are usually either set on a fixed point, or on a 1 minute rotation.

if there's been an office re-shuffle, and you're sat on an end desk or where your screens can be seen by others or face an open plan area - HR/boss have seen your browser history and are now just waiting for physical evidence, and some tell-tale-brown-nose with line of sight to call down for a "co-incidental" walk past of your boss, and possibly HR manager.

but yeah. we use apple to track our employee's for us. icloud enterprise is an amazing tool.

"hello yes? you're calling me from the hotel? your phone doesn't work? that's because you're in Tunisia, a country O2 seem to think equivalent to Syria, and so you have no data unless your on wifi… how do I know? because I can see your little blue dot …. er… its in your calendar!".

It's built in to every iPhone, and we enable it by MDM policy. Even employee devices that they "just" want their work email on. Read that small print folks ;)

I just haven't figured out what apple use as their "teamviewer" type software to see your phone screen and take control if needed. I've seen it in action and it's brilliant. I want it.

Apple is Mac-ing on enterprise: Plans strategic B2B alliance with HPE

Douchus McBagg

Re: They create the kind of wonder...

Enterprise.... hmmmm …. don't you need some form of enterprise product, or I dunno… something... to be in the enterprise market?

oh wait, no sorry, I forgot the ipad "pro". i'll get back in my box.

while I don't have to like them, you have to respect apple for the same reason I respect that guy who does talent shows and makes a mint off of stupid people... Jeremy Howel? Powel? you know... the snarky one that has his trouser waistband and nipple level...

anyway, a fule and their moneys etc. etc.

Meet the Frenchman masterminding a Google-free Android

Douchus McBagg

just shut up and take my money etc. etc.

as above.

and may I add, best of luck for this endeavour! imagine how fast a phone that doesn't have to run monitoring and reporting tasks is going to be - maybe we can then wind processors back to sub 1Ghz with "only" half a gig of ram and get more than a days battery life! craziness!

User spent 20 minutes trying to move mouse cursor, without success

Douchus McBagg

good times...

another little gem i'm sure you're all aware of:-

transparent cello tape (scotch tape) over the optical "eye". initial eyeball mk1 inspection can easily miss it, but there is enough I/R reflection off the adhesive side to blind the pickup sensor rendering the mouse cursor motionless.

also one or two stray cat hairs in the sensor hole (or substitute as necessary), also renders an optical mouse non functional.

had a PHB fall for the tape variant and reboot his machine as it "must have crashed, losing a couple of days of work" apparently. God knows how much work he lost every weekend and had to re-do on Monday when the machines all got a scripted restart on Sunday night.

A lot of serial mouse connectors had locking bolts and cable strain relief built into the plug. None of this "falls apart after a year" apple connector rubbish. IIRC those aluminium mouse pads flew beautifully spinning in a long lazy cork-screw arc. usually to end up sticking in the plasterboard walls. RIP proper built kit (Sun/Sgi etc.).

Artificial intelligence is good for at least one thing – making hardware important again

Douchus McBagg

its just the latest name for an old thing

cloud - internet - network - mainframe

AI - algorithm - equation - excel sheet knocked up by a kid during a summer work experience placement

blah blah blah and the wheel keeps on turning...

Microsoft programming chief to devs: Tell us where Windows hurt you

Douchus McBagg

Re: Tell us where Windows hurt you

i actually twitched involuntarily when i read that

BOFH: But I did log in to the portal, Dave

Douchus McBagg

not limited to their support site. the driver installation is a page from the same book of self torture.

best just extract the inf and sys files and let windows splat them in itself.

no need for:-

*device* management software

*device* monitoring software

*device* user experience enhancement softare

*device* update software

*vendor* device update management software

*device* reporting software

*vendor* support assist software

honestly. cut all this crap, and cut the download from the gigs clogging up my MPLS, to the 60kB we all know it actually is, and free up the extra 10% server cpu time burnt with all of the "Support Processes" removed from the equation.

its like install one tiny peripheral, and your whole machine's purpose for being becomes just a life support system for that one device's existence and operation. "would anyone like any toast?"

La, la, la, I can't hear you! Apple to challenge Bose's noise-proof cans

Douchus McBagg

Obviously enough idiots dropped £300 on a pair of their crap headphones, so they're turning up the numbers and seeing what muppets'll spend £600? or a grand?

nice position to be in, I wish them well in their endeavours to separate the stupid from their money.

Guess who else Spectre is haunting? Yes, it's AMD. Four class-action CPU flaw lawsuits filed

Douchus McBagg

oh god. so we're going to switch the cold calls from:-

"have you had PPI" to "have you got a processor?"

Microsoft ends notifications for Win-Phone 7.5 and 8.0

Douchus McBagg

heh, my old 1520:- awesome screen, cpu, storage, camera, nice interface... no apps though...

Vodafone sent it to me as a 4G test pilot upgrade from my Lumia 800 - with a resulting "hell yes" and a 2 year £40pcm contract. in an empty box with a charger. no packaging. just rattling around in a standard courier box. not a scratch. still got it, and awaiting someone to slot windows4arm into an install package for it as Voda won't let it pull down the win10mobile update.

have been on apple since, as I get them for free as part of my job. I think the last android that actually impressed me was the wife's htc one m8. neeeeearly got one myself... but hey, y'know, free iPhones. waddaya gonna do?

Samsung heir walks free after appeals court quashes bribery charges

Douchus McBagg

i'm shocked! shocked I tells ya!.... hands up who didn't see that coming?

Fore! PCI Express 4.0 finally lands on Earth

Douchus McBagg

Re: am I the only one who

that was as per pci-e v1 and v2.

part of the pci-e v3 spec was the move from an 8+2 signaling to a 128+2 scheme. cutting overhead from 20% to around 1%

so. pci-e v1 is 2.5Gb per lane, and pci-e v2 is 5Gb per lane on an 8+2 signaling

pci-e v3 is a more managable for the tech at the time 8Gb instead of the assumed 10Gb doubling, but makes up the supposed shortfall by cutting ~20% overhead.

Forget One Windows, Microsoft says it's time to modernize your apps

Douchus McBagg

i'm sure everyone alreadys knows, but for windows10 spying :-

https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/

when i first heard it, i was astonished. anti bacon? why the hating on salted pork products?

Oracle staff report big layoffs across Solaris, SPARC teams

Douchus McBagg

sparc powered lap warmer...

look up tadpole sparcbook and ultrabook

i had one "back in the day". corp paid for ofc as it was $$$. it was the mutts particulars at the time.

damn i'd forgotten that little gem from my past.

and a CycleC5 IPX board that crammed an ultra5 CPU into an IPC/IPX case. like putting a jet engine in a shopping trolly.

good engineers never go to waste. just look at the brain drain from Sun/SGI into Nvidia/Ati (as it was).

Anyway, good luck to all those involved. income removal is never pleasant. Wish people well for exiting Larrys shadow. They'd better treat people well on the exit. it's all part of managing the brand these days.

Oh no, EE! More UK mobile customers face sluggish roaming abroad

Douchus McBagg

I was going to wax lyrical about Vodafone being awesome across the water. But I'm currently on my way back from a there-and-back London-Paris today to oversee various crap beIng installed and set up in our Paris office, and I couldn't get fuck all. Couldn't even get vpn to frigging connect on my laptop.. So without a decent email machine, and I've been off chat, and I'm now going to walk into a shit storm in the office tomorrow as I've not been able to communicate what's been going on or keep on top of otherwise.

I have corp email on an iPhone, but that's on voda as well so even that was sporadic at best. Anyway all it's good for is seeing that some shit is going down and not being able to see what's actually going on or respond quickly.

So more fool me for relying on Vodafone to provide a service. No Nic port on my dell 5510 without a dongle or docker. Vpn over wifi or nuffin. And all I got was a big fat nuffin.

I am very pissed off. Carriers I kept hopping between were orange F and SNF. No Voda coverage at all and they've effectively cut my roaming budget down from 20gig with my uk allowance to 4gig roaming. I can burn a gig a day just being hooked up to vpn. Anyway just my expirence

London 'not-spots' look out! Mayor wants team to tackle crap signal

Douchus McBagg

if you have the room to reach into your pocket and get your phone out on the tube, then go for it sunshine. but speaking for myself think i'd be happier with some friggin air con shoved down the hole rather than data. least 4g is data only. none of that "talking" rubbish please!

mind the gap

TalkTalk fined £100k for exposing personal sensitive info

Douchus McBagg

the 70+yr old Father in law was a victim of this. he got a "Support" phone call, "go to this site, install this software" etc etc, then when he asked them what they were doing, they got verbally abusive. he took a photo of the notepad window they had opened and the text they had typed. it was something nice like, "we now own your computer you <expeetive expleetive>, you kept asking questions so i'm going to <expletive> you" or something wonderful like that, from what I recall.

fortunately he had the presence of mind to take the photo and just hold down the power button.

It took his daughters naming and shaming talk talk on twitter before all of a sudden, his account was unlocked and password had been reset and he could access his account again as opposed to the hours of wasted time we'd spent previously on the phone trying to get him back into his account after this.

When his laptop landed on my desk it would load the windows7 kernel, and then a picture that looked like a computer icon from win3.1/9x popped up in the middle of the screen with "a password is required to start your computer".

did a full wipe and reload, god knows what crap they'd got installed on there. fortunately we had backups of anything important

New Amiga to go on sale in late 2017

Douchus McBagg

already have each of their Vampire2 products. all I'm going to say is:-

"shut up and take my money!"

Blinking cursor devours CPU cycles in Visual Studio Code editor

Douchus McBagg

why the fudging flipperdy flop, is the CPU giving two patooties about rendering the futher monking cursor?

this is why you never give the dev team decent kit. makes 'em lazy. if it runs good on a thing from ten+ years ago, it'll hit light speed on a reasonably current machine. and that equals "good user experience"

how much CPU does a serial link WYSE terminal have to render it's cursor? sweet gravy Winston, if i had 13% of the CPU power of a current thing back then, i'd have been playing quake in 1978 instead of having been eaten by a grue!

our current dev team have dual socket six core Xeons with gobs of ram and Cuda Cores. makes me want to puke.The business wonders why all their in house apps run like chewing gum on a sun baked sidewalk.

/Cave Johnson

Shopping for PCs? Ding, dong, the Dock is dead in 2017's new models

Douchus McBagg

Re: Optional... apparently

I currently run a Dell mobile precision 5510 lappy connected to their WD15 dock. it uses USB3 protocol on a USB-C physical hole, so only able to drive 1x 30" at 2560x1600 off the DP port, or two 24"'s daisy chained at 1920x1200. you can get a third on there, but the res is seriously compromised as not much bandwidth left.

the TD15 dock again runs off the USB-C port, but talks thunderbolt, so more bandwidth hence can drive 3x 4k res screens. i have this on order ATM.

the dock from what i can figure provides 130 watts of juice to the lappy, and has provision for 60W for itself (130W output for the laptop charger, 180W for the WD15 dock. the TD15 runs a 240W power pack)

so yes, one cable. power, gig ethernet, usb2/3, hdmi/vga/displayport, audio jacks.

Daddy, what's 'P2P file sharing'?

Douchus McBagg

too bad none of these people understand there are alternatives that don't sound like they were recorded on a mobile phone.

in a cardboard box.

in a disused lavatory.

with a sign on the door saying "beware of the leopard".

Facebook Surround360 design lands at GitHub

Douchus McBagg
Big Brother

you lost me at "facebook"

Apple Watch craze over before it started: Wrist-puter drags market screaming off a cliff

Douchus McBagg

previously burnt through two fitbits, so never again. one died from sweat, and another died from me being caught out in the rain. so much for shower proof.

Some of the guys in the office have a Microsoft band1, and really rated it, so I've plunked down for a Microsoft band 2.

I love the notification features. I can sit in a meeting and still be on top of emails, whats apps, texts, you name it, without being that rude that I'm staring/poking at a phone in my hand while someone else is hosting the meeting / having a conversation...

plus the vibrate/caller ID on my wrist means I know when a phone call is coming in, as chief on the missus problems was she could call me, but I'd never pick up, as I'd never feel the vibrate in my pocket.

that plus my Bluetooth headset/ear buds mean I almost never have to take my phone out for any reason other than typing or watching stuff on the train.

also the good health/sleep/activity monitoring blah blah blah... stuff

I've not worn a watch in years, and I will never wear a basic "time piece" again I think, but this has converted me. it's been a solid two months now and this things only off my person for charging. which is maybe once or twice a week, and it only takes 30-60 mins for a full juice up on a decent usb charger.

left it at home charging one morning and was genuinely annoyed at myself. 1; for the loss of step data, and 2; connection to notifications, 3; able to know that someone is calling me and who it is. I wouldn't have cared at all if I'd left a "watch" at home.

looks like hopefully the faddy iwatchers will drop off the market, and what's left will be actually usefull stuff for people.

bought the missus a garmin HR+ or whatever. it's the heart rate monitoring one. its good down to 50m, so she can take it swimming, and the battery life is good. around a week or so plus. but it lost sync with her phone, and we've never been able to get it to connect back with the app. tempted to take it back and get her a Band2 as well, as it just does what it says on the tin with minimum fuss.

Shock: Apple patents the phone book

Douchus McBagg

so, they patented the fix for "holding it wrong"?

This local council paid HOW MUCH for an SD card?!

Douchus McBagg

I've just had an argument with our purchasing department as someone can't tell the difference between "quad card" as in a basic four port graphics card, and a "Quadro M4000 8G card" that Dell have seen fit to slide into our standard platform build.

maybe I should give in to the stupidity of the system, take advantage and say I need a gtx1080... for erm, for errr... 1080p displays.. yeah... that'll work.

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