Posts by Bluto Nash

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Re: We had an issue with a rabbit

"She was both a challenge & a delight to live with."

An apt description of having one or more cats in one's household.

Microsoft tries to knife passwords once and for all - at least for consumers

Re: Windows is no longer an option.

...and "Punch the monkey!"

Team Trump readies national security card to justify taxing Americans for foreign chips

Re: Tariffs, the tax that keeps on hurting

Astroglide handles the painful tarts aspect.

Or foreplay, y'know?

PIRG's 'Electronic Waste Graveyard' lists 100+ gadgets dumped after support vanished

Re: Buile it yourself...

Mine's only on its 46th year, but still quietly humming along, with no end in sight, even without security updates r web connectivity. It even uses components that you can see with the unaided eye - even mine. My oldest son wants it willed to him (really!)

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Re: install a Linux distro of your choice

Can verify - Quicken 2002 here under Wine. Super happy, does everything I need.

Sweden seizes cargo ship after another undersea cable hit in suspected sabotage

Re: You know, bad weather can sink bad ships

"I don't know what sort of magic shape-charged you are using to make the buckling of the hull due to the explosion occur in the opposite direction"

Pssh. Easy-peasy. You simply use high IMplosive instead.

Undersea cables must have high-priority protection before they become top targets

Re: @StargateSg7

Cistern* Chapel.

FTFY.

Payments firm accused of aiding 'contact Microsoft about a virus' scammers must cough $650k

Re: They've tried calling me before

My IBM Model M keyboard doesn't have a Windows key. That's blown their minds a few times as well:

"What's at the bottom left of your keyboard?"

"Cee tee arr ell?"

What is next to that?"

It's blank"

"??? You're lying"

...etc.

Did nobody tell them about the lockdown? Logitech releases new 'luggable' mechanical keyboard for LAN parties

Model M fo' life

One of the unpublished advantages of the Model M is the lack of a Windows key. It frustrates the hell out of random scammer calls. "OK, so what key is next to the Ctrl key on your keyboard?" "Um, a blank spot?" "You LIE!"

This aside from the obvious advantages of:

1 - LOUD - You KNOW when I'm typing

2 - Durable - I have three - one at home, one at work, one spare. The spare is unlikely to ever be necessary

3 - Heavy - Not gonna shift around while I whack on it

4 - Removable keycaps can be run through the washing machine in a lingerie bag

5 - Durable - Did I say that? Only have to rinse the blood of the user off before writing the post contact report.

6 - BEST tactile response of any keyboard, ever. Of course, I learned to type on a manual typewriter, so there's that...

Plus already paid for and less than 200 quid each to begin with. WTF are they thinking?

Latvian drone wrests control from human overlords and shuts down entire nation's skies

Re: Sounds like a job for Airwolf

"Quick, someone call Jan-Michael Vincent and Ernest Borgnine!"

Warming up my Ouija board now, sir!

Getting a pizza the action, AS/400 style

Re: A real pizza

Got a decent recipe for Italian sausage? I've been looking for one...

Reg readers have not one, but TWO teams in Folding@home top 1,000 as virus-bothering network hits 2.4 exa-FLOPS

Yeesh. Had a fair number of WUs and points collected under my real name, then joined the team. Nothing transferred. Dammit.

So how do the coronavirus smartphone tracking apps actually work and should you download one to help?

Re: False positives could be off the scale.

Does that REPLACE my hat or just supplement it?

Watch out, everyone, here come the Coronavirus Cops, enjoying their little slice of power way too much

Re: "Now they are your best friends? sigh..."

Quite a bit of difference between "herd immunity" and "natural selection," the latter of which I take it is actually what you're implying. Get a vaccine together, inoculate the populace, and THEN you have herd immunity.

Assuming you don't allow the antivaxxers to get their say.

ISP Monkeybrains cries foul over coronavirus fees after requesting more bandwidth. Zayo says it was all a mistake

regardless*

Instagram influencer fools followers into thinking Ikea photoshoot was Bali holiday

Re: Clearly a cover up

It's better if you get Lyme disease at the same time

Curse of Boeing continues: Now a telly satellite it built may explode, will be pushed up to 500km from geo orbit

Stupid (I'm quite sure) question...

Why not take that last 70+ kg of propellant and just push the damn thing OUT of orbit and into the direction of eternal travel thataway? Plunge into the sun, etc., or into the cold void of outer space? If it decides to blow up then, it's heading outward (or inward if burny-burny fate is opted)? Why just park it out a bit and leave it?

Why can't passport biometrics see through my cunning disguise?

Regardless of the technical content

That's a rockin' little number you linked to at the end there. Cheers!

'Literally a paperweight': Bose users fume at firmware update that 'doesn't fix issues'

Holy cr@P

This is why we use physical links like TOSLINK for audio. None of this futzing about with wireless and (oh, HELL no) EQ-ed to death to make up for audio insufficiencies hardware.

Aw, bad day at your air-conditioned, somewhat clean desk? Try shifting a 40-tonne fatberg

Re: From experience ...

Doesn't everybody? Geez. You people.

Chew it up?

Couldn't a collection point with some sort of a macerator be built prior to entry of the main sewer line? That way "flushability" becomes a moot point.

Re: Other places...

Previous head of the cafe was an idiot. Full stop. Hopefully their replacement has something aside from a lump of nappies for a brain.

Reaction Engines' precooler tech demo chills 1,000°C air in less than 1/20th of a second

Re: This is truely impressive

...walked into a bar. Much quacking ensued..

Nice work if you can grift it: Two blokes accused of swindling $10m from the elderly with bogus virus infection alerts

Fuck 'em.

Here's to beer, without which we'd never have the audacity to Google an error message at 3am

Re: Also, keep yourself current with Google's search operators..

Plain Text Linker Add-On for Firefox made it clickable the first time, too... :-)

That's a hell of Huawei to run a business, Chinese giant scolds FedEx after internal files routed via America

Fedex diverts tech docs through US?

Nooo, that's not fishy. Not fishy at all.

Germany mulls giving end-to-end chat app encryption das boot: Law requiring decrypted plain-text is in the works

Re: Honey, we're out of

"Just be careful not to slip while you tango"

Paris? That was the last one.

Honey, hive had it with this drone: Couple lived for years with thousands of bees in bedroom wall

Wait, wut?

I thought the cat took care of them?

iPhone gyroscopes, of all things, can uniquely ID handsets on anything earlier than iOS 12.2

People are just too goddamn smart.

This is obviously why we can't have nice things.

AND these people are apparently witches.

Taylor drift: Finally, a use for AI emerges? Cyber-smut star films fsck-flick in Tesla with Autopilot, warns: 'I wouldn't recommend it'

Re: Boyfriend???

"My fault, have not taken it out for a while..."

Not even to pee? Eeew.

Stage fright or Stage light? Depends how far you dare to open your MacBook Pro's lid

Another victim of the form factor "diet"

Has been the ability to drive a signal any appreciable distance. I have old(er) machines that will drive a 35-50' HDMI cable All. Day. Long. Forever. The bevy of new Ulltrabooks now have a hard time doing 10' on a good day with a following wind without external amps, sometimes failing to even put out enough oomph to drive a wireless HDMI adapter that's connected through a measly 3" cable to a level that the receiver won't just give up on after a few seconds of trying to link.

Give me a few MORE mm/grams and give the damn chassis some more battery, a half a volt more output on the video and a wireless card that isn't anemic and I'll be quite happy to support it. Too many things run on the edge of "working" at this point, just to get the willy-wagging rights.

Ooh, my machine is SO much faster than yours... Oh, wait, that might be a bit of a problem...

Re: Well that was an invisible problem

I did the same thing when we added another 4GB drive the the SCSI array on the primary file server - simply ran a script that generated 10MB files until I filled around 3GB of space on the drive. Excluded from backups, naturally. Then whenever the PHB noted that we were "running out of space," we would simply delete a few to make "found room" on the drive. Did that for a year or three, and nobody the wiser.

Windows 10 can carry on slurping even when you're sure you yelled STOP!

Re: diving headlong into the Registry

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\System}

"HeyMSGetYourGoddamnMittsOffMySytemDammit"=DWORD:00000001

FTFY.

Lenovo tells Asia-Pacific staff: Work lappy with your unencrypted data on it has been nicked

WTF

Why isn't this sort of breach not only punishable, but encryption not REQUIRED for HR related data? I mean like REQUIRED sort of required, not "It'd be nice if you maybe did that encryption thing on that laptop we gave you."

Site IT needs to not deliver a laptop that hasn't already BEEN ENCRYPTED. Why does a user need an unencrypted laptop in the first goddamn place?

Jeebus.

Official: Voyager 2 is now an interstellar spacecraft

Re: 50 years

Thank your parents.

Re: I was around 50 years ago, just barely

However, when you come right down to it, there are very few problems that a generous infusion of cash WON'T solve. The will (and wherewithal) to APPLY said infusion has always been the issue...

Icon for all originally involved.

Dine crime: Chippy sells deep fried Xmas dinner

Re: festive fried food

I'll take a gross. Do they ship internationally?

That was a finely turned phrase, there. Don't taint it.

Regardless of the fact that Brussels Sprouts TASTE like one might imagine taint to taste like...

Bloodhound SSC reaches the end of the road for want of £25m

Toast sensitivity

or a toaster that is diversity sensitive.

Aren't ALL toasters diversity sensitive by the fact that they can create any number of shades of "not white" on your bread?

Peak tech! Bacon vending machine signals apex of human invention

Oh, I CERTAINLY enjoy a BLT sandwich.

Once I pick the L and T off of it.

Insult to injury: Malware menace soaks water-logged utility ravaged by Hurricane Florence

Who with enough access had the lack of forethought to actually fall for and/or trigger whatever ransomware vector was triggered? Shouldn't the sysadmins or those with that level of access be far more resistant to this sort of attack? Assuming it came through the normal vectors of email, etc., that seem to be in vogue nowadays. Users should only be able to fsck their own files, not traverse multiple databases with the ability to wipe this stuff out.

Space station springs a leak while astronauts are asleep (but don't panic)

Re: Then they're hurt or killed

Welcome to space, where EVERYTHING will kill you.

Wait - I thought that was Australia?

Cracking the passwords of some WPA2 Wi-Fi networks just got easier

Re: Nice Model M KB in piccie

I've got three - one at home, one at work, one as a spare that I'll never need, since they Just. Don't. Break. Ever. It is indeed the keyboard for those that type for a living, bar none.

Gotta pop the keycaps off and wash them every year or so, but the mechanism itself has never failed or gotten erratic.

'Can you just pop in to the office and hit the power button?' 'Not really... the G8 is on'

Re: Long ago.

30000 hours? 32767 probably!

The extra 2767 covered by "about every"

Grad sends warning to manager: Be nice to our kit and it'll be nice to you

Re: Sometimes violence is the only answer

Back when I used to work for Radio Shack (the US equivalent of what in Britain? Curry's? PCWorld?), we were shipped nifty little 10 (maybe 20) MB external HDDs to run the store POS ("Point Of Sale," not the obvious acronym) systems on. There was pretty much company-wide failure of the devices to boot or otherwise operate as designed (Total Inability to Support Usual Performance) when coming up from a powered off state. I came up with the ingenious solution of lifting the front of the units by around 2cm, then letting them falll on to the desktop that they were supported by during boot. This apparently unshipped the heads on the drives, allowing them to operate properly from there on - at least until until powered down the following night as mandated by corporate.

All was well until I received a call from the CIO "asking" that I cease recommending that particular solution in our region as a way to get the (g*ddamn) systems to come up every day. That call was shortly followed by a firmware patch that unshipped the heads properly...

Tired sysadmin plugged cable into wrong port, unleashed a 'virus'

Re: tech support team woes

So a TDR is a bit like Han Solo?

"You've never heard of my ship The Beryllium Vulture? It's the one that made the cable run in less than 12 meters"

Skype for Business has nasty habit of closing down… for business

Re: Why are people still on 32-bit windows

Unfortunately, there are still a number of rather pricey technical and scientific apps that take a dump when attempting to load on x64 Windows, and the cost to upgrade to 64 bit at the application level is simply prohibitive.

Wow, MIND-BLOWING: Florida Man gets an earful from 'exploding Apple AirPod' bud

Regarding the caption on the picture...

Isn't this the chap being held in Harlow from yesterday's story?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/09/drug_suspect_toilet_holdout/

No sh*t, Sherlock! Bloke suspected of swallowing drug stash keeps colon schtum for 22 DAYS

Re: You may think it's funny, but...

Rectum? Damn near killed 'im!

Hawaiian fake nukes alert caused by fat-fingered fumble of garbage GUI

Re: Confirmation checkbox needed

We have a similar system in place at my site, whereby a notification is sent to all emergency response personnel. It prompts "Type 'EMERGENCY' to confirm" before it sends the message. Is it THAT HARD? No, it's not. Simply a case of a bad GUI rising up to get a clean chomp at a poor scapegoats arse.