Posts by Stratman

Welsh Doxbin admin jailed for egging on swatters from behind a screen

Re: Mental Health

Were his mental ilnesses diagnosed by a doctor or a lawyer?

To fix this Wi-Fi network, we'll need a crane

Re: Everybody like big boom ...

Ah yes, the exothermic method of relocating things. For anyone remotely interested in this art, I recommend searching out recordings of Blaster Bates and his after dinner speeches.

Obvious really >>>>>>>

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

Re: Not the same, but ...

Essential or not is irrelevant, they were nothing to do with the sales droid. If I had been a manager at the operation I would have told them to get out and not to return, and explained to their boss why they are forever banned from my premises.

Tesla Full Self Driving subscription to rise alongside its capabilities

"The massive value jump," wrote Musk, "is when you can be on your phone or sleeping for the entire ride (unsupervised FSD)."

Drivers do that now. With similar outcomes.

Lawmakers urge FTC to probe Trump Mobile over 'deceptive' marketing

The real surprise

is not that he has failed to deliver, but that people thought he would.

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

Re: Not quite terminal

Not strictly on topic, but 'interesting' nevertheless.

Many moons ago a colleague always carried a modified 13A mains plug in his staying-away-in-a-hotel kit. The fuse was replaced by the thickest copper wire he could fit in it, the same wire joined L and N. When he was kept awake by a television blasting at full volume because the occupant of a nearby room had fallen asleep, he'd plug it in and take out the breaker giving him a good night's sleep.

Intern did exactly what he was told and turned off the wrong server

Re: Incorrect labelling

Or St. Ives instead of St. Ives (true story).

Don't shoot me, I'm only the system administrator!

Way back when a prince was marrying his blushing bride at St. Paul's Cathedral, our OB truck was to provide the main coverage. Come the morning of the big day we had an 'everybody must attend' safety briefing. Our truck was parked on the far corner of a grass square, diagonally opposite the side door which was our way in. For the few days before we had been taking the direct route across the grass rather than the path round two sides of the rectangle. "On no account must you walk across the grass to go in to the cathedral," said the scary man doing the briefing. He explained that's what terrorists would do, take the direct route. "Anybody who steps off the path will be shot."

On a similar vein, Trooping the Colour during Northern Ireland 'troubles' brought similar arrangements. One summer little Stevie was given the job of getting the sound of the Queen's arrival at Horse Guards. "Right, so there are police snipers on those roofs and you want me to point this at the Queen? Okay." 'This' was a Sennheiser 816 gun mike in a Rycote windshield (non furry variety) with pistol grip.

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

Re: Honestly

N-scale model railways:- two and one sixteenth millimetres to the foot. Lovely.

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

...and cars

User demanded a 'wireless' computer and was outraged when its battery died

A long time ago we were televising something from a big London theatre. As various things were powered up and switched on, a cameraman (EMI 2001 for spotters, shows how long ago it was) called in and said his viewfinder was black, no picture. We looked at his camera and there was black on the main output as well. I trotted inside to troubleshoot and spotted the problem as I walked towards it. Phil, our professional cameraman and all round nice guy, had forgotten to remove the lens cap. It cost him a round at lunchtime.

Admin brought his drill to work, destroyed disks and crashed a datacenter

Re: New AC...

I believe that also happens with chandeliers

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

When on an outside broadcast and monitors or viewfinders suffered from reflections, a quick and easy fix of sorts was to put some neutral density (ND) filter sheet over the screen. It worked quite well, reducing the reflection's brightness relative to the image by fifty percent. The light from thereflection has to go through the ND twice (once on the way in, once on the way out), the image only once. Turning up the contrast a bit solved the other side effect.

What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack

When on an OB quite a few years ago, covering a world famous dog show, we rigged a couple of standalone portakabins with various bits of equpiment. As is the way of things their names were scrawled with magic marker on 50mm wide PVC tape and stuck to the doors. We called them Additional Recording and Sound Equipment, and Field Editing and Compilation Kit.

We got a few knowing smiles, mostly from fellow tekky types, and they stayed there for the duration.

Users hated a new app – maybe so much they filed a fake support call

When working in outside broadcasts we were sent rotas telling crews where to go. It's blindingly obvious but we genuinly received a rota with "St. Ives" as the location. Yes, the inevitable happened.

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: Start early !!!

Sadly not, although he's not allowed to say what he does.

At his primary school my eldest son, now in his middle thirties, was in his classroom one day when the teacher announced that something had gone wrong and the school computer (a BBC Micro) couldn't print any more. My lad, about seven years old at the time, put up his hand and asked if he could have a look. Ever keen to encourage inquisitiveness the teacher agreed. He switched off the computer and printer, removed the printer lead, blew in both ends and switched everything back on. To the utter joy and amazement of his teacher it all worked.

We had a CPC6128 at home and even at that tender age he'd learnt that with faults like that it was usually the bit in between that was the problem.

I've never been more proud!

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

I still use my Nook out of preference, I find it far better than my dust-gathering Kindle. Yes the store and support for it stopped years ago but it still does everything it did on the day I bought it. Finding books and loading them isn't a problem either.

US Dept of Housing screens sabotaged to show deepfake of Trump sucking Elon's toes

1. Classified

2. Classified

3. Classified

4. Classified

5. Classified

DIMM techies weren’t allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers

Before retirement I worked for a world famous broadcasting corporation in outside broadcasts. We had quite a large technical stores, where kit over and above that which our OB vehicles were equipped was stored for when it was needed. Extra cameras, vt machines, microphones, the full gamut. A storekeeper noticed that during quiet periods a lot of this kit stayed in the store. To cut a long story short, he ran a short term hire business using the equipment he figured wouldn't be needed for a few days. He did very well out of it, until a random audit threw up some questions that only he could answer.

Huawei to bring massively expensive trifold smartphone to world market

Re: Why not

Disciples will be begging Apple to make something, anything, that costs £3001 just because.

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

Re: Heil Wankpanzer...?

Do Tesla still remotely disable any upcharge options purchased by the original buyer when it's sold on?

Re: Ferdinand Porche?

To quote stephen Fry (who may have been quoting someone else) I don't think Musk can be Nazi, the Nazis made decent cars.

We’re paying for what we don’t get: East D.C. neighbors frustrated with Amazon’s Prime delivery exclusions

Why would the delivery time change after pressing the 'buy' button? It knows who you are and where you live as soon as you log in.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

It works with golf coaches too.

Me:- I can't stop hooking my long irons.

Coach:- Show me

Me:- Hits perfect long iron shot with slight fade.

Apple owes billions in back taxes over Ireland state aid rule break

I wouldn't be even a little bit surprised if none of it is actually paid.

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Re: Every office has one.

Fewer - not as many

Less - not as much

Easy

NASA ought to pay up after space debris punched a hole in my roof, homeowner says

Re: Sounds fair

What if its your own nuclear weapon?

Then it's arson and not covered :-)

Waymo robotaxi drives down wrong side of street after being alarmed by unicyclists

Re: Pretty bad

Yeah, pretty bad that it elected to go into the oncoming lane.

[...]

Sounds like an indefensible case of overtaking when unsafe to do so.

Truck-to-truck worm could infect – and disrupt – entire US commercial fleet

Re: The Hollywood script writes itself

Guess it would have to be a Short rather than a full length feature...

Dunno 'bout that, ever seen Vanishing Point?

How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes

Re: There should be removal instructions or a removal script

I wonder if asking it "How do I uninstall you?" would work.

I might as well type "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" now to get it over with.

Aircraft rivet hole issues cause delays to Boeing 737 Max deliveries

Re: Boeing should

You can delegate tasks, you can't delegate responsibility. It's sold as a Boeing it's bought as a Boeing. It's a Boeing.

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

The vision mixers were Grass Valley, and very good they were too.

My round ------->

A long time ago I worked for a world famous broadcasting corporation based in Britain, in telly outside broadcasts. At the time we were using Philips LDK5 cameras whose base ends had two cameras worth side by side in a ninteen inch rack with their hefty power supplies under the desks, 3U above ground level. These had protruding push button on/off switches. Being Philips they provided guards around them and being Philips they usually fell off. The spring was nicely strong and they didn't change state until they were released. This is important.

We were doing a routine Match of the Day one weekend and midway through the first half a colleague who was sat at his desk stretched out his legs and we all heard an ominous click. "Don't move!" we yelled at him. The sole of his shoe had depressed the guardless on/off button and he now faced the rest of the half holding the moderately strong action switch pressed in . Oh how we laughed.

To his credit he lasted the rest of the first half without releasing it but looked in some discomfort as he limped off for his half time cuppa.

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

Re: All the more reason

I can't not pronounce the X more like 'sh'. It seems more appropriate too.

UK's cookie crumble: Data watchdog serves up tougher recipe for consent banners

Re: Next should be non consentual email

They need to have my email address. I never, as far as I am aware, agreed to receive this stuff, I have replied asking them to stop sending it.

I wonder if the ICO would do anything about this ?

Have you tried asking it?

Microsoft billing 3 cents a minute to revisit tedious Teams meetings via API

Re: Meeting Tax

Alternatively just have meetings standing up. No chairs and certainly no tea and biscuits.

With version 117, Firefox finally speaks Chrome's translation language

I enabled it in about:config (and restarted Firefox, to save another fifty posts) but it doesn't work for me. I went to a German newspaper site, the icon was nowhere to be seen. Asking the intertubes suggests Fifefox Nightly is needed at the moment, and as you mention in the article, release 118 is when the masses will be blessed with it.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

Re: Poor design in my opinion

Nudge it to change track? Just like a vinyl record player then.

Three seconds of audio could end up costing Fox $500,000

Re: Harmony by disharmony

Then apologising for making a fuss.

Twitter tweaks third-party app rules to ban third-party apps

"Tweak New Twitter" does exactly what you have described, and is how use it.

ChatGPT has mastered the confidence trick, and that's a terrible look for AI

Re: I asked it what War and Peace was about.

I'm pretty sure Sir Terry wrote The Colour of Magic

Study suggests AI cruise control could kill traffic jams by cutting out the 'intuition' factor

Re: It can only do so much

Same here in London, except the car-hating powers that be time the lights to cause as much delay and frustration as possible.

Vonage to pay $100m for making it nearly impossible to cancel internet phone services

Good. Now do the same with Amazon Prime.

Make it as easy to cancel Prime as it is to sign up. Same number of clickthroughs, buttons of equal prominence, no double, triple, quadruple or more negatives and make joining Prime a separate transaction as opposed to now where it's intricately entangled with making a purchase.

Twitter's most valuable users are ghosting the platform

Firefox add-on

Tweak New Twitter

Remove algorithmic content from Twitter, hide news & trends, control which shared tweets appear on your timeline, and improve the UI

Works a treat, I only see accounts I follow. It gives you pretty much full control over what you see and what you don't.

This maglev turntable costs more than an average luxury electric car

Re: A fool and his money...

A phile and his money, surely?

US warns cryptominers must cut power use to avoid busting US carbon goals

Re: Comparing wax apples with silk poppies

Bitcoins that I mined uses ASIC not GPU, that is ETH. Is it wasteful? Heck yes. That is the point. It cost to create it, so it has value

Not to me it doesn't. It only has value if someong else thinks it does, and I'd seriously question their judgement and perception of value.

Windows 10 update breaks audio for some systems

"Microsoft has confirmed the BitLocker update issue, and said it's only affecting Windows 11 users. For now, Microsoft is warning all BitLocker users to disable the service prior to installing the update."

How is Mr. or Mrs. Average User meant to know thing like this?

Coinbase CEO says everything's OK after SEC filing gives netizens the jitters

Stablecoin collapse sends tokens tumbling

Crypto-currency markets are being rocked after a popular token lost 99% of its value, dragging down a so-called "stablecoin" with it. (Link to BBC Tech report on tumbling funny money)

An international incident or just some finger trouble at the console?

"Yep, we just disconnected France." >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>