Posts by Zarno

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

Re: Yearly tasks....

"Oh, that thing? We stuffed it in a bag with some towels till it stopped making noise."

or "Oh, we replaced it with a nicer wall clock that didn't need batteries so often."

I could list way too many theoretical situations...

Systemd 255 is here with improved UKI support

Re: Mixed feelings.

That would be an insult to the image, my good internet denizen!

Although I could see the ability to load custom images, splash animations, and the like being shoehorned in at some point.

Icon because, well, that's what I'd set mine to...

Mixed feelings.

At least let me customize the shade easily if it becomes "A Thing" to use the color #007FFF ?

Mine is the one with a swatch pack in the pocket, fancying #120A8F or #FF6700....

BOFH: Groundbreaking discovery or patently obvious trolling?

Re: The New and Improved "Bovine Adjustment Implement"

10 feet of 4" pipe, u-bend, 2" sprinkler valve, 10 feet of 2" schedule 80 electrical conduit sleved on the inside with 1.5" SDR 21 irrigation line.

Golfball relocation device that will surprise and terrify.

Standard warning that DWV or foam core 4" is not desigbed to be used for pressure applications, and solid core is not designed to be used for air applications due to shrapnel vs split on overpressure.

Tool bag lost in space now tracked by garbage watchers

I found one of those screwdrivers in a cupboard in my new house actually...

Icon because I think the aliens are just messing with our inventories as they play SimLife...

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

Re: Tech support call

I remember at least a few of the older ones had actual liquid drain channels built in, to divert spills to "safer" locations.

They don't make them that robust anymore.

Icon because they may have been bomb proof.

Why can't datacenter operators stop thinking about atomic power?

How long before they start selling VR pods that harvest your body heat to offset the energy costs of running the AI servers? Asking for a guy named Neo...

Sure, give the new kid and his MCSE power over the AS/400. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Umm. Mainframe?

My vacation soaked brain read that as "gerbils", and it still made me laugh up a storm.

Why these cloud-connected 3D printers started making junk all by themselves

Ooooh, that's a nasty little one!

I like it!

The small print was noticed. :)

I was meerkat-ly postulating and making musings on what it would later expand to, once one was to have paid for the full document to be printed and couriered in by trained pigeon.

Your SlowBreadmaker will feed you your whole life

I assume life being defined as however long till it decides to introduce one of the more interesting ingredients.

Naturally, it would allow you to obtain your unique daily antidote by watching 20 hours of advertisements, paying for another BreadCartridge, or both, depending on your subscription tier.

Contacting the company by the form found in the bottom of the locked filing cabinet in the disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.” will summon a free antidote in 4 to 7 business years.

No, they got the old one that looks like a clown nose on a bit of string.

Mine's the one with a rubber chicken on the shoulder and a daisy in the pocket.

The price of freedom turned out to be an afternoon of tech panic

UVW=RST or GTFO

If someone wires the building wrong, then fix it at the main breaker, don't hide it in my equipmen panels...

Tesla hackers turn to voltage glitching to unlock paywalled features

Re: Musk asnwering questions?

Note to self, messing with classic Hawthorne will get you a downvote.

Re: Musk asnwering questions?

Or maybe a large scarlet X?

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

Very very apt...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6nQfPvgSFU

Dilbert Screensaver.

Notice the sign.

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

Re: Not a lift but…..

Here, have a Pint.

That will hopefully help punt the punts from your mind.

One might expect an invoice for the trouble.

Error 402; Payment Required.

A pint, for everyone must have required one after that.

NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

Re: Talk it up

Well, because they have to consume a lot of fibre to push all that BT BS out, they have a surplus...

Icon because there has been an explosion of "Fibre to that carpark 3 towns away, where we swap to RFC 2549 for the last leg."...

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

<quote>... don't get bent over a barrel and f...</quote>

orced to bob for the apples with the rest of the party-goers at the BOFH Holiday Bash?

Re: Similar language problem on Windows 1 0

SHFT+CTRL+U+<unicode hex value> then maybe ENTER key.

For example. SHFT+CTRL+U+00B0 for ° (I fibbed and used ALT+0176 to enter that symbol, because windows at the moment...)

Mine's the one with an IBM codepage, ascii, and unicode roadmap in the pocket. Or is that a BART timetable from 2010?

BOFH: You can be replaced by a robot or get your carbon footprint below Big Dave's

I prefer the embodied heads in jars, thanks.

Mine's the one with the ticket to the Head Museum in the pocket.

"Aroo!"

First of Tesla's 'bulletproof' Cybertrucks clunks off production line

Re: VW Beetle

The newer vehicle masquerading as a Mini is far from mini, more maxi.

Yeah, they really seem to have padded it out for the reboot.

Watching the two guys in a shed work on one of the old ones drives home how truly small the real deal is.

The under-bonnet area barely fits your trained hamster's wheel, but the reboot can practically fit the original inside the boot...

Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss

Re: Well I'm not alone...

I remember at some point hearing there was a quota bug in Exchange or GroupWise that meant messages in the "Trash" or "Deleted" folders didn't count towards any mailbox quotas.

Could be they were told it would allow them to store more stuff, and it became Tribal Knowledge, passed down through the ages?

Clingy Virgin Media won't let us leave, customers complain

Re: Hotel Virgin California

"Once you pop, you can't stop!" came to mind as well...

Lamborghini's last remaining pure gas guzzlers are all spoken for

There was indeed a billing mixup!

Actual usage was $18.90, and the overpayment came back as a credit to the account.

Have a pint!

Actually, yes, I tend to ravel to out of the way industrial sites for most of my work.

As far as the hotel, not many have L2 available, and the nearest other one that does in this case isn't on the corp account.

I just checked the receipt, and it was $98.77 for the charging. It was from 8% to 90%, and I was eating dinner at the noodle place across the parking lot and popped out to move it when the "charge complete" message popped up. I'm going to look into that some more, because there may have been an overcharge by the rental company... (pun not intended).

I will amend the pricing after I look through things and contact them.

Thanks for being skeptical, it might get me a refund!

The vehicle limits you to 16A max on a 20A plug, or 13A max on a 15A plug, to stay within safety margins on the cabling.

I was on a 15A service at the hotel lamp pole, with a 20A at the customer site.

That equates to less than your standard tea kettle, or 1.76KW for 8 hours at the customer site, and 1.43kw for around 8 hours overnight.

Totaled, if everything was perfect, 25.8kw per total day. Conversion losses meant it was less. I also had to deal with the light poles shutting off when the sun came up, but that is a weird edge case.

Electric usage was average 371wh/mile according to the vehicle trip meter, and I was in "Chill acceleration" "range extender" "high regeneration braking" and "don't auto cool the cabin unless it hits 40C" modes. Did I mention the ambient temp was 35C in the day? Cabin was set to 21C with minimal fan. Highway speeds were 70MPH.

I used adaptive cruise where possible, because damn does it give a nice smooth stop and go.

Divide that out, and my mileage budget was 68 miles a day for only hotel/jobsite charging.

The L2 at the park was OK, but 4 miles of driving and an hour per 13 miles added (9 miles useable if I only charged an hour, 22 miles useable if I charged for 2), meant I used it sparingly, or when things got really tight.

The supercharger station was infeasible with the peak pricing, as I found out on the one trip I used it. it cost bloody $95 to fill the thing to 90%! And that's not even the full 250 miles range...

I didn't have to pay out of pocket for that one thankfully, but my "fuel" row on the expense report was hurting. Shame on me for not reading fine print I guess?

As far as bad planning on the hotel, that was the closest one I could book on the corporate account. I am not paying out of pocket for a hotel on a business trip.

I did make it work, and mainly as a challenge to myself.

Again, not trying to say an EV is bad, just giving my tale with the data I collected to gauge if it would work for me.

A pint for everyone who stuck around for story time.

There are vanishingly few people who actually have any issue that isn't purely in the "change bad" category.

The hotel I stayed at on a trip hadn't yet installed their L2 charging station, even though they proudly said they had one. Plugshare didn't show any othersnearby either

I got by with the 110V plug to a lamp pole (roughly 2 miles range per hour charge), but had to be very very very thrifty with the miles on the daily 45 mile round trip commute to the customer site.

There were no L2 chargers on prem at the customer site, seeing as it was in the process of being built and mostly consisting of packed DGB for the parking lot.

Thankfully their management allowed the 110V cord to an exterior lighting outlet, and they were open to adding an L2 if their site plan and power budget/payment/etc was figured out.

The only L2 charger around the site was 7kw (roughly 12 miles range per hour charge), and meant having to drive another 4 miles the opposite way from the hotel, so there's 8 miles total used round trip to station.

Got to know the local park near the L2 pretty well, even if it was usually near dark by the time I got there and decidedly after dark when I left.

The closest L3/Supercharger option was roughly 40 miles from both the site and the hotel, and that meant driving 45+ minutes (traffic...) to plug in and charge to 90% (rental agreement had a "no charge over 90% clause), get a bite to eat, then drive back. Did that when I dropped into the danger zone of having less than 50 miles of range left if I went right back to the hotel.

Then having to return it to the airport with a sufficiently high charge left at the end of the week.

It was a heck of a different experience from renting a traditional vehicle and being able to top off on the way to and from a site, and I did have to shift my time around and cut out my usual cardio in the pool.

I've since rented an EV every time I've gone to that customer, mainly out of spite for myself, a stubborn determination to make it work, and the smile of driving what I can only describe as a stick shift stuck in 1st with no rev limiter. That hotel still hasn't installed their L2 charger.

I guess I/m one of the vanishingly few to have an issue that's not for lack of trying?

I'll leave this in neutral, can't really give an upshift or a downshift.

Re: Ah yes - the "there aren't enough charging points" defence...

all new home chargers must support vehicle-to-grid discharging

I hope that the PoCo will be required to pay a rate to the owner that includes compensation for the battery wear that is caused by the charge/discharge, and that owners will be able to set a "Don't charge me to 100% or discharge me past 75%" or similar rule.

Also would be nice to have a "I don't want to discharge at all tonight, I have to do a long trip in the morning." button.

I can see it being a boon to a homeowner in a few situations, such as off-peak pricing and outage protection (if there is a transfer-switch and such for it), but there is a potential for abuse of power (pun not intended) if the additional discharge cycles are not taken into account.

You're too dumb to use click-to-cancel, Big Biz says with straight face

Re: How hard can it be?

That's because their system showed that the real total was 65535 people, one parakeet, two sugar gliders, a kinkajou, a frumpy chinchilla, and a seriously cheesed off cat.

What do you mean their data is faulty? They paid good money to that data broker at the zoo!

Turning a computer off, then on again, never goes wrong. Right?

Re: And Arnie? He will not be back.

One might say, he could have been Terminated?

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

All fun and games until that ancient version of NT 4.0 and control software that runs the CNC machine doesn't have English fully there because it was a localized German version.

And all the scripting/control flow was in German, comments and variables both.

I got really good, for a time, at comprehending the pertinent stuff, but good luck spelling or saying any of it out loud without a cheat sheet.

Pint for what I needed after a particularly fun reinstall of the golden master image that I thoughtfully ghosted when I had it for a PM schedule...

Security? Working servers? Who needs those when you can have a shiny floor?

Re: Cleanable keyboards

+1 for Model M!

Sounds like an ammo dump cooking off while typing, glorious tactile feel, and swanky curves.

I run a Unicomp M13 USB reproduction for work, and I have a few original M's at the house.

Re: Clean keyboards

404 Pause button not found.

Our old Kenmore washer dryer stack station at the family getaway will lock the lid and refuse to unlock it till you manually turn the cycle dial to JUST the right position.

It does this even if you pull the plug, so my guess is it uses a bidirectional solenoid bolt lock.

If it's gotten into an unbalanced spin cycle, you just have to wait while it waltzes, or cycle through manually again and rearrange.

It refuses to die, and is easy to winterize, so it has earned its place.

Cisco: Don't use 'blind spot' – and do use 'feed two birds with one scone'

Re: Blind spot

And sadly, octopus is rather tasty, and has a great texture.

But I very rarely eat Tako Tacos, or anything else octopus anymore, because the guilt of eating something that intelligent got to me.

A pint to wash down the memories.

BOFH: Cough up half a grand and we'll protect you from AI

Oh goodness, where will he get that cert...

My guess is it'll be a simple "sign here" of the paperwork to start the course, and end with the boss on a C-130 in some war torn land, having had said paperwork changed out for enlistment docs to the foreign legion.

SSD missing from SAP datacenter turns up on eBay, sparking security investigation

Re: Where I work - Cistern Failure

Upvoted for the data dump joke.

One may say he "flushed his cache attempting to liquidate assets".

Mine's the one with no storage at all except pockets.

BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business

Had a legit cackle at Detroit Airport to that line.

Icon because I see TSA thinking ai am unhinged.

Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file

Re: That's the way to do it

Mooing for nothin' and your chicks for free.

Now that that is out of my braincase, I will grab my coat.

Seriously, boss? You want that stupid password? OK, you get that stupid password

Re: Missing part

"pasinpapaalfasierasierawhiskyoscarromeodavidjuantoo3"

(Guess what airport I fly through on the regular...)

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: Hmmm

's/purge/sell for beer money/'

FTFY

Icon because above.

BOFH: Ah. Company-branded merch. So much better than a bonus

Re: Got some NSFW merch at W.

Are you sure it's not a rebranded Hitachi part number?

Is there an FRU on it?

BOFH: We send a user to visit Kelvin – Keeper of the Batteries

Re: Ahhh Kelvin

Was the experiment by chance similar to the installation of a dual purpose straw with a power drill?

Re: Not if Kekvin dishes out the straws

I doubt you will find a prehensile page flipper.

What's up with IT, Doc? Rabbit hole reveals cause of outage

Re: Squirrels will eat anything.

They will eat anything, and like bird eggs.

Not as nasty as cats to the local bird populations, but they do reduce numbers.

The birds pecking after the red squirrels and dive bombing them is fun to watch.

Re: Ouch

They can be taught to use a litter tray by placing errant droppings in the tray, and they get the hint pretty quickly.

Move the tray, and they get confused, and go back to nature rules.

Re: Ouch

One of our furry demolitions masters used t chew 110V mains cables. He survived to a ripe old age, and was always spunky and spry.

We used to joke he was recharging for a fun night out.

SystemRescue 9.06 is here with the shiny new Xfce 4.18

Re: Time to get a new dual plug USB stick..

Denatonium Benzoate. A little lasts forever.

Epson zaps lasers into oblivion, in the name of the environment

Utterly garbage.

Are they seriously trying to tell me that reconditionable toner carts that last 1000+ sheets, or more when on toner saver, are worse than the "Used for 20 pages then dried out over a long weekend" ink carts?

I have an HP laser older than one of my coworkers that's still printing, whereas the Designjet 755CM is currently yawning for belts, ink carts, and a new flex flyer.

Sadly large format laser is still extremely rich for my blood, so I feed the inkjet beast I have sparingly.