Posts by Roopee 530 publicly visible posts • joined 5 May 2015
You jest, but I used to occasionally give technical support while driving between clients; I would describe the screen to them and/or get them to describe it to me (as in read the icons/boxes/buttons) so they could find what I was telling them to look for... these weren't the most tech-savvy of clients you understand, so the visualisation didn't overly impact my driving skills!
Sadly (and somewhat ironically) the article doesn't say much about the keyboard, such as whether is has double-shot keycaps, but the layout is a non-standard laptop-type and looks too compact to be comfortable if you're used to the traditional layout, especially for the cursor block and the number pad. I assume it isn't double-shot as that would surely have been a positive feature worth commenting on.
I'm not a full touch typist except for numbers (I used to be an accountant) so yes, I need the letters to type quickly (i.e my usual 30 wpm), and also yes, being worn shiny is a problem. I do have a couple of used double-shot keyboards, backlit gaming mechanicals (wired) which are great, but I'm too poor to justify buying a new, wireless one for WFH, and the heavy 'gaming' wires get in the way on my office desk, so I use relatively cheap wireless combos and treat them as disposable. They last me 2-3 years. :)
In other words you practice preventative maintenance, and naturally any machine will last a lot longer if you do that.
However, you can't stop the keycaps wearing out: I'm not a heavy-handed typist and I don't spend my days bashing out long emails and reports, but even I have to replace my keyboard/mouse combo every couple of years when the surfaces become shiny.
This device seems like a pretty dumb, ill thought-out product for a list of reasons, some of which are mentioned in the article.
It’s one of my daily drivers, alongside LibreWolf, Floorp and Supermium, depending on which OS I’m on. Previously I mainly used Pale Moon.
I never use Chrome on my own PCs, and rarely Firefox these days. I’m sure many here are similar, it’s a shame the message hasn’t reached the masses and the management...
Edit: forgot to mention iCab Mobile on my iThings.
TextPad - not FOSS, but I bought a licence over 20 years ago and still use it almost daily, so it has earned its keep!
At the time I needed something for NT4 that would handle much bigger files than Notepad, and REs, to create test files (up to a million lines in some cases).
I think these days your average Linux GUI text editor is just as powerful, but I do like TextPad's UI.
I think you'll find it taught you nothing about driving, but did teach you fine motor control and hand-to-eye coordination, and lots about the physics of momentum and friction... driving like a bell-end is entirely on you!
As for Kumma Bear, my first thought was the clue's in the name - or is that just me?
It doesn't make any difference whether you manually or remotely update your bus/whatever, if you don't know exactly what the update is/does, and can verify it, you have no security - thus you need to trust the manufacturer because you are at their mercy.
So if there's reason to believe your supplier might maliciously 'update' your safety-critical device, you shouldn't have bought it in the first place, and you certainly shouldn't apply unchecked updates (though you may be too late of course)... not really rocket-science.
Hands up who trusts Chinese manufacturers, or more to the point, the Chinese government! Other countries are available.
Not that I trust our own or our allies' manufacturers or governments even in peace-time, but at least their software updates/cock-ups probably aren't malicious.
Have you ever tried to photocopy/scan a tenner? Most machines won't let you scan money...
I discovered this at a school around 20 years ago when I was asked to assist a teacher who was struggling to make some "play money" as a teaching aid - we both thought there was something wrong with the new colour laser photocopier/printer!
I've always wondered how they are able to recognise currency notes?
I found by empirical research, i.e. trial and error using my own MFP, that you can scan small sections and stitch the images together, but then it won't print the result!
The bit that first triggered that same response from me was "45 percent of enterprise employees now using generative AI tools"... I can't be as bothered as you to look it up because I was already convinced by that that the numbers were BS, but I'm pretty sure it should have been quoted as something like "45% of users of LayerX's browser extension", which is no doubt a very, very different number!
El Reg, please quote some sources when you quote so many specific, highly questionable, numbers.
Garuda is stunningly well-designed - I have it on the (old) PC that’s connected to my telly. And it’s great If you want to impress jaded Windows users with Linux because it looks amazing yet it’s completely intuitive -and it’s fast - hallmarks of good design.
Unlike this heap of junk - it beggars belief that Windows is so badly architected that simply changing the colour of dialogue boxes globally is so hard that Microsoft still hasn’t managed it on their core product!
That’s called “reinventing the wheel“ Bob! And your undoubtedly clever solution sounds as though it is fiddly to setup and slow to run...
With Ventoy you simply boot the Ventoy USB (which can be an SSD in a USB caddy), choose which ISO you want to boot from the several you copied onto it, then it boots from that ISO - just like magic :)
Even better, spare space on the disk can be used for drivers or anything else once your chosen OS has booted as it appears as a standard USB drive.
Occasionally you’ll come across an ISO/BIOS combination that doesn’t work, or a BIOS with an arbitrary size limit (eg 128GB), but I’ve found very few.
Mine’s the one with several Ventoy drives in the pocket —>
> the majority who voted for this fascist nutjob...
...worship money.
Economic pressure will hit them where it hurts, and the rest of the world is already making arrangements to help Mr Trump do just that, either directly or indirectly. Even without our help he’s making a pretty good job of it all on his own with his idiotic tariffs and isolationist policies.
Mine’s the one with “Macroeconomics for Idiots” in the pocket —>
I stand by my comment on a recent previous thread quoting market shares: completely inappropriate use of significant digits/decimal places implying high precision when in fact accuracy is more likely to be +/- 10% or worse, which completely negates the spin that is being put on this.
I think most of the users of El Reg understand the basics of scientific method and statistics, so please, do us a favour, and stop parroting this nonsense and apply a modicum of intellectual common sense!
By all means say this is likely higher than the last such survey, but static/decline is still within the margins of error - that is all you can say about these figures.
Sorry Liam, I’ve been using PNG since at least ~2002, when I bought Macromedia Fireworks which uses PNG as its native format, and it has never once occurred to me to pronounce it “ping”!
Incidentally Fireworks was much better at creating and manipulating complex text than the contemporaneous Adobe Photoshop (?4) so I decided to use it for my advertising graphics. Guess which app Adobe chose to can when they bought Macomedia... all they were interested in was Flash. I was so annoyed, I wanted the bugs in Fireworks fixed!
I hate to stamp on your conspiracy theory as I’m fairly paranoid myself, but of course you need a router and/or wireless access point - unless you only have one device per room, and that one device is wired!
I agree with several commentards above that FFTR is probably meaning to each apartment in a tower block - have you seen typical Chinese housing? It makes London look spacious and sparsely-populated...
> someone who gets their phone free
Nobody "gets their phone free on their phone plan" - it's factored into the price of the plan, and not necessarily at a discount either. It's a form of hire purchase, or buying "on the never-never" as it used to be called. A way of exploiting people who want something before they've saved up for it.
It's not like we have much choice these days... how far is it to your nearest branch, and have you got the time to drive there every time you want to make a transaction?
FWIW, I'm pretty sure a bank's iPhone app is a safer alternative than a Windows browser for banking , all things considered.
Might I suggest a (not too) used mechanical gaming one from eBay at <£40?
It would tick all your boxes. I’ve bought 3 recently; all have standard layout, back lighting than can be turned down or off, a USB port, and are excellent to type on. A bonus is the keytops can be replaced if they wear out, and another bonus is none of them has an AI key. :)
At work our line-of-business app is Salesforce-based, so we have to have a Salesforce add-in in Outlook (currently we can run Old or New - I run both). I don't think such a thing exists for Thunderbird, and I'd be surprised if it would ever be written, so unfortunately Thunderbird is a non-starter.
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