Posts by Giles C

What's your Mean Time To Innocence – the time needed to prove that mess is not your problem

Re: The usual suspects

As a network engineer I am only too aware of the fact that everyone blames the network for any slight problems.... and usually have to prove my innocence.

Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac

Re: I can never ....

In opposite directions?

Electric two-wheelers are set to scoot past EVs in road race

Re: What do these give you that an electric bicycle does not?

No need to pedal so if you are going more than a few miles it is easier.

I remember seeing one system where all the batteries where the same type and you basically dropped a battery off for charging and picked up a fully charged one from a kiosk on the roadside (obviously you had to pay) but it saved charging at home.

Re: Yet more data grabbing

Nobody wants to sell you a product any more - just a means to advertise and get you to buy more products.

I am glad that when I go and by a hammer there aren't options for cloud connected hammers - yet...

'Strictly limit' remote desktop – unless you like catching BianLian ransomware

Re: Passwords

VPN every time.

Doesn't need to be that complex or expensive a solution but the main thing is always have a firewall between the internet and corporate resources.

I think one of the big hacks a couple of years ago was RDP exposed to the internet as a gateway.

p.s. putting services on random ports is not being secure.....

Will LLMs take your job? Only if you let them

Re: In The Long Run.......

Well that means I am under subsistence level then.

Only got a 50” tv (8 years old) do have a smartphone and the newest car is 10 years old and the other two are 23 and 34 years old and don’t claim any benefits…..

Oh well

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

Re: When do people understand that cash rules?

I also watched that video it was certainly interesting (or scary)

Zoho creates browser with 'Open Season Mode' for when you don't care about privacy

Simple question - why would anyone use the open season mode - unless you are developing the sort of software that needs this to run.....

If so it is a strange market to aim for - virus and malware coders?

ESA's Jupiter-bound Juice spacecraft has a sticky problem with its radar

Re: Simple fix

To quote Ronnie Barker (as Arkwright)

You just need to j-j-j-jiggle it a bit

Balloon-borne telescope returns first photos in search for dark matter

Re: Helium is cheaper than rocket fuel

An xkcd for you

https://xkcd.com/2766/

If you don't get open source's trademark culture, expect bad language

I find most people refer to hoovers as a generic term.

Unless you prefer Numatic products in which case they are always Henry.

Support chap put PC into 'drying mode' and users believed it was real

Re: Nipples and sonic screwdrivers

They do, I was issued with one of them on my last contract, first thing I did was to go into settings and disable it. The laptop had a perfectly good trackpad and I kept catching it whilst typing and sending the cursor into the opposite side of the screen.

I know some people love them but I can’t get on with them they go from moving the pointer a fraction of a mm to the other side of screen when you look at them and never found a happy medium

Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?

Re: old password

I’ve mentioned this is a comment before but a friend of mine created a server

Blackberry Enterprise Server for EXCHANGE number 01

Or besexchange01

When pointed out we just laughed and it stayed in place for at least 5 years

We also had a back door password for most of the network kit a various of “its all gone wrong” better not put the full version in as it is probably still in use 5years after I left the company

At one place I worked I was for a while involved in the backup of the servers and hence knew the combination for the large safe the backups were stored in.

For some reason this safe used to confuse the people whose job inherited the backup process.

Every time someone couldn’t get in the safe they called me as I had the “skill” to get the door open, worst thing is I can still remember the combination even though I left the company back in 2018. If the safe is still at bgl and it can’t be opened I could be prepared to unlock it for a suitably large fee……

Techie called out to customer ASAP, then: Do nothing

We can’t verify if that is true as the dilbert.com site has gone and it is now subscription only behind a paywall….

Sounds like the same contract people where working at last weeks on call

Last week we had the on-call where the staff got moaned at for not sending an engineer but fixing the problem,

This week someone sent to a site to meet the contract terms.

You do wonder about the people who draw up the contracts.

I used to work where we had a 4 hour fix contract with a supplier but if it was a hardware failure (i,e, someone let the magic smoke out) then that was fine but if it was a config issue then we didn’t need an engineer on site. Far more sensible

CAN do attitude: How thieves steal cars using network bus

I remember someone making a double number plate for a car , there were 3 number plates the one on the car had the normal number in front of that was one held with electromagnets on one side it has the normal plate on the other it said stolen.

The idea was a switch in the car had to pressed to engage the magnet otherwise when you drove off it would flop down and reveal the word stolen to anyone following

Seems very simple in principle.

Mind you the biggest protection they could make for bus networks is to route the cables where they are only accessible with a bit of work, ie the headlamp bus connector is only accessible if you remove the headlamp which also means opening the bonnet and stripping out a few covers first.

Defunct comms link connected to nothing at a fire station – for 15 years

Re: "NEVER SWITCH OFF"

This approach has worked on the past.

The question is asked Is xxx still used?

No replies forthcoming…

Raise a change request to turn box off, include all correspondence trying to find out if it is use still.

Get change approved

Turn box off

Wait for screams of panic….. then turn it back on

As long as the change was approved no fallback

Worse are the machines you find under the comms room floor or inside a ceiling void that nobody remembers being put there.

The most bizarre online replacement items in your delivered shopping?

My mums dog will eat cat food, my cat will only eat certain specific brands and then it depends on the day of the week.

Dogs are food vacuums with legs, cats are far harder to keep satisfied

Botched migration resulted in a great deal: One for the price of two

The opposite problem

We had the accounts department decide to not pay the bill for one of the service providers at the time we used two. BT and Verizon, suddenly get an emergency call both the primary and secondary lines have failed at the same time (they were in separate buildings) both my boss and me where at a local conference when the call came though.

So one of us went to each site (the closest to our homes) and found the carrier on both circuits had failed,

A quick bank transfer later and we were backup and running with only about 3 hours or £120k in lost revenue for finance to account for……

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

Re: Back in the day

I will go with ironic as I didn’t spot the mistake until it was too late (a day too late…)

Back in the day

We used the following shorthand when out at desks

VDU fault - very dumb user

EDU - extremely dum user

Internally we would refer to id10t and picnic. If these never went in the call logs for obvious reasons.

That way if we needed to call back to the office to get something done then saying there was a vdu problem didn’t matter if it was overheard.

Mind you I once told someone the problem was with the warp core they believed it and well…..

China’s Baidu claims its ERNIE chatbot reinvents the computing stack

or choose the winning premium bonds?

Microsoft and GM deal means your next car might talk, lie, gaslight and manipulate you

My BMW comes up with fairly useful messages, rather than just an idiot lamp.

I,e. Tyre pressure low please check as soon as possible, or left headlamp bulb failed

But maybe that is an exception (even though the car is 10 years old)

Most of the time I don’t look at the screens in the car, as long as I get in and it works who needs them.

I still miss an option on a SAAB I used to have, it had a really nice control panel with the best button ever for driving at night “black panel”. This turned off everything on the dash except the speedometer unless a fault occurred so driving at night there were zero distractions inside the car.

Simple and brilliant at the same time.

BOFH: I care a lot ... about onion bhajis

Re: Small Rural AM station?

Yep, Usenet is the missing link between bbs systems and the current internet - it is a lot closer to the bbs systems. Not bad for a system developed over 43 years ago…

Duelling techies debugged printer by testing the strength of electric shocks

Re: Reminds me...

My normal reaction to a machine stopping working is to check the machine is working and if so then check the cable as they have a tendency of failing.

Surely it should be put on a charge card…..

Huge lithium discovery could end world shortages ... Oh, wait, it's in Iran

Re: Don’t be a Elven infantryman.

I thought was Monty Python and the Holy Grail

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhP4DS2WURU

Service desk tech saved consultancy Capita from VPN meltdown, got a smack for it

Re: The old truth

You have to wonder what happened to the people who implemented the change without testing on the platforms that were in use.

Sounds like the testers all used windows 7 and ‘forgot’ about the XP users.

At the very least as part of the post imp testing it should have been tested on both platforms so it could have been rolled back inside the change window

Backup tech felt the need – the need for speed. And pastries and Tomb Raider

Re: Formatting DVDs?

I think you are right (write?) once a dvd-r has been written to it can’t be changed again as they are a write once media.

So the disks must have been RW

Bitcoin mining rig found stashed in school crawlspace

Re: “ Sorry, this content is not available in your region.”

That will be the site wants to run 500+ tracking and advertising cookies the owners don’t want to make it gdpr compliant so instead they block all EU ip addresses

PC tech turns doctor to diagnose PC's constant crashes as a case of arthritis

Re: Dell's help desk script

We used to have that function as engineers where I worked if we called into the helpdesk then pressed 9 (I think it is 4 years since I worked there) it bypassed all the menus, pushed us to the first call in the queue and got us straight through.

You can tell the person who programmed the call vector used to have a problem with getting through.

Re: Dell's help desk script

Going back to the mid 90s and I was employed doing CAD work and we used Dell 486 machines, there was a fault with my machine and they sent out an engineer to swap out the system board. Only one problems for Autocad it needs a maths coprocessor so mine was the mighty 486DX cpu (to anyone under 30 yes that was a separate option) and they sent out a board with a 486SX chip installed. Took another two days for them to get the correct board and chip installed. I can’t remember what the helpdesk said but explaining to your boss that the machine can no longer run the software it was bought for isn’t a good thing to be doing….

Behold Big Tech's mightiest new innovations: Minecraft Crocs, recycled cubicles

Cube

Strange I remember seeing those cube like things in office about 10 years ago - weren’t very popular as they were used as meeting rooms and had benches on each side, the problem was getting in and out as there wasn’t enough room to stand up in them so you had to shuffle in and out.

They just want everyone in a cube like battery chickens, if you are in an office but can’t see anyone then what is the point of being there, most office got rid of big partitions a few years back going to just desks - yes it was noisier but if stopped the gopher impressions when the door opened….

A tip for content filter evaluators: erase the list of sites you tested, don't share them on 100 PCs

Re: Out o'curiosity ...

In the article he said he tried to visit the site and it was blocked- so the filters worked however the browser would still have the site in the history as usually most filters replace the content with a stop looking message or similar.

The problem is the machines imaged would still have the name in the history and autocomplete would probably catch you typing pl… and fill in a useful suggestion.

If you have a fan, and want this company to stay in business, bring it to IT now

Re: air CON

Well for you maybe, I am sitting here with the heating in my house set to 19C, and in an office normally 20-22 is fine, mind you I used to work with someone who would be wearing a coat when it was that temperature in the office. My brother is even worse anything above 18C is too hot for him - and no we are not Geordies but come from the Fens….

Sick of smudges on your car's enormo touchscreen? GM patents potential cure

Another device only one manufacturer has

Going slightly off topic here but I assume Ford owns the patent on electrically heated windscreens, the best device for getting driving in cold weather made.

I don’t have them on my normal car (BMW) but I do have one on my Tiger kit car - yes I know it sounds odd but the car with no roof, door, or any other glass rather than the windscreen has a heated window.

I assume there is some patent reason as it makes getting going in colder weather a lot easier but I have never seen a non ford (production) car with one….

Romance scam targets security researcher, hilarity ensues

Re: Does anyone remember the 419 scam baiters?

I remember seeing that site as well.

I think the best one was someone selling a go-kart (engine powered) where it was so powerful you had to take an anti nausea treatment called sheet before using , the question was something like ‘can you eat sheet?’

There is a scam baiting community at 419eater.com but I can’t see the original pages from a quick search.

Edit just a bit too late…

Microsoft switches Edge’s PDF reader to pay-to-play Adobe Acrobat

I still find it really odd that after using a Mac for years all the tools for creating and manipulating PDFs are built into the so.

I know some of the more advanced features that Adobe way you to pay for aren’t probably there. But I can create a pdf from just about any document editing app on the system and using the built in preview tool can reorder and edit pages in a pdf.

It has been like that since I started using a Mac over 10 years ago.

No more free love: Netflix expands account sharing restrictions

Nope there are rules about large groups in the license but this refers to pubs and anywhere you take money - which seems reasonable.

I have a few box sets and they get lent to family friends etc once I have watched them and the same happens with movies.

And before anyone asks I do buy the discs as I then always have them even if I stop paying for the streaming services

The point to way in is this, I pay for a full tier 4k subscription which allows me to watch up to 4 streams at once. So as long as I don’t exceed 4 streams does it matter to them where people logging in with accounts physically are.

I can understand if you are on the 1 stream at a time subscription but on a 4 stream…..

Smart ovens do really dumb stuff to check for Wi-Fi

Re: Fitting WiFi to an oven

My oven has sophisticated controls I get set the over to start at a set time and good for for a duration (useful if going out and knowing when you will be back) but that is it.

Normally I am at home when cooking food so don’t need it the same as I don’t use the wireless app on the washing machine again it has a delay timer so I can set it to start washing and be finished when I wake up.

No I do not have any need for WiFi enabled

Washing machines

Ovens

Fridge

Pressure washer (why would I want a phone anywhere need a 150psi water jet)

Shower (saw that the other day…..)

Smart thermostat

Lights

Anything else I have forgotten please add to the list….

User was told three times 'Do Not Reboot This PC' – then unplugged it anyway

It is not quite the same but in the last few weeks of working for a company I had to go and do some maintenance work on the network for the only office that ran 24x7 (it was an out of hours claims line).

It had been arranged that I would do the work in sections starting at 2300 to avoid disruption.

I got there and prepped the work and then at 2230 all the machines powered up (if not already on) installed patches and shutdown again.!

But this is a 24 hour operation? I got told that they do this every night…. This is because the machines were set to install patches at the same time as the other call centres which shut down at 2200.

So then the question came haven’t you reported this to the service desk to which I was told no it gives us a break…..

On my return to the office I mentioned this to the person in charge of patching to be told that nobody in the 6 months of the site being running had bothered to raise this issue - for all I know it could be the same 5 years later….

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Car tyres

For the best mash up between imperial and metric look at the wheels on your car.

The wheels (rims) are measured in inches the rim will say something like 7Jx17 that is a 7 inch wide rim using a J pattern (what is needed for tubeless tyres) the 17 is the diameter of the rim.

Inside the rim is an offset which is referred to as ET number. This is the offset of the bolt face from the centre of the rim measured in mm. It is a positive number if the offset is towards the outside edge and a negative if the offset is towards the axle side.

So that is interesting….

The tyres are even worse.

Take a typical 205/50 R 17

This is a tyre which is 205mm wide where the height of the tyre sidewall is 50 percent of the width and it is a Radial tyre designed for a 17 inch diameter rim.

Metric tyres were tried in the 1980s but they were abandoned due to lack of support if you need metric tyres now they are almost impossible to find.

They are standard but use multiple measuring systems…..

AI may finally cure us of our data fetish

Re: Bot for the sake of bot?

When I used to have to do this the last time was to build a network switch template against a known standard.

I copied the contents into a table, and then worked through my standard document referencing the relevant parts of the standard. Took me a day or so but at the end the auditors were happy with it.

There is no point in rewriting the standard and changing a couple of words.

Nice smart device – how long does it get software updates?

Re: Nobody

I have a so called smart washing machine. I say so called because I have never connected it to WiFi, or downloaded the app for it.

Until they make a washing machine that can load and empty iftself and put the clothes away what is the point. It has a delay start function so I can load it in advance but I can’t see the point of the other so called smart features.

Same as I why would I want lights I can turn on by using my phone, there are switches around the house that do it for me.

Chinese Tesla owners protest another round of price cuts

Re: Generally never a right time to buy for lots of stuff

Yep ordered some curtains between Christmas and new year and got a 10% discount. A week later they are advertising a new sale with up to 30% off.

I haven’t gone back and checked but as I was happy with the price when I ordered it I can’t see any point - they are being custom made and I am waiting for the dispatch date which should be this week.

Happens all the time you buy something and it is cheaper a few weeks later but occasionally you can be smug as the price rockets up.

Texts from your dog and brain-free astronomy: The best of the rest from CES

I keep thinking of getting an automated telescope mount but I would want one with an eyepiece so it didn’t rely on a bit of tech to get the views, but then in the east of England it is often cloudy for days on end so it would just sit there not getting used (nearest dark sky site is at least 30 minutes away.

So not for me I’m afraid although it does look nice they could put an eyepiece mount on it.