Posts by lybad

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Re: Good

Guess that depends - most of my local town centre is 20mph. People tend to observe that through the actual high street, but not the road that goes past a primary school and suddenly narrows, and worse than that, last night while I was walking past, three cars in a row ignored the mini roundabout and went effectively the wrong way round it. Unfortunately one of them did that while a car was already on the roundabout...

My thing about speed limiters is that we have one car, which allows you to set the speed limit and see the setting on the dashboard. The cruise control doesn't display the speed it's set to, which is crazy.

However, we also have a motability vehicle, which displays the speed limit on the dashboard and on the satnav - and that is camera based. If you go over the speed limit, it flashes at you for a few seconds, then sits there looking angrily at you. However, it's not unusual for it to misread or completely ignore the road signs. Last week I drove down from Aberdeen, and as soon as we hit the national speed limit on the dual carriageway, and it insisted it was a 30mph road all the way until Laurencekirk, when it went to 50mph (correctly), and then went back to 30mph, until I got home. So about 50 miles of reading the speed wrongly.

Atari 400 makes a comeback in miniature form

Re: The bulge

Both machines being the 2 Atari machines - the 400 and 800.

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

Re: How many fraud and theft cases in the 80s?

Magistrates and crown courts don't apply across the whole UK - different system in Scotland.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Re: Languages as fonts

While comic sans might look awful iirc it's designed to be easy to read by dyslexics.

False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration

Our Android Auto has only had to be repaired once - for wireless AA. It's just buggy as anything for deciding if it's going to connect today.

And why does it insist on disconnecting my daughter's iPhone when I'm connecting my phone. She lives 50 miles away.

Britain's largest private pension scheme reveals scale of Capita break-in

Re: Can't wait...

Not quite all staff. Membership is only open above a certain pay grade. And if you were part of an institution that got absorbed by another you could still be in an alternate pension scheme.

Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it

When I were a lad...

Well, maybe not quite a lad.

When I was a student, our computer labs were on the 10th and higher floors in a city centre building, which then got sunlight (hey - it was Scotland, so it only happened occasionally). We had a lab of Sun Workstations. You know, the ones which needed a metal mousemat painted with dots to work. Had exactly the same problem so you could have 20 or 30 machines at a time suddenly not in mouse mode.

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

Re: Don't get me started...

No - a bugler plays music with a bugle.

A horn can be a post horn type thing, or something like a tenor horn, which looks like a tuba that shrank (a lot) in the wash.

UK tax authority nudges net 'influencers': You may owe us for those OnlyFans feet pics

Re: I think you'll find...

English? I'm subject to HMRC rules, but I'm not English or even live in Engerland. :D

Vodafone and Three's UK arms locked in merger talks

Re: Annoying

Although the same company (or subsidiary) Three and Smarty are not the same - for example, Three customers probably get priority on the mast. And higher data speed for example.

'IwlIj jachjaj! Incoming LibreOffice 7.3 to support Klingon and Interslavic

The flip side of this is when people come in and tell you that you don't speak your native language properly.

Happened to a friend and me, when a Polish postgrad student came to the University I worked at. And promptly told us we didn't speak proper English. But then my friend comes from Blantyre... :-)

(I've a weird Scottish dialect - because my parents moved round the country a lot with their jobs when I was a kid)

Magna Carta mayhem: Protesters lay siege to Edinburgh Castle, citing obscure Latin text that has never applied in Scotland

Re: Mars Bar

When I worked in Glasgow I used to get deep fried pizza from the chippy on Buchanan Street next to the south entrance to the underground/subway/clockwork Orange. Used to find them really tasty, but you could feel your heart working overtime.

My daughter used to get deep fried Freddo's after swimming on a Friday. Another part of Scotland though. Look disgusting though.

BOFH: 'What's an NFT?' the Boss asks. In this case, 'not financially thoughtful'

Re: Turings?

Exactly. That was my point.

Goodness knows what an English based person would say to a Scottish £100 or £1 note.

Turings?

Had to google that one - living in Scotland I'm not likely to see many of them. They're likely to be treated as dodgy cos they're not issued by a Scottish bank.

Try placing a pot plant directly above your CRT monitor – it really ties the desk together

Re: Your headline reminds me...

I was walking to get the bus to work at one point, saw a police car across the road from a local church, and thought they'll be looking for someone dodgy.

A few days later - https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/local-news/church-was-drugs-farm-2758104

How many Brits have deleted life-saving track and trace app from their phones? No idea, junior minister tells MPs

Nation Dependent

This story goes on about "British" people - NHS Scotland use a different app (Protect Scotland https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gov.scot.covidtracker ), so it's a bit of a weird way to describe it anyway.

Telecoms shack in the middle of Scotland put up for auction at £7,500

I think you misunderstood the question. Where is Campbell Town? Not Campbeltown.

Re: No it was a Lamborghini and it was going uphill. ;-)

I'm sure someone could for Forza Horizon 4 - but not Forza 4.

Just cos I'm pedantic. :-)

Re: Geography lesson

In general, the east coast isn't rugged - but parts of it are.

It would take me about 45-60 mins to get a train to anywhere in Scotland. And I live here, but the nearest train station would be Arbroath or Dundee.

Campbeltown - it's Campbeltown, not Campbell Town?!?

Qualcomm under fire for 'anticompetitive' patent shenanigans causing pricey UK smartphones

I think they do some phones with Snapdragons - just want to know why just them? Aren't Nokia/HMD, Xiaomi, Huawei (I know some don't use the Kirin) and Google amongst others using the same chips? Or is it a scale of sale thing?

Thought it said something nice? HS2 does nothing for anyone north of Manchester/Liverpool.

No amount of Glasgow handshaking will revive this borked kiosk

Re: Pacific Quay?

Yes? Your point being?

Cos there's never a name of a location in any other city in the world...

Why make games for Linux if they don't sell? Because the nerds are just grateful to get something that works

Re: SteamOS

In other distros it's even easier. Manjaro bundles it out of the box.

While true in many cases is not always true.

Many years ago I had a machine that dual booted OpenSuse and Windows. The couple of games I had installed ran better under wine than native Windows. One of them was Trackmania Nations, the free version, iirc.

A pub denied: One man's tale of festive frolics postponed by the curse of the On Call phone

Re: Ȝule yogh

That depends. I always called it Menzees, as did everyone I knew until I went to Dundee. My wife says the same. I grew up in the west of Scotland and my wife was in the proper north east.

Red Hat defends its CentOS decision, claims Stream version can cover '95% of current user workloads'

Re: The RedHat corporate spinners won't fix this

It depends - the powers that be moved us to RHEL, as they allegedly wanted a support package in place. But suppliers of support need to be on an approved list before they can used.

Re: How to switch?

I agree - we're mainly a Windows and RHEL shop - with some CentOS boxes, which are being moved to RHEL. However, we do have some Ubuntu machines used in some labs - trying to learn the subtle differences when setting them up is not simple.

We had the same type of thing when VMWare stopped including SLES with the licence and we started moving to RHEL based setup.

Windows might have frozen – but at least my feet are toasty

Re: Always expect th unexpected from users

Many modern laptops do it as well - my Huawei Matebook D from last year does it, as do the Asus laptops in the house. All Ryzen 2k or 3k series.

Super-antique-fragile-and-it's-XP-alidocious, even though the sight of it is something quite atrocious

They're not closing all the stores. Just the majority.

I'm intrigued what they are going to do in areas like where I live where my nearest Sainsbury's is 15 miles one way, and 45 the other, but still have more places to collect items ordered remotely. On the other hand I have 3 Argos branches about 15 miles away and one about 30.

The engineer lurking behind the curtain: Musical monitors on a meagre IT budget

Other counters

When I was an undergrad in the late 80's/early 90s, I had a lecturer who was a director of the company that made the First Word (and Plus) wor processor for Gem. He told us that there were random counters in the code that were designed to slow the application down, and they just reduced the count on subsequent releases to improve performance.

If the Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition doesn't make you a fan, we don't know what will

Re: A 600£ or 700£ price is now considered not hard to swallow? For a phone?

Of course it can. Xiaomi are available direct from themselves but also through Amazon amongst others. And they are not part of Huawei, so don't have the US issues (yet).

I got a 5g handset for £220 a few weeks ago, from their own site.

Microsoft will release a web browser for Linux next month. Repeat, Microsoft will release a browser for Linux – and it uses Google's technology

Re: At least

Both Crysis and Witcher 3 are reported as working fine on linux - check out ProtonDB for a list of real people's experience of running (Windows) games on linux.

Re: At least

I honestly can't remember IE for Linux, but I suspect they did. I know I did run IE 5.something on Solaris at one point.

Epic, Spotify, ProtonMail and pals rise up as one against Apple's 30% cut, call for end to Cupertino-style markets

Re: How about...a Linux Phone?

There have been - there was (is?) a Ubuntu Touch OS that was used on a couple of phones.

The biggest problem for most of these is the performance and/or interface, along with apps or programmes. Though a lot of that is solved if you get things like HTML5 apps.

Amazon Lex can now speak British English... or simply 'English' if you're British

Re: American English is English

Had something similar at work in Glasgow. A Polish student told my Scottish friend from Blantyre that he couldn't speak English properly. Now Scotland's west coast might not be queen's English, but really?

Article quoted as "Amazon said: "With British English, you can deliver a robust and localized ['scuse me?] conversational experience that accurately understands the British accent. Amazon Lex also provides pre-defined slots that are localized [ahem] to capture information such as common names and cities found in England.""

So British English - but common names and cities found in England. So that rules out Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland's cities and names then?

Putting the B's in bargain basement, Xiaomi staggers into sunlight clutching Poco X3

MIUI is like every skin - personal preference. I use EMUI and MIUI every day (one tablet, one phone) and can't say I care wither way. But I probably prefer MIUI. Xiaomi tend not to be as aggressive in terms of forcing their own skin on the device owner.

As I mentioned, Poco is now a separate company from the main Xiaomi line, so they are competing now - and as for the launcher, the Poco launcher is a different beast from the main MIUI one.

https://9to5google.com/2020/01/17/poco-splits-from-xiaomi-to-become-completely-independent-brand/

It might be based on MIUI - but Poco is a split off company from Xiaomi, and has always used it's own launcher. Should be available on the Play store if you look for it.

Google to pull plug on Play Music, its streaming service that couldn't beat Spotify, in favour of YouTube Music

The thing about the web YouTube music is how difficult they seem to make it for you to listen to an album you have uploaded. Search defaults to online media rather than your library, and then when you switch to your uploads, it lists all the music in a random order. Trying to actually find the album is a nightmare.

Re: Anyone know how to buy through YouTube Music?

Yes it is primarily a streaming service. However Google Play allows you to buy music, but according to something I saw yesterday, they're about to stop selling music as well. Which means I need to find an alternative site for buying music if I can't or don't want to buy physical media for those items.

Re: I've just uploaded my music collection to...

Afaik - the issue with the free YaToob needing the device to be unlocked only applies when you're streaming media. If you have local content it should play it with the screen locked.

For me, I've always just used local content on my device, and at present I use Omnia as my media player. Works for me...

Chinese tat bazaar Xiaomi to light a fire under Amazon's Kindle with new e-book reader

Re: Is there a point to eReaders that I'm missing?

You used to be able to argue that they were cheaper than a tablet, but with the Fire tablets, that's not true anymore.

I used a paperwhite for years as it was convenient for on the bus - especially as some of the books I read are more coffee table books in print. However, since I've been working from home, I've been reading more graphic novels and less books, and the 10" Fire tablets are great for those. If I ever start commuting again, I suspect I'll go back to the Paperwhite again.

Going back to the Kobo/Kindle thing - in the early days Kobo used to emphasise they felt if someone bought a book from them, they "bought" a book from them - so they were free to make backups, copy them to other devices, etc, whereas Amazon only licence the book to you - so if Amazon decide they don't like your face/money and close your account, you basically have the licence (to kill), revoked.

Utilitarian, long-bodied Nokia 5.3 has budget basic specs - but it does cost £150

Same here.

If you're appy and you know it: The Huawei P40 Pro conclusively proves that top-notch specs aren't everything

Re: Wonder if the quoted excellent battery life

The issue here is that for quite a while, Huawei have not released codes for unlocking the bootloader. Plus they also use their own chip designs, so it's generally not easy to get something like LineageOS on to them.

Xiaomi Mi 9 owners furious after dodgy Vodafone software patch bricked their mobes

Re: To be fair

They had a shop. It's now closed I believe. But 3 amongst others have sold Xiaomi devices, and I'm sure places like Argos and Amazon sell them.

Re: Android One

I thought with Android One it was still the device manufacturer that built the OS - as different devices will have different components. So updates will be quicker than a non-Android One device, but not guaranteed.

Xiaomi what you're working with: Chinese mobe-flinger proffers two Redmi Note phablets for UK market

Re: This is more than a little disturbing...

You're missing the point - this isn't about the ROM as such. The global ROM is what is on the phone if you buy a genuine UK market Xiaomi handset.

Given that most people will do some customising of their settings, even if it's just their ringtone and wallpaper, it's not that difficult to search for and turn off a setting for displaying adverts (or as Xiaomi put it - suggested apps).