* Posts by agurney

221 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2015

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Nuclear reactors smaller than a semi truck to be tested in Idaho

agurney

Re: the average US home only consumes around 30 kWh of electricity per day

Today we consumed 24kWh - north UK, no EV, no AC.

However, our solar panels generated 27kWh, with any excess stored in batteries which keeps us going overnight, so currently NOT "contributing to our current CO2-apocalypse."

'Cyber security' behind decision to end defense satellite sharing of hurricane data

agurney

Re: SimEarth

"Additionally, I don't think people realize how fast water can rise from flash flooding. "

In the late 1970s we (me & future Mrs. G) went to the Linn of Dee, put a bunch of tinnies in the river to cool and pitched our tent a dozen feet (no metres in those days) above the river; woke up in the morning to the water lapping the edge of the tent and the beer long gone. Eye opening and scary!

Let's Encrypt rolls out free security certs for IP addresses

agurney

Re: why are we using dns?!!

"..deceased college"

Harvard by any chance?

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

agurney

When I was starting my first career, as a teacher, I was hauled up in front of the beak within my first five minutes of a teaching practice placement for not wearing a tie .. the head of the art department obligingly cut me one from paper and all was well.

agurney

Re: VAX field service engineers

"There is a footballer who lost a finger, due to a ring when he climbed a fence"

I know a newly married goalkeeper who sadly lost his ring finger when the ring caught on a hook holding the net when he dived to me a save :(

Ex-NSA bad-guy hunter listened to Scattered Spider's fake help-desk calls: 'Those guys are good'

agurney

Re: Ad

especially when it's the only shop on the island :(

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

agurney

Re: Myself

...started writing about 50 years ago

I wrote a program that takes Dover HW and LW times and creates tide tables and corrections for a variety of locations on the Scottish west coast for sailors .. I only run it once a year so have never bothered converting it from QBASIC .. hence having a rarely used Windows 98 (or is it '95?) VM. If it ain't broke don't fix it (there be dragons!)

Uncle Sam pulls $2.4B Leidos deal to support CISA after rival alleges foul play

agurney

What an odd image to illustrate the article, no doubt AI generated - split down the middle but the edges don't match; T on the left is intact but the right has a shred of T; and amazingly the end of three lines of text has been torn from the left side without the paper it was printed on! ... and those fingers are decidedly odd :(

US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired

agurney
Headmaster

someones -> someone's

agurney

I think you mean "principles" not "principals", and I seem to remember enjoying "The White Company" when I came across that and the bookshelf of simlar tomes in the local library 60 years ago ... but I've also enjoyed troublesome works such as Peter Wright's Spycatcher and those of Solzhenitsyn (First Circle was stolen from me on a train in Yugoslavia .. but I didn't make a fuss as it was in the days of Tito).

I've had some AI images created that bear a similarity to some of my stuff that's online, but they could probably be fobbed off as "derivative" - maybe that's why ChatGPT and their ilk have a tendency to misspell common words in their graphics renditions.

Citrix finds new use for virtualization: Avoiding PC price hikes caused by tariffs

agurney

Upvoted for creating a new word "quoloquial" .. I've added it to my lexicon :)

How Amazon red-teamed Alexa+ to keep your kids from ordering 50 pizzas

agurney

Re: Interesting

"So I wonder how they bar ordering 50 pizzas but still let you order pizza..."

.. some smart youngster would order multiple pizzas multiple times, but avoid 10x5 in case duplicates were discarded.

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

agurney

Re: Please do not all power on at once

"Two Loos, Le Trek"

wasn't that the French painter with the big house .. "Two Loos Lautrec" ?

Developer scored huge own goal by deleting almost every football fan in Europe

agurney

Re: It never gets old

Why would the Practical Reporting and Extraction Language not be suitable for extracting the data and creating the reports?

.. because it's a Pathelogically Eclectic Rubbish Lister

Raspberry Pi not affected by Trump tariffs yet while China-tied rivals feel the heat

agurney

avoid the 34% on Chinese imports ..

Oops, I was wrong, that should be 34% on top of an existing 20% ... time to top up the popcorn [because my pension's now toast]

agurney

so I don't see how Raspberry PI not being manufactured in China is going to avoid the blanket tariff of 10% on imports for goods coming from the UK..

It won't avoid the 10%, but it will avoid the 34% on Chinese imports and 20% on EU imports.

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

agurney

In Scotland you must have a degree, or equivalent, as well as a teaching qualification for a subject before you are allowed to teach it (from previous posts it seems like France has similar requirements, and rightly so)

agurney

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

..run a training course and finding at the last minute it wasn't quite what he was hired to do..

I had something similar to that in Mumbai for a national Telco. I was booked to run a course on SMS fraud and similar stuff for a handful of techs (state of the art at the time). We were squashed into a hot cramped cupboard .. but when I laid out the agenda for the sessions there was a bit of consternation and folk started making apologies and leaving the room. Within a few minutes I was ushered to a lecture theatre and asked if I could do my presentation on the LIVE system in front of a hundred or so folk!

[Yes, everything went well; I knew my stuff, answered all the questions that were thrown at me and did some requests that identified SMS spamming in progress in real time so a good session and a happy customer]

agurney
Headmaster

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

I think you mean hens' teeth

agurney

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

Interestingly, $largeNuclearSite down the road has started doing just this, and is causing a drain of teachers from the area as they're offering much higher salaries and better working conditions..

Similarly, when I was starting out in education (teacher, then industry .. I could do so did!) at the start of the oil boom in Scotland, new science teachers who were being recruited for the northern isles (Orkney/Shetland) were being poached by the oil companies at massively inflated salaries.

Scotland now home to Europe's biggest battery as windy storage site fires up

agurney

Re: Back of the envelope

I think you'd annoy Caledonian Canal users.

You might be able to increase the capacity but you'd need a considerable difference in head to generate electricity, maybe similar to the Cruachan pumped storage.

US stocks slip as Trump pulls trigger on Canada, Mexico, China tariffs

agurney

Re: Heres

"The problem is that those are really on the wrong side of Canada to export to Europe..."

Not really; after all that "drill baby drill" the Northwest Passage will soon be clear all year round :(

agurney

"Trump is a weird phenomina."

I was going to be a grammar nazi and complain about the use of the plural, rather than the singular 'phenomenon' .. but on reflection there's more than one of them :(

Wozniak: I didn't reduce chip count for manufacturing. I wanted to prove I was clever

agurney

Re: 'Woah… what a brilliant engineer.'

"I just wish he'd embraced Linux..... "

it may be a bit late, but what is his Raspberry Pi Zero using?

100-plus spies fired after NSA internal chat board used for kinky sex talk

agurney

Re: not the other meaning

"Wide topped welly boots...."

You're Baa-aad

Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

agurney

Re: Sounds like a resourceful IT tech

Clearing out a Ferranti site following their disastrous takeover, it was common to find stuff that had been thrown in a skip midweek appear in a car boot sale at the weekend.

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

agurney

Re: Here are the copies

My old QIC tapes are in the greenhouse.

Miles of strong ribbon that (mostly) keeps the avian pests away from my fruit'n'veg plants!

DOGE latest: Citrix supremo has 'read-only' access to US Treasury payment system

agurney

Re: DOGE

I was wonder how it's pronounced...

probably the same as Venetians pronounced it when the Doge was their head of state.

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

agurney
Joke

"Biggles Flies Undone" was a cracker

Is that a bird’s nest, a wireless broadband base station, or both?

agurney
Coat

Re: They're employing birds to do the work too?

.. The cranes snuggle up to the cows, pick a leg up, and go to sleep. Then the cow decides to move somewhere else...

Aren't you thinking of flamingos? (why do flamingoes stand one leg? .. because if they lifted it up they'd fall over)

What happens when someone subpoenas Cloudflare to unmask a blogger? This...

agurney

Re: First Amendment

I'd support Trump invading Tamworth if he were to ride into town in a Tamworth Pig - a Reliant Robbin for the uninitiated.

.. why does that make me conflate Trump and Del Boy?

Eutelsat OneWeb blames 366th day for 48-hour date disaster

agurney
Headmaster

Re: out by 11 days by the mid 18th century?

"..only Britain. E1R had been advised by John Dee to switch..."

E1R wasn't Britain; she was only England and Ireland.

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

agurney

Re: Quote

"Not a battery as yet. I'll look at the figures after a full year of running.."

I'm happy with my numbers thus far; i've had one solar inverter failure (easy DIY replacement after 9 years) and the batteries 'should' have a good life:

As a fairly early adopter (2011) I'm getting around 73p per unit for FIT + (deemed) export which brings in around £2K per annum.

I'm paying about 8p for an EV tariff for a few hours overnight to charge the batteries (15kWh).

At the moment I'm using more than I can store overnight and the solar's doing next to nothing, but within a couple of months I expect to be able to charge the batteries mostly from solar so should have a minimal off peak electricity bill along with income from the FIT so more £ in than out.

agurney

But are the rest really any better ?

Scottish Hydro, which became SSE, then passed on to OVO .. doesn't matter which one you pick they all seem to be morphing and merging and following the same downward spiral.

Entropy would seem to be an apposite description.

agurney

.. " .. the bullshit about saving money, being more economical, is really annoying. If people want/need to use less they know how, and it doesn't take a smart meter to tell them..."

I find my smart meter very useful. I have solar + battery storage + a low cost nightly tariff (used to charge the batteries). The smart meter lets me monitor consumption in real time so I can see if I'm dipping in to the grid at peak rate times so can balance kettle/oven/heaters/whatever if necessary (target is: Usage Now=0 on the smart meter)

[ .. per another current thread I have ESP32s/ESP8266s monitoring water temperature, humidity, solar and battery inverters, and more, all feeding a Raspberry Pi running an MQTT broker and displaying via another ESP32 so I can see consumption and status across appliances.]

[ The OVO reference hit a nerve; I've just had a smart meter fitted to MIL's remote property because of the radio teleswitch service cutoff and they still haven't sorted the bills out after nearly two months]

NetAdmin learns that wooden chocks, unlike swipe cards, open doors when networks can't

agurney

Re: Car doors

At the other end of the scale I had a Ford Cortina (MkII, 1970s) where the driver's side lock was so worn I could unlock it with my thumb nail. Ignition was a bit trickier, but not mutch.

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

agurney

Re: Screen savers

yeah, but when was the last time you saw a keyboard with "Enter" on any of the keys?

agurney

Re: I had one user...

Personally, I can't remember seeing an office printer using anything other than A4 or A3 paper.

I worked as a tech. writer for a US TLA in the UK .. I regularly had to flit between A4 and US Letter in the same printer.

Abstract, theoretical computing qualifications are turning teens off

agurney

Re: COMAL

WOW, that brings back memories .. there's a fair chance that you used one of the BASIC and COMAL open learning courses that I wrote for TVEI way back when (1987-1988). The language and environment (compiler, interpreter, whatever) wasn't important, but the approach I took to logic and code structure was.

Coincidentally I'm retiring today after several decades in the industry (real world, not Scottish education) with no regrets.

Hide the keyboard – it's the only way to keep this software running

agurney

Re: Just move some disks

ah, you mean mañana .. however there's no word in Gaelic with such a sense of urgency

Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms

agurney
FAIL

Re: Lifestyles of the rich and famous...

I have dropped an anchor in 3m of water and then ridden to it in 30m of water. Loch Striven..

I've done the same many times - same & similar Lochs on the West coast.

I should have known better and thought about it a bit more before posting.

agurney

Re: Lifestyles of the rich and famous...

..at 5am they were almost certainly anchored.

Anchoring in 50m? I doubt it.

Hello? Emergency services? I'd like to report a wrong number

agurney

Re: Really?

There doesn't seem to be anything close to a universal standard.

A good start has been made in the US for new 'phone systems:

- “Kari's Law” has been enacted, whereby any calling device within a property must be able to directly dial 9-1-1 without a prefix, with a notification being sent to a central location (e.g. security, reception, front desk),

- Ray Baum's Act takes it a stage further and mandates that location information be included (e.g. address, hotel name, floor, room number)

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

agurney

Re: super thread drift.. but..

"The reason they teach drivers to keep the wheels straight (in a right hand turn situ in driving on left side countries, and left hand turn in driving on right side countries) is to avoid the problem of the car jumping into oncoming traffic in the case of being rear-ended."

..and why here (UK) you're taught to apply the hand(parking) brake when stationary at lights or in a queue.

Raspberry Pi OS airs out some fresh options for the summer

agurney

Re: Sunshine

It's the middle of July here in Caledonia and our Christmas roses have started flowering :(

'One Less Car' Uber bets a grand you'll ditch your wheels

agurney
Headmaster

"one less car"

I gave up at less (see icon)

The trial will involve just 175 carefully selected people in ...

What criteria? There's no point calling an UBER if you have a wheelchair or other awkward load .. and if they can take a wheelchair I believe there's a surcharge for the extra time involved (please correct me if I'm wrong)

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

agurney

Tools..

As a student (in the 70s) I had a couple of summer jobs in a Dutch pickle factory. The 'superviors' were students from a local engineering college whose tools were a monkey wrench (adjustable spanner) and a large screwdriver.

When the production line jammed the monkey wrench was used to smash the offending jars of gherkins and the screwdriver was used to clear out the mess .. I don't think the students were actually allowed to use the tools to adjust the machinery.

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

agurney

In the 1950s and 60s the Glasgow trolley buses were known as "silent death".

Sounds like not much has changed.

BT delays deadline for digital landline switch off date

agurney

Re: Reality bites

I'm writing this via a data-only FTTC line in Edinburgh. It works fine.

.. I'm using FTTP just along the road from you, however I also have a "careline" system that requires POTS; if there's a power cut the copper phone line still works and the panic button will still call for help.

Going fully telephony over FTTP I could probably run my UPS to the ONT and phone to ensure that I have a connection, but there's no suggestion BT will provide a UPS to every premises to keep the system working the way it's done for decades with the power provided by the cabinet/exchange.

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