Posts by agurney

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

I call fake .. they would have bought from Waitrose if it was real.

Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font

You lost my attention when you started calling a typeface a font.

Outlook for Mac bug makes font choice a purely decorative feature

<twitch>aaarrgh.. not again.. typeface not font</twitch>

US auto regulators want to kill robotaxi brake pedals

Re: Fucking idiots

Can we give everyone a steering wheel as well like those kids rides at the fair?

Like this one?

Portuguese bank sign's storage is about to cash out

Re: Signs of things to come

Less bork, more greengrocers apostrophe's

Bloody trolls.

Upvoted, but the twitches have started :(

Tech support chap hauled out to help SWAT team saw his life flash before his eyes

More curiosity than intimidation, but for a week I had to walk past some manned serious weaponry on the back of a land rover when entering Saudi Telecom in Riyadh to deliver a training course.

Satellite phone dreams orbit reality as direct-to-cell usage set to underwhelm

Re: Solution looking for a problem

..perhaps go find a WiFi hotspot for now.

I would, but a it's a dozen or so Km/miles away

That an app 'Fits on a Floppy' is still a useful measure in 2026

Re: That an app 'Fits on a Floppy'

Those were the days...

They still are :)

I am tinkering with ESP32 microcontrollers where the available program size is similar to the BBC micro's 5 1/4" floppies (~340KB).

OK, the IDE takes up a lot more, but the end result is that the programs will fit on a (really old, single sided) floppy.

Re: Single line app

... sounds like PERL

Yes, you can serve a website from a $1 microcontroller

That's nothing new, I've been using using Espressif microcontrollers (ESP32 and ESP8266 (less than a quid)) for years to create 'websites'; they have more than one page and interact with other ESP* controllers using ESP-NOW to publish live updates (fencing scoring display and control system). OK, currently only for local (192.168....) users over wifi but that's simply because there's no need to expose it to the WWW.

Linux 7.1 will have an optional new NTFS driver

Re: What is this for?

"..It's an awl/reamer/punch."

It's for removing boy scouts from horses' hooves, although I usually use it as a marlin spike for splicing rope or unfankling knots.

Tech support chap's boss got him out of jail so he could finish a job

Re: $50

Used to be like that near Ibrox in Glasgow parking for the football, don't know if it still is.

While you're here, could you go out of your way to do an impossible job?

Re: it happens within companies too

Similarly, I was due to give a presentation to a national telecoms company in Saudi that included a demo using live data from a database back in blighty.

During the on-site preparation it became obvious that the Saudi national firewall wouldn't let me connect, so after a bit of head scratching I invited the class back my hotel and used the hotel's satellite link to bypass the restrictions ... I've never felt so nervous that I might be getting into serious trouble.

Cybercrime isn't just a cover for Iran's government goons - it's a key part of their operations

Re: The Jessica Lyons dictionary

'red white and blue'

not Russian?

Microsoft Azure CTO set Claude on his 1986 Apple II code, says it found vulns

Re: Stories old code could tell

My father (RIP) uncovered a VAT fraud many years ago for HM C&E on an under-the-counter Apple II BASIC accounting application.

Log in with user/password .. accounts OK.

Log in with with user/password(n) .. accounts adjusted by n% to mislead the tax man

Hotel's rotary switchboard so retro it predates the concept of crashing

Re: You know how to dial, don't you?

Arcs, not circles.

Re: who have not seen such a device in the wild (or at least outside a museum)

" Or the function of the A/B buttons on public telephone boxes ?"

That was one of our challenges when I was in the scouts in the 60s .. there's a phone box in Ayrshire that still owes me 4d because the B button didn't do what it should have.

Edinburgh councillors pull the plug on 'green' AI datacenter

Maximum of 2 dozen new jobs, most of them low paid cleaning and security.

Shouldn't that be a cat, a dog and a human? Cat to keep away the rodents so they don't nibble the cables; bloke to feed the cat; and dog to ensure the bloke doesn't touch anything?

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

"Isn't vomiting rolph not ralph? I'm certain I wouldn't ralph into the porcelain telephone."

No, it's "Hughie" .. far more onomatopoeic :) [ cf Sir William Connolly]

Cloudflare CEO threatens to make the Winter Olympics a political football after Italy slugs it with a fine

I don't watch football, but do have 1.1.1.1 as a secondary DNS (primary is a PiHole).

I might be impacted by crippling of censoring that service, so my immediate reaction is to agree with Prince ... but playing the Trump card trumps that :(

I might even reconsider 4.4.4.4 or my ISP's.

New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good

Re: Epoxy?

I was a teacher many moons ago and some scrote nicked my keys from my store room on a Friday.

I was able to get into the car and hot wire it (only a MkII Cortina) but had to break into my flat, requiring a new lock.

The brat was identified and reparations and apologies made, but please do be aware of potential unintended consequences of a prank.

The Roomba failed because it just kind of sucked

Yes, they are great on short pile office carpets, shit on domestic carpets.

The only place I I've seen them being any good is in Travelodge hotels - with short pile carpets and uncluttered rooms and corridors they can do a fairly thorough job freeing up housekeeping staff for other tasks.

Similarly, robotic lawn mowers working 24x7 keeping hotel lawns manicured.

Web dev's crawler took down major online bookstore by buying too many books

Do Sue, Grabbit and Runne sell books?

Campbell's CISO canned after lawsuit alleges hour-long rant against staff and customers

.. You NEVER say stupid crap like that as head of a company..

The precedent was set by Gerald Ratner.

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

Re: “Starships might land on Mars in 2026”

.50 cal anti-material rifle

anti-materiel

AI is actually bad at math, ORCA shows

.. or D) the resistor was in parallel with the LEDs.

New boss took charge of project code and sent two billion unwanted emails

How would you present it ?

In the same way as I might refer to the late 1600s, late 1700s, late 1800s and late 1900s.

We are currently in the early 2000s .

"This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Nick" who in the late 2000s..

Oh come on, get real, we're only 25 years into the 2000s, the late 2000s won't be until 2900 :(

BBC probe finds AI chatbots mangle nearly half of news summaries

consistency

".. analysis .. found that 45 percent of answers ... 31 percent had serious sourcing problems .. a fifth had issues"

why not 20% ?

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

Re: The more things change .... (Gilbert and Sullivan's 1879 comic opera The Pirates of Penzance)

sorry, wrong opus, Pinafore is more apposite:

.. Of legal knowledge I acquired such a grip

That they took me into the partnership.

And that junior partnership, I ween,

Was the only ship that I ever had seen.

Chorus.

Was the only ship that he ever had seen.

But that kind of ship so suited me,

That now I am the ruler of the Queen's Navee!

Literal crossed wires sent cops after innocent neighbors in child abuse case

Re: You should never cooperate with the police

"Under English law, the court and the jury may draw an adverse inference from fact that someone did not mention a defence when given the chance to do so if charged with an offence."

"wisnae me" should do it.

Inside the belly of the beast: A technical walk through Intel's 18A production facility at Fab52

Unlucky 13

"..much like many office buildings superstitiously lack a 13th floor."

Brings back memories of troubleshooting the mapping of hotel rooms to switch ports.

Room 10:port 10, 11:11, 12:12, 13:14 .. and repeated over several floors :(

Lowercase leaving you cold? Introducing Retrocide

Looks very similar to Epson dot matrix characters.

It's a typeface, not a font.

I feel I've lost that battle.

The sweetest slice of Pi: Raspberry Pi 500+ sports mechanical keys, 16GB, and built-in SSD

Fortunately RGB LEDs are pennies these days, and I could use some help when the light goes down, assuming the characters are lit and not just the spaces between the keys.

I've a couple of Lenovo thinkpads with LED keyboard lights, but they aren't great as they only have a few white LEDs.

Re: a better keyboard...

I would hope the SSD is less shoogly and bothersome than the ZX81's 16K RAM extension.

One long sentence is all it takes to make LLMs misbehave

Re: Breaking Olds : Would a rather contrived sentence do it ?

Anything from Hansard should do it.^*

^*The official report of all UK Parliamentary debates.

Solid-gold nav bars? Trump plans redesign of government websites

Re: TRUMPIAN STYLE GUIDE

.. and to hell with apostrophes and grammar.

[typefaces not fonts, but that's a rant for another day]

Re: Vanity Projects

.. or a (gold) star spangled banner

Arch Linux takes a pounding as DDoS attack enters week two

Re: DDoS attacks are not always what they seem...

"nit comb" should satisfy both, as well as being particularly apposite in this case :)

Basic projector repair job turns into armed encounter at secret bunker

Re: How did you get in here?

Often the biggest challenge visiting sensitive customers was simply finding them. They generally don't advertise or have nice signs saying 'Acme Ltd'.

I've had that running training courses; Orange UK only had a tiny orange square on the entrance - and in the US, Verizon Wireless were behind a numbered door in an anonymous building on an anonymous road on the outskirts of a large city (Denver IIRC). Satnav wasn't great in those days so had to rely on hire car maps.

..unthinkable, civilian insubordinace.

As civilians I/we thoroughly enjoyed going to Glencorse Barracks and walking/sauntering out of step to the pistol range, while the squaddies had to quick march everywhere. The looks we received .. happy days.

BOFH: HR plays checkers, IT plays 5D chess

..while claiming it a Windows update borked it.

No need for pretence.

Sysadmin cured a medical mystery by shifting a single cable

Re: More than once

"ect" is a good example of a loose end.

News from a possible future: ‘Rampant jellyfish cause AI outage by taking datacenter offline'

Re: Farsands of em

Jellyfish 'blooms' are an annual occurrence.

Here's a photo I took in August 2002 in Loch Nevis: https://www.glaucus.org.uk/jellies_AG.jpg

It took ages to clear the engine's cooling water intake.

Trump seeing green as he weighs deal to allow Nvidia Blackwell GPU sales to China

OK, so banned because of security concerns; but give me/us 15% and it's all OK?

DEF CON hackers plug security holes in US water systems amid tsunami of threats

Re: KISS principle as applied to municipal water systems

I have a BT POTS line for a careline/telecare system that requires copper - it took a bit of persuading to reinstate it following an FTTP installation, but they'll keep it going until the care systems eventually change (to 4G I believe)

Intern did exactly what he was told and turned off the wrong server

Re: no fault

still not a great solution - old embossed dymo labels are still legible after several years, however the adhesion is inconsistent resulting in a pile of perfectly readable labels on the floor (admittedly might be to do with the surface they're being attached to as some are still in place after decades).

BOFH: Deepfake or just an idiot? We'll need an audit to confirm

my sequence is the registrations for vehicles that I've owned over the past 50 years; easy to remember for me, and If a password hint was required "blue cortina" or "red mini" wouldn't help anyone else. Latterly had to append a phrase to meet minimum length + special characters.

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

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

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!