Posts by PB90210

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

Re: "I did a spot of Artexing"

I think it's probably less fashionable because of the asbestos. The popularity was more to do with the fact that it could make a Victorian ceiling look half decent with little effort

Re: Kneeling Chairs

I bought a kneeling chair to help stave off an aching back... only to discover I suffer from 'housemaid's knee'

It's now used to support the TV at the bottom of the bed!

UK justice system unplugs from ancient datacenters after five-year slog

Re: Sir Brian Leveson recommends numerous uses of AI

Many a case hinges on arguments over the position of a comma, the meaning a phrase and the interpretation of a clause in some ancient statute... and that's before you throw AI hallucinations into the mix

Microsoft sets Copilot agents loose on your OneDrive files

Re: Who watches the watchers?

"it is up to the user to make sure that anyone with whom an agent is shared has access to the same source files. Otherwise, there is an even greater chance that Copilot might be confidently wrong"

But will it admit that it doesn't have access to all the info... or does it just give an answer based on the little it can see?

Next-gen nuclear reactors safe enough to skip full environmental reviews, says Trump admin

Don't worry, Donnie's just promised to fix the voting...

Luckily, with the aspirin and cholesterol overdose and the sedentary lifestyle, he should not be around when the Domesday Clock hits 5 past midnight... as we all get to bathe in the warm orange glow of, erm, his tanned hide

DWP finds Copilot saves civil servants a whopping 19 minutes a day

Re: How many man hours...

It's more likely to be that there was budget left over that needed to be used up before the end of the financial year... "we need a success story"

EU's fishy digital certificate system leaves exporters floundering

The deity tried that with Zebra fish...

Help! Does anyone on the bus know Linux?

Have you tried Father Ted's version of Speed, with Dougal on the milk float?

Crossrail? More like Borkrail...

Re: What's wrong with 'The Circle Line'?

Originally clockwise and anticlockwise directions were run by different companies, so an unscrupulous ticket office could sell you a ticket only valid for a journey the long way round rather than refer you to its rival at the next window for the more direct journey

Re: increasingly inaccurately named Circle

It certainly knackered the old question...

"If black goes up and down, and red goes side to side... where does yellow go?"

Tech support detective solved PC crime by looking in the carpark

Beat me to it by mins!

Tesla Full Self Driving subscription to rise alongside its capabilities

Re: Typical musk

So you pay double for a robotaxi... not so much 'car sharing'...

That's what you get taking too much Special K

Trump promises nuclear datacenter permits in 3 weeks, calls Greenland 'big beautiful ice'

Re: 'big beautiful ice'

And just 55 miles from Russia!

Better impose tarrifs on whoever is in charge of it!

Re: Dropped

Rumour is the pilot of Air Force 1 said "if you don't keep quiet in the back, I'll turn this thing around... don't believe me?... just watch"

Notepad will now tell you all the ways Microsoft has enshittified it

Re: Edit.com

No no... that's just Copilot creating an editor on the fly to make you think you have some kind of control over your machine

It will even create mistakes in your code for you using the latest AI

ATM takes a kicking yet keeps on ticking

Re: Wow

Some of those in the car parks of fast food outlets are connected using 3/4G modems.

This has the added benefit that they can easily be tracked while traveling in the bucket of a JCB at 3am.

Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

Re: This is now not a joke

Unfortunately modem trains are packed with electronics that can occasionally need a reboot... not much fun on a tube train when you have to pray the reboot is over before the emergency lighting runs out

Re: Suggestions?

"I'm afraid we don't do on-site replacements, but if the burglars can return them to our service centre we can fix them under warranty and return them"

Experiment suggests AI chatbot would save insurance agents a whopping 3 minutes a day

But you could easily wipe out that 3 min saving with a single paper jam or a simple 'out of paper'

S Twatter: When text-to-speech goes down the drain

My SiL has occasionally sent a text to my BT landline. It gets ready out by a bot, including emojis!

I've never bothered to test it out... [poo emoji] Scunthorpe powergenitalia [poo emoji]

Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause

Re: I wasn't even there.

What do you do when the manual says the status light should be either off or green but currently is a salmon pink colour?

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Re: consumers are returning to physical media like CDs

On the other hand, most people seem to prefer the warmer sound of LPs to the harder clinical sound of CDs

It doesn't seem to bother me much, but the sound of a BBC live broadcast of something like Glastonbury makes my skin crawl. I've been to a couple of concerts recorded as part of 'Sight and Sound in Concert' (Santana, Hawkwind?) and enjoyed every moment, but the televised version sounded terrible (I think they take the feeds raw and do mixing live rather than in editing)

Re: Music - sorted!

EAC will also allow you to rip CDs and split them as you need, so you can have classic, live or concept albums ripped as a complete performance rather than a bunch of tracks (act 1, act 2, etc)

Re: consumers are returning to physical media like CDs

What everhappened to that laser LP. scanner that promised the end of worn out records, shown on something like Tomorrow's World all those years ago... oh, that's right, it was Tomorrow's World, killer of just about every bright new idea of the 1970s/80s/90s

I like my CDs smeared with jam!

Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

Re: Been There...

For a Brit, someone who 'earned their keep' is someone of value... someone who has gone the extra mile.

I worked in a dept prebuilding IT kit and we 'earned out keep' by ensuring the majority of onsite installs could be carried out by relatively unskilled installers. At times it would also mean translating what the project manager was asking for into a solution that had a chance of actually working... 'you ordered the wrong cables... you forgot to order microfilters'

One criminal, 50 hacked organizations, and all because MFA wasn't turned on

Re: The email address is all you need

Years ago I was confronted with security questions which I would never have answered because they were difficult to to answer, let alone remember what I had set years before.

'Father's middle name'... erm, 'none' or whatever it was before he changed to by deed poll? 'First school'... erm, '[town] school' too obvious, so did I use the street name, but which street?

I did once answer 'place of birth' with the original location of the, since moved, hospital, only to discover later that the maternity facilities at the time had been elsewhere

When the lights went out, and the shooting started, Y2K started to feel all too real

Re: Things went RIGHT for once

I think QI had him down as the most dangerous man that ever lived

Baby's got clack: HP pushes PC-in-a-keyboard for businesses with hot desks

I was going to suggest something similar... with perhaps some kind of mouse-equivalent to save having to drag one of those around

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

Re: Y1999 Problem

I vaguely remember there was a problem with some credit card swipe terminals.

They had passed the usual y2k tests but crashed the week before y2k because they calculated a 'settlement date' a few days ahead but that hadn't been thought of... and that happened to coincide with everybody's last minute shopping

(y2k rollover was fine because the settlement date was long passed and no longer a problem)

Pizza restaurant signage caught serving raw Windows

Re: surely there's a market here.

I was unfortunate to have to walk passed one of Taco Bell's first forays into the UK, by Warren St Stn in London, back in the '80s(ish?)

It was memorable for the fresh pile of sick outside every morning! This stopped after they closed (under a year?)(and left the UK?)

Re: I recently 'dined' at Luton Airport

My internet radio died just before last Xmas, and I picked a replacement Roberts Radio. John Lewis had a number in stock, strangely priced differently according to colour (up to £50 more!). A local branch had a couple, so I decided to reserve one, just in case. To reserve it I had to supply email and mobile number. 'Reserving' meant a 24hr delay... and they managed to send it to the local Waitrose (which I passed on the way to JL!)... and they added me to a mailing list (despite my ticking 'no publicity') that took ages to get off

The radio is fine, but fu John Lewis!

('never knowingly undersold' = we sell it at an exorbitant price unless...)

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

Re: We’re watching you

Had the misfortune to work in an office with a guy from another dept. He was a lazy sod who never seemed to do any work (we knew what his dept did but not what he did)

He was a smoker who would religiously go for a smoke, on the hour, every hour! (his lunch break was 1200-1245, but still didn't miss his 1pm drag)

He left his PC unlocked one day. I took a pic of his empty desk, added a 'timestamp' of 1:02, uploaded it to the local server and opened a browser window pointing to it on his desktop...

Cue a frantic search for the hidden camera!

Re: One particularly hated manager ...

No, it was one of those twiddly knob ones... no stethoscope or gelignite was involved

I'm guessing he recognised the make and guessed the default and/or common settings

Re: Back in the mid 1960s

Was reading something similar a while back...

Customer was berating a woman assisting in the shop and finally demanded to see the manager

Manager was fetched, customer complainted and demanded that the woman was fired on the spot

Manager apologised but refused to fire the woman... "Madam, she's the owner,"

Re: One particularly hated manager ...

(have told this before...)

We were involved with a government project and a couple of the company's security team turned up to do a quick check before the official government security audit. In passing I happened to mention that we had a couple of cupboards with combination locks that we were not able to use because no one knew the combinations.

In just a few minutes they were unlocked!

(the instructions for setting/resetting the combination were found inside)

BOFH: All through the house, not a creature was stirring except the homicidal vacuum cleaner

Re: USA Option

I have memories of doing a job in a building, going down in the lift to the 'floor 0', turning right to go out of the front door... but finding a blank wall!

The building was on a slope and the entrance was a floor higher than the rear, so the entrance was actually 'floor 1'... and Sod's Law meant I got in the only lift that served that particular floor

Former UK chancellor George Osborne finds something to do at OpenAI

I think it's a question of losing jobs to AI or to the multitasking George Osbourne

Apparently he has just secured yet another tech job... advisor to Coinbase

(can't find a difinitive list of his current employment, but Doolally Mail seem to think he has 5 other jobs)

Trump Media jumps aboard the speculative nuclear fusion bandwagon

Re: The Green New Scam

He will have the fusion reactors converted to good old fashioned coal... the clinker produced is obviously a form of fusion

User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis

In Android at least, you can install the browser of choice, disable Chrome (settings>apps) and replace the Chrome shortcut on the quick launch toolbar with one for the browser. Playstore keeps installing updates but Chrome doesn't appear to try to phone home at any point, although components possibly do (I've got a no-root firewall installed and it doesn't flag up any connections)

Re: The usual suspect

Had the opposite...

Colleague picks up the phone, caller speaks, colleague says "yo, xxxhead"... manager, who just happens to be 'visiting', blanches

Yes, it was a customer calling but he was an old favourite and happy to trade banter

Re: "an electrician will trust that you've turned the switch off"

A safer version...

Customer has 2 modem lines and keeps reporting one faulty... it's never the modem/line

Engineer: "modem A works but B doesn't... swap the interface cables, now B works but A doesn't... where's the fault?"

Customer's 'IT' bod: "the modem?"

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Or, just the other day,The Donald confusing 5G/6G with the number of pixels of a mobile's camera while announcing a 6G mobile initiative

Re: screen messages

I find it distracting when someone reads back your phone number but with the pauses in the'wrong place'

Oh, and those websites that insist on you entering your 20-digit card number without those pesky spaces that are shown on the card *to make it easier to read*!!

And those boxes that immediately scream 'input error' after the 1st character rather than wait to see if the input is actually invalid... you're asking for a date but I don't know of any single character dates!

"Dear BBC, I'm listening to Charlie Chester on my so called' 'wireless' set, yet I have had to string 100yds of wire around my garden to receive a signal..."

BOFH: If another meeting is scheduled, someone is going to have a scheduled accident

I was expecting that heavy PSU at the top of the rack to slide forward on its runners and...

I'm sure that rack was firmly bolted down!

Death to one-time text codes: Passkeys are the new hotness in MFA

Back in the days when the golden rule was, THOU SHALT NOT WRITE DOWN THY PASSWORD, had an argument with Santander because they insisted you entered 3 random characters from your password... meaning you would have to write it down so you could figure out the 3rd, 6th and 7th characters

Not saying I was successful, but it was changed a few months later

>muscle memory

I had to access an office on a different floor than usual, swiped my card... could not think what the PIN was and had to be buzzed in

Afterwards, went back to my own floor and didn't have any problem getting in