Posts by TSM

Two signs in the comms cabinet said 'Do not unplug'. Guess what happened

Re: DO NOT REBOOT THIS COMPUTER!!

> I put a big sign on the monitor saying "DO NOT REBOOT THIS COMPUTER!! It is being used for $PURPOSE and needs to run interrupted!".

He was just trying to make sure it ran interrupted, like you asked.

Just follow the instructions … no wait, not that instruction to lock everyone out of everything

Re: Writing instruction manuals is an art....

Don't worry, one day soon it will just be a file that you can only access by pressing a specific sequence of buttons on the infotainment panel.

Re: Bah!

Perhaps we need to muster up all the intestinal fortitude we can gather and pretend to be really into such things. Then it will be uncool and they may finally go away.

Go ahead, be rude. You don't know it now, but it will cost you $350,000

Re: You get what you order

Not always. I'm happy to recommend Fisher & Paykel washing machines after ours lasted us 17 years - replaced a couple of years ago by another F&P of the current nearest equivalent line but with larger capacity.

On the other hand I couldn't tell you what brand our freezer is, but I'm happy to get another one if and when it decides to pack up.

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

Re: Bad design

> Ovens for example, never have a simple way to set the bloody clock, they ALWAYS have some weird thing that involves pressing 3 buttons at once and then turning two knobs simultaneously while casting the runes.

Ours isn't too bad. The function knob on the left has six settings, going clockwise they are Fast Set, Slow, Time, Oven, Mind, Set. Time (in the vertical position) is the normal setting and just displays the current time. The ones before Time are for fast (1 hr/step) and slow (1 min/step) increments to the clock. The ones on the other side are for the automatic start or stop (I don't even know which) function that we never use. So it's just "turn it two steps to the left until it gets to the hour you want, one step back to the right until it gets to the right minute, then back to the central position." The only hard part is timing the turns so that it stops on the number you want, but if you miss it you just have to go around again.

Senior engineer reported to management for failing to fix a stapler

Before I was even working in the IT department - but doing IT-ish process improvement in the department where I was working - I was asked to help someone out with their digital camera, which was the first time I'd seen one (this being about 18 years ago). I have no recollection of the actual problem but it was indeed pretty simple to sort out.

Of course, that only reinforces the general belief that you do know how to solve every problem. I did eventually teach the Marketing department how to randomise lists and how to compare two lists in Excel, so they didn't have to ask me to do it for them every time they needed it. So these days it's mostly my team members asking me about actual job related stuff, which is nice.

Tetchy trainee turned the lights down low to teach turgid lecturer a lesson

When I was at uni - around 30 years ago, sigh - what the lecturers wrote on the blackboard was generally what we would write in our notes; the additional discussion, Q&A, etc. was not normally written down although of course you could do so if there was something you found illuminating. Overhead projectors with the continuous rolls were used usually to supplement, for instance if they had been asked to explain something in the main notes and wanted to draw a diagram, or if they wanted to show something that would have taken a lot of time and effort to draw by hand. When I did my honours dissertation presentation it was all on OHP transparencies.

I remember the first time we saw a computer projection in one of our classes - it was not done the same way as today; there was a special backless LCD (I think) monitor that could be put on top of the overhead projector like a fancy, animated transparency. Because everyone had overhead projectors and almost nobody had a dedicated computer projector.

To preserve Earth's treasures, digital silence is golden

Alternative truth being rediscovered: Humans are awful.

As a corollary, if we can find a spot without many of them, we should keep it that way so we can enjoy it.

BOFH: It's Friday, it's time to RTFM

Re: Watch for hidden acronyms.

Both scanners and cameras, I believe.

And it was Technology Without An Interesting Name, if I recall correctly.

You can never have too many backups. Also, you can never have too many backups

Re: Stack popped reading that procedure....

> The classic solution would be using a Grandfather-Father-Son rotation

This was at a point in time where the backup hadn't been done for a month. You're still doing a month's worth of data entry over the weekend.

We were promised integrated packages. Instead we got disintegrated apps

Re: Photos via MMS

> The only thing you didn't explain is why on earth would you need to send a picture from your phone... What could be so urgent it can't wait for you to get home/to work and do it a more conventional way?

Well, in my case yesterday, I wanted to send my daughter pictures of the various multi-colour yarns they had at the shop I was in, so she could tell me which ones she wanted me to buy for her. Taking the pictures, walking home with them, showing them to her, and walking back to the shop to buy the selected ones would have been rather inefficient. (Especially when the response after the first round of pictures was "can you take close-ups of all the ones of this type?")

Mind you, our phones refuse to send photos to each other via MMS or Bluetooth, even though both phones can send and receive photos via MMS with other correspondents; our current working theory is that our phones simply hate each other. So we had to email photos to each other instead.

Enough with the notifications! Focus Assist will shut them u… 'But I'm too important!'

Re: I like that man - even if he did move to France

SQL Developer does this to me all the time - I'm typing in a query and part way through it pops up a dialog box to tell me that the database connection has been reset, and waits for me to click "OK", which of course is the only option. Everything I type before I notice the dialog is there gets lost.

Something similar with one of the apps I use (though not as useless as a mere notification) - on launch, the application displays a dialog box for you to select which connection to use, and to enter login details if you don't have the option set to save them. If you have so much as looked at another application while this one is starting up, this window appears underneath everything else, and doesn't have a task bar button; you have to alt-tab to it - and it appears at the end of the alt-tab list, though of course that's not particularly hard to get to.

More than once I've gone to restart my computer, and on closing down everything else found one or two of those windows patiently waiting for input.

Re: Windows System Sounds - office hell!

I just keep a pair of earphones plugged in to mine. I put them on if I'm on a call or want to listen to music, and the rest of the time they absorb whatever sounds my laptop wishes to inflict on the general environment.

The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups

Re: You just never know...

I've had some old requests. One company wanted an explanation a couple of years ago of ~$10k of due payments that were showing up in a report as not having been paid; we had to restore a system we'd decommissioned in 2015 to investigate what had happened to them, but the payments they were asking about were from the 2008 kind of era, so you'd think they could have asked a little earlier. (The big one that was almost all the total was paired with an equal negative amount which was also showing unpaid; most of the others had been paid, but the invoice had been transferred to from a subsidiary to their main company, so it didn't get picked up properly in the data update that got the payment information out of the old system. I think in the end they technically owed us a bit, but we obviously weren't going to press them for it.)

I was less successful when we had a legal request (for a court case) to recover all payments made to a certain vendor ever. We could give them back to ~2006 OK, but before that payment information would have had to be dug out of our (current - 3) system, which was an Access database with a custom front end. Which I was reasonably familiar with, and which I'm pretty sure were backed up to offline storage (they were backed up initially to our fileserver, and some years later we had a big push to archive unused stuff off the fileserver to offline storage), but neither I nor anyone else I asked who'd been around in that sort of era could work out where those archives actually were now, or if they still existed.

Well, you clearly shouldn't have been stealing cameras in the first place!

How one techie ended up paying the tab on an Apple Macintosh Plus

Re: No convert

Did you know the F8 thing still works, more or less?

Looks like the first press of F8 puts it into an odd selection mode, then subsequent presses select the word, sentence, paragraph, and whole document.

But then you're still in that selection mode, and clicking with the mouse will select from wherever the starting point of the latest F8 selection was to the current mouse position. It's a little odd to get out of.

Switch off the mic if it makes you feel better – it'll make no difference

Indeed, the article on this very site about the wallpaper speakers (https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/29/mit_flat_speakers/) does specifically discuss their potential as microphones, which researchers are actively pursuing:

----

MIT professor Jeffrey Lang confirmed as much in an email to The Register.

"The same device can work as a microphone," said Lang. "It can be mounted on the surface of any object and used for sound recording. The device itself is passive and generates voltage signal under incident acoustic waves. But we apply a small transimpedance amplifier in order to obtain a large signal-to-noise ratio."

"We actually have an upcoming paper that reports the microphonic performance of the same device. The amplifier is the only part that consumes power. If a standalone design is needed, usually the signal storage/processing and wireless transmission consume much more power than the amplifier itself."

"But we can either use a battery or integrate energy harvesting components to make it standalone without wiring to external power. For instance, our group is also developing thin-film solar cells and it's possible to integrate that with the acoustic thin film to provide the energy."

----

So we can look forward to a time when our houses really are listening to everything we do all day long.

Your software doesn't work when my PC is in 'O' mode

Around 20 years ago the organisation I worked for had a strict policy of having all computers turned off at the end of the day. This policy was accompanied by a photo of the mangled remains of a computer in one of the workshops whose monitor, IIRC, had decided to set itself on fire one night.

You can buy a company. You can buy a product. Common sense? Trickier

I did once waste a fair bit of my ISP's tech support time trying to figure out why I couldn't access my email, which had previously been working.

After about half an hour of rechecking various settings and trying all manner of things, I realised that I still had my work VPN active from when I'd been fixing an issue remotely, hours earlier. (I already knew that my work VPN blocked my ISP's mailserver, though this is fortunately no longer the case.)

Prototype app outperforms and outlasts outsourced production version

Re: Been there - done that

Sounds like they were indeed a team of tools.

No, I've not read the screen. Your software must be rubbish

Re: penultimate hurrah?

Yes, that's why Win98 was the penultimate (second last) entry in the 9x family. I'm not sure what your point is here. Or are you just riffing on WinMe since it came up?

The dialog in question does have a "Don't show this dialog again" checkbox.

Unfortunately I have to leave it set to show the dialog every time, because if I don't, it doesn't turn off the inbuilt speaker when I plug in headphones. And they're treated as a single "Speaker/Headphones" device in the control panel, so I can't just disable the speaker and leave the headphones enabled, which would be my preference.

Bouncing cheques or a bouncy landing? All in a day's work for the expert pilot

I think you mean "autodetecting external screens, and then deciding randomly whether to use the same settings as the last time they were on this screen configuration, or to turn some screens off at random just for the hell of it."

At least that's how my work laptop behaves. Plug it in, see whether all the screens come up, and if not (about 10% of the time) go to display settings and put it back to "Extend" rather than "Show only on monitor <whichever one it likes today>".

BOFH: On Wednesdays, we wear gloves

Re: Beyond 2000

I remember when it was "Towards 2000"...

Wi-Fi not working? It's time to consult the lovely people on those fine Linux forums

Re: Always read from the end

Sometimes you need to be more thorough. Particularly on the Microsoft forums, I've seen error message threads which have a collection of five to ten separate fixes, each of which fixes the problem for a distinct subset of users.

I've done the very same thing. Googled for my odd problem, been happy to see there was a single forum thread about it, realised it was an old thread I'd started, read to the end, and left to ponder the "never mind, I've managed to fix it" message I left last time.

If I recall correctly, I managed to nevertheless use that information to fix the problem - by looking in my sent emails from around the date of that last post for any that might be related to the issue. I don't think I got the actual answer, from memory, but enough hints to put me on the right track.

I would drive 100 miles and I would drive 100 more just to be the man that drove 200 miles to... hit the enter key

Re: are you sure (y/n)

Frankly anyone doing their internet banking at a cyber cafe is putting themselves at significant risk even if their bank does log their session out immediately. From what I've heard the incidence of keyloggers etc (known to the operators or not) at those sorts of venues is rather high.

LibreOffice 7.2 brings improved but still imperfect Microsoft Office compatibility

Re: incompatibility issues

The printer obsession does extend into places you wouldn't expect it.

I recently had to fix an issue where commands like setting the page header and footer in an Excel document (from Access VBA - don't ask) failed, because the print spooler service had been disabled for security thanks to PrintNightmare, and without it the user didn't have a default printer, and without a default printer the very concept of page formatting makes no sense, apparently.

Re: incompatibility issues

Yeah, I had very similar issues in the same era. Going between Mac and PC would screw up a bunch of stuff, in particular all my equation objects were essentially destroyed - as I was doing honours maths this was a bit of a problem, and in the end I had to avoid the Macs and edit it only on PC.

For postgrad I learned how to use LaTeX instead and was able to move seamlessly between Mac, PC, and SGI Indys for my editing - and as a bonus the files were a lot smaller, which was useful when they all had to be stored on floppy disk for transit.

Electrocution? All part of the service, sir!

Re: caught the voltage switch while reaching for the power switch

All the ones I recall seeing on computers (a handful or two, I guess) have just been an exposed rocker switch.

BOFH: They say you either love it or you hate it. We can confirm you're going to hate it

Re: Deja vu!

> Mageia highlights only the file name before the extension when renaming - does Windows still highlight the whole name, including the extension? I am not interested enough to fire up my dual-booting laptop just to check

Nope; from about 7 onwards, I think, it initially only highlights the part before the extension. You can of course subsequently alter the selection as you choose, but if you just go click-pause-type, the extension will be untouched.

And if you do change the extension* it pops up a dialog to warn you that you might be making the file unusable and asking you if you really want to go ahead. Though of course the average user won't read the warning and will just press "OK" anyway.

* except in the case where it didn't have an extension originally

Microsoft made $167m a day in profit, every day, over the past 12 months

Re: The first RANSOMWARE O.S...

Right now I am struggling to get my daughter's old Win 7 laptop (which she uses for university) to activate her copy of Office again - I've tried enabling the TLS 1.2 stuff as per their article, without result - which took some searching to find since, of course, there was no error message, just a silent failure. And yes, Win 7 is no longer supported, but the computer likely won't manage an upgrade to Win10 since it struggles enough as it is. More memory would probably help, but I just don't have the money to keep my kids updated with modern hardware.

But Microsoft's certainly not earning any brownie points with me when it refuses to acknowledge my perfectly valid licence, and won't let my daughter save or edit documents in a few days' time.

So if I can't get this sorted we may have to try migrating her over to OpenOffice / LibreOffice instead, at least until we can afford to buy her a new machine. At which point it's going to be very tempting to burn her a live DVD of one of the alternatives and see how her system performs with it.

Games are the real problem with moving, of course.

Don't cross the team tasked with policing the surfing habits of California's teens

Re: Unions...

I'd have been tempted to retitle the positions as software typists. But that might have ruffled a few other feathers.

Yep, you're totally unique: That one very special user and their very special problem

Did the same on my work laptop, after one too many times of accidentally turning the volume down instead (the brightness controls are apparently Fn-up arrow and Fn-down arrow on this one).

Now my main irritation is that when I'm using the laptop keyboard, the trackpad picks up lots of unintended movement / touches and I often wind up inserting text at some randome point because it thinks I clicked the mouse there. I used to have the option set to disable the touchpad when an external mouse is connected (which it nearly always is), but had to untick it when it started refusing to enable the touchpad even when there wasn't an external mouse. (Lots of fun trying to find and navigate that dialog when you don't have any functional pointing device!)

What can the 1944 OSS manual teach us before we all return to sabotage the office?

Re: 404 error

Now on the Department of Homeland Security's site instead, at https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=750070

Diary of a report writer and his big break into bad business

The trick with that one is to make your Normal.dotm (or whichever template file you're using for that project) read-only.

Yes, there's nothing quite like braving the M4 into London on the eve of a bank holiday just to eject a non-bootable floppy

Makes me feel old

... that it's now considered necessary to carefully explain the circumstances and consequences of leaving a non-bootable floppy in the drive.

Not that I disagree. There are adults now who have never even seen a computer with a floppy drive.

Like Alan Brown, I too used to set the boot order to C: first as soon as I got a new system (though more usually C: D: A: rather than C: A:, as most of my computers had optical drives by then). The 0.05% of boots that you specifically want to boot from a floppy or CD, you can adjust the settings for that boot, otherwise just boot from your primary system disk - if nothing else, it saves you some boot time.

Similar when my ADSL modem/router died. They insisted that I had to swap cables, etc., and even went as far as sending a tech out to check the line, despite my objections that no sort of problem with the line would explain why the power light wasn't coming on, or why it wasn't routing traffic across the LAN.

They did eventually replace it, though initially they were going to charge me full price for it, until I pointed out that they were offering the kit free with new contracts, and as a customer of 10+ years standing I was more than happy to sign up for a further two years...

Re: the one on the telly thing?

In all fairness, I have myself turned up to work with my laptop, sat down at my desk, and pressed buttons on the keyboard to wake the system up so I can log in - before remembering that I need to actually take the laptop out of the bag and connect it to the dock first.

Don't be a fool, cover your tool: How IBM's mighty XT keyboard was felled by toxic atmosphere of the '80s

Re: The 80s were generally a happy time...

For what it's worth, here in Australia I've never been able to get petrol out of an ATM, only money.

Re: Dolores?

Given that it was capitalised, I assumed it was indeed an intentional reference to her.

I haven't bought new pants for years, why do I have to keep buying new PCs?

Re: Mother and Mother in Law

My mother's not too bad. I occasionally get asked to look at her system if there's something wrong, but not very often; and she has pretty basic needs - but firmly committed to Windows because she definitely does not want to learn new interfaces (she mostly uses Word and Publisher on it).

My in-laws have an ancient computer running XP. They manage OK with it, although we did discuss recently that it might be reasonable to think about upgrading a bit. They don't have or want any form of internet (even blocked it on their mobile phone), so it's safe enough as it is. Of course this means that every time they do want to look something up on the internet (parcel tracking, funeral notices, etc), they call us and ask us to look it up for them. But it's not very often, so we're happy to oblige. It's a lot less work for us than training them up on using the internet safely would be!

Re: I hate to say it, as I don't like the way they work...

Here's an experiment for you. Go to your favourite Office app, customise your Quick Access toolbar, and set the filter to "Commands not in the Ribbon". See how many there are? How are they discoverable to the average user?

Of course, most of these are things the average user won't need, or specialisations of general commands that are in the ribbon.

Nevertheless, you're right that the ribbon is a benefit to new or inexperienced users. It usually does a reasonable job of presenting the most useful options for what the user appears to be doing.

However, for experienced users who knew how to find all the features they used in the menu structure, the ribbon slows them down very time they have to change to a new group to get to the command they want. Before the ribbon all the commands were accessible all the time.

I find for example that in Excel (which is the Office app I use the most) I frequently want certain commands from the Data group when I'm on other groups. The solution, of course, is to put all the commands you frequently have to swap ribbon groups for onto the Quick Access Toolbar. If you get the Quick Access toolbar set up properly for your usage pattern, the Ribbon isn't really a problem.

Related is the issue of trying to find a command that you know is in the program, but don't know which ribbon group (if any) it is in. (Though trying to find an obscure option in the menus wasn't necessarily any better.) This is compounded by the fact that a bunch of stuff is shoved off into the weird File menu structure - there's nothing more fun than hunting through the ribbon for an option which turns out to be buried somewhere in the File menu.

It took me quite a while to work out how to open another user's mailbox in Outlook. (It's *not* File > Open and Export > Other User's Folder). And in fact "work out" is overstating it, I eventually managed to find it in the help files. And because it's something I do very rarely, every time I need to add another mailbox I spend time hunting for it (and usually having to resort to the help to find it, though at least now I know the keywords to use in my query).

(File > Info > Account settings > Account settings > Change > More Settings > Advanced. At least for now.)

Takes from the taxpayer, gives to the old – by squishing a bug in Thatcherite benefits system

Re: Language!

I mean, that is the entire point of HLLs.

If you happen to be cooking something in your microwave when the rollover hits, it might decide that it's never time to turn off.

I built a shed once. How hard can a data centre be?

Re: "Right," said Fred.

The line immediately before it links to the video on YouTube that it is referencing.

Cruise, Kidman and an unfortunate misunderstanding at the local chemist

Re: Is no one going to mention...

That would be redundant.

When even a power-cycle fandango cannot save your Windows desktop

Re: PROGMAN.EXE

Because, of course, there was a lot of software that relied on PROGMAN.EXE rather than bothering to check what the user's shell actually was (which even in the 3.x days didn't *have* to be progman, but usually was)

Worn-out NAND flash blamed for Tesla vehicle gremlins, such as rearview cam failures and silenced audio alerts

Re: Uh-huh

This bit certainly implies it:

> These all use an infotainment system powered by Nvidia's Tegra 3 system-on-chips that include 8GB of eMMC NAND storage, which is typically found in phones and cheap laptops.