Posts by PyroBrit

Toyota plus 4 other Japanese automakers caught cheating on certification tests

Convenient for Nissan?

Ah yes! Good old Mitsubishi.

Lies about vehicle friction data and comes clean six months after the Volkswagen Diesel emisions mess.

Falls on its sword full of apologies. Couple of managers publicly resign. Share price tanks 30% and Nissan/Renault owns them within a week. That's incredibly convenient.

5 Years later Mitsubishi Motors Japan closes vehicle imports into Europe. 36 countries close their import operations. Think France and Germany are still left due to Government Plug-in-Car grants. Not bitter at all. Lot of pissed off dealerships who had just rebranded their premises.

A brand new Linux DRM display driver – for a 1992 computer

College Love

The year was 1984, a brand now college opens in Swindon, ironically called "New College" and the primary computer on campus was BBC Model B attached to the Econet Network and sharing a 20mb Hard disk. Pretty much every classroom had one along with the 20 odd in the computer room.

The secondary computer room however, was fitted with half a dozen Atari ST which turned into my fave computer of that time. They were so new that the OS was still on bootable floppy and the 3.5" floppy discs were single sided. It took a few months before upgrades included OS on ROM.

After leaving college in 1986 and entering the real world of a career in IT, my first pay packet was to buy an ST512. Subsequent upgrades were to replace the floppy disk drive with a double sided 1.4MB version and Evesham Micros sold a memory upgrade kit. This required the soldering of 8 memory chips and 8 capacitors direct to the motherboard after you had used a solder sucker to clear the holes for the chips legs to sit in.

Sadly, I'm of an age now that a task such as that requires a large magnifying glass, a lot of light and a very steady hand.

BOFH: You'll have to really trust me on this team-building exercise

Re: Wouldn't let me on the cardiac ward

Funnily enough our local radio club had a Zoom club meeting in the middle of Covid lockdown. One of our members was taken ill so joined the meeting from the casualty ward of the local hospital with the nurses waving at us in the background.

It's a fun memory although the poor guy did end up dying.

One decade, 46 million units: Happy birthday, Raspberry Pi

Hotspot!

Can't fault the PI. They are brilliant.

Currently have three in continuous use.

1. Retropie connected to a home made arcade joystick table which resides in our living room and uses the TV for the screen. It's common to have an Asteroids party when visitors are allowed.

2. The ever present PI-Hole that every house should have.

3. As an Amateur Radio Hotspot for Digital Radio Transmission. I use a ZumSpot hat on a Pi-Zero and it's used almost daily to talk to radio repeaters around the world. Mostly Florida and Okinawa at the moment but that changes depending on how busy these repeaters and digital rooms can get. Using PI-Star as the front end software.

LoRa to the Moon and back: Messages bounced off lunar surface using off-the-shelf hardware

EME, LORA and Meteor Scatter

Yep, first read of the story didn't say anything spectacular. In the HAM world, we have done this for quite a while with some cheap gear.

I don't see a mention on the Frequency used by Lora and considering the modules are available in 433Mhz, 868Mhz and 915Mhz, it may make a difference. Certainly 433Mhz would be quickest to get working with a borrowed ham yagi and suitable amp.

Might be harder with 915Mhz but i've not read up on the propagation properties of this frequency at distance. Normally higher frequency = less penetration.

What I find more of an achievement is the use of Meteor Scatter for communications. Bouncing your radio signal off of the ionised trail of a meteor passing through the upper atmosphere when that trail may only last from a few seconds to 30 seconds.

Wheelie bad end to 2019 for Canyon Bicycles as hackers puncture IT systems

Optional

Ah well they host their servers at 1&1 which says it all really. Not the cleanest of places when it comes to hosting.

IT consultant who deleted every account on UK company Jet2's domain cops 5 months in jail

Re: I am not an IT worker of any kind...

Don't login from Starbucks or any coffee establishment as you are most likely to end up on CCTV.

No merry Christmas for SwiftStack staff: Enterprise cloud storage biz axes workers amid strategy shift

TBH. Better to be redundant before xmas so you can react and change your spending limits. Trying to juggle redundancy and the credit card bills after Christmas would be worse.

I'm just not sure the computer works here – the energy is all wrong

Re: Ah, the carefree days of yore

I learnt the hard way when I bought my future wife a set of Jump leads for her car as a christmas present. 20 years later and the story is repeated to family and friends with much amusement.

The leads are still going strong too.

IBM to expunge over 500 people in latest redundo round

Optional

Yes I guess they could sack you and you lose your redundancy package.

BA's 'global IT system failure' was due to 'power surge'

Maintain your generators

Whilst working at a company in 2001 we had a total power failure to the building. Quite correctly, the UPS maintained the integrity of the server room and the backup generator started up as commanded.

Upon contacting the power company we were told it would be down for at least an hour. Our building services guy said we had fuel for the generator for 48 hours. Two hours later the generator dies.

Turns out the fuel gauge was stuck on full and the tank was close to empty. Dipsticks are your friend.

Miss Misery on hacking Mr Robot and the Missing Sense of Fun

prefer Halt and Catch Fire

I gave up on Mr Robot half way through season 2.

However, Halt and Catch Fire is brilliant. I just had to break out a copy of MAME after watching the first couple of episodes.

Fire brigade called to free man's bits from titanium ring's grip

Optional

My wedding ring is Titanium and at the time of purchase, I had the choice of 99.99 pure Titanium or a Titanium Alloy.

I picked the pure Titanium as it is softer than the alloy and shouldn't be a problem for emergency services if I get into a situation requiring it's removal. It's certainly too small to go on my dick so the situation in the story shouldn't ever happen.

Fitbit picks up Pebble, throws Pebble as far as it can into the sea

Optional

I'm looking at the Vector Smartwatch with always on display and 30 days battery life between charges.

Barnet Council: Outsourcing deal with Capita has 'performance issues'

Re: libraries closing

Sounds exactly like my town. We have secured free parking after 3pm for the car parks but it's only a trial. All the shops seem to be charity shops too.

Hell desk thought PC fire report was a first-day-on-the-job prank

Re: so.. Back to briefcase

Many years ago I used to take a briefcase to work, partly because it was a birthday present from my parents and partly because it really was useful to carry my lunch and magazines to read. I also had quite a craving for cream cheese that comes in toothpaste style tubes and TUC biscuits.

One day I was rushing to get away from work to go to the pub only to find that a couple of my colleagues had squeezed cream cheese onto the handle of the briefcase and place the handle back down flat so you could not see the cheese. You can image the mess when I grabbed the handle to have cheese squeezing out between my fingers.

I of course arrived late to the pub and to much smirking and laughter from people around me. I know who you are even if at the time I did not acknowledge that I had been pranked.

Wi-Fi commuter fears

£50M ????

That's seems to be a lot of money wasted. I wonder how much was creamed off the budget to line the pockets of manglement types?

Safe browsing checks fail as 16,000 WordPress sites hacked this year

Re: Plugin Hell

+1 for Concrete 5.

Brexit makes life harder for an Internet of Things startup

CE = Chinese Export

Took me a while to realise it stood for something else other than Chinese Export.