Posts by mickaroo

Keeping yesterday's computers ticking takes more than nostalgia

Reminds Me Of My Youth

I was the 'Instrumentation Specialist' for a small lab with variety of microprocessor control equipment.

One morning, one of said intruments refused to boot up. A quick examination discovered a failed power transistor that has demolished about one square inch of the printed circuit board it was attached to.

The instrument was no longer support, so a replacement board was a non-starter, but a replacement power transistor was available at the local electronics store.

I spent an interesting afternoon rebuilding the pcb with pieces of telephone cable wire.

And, amazingly, IT WORKED!

I have neither the patience nor the manual dexterity now that I'm older than dirt.

Google breaks Alibaba’s record for Europe’s largest DMA fine

Re: Slap on the wrist still...

Instead of fines, maybe jail time for the head-honchos?

I'm moderately sure that would get their attention...

HP customer claims firmware update shoved printer off support cliff

Re: OH BROTHER !

I can beat that! I have a Brother MFC-255CW. The printer works great with Linux Mint Mate, but enabling the scanner required a little web-surfing (the installation programme puts the config file in the wrong folder).

And the last firmware update from Brother was 2011! Its like Keith Richard... cannot be killed by conventional means!

I also have an HP OJP8710, which lost wireless connectivity a few months ago. So now I'm wondering if that's been clobbered by HP...

FCC walks back router update ban before it bricked America's network security

Re: The world needs to block the USA

There are not enough voices in the USA *with the balls* to stand up to Trump and his cohorts.

There, fixed that for you…

Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down

Re: disturbing timing

Now up to 29 downvotes at the time of reading. Rock on...

And the answer to your question is... No, the majority of Linux USERS have never built a kernel and will never need to. They're USERS, not DEVELOPERS.

And yes, I use Linux. And yes, I built a kernel from sources once. It was lengthy, confusing, and certainly not easy for a novice. But it did boot.

Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching

I used to work in big pharma, doing installation/operational qualification of production equipment. One of the operational test was ‘RF interference’ from walkie-talkies (cell phones were verböten in Production).

The vast majority of the equipment would be just fine, but I’ve seen a few cases where the equipment would have a brain-fart and fall over. Then we’d have to test how close you could be, and flag the equipment with ‘no walkie-talkies’ within X-feet.

Windows Update is a torture chamber for seldom-used PCs

Been there… Done that…

I posted this a year or three ago.

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/1/2023/11/15/november_2023_patch_tuesday/

Maybe I should have copyrighted it and made some cash off you late-arriving laggards.

West Sussex's Oracle rollout pushed back again as costs balloon 15 times

A Correction To The Title?

West Sussex’s Debacle rollout pushed back again as costs balloon 15 times…

Microsoft Copilot to hijack your browser... for your own convenience

Brain-Fart

>> opening links in a side panel rather than launching your default browser <<

I misread that as “…opening links in a side panel rather than laughing at your default browser.”

Apple's budget-friendly MacBook Neo is bursting with color and compromise

Never look a gift-horse in the mouth

My wife has a really old Intel MacBook... 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD.

The battery is shot ($500 to replace?)

The power supply died (using an old Dell USB-C brick now)

It only has one USB-C port (not two)

So for those budget-minded among us, this may be an interesting option.

Orbital datacenters are a pie-in-the-sky idea: Gartner

Re: Must be snowing in hell.

Yes. For once, the voice of reason and logic.

Microsoft throws spox under the bus after Parliament testimony on ICC email kerfuffle

I have a vague recollection of a magazine article from several decades ago that noted the Thatcher Conservative government of the time was “more socialist” than the Nicaraguan Sandinistas of the era.

Go figure…

Linus Torvalds and friends tell The Reg how Linux solo act became a global jam session

Hardcore Penguinista

I messed with Linux back in the late 1990’s, but it was SO MUCH DIFFERENT from what I was used to (DR-DOS) that I didn’t commit. Then in the early 2000’s, necessity forced me to embrace Unix (Sun Solaris). After that, Linux was a walk in the park.

SUSE, Caldera, Corel, PC-LinuxOS, Ubuntu (various flavours), Mandrake, Debian (briefly), and finally… Linux Mint Mate.

I also got pretty good at building NDISWrapper from source and hacking Windows .inf files to enable various USB wireless dongles.

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

That's Not What I Want To Say!

>>It is a silent, unauthorized amputation of intent, where the pursuit of low-perplexity output results in the total destruction of unique signal<<

Wow! Big words for "You just gutted my sentence"

Microsoft dials up the nagging in Windows, calls it security

Deja Vu All Over Again...

Didn't they try this with Windows Vista?

Every time the user clicked on ANYTHING, a UAC warning appeared to prevent you from achieving anything meaningful. Like regular work...

Or am I mis-remembering?

Brussels eyes crowbar for Meta's WhatsApp AI lockout

Re: Maybe they'll warm up to the EU now

I’m a ‘social media’ refusenik, so frankly, I don’t give a shit.

Does being a Meta refusenik make me ‘metastatic’?

If you're one of the 16,000 Amazon employees getting laid off, read this

Our employees are our most valuable asset!

Here, have a pink slip…

High Court to grill London cops over live facial recognition creep

It’s also interesting that said Sarah Jones stated “… thousands of dangerous criminals [taken] off our streets…” without offering any concrete evidence to support that claim.

Trump says he got a deal for rare earths in Greenland, but they won't come easy

Sitting on the fence

I can't decide if this post is for real, and deserves a downvote.

Or is sarcasm and irony, and deserves an upvote.

Could go either way...

Microsoft 365 outage drags on for nearly 10 hours during bad night for North American infra

Confusion Was Rife...

...because Thunderbird was just showing the message: "Cannot authenticate user".

Then I checked Downdetector.ca... Ah, that explained it.

I guess my next "Weaning myself off Micro$oft" will be to dump Outlook.

Protonmail anyone?

Concorde at 50: Twice the speed of sound, twice the economic trouble

Re: HS2 then

Comments like this always make me wonder…

The £80bn didn’t just go up in a huge puff of smoke. It supported numerous families from being unemployed. Who in turn supported grocery stores, toy stores, auto shops, I don’t know what else, and most importantly… the local pub.

And on top of that, the scientific and engineering breakthroughs!

Ready for a newbie-friendly Linux? Mint team officially releases v 22.3, 'Zena'

Re: virtualbox painless

I, too, became annoyed that the packaged VBox was always a couple (or three) versions behind the current release candidate. Now I download and update from the Oracle-VBox website.

They notify when there's a newer version, and the update has always gone swimmingly.

Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

Re: Thunderbird for the win

I recently gave the M$ Outlook email client the “long goodbye” on my laptop and my Android phone, and switched to Thunderbird as part of my “weaning myself off of Windows” initiative.

No complaints so far…

One real reason AI isn't delivering: Meatbags in manglement

Interesting Etymology

You can’t spell “fail” without “AI”.

What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

Re: Audio

Sound on my Linux Mint Mate works JUST FINE. I had full five-speaker Dolby (plus a sub-woofer) until my home theater popped its clogs. Don't feel I can blame Mint for that. Now it's stereo through a pair of Bose Bluetooth Minis.

Every printer I've ever owned has worked JUST FINE with Mint. I presently have two:

A recent HP that runs JUST FINE under HPLIP.

A Brother, older than dirt, that runs JUST FINE under CUPS.

I guess I dodged both of your bullets.

Whatever legitimate places AI has, inside an OS ain't one

Re: The GUI subsystem is part of the OS, and rightly so.

Well…

If the GUI is “part of the OS, and rightly so”, why was it SO EASY to install WPS4WIN over Windows 95?

The only reason that the Windows GUI is part of the OS, is because Satya says so.

KDE Plasma sets date to dump X11 as Wayland push accelerates

Re: CDE

I, too, used CDE in a long-past life on Sun Solaris workstations. It was by no means the worst GUI I've ever had to navigate..

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

Re: If only there was an alternative OS

I'm 'weaning myself off of Windows'.

I have a mostly stripped Linux Mint as my daily drive, and Windows10 in a VM for those days when I can't find any pins to stick in my eyes.

I'm slowly discarding 'Everything Comes With Copilot' and replacing it with FOSS. It may not be a straight 100% replacement, but it gets the job done.

When I shared my goal with a colleague, I received this reply:

"But Microsoft is the industry standard!"

Stuff that...

How do you solve a problem like Discovery?

Re: ROAD TRIP!

That video is AWESOME!

How many people in the world can say:

"We heard a bang outside. I climbed out of bed to check everything was OK; it was just some pecker-head driving by in a Space Shuttle..."

Microsoft's ancient icon library still lurks deep within Windows 11

CUTE!

Icons from a kinder, gentler time.

I especially like the detonator with the stick of Dynamite. I have to find an application for that one. Windows Update, maybe?

NordVPN open sources its Linux GUI client under GPLv3

Re: Linux VPN

I've been using Mozilla VPN since HMA-Pro stopped supporting their VPN on Linux (also Mint).

Mozilla isn't awful, but it doesn't offer the flexibility of HMA-Pro.

Linux Mint 22.2 polishes the desktop, but kernel updates are the real deal

Re: Hibernate is missing by default

Have an upvote for two reasons:

1. I rarely make it to the end of long posts, I lose the will to live first. I read yours to the end.

2. Anyone that can use 'ameliorate' in a sentence deserves an upvote!

Linux Lite relief: 7.6 keeps it simple, shiny, and mostly slim

Re: Modern bloat

I feel that the term 'bloat' is relative. I have Linux Mint Mate installed on a Unibody MacBook (dual core processor and 2GB RAM). It has an 80GB SSD with a swap partition enabled. Granted, you wouldn't want to play Crysis on it, but for everyday cooking, it's more than adequate.

I could try installing Windows 10, that might be fun. Windows 11 is a total non-starter...

Network scans find Linux is growing on business desktops, laptops

I was there first...!

I've been running Linux on the desktop in various flavours (Corel, SUSE, PCLOS, Mandriva, Mint) since when I still had hair.

And I finally killed my M$365 account this month. I feel so liberated...

Some users report their Firefox browser is scoffing CPU power

"...proudly and resolutely LLM-bot free zone..."

Moi aussi!

OK, I used DeepL 'coz I don't speak French (enter sarcasm icon here)

Californian man so furious about forced Windows 11 upgrade that he's suing Microsoft

Virtually Painless

I enabled Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 on my Windows 10 Virtualbox VM, and M$ instantly attempted to install Windows 11.

Without asking if that's what I wanted. Of course...

Intel's leaders have stopped pretending – and it's about time

Re: Intel's leaders have stopped pretending – anbpkkkl0d it's about time

The WINTEL Axis of Evil.

So the '...TEL' part is on the ropes.

Let's hope the 'WIN...' part is next.

KDE targets Windows 10 'exiles' claiming 'your computer is toast'

Re: Too many distros

>> If you are repurposing a Windows machine, you're using the hardware you have and hoping it's all supported <<

I have Linux Mint Mate installed on four different laptops:

1. A moderately recent Lenovo ThinkPad.

2. A somewhat older Lenovo ThinkPad.

3. An much older Dell Latitude.

4. A positively ancient Unibody Macbook.

It installed and worked on all four, without any faffing around.

Granted, installing Mint Mate on my Asus Chromebook wasn't an unqualified success. It works if you have plenty of time to spare and don't need sound. But then, I'd categorize the Chromebook as an "edge case". And good luck installing Windows on it...

Engineers bring Psyche's thrusters back online

I got the joke!

Have an upvote...

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

Re: Does it have to be a hosted desktop?

Same expedience here…

My lightly aged ThinkPad sans TPM2.0 happily runs Win11 in a Virtualbox VM.

My very aged Dell, however, doesn’t meet the CPU requirement, even with a VM.

The post-quantum cryptography apocalypse will be televised in 10 years, says UK's NCSC

Stick It Up My Backdoor

Why is everyone so bent out of shape by Quantum Unencryption, if every government and his flea-ridden dog wants a backdoor anyway...

Did NCSC not read the Investigative Powers Act?

France offers US scientists a safe haven from Trump's war on woke

American Technology

The joke used to be:

Canada could have had French Culture, British Politics and American Technology. Instead, we got American Culture, French Politics, and British Technology.

Perhaps the Brains would like to Drain to The Great White North instead? And we could have American Technology after all!

That's if we don't become the much more bigly and much more safely 51st State...

Microsoft adds another Copilot hotkey – this time for AI voice chat

Re: and for the poor buggers that use computers for REAL WORK?

Go to Settings > Apps > Uninstall Copilot.

I've done it dozens of times...

GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin

Re: No Thanks

Years ago, I spent many a happy hour playing with xorg.conf to have something resembling a working display. However, I haven't done that in a very long time. These days, I install Linux Mint Mate, and It-Just-Works.

I guess Wayland is coming. But in the meantime, X11 works for me, too...

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

>> The only verified backup is one that you have restored from <<

Back in the day, we ran an application on OS/2 that generated sequences of files with OS/2 long filenames. Our backup department (off in another building) ran backups of our data daily.

One day, we needed to restore some data. The restore was successful with one caveat... all the files restored with DOS 8.3 filenames and were completely unusable.

After faffing around for a couple of weeks trying different things with different backups (same result), one of the ladies in the backup group called and said "There's a checkbox in the top right corner to restore long filenames. Should I try that?"

That's a big "YES"...!!!

Microsoft to force Windows 11 24H2 on Home and Pro users

Re: "an ever-lengthening list of known issues, many of which remain unmitigated or unresolved"

Interesting...

I attempted an install of Win11 on VBox with virtual TPM enabled, with limited (read... ZERO) success.

Do you know something I don't?

Haiku Beta 5 / In tests it's (Fire)foxier / It pleases us well

To Be or Not To BeOS

I played with BeOS back in the day and really liked it, but there was no ecosystem. Since then I've messed with Haiku "just because I can" through its slow but steady development. It finally sounds like Haiku may be ready for a serious revisit.

Now... Where did I store that old Core-Duo Unibody MacBook...?

Google's 10-year Chromebook lifeline leaves old laptops headed for silicon cemetery

I did something similar and installed Mint on an old Asus Chromebook. The installation was decidedly fraught and not for the faint of heart. The Chromebook is usable for basic stuff, but it's cludgy and there's no sound

Shackleton's Endurance sets sail for polar peril in Lego

Read The Book...

I picked up 'South!' as the make-weight third book in a 3-for-$15 book sale bin.

By page 20, I was totally hooked! There are parts where the comment 'You couldn't write this stuff' seem literally true.

Buy the book, then build the model.

That's what I'm going to do.