* Posts by TangoDelta72

58 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Oct 2016

Page:

Tired techie botched preventative maintenance he soon learned wasn't needed

TangoDelta72
Thumb Up

Shipping things that must remain upright

I worked in a logistics warehouse that did all of its own assembly and packaging. When an item that had to remain upright from the moment it was fully packaged to the time it was delivered, a little 3"x3" adhesive sticker was attached to the box or crate. This sticker was actually a little reservoir of blue liquid that, when a pair of tabs was removed (like when you pull the strip out of a AA battery slot on some new toys, which allows the battery's contacts to go "live"), it would allow the blue liquid to slosh around its enclosure. The neat pat of this device was that would prove if the box or crate had deviated more than 45 degrees in any direction. If no blue liquid was in a place where it shouldn't be, it was evidence that the crate had been upright during the entire transit. It was a good way to ensure that sensitive items were handled carefully. It was also like a chain of custody for safe transport.

They've only gone and made Doom run in a PDF file

TangoDelta72
Terminator

A Barbarian's quote

Conan:

"Chrom* [sic], I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, and why we died. All that matters is that today, two stood against many. Valor pleases you, so grant me this one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, the HELL with you!"

Icon --> because, well, you know.

US airspace closures, lack of answers deepen East Coast drone mystery

TangoDelta72
Coat

A military base in NJ

It's the past catching up with us. I'm sure it's the same base where Steve Rogers became Captain America, Shield was founded, and Hydra embedded. It's just those last folks' toys that are just coming out to play. See?

Microsoft coughs up yet more Windows 11 24H2 headaches

TangoDelta72
Coat

Re: They should have called it...

Vista 2: Electric Boogaloo

TangoDelta72

Re: Windows 11 Bluetooth...

I feel your pain. There was a similar BT fail with 23H2. Search the comments against my handle and perhaps my suggestion can help.

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/11/01/windows_11_23h2/

Panic at the Cisco tech, thanks to ancient IOS syntax helper that outsmarted itself

TangoDelta72
Coat

From the files of Sergio Aragonés

Groo the Wanderer would eat you?

AI Jesus is ready to dispense advice from a booth in historic Swiss church

TangoDelta72
Flame

Re: [AI Jesus] is ready to hear thoughts,... "is explicitly not a confession."

[quote]

Not that I imagine Hell needs any further assistance in filling its pits. If Hades were landfill it would have been obliged to convert to recycling eons ago...

[/quote]

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hell-endothermic-exothermic/

TangoDelta72
Terminator

Re: At least it didn't follow Google's AI

I've always found Bender to be Artificially Intelligent. A shiny Jesus who's not afraid to tell it like it is. See how he gives Fry some sage advice to get to the afterlife.

Icon: Because Bender actually wanted to be a Terminator.

Relocation is a complete success – right up until the last minute

TangoDelta72

Any metal will do, right?

This may be an urban legend (or rural, depending on where you think it may have originated), but a .22 caliber round was apparently used in lieu of a BUSS fuse.... until it got too hot.

Personalized pop-up was funny for about a second, until it felt like stalking

TangoDelta72
Thumb Up

Re: Net Send - Useful sometimes, when not abused

And yet, there were times when it was quite useful when not exploited for devious, um, exploits.

Back in the mid 90s before a lot of [now] obvious security holes were plugged, I was working at a government facility supporting hundreds of international sites. Those sites were initially set up by our HQ team and remotely managed, but left the locals to perform basic IT operations and updates that had to be done on site (travel budget was good, but not THAT good). During one update instance, a particular site could not complete some thing or other, so they called for help. This was before VoIP and we had a robust VPN and everyone was on a 10-net, so calls could happen and we could still see what was online (or not).

Being an international setup, sometimes things got lost in translation so despite an hour or so of talking and taking the non-IT locals through the motions, we still couldn't get a config file to set correctly. We had something like 211 out of 212 sites successfully updated, but this one was giving us a hard time. The host server's OS was up but the service in question was not and we could only get so far. The last part of this update was a pathname that had to be manually keyed in. I could hear what they were telling me on the phone: "this letter, this symbol, this number, etc...", and it sounded correct, but the problem persisted.

This being the age when Win95 and NT4 still reigned supreme, I had the bright spark to send them *exactly* what should be keyed in. Mind you, we would have sent them an email, but the service in question which was down was in fact their email server. NET SEND to the rescue! I don't remember what it was, but something like a 1 to an I (capital i) or l (lowercase ell), or an O (capital o) to a 0 (zero) that was transposed. Remember: Win95 and NT4 chose its fonts poorly.

When the NET SEND 10.0.212.2 "CAN YOU SEE THIS ON YOUR SERVER SCREEN? HELLO FROM HQ!" hit their server's screen, there was an almighty "Whoop!" heard over my phone. NET SEND's display uses a font that was UNICODE (or something along those lines. Ugly but completely obvious as to what ASCII char was displayed). So we commenced with the correct string that had been muffled from the beginning. Yay!

This was one of the things I stumbled on just before this trouble call came in:

Old school security from Gibson Research Corporation (anyone remember the proto-security site?): Shoot the Messenger

What is this computing industry anyway? The dawning era of 32-bit micros

TangoDelta72

Active Directory and Domino names.nsf

"I think it was also around the time when Microsoft brought out Active Directory which doomed Novell's offerings. Late 1990s"

Active Directory was a MS conceptual port of [LotusNotes] Domino's names.nsf file. It was a directory, sure, but it was also the configuration database (yes, a database) for your Domino domain. I'd been trained on N/D for a while, and when Win2k/Server came out and I needed to train up on AD, all the main concepts & elements were already in my head.

Twitter tells advertisers to go fsck themselves, now sues them for fscking the fsck off

TangoDelta72

I'm reminded of an old song...

https://www.lyricsondemand.com/king_missile/the_sandbox

Can't get Minecraft, MongoDB Cloud, others to work today? Blame that Azure outage

TangoDelta72
FAIL

Re: Ain't that fun ?

Likewise.

I think the first game that turned me off from most new games was Diablo III. It required an internet connection to play. Nope, sorry. Your software needs only to run on my machine, not anywhere else, that includes connections (localhost, anyone?).

Dear Blizzard et al:

I would like to pay you money to play your games. I live in a desert camp with no internet access. Blah blah blah...

Signed,

The Offline Ogre.

Tesla delays 'Robotaxi' event as Musk 'makes' design 'tweaks'

TangoDelta72
Devil

Re: "...important design change to the front..."

Smithers, deploy the cow catcher.

Windows Notepad gets spell check. Only took 41 years

TangoDelta72
Facepalm

Someone saw the future coming...

...and planned accordingly:

https://win7games.com/#calc

Scroll down for notepad.

MIT's bionic leg upgrade leaves amputees walking like the wind

TangoDelta72
Terminator

Re: The research is a leg up to potential users. Or maybe two legs on the ground?

Well, time to read the Cobra series by Timothy Zahn (again). If you haven't read it, one of the plot devices is a prosthetic ankle which has a laser that shoots out of the heel. No, really, it's cooler than it sounds!

TangoDelta72
Terminator

"Augmented" NOVA episode

I watched this episode when it came out. It describes a lot of his personal history and struggles, and why he went to MIT. The latter half of the show went into the patient experience, technical and medical aspects, and hurdles to overcome. That was in 2022, so I'm glad to hear that there's more progress in his work.

NOVA episode guide:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nova_episodes#Season_49:_2022

MIT "Augmented" description:

https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/augmented-nova-pbs-episode-featuring-hugh-herr/

America's best chance for nationwide privacy law could do more harm than good

TangoDelta72
Unhappy

Here I was, ready to make a funny joke on the LCCRUL acronym...

...but it's already devolved into partisan commentary.

OK, my silliness: Krull.

That is all.

US Air Force says AI-controlled F-16 fighter jet has been dogfighting with humans

TangoDelta72
Mushroom

Re: End game?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Kinky Sex makes the world go 'round.

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

TangoDelta72
Coat

Peak messaging client

When I get to the top, I will meditate in the Lotus position.

Health system network turned out to be a house of cards – Cisco cards, that is

TangoDelta72
WTF?

Very Cleese-ey response

Who are you who can summon fire without flint or tinder?

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

TangoDelta72

Re: Depends on your definition of growler I guess.

"Water, barley, rice, yeast & hops ... how hard can it be?"

While in college I had a neighbor who was doing his master's on yeast fermentation biochemistry (He was an excellent home-brewer as you can imagine). During one porch-sipping conversation of his latest batch, he told me about some of his research. Apparently yeast will create certain histamines in the fermentation process only with rice that is known to cause allergic-like reactions in humans.

For years, I'd always gotten a runny and red nose any time when Budwieser was the beer on tap at a party. I didn't like that effect, so I tended to stay away from it. Since Bud is one of the brews that use rice, I finally had an answer to why it happened.

Science: FTW.

Windows 11 23H2 is a Teams effort but Microsoft already spoiled the best bits

TangoDelta72

Re: Hopefully they've fixed Bluetooth - You using a Dell XPS ####?

The thread you posted brought back some painful memories.

I had a similar situation with my BT speakers (only BT device connected to my Dell XPS 8930). High-level observation was that BT was no longer a capability acknowledged by the machine after a Patch Tuesday event. The BT option in Settings had the On/Off toggle greyed out, too. I did the typical things: uninstall/reinstall drivers & devices, reboot, Restore from a restore point, etc. and no luck. I spent three hours with a Dell tech and no luck, either, so they sent me a box to send the PC back for a MB replacement.

While waiting for the box to arrive, more research online finally found a dead-simple fix: you'll need to uninstall the device in Device Manager then power down the machine and - here's the important bit - UNPLUG the machine from the wall. Let it sit for 10 minutes. Apparently the capacitors on the sound/BT card retain bad settings even after a reboot, so a reboot never really clears the underlying problem since the power remains to the MB.

Hope this helps.

X confuses the masses by removing all details from links

TangoDelta72
Coat

Crazy 1980s movie plot alert!

Brewster's Billions? The caption at the top says it all.

X marks the spot where free speech clashes with Californian transparency

TangoDelta72
WTF?

Both sides are in the wrong here

To me, the larger issue at point in the proposed law isn't about free speech, but this:

"If X has nothing to hide, they should have no objection to this bill," Gabriel said of the platform's opposition.

This is a horrible justification, a perversion of history, and at best the worst kind of political grandstanding. To paraphrase: "If you have nothing to hide, then you should have no objection to an investigation on your property [regardless of reason]." Further, if the First Amendment is being cited here by X, then the Fourth Amendment should also be cited in parallel, since the word "hide" was used in the statement and the word "search" is fundamental to the Fourth (yeah, I know, a stretch, but if the State is attempting to compel X to present [search] and then modify [seizure] content...).

"Yet its lawyers are making a compelling case for why AB 587 might not be the right move to clean it up."

I'm not supporting X's arguments in general, but I agree with their logic here.

Lithium goldrush hits sleepy Oregon-Nevada border

TangoDelta72

Don't be too sure

Given the location within Oregon, don't be too sure about the historically liberal leanings of the state: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/12/oregon-secession-idaho-move-border/621087/

Wordpress sells 100-year domain, hosting plan for $38K

TangoDelta72
Linux

Re: Another way?

"Else the driver will soon be thrown down the mountain side."

I heard that Torvalds will be invoking the Ättestup.

The 2016 comedy series Norsemen depicts a group of elderly men reluctant to perform the ritual after being informed that the tribe no longer has the resources to support them. Rather than commit Ättestupa, they form their own self-sufficient society hidden from the original tribe.

US Republican party's spam filter lawsuit against Google dimissed

TangoDelta72

Re: Hahaahahahahaahaha

Shoot one foot, two more shall takes its place. Hail Hydra.

Musk's latest X-periments: No more headlines, old posts vanish, block gets banned

TangoDelta72
Facepalm

Re: Engagement??

<quote>

Twitter claimed the objective was to "reduce the height of tweets," thus allowing more content to fit on a user's screen at a time.

</quote>

I "raise" you one

C

O

F

V

E

V

E

South Korea's biggest mobile telco says 5G has failed to deliver on its promise

TangoDelta72
Gimp

Re: Blackpool Already Has 6G, Honest!

Bah! 8G is already out there. I seek the truth!

Cage match: Zuck finally realizes Elon is full of twit

TangoDelta72
Joke

Maybe they'll kiss? (No Paris icon).

Boffins reckon Mars colony could survive with fewer than two dozen people

TangoDelta72
Go

Re: Obvious? Mars needs diversity

Don't forget about big guys who are good with knots. You need them on Mars.

Scientists strangely unable to follow recipe for holy grail room-temp superconductor

TangoDelta72
Megaphone

Re: 808 State

The 808 State was a decent house band. When I first heard the band's name, I didn't know they were British and thought they'd named themselves after the Hawai'ian telephone area code.

Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs

TangoDelta72
IT Angle

Re: IT angle ?? Tying in it for you

I'll offer a Security angle, under the MP Control Family of the NIST Risk Management Framework.

File Explorer gets facelift in latest Windows 11 build

TangoDelta72

Re: simple requirement

Calc and more:

https://win7games.com/#calc

Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file

TangoDelta72
Devil

All cows must die

Moo moo moo, moo.

Alien rock causes cosmic disturbance in New Jersey home

TangoDelta72

Educational Opportunities Abound!

What a wonderful opportunity to share with the local schools. Assuming it's not radioactive, have the kids take its mass, volume, hold a magnet next to it, talk about where it came from, what it's made of, how old it may be, etc... so many great ways to get kids into STEM with such a rare event.

And then of course, when they get older, they'll join the Reg masses and keep the cycle going.

Tesla Semi, out since December, already facing a recall over brakes

TangoDelta72
Pirate

The Tesla Goliath Project

KITT's nemesis, Goliath! And look, it's got sparks, so "electric"!

Google again accused of willfully destroying evidence in Android antitrust battle

TangoDelta72
Thumb Up

Re: This One Simple Trick...

Sorry I couldn't find a better clip, but around the 1:30 mark is where it gets to the point. It's all good, man.

Beijing grants permit to 'flying car' that can handle 'roads and low altitude'

TangoDelta72

Speed Racer did it first...

...although it only had two blades in front. Failure to lift off.

LEGO and a model.

Lockheed Martin demos 50kW anti-aircraft frickin' laser beam

TangoDelta72

Re: Wahey -- Skynet is here!

We are one step closer: Not quite a T1000, but it's a start.

Twitter data dump: 200m+ account database now free to download

TangoDelta72

Re: Twitter business plan

This seems to be an accurate prediction.

OK, we know iPhones are expensive but... $11 a month for Twitter Blue on iOS?

TangoDelta72

Re: What's the Point?

SPOOON!!

Anti-piracy messaging may just encourage more piracy

TangoDelta72

Re: The "poor" victims of piracy

Oldie, but a goodie. I'm not a CL fan, but there are salient points made and what's old is new again:

http://antiquiet.com/miscellaneous/truth/2009/06/courtney-love-on-the-industry/

Behold this drone-dropping rifle with two-mile range

TangoDelta72

I see your proxy war and raise you some kinky sex. Enjoy!

Putin reaches for nuclear option: Zuckerberg banned

TangoDelta72

Re: I know, right?

Green Day's F.O.D or Ha Ha You're Dead will work for me.

Microsoft gives Notepad a minimalist makeover to match Windows 11 style

TangoDelta72

Stripping metadata

Notepad is still my go-to for stripping metadata when copying from other [MS] products. Just paste into a brand new Notepad and voila! no more hidden tabbing, links, formatting... nothing. Then Ctrl-A, Ctrl-V, and paste into wherever I want it without anything trying to be more helpful than I want it to be. Tabbing and spacing will still convey, but it's usually those things I want anyway.

Notepad++ doesn't really do that so well, but I love it for quick code editing.

But back to the original story: it does seem rather pathetic that an "improvement" over such a simple program is delivered with a bug caveat.

Swiss lab's rooftop demo shows sunlight and air can make fuel

TangoDelta72

Re: Nope

I still love the smell of two-stroke in the morning, but I'm being converted:

Petrol:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_Man_TT#Current_race_records

Electric:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TT_Zero#Fastest_race_lap_by_year

Quiet, and getting faster by the year.

AI algorithms can help erase bright streaks of internet satellites – but they cannot save astronomy

TangoDelta72

Re: Painting them black ...

This product seems interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack

It's already being used in astronomy, and apparently there are "flavors" that can absorb or reflect different wavelengths, depending on purpose.

The unit of measure for fatbergs is not hippopotami, even if the operator of an Australian sewer says so

TangoDelta72

Re: Pural

But I do* not verbs at the end of my sentences put!

* - "do" is a modal, or "helping" verb, so it's ok up front. :-)

Page: