Posts by VerySlowData

Digital Research's GEM opens a new window on Linux

Re: Past experience

MK14 - I never managed to get mine going properly, got hold of an Acorn "rack" computer with Eurocard modules. Later at work, I recall changing ZX80 tv modules for use here in Oz...

Exec couldn’t identify a photocopier, which made for a fax-inating tech support call

Re: Fax is still alive and kicking.

Yes, my local medical centre faxes referrals printed out by my doctor in his office to specialists; when asked about this, the receptionists told me that most specialist's offices only accept faxes or snail mail! (Mind you the specialists all have laptops thay take all the consulting notes on...)

Microsoft finally fixing File Explorer and the Context Menu

Re: Back to the future

hear, hear!! MS announced to all and sundry that Win 10 would be the last windows version... They lied yet again...

Gothenburg's self-driving bus trammed on day one

Re: Melbourne Trams

maybe one day car/truck drivers will read the stop signs that come out from the sides of Melbourne trams and stop!!! regularly I hear the ding-ding-ding of the tram driver as oblivious car drivers sail past while the alighting passengers take their lives in their hands to reach the side of the road (Racecourse Rd in Flemington)

grrr bah snarf...

UK Typhoon jets fitted with bargain-bin drone busters for Middle East sorties

Re: Same cost only if you ignore the sortie

Camels fitted with Ukrainian Cardboard Drones (from Oz!) is what they need!

The class of 2026 has heard enough about AI, thanks

grrr, bah, snarf

AI (it's Artificial but NOT Intelligent) is a snare and a delusion. There will be many tears before bedtime when it (AI) all falls over, hopefully taking a lot of TechBros with it..

France buys nuclear supercomputing spinoff Bull from Atos for €404M

Re: ICL

They could build and sell PICL computers! the pico chips could be Raspberry Pickles...

Bork ventures to the Middle of Lidl

Re: Swap out

so true, we had a major renovation done recently; as soon as a tool wore out, the tradies would zip off to Bunnings or elsewhere and buy a new one! the stuff that seemed to last longer was makita or dewalt.. (I'm a ryobi person myself, but I'm not flogging my tools as hard the tradies do..)

NASA loses contact with MAVEN Mars orbiter

Marvin was waiting round the back of Mars

Definitely Marvin the Martian; getting fed up with all these alien spacecraft from a neighbouring planet!

Australia’s attempt to join the space race lasts just 14 seconds

top marks for giving it a go!

even the biggies, SpaceX and the like don't always get their rockets into space.. Gilmour Space deserves a cheer for trying and trying again..

Trump administration threatens tariffs for any nation that dares to tax Big Tech

time to pull the plug

maybe the large part of the world that is not the USA should just pull the plug on the tech bros; google/alphabet, meta, X and other internet companies. There are enough smarts in the rest of the world to route around them...

'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama

Oxide OS

I would agree with other commentards that the best approach for the R4L team is to abandon fighting to get Linux changed, but build a linux-like OS (called Oxide OS) totally from Rust components and sub systems [not a rust expert here] the kernel would be the biggy, but with the salami approach - one slice of code at a time it may well be doable. The two code bases could be compared for performance and security, and people could choose the OS they want (as opposed to MS' laying down of the Windows law!)

Temporary printable tattoos could be the future of EEGs

Re: Interesting tech

I had my cataracts done abt 20 years ago, there wasn't any particular injunction about face washing (and you have the eye being done bandaged up for a day anyway, when you go back to the hospital and the opthalmologist removes the dressing and you can see properly!)

This was the Fred Hollowes style of intraocular lens replacement where they put a cannula in the side of the eye, (you are more or less awake for this!) ultrasonic emulsification of the cloudy lens, suction all the bits out of the lens sac than popin a rolled up replacement plastic lens which unwinds into position, bobs your uncle, you can see again!!!

If you have cataracts, definitely recommended!

Australia to build Top Secret cloud in AWS for military and spooky users

TSOzCloud

Surely Albo and Co could have a TSOzCloud built here...if we are going to keep all our classified stuff on computers, I would rather they were built, owned and run right here in the wide brown land..

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

Re: Isn't systemd great?

Ah, I bought one of them, long ago, 5Mb 5.25" Full Height Hard Disk (cost AUD500 back then) I remember thinking that I could copy all my floppy disk contents to it and still have lots of space!

China caught – again – with its malware in another nation's power grid

Re: No need for China to infect the UK or other grids, they already have enough power

Really? We have solar panels and an inverter. works OK and doesn't come with any connectivity at all. There is an LCD panel that tells you panel voltage and power that it is providing to your house and that's it.

Aerial cable tangles are still being strung up, but carriers are slowly burying the problem

trees and power lines

Do what we had to do: get a qualified tree removal firm who will arrange for the power to the overhead power line to be switched off during tree removal. Painless and safe! Mind you, I had to ruthlessly prune a lemon tree that I planted as a seed in the wrong place years ago, after receiving a Notice to Remove Vegetation from the power reticulation company.

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: TBFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC vs managers - You Forgot

Luckily, my SWMBO doesn't as she is a great collector of sewing and kitchen stuff just in case...on the other hand my TBFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC has taken over the shed/workshop and is threatening my inside house room! It has been very useful for repairs over the years.

An important system on project [REDACTED] was all [REDACTED] up

The Italian Job

Shades of Micheal Caine...

Microsoft will upgrade Windows 10 21H2 users whether they like it or not

marketing lies

Microsoft made much play of their statement that Windows 10 would be the last windows ever needed...then proceeded to browbeat Win 7 (and before) users into upgrading! I hope one day that there will be a viable Win7 frontend for linux or a BSD.. probably not in my lifetime.

Nice smart device – how long does it get software updates?

Re: Nobody

shades of the famous Bluebottle from the late lamented Goon Show!

Google Japan goes rogue with 5.4ft long keyboard

useful for holding fabric

When not coding or communing with the computers, could be very handy for sewing folk needing to hold fabric down while laying out patterns. personally i would use it for fishing out stuff stuck under shelves, cupboards, etc.

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

Beyond Compare

Same here, bought a licence some years back and use it all the time.

It's time to kick China off social media, says tech governance expert

Re: Fixed it for ya

Great idea; have IANA/IETF/whoever fence off an IP6 netblock and move all social media monoliths there. Publish the allocation so that the rest of us can block it and where possible not route it...

Then the internet can be returned to some semblance of sanity..

BOFH: The Geek's Countergambit – outwitted at an electronics store

new BOFHs are developing

Simon is alluding to other BOFH nests developing in allied businesses... The old trapdoor just in front of the Technical Service counter may be refurbished soon!

Earth to Voyager 2: Standby for connection – after we tip this water out of the dish

Re: Rusty scuppers?

long ago, I also lived in Canberra and experienced torrential rain storms that flooded and closed main roads in the south (Woden Valley). Once such event caused cars to be swept away with at least one fatality.

The frost: removing the ice from your windscreen is a regular morning chore in Canberra...

Robot vacuum cleaner employed by Brit budget hotel chain Travelodge flees

old roombas never die

Our old Roomba (3rd Battery pack, replacement handle, repaired power pack, etc) crashes around the house, but doesn't attempt to escape outside, as it can't handle steps (just like Mk 1 Daleks). It stops and bleeps in a foreign language, and sits there forlornly, waiting to be moved..

DIY Sinclair clones: Left it too late to back the Next? Build your own instead

Re: ZX80, ZX81 -- some of us used real computers!

long ago, a friend of mine designed and built an addin 80 column video card for the Osborne 1 here in Oz; it was sold to the Osborne corporation and he and his family got a free trip to California while he did paid work for Osborne integrating the mod into their systems. Still got one in the junkbox outside somewhere...

Reviving a classic: ThinkPad modder rattles tin to fund new motherboard for 2008's T60 and T61 series of laptops

T61 Fans

My older T61 (battered case held together with stickers) suffers from ThinkPad fan disease. I have ordered replacement FRU's on eBay with varying success, but my best fix was fan disassembly (clean and oil bushes sparingly) and careful refitting. The noise comes back eventually, but if you work in a quiet environment (I don't) it would bug you after a while.

Macmillan best-biscuit list unexpectedly promotes breakfast cereal to treat status

Re: Weetbix

VitaBrits FTW!!!

Re: Hate to disagree but...

I'll have you know that Tim Tams are available with proper Dark Chocolate coating!!! Penguin bars (my step-daughter brought some back from the UK a few years back) are a bitter disappointment...

Sir Clive Sinclair: Personal computing pioneer missed out on being Britain's Steve Jobs

Re: The ZX 80 in its white plastic shell

No CMC (Julian Barson) in Melbourne. We also had an early SoC 6502 eurocard computer pre-Acorn..

The ZX 80 in its white plastic shell

Long ago here in Oz, I recall unpacking and de-casing ZX80's (dozens of them) to replace the UHF TV modulator unit with a VHF version for Australian TV's (No UHF here back then). ISTR the keypads were always a bit iffy.

Still, we had never seen any computing device that retailed that cheaply. My employer at the time sold a lot of them...

You walk in with a plan. You leave with GPS-tracking Nordic hiking poles. The same old story, eh?

Re: recommend Witch? magazine

Really? I find that the 2mm hex keys round here seem to vanish into the black hole (that contains biros and single socks) whenever I need one...

When everyone else is on vacation, it's time to whip out the tiny screwdrivers

Re: Two observations:

ThinkPads suffer from this particularly: however it is alleviated somewhat by the good diagrams in the HMM's still available from lenovo (an IBM tradition?) which give the size and length of each screw..

Go to L: A man of the cloth faces keyboard conundrum

My late wife's father who was a linguist at Aston University in Brum also wrote dates this way: 4.vii.2021

I think he used this format when he was studying for his doctorate at Lyon in France.. I tend to do dates as SUN04JUL2021 these days..

BOFH: But we think the UK tax authorities would be VERY interested in how we used COVID support packages

Re: Auditors...

From Bob Howard's office ? (thanks Charles Stross!)

For blinkenlights sake.... RTFM! Yes. Read The Front of the Machine

Re: Blinkenlights

And why oh why is the led brightness on the devices so high that a single box could light up a football stadium???

BOFH: 7 jars of Marmite, a laptop and a good time

Vegemite

Vegemite on crumpets, toast, muffins... Icon showing vegemite origins

Dangerous flying car drone zoomed into UK's Gatwick Airport airspace after killswitch failed

Hmm.. I wonder

Maybe what was flown at Goodwood was not what was submitted to CASA for approval. Here in Oz, CASA are very fussy about approvals for flying stuff, generally.

Let's Encrypt? Let's revoke 3 million HTTPS certificates on Wednesday, more like: Check code loop blunder strikes

got email

We got the email, followed the advice and the certs for our affected domains were renewed.. no muss, no fuss. Kudos to LetsEncrypt for being upfront about this..

Raspberry Pi goes 2GB for the price of 1GB in honour of mini-computer's eighth birthday

The Pi as a part

I have some older pi's; one came as a freeby on MagPi magazine (the Pi Zero, ISTR) Amazed that a whole computer came on a PCB not much bigger that a 40pin dip and could get at the io ports easily. With Pi's and Arduini , we now have really blurred the line between discrete chips and complete systems to solve problems or scratch electronic itches!

Happy Birthday, Raspberry Pi!

All that Samsung users found on UK website after weird Find my Mobile push notification was... other people's details

here in Melbourne

happened to my Samsung late last night.. very odd.. I ignored it also..

Aw, bad day at your air-conditioned, somewhat clean desk? Try shifting a 40-tonne fatberg

not a great day at the ACCC

you could say the the ACCC were not flushed with success!

(I won't take a coat today, it's a bit warm out there!)

Remember the 1980s? Oversized shoulder pads, Metal Mickey and... sticky keyboards?

Re: Coke Cleans

Actually, long ago when I was a Tech College student, The Workshop Technology teacher used coca-cola as a cleaning agent for for the copper side of blank FR4 pcb material, a solid rinse in clean water and over dry prior to coating with resist. Worked like a charm!

Boris Brexit bluff binds .eu domains to time-bending itinerary

Re: Yes EU Minister

upvote for Aldi Moser Roth chocolate (the 85% Dark is great, and good for you!)

Can't bear to part with that well-worn copy of Windows 7? Microsoft might let you keep it updated an extra year

Where is Windows 9?

Enough with Satnav Gnutella's wet dream OS, "Windows 10" already! Aren't there enough sane developers left at MS to do a proper upgrade of Windows 7 to Windows 9 for all the ordinary folk who have real work to do on not the latest hardware. Windows 10 is a warmed over, phone-interfaced GUI spyware abomination.

When the time comes to move on from Win 7, barring miracles, I will be migrating boxes to Linux Mint; tried ReactOS, nice but no where near finished.

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, where to go? Navigation satellite signals flip from degraded to full TITSUP* over span of four days

Re: What's the point of a pilot phase

upvote for space dicks! (or should that be Dicks in Spaaaaaace....?)

Jocasta? Jocasta! Don't ram that trolley into the man: New tech promises an end to this scenario

Why not homing trolleys

Ford should work on trolleys that drive themselves back to the their owning supermarket, then we wouldn't have to put up with them loitering around the bus stop out the front of our house a kilometre from the shop, or in the laneway to the railway station (I refuse to say train station...)

They're BAAACK: Windows 10 nagware team loads trebuchet with annoying reminders to GTFO Windows 7

When MS wakes up and updates Win 7 to Win 9

If MS haven't woken up and released the proper update from Win 7 to Win 9, by Jan 2020, then its goodbye Windows and my computers will just boot to Linux Mint. Mint works for me, email, browser Arduino, Open SCAD etc..