Posts by Is It Me

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

Re: Irony…

Pretty sure I have seen at least one film/tv show which used the 1USD bill cleaned up to create higher denominations.

Can't think what it was though, so probably not a great one.

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

Re: Under construction

Dreamweaver used to come with an option to strip out the extra code from Word (and possibly Frontpage)

ZX Spectrum: Q&A with some of the folks who worked on legendary PC

It was a personal computer in that it was designed to be used as one per person rather than mainframes with dumb terminals.

BOFH: Something's consuming 40% of UPS capacity – and it's coming from the beancounters' office

Re: A possible solution

No need to do that, powercycling 200 times has already done the job.

IoT biz Insteon goes silent, smart home gear plays dumb

Re: I'll allow myself a smug grin

As far as I am aware the Z-Wave and Zigbee kit works with local controllers that don't need an internet connection to work.

My 9 year old Vera Z-Wave controller no longer connects to their web servers and still works perfectly using the web interface built in to it.

Dell creates portable workstation that meets Evo consumer laptop spec

Re: Dells

Thanks,

I came to see if anyone had checked if they had a built in Ethernet port, and it is a shame that they don't.

The month I worked for DEADHEAD: Yes, that was their job title

Re: junk-food punnet of chips and gravy with cheese

I am in my 40s and only remember one place that did it in newspaper, and that was somewhere on the Gower Peninsula in Wales.

They must have had a contact at a printing press as the newspaper pages were never complete, often missing photos or whole articles.

UK Home Office dangles £20m for national gun licence database system

Re: Why bother at all ?

You can own a ".50cal sniper rifle" in the UK, you just need to have good reason, which is long range target shooting on a range that allows it.

There was an attempt to make them illegal to own a few years ago but the people that own and shoot them were able to push enough evidence in to the review that they were kept as legal.

The other types of firearms that were made illegal were type of rapid(ish) firing ones.

Ransomware puts New Mexico prison in lockdown: Cameras, doors go offline

Re: "The attack took automatic security doors offline"

You mean all those films/tv shows showing that all locks unlock at any form of attack aren't accurate, who knew?

Back to school for Microsoft as it prises apart the repairable Surface Laptop SE

Re: Good as far as it goes

I think you under estimate how long schools will want to eke out their investment even in "cheap" computing devices.

They will likely be buying a set for an entire class to be able to use at once, so that will be in the region of 30 of them.

I have been involved in upgrading very old desktops and laptops with SSD and RAM upgrades for complete sets of 30 in a previous job.

Being able to extend their useful life by another couple of years will be important most of the time.

Time to party like it's 2002: Acura and Honda car clocks knocked back 20 years by bug

88mph I believe...

Uber's gig economy business model takes a blow from London legal double-whammy

Re: Not ride sharing

I am not an Uber fan, but I believe the original idea was that it was a way of setting up ride share that shifted when it realised it could make more with the ride hailing/taxi option

Amazon India execs questioned after sellers allegedly use site to smuggle marijuana

Re: Always wondered who buys those £4K books

There are rumours that they are used for money transfers and laundering.

Also it can be down to a pricing algorithm going screwy

A lightbulb moment comes too late to save a mainframe engineer's blushes

Re: "Is it plugged in?"

another "correct" reply is to ask them to check where it is plugged in (what colour the port is etc.)

That is less an issue with checklists and more an issue with poor management/organisation

A tiny island nation has put the rights to .tv up for grabs – but what’s this? Problematic contract clauses? Again?

Re: I have too much time on my hands...

I believe TFA = The "F" Article", I have seen the F to mean full, but usually not.

UK funds hydrogen-powered cargo submarine to torpedo maritime emissions by 2050

Re: Why a submarine?

And the start and end are likely to be in ports, which are usually in a harbour that is designed to shelter the vessels from the weather

Fix five days of server failure with this one weird trick

Re: The "inspector"

There used to be a video that compared what happened when you took the heat sink and fan off and Intel CPU and an AMD CPU running a game.

The Intel based one started glitching and crashed before it had any permanent issues, the AMD let out the magic smoke.

Magna Carta mayhem: Protesters lay siege to Edinburgh Castle, citing obscure Latin text that has never applied in Scotland

Re: Castling

Depending on what border you are near you will hear different versions, usually it is expressed as within a towns walls after midnight.

First time I heard was about shooting Welshman in Shrewsbury, and also heard it for Chester (again shooting the Welsh)

Right to repair shouldn't exist – not because it's wrong but because it's so obviously right

Re: Even maintenance can be hard

I went swimming with out realising that my Pixel 2 was in my shorts pocket, only found out when my wife pointed it out on the bottom of the pool

Picked it up blew out the USB-C port and kept using it until a year or so later it fell foul of the camera issue that they were known for.

I also spend time on boats and sometimes get wet enough that I would worry about my phone if it wasn't water proof.

I realise my use case isn't yours but waterproofing can be a good thing, and doesn't mean that it can't still be repairable as I have various waterproof items with user changeable batteries etc.

Exsparko-destructus! What happens when wand waving meets extremely poor wiring

Re: Reversed polarity

I have seen more wall sockets wired up the wrong way then extension leads

McDonald's AI drive-thru bot accused of breaking biometrics privacy law

Re: Success Rate

Not sure that the touch screen user is in the UK as I think Wendys has only just re-launched over here.

ASUS baffles customer by telling them thermal pad thickness is proprietary

Re: At this point I wonder exactly which provider makes sense

With phones Nokia now is nothing to do with Nokia then, Nokia phones now is HMD with Nokia now doing other things.

Google to revive RSS support in Chrome for Android

I pretty much just use RSS for following a few webcomics now, oh and BOFH just in case I don't notice it when I have a scan through El Reg and find that the free level of Feedly works for that

Nvidia nerfs RTX 3080, 3070, 3060 Ti GPUs to shoo away Ethereum miners

If you read the first comment it tells you, they are doing 3d modelling.

I got myself a 3070 based computer as I am intending to do some photogrammetry in the near future (and play some games too) and the NVidia cards CUDA cores make a big difference to the time taken to do the work.

Microsoft says Outlook hit by 'email visibility issues' – as in, they're blank

Re: 2021

This is for the Office 365 versions of the desktop software, they are designed to constantly update themselves and are the software option that MS is pushing.

For example if you work somewhere that has the Office 365 E3 or above (or Education equivalent) each user gets 5 licenses to install the desktop suite, but only of the automatically updating version.

Appeals court nixes online blueprint sharing ban on 3D-printed 'ghost guns'

Re: Bah!

Almost certainly true in the UK, you just need to go through a lot more paperwork than in "The Land of the Free", my custom 10/22 (not sure if there are any Ruger parts in it apart from the magazines) was less than £250, and that included a scope and moderator (silencer or suppressor or what ever you want to call it).

I think in "The Land of the Free" you would need to spend that much on the license for the suppressor.

Apple faces another suit over its allegedly misleading water resistance claims

Re: Apple only needs to show...

I had an argument with a car dealer that a car I got from them (2nd hand, but only 6 months old from a main dealer) wasn't fix for purpose as I asked if it had full iPod control and was told it did.

After I tried it I found it only supported iPods via bluetooth (no track listings etc, but can pause and skip) or AUX in, no control from the car at all.

I said I would be returning it for a full refund if they didn't resolve it, in the end they got an external company in to do an upgrade on the car.

It is an obscure feature that was important to me (I listen to Audible audio books from an iPod classic when driving any distance) and I specifically asked about it before making the deal and would have waited for another one of the same model but with the factory fitted upgrade to come in.

How do you save an ailing sales pitch? Just burn down the client's office with their own whiteboard

Re: " 220V on which South Korea operates"

And (at least in 1996) South Korea.

It took me 3 or 4 days to work out why a digitiser connected to a CCTV camera wasn't working (this was part of an animation line test system set up on an Amiga), it had all worked when several together in the UK installed the software and tested. I had even labelled all the connectors with matching sticky dots to make it as easy as possible to put it together.

Several had been sent to 2 different animation companies in Seoul and none were working.

I got nearly a week in Seoul, but only 2 half days to look around as it took so long to find out that it was 60Hz and there was a switch in the CCTV camera that needed changing if it wasn't running on 50Hz

You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right? Trust... but verify

South Korea (at least in the mid-90s) had both 110v and 2x0v supplies, but even the 2x0v mains ran at 60Hz.

Loser Trump's last financial disclosure docs reveal Tim Cook gave him $5,999 Mac Pro, the 'first' made in Texas

Re: I was wondering...

He will sign multiple copies of each thing, and use one pen for each.

The pens are often used as gifts saying that they were used to sign x in to law.

100GB doesn't always cut it in these remote-working times so Microsoft has upped OneDrive file size upload limit to 250GB

Re: All these unnecessary limitations

I think this is talking mostly about sharing files across sites, so if you are working with someone to edit a video one person might do the colour grading and someone else adding the audio etc.

Pizza and beer night out the window, hours trying to sort issue, then a fresh pair of eyes says 'See, the problem is...'

Re: Proof reader

Our previous helpdesk software did this, so you would copy and paste an email address and it would fail and all sorts of other oddities

The curse of knowing a bit about IT: 'Could you just...?' and 'No I haven't changed anything'

Re: Printers attached to PC's

This makes me think you might be a rebreather diver (I know there are other places that use 3 sensors and voting logic)

Cats: Not a fan favourite when the critters are draped around an office packed with tech

Re: Dead mouse

We once lost one of our cats for about 4 days, turns out it had been exploring a near by house that was being renovated and had gotten himself boarded up under the floor.

The workmen had to lift a bit of floor and out popped the cat, came straight home and ate and drank it's own body weight.

They can survive longer than you think

Happy birthday to the Nokia 3310: 20 years ago, it seemed like almost everyone owned this legendary mobile

Again the 3210 had no aerial, so should be the one that got the love.

Oh what a cute little animation... OH MY GOD. (Not acceptable, even in the '80s)

Re: Adult floppies...

Ha ha ha ha. You dumb b@$tard. It's not a schooner... it's a Sailboat

Folk sure like to stick electric toothbrush heads in their ears: True wireless stereo sales buck coronavirus trends

Sell them, that is what I did with the earphones that came with my iPod years ago.

Since Apple sells them for a painful price you can get a decent amount of money from an Apple fan.

A memo from the distant future... June 2022: The boss decides working from home isn't the new normal after all

Re: It could work out if love comes from two sides

One thing to consider, is the costs of working from home will vary with the seasons for most people.

In the UK in winter the heating bills will go up considerably, my heating comes on for a little bit in the morning for house to be comfortable to wash and dress then goes off until shortly before I would get home from work.

If I am working from home come winter the heating will be on all day.

With similar issues for places that need cooling to be comfortable in summer.

Don't Zoom off elsewhere: Google plugs video-chat service Meet into Gmail as user eyes start wandering

You can get Teams for free, just sign up with any email account that isn't associated with an MS account/service

Bose shouts down claims that it borked noise cancellation firmware to sell more headphones

Re: Never, Ever Buying Bose Again...

Is the answer not in the article, that they didn't actually change anything to do with the ANC.

I have seen this in desktop support, you tell users that you are going to do something and don't do it for some reason. Suddenly they are all logging tickets saying "since the change such and such hasn't worked", even though there was no change.

What ever it was either is working fine, or had been broken for ages but the idea that we had changed something prompt them to notice it.

Where's the best place to add Mentos to Diet Coke for the most foam? How big are the individual bubbles? Has science gone too far?

Re: Back in the old days

Mint imperials work very well, in fact from the unscientific testing I did a few years ago they work better than Mentos.

And cheap diet cola also works at least as well as name brand diet cola

Marriott Hotels hacked AGAIN: Two compromised employee logins abused to siphon off 5.2m guests' personal info

Re: 2FA FTW!

Having the customers turn on 2FA wouldn't have made any difference, having staff use it probably would

Yeah, that Zoom app you're trusting with work chatter? It lives with 'vampires feeding on the blood of human data'

Re: What are the alternatives?

Same here, used it for a few years at work and found it to be reliable and works with our existing Polycom kit, which Teams won't

Stuck at home? Why not let an edgy, GPU-boosted slice of Azure keep you company?

Re: "Wooden box market"

Shouldn't that be artisanal wooded racks hand crafted by the monks on a Himalayan mountainside?

Reach for the sky: Pixar founders win Turing Award for pioneering 3D animation – and getting rid of jagged edges

Re: So well deserved !!!

If that was at the BFI I went to that too

Oh, we may have found the COVID-19 silver lining: Coronavirus pandemic halts Xerox hostile takeover of HP

Re: Well that's new

It looks like part of the reason they are stopping is that they can't go out and meet & greet the current HP shareholders at the bribery events (like expensive dinners etc.)

Hey, friends. We know it's a crazy time for the economy, but don't forget to enable 2FA for payments by Saturday

Re: Not on amazon

I believe the rules are for the bank/card issuer.

Amazon have taken on the financial risk of card holder not present for a long time by not asking for the CV2 number. They decided that any loss is worth it to minimise the effort from their customers

Deliveroo UK adds 'Don't interact with the help' option for when ordering a burger

Re: 10,000 or 596?

It is quite simple, the number of cases were someone has been tested and tested positive is 596.

10,000 is the expected number of actual cases that there in the UK allowing for the fact that the majority of people with symptoms aren't being tested and allowing for people who are infected and not yet showing symptoms.

Computer, deactivate self-destruct system requirement, says Sonos... were it on a starship in space, and not a smart-speaker slinger

I am probably coming across as a Sonos apologist, but for those who have suggested possible alternatives none of them come near the Sonos experience and especially not for non-technical people.

The multi room side of Sonos gives perfectly in sync sound across rooms, the set up is user friendly and simple, adding music services is also user friendly and simple.

The sound quality out of the "Play" speakers is good enough for most people under most circumstances and the "Connect" is there for those that want better quality from their existing speakers and amps.

Management seems set on destroying the reputation of the product with these announcements and then retractions though