Posts by Is It Me

Scientists suggest possible solution to space-induced bone loss

Have you seen that they did a graphic novel of at least one of the Stainless Steel Rat stories?

Chap blew up critical equipment on his first day – but it wasn't his volt

Re: Gateway computer had identical keyboard and mouse sockets

A reasonably number of motherboards had a fuse on one or both of the PS/2 sockets that would blow if it was plugged/unplugged while live.

They usually weren't designed to be easily replaced either

Re: ... because Japan.

South Korea has (or at least had in the mid '90s) outlets there were 240v 60hz as well as one that were 110v 60hz.

This lead to an issue with some kit that had been sent out to animations houses as it had an analogue CCTV camera that used the frequency of the voltage for some sort of timing signal.

It took nearly a week of investigations before a replacement power supply came in for the digitiser that was marked for local use, then a dip switch change on the camera got them working for at least 2 different places that over there that purchased the system.

I got a week in Seoul (but only about a day to look around as it took that long to work out the issue).

We all scream for ice cream – so why are McDonald's machines always broken?

Re: Better to find a Mr Whippy van

The ones I have seen in the last couple of years all take card payment now.

Indian telecoms leaps from 2G, to 4G, to 6G – on a single day

Re: I wonder

When travelling to a country where roaming isn't included in my plan I take an older phone with me to put the local SIM in and then use it as a hotspot for data,

If you have a phone that supports an eSIM you can now get an app that will sell you a local 1 week, 1 month etc plan via the eSIM (not used it yet as I haven't been outside the EU since I have had a phone that supports eSIMS)

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

That is not the description of a first world country in the twenty first century.

That is a county using at best a late twentieth century system.

Security? Working servers? Who needs those when you can have a shiny floor?

Re: Clean keyboards

I was using acetone to clean some superglue off some magnets at my desk, a few drops splashed on the hand rest of my keyboard and it now has some interesting shaped melted spots.

Sanding them down a little has helped disguise them, but some of them still look like cigarette burns (I don't smoke)

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

I am pretty sure that I have mentioned it before, but that are dive computers with user replaceable batteries and these are things that are designed to keep their waterproof at depths of 100 meters and deeper.

This legit Android app turned into mic-snooping malware – and Google missed it

Re: Legit Google Play apps getting compromised happens fairly often

I am on a Google Pixel phone and when using an app for the first time it asks about permissions and gives options that include "this time only" and "only while using App", it also regularly prompts for removing permissions from apps that I haven't used for a while.

Brits start 'em young with 20% of tots 'owning' a smartphone

Re: "by the time they are 12 it's something like 97 percent"

From when GCSEs came in you used to do coursework (which counted towards your final grade) as a mix of in school and at home, that might be essays for English, paintings for art etc.

My understanding from the comment was that now all of the coursework part is now being done under supervision in school and not a mix of in school and at home.

Requiem for Google Reader, dead for a decade but not forgotten

Outlook

Even Outlook supported RSS feeds and may still do.

As Outlook was were I used to have to spend most of my time (as ex-employer didn't have any helpdesk software) I used to use that.

I do you Feedly, but I now pretty much use RSS just to follow a few webcomics so don't heavily rely on it

Once AI can create endless viral videos, good luck switching off social media

Re: YouTube Shorts

YouTube seems to have been pushing the channels to create these things, several good channels seem to be taking clips from their main videos and releasing them as shorts for a few days before the main video release.

I think that is because the logarithms push channels that post content more often and so they will do better releasing this little videos every day or so than just the main video once a week or so.

Cop warrant orders Ring to cough up footage from inside this guy's home

Re: Video on Ring's servers is the problem

The difference being that the owner gets to see the warrant and know what it being looked for/at

McDonald's pulls plug on Wi-Fi, starts playing classical music to soothe yobs

Re: Classical music calms?

As someone who has worked retail in the past, you really need to think of the workers.

Even looping a whole CD will drive the workers insane by the end of one working day, let alone a week of it, at least now you can store enough music to keep it different over the course of a day

Live Nation CFO on Taylor Swift ticket chaos: Don't blame me, bots made me crazy

Not everything has to be managed by market forces, why should ticket prices by managed that way?

If the law was that the secondary market could only charge face value plus (as a random figure) 10% the on;y people to suffer would be the scalpers.

It would reduce the pressure from bots as they could no-longer mark everything up by 1000%, and fans would be more likely to get a ticket to an event they actually want to see.

Venues and artists would lose nothing, and possibly gain as the people at the event might have more money for food/drink and merchandise

Remember the Ozone hole? The satellite that spotted it just caused a space junk scare

Re: Safe decommissionning

I believe it is now, but in the '80s it wasn't.

There are several companies trying to get money for safely de-orbiting older satellites, don't know if any of them have actually started to do anything practical yet though

Oh, no: The electric cars at CES are getting all emotional

Re: fratzonic chambered exhaust

But only on the inside of the car, you want the driver to suffer not everyone else

BBC is still struggling with the digital switch, says watchdog

Re: Slow moving

Audible (at least on Android) doesn't stream, it downloads all or most of the file first.

I haven't had any real issues with BBC iPlayer here or using VPN back here when abroad, I don't use the BBC Sounds app but wouldn't rely on streaming when driving.

Those screws on the Apple Watch Ultra are a red herring

Re: Do any analog watches

Relatively easy and people can do them at home, but more importantly pretty much any jewellers or watch shop can do a 100m/200m battery replacement and a decent number can even do a pressure test afterwards.

There are a fair few dive computers (and I have one of them) where replacing the battery is a user task as they are designed with a battery compartment that is sealed from the rest of the device, admittedly these were noticeably bigger and thicker than a smart watch

Re: Muppets

This is one can function underwater and you can rent a dive computer app for it (monthly or annually), or just use it as a depth gauge straight out of the box without any extra apps.

Apple to compel workers to spend '3 days a week' in the office

Re: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who insisted...

These comments aren't anti-right wing politics they are anti-useless Prime Minister who has broken the law and lied about it while Prime Minister

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