Posts by Is It Me

Oh Brother. Printer giant denies dirty toner tricks as users cry foul

And that is why people were buying Brother laser printers, a bit more expensive to start with but can be left for months or years and still work and cheap compatible toners which make the printing costs tiny

101 fun things to do with a locked Kindle e-reader

I believe that they still let you download to your computer with the Kindle programs on the computers, and this probably continues to allow you to remove DRM from your purchased books.

What has stopped is the download from the Amazon webiste in the bit to manage your device and content,

Nolanverse Batmobile leaps barrier between film and reality – but it'll cost you

It is possible to have not enough space for the toys you need, but not possible to not need more toys.

Bandai Namco reportedly tries to bore staff into quitting, skirting Japan’s labor laws

Re: Not just in Japan

Happened to Bart's teacher in a Simpsons episode

No, really, please ban Chinese DJI drones from America's skies, senators are urged

Re: Here in the EU generally and specifically Spain

I haven't looked at Spain, but in France anywhere that is considered part of a town is off-limits even to the sub-250g drones, it also has a much lower maximum height of 50m vs the 120m or 150m I have seen elsewhere.

That said France the operator ID is free and lasts 5 years, it is also valid across the EU, which the UK one isn't since Brexit.

I have been looking in to it before taking a drone on holiday.

I also looked at Egypt and THERE they are basically banned, and will be confiscated from luggage on arrival as a tourist

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Re: super thread drift.. but..

It maybe down to badly created Start/Stop systems, if I take my foot of the break after the car has turned off automatically it restarts it.

I can fix this PC, boss, but I’ll need to play games for hours to do it

Re: Doooom!

Surprised I had to scroll this far down to get to this.

Set up with cheats so everyone had the chaingun and could keep topping up ammo, if a while of everyone running around constantly shooting each other with that and it was probably OK

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Re: Nice day for a trip to Scotland

Used to have that at a couple of ADSL sites, once every few months the connection would drop and just doing the automated BT line check (you called a number and asked them to do a test on another phone number) would fix it every time. But if you called and asked if there was a line fault there would be a pause and be told that there are was no errors but the line would have started working anyway.

How the Xbox Series X fridge chilled our holiday spirits

Re: Thermoelectric fridges

Once you have a 3d printer almost every problem looks like it can be solved with one.

What's the golden age of online services? Well, now doesn't suck

Re: Ah the good old days

I know some people use their mobile so rarely that PAYG still works for them, but when you can get unlimited calls, unlimited text and some data (the I looked at was 4GB) for £6 per month it seems that that PAYG is really becoming unlikely for anyone in employment how actually uses their phone at all.

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)