Posts by El blissett

Microsoft slices Windows 11 update size by 40% (no, not by cutting hardware support)

That would explain why the space age combination of an NVME boot drive and a RAID 0 storage array flunked the Windows 11 install out. If only I'd been using more common hardware, like a punch card and a magnetic tape, the slimmed down installer would have worked.

Fairphone makes wireless earbuds less foul, by charging batteries carefully

Very tempting for all my needs until I looked up how heavy it is (they don't say on their website). It's heavier than my Xiaomi Poco which is a real brick to hold for extended periods of time. Still, this is the closest I've come to getting one since the original.

Five words everyone wants to hear: Microsoft has 'visually refreshed' Office

Would rather they "visually refreshed" Outlook by completely rebuilding it to be functional, competent, and compatible with actual emails that people send, but that sounds too hard.

Six years in the making, Vivaldi Mail arrives alongside version 4.0 of the company's browser

Sticking with eM client until O13/V4 has exchange support, but watching closely. Vivaldi has rapidly advanced to the point where I don't need to run multiple browsers / software / profiles to get what I need - so just like Opera used to be.

Congestion or a Christmas cock-up? A Register reader throws himself under the bus

A wholesome story with a happy ending - Merry Christmas!

Freenode IRC staff resign en masse, unhappy about new management

.... an IRC service still had staff?

Which? warns that more than 2 million Brits are on old and insecure routers – wagging a finger at Huawei-made kit

Re: Huawei

Nothing nefarious about Huawei's kit or practices. Just that in a reverse of a recent Line of Duty finale, the world + dog would rather believe it's a red conspiracy rather than utter incompetence and laziness on the part of Huawei.

My isp just replaced my Huawei router and all the connection drop-outs and random packet-caused resets have vanished. I feel bad for all the times they called out Openreach when it was a PEBCAK.

Yes, there's nothing quite like braving the M4 into London on the eve of a bank holiday just to eject a non-bootable floppy

Not the most stimulating work day, but there are certainly harder ways to earn a wage (and a tip, and a bonus).

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

This - it's an IEC 13 cable OR it's a kettle cable - if you think they're the same it's your turn to chuck out the molten remains.

Leaked memo suggests LG is thinking about quitting the smartphone biz in 2021

My LG v30 (2017 flagship) is the most durable flagship handset I have ever owned. Barely a scratch on it despite dropping it maybe twice a week, and the battery life is still as good as new. The software and security updates delivered have been a running joke with LG and never really went anywhere despite their promise to improve.

While I'd love to have upgraded to something like the V60 or the G8S, they were simply too expensive and didn't offer enough of a reason to switch off of the V30. And LG's V-series niche in hi-res audio, while still top of the pack in terms of quality and engineering has reasonably similar technical equivalence in Xiaomis and other manufacturers selling better handsets that won't last as long but are half the price and run modern chipsets/Android.

LG as a manufacturer need to innovate to show off what they can do in terms of screens for other manufacturers, hence experiments like the V50 dual screen and the Wing flip screen, but it's not a commercial consumer oriented strategy for survival in a challenging market.

The engineer lurking behind the curtain: Musical monitors on a meagre IT budget

I definitely used the screensaver speed trick once.

McAfee seeks $2bn return to stock market after Intel unpleasantness

Who out there has positive views of the McAfee brand??

When I think of McAfee, I either remember the omnipresent crapware of the early 00s, or John McAfee waving a gun around and absconding from Latin America with a murder charge.

NHS COVID-19 app's first weekend: With fundamental testing flaw ironed out, bugs remaining are relatively trivial

Not much point blurring the address underneath. The QR codes are so huge because, for some reason, the QR code encodes the full plain text details of the address of the venue rather than an ID... meaning poor Adil will need to set up an entirely new one as his checkin data is worthless now.

Microsoft confirms pursuit of TikTok after Satya Nadella chats to Donald Trump

Re: Tik Update Tok

Tik-In Tock: Satya's Undercooked Purchase

Someone made an AI that predicted gender from email addresses, usernames. It went about as well as expected

Great. Now, can they shut down the ad targeting gender AI as well? I get dresses punted at me several times a month before the content abruptly shifts to more male coded things.

BT and Serco among bidders competing to run Britain's unfortunately named Skynet military satellite system

Tactical Networking? Thought that was when you use black velcro to hold a broken cable in.

Ooo, a mystery bit of script! Seems legit. Let's see what happens when we run it

Sure I have, but never on a networked machine.

Of course, if someone I know emailed me with a touching romantic executable message in the 90s, I guess I'd run that at work just to see what it was as well.

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

Another vote for Edge Lords from me.

Whoooooa, this node is on fire! Forget Ceph, try the forgotten OpenStack storage release 'Crispy'

Re: Back when OpenStack was launched with NASA, you literally ...

My uncle was permanently drunk from his early teens to his sad early end and still managed to fit in an unrealistically successful career in rocket science - software programming for ballistic missiles.

Ooh, my machine is SO much faster than yours... Oh, wait, that might be a bit of a problem...

Tired El Reg Subeditor: Suspect this ought to be in the Who, Me? category and not Data Centre...

Git365. Git for Teams. Quatermass and the Git Pit. GitHub simply won't do now Microsoft has it

Codeplex for Business?

Ubuntu wants to slurp PCs' vital statistics – even location – with new desktop installs

Me at work: Bloody European Union legislation making me change all my perfectly secure processes...

Me reading this: Choo choo mother forkers, all aboard the GDPR express to a brighter, opt-in only future

IBM's next turnaround tool is ... a new open-source font?

Ah, the Nokia approach to disaster management.

OMG, dad, you're so embarrassing! Are you P2P file sharing again?

Well colour me baffled that The Teens are going back to essentially home taping when P2P was/is such an efficient way of getting what you want, especially for rare and out of print records that The Man deems no longer suitable for public consumption.

This is entirely Googletube's fault.