* Posts by The Dogs Meevonks

555 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Aug 2017

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Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

Woosh

That's the oh so obvious sound of you entirely missing the sarcasm that my post was dripping with... did you even see what/who I was replying too?

Hint - it was the troll with the amphibious username.

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge
Trollface

We could extend that to people who vote tory, or EDL or the reform party... perhaps we should just burn them at the stake like witches... thjnk of that lovely smell of gammon wafting over the land.

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

Burglars love cutting them

I used to live next to a Rugby club... every time it got burgled (which was often) they'd lift the manhole cover for the telephone cables and just cut them to disable the alarm... Not just the rugby clubs though... the WHOLE LOT.

We'd wake up on a Sunday morning every couple of months to no phone service... and BT would only repair the ones that actually managed to tell them. They wouldn't repair ALL of the cut ones at the same time. So anyone who was away or out and didn't know had to wait until they actually discovered it and was able to log it with BT...

The poor guy was back and forth repairing cables in all weathers at all times of the day because of this. It probably affected up to 60-70 homes at a time.

Kremlin accuses America of plotting cyberattack on Russian voting systems

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

Shocked... shocked I tell you... well not that shocked

Every accusation is a confession of their own plans

Chrome users – get an alert when extensions are in danger of falling into wrong hands

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Trollface

Re: Money Money Money

Gotta love those VC morons who haven't got a clue... twitter has been around for what... 18yrs and has never turned a profit in that entire time... and some even bigger moron came along and paid 44 billion for it... and it's now worth about 1/4 of that thanks to the genius in charge.

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

The best advice to chrome users

Stop using chrome... use something else that's better for you

World-plus-dog booted out of Facebook, Instagram, Threads

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Trollface

Re: And for just a short period of space time

Woosh!... that's the sound of the George Carlin line going over yours and everyone else's head.

Also.. I assume you meant 'your' and not 'you'... unless you were trying to say 'you bellend' instead of bell curve

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

Re: And for just a short period of space time

Think of the stupidest person you know... then realise that 50% of people are stupider than that.

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

Here in Bedford Falls, we don't have social media, every one is friendly and kind.

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Trollface

Re: Food for thought

Only the ones who live in their mom's basements.

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Trollface

Re: Not So Brilliant

'If I was' going to give a shit about anything... It'd be Midge ure

What a surprise! Apple found a way to deliver browser engine and app store choice

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Re: My phone, my life.

I actually have very few apps installed on my phoned... aside from one for accessing Mastodon and a few messaging apps signal/telegram/whatsapp (the last one for family who refuse to use anything else), amazon, ebay, netflix and a couple of apps for my heating and solar/battery system.... banking apps, google wallet and the kindle app (for my own books, not bought through amazon)

I check what permissions are required before installing, don't install stuff filled with ads or that need excessive permissions, I use the duckduckgo privacy app to block tracking and so forth from other apps... I have a music app for listening to music (no streaming for me) and an app to connect to my Emby mediaserver.

It's a pretty small number of apps when I look at what others have... most have at least 6-10 times as many... and most of them aren't used but still allowed to track and harvest their data.

Elon and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad legal week

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Re: Odd, isn't it?

Well he does live in a vacuum much like the inside of his head.

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

I may have the most evil story

I worked for a company that I left in 2004

My immediate line manager was an utter arsehole. Incompetent, a liar, and surprisingly a male misandrist.

He did things like lie to managers in other depts about people applying for jobs internally from his team, alter holiday forms to remove dates and encourage every one to snitch on everyone else for the tiniest of things. he once convened a meeting to discuss exactly why a member of his team was seen eating a packet of crisps from the vending machine, whilst waiting for the kettle to boil when they were making cups of tea for themselves and others on their team... That level of petty, arrogance is hard to tolerate. So I quit and left them in the lurch because he threw a strop and demanded I be removed the same day... I laughed because I'd given them 2 months notice and they had to pay for the full 2 months of garden leave. :)

But the story goes back about 6 months earlier.

I'd become friendly with a girl in another dept... one thing led to another and for a couple of months we had a bit of a fling. I knew she'd been seeing some married guy but had broken it off because he refused to leave his wife.

Well... guess who that married man was.... add adulterer to his list of wankerish accomplishments.

After the xmas break, I came back to find he'd actually left his wife and was now shacked up with this girl

On the day I left... which was also the same day I handed in my notice. he came up to me in the lobby and held out his hand with the smuggest smirk on his face and wished me good luck.

I gripped his hand... pulled him a little closer and said... Thanks... oh, and sorry I fucked your mistress

His grip went limp... his smirk vanished... his face went purple... and that was the moment he decided to take a swing at me and only managed to brush my shoulder... in front of about 10-12 people.

I turned to the reception staff stood 10ft away and said, would you mind calling the police to report an assault.

He quickly disappeared off home... HR tried to placate me (and failed)... and as I pointed out... I don't work there any more.

Last I heard he'd been fired and one of the best snitches got promoted to his role... a few months later I was contacted to see if I'd be willing to go back as they were having trouble retaining staff. But I was in a new job with a 50% pay increase

The company still exists... but it had to sell the big shiny HQ it built and now exists as a tiny fraction of it's former self.

Palantir boss says outfit's software the only reason the 'goose step' has not returned to Europe

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

Conservative?

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

Re: They could have spent the money on legal migration instead and would have not died.

The tories have made it as near to impossible for anyone to make their way to the UK legally as any kind of refugee. They created this mess and as usual refuse to accept responsibility... it's all the refugees fault, their evil and their little boats are a threat to everyone else life.

Or as I like to say these days.

Conservatism is the irrational and illogical fear that somewhere, somehow, somebody a conservative feels is inferior to them... is being treated equally.

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The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge
Trollface

It's phonetically spelt the same as it's pronunciation

THAT

City council megaproject to spend millions for manual work Oracle system was meant to do

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Trollface

Re: You would have to wonder...

They could employ lots of people called Cratchett too.

Actually.. scrap that. If you take into account historical inflation... Bob Cratchets wages today would actually be higher than the minimum wage.

Scrooge was actually a generous employer paying a living wage.

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

They can apply to the govt raise it further... the govt have basically made a blanket agreement with all of them to say yes to whatever they want.

There's only a few counciles in the UK who are not raising council tax above the threshold. We're getting an 8.6% rise here.

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Trollface

Mike Godwins second law

Anyone who uses 'woke' as a pejorative, 99% of the time turns out to be a fuckhead.

Don't blame me (or him)... it's science.

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

Well, the national avg for a typical home is around the £280k mark I think. So 200,000,000 will buy 714 homes... before any of the other costs/expenses are taking into account... so you could probably lower that 10%... 643 homes.

If they build them... they could build about 1000 as (according to a home builder family friend) about 2/3 of the sale price is the build cost... But that's not factoring in any infrastructure that might be needed... ya know like roads, sewers and so forth.

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

BCC = Systemic incompetence

I went to a gig in Brum in the latter part of 2022. By my own admission, I never knew about the ULEZ zone and my satnav was darting me around backstreets to avoid rush hour traffic... so I never even noticed signs about it.

Because I'd moved a few weeks earlier, and because of the postal strikes. My V5 was delayed in being updated and returned with the new address... and also because of postal strikes and mail redirection... any mail could take 3-4 weeks to get to us via the old address.

So in the new years... 32 days after being sent. A PCN arrived. This PCN gives you 28 days to respond, 14 if you want to pay the reduced charge.

I was happy to pay the £60, and informed the council of the mistake issuing the PCN to the correct address and asked for them to reissue it correctly.

They ignored it for 12 months.

Then in Jan of 2024, I get a letter trying to charge me triple the amount plus... they apologised for the delay in responding but stated they could disregard anything I said because it was longer than 28days. They also refused to issue an NoR which you need to appeal to the tribunal.

So I was advised to wait for the charge notice to be issued and a claim made through the traffic enforcement centre.

When that arrived (all of a sudden BCC are desperate to try and recover money for some reason) I filled out the witness statement telling them why and that they'd been asked to reissue to the correct address.

TEC cancelled the PCN... now BCC have to waste more money and resources deciding if they want to 'correctly' issue the PCN like they should have done 15 months ago. They've lost the fee for logging it with the TEC too.

All because of incompetence and bureaucracy, desperately trying to recover £190 instead of the £60 that was owed... how much more was wasted in work hours after ignoring it for twelve months, reviewing the reasons and deciding... to ignore their own mistake as justification for trying to screw over people for triple the amount... only to have to cancel the entire PCN and then waste more money/resources deciding if they want to reissue it to try and recover £60.

Web archive user's $14k BigQuery bill shock after running queries on 'free' dataset

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Trollface

Pretty sure some of those 'Reddit' experts also have El reg accounts too.

A small Alaska town wants a big bronze Riker

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

The only local 'celebrity' in my new home town... is the son of a local business owner who's a thug that beats up little old pensioners and gets away with it because of daddies connections and payouts.

Rice isn't nice for drying your iPhone, according to Apple

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Translation:

How dare you try to fix your device instead of giving us our rightfully owned money that's in your possession.

Virgin Media to stand up rival network operator to BT Openreach

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Re: More BS from Vermin

They did that in the city I grew up in (Milton Keynes) and it wasn't fit for anything. It also meant that for 30yrs the promise of bringing cable to the older parts of the city never happened... until they finally got around to laying FTTH a few years back.

Then I moved... and now my avg speeds are about 40Mb and FTTH isn't coming here for a couple more years.

Honestly can't wait... to tell sky to go f*ck themselves over their shitty service.

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

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Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ

Thanks for the suggestion, but my dad had parkinsons and lewy body dementia. I gace up work for 7yrs to help my mum care for him and know exactly how bad it can get. The thought of having to go through it again and lose another 7yrs or so of my life... terrifies me. So, whilst it was too late to do anything about POA for him, we got it sorted for my mum about 10yrs ago. both me and my sister have POA if needed.

It's worth doing for parents... don't leave it too late.

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Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ

I despair at the regression my mum is undergoing since getting covid 2yrs ago.

After 20yrs of being online, understanding the basics of computers and so forth... She now can't tell the difference between email and various messaging services.

Last year, she had some scammer message her through facebook via a compromised account of a friend... She mentioned to me that she'd not heard from him in ages and that he was 'very chatty' which was unusual to me.

After taking a look at the messages... I spotted all of the signs of the build up to the scam and told her so, I said to email him or call him to let him know his account had been hacked.

She messaged him... through facebook... to the scammer to tell him about the scammer.

Cue facepalm emoji.

I had her come to live with me 18 months ago as she's now in her late 70's and needs some extra help... at least 5 times a week, I have to deal with some ultra simple task that she's no longer capable of understanding... I can't tell if it's cognitive decline due to age, covid or early onset dementia... and she point blank refuses to see anyone about it to investigate. Which makes my life 10 times harder and more stressful than it needs to be.

I live in constant fear that she's going to be so utterly oblivious to scammers that will rob her blind... she blindly believes everything she reads on facebook... spends countless hrs each day glued to her phone and has shown me dozens of AI generated (and obviously fake) images that she thinks are real and show amazing and impossible things. I had to reset her phone to factory because she'd installed and given permissions to so much shit that her txts were utterly broken and she couldn't receive anything via text message anymore after giving some facebook/meta app permission to take over control of everything... and removing it and resetting defaults was the only way to fix it. She then accuses me of deleting all of her contacts because she can't tell the difference between a contact and an instant message anymore either.

Then there's the inability to see anything right under her nose on a screen... So when she asks me how to do something and I say 'click on the button marked XXXXXXX' she spends minutes looking for the big brightly coloured button in the middle of the screen and complaining that she can't see it even as I'm pointing right at it... and then claims it wasn't obvious to her.

Sorry for the rant... it's frustrating dealing with a parental unit who refuses to believe that they could ever be wrong about anything and who's default response to anything is denial.

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

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

Had a similar thing happen

Not going to mention names/companies. But I worked for a software developer about 18-19yrs ago. I was sent to Newbury (about a 100 mile trip) to fix an issue with a venue that couldn't be done remotely.

Upon arriving I was met with a system that kept crashing. As I was told to speak to the higher ups in tech support (who were too busy to go and sort it) before doing anything... I did so.

I was instructed to do about a dozen different things, none of which worked... and none of the suggestions involved actually opening up the system.... I'd suggested several times that I pull the system and open it up as it could be a hardware issue... This was dismissed and scoffed at, it was absolutely a software issue and they'd figure out what it was eventually. (every crash, they'd spend ages pouring over logs before making the next suggested change)

By the end of the day, it wasn't fixed... and I was told to find a cheap hotel for the night and be back there at 8am in the morning... because the support team were going home.

So I took matters into my own hands... pulled the system and stripped it down.

I took photos on my crappy little phone as evidence of what I found.

This thing was clogged up with dust, and the fan on the CPU cooler had failed... it was crashing because every time they tried to run tasks on it... it overheated and shut down, or after it was left on for a little while... heat soak caused the same issue.

I cleaned it out, went through their spares and old systems looking for a compatible heatsink... found one, cleaned it up and installed it. problem solved... support team very pissed at me the following morning.

But the venue, gave me a glowing report and gave the company a load of crap over the wasted day... I was lucky that one of the venue managers was present for a lot of the calls.

Sadly the company never learned the lesson... about 6 months later, started laying people off to cut costs. That same support team still held a grudge and kept sticking the knife in at every opportunity because I embarrassed them and I was one of those earmarked to be laid off.

The day after I was told... I never bothered going in and went straight into job hunt mode.

That's when I decided to become a contractor, I grabbed a temp job at a place I'd worked before to bring in money and was in a new contract with a 30% pay increase within 6 weeks... I've never looked back.

Zen Internet warns customers of an impending IP address change

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Facepalm

Zen are not as good as people claim

I switched to Zen, mainly based on the number of people who claimed they were amongst the best ISP's out there... and that it was worth paying a little extra.

All seemed fine for the first year.

Then slowly over the next 11 months, my speeds started dropping from the 73mbps I got... until I was barely getting low 20's... well below the min 39mbps guaranteed speeds.

When I called to log the problem... I was informed that they could see the speeds were dropping over that entire 11 months, but they did nothing to resolve the issue. It took weeks before it was resolved. We had a back and forth with their customer service staff behaving like antagonists... literally baiting me by making 'polite' but unreasonable demands to force me to accept all costs related to engineer call outs and refusing to do anything unless I accepted those costs.

It took the intervention of their line manager before things moved forward... and I ended up with months of credit due to their behaviour.

Eventually after a few visits and equipment needing replacing in the exchange and the local cabinet... were speeds back to normal.

Then about 8 months later... more issues, more attitude from their CS staff and once again, intervention from their manager and more credit applied to my account.

In the last 18 months I was with them... I probably only paid for 50% of it.

Caveat Emptor... don't believe the rando commentards on here raving about companies... they're not reliable.

Fairberry project brings a hardware keyboard to the Fairphone

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Sony Ericsson P990i wasn't bad

I had the Sony Ericsson P990i as my first smart phone with a touchscreen and it was pretty decent. used it right up until 2011 after about 4-5yrs of reliable use.

Removable battery, could remove the numpad flip front with ease. Good call quality and a nice clear colour screen.

I actually miss phones that would last for days on a tiny battery and had a proper keyboard... If there was a decent alternative, I'd consider it for my next phone... I've had my Pixel 6 pro for about about 20 months so far and not impressed with the camera at all.

It took Taylor Swift deepfake nudes to focus Uncle Sam, Microsoft on AI safety

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Facepalm

What a surprise

The people that created the face eating leopard bot, shocked when it eats faces.

Five ripped off IT giant with $7M+ in bogus work expenses, prosecutors claim

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Re: Lashings

My first thought was that you'd googled them for effect.

As an avid reader of the famous five and secret seven books as a kid... I can't really remember anything about them apart from the dog Timmy.

I do however remember more about the comic strip presents 5 go mad in Dorset that I saw in my early teens... and the ex page three model Corrine Russell that had a part in it. :)

YouTube video lag wrongly blamed on its ad-blocking animus

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Re: I can smell something... smells a lot like bullshit

I did read it, i use firefox, ublock, noscript, privacy badger and so forth... I'm just sick and tired of these wargames and the constant back and forth with entitled wanker corps and their belief that they are entitled to my information and privacy, as well as the money in my wallet if I dare to object to their rightful ownership of it.

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

I use firefox with numerous plugins (noscript/ublock/privacy badger and so forth, plus others like clearurls and a couple of youtube ones to get rid of 'shorts' and enhance playback... I place all google sites in their own container too.

But I must confess that I'm sick and tired of playing this wargame... having to constantly battle against sites who want to invade my privacy and harvest everything about me without my consent.

So if I could 'nuke em' in some way... I would. :)

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

I can smell something... smells a lot like bullshit

I've seen videos of people using youtube and content not loading, and then turning of their adblocker and the content loads perfectly.

I've tried this myself and have experienced exactly the same thing.

So you'll have to forgive me if I assume that google are a bunch of lying, wankers who have declared war on anyone who dares to try and stop their invasive, toxic behaviours. They only have themselves to blame for people wanting to block them, because they're toxic, they're entitled and think they have a right to our data, our privacy and to force feed us whatever any fucker is willing to pay them to do... whether we like it or not.

Fuck the ad industry and those that support their practices.

Nuke em from orbit... it's the only way to be sure.

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

People do just that... I know because I've done it. It cost £30 for a cheap basic printer and about £70 for new ink. So I'd give the printer away via freecycle in my area and get a replacement. Then I discovered 3rd party inks and started running into warnings and issues like this one. It's not just HP who pull this shit. Lexmark gave me constant warnings every time I used my printer, Epson do the same.

I know it's daft... but last year I signed up for the Epson ready print... £1.99 a month, £23.88 a year, 50 pages a month or roll over what's left for the next month. I don't print 600 pages in a year now, and I'm trying to move away from this disposable culture and try to be a little greener... so solar panels and battery storage installed, extra insulation in the house and my next car will be a hybrid. Reducing plastic waste, recycling as much as possible.

But nothing would ever convince me to touch anything from HP ever again.

COVID-19 infection surge detected in wastewater, signals potential new wave

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Re: It is only Covid if you take a test

Was he ever actually in intensive care? I can't recall now as it's been long overshadow by his constant lies, deceit and corruption... so anything he says can easily be assumed to be utter bollocks... and whilst he was slinging praise at the NHS for his care in a nice private room... he was also laundering about 1 billion pounds through the NHS to friends and crones for defective PPE.

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Re: It is only Covid if you take a test

I thought I'd finally got it just before xmas. My mum came down with something and I caught it a few days later. But she tested after she'd been ill for 4 days and got a negative test. My brother in law caught it from her too and he tested negative.

Whatever it was, it mirrored some covid symptoms and wiped everyone out for the better part of 3-4 weeks. Started with a cough and sore throat, then headaches and extreme tiredness... after about 10-12 days it turned into a nasty cold for a further 10-12 days.

Seems there's some viral thing going about this winter that's not covid but it really contagious. My whole family has had it, as have friends and not one of them has tested positive for covid.

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

Selfish, ignorant and entitled people do selfish, ignorant and entitled things... They only care about themselves, they lack the cognitive ability to be able to understand how these things spread and what can be done to mitigate it.

Ironically... covid has been proven to affect cognitive ability thus compounding the problem in those who have had it, more than once or even suffer with long covid.

People like this always remind me of the saying... some people are too stupid to know how stupid they are, and thus display supreme confidence and arrogance about their assumed superiority on everything.

Amazon already has a colossal ads business and will extend it to Prime Video in January

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I wanted to watch their rings of power... I pay for prime.

I couldn't because I use a VPN... so I downloaded it instead.

There are a few shows/movies that are exclusive to prime that I enjoy... and I've never actually watched them on prime. I've watched them dozens of times.

So why was I paying for the service... because I actually want to pay for content that I enjoy.

But these fuckers are literally forcing me to go back to old habits... and I'm more than happy to do so.

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

Ditch Amazon

It's time to ditch amazon entirely... not just because of this. But because the service they offer in general is just a really bad value for money experience.

Quality of products has gone through the floor as decent brands abandon the marketplace, leaving the site flooded with cheap chinese knock-off garbage that can not only be a waste of money... but also potentially dangerous. See the recent Louis Rossman vids for examples of dangerous quality products.

Then there's reviews... they can't be trusted because you can list an item that's good... earn thousands of reviews and then swap out the item for something else and you keep the reviews for entirely different products. People see the reviews and think it's positive, they don;t actually read the reviews to see if the review is talking about the same product now being sold.

My yearly sub is due this month and I'm cancelling it. I don;t watch prime video anymore because the gui is so bad it's hard to find anything, they removed your ability to see just what's free to prime users... so they can try and steer you towards more purchases... renting anything costs more than actually buying a physical copy on bluray and as with all 'digital' purchases, anything you buy can be taken from you at a later date.

The only way to win, is not to play.

So I've switched more and more to local businesses, gone direct to brands sites to buy direct or from their approved resellers. I've cut what I spent on amazon by more than 50% this year.... in fact, just 1 of the xmas presents I bought was from amazon... and that was a gift card for my brother in law who wanted something specific he can't get locally.

I'm so done with the enshitification of everything.

Is it time for 6G already? Traffic analysis says yep

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Oh FFS roll out current gen first before trying to con us again

Look... I've literally... and I do mean literally, in the last few months got access to a 5G signal in spite of having a 5G phones for the last 4yrs.

Why you might wonder.

Because I was using a shitty provider (giffgaff) who used the backend services of another shitty provider. I lived in a large city until Sept 2022 and could get a reasonable 4G signal over most of the city.

Then I moved to a small town near the coast of North Wales... I couldn't even get a signal in town, let alone a decent one anywhere else within 20 miles.

So I did some proper checking out of service providers and found that they only one that had a decent signal in my entire area was EE.

So then begins the hunt for a sim only deal from some one who uses EE's backend services and actually offers the whole spectrum and not part of it... Because there are some out there who can't give you a proper service whilst using the same providers.

What did I end up with.

1pmobile... I kid you not. The cheapest, most basic sim only service around gives you the best deal and the best service.

£10 a month, unltd calls/txts and 25GB data and a full 5G signal everywhere I go, and a decent 4G one outside of towns/villages. I can finally walk down into town and not hit a phone dead zone.

So FFS... before you start adding tens of thousands more towers and repeaters... how about you... I don't know... ROLL OUT 5G Properly you utter cunts!!! Hell, even a decent 4G rollout to the whole country would be a good place to fucking start.

Superuser mostly helped IT, until a BSOD saw him invent a farcical fix

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Trollface

You had a chisel!!!

We had to sharpen our fingernails on rocks before carving the ones and zeros.

PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here

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Don't be silly, buttons cost extra, and they're 9.99 each. And for some reason you also need to purchase the button hole maker for a further 49.99 because 3rd party hole makers invalidate your warranty as does making holes in anything that we still own, because you only have a license to wear the mac on dry days.

Doom turns 30, so its creators celebrate seminal first-person shooter’s contribution to IT careers

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Re: Beginnings of networked games heaven

Some of the first downloads I ever did were sound packs for Lemmings... I made all of mine sound like Simpsons characters. :)

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Re: Carmack misses the creative packaging and other in-store marketing efforts of the era

I still remember opening my original X-Wing box with multiple 1.44mb disks and a huge manual. I also remember selling a huge box of games on ebay about 20yrs ago for almost nothing... at least 20-30 titles, original boxes... some disk, some CD.

I still have a huge stack of CD/DVD based PC games in my home office... including some of those dodgy ones with the CDrootkit program on them that killed CDRW drives... lost a few drives to that before it was discovered.

The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

We found the best way to combat that was to setup your own server on a work lan and ADSL... So we had the advantage.

We did stuff like that right up until the mid-late 2000's and it even proved to be beneficial for the company.

Once with an old BF42 server running the desert combat mod that I used to be involved with just outside of the firewall, we kept getting random stalls/lag of about 1s.

After some investigating by the ISP/BT they found a piece of misconfigured equipment in the exchange.

So that was used as a great selling point and justification for the boss to allow us to keep running a mini game server on the site. :)

It helped having a cool boss too.

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Fond Memories

Whilst Wolfenstein 3D was my first experience of FPS gaming a year or two earlier... Doom was certainly the most memorable. Installed on a work computer that we played out of hours that had no sound card installed, and then on a very used 386 that I got and managed to install a soundcard on. We'd swap discs with fan made maps/levels and mods.

Then a few yrs later we had Quake... which advanced the graphics further and with true 3D modelled objects. It was also when I first started to get online through work as it would be 98 before I had a PC with modem at home. So of course we downloaded mods for quake to add star wars characters and sounds. We also downloaded soundpacks for Worms to make them sound like Simpsons characters and so forth. Of course we can't forget games like Dark Forces either... that I probably played more than any other.

Such innocent fun... now it's all 9.99 for a soundpack or a new skin for your character... thank fuck for the hats with skulls on.

Recently replaced a fan adapted versions of Dark Forces and Quake with better graphics.

I'm also still playing games like Tie Fighter and X-Wing Alliance thanks to the work over at the x-wing alliance upgrade project... taking the originals and making them look amazing once more. I hear that there's work on the original X-Wing game and hopefully X-Wing Vs Tie Fighter too.

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