Posts by Solviva

Amazon tells folks it will stop accepting UK Visa credit cards via weird empty email

Does you does

Or does you don't take A̶c̶c̶e̶s̶s̶ Visa?

Re: My email wasn't blank...

Nothing to do with their (future) Schengen status. Any EU citizen was allowed to travel to the UK with their national ID card. Just like those few who were lucky enough to get the extremely short lived UK ID card could have used it for travel to other EU (+ non-EU Schengen) countries.

The only thing Schengen does is allow for ID free travel between participating states, although 'temporary' border controls can be re-introduced for 'emergency' reasons.

There's only one cure for passive-aggressive Space Invader bosses, and that's more passive aggression

Re: Huh, wonder which company that could have been.

Perhaps NE-where year 2000 Compatible.

Linux 5.16 to bring mainline support to Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module – and the nifty devices built around it

Re: RPIs are *not* fully functional with mainline kernels

But this is talking about 5.16, not 5.15.

Electrocution? All part of the service, sir!

Re: "The power lead approached the PC..."

Not a shaver socket, it has a third earth pin in the middle as well.

Re: "The power lead approached the PC..."

That almost-but-not-quite EU plug could be Italian. They have sockets with a slightly different offset and i think slightly smaller diameter holes, such that it looks fine, but takes you a while to work out just why you can't force your pins in the holes... Not even lube does the job!

They seem to have both types of sockets installed in (probably? older) buildings, so you just need to hunt around till you find one that fits.

Apple's macOS Monterey upgrades some people's laptops to doorstops

Re: "$99 and 24h later"

That's $110 + tax, the $19 cloth must have included tax :)

Re: In fact, that's pretty well stated in the article

Could be said user had in fact caused unrelated damage previously to the enclosure or screen, but despite that damage the laptop was 100% functional till the update.

Then come along Apple "Yes we'll take a look, but first we need to fix that unrelated damage for $99".

As stated above, it's $299 for other repairs (self inflicted rather than warranty failures), so reviving a dead machine would come under the $299 fee, which clearly it didn't.

Re: Guess I'm Lucky

Revived my mid-2012 macbook and updated to Catalina at the weekend. It's not offering further updates since this isn't supported by anything later. Oddly if I look in the App Store, it proudly displays Monterey, and under compatibility "Works on this Macbook Pro". Hmmm....

I did update the Wifi Card a few years back to a later Macbook's version and apparently the wifi card was at least one of the sticking points for post-Catalina, so there's the remote possibility it does a more detailed HW check. Or is just lying.

What a clock up: Brit TV-broadband giant Sky fails to pick up weekend's timezone change, fix due by Friday

Re: More BST than GMT

It's down to what's an acceptable time to gain an hour of darkness in spring. By the beginning of April in a fair part of the UK, shifting forward an hour means most people still are getting up in daylight, yet benefit from an extra hour of daylight in the evening.

At the end of the year, I guess they couldn't decide on a good time to make the evenings shorter again, so likely waited till it's dark when you're travelling home after work. so nobody would care if it want dark already an hour before the travelled home and are stuck in work.

Apple arms high-end MacBook Pro notebooks with M1 Pro, M1 Max processors

My touch bar gets the most use when I'm pressing a number key, likely whilst also pressing alt or cmd. The way my fingers spread out, often one of them glances the touchbar and 'presses' whatever f key happened to be near the stray finger. Annoying when working in terminal that interprets the f key as something.

Re: It has a notch!

So basically the top menu bar is shifted up and an extra 74 vertical pixels are available? W00t!

I cried when everything 'upgraded' from 1920x1200 to Full HD 1920x1080. That missing 120 pixels was awfully noticeable being 10%. A notch in this menu bar may or may not be distracting, but as 90% of the time that menu bar is visible and about 20% at the left & 20% at the right is ever used, the centre 60% is rather unloved.

As for the rest (ports) welcome back to 2012 (minus the USB-A ports). I guess in another 5 years the ports will be disappearing again till you're left with a big USB-C powerbank + screen + keyboard, before suddenly they announce a full set of ports, like it's the best thing since sliced bread.

How many years did it take them to realise 'pro' users actually use the function keys?

Boeing 737 Max chief technical pilot charged with deceiving US aviation regulators over MCAS

Re: Some extra info

Tricking the FDA? Think you're posting on the wrong thread, this is about aviation, not food and drugs.

Config cockup leaves Reg reader reaching for the phone

That'd be the ISP whose access numbers most often ended in 666

Nearly 140 nations – from US and UK to EU, China and India – back 15% minimum corporate tax rate

Sure they breached the €750m sales threshold, but unfortunately made a loss so no tax to pay.

SpaceX prepares to launch four civilians and a glass dome into space

Bowel movements?

Are they including a portaloo in the capsule? I guess the Dragon capsule was mainly intended for shortish missions 'space-docking' whereby passengers could relieve themselves. This I believe is a 72 hour jolly so nature is sure to be calling once or twice before they return to terra firma.

Ch-ch-ch-Chia! HDD sales soar to record levels as latest crypto craze sweeps Europe

Re: Quick buck

In my limited experience (sample size ca 300 drives), I've encountered...

Seagate ST2000s that developed read errors starting from about 6 months old, drive retired once that happened. Retirement rate after that was about 1 every couple of months.

Drives that live fast & die young, read errors after a month (again Seagates, 12TB I think).

Deathstars - you know you should be backing up anything worthwhile on them but too lazy to do it.

Then the rest either keep plodding on till the spontaneously die (rare).

I wouldn't put the failure rate of a drive from a rig much higher than a fresh drive. If there's something worth keeping on it then back it up. The main advantage of a new disk is warranty (although UK folks should be careful if they need to send the disks back to the EU for warranty replacement...)

Re: Quick buck

Well there could be a glut of once-written large capacity HDDs on the market, assuming people get over their sunk-cost fallacy and realise there's more money to be made flogging the disks than holding on to them in the hope of earning something...

Following Torvalds' nudge, Paragon's NTFS driver for Linux is on track for kernel

Thats the beauty of make (menu)config. Pick the bits you don't want/need.

Giant Tesla battery providing explosion in renewable energy – not as intended

So it's a UPS to keep power on till the Diesel kicks in then?

I've got a broken combine harvester – but the manufacturer won't give me the software key

Re: Only half the story of half the story

Does the wifi model load and unload the washing from the app? Or does i just pop up a message on your Samsung devices that the cycle is complete?

Ecuador shreds Julian Assange's citizenship

Which bit(s) of the history mentioned here are you contending?

Re: Journalist prosecution

Mr Assange offered to be interviewed by video link. That I think was not allowed under Swedish law, and they wouldn't make any special arrangements for this. In the end the prosecutor Fru Ny was going to interview Assange at the embassy.... until she pulled out at the last minute. Why?

Whilst he was still in Sweden for a few weeks after the event (August), they had plenty of time to bring him in for questioning, but didn't. Why? He asked if he was allowed to leave Sweden (as part of his original schedule), and was told no problem, so he did.

Once he left Sweden, something changed (Novemberish) that resulted in a European arrest warrant. Surely it would have been much easier to issue an arrest warrant while he was still in Sweden, and/or deny his request to leave. Why the delay? It's not like the interview suites were booked up for the next 3 months.

Galaxy quest: Yet another sub-£500 phone comes to trouble mobile big dogs in the form of Realme GT 5G

Well that's extremely daft to to remove part of the screen for a camera.

In the (not-so-good) old days you could buy (crappy) LCD monitors with dead pixel guarantees, as in you could swap for a different monitor should you find a dead pixel. Now they guarantee part of your screen will be permanently obscured?

Looks like your review model has a problem on the top left of the screen, sort of a bunch of dead pixels. Is that a design fault or just a bad batch you received?

Funny how Sir Tim Berners-Lee, famous for hyperlinks, is into NFTs, glorified hyperlinks

Re: Nothing Fecking There

It's like the 'name a star' con-outfits.

Yes you've paid money to a random company who keeps a ledger (I can imagine they even skip that) of folk they've conned, in return providing said folk a certificate 'proving' their star now has the requested name.

Debian's Cinnamon desktop maintainer quits because he thinks KDE is better now

Re: KDE ?

I've heard there's a company that prefixes their products with a lowercase 'i'. Very weird behaviour that I can't see catching on anytime soon.

Linus Torvalds tells kernel list poster to 'SHUT THE HELL UP' for saying COVID-19 vaccines create 'new humanoid race'

Re: What are these bloody idiots going to do if something worse than COVID-19 comes along?

Hopefully that will be the end of them, whilst the more rational folk get by just fine.

Blue passports, French service provider: Atos bags £21m UK Passport Office deal

Re: backdoor identity card

Or some sort of official authentication system.

You don't need to do much to get more secure than 2 utility bills, date of birth, postcode etc for 'authentication'.

FBI paid renegade developer $180k for backdoored AN0M chat app that brought down drug underworld

Re: Huh?

If they also sent comms to random Chinese IPs then nobody would suspect a thing.

Antivirus that mines Ethereum sounds a bit wrong, right? Norton has started selling it

Re: I thought this was a variant on the "Freemium" model.

I know someone who in the 90s had distributed,net cracking RC5 on all the PCs in their parents house... and their school cluster. The school was rather a manual operation of copying the work to/from floppies on each machine due to lack of internet.

Was very convenient when they splashed out on a bunch of Celeren 300 machines which said person upgraded to Celeron 450s to help MS Word load 2s quicker and process RC5 hashes 33% faster.

Of course electricity was 'free' then :)

Re: WFH

They might (actually most probably not...) notice the laptop running rather warm, fans blowing more, battery draining faster (unless they set to only run when powered).

Here's how we got persistent shell access on a Boeing 747 – Pen Test Partners

747's nosecone also holds jackets.

Oops, says Manchester City Council after thousands of number plates exposed in parking ticket spreadsheet

In Sweden you send an (not-so-premiun 30p + operators fee) sms to the DVLA equivalent and get the details back. Well as much as name and city. Sven Svensson in Stockholm might not be so identifiable.

For slightly more unique individuals you can look them up in one of the several online databases for full address, birthday, married or single and to who, owner of a business(es), cars owned, pets owned (dogs & cats anyway)... Then either pay a small fee for their previous years tax declaration or visit in person a tax office and ask for it. I think in the tax office, the person being inquired of gets a letter saying Anders Andersson just got a copy of your tax record.

iPhone XR caught fire after getting trapped in airline passenger's seat

Maybe the should update it to 'before you move your seat, check your phone is not somewhere inside the seat'.

You don't know your phone isn't lost until you've lost it.

Re: Clumsy while sleeping

As written the details seem a bit fishy...

Passenger was in lie-flat position presumably having been lying flat. Passenger moved seat to seat-mode, so stewardess could re-arrange bedding. How do you (re-) arrange bedding on a seat when it's in seat mode???

Furthermore this is BA's business class, not Singapore's first class. Arranging your bedding is up to you, well as much as the 'bedding' consists of a blanket and a pillow.

Pigeon fanciers in a flap over Brexit quarantine flock-up, seek exemption from EU laws

Pah that's so old, you need to modernise with Fiber To The Pigeon.

Grotesque soundbyte alert: UK government opens wallet to help rural areas get 'gigafit'

Re: Alternatively ...

How less resilient to power failure is FTTP compared with...?

VDSL/FTTC you need power to the modem (& maybe separate router). FTTP you need power the 'modem'/ONT (& probably separate router). The FTTC cabs have battery backups, FTTP fibres end up in an exchange somewhere with battery & backup generators.

I'd say FTTP is more resilient to power failure. Unless you're talking purely about voice comms....

Starlink's latent China crisis could spark a whole new world of warcraft

Simples, the Chinese.gov contact President Trump and enlist him as the chief Great RF Wall builder.

Just extend the Great Wall vertically with RF shielding materials (some form of metal mesh should do the job). Result - Greatest Firewall of China v2, it's gonna be the best firewall you've ever seen!

Seagate UK customer stung by VAT on replacement drive shipped via the Netherlands

Re: The problem here isn't the borders, it's the ludicrously anal way that the tax situation was set

You contradict yourself.

"This really made little sense, any value that has been added to the item was added in the UK, not in France"

What value was gained from the book in the UK? None. It was sent to France for you to peruse and obtain value from, in France.

" If I had travelled to the UK and bought the same item in Waterstones to take home to France, I would not have been quizzed about where I was taking it. I would just have paid UK VAT"

Because you would have been able to add value by perusing the book in the UK. That you took it back to France with you isn't a problem, (ex)-EU rules.

SD card slot, HDMI port could return to the MacBook Pro this year, says Apple analyst

Unfortunately this sounds, err, too good to be true.

HDMI & SD card slot would be welcomed, and sounds plausible, especially since my 2019 MBP is the same thickness (seemingly at least) as my 2012 MBP. To go back to magsafe may be a bit far. I enjoy being able to charge everything with USB-C. To have a magsafe charger could be nice if maybe they can design a reliable version of those magnetic USB-C plugs you can get that apparently fail after a few weeks. I'd sacrifice one of the USB-C ports for a magsafe though to have the choice.

USB-A may be nice to have a single port for whatever, but really it's time things moved to USB-C. USB-C to A adapters cost next to nothing. For those legacy devices, you can buy one for each device and leave it permanently attached.

The touchbar I was a painful death on. Thankfully I at least got a real ESC key and the new 'old' keyboard. You never know, give it another 5 years and we'll be back to removable batteries!

We know it's hard to get your kicks at work – just do it away from a wall switch powering anything important

Had a similar inexplicable power-loss with a Supermicro machine not so long ago. Can't remember how it started, I think occasionally it would just reboot. It then progressed to simply dying completely, like there was no power into the machine. It had IPMI and even that was dead.

Unplugged both PSUs, replugged them, nothing. Something made me think to try a wall socket rather than the rack power (which obviously was working since other machines were happy with it). As soon as it tasted power from a different UPS it sprung back to life. Then sometime later it died again, this time no amount of trying different power sources would wake it up, so I pulled it out the rack (still plugged in) and popped the lid for it to spring back to life. Now the lid-closed switch seemed to have an effect. After enough of these shenanigans a new machine was acquired to replace it and I pulled the odd machine out and sat it in the corner for a year or so.

Came round to try it again, and strangely it seemed to be fine and worked for a good few months with no issues... then it started again as before!

Negative Trustpilot review of law firm Summerfield Browne cost aggrieved Briton £28k

Well funnily enough, there is a 1 star review that goes along those lines, albeit that they are suing rather than they won. It also contains the post that they originally sued over and was taken down :)

Apple reportedly planning to revive the MagSafe charging standard with the next lot of MacBook Pros

You can avoid a rats nest at home/office/in your bag if you buy the right cables first.

I've got a 3m long USB-C 100W cable for my macbook (just because). It's only USB-2 though. Was about 50% more for USB-3 but since it's 99% used for charging why pay extra.

The problem can be now seen as there are too many options making it more a burden on you to find the right cable.

I like the fact I can now use the same cable and swap it to my phone (obviously it's not an Apple phone) if it needs some juice quick. Sometimes I'll top up the phone from my laptop (4 USB-C ports makes the Macbook a very good pwerbank ;). Once though, the Macbook tried to charge itself from the phone, phone obliged and its battery indicator went rather quickly the wrong way.

Re: Wish list

My first was a 2012 MBP (only on my 2nd now). The daftest thing I found was the lack of a power status indicator. Compounded by a bug whereby closing the lid and removing the Thunderbolt ethernet had a good chance of hanging the system, except it wasn't just an idle hang it was a busy loop. But all (well the screen) lights were off so you'd think it was asleep? Pop it snugly in to my backpack, take it out an hour later at home to find it's turned into a furnace.

After this happened more than once I found the best I could do was close the lid, unplug everything, then hold the fan exhaust to my ear for a couple of minutes as the fans were the only semi reliable indicator of life.

Re: Hooray!

I can see this now

Base price 16" with touchbar £$€ 2999

Replace touchbar with real function keys +£$€ 200

Dratted 'housekeeping', eh? 150k+ records deleted off UK’s Police National Computer database

Wonder if they lost my prints... I should send them a letter asking if they have a record of my prints and along with a note about how I did fondle the stamp with my very moist tongue. Oh wait

Sun, sea and sad signage: And lo, they saw a shining light in the sky... oh, it's a BIOS error

Sounds like the "unsuccessful overclocking attempt" message, which makes you wonder why they need to set an advertising machine to 11?

I built a shed once. How hard can a data centre be?

Evidently some folks in that street are unable to read signs on walls...

Elon Musk says he tried to sell Tesla to Apple, which didn’t bite and wouldn't even meet

Any guarantee work needed will only be done if any damage to the car is first repaired (at your expense)