Posts by Chloe Cresswell

BOFH: Looks like you're writing an email. Fancy telling your colleague to #$%^ off?

Re: Life imitating art

<clickerty-click>

Which I think for ChatGPT would technically be suicide.

Poor communication led to complete lack of communication

Re: Email...

We had a sales guy set his email to forward to his personal pipex account.

His next in line staff member went on holiday, and forwarded her email to him.

In comes a virus infected email our system didn't detect, but Pipex did. We had a single channel of ISDN, I got to see the tennis of rejected bounce -> forward -> rejected bounce as the email got slightly larger with the headers each time.

And Pipex's connection and sevrers were going to win regardless ;)

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

Re: Sounds like Tesla drivers should always carry a can of petrol with them in Winter

I think we are thinking of the same series *nods*

The Q30 has a simple system - you need to apply the handbrake and put it in neutral. Only then will the engine stop. Pressing the clutch/disengaging the handbrake is when it starts again.

My Q30 needs the battery to be at a certain level, the engine temp to be at a certain level, and even then it limits itself to 3 stop/start cycles till it gets some real charge back in the battery.

Re: Sounds like Tesla drivers should always carry a can of petrol with them in Winter

There was a programme years ago covering a cold trip, using arctic trucks and ford mondeo mk1s. The mondeos were only going like, 10% of the trip, and had to be left running over night to keep the engines going. One of them ran out of fuel at like, 3am, and froze. And lighting a fire under the car's engine bay was precisely how they got it going again.

Need to plug in an EV? BT Group kicks off cabinet update pilot

Re: From what I can recall ....

My local FTTC cab shows evidence of someone trying to park in it, by the dent and angle..

The actual wiring green box is on the other side of the road, and has no power to it *nods*

Then there's a friend's FTTC cab, which is at the side of a roundabout. Not that it matters, as twice in the last 2 years, someone has parked a car through it, taking out connectivity for the area!

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

Re: Finding a working charger

Longest range I've had was a mk4 mondeo 2.0 tdci, due to the 70 litre tank, you could hit 1100 miles on a long trip on a single fill up.

Re: Screw the Hoi Polloi!

the lamp posts around me are up against the houses, so if you do that, you're still running cables across the pavement. And as there's 4 lamp posts for 20+ houses, that's a lot of cables to each one.

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

I get 5G on my O2 phone in my home town, so far it's shown to be around 7.5 down and 0.12 up. 4G on the same phone is 40/24!

UK officials caught napping ahead of 2G and 3G doomsday

Re: Going to be awkward

You don't seem to have read it properly.

Re: Going to be awkward

That's Boston. As the joke goes, you know what Boston got in the late 70s? A road out...

Re: Going to be awkward

My primary phone has a 5G sim in it, and there's still lumps of Lincolnshire where it's on 2G *nods*

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

What does the make/model of an air sourced heat pump have to do with a photo-voltaic solar array?

Hint: nothing.

For most of the houses in my area, that would have to be on the front wall, over hanging the pavement, as there's no front yard/garden. And yeah, you're not meant to put things that overhang the public space, it has to be on your land.

I close the windows when it gets to 16C...

Funnily, my house was marked down on it's energy report when I had my PV system installed for not having a smart thermostat. Seems having your heating maintain a temp/etc is more energy efficient then having the heating turned off. You'd think not having it on would be the more efficient option...

Also there's different use cases - I don't have my heating on to maintain a temp (infact I don't even have a thermostat on the heating), when it gets too cold I turn it on for a while. I can measure my heating use in a year in a few tens of hours. This is also almost the worse case for a heat pump.

So if I switched to a heat pump, I'd have to change how I use my heating to a model that will use a massively larger amount of energy then I do now.

To BCC or not to BCC – that is the question data watchdog wants answered

Had some emails come in recently where I was BCCed in on a hybrid exchange system. I don't know if they screwed it up, or this is default, as we don't use any hybrid setups, we are either on prem, or hosted o365.

But when I looked at the header of the emails, I found the exchange system had put all the BCC addresses in a field, apparently to pass it to the external exchange side, that didn't strip it out.

So every BCC email we have had like this has had the BCC address list 'hidden' in the headers for anyone to see all the people it was sent too!

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

Re: Hated by sysadmins

Or if you had the unpatched release (pre 1.2 iirc) 200% network utilisation...

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

SIM Farm. Full box. CD release. Contents of the CD? 1.3mb. You could pirate it onto a single floppy disc...

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

Re: We've all made that call.

I used to carry in my toolkit a white headed rubber mallet for HDs that weren't quite failed _yet_...

Rare machines

I used to be friends with someone who worked with some machines called "Deltas". The company was bought out and they were told all IT work had to be done by the new owner's IT department.

So my friend had one of their guys come out and look at the deltas in their racks. Guy looks at one and asks basically "what the fuck is that?"

"That's a delta."

Guy takes out a form and starts to fill in the details... "does it have a serial number?"

"X00001, the X is for eXperimental"

Guy looks at him, and then asks "How many of these are there?"

"5, X00001 to X00005"

"How many were built?"

"5..."

Openreach hits halfway mark in quest to hook up 25M premises with fiber broadband

Your signal isn't the only one on a GPON fibre, for a 10 subscriber system you have 20 carriers down that fibre.

Re: It's here

OR are using self supporting fibre - the steel guide wire that takes the load is part of the cable itself. As opposed to the older system of running a cable that is a tube from the pole, and blowing a separate fibre though it.

I do hate how broadband has become a byword for internet access. Last time I checked the fibre system being rolled out was a wideband tech, not broadband.

Government and the latest tech don't mix, says UK civil servant of £11B ESN mess

Most have PTFE degrees, as nothing ever seems to stick...

Bright spark techie knew the drill and used it to install a power line, but couldn't outsmart an odd electrician

Tech: fired, drill bit: vaporised and lining the hole with a metallic coating. I think the drill might have quit working in protest, so... all three? ;)

We had a fibre pulled into a building in the City of London. Contractors we being very cautious with it, down to radaring the wall.

We asked why, and were told the last job they did, the main tech (no longer with them) drilled into a wall and though a 44KV feed, taking out 4 buildings in the time it took the drill bit to vapourise, and they weren't making that mistake again.

BOFH: Monitor mount moans end in Beancounter beatdown

"never learn" I don't think enough of them are around long enough to learn.. or to instruct the new incoming beancounters so they can learn...

Shock horror – and there goes the network neighborhood

Re: When checking voltages...

"never trust a programmer with a screwdriver" also "Never trust a hardware FE with a software patch"

Paying for WinRAR in all the wrong ways - Russia and China hitting ancient app

Re: WinRAR? Why?

You are correct, you could use the non-registered version in a business environment, in violation of the winrar licence, you know, the one time RAR labs do take action.

Or you could, as you say, use one of the other free versions... that don't exist. There's only one system that make rar files, and that is from rar labs. The only other programs that "make" rar files need rar.exe from.. rar labs to do it.

Re: WinRAR? Why?

"Why would anyone want to make a rar file when you can just tell the other people (who are the ones that require) it that they can just change their work flow to match yours instead".

In the case we had, the supplier's helpdesk system would automatically unpack the .rar files and attach it to the ticket. Using rar.exe. The command line version does not support any format but rar, unlike winrar which does. So sure, you could send them a .zip file, or a .7z file, and they would (and did) close the support request due to not being supplied the diagnostic data .

Re: WinRAR? Why?

The reason I see people with licenced versions of WinRAR is they have a requirement to make .rar files (normally for sending files to china), and making RAR files is the one thing you need rar.exe/WinRAR for.

Re: WinRAR? Why?

rar was one of the first compression systems to properly support multibyte characters, I could see that giving it a reputation for "better" in somewhere like China. And these reputations will often out last the software itself.

Windows 10's latest update issue isn't a bug but a feature – to test your patience

Re: Windows is the best advert for Linux.

Go stick your head in a pig?

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

It's more the point that to get to the point of passing, they have already 'made the cut' most of us wouldn't get to.

That's the entire point of the comment. They past. They might not excel yet, but they _made the cut_ already to be in their profession.

"What do you call the person who graduated their medical degree with the lowest score.. Doctor"

Search for phone signal caused oil spill, say Japanese investigators

...what is the Japanese for "left hand down a bit"?

Switch to hit the fan as BT begins prep ahead of analog phone sunset

Re: “Roads? Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads” (Doc Brown)

9 was the furthest from the finger stop? None of your phones had a 0 then?

(also, making it 111 with loop disconnect dialling would mean a slightly broken cable would tap out 1 1 1 and call the emergency call system. A faulty line tapping out 9 9 9 is much less likely)

Re: Connections..

We could get a Virgin leased line - it would be provided by Openreach though. And for the 4 members of staff, it would also be very expensive. This is the issue. The only choice we have is over OR, adsl2 or leased line.

Connections..

Client of mine was moved by BT Business from 4 channels of ISDN to VoIP Deskphones. Just one issue. BT can't provide a connection to run said phones, 16/1 adsl2 is the maximum the site can have as they are on the only cabinet not upgraded to FTTC on the exchange, and now that roll out is gone.

They did say they plan to provide FTTP between 2026 and 2028 to the site though...

So the deskphones? Each one has an EE sim in to give it connectivity to use VoIP.

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

Re: Too pessimistic - Not always

Because when you have a requirement for a thermal reflective layer on the outside wall which can be done by simply using foil backed plasterboard, who is going to buy different plasterboard for the internal walls... *nods*

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

On site dirt: Machines in Lime quarry. replacement policy was to buy a new machine, set it up for someone in the office, their old machine would replace the dead one out on site, to give at least some life span out of them. The Aircon for the computer room needed work every 3 years when the lime dust killed its external unit too.

Coffee company: all the desktop machines had between 3 and 5 cm of coffee grounds they had pulled out of the air in the bottom of the mini tower cases..

Machines that came into the workshop for work: "mouse issue" turned out to be "mouse has made a nest in the amstrad 486 AIO and used the motherboard as it's toilet"

BOFH: What a beautiful tinfoil hat, Boss!

Re: Salt lamps

I have no issue with them as a stand alone thing, but having seen a number of machines have the USB ports damaged (normally by blowing the USB protection ploy fuse..) by them, and fans, and other junk that people plug into the PC's usb ports... I keep throwing cheap USB PSUs at people so they can plug them into that, instead of a PC.

Salt lamps

Ah yes, the thing tying up a USB port on a desktop machine... No I don't have any clients with them, why do you ask...

Someone designed and sold on Amazon a 5G blocker for wifi routers. People bought them, and complained their wifi was crap.. because they had put their router in a faraday cage.

Tesla knew Autopilot weakness killed a driver – and didn't fix it, engineers claim

Re: WTF

Back when I was learning to drive, my driving instructor said the following to me: Think for other people, because you can be sure they won't be.

It's stuck with me, and yes, I'm always thinking for other people, in the "what stupid thing are you going to do next" way of thinking.

ISP's ads 'misleadingly implied' existence of 6G, says watchdog

I'm sure he won't last long around the Department of Administrative Affairs.

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

Given who I follow on Twitch, all I have in my head now is "YOU AWAKE TO FIND YOURSELF IN A DARK ROOM!"