* Posts by Screepy

107 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2018

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SpaceX's faulty Falcon spewed massive lithium plume over Europe, say scientists

Screepy

Re: Hey, no problem, right ?

"So, gien that Natural Selection has failed to curb the ever-increasing dominance of Man over Earth.."

Fear not, natural selection still works just fine.

Your mistake is looking at it from a human timescale.

A thousand years is a blink of an eye for natural selection.

Porsche panic in Russia as pricey status symbols forget how to car

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Re: More cloudybollocks

True that the old Micras had great cyber security (ie. nothing to hack), however it was also incredibly easy to steal.

My R reg Micra would open it's doors if you coughed next to it.

On the positive side, no one wanted to steal it :D

25 years of meatbags permanently in space on the ISS

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Re: "Spot the station" app

This website is also pretty cool for tracking the ISS.

https://isstracker.pl/en

And like you say, once you know what to look for it's really easy to spot as it comes over.

Planes flash, the ISS is just a continuous bright 'star' cruising past.

Game on! Penguin levels up as Linux finally cracks 3% on Steam

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Re: SSD Issues

I don't believe your brother's experience is typical.

I have three devices in my house running different Linux flavours.

All three run either M.2 or 2.5" SSD or a combo of both.

One of mine is actually running a Samsung 870 Evo.

None of them have ever had any issues with the drives.

A lot of my team I work with in my org (15 of us) have also been bitten by the W11-is-the-last-straw bug and hopped over to Linux.

We have a Linux teams chat dedicated to helping one another answer questions etc.

SSD issues have not cropped up once since we started the thread 16 months ago.

Sounds to me like your brother was unlucky.

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ProtonDB

I haven't seen it mentioned in the comments so just letting people know..

If you're thinking of gaming on Linux take a look at the ProtonDB website.

If the game(s) you play are ranked as platinum or gold , you'll generally be fine out the box.

When I switched to Linux 2 years ago I used ProtonDB to see which of my games would come across with me too Linux.

Amazingly, 38 out of 41 in my Steam library!

Obviously your mileage may vary depending on your game choices. As others have already mentioned, quite a few of the triple AAAs have anticheat that makes life more tricky.

It's also surprising how fast games get ranked on ProtonDB nowadays. It used to be a couple of months following release before you got an idea of whether the game would be ok on Linux, now it's usually a day or two.

Anno 117 has already got Platinum status, and that only gets released on 13 Nov.

Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day

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Sadly, I think most banks are onboard the AI hype train.

Kubernetes kicks down Azure Front Door

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Re: Trust???

Yeah it whacked our org website as well.

Also had issues with our InTune portal.

Was messy indeed. Web dev lobbing tickets at infrastructure team for two hours this morning. Infra team desperately trying to work out if it's us or a wider problem.

MS really need to sort out their status pages, it's infuriating troubleshooting something that they just haven't admitted to yet.

Windows 10 refuses to go gentle into that good night

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Re: Win11 will go onto older hardware

This works for sure, buy not for enterprise that has compliance audits.

I upgraded three of our still very powerful W10 desktops that had been flagged as non-W11 upgradeable.

I used the Rufus method you described and it was a straightforward upgrade.

2 days later the security team got in touch to say the machines had flagged up as non-compliant and were not allowed to run W11.

It annoys me so much that MS are throwing BS requirements at W11. These desktops are Core i7s, 64GB ram, Nvidia quadro cards, 2x 1TB SSDs.

They still absolutely fly along!

We've got 40 of these machines, all heading to charity on October 14th. And we're replacing them with 40 new desktops at £2600 each.

Office 2016 and 2019 face October 14 execution date

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Re: Yawn!

Indeed, for personal use it is a yawn.

However for businesses it's much less of a yawn and more of an eye twitch on whether their older office versions will pass security audit.

Hint, they won't pass.

So they have two choices, accept the risk and the price jump from their cyber insurance or begrudgingly migrate to a newer subscription based version.

WhatsApp's former security boss claims reporting infosec failings led to ousting

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Re: Anyone dumb enough

WhatsApp is a really difficult one.

Everyone uses it because everyone else has it.

It's so frustrating.

When Meta bought it in 2014 there was a mini surge of leavers as people went to Telegram or Signal but it wasn't enough and most people snuck back to WhatsApp when they realised their family/friends hadn't bothered to move.

Don't panic, but it's only a matter of time before critical 'CitrixBleed 2' is under attack

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Bah!

Another crit vuln just been announced.

Ver . 13.1.59.15 now available to install

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Upgraded our NetScalers this morning, surprisingly the download portal was working (last time it melted when every sys admin hit it at the same time).

The recommendation to run the kill pcoipConnections and icaConnections makes this upgrade slightly more annoying as you'll punt all your users off even if you're using HA pairs.

May your upgrades run in calm seas

Techies thought outside the box. Then the boss decided to take the box away

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Shredder

The first thing you must always do when moving into a new office is print a sign saying

"IT Suggestion box"

and stick it above the shredder.

Bonus points if you also print a picture of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arch-enemy, Shredder, and stick that on the shredder.

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

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Myself

"Who was the least qualified person you've had to clean up after?"

My younger self

'I guess NASA doesn't need or care about my work anymore'

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Re: NASA's website

Re The FT.

It always reminds me of that Not The Nine O Clock News skit.

Mel Smith, "I read the Financial Times because I have a pink bathroom"

But yes, the FT is a well run publication

Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to fight back

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In that case Google have lost a product :⁠)

IBM orders US sales to locate near customers or offices

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Re: Basic common sense

"The outcome of this is that they may start from far behind the Americans.."

This is a key point.

The outsourcing is too fast and not done properly.

In my work I endlessly have to deal with companies that have outsourced to India but have done so at a pace that the new engineers are not yet ready to absorb.

The end result, a shit experience and a whole load of frustration.

Non-biz Skype kicks the bucket on May 5

Screepy

Re: full URL

@Old one (Susan)

https://jitsi.org/

Windows 11 market share falls despite Microsoft ad blitz

Screepy

+1 for Mint.

I'm by no means a Linux power user - I still get confused when people get angry about snap or systemd .. etc.

I went with Mint because Liam recommended it a couple of years back as a good option to make the hop across from Windows.

I really like it, and it stays out of my way so I can just get on with things.

I game on it a lot as well, all through Steam, and don't have any issues, but like others have said check protondb for your games of choice.

Ford CEO admits he drives a Chinese electric vehicle and doesn't want to give it up

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Re: For years I've wanted this

"it has a small internal combustion engine that powers the batteries. One tank of gas gives a range of up to 1,000 to 1,200 kilometers."

This is really nothing new at all.

Like a couple of you have pointed out, there are quite a few of non-chinese brand cars that do this.

All Honda hybrids are the same I believe, not just the Accord. The hybrid Jazz/Fit certainly uses the petrol engine as a generator to charge the battery.

Also quoting range of a vehicle without also quoting the efficiency is useless.

Sure it can go 1000km, but what is the actual mpg or km/l?

It reminds me of an advert several years ago when Toyota brought out a new Land cruiser Prado model.

It advertised a range of 1200km as standard, which was amazing for a big 4x4.

What the stats didn't show was it had a 180 litre fuel tank, so the mpg was just a rubbish as all the other big 4x4s but this one made your eyes water a bit more when you filled the tank and saw the total price on the pump.

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Re: :)

That's not a problem with EVs, that's a problem with supply.

Did they also tell gas/petrol stations to turn off half their pumps to save electricity as well?

Europa Clipper heads to Jupiter: Can its icy moon support life?

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Fascinating

I wonder why they have to destroy the craft at the end of the mission. I understand they don't want to contaminate Europa but we're ok with contaminating Ganymede?

Does anyone know why they can't just slingshot away from Jupiter and it's moons and send it off into the dark with it's sensors running sending NASA data until it runs out of power (a la Voyager)?

Disney kicks Slack to the curb, looks to Microsoft Teams for a happily ever after

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@Mikus , while I agree that Teams is less than ideal, I've been running it on Linux Mint for over a year and it's been fine.

I have no real issues with it at all.

The version I use is the first hit in software manager.

I suspect it is just the web version in some sort of wrapper but it works fine for me.

There are a few quirks; like it doesn't highlight which screen you are sharing in red, so you need to keep track of which one you've shared, and you can't pop out a video call into a separate window.

But overall I think it's workable - it means I can stay away from W11 and still continue to work for my curreny employer ;⁠)

Microsoft sends Windows Control Panel to tech graveyard

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Clearly you are only considering yourself @Khaptain and not perhaps a good chunk of Reg readers who are in support?

They may need to go through this process several times a week helping other users.

When you work on first line these extra clicks really frustrate.

Five months after takedown, LockBit is a shadow of its former self

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An interesting read..

Although not directly linked to this story if anyone is interested in how law enforcement approach cybercrime, Andy Greenberg's new book, Lords of Crypto Crime, is well worth a read.

And if you haven't already read it, his earlier book, Sandworm, is also fascinating.

Windows 11 tries to escape Windows 10's shadow with AI muscle

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Re: updating the fleet

@James - are you saying that the big edu institute will pay for extended support for the W10 devices or just 'wing it' once official support ends?

The problem a lot of orgs have is that their cyber insurance won't cover them if they continue to use unsupported (and therefore unpatched) machines/OSes.

My org isn't massive (+-3000 users each with a W10 laptop) we can't afford extended MS support as it's incredibly expensive so we're forced to go W11 as otherwise our insurance won't cover us...

Screepy

Re: If they weren't removing the choice no one would bother changing

"The last terror is probably printing / scanning which had always been a bit of a nightmare in previous Linux experiments."

I had a similar experience to Boothy.

When I installed Mint last year, i chose default setup for printers and scanners during the install and my Xerox C235 has worked flawlessly right out the gate. I was most pleasantly surprised.

Transport watchdog's patience wears thin as Tesla Autopilot remedies may not be enough

Screepy

Re: Some statistics of electric car accidents

Interesting link, thanks.

If you click through that link to the site where they got the data from there are some other interesting bits in there.

RAM really not coming out looking very good - topping the charts in a lot of those results - more incidents (not accidents) than any other brand.

BMW has the most drivers caught driving under the influence of alcohol.

And, as you mentioned, Tesla, which are the most accident prone.

Also, a small point but important, your subject line says it's electric cars, but that study covers both EV and ICE - which makes it a much more interesting dataset.

Euro-cloud consortium CISPE calls for investigation of Broadcom

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"Do you you grow sustainable lettuce? No you grow it as big, watery and unsubstantial as you can, cut the head off, and sell it quick."

Not done much gardening in your life have you?

The individual lettuce isn't sustainable, you eat/sell that.

What needs to be sustainable is your ability to continue to produce lettuce of suitable quality for years and years.

So, instead of being greedy and harvesting all your lettuce at once, for a huge feast/profit, you need to let some lettuce run to seed, harvest that seed and then replant them for the next season. Rinse and repeat - sustainable.

So what that rather messy metaphor means is Broadcom are harvesting as much money as they can with no apparent thought of the future of VMware. Ie. Not planning for it to be a sustainable long-term..

US says China's Volt Typhoon is readying destructive cyberattacks

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Re: Critical infrastructure at the heart of threats

On your point a)

The answer is, mostly everyone :(

There's hardly a country out there that hasn't connected critical infra. Main excuse is to allow remote troubleshooting/monitoring.

But also, air gapping won't always help (it certainly reduces the risk though)

Stuxnet ran riot on the Iranian centrifuges and that complex was air gapped. A suitably placed agent just needs a usb/network port or whatever and off they go.

When it comes to state-sponsored hacking, you can probably assume they will eventually find a way in. What you need is suitable mitigation for when/if they launch their bot/worm/malware/etc

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Sandworm..

If you're interested in security, I can recommend grabbing yourself a copy and having a read.

I recently read it and found it to be both terrifying and fascinating at the same time.

40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes

Screepy

Re: Elite: Dangerous - VR Masterpiece

I'm with you on this GraXXor, I loved Elite Dangerous.

The scale was mind boggling.

I went on both Distance Worlds expeditions and travelling with all the other commanders across the galaxy to beagle point has been one of the gaming highlights in my life.

In 2017 I went to FX17 in London to listen to some talks by the devs on how they designed and coded the game.

The astrophysicist who worked with the devs on creating the stellar forge have a brilliant talk on how the universe was generated in game.

There were certainly some disappointing decisions in the game, and some clunky multiplayer issues - trying to get hundreds of commanders in the same instance for a mass launch was always a lottery.

I eventually finished with about 1500 hours on ED.

Has been one of my favourite games.

This could still wing its way to you, if you have the dosh: One Concorde engine seeks new home

Screepy

Re: Asking for a Friend....

The Chevy impala with a jato attached is one of those great legends that doesn't seem to die.

https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1995-04.html

Musk floats idea of boat mod for Cybertruck

Screepy

Re: 7,000 lbs?

This is true but I don't think the cybertruck is coming to the UK or Europe as far as I've read.

US licenses are a bit more relaxed on the weight limits.

I believe it changes from state to state but 10,000 lbs (4,545 kg) seems to be quite a common limit over there. So that would give users about 1,000kg to play with.

Hopefully one of our US readers can give us a better idea of the allowed weight limits on standard licenses..

Firefox slow to load YouTube? Just another front in Google's war on ad blockers

Screepy
Pint

Re: This is not the first time this has "accidently" happened

@NickJP - thanks for those links.

I added them to my pihole, disabled my uBlock origin, and can confirm that I got no YouTube adverts within the video.

I hopped about across 8 or 9 different videos, no issues, none of them had adverts.

I did notice one or two ads appear alongside the comments section of the videos which I never usually see, so I assume uBlock has been sweeping those up for me in the past.

But thank you, please accept this -->

Screepy

Re: This is not the first time this has "accidently" happened

"PiHole works for Youtube, as long as you view via a browser. When you use the app, it serves ads directly from Youtube servers, making blocking them a game of whack-a-mole."

That's interesting. I've been running PiHole for years and I've never seen it block a YouTube advert (in browser or app). It blocks loads of ads but never ones embedded in the YouTube video.

I need to use uBlock Origin to get rid of the YouTube ones.

Are you doing any extra tweaks to your pihole config to get it to block YouTube ads?

Mint freshens up its Linux garden for Ubuntu and Debian fans

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Pint

Re: In a galaxy far, far away...

" Linux Mint CInnamon is my main distro"

It is mine too.

Mainly thanks to Liam tbh.

I'm a MS sys admin, and have been for 20 years.

At home everything was MS, mainly as it was easy for me to fix due to familiarity.

Last year I read one of Liam's articles and it convinced me to try Linux Mint.

Has been my main OS for just over a year now. I'm still pretty crap at troubleshooting it when I have the occasional hiccup but overall I've been impressed.

There are bits and pieces that still annoy me (particularly around certificates. If we update our certs on our Citrix servers, the next time I try and connect from home I get all sorts of trust issues) but that's down to my skillset rather than anything wrong with Linux Mint.

Certainly won't be going back to MS for my home daily driver.

Thanks Liam -->

Volkswagen stuck in neutral after 'IT disruption'

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Re: Rumours...

"The oops being buying networking gear that can be disabled if licences expire.."

All our new Aruba kit (Switches and APs) is subscription license only.

No other option :(

It concerns me greatly.

Apple's iPhone 12 woes spread as Belgium, Germany, Netherlands weigh in

Screepy

Re: Follow the money

It's frequently not as nefarious as that.

As someone posted in another thread, a surprising amount of these 'finds' are university students doing some research.They get a batch of unexpected results and things snowball from there..

Google launches $99 a night Hotel Mountain View for hybrid workers

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Re: I spy a business opportunity

The bigger corps I've worked for, there were always security guards watching the entry gates. Standing there scanning a load of cards one by one may attract their attention (unless off course you can cut them in on the sweet deal)

NASA 'quiet' supersonic jet is nearly ready for flight

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Re: Concorde, so loud

"I wasn't aware that the Concorde flew supersonic over land."

I don't think the OP was saying that it went supersonic over his area, just that the engine noise as it came over was really loud.

My grandmother's house was on the flight path and when we visited we all would stop talking and listen to the cups and saucers rattle on the shelves as it came over. It was really loud - I loved it.

A couple of years before Concorde was cancelled. BA took a load of RAF war vets up on a short circuit flight as a thank you for their services during ww2.

My grandad (rear gunner on Lancaster bomber) had already died by then but the widows were still invited.

My gran went on the flight.

When I asked her what it was like she just shrugged and said it was '.. a bit bumpy and quite chilly, but the air crew were gorgeous"

My dad pointed out that it was the only plane she'd ever flown on and consequently had nothing to compare it too :D

Mark Zuckerberg would kick Elon Musk's ass, experts say

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Re: he starts his day with octopus, a bowl of ice cream, eight oatmeal biscuits, and a donut

I wasn't a big octopus eater but growing up on the coast, I ate my fair share.

Watched My Octopus Teacher a few years back.

No chance I can eat another one.

I know it was heavily anthropomorphised but there's still no way I can eat one again. There is just a little bit too much 'intelligence' there for me.

Google HR hounds threaten 'next steps' for slackers not coming in 3 days a week

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Re: Interesting

"I've been onboarding new people for the last year or more, all entirely remotely. We don't have problems - then again we are not stuck in the management dark ages either."

Precisely this.

Onboarding remotely may be different but it's not necessarily more difficult or worse.

If your onboarding processes are still stuck on the ark with Noah then of course you'll struggle.

Raspberry Pi production rate rising to a million a month

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Pi-hut have Pi 4 8GB 'starter kits' available right now, £104 - hdmi cable, power supply, case, SD card, and pi4 8GB.

Not ideal as i know a lot of us would prefer just the board and then pick and choose what we want depending on our project of choice but at least it's something.

I nabbed one as I'm going to be setting up BirdNet-pi in the garden :)

https://github.com/mcguirepr89/BirdNET-Pi

Leaked Kyndryl files show 55 was average age of laid-off US workers

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Re: Unfortunately...

What a totally shit OP.

"Why have one oldie at £90k when you can have 3 youngsters at £30k each?"

I'll tell you fuckin why!

It's because when I log in in the morning it will take me 30 minutes to fix the finance system issue that your 3x juniors spent all night on and are still no closer to fixing.

Sure, they answered the phone, and the customer got to speak to someone. What good did that do if that someone is still too inexperienced to know how to fix it?

Microsoft disarms push notification bombers with number matching in Authenticator

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Re: Hmm.

I'm not sure this is the fault of the authentication type though.

That is just a time limit implemented by the admins when they set up the application, in your case Canvas/ Workday.

There is usually a setting in the config of the app for how long an auth session will last - controlled by the sys admins obviously.

At least that is how a number of our applications were set up with when we added 2FA - we could set timeouts from minutes to hours to days, or just x min of inactivity.

So either your orgs security policy has stipulated a time limit or the admins left it at default and/or their best guess at a suitable timeout.

Benchmark a cloud PC? No way. Just trust us, they work, says Microsoft

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Benchmarks are important sometimes..

We spent 2022 moving a big SQL data warehouse into Azure and onto some of their beefier VM options.

For the next 6 months we struggled with performance. Data cube analysis that would take us 5-6 hours on our previous on-prem servers was now taking double that.

MS had helped us spec the cloudy VMs - we provided our on-prem specs and they provisioned us with the VMs that would supposedly outperform our older system.

Not even close. Our SQL DBAs spent days/weeks trying to tune the system but we just couldn't get anywhere near our old system. We even bumped the cloud VMs up a couple more performance tiers (which completely wiped out the planned budget for the system) but still had issues.

Back and forth we went with MS support until they eventually said that the setup you was running as optimally as it ever would.

So, I had to rebuild the system on-prem again and we migrated back (what fun that was).

During the switch back we had a couple of days downtime.

DBAs and I took the opportunity to absolutely smoke both systems with some benchmarking tools. The on-prem kit was so much better it was a joke. And we're not talking high-end kit here. Midrange hybrid Nimbles as storage layer, with good, but not amazing Aruba switches and a well oiled but nothing special VMware layer running the VMs.

The main weakness that we spotted on the benchmarking for the cloud stuff was disk IO, it just couldn't get anywhere close to the on-prem Nimbles.

The most bizarre online replacement items in your delivered shopping?

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Tesco and Morrisons both offer 'no bags' option now - in fact I think it's the default option.

Food shop comes in plastic crates, which you empty and hand back to the delivery driver.

We've got plenty of AI now but who asked for it? El Reg's vultures chime in

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Re: Why Kettle? It's the collective noun for vultures in flight

Interestingly, or at least I find it interesting..

If the vultures are on the ground or in a tree it's a committee of vultures.

If they're feeding on a carcass then it's a wake of vultures

:)

Adidas grapples with $1.3B in unsold Yeezy sneakers after breaking up with Kanye West

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@Doctor Syntax

"Of course they'll all end up in land fill one way or another."

Sadly not just landfill, pop over you YouTube and search

'No Lost Shoes | A film by Max Romey'

Only 10 min, an interesting, if rather dispiriting video.

I'm an ultra runner (a very amatuer one!) and have been trying out NNormal shoes - they're trying to stop shoes ending up in landfill (or on distant shores) - after you've worn out your shoe you can send them back to NNormal and theyll break them down again and recycle it all (hopefully)

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