I knew this would backfire!
BMW are like Apple. Over-engineered, overpriced garbage, rather similar to the subscription idea!
Posts by SuperGeek
232 publicly visible posts • joined 14 May 2018
Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure
PEBCAK problem transformed young techie into grizzled cynical sysadmin
Decades-old Home Office asylum system misses EOL deadline, no new timetable in place
Thursday 7th September 2023 05:23 GMT
what a surprise....not!
The UK Gov are a laughing stock.
Smart Meter deadline: Overzealous, missed and over budget.
Grenfell cladding fiasco: Still a joke and not corrected across the UK.
Electric Cars and Heat Pumps: Way overzealous and probably going to be out by 20 years!!
This isn't mentioning all the other crap they have denied/missed. And now we have the school roof nonsense. They'll narcissist their way out of that too!!
AI on AI action: Googler uses GPT-4 chatbot to defeat image classifier's guardian
Wednesday 2nd August 2023 05:40 GMT
Sounds like an orange lump
"The Terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."
I think they meant The Trump, because that description fitted him perfectly, albeit without the word "narcissist".
Google's browser security plan slammed as dangerous, terrible, DRM for websites
Asus blames 'thermal stress' for fried SD card readers in Ally handhelds
Thursday 27th July 2023 08:04 GMT
The SD card reader on my Latitude 7390 gets quite hot under sustained write and it's nowhere near the heatsink. I use an Endurance grade card as a kind of HDD in this machine, as it's a minimalist ultrabook style. The SD reader on this is wired to the PCIe bus, so is quite fast, and gets warm under heavy write load like torrenting. It hasn't crapped out yet.
I wonder if the heat from the Ally is melting solder somehow.....
Musk's X tries to win advertisers back with discounts
Want to live dangerously? Try running Windows XP in 2023
Obscure internet boutique Amazon sues EU for calling it a Very Large Online Platform
BOFH: Cough up half a grand and we'll protect you from AI
Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time
BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business
Meta tells staff to return to office three days a week
Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it
Microsoft scrambles to fix Windows 11 'aCropalypse' privacy-battering bug
Thanks to generative AI, catching fraud science is going to be this much harder
OpenAI's ChatGPT is a morally corrupting influence
Midjourney, DeviantArt face lawsuit over AI-made art
Apple says 2017 MacBooks don't have FlexGate defect. Aussie tribunal orders a fix anyway
Monday 15th August 2022 19:47 GMT
Display cable?
That looks more like heat damage due to the machine heat being ejected towards the screen. Apple for some reason put the heatsink/fan between the base and screen. DELL copied that with my G3 3779. It causes the plastic layers (refractors, deflectors, etc) in the screen to warp. A display cable too short would flex and break, causing coloured lines, and other symptoms. I've had laptops that have pulled the LVDS socket off the back of the screen due to a manufacturing defect, or it having been previously fiddled with and put back wrongly.
FYI: BMW puts heated seats, other features behind paywall
Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout
Meetings in the metaverse: Are your Mikes on?
BOFH: The evil guide to upgrading switches
Bank had no firewall license, intrusion or phishing protection – guess the rest
Wednesday 6th April 2022 10:20 GMT
Re: Without reading the article
"They realised their mistake, paid their licence arrears, put in place a system to prevent recurrence, extensively audited their systems to ensure no intrusion had occurred, write a grovelling apology to their customers and by their quick corrective action managed to avoid being exploited?"
Does Hell freeze over once a blue moon?
Review: ASUS dual-screen laptop may warm your heart, will definitely warm your lap
Monday 21st March 2022 23:10 GMT
Any heat...
Can be bad news. Repeated on/off cycles cause heating/cooling thermal cycling of solder joints, which recently killed my Dell G3 3779 gaming machine, even run on a cooling pad and undervolted! And on modern single board machines it gets expensive, as I can guarantee it'll happen out of warranty!
Unable to write 'Amusing Weekly Column'. Abort, Retry, Fail?
Make assistive driving safe: Eliminate pedestrians
Saturday 12th February 2022 09:25 GMT
Re: Tesla
"If you advertise it as an "autopilot", then it's an autopilot. Switch on, leave it to it. Not a driving assistance. Don't they have trade description laws in the States?"
Apparently it's the same with planes. Autopilot is not self flying, only "pilot assistance"? So why don't they call it Assistpilot? Then it can't be classed as misadvertising! Tesla can use the name too, and it's self explanatory!
Bouncing cheques or a bouncy landing? All in a day's work for the expert pilot
Big shock: Guy who fled political violence and became rich in tech now struggles to care about political violence
Foxstuck: Firefox browser bug boots legions of users offline
No more DRM-free downloads as Amazon's ComiXology app set to disappear inside Kindle
Canon: Chip supplies are so bad that our ink cartridges will look as though they're fakes
Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault
Apple custom chip guru jumps ship to rejoin Intel
You've stolen the antiglare shield on that monitor you've fixed – they say the screen is completely unreadable now
Sunday 2nd January 2022 18:23 GMT
As a self employed mobile technician....
(WARNING: If you're eating you might want to, uh, not be!)
Not so long ago a customer of mine called me out saying his son's computer was overheating and shutting down. The son's father told me that he'd run the computer with no cover on for a few days as they'd fitted a new component and couldn't get the side panel to stay on fully. After a few days with the cover off they'd got it back on. This was under a dark desk.
Suddenly, it had started overheating. And, they'd not been able to find the family gerbil after it had gone walkabout, three days previous, after making a break for it from its improperly latched cage. I knew what was coming, and still can't get the image out of my head. The family gerbil, headless, decimated by the CPU fan (a high torque Corsair one), splatted all inside the case. It must have been snuggled in there as they put the cover back on, snuggled under the horizontal HDD cage so they didn't see it, where it had come out to investigate the big spinny, draughty thing later on. The guy had gone to make us all cups of tea. I didn't know how to break it to him, as his daughter loved the little furry guy.
I just walked into the kitchen and said, "I don't know how to break this to you, but I found the gerbil.....". He was smart enough to put two and two together. He told me not to bother cleaning the computer. "Chuck it in the bin, we'll buy a new one from you, and tell my son it is unrepairable."
Phew. I didn't fancy cleaning gerbil guts at all! Nicotine is nothing in comparison! The father kept the gerbil decimation a secret, and told the kids he'd escaped out the door or a window. I built them a new PC and had the old one shredded, I wasn't stripping it.....
Windows takes a breather in London's Spitalfields
Thank you, FAQ chatbot, but if I want your help I'll ask for it
Swooping in to claim the glory while the On Call engineer stands baffled
Friday 26th November 2021 17:59 GMT
Re: Hands On
"Assuming prodding may involve the use of hammers. Large adjustable spanners may be substituted if you find yourself suddenly hammerless."
Hehe, Photonicinduction comes to mind! "Where's my 'amma?"
Then when he's "fixed" it, "I popped it!!"
He's a crazy awesome Londoner who does crazy experiments with VERY high voltages! I recommend giving his YouTube channel a watch!
Reg scribe spends 80 hours in actual metaverse … and plans to keep visiting
Whenever automakers get their hands on chip supplies, the more expensive vehicles are first in line – NXP
Zuckerberg wants to create a make-believe world in which you can hide from all the damage Facebook has done
Good Grief! Ransomware gang has only gone and pwned the NRA – or so it claims
Windows terminates here. Please remember to finish setting it up on arrival
Fatal Attraction: Lovely collection, really, but it does not belong anywhere near magnetic storage media
Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram deplatform themselves: Services down globally
Monday 4th October 2021 22:55 GMT
Re: Facebook down..... side benefits?
"And for those of us with family stuck abroad in a pandemic won't be able to talk at all. Yay!"
Phones exist. You know, the function of the "smartphone" that is its main feature? Call them, and, you know, use your voice. Hard to understand in these days of keyboard tippy-tappy, I know.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
