Posts by DoctorPaul

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

Re: I'm sure we've all done this too

Hell's teeth!!

You mean it's not just me that has the street light thing happen??

This needs some serious research.....

25 years of PHP: The personal web tools that ended up everywhere

Thanks Rasmus!

Has kept me in work for at least 20 of the 25 :-)

Trump issues toothless exec order to show donors, fans he's doing something about those Twitter twerps

Re: @El Reg, teach your authors some basic journalism

Remember Kent State?

Google rolls out pro-privacy DNS-over-HTTPS support in Chrome 83... with a handy kill switch for corporate IT

Re: Power grab

"Pair of pi-holes" - absolutely!

When I started with a single pi-hole, I would lose DNS after a few days - something seems to lock up a pi-hole at some point, which took out DNS completely.

With a pair of them, I can see from the admin screens that one does most of the work for a number of days, then things flop over to the other one. Then back again and so on. Is this a common issue for other pi-holers?

Are they reliable now? Let's just say that I recently realised that I hadn't done a remote connection and update on mine for over a year - "it just works".

SAP proves, yet again, that Excel is utterly unkillable

Re: Excel excels

That's my clients your talking about!

NHS contact tracing app isn't really anonymous, is riddled with bugs, and is open to abuse. Good thing we're not in the middle of a pandemic, eh?

Re: One would have throught...

Wow, you've got the right user name haven't you?

Are you a professional idiot or just an enthusiastic amateur?

The Rise of The (Coffee) Machines: I need assistance. I think I'm running Windows. Send help

Re: Not quite Windows

Got a version of that error on the British Gas web site - "something went wrong but we're not telling you what".

Security through obscurity?

25 years of Delphi and no Oracle in sight: Not a Visual Basic killer but hard to kill

Thanking all who mentioned Lazarus!

I bought my copy of Delphi on the day of its release in the UK "and never looked back".

Looking forward to exploring Lazarus

UK contractors planning 'mass exodus' ahead of IR35 tax clampdown – survey

Re: Anonymous Contractor

Many years ago I went permanent with a firm I had happily freelanced for over a period of 5 years or more.

Our relationship broke down within weeks of the change and I was signed off sick for months. And this was working with exactly the same people with whom I'd had a great rapport up to that point.

I believe that the legal definition of whether someone is an employee is that the employer-employee relationship is a master-slave relationship. As a contractor, I was asked to do things - as an employee I was ordered to do things.

Come to Five Guys, where the software is as fresh as the burgers... or maybe not

Re: upstart?

Ah Five Guys!

Used to have one here in Kent (Westwood Cross) - and I swear that I never saw more than 4 people in there at a time, and 2 of those were staff :-)

The location is now a phone shop.

So you locked your backups away for years, huh? Allow me to introduce my colleagues, Brute, Force and Ignorance

Re: Seen in the wild

Lordy that takes me back!

That completely describes our tours round France in the 80s. Crawl under the veedub camper every morning and apply hammer to the starter motor. And finally a push start to get it off the ferry on our return to Dover.

Happy days!

What if everyone just said 'Nah' to tracking?

Re: PiHole

Been running PiHole for a while now, must get round to setting up DNS over HTTPS some time!

My only caveat is that you need to run TWO of them to be fully reliable. In my case each Pi seems to lock up every few weeks, taking down DNS. Running two of them seems to provide a reliable fail-over.

Help! I bought a domain and ended up with a stranger's PayPal! And I can't give it back

That reminds me, time to move on from Vidahost

Happy Thursday! 770 MEEELLLION email addresses and passwords found in yuge data breach

Well worth doing

Been doing that for years, it's interesting to see which firms have been hacked when the spam starts arriving at their assigned email address :-)

One point - this approach requires catch-all email forwarding on the server, which some suppliers don't like to provide.

It also means that you then get all the cr4p sent to randomly generated addresses at your domain - any that turn up more than once I forward to a junk folder.

On the first day of Christmas, Microsoft gave to me... an emergency out-of-band security patch for IE

Re: Initializing installation... done!

Ah, that takes me back!

Initializing installation... done!

Why would you trust programmers who seem to need an exclamation mark when things actually work as intended?

Britain's rail ticket-booking systems go TITSUP*

British Gas web site used to raise my blood pressure -

"Oops, something went wrong - but we're not going to tell you what"

Shortages, price rises, recession: Tech industry preps for hard Brexit

Re: And all we can do...

"Move on"?

Where to exactly?

Day two – and Windows 10 October 2018 Update trips over Intel audio

Likewise, and the next move will be to Mint

Remember when Apple's FaceTime stopped working years ago? Yeah, that was deliberate

iOS7 was when I jumped ship

Like to think I was an early adopter of Apple kit - £1300 at educational discount for a Mac SE with twin floppies in 1987 on which to write my PhD thesis - but the forced iOS7 upgrade to my iPad was the last straw.

To be told in the Apple Store that I had no right to roll back to iOS6 despite having "bought" the hardware did things to my blood pressure that I really don't want to recall :-)

So now it's Android all the way - which means Google's own kit basically. I love to pick up last year's model on eBay just after the latest bit of bleeding edge tech is released. Nexus 6P phone does me very well thank you, even with Oreo.

Sorry to all the script kiddies out there, but I'm not willing to give up the last few decades of UI design for something that could be rendered on a 256 colour VGA adapter and looks like a 5 year old with a set of crayons designed it.

Which is one factor in why I'll be jumping from Windows 7 to Mint - don't even get me started on the abomination that is the Windows 10 UI!

(Lights blue touchpaper and retires)

You know all those movies you bought from Apple? Um, well, think different: You didn't

Re: Where do you put those hard drives?

Yep, plex in the airing cupboard!

Used to hold the old immersion heater, gone now we've got a combi boiler, and those empty 22mm pipe runs make cabling throughout the house a breeze!

Re: Music...

Do what I do - stick them on a USB3 external drive, and attach that to a plex server.

Mind you, I'm up to 12Tb as things stand, but it's all mounted in the old airing cupboard so even the waste heat is reused :-)

Creaky systems 'cost lives': Health secretary Matt Hancock pledges to solve NHS IT woes

Re: Cost of ownership

Sounds like moving from one lock-in to another to me.

So NHS goes linux?

"Rather, the NHS will impose open standards to ensure interoperability, "

Time to show M$ the door and embrace open standards?

Well, I can dream can't I?

We've found another problem with IPv6: It's sparked a punch-up between top networks

Re: El Reg & IPv6

Why, does it make you more stoned?

Re: El Reg & IPv6

"Capitalism is the exploitation for gain of one person by another, communism is *precisely* the opposite" - from my Social Studies degree in 1971.

Think on it - for the poor b*gger on the shop floor there is no discernible difference, life is cr@p.

I predict a riot: Amazon UK chief foresees 'civil unrest' for no-deal Brexit

Re: eh?

Nice to see a post from someone who seems to know what they're talking about.

My stepson worked for years in import/export processing and assures us that Dover will gridlock - no ifs, no buts, it will be a total meltdown.

Think Operation Stack every single day, then double it :-(