Posts by Natalie Gritpants Jr

/e/ OS 3.0: Slightly less clunky, slightly more private

slashy-slash sounds like a nightmare clown

What will UK government workers do with an extra 26 minutes a day?

Re: Indicative of a better way?

Also, how bad is the software they are using that you have to ask AI how to format a paragraph or align some cells in a spreadsheet?

Ukrainians smuggle drones hidden in cabins on trucks to strike Russian airfields

Re: To quote a fictional

Russia is already doing everything they can.

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

Markdown is already a confusing mess of different versions and implementations. Microsoft is wasting its time if it thinks it can bugger up another standard

VodafoneThree's a crowd – now comes the hard bit

Re: Were all the good names taken?

I think it should have been Threedafone, or Vodathrone

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Still do, it prevents dust settling on the screen.

Trump threatens to add formal Apple Tax on top of the 'Apple tax'

Re: the fish rots from the head down

Which way round is your fish?

Re: Partners are leaving to start their own firm

If Microsoft is banned from doing any work for the federal govt, does that mean no more security fixes if you have a .gov domain? Putin will like that.

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

"we use our most sensitive, precise and exquisitely constructed anatomy to directly control it"

I am never going to borrow your keyboard

Royal Navy freshens up ships' electromagnetic warfare defenses

Gatling gun with tinfoil dispenser

Signal chat app clone used by Signalgate's Waltz was apparently an insecure mess

Re: A quote from Forrest Gump comes to mind.

You can photograph your secure app with another phone. Useful for a get-out-of-jail-free situation

The one interview question that will protect you from North Korean fake workers

How about once you want to hire a person, you interview them in person to hand over the laptop and security things. No need for them to come to head office, just use a trusted agent near them.

Downward DOGE: Elon Musk keeps revising cost-trimming goals in a familiar pattern

There's a saying from Ireland: when two people tell you you're drunk, go and lie down.

Google Cloud’s so-called uninterruptible power supplies caused a six-hour interruption

Re: Unbelievable

All well and good till you discover the diodes are backwards

Mobile ad world drama: AppLovin not lovin' short seller assault claiming fraud

Hmmm, who to side with? Ad slinger or short seller. Is there a way for both to lose?

From MP3 to Web3 to now 3D, Napster gets a new owner

Almost nobody remembers Napster (oldies keep quiet, you're not of interest to the new owners as you're too savvy to buy from them). Would be better as the name of some modern trendy environmentally friendly daipers - nappies for hipsters

UK satellite smartphone services could get green light this year

Re: Impressive

The satellites from AST are the size of a basket ball court and divided into a hundred or so antenna arrays, each one is more than 1m^2 and can steer some number of beams very accurately. This is not an ordinary mobile phone mast, this is an AST mobile phone mast in space.

FTC's $25.5M scam refund treats victims to $34 each

Re: WOOT!

Ever tempted to say "let's get the duck out of here"?

Open Source Initiative defends disallowing board candidate after timezone SNAFU

OSI is the international standards organization, but is actually some french phrase so if you're going to make assumptions about timezone I would pick Paris

Mega council officers had no idea what they were buying ahead of Oracle fiasco

Re: Colour me surprised. Not.

The OP is probably employed in the private sector where performance like Brum council would have resulted in real bankruptcy and job losses, so yes, the OP could probably have done much, much better for a fraction of the price.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Yes, sheet music and concert tickets. Phone batteries are not that reliable, especially when the insurance black box in my car connects to the app and turns the phone GPS on so it can track me, that flattens the battery in hours if I forget to connect the charge cable in the car.

Trump can't quickly or easily kill the CHIPS Act, but he can fire the workers funded by it

Re: The Trump administration’s plans for the future of NIST are not clear.

Can we start calling him Agent Orange?

The biggest microcode attack in our history is underway

If Trump annexes Greenland, he may well let Russia have Ukraine. If that happens, there will really be nothing stopping China taking Taiwan. You can expect that to disrupt the supply of chips to such an extent you will probably see a massive economic depression and a lot of redundant IT professionals.

India's banking on the bank.in domain cleaning up its financial services sector

In related news, the fruit preserve regulator is aiming to tackle the fake spread epidemic with the jam.in domain name

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov

We've all seen this playbook in several countries in the last few decades: Elect a strong-man leader, fuck stuff up, declare an emergency, cancel elections, dispose of opposition

Nobody works 120 hours in a week. That results in 6 hours per day to eat, wash and sleep. Anyone who thinks they do that should not be trusted with anything sharper than a crayon.

Ubuntu upgrade had our old Nvidia GPU begging for a downgrade

Nvidia chips soldered to a motherboard means that motherboard is on my do-not-buy list, same as Realtek network chips

Google Maps to roll out Trump-approved Denali and Gulf of Mexico rebrands

Re: What's in a name...

Well somebody did, and we're not going home till they admit it. I can stay here all night.

Sonos CEO steps down after smart speaker app upgrade hit bum note

Going to be more common with smart devices

They make a handsome profit on the initial sale, but a loss on backend compute resources needed to keep the product "smart". They could charge a realistic fee for the cloudy stuff instead of pretending it's free, or just open source it and let the geeks come up with a way. Shelly do this with their switches and stuff, and it is a joy to work with.

UK prepared to throw planning rules out the window for massive datacenters

90% of turkeys surveyed

said that Christmas was the biggest problem they faced

Short-lived bling, dumb smart things, and more: The worst in show from CES 2025

Re: making an essential appliance too damn complicated

You could just flip the circuit breaker

Chinese RISC-V project teases 2025 debut of freely licensed advanced chip design

"hasn’t progressed as quickly as hoped and argues that’s because developing high-end chips is hard."

If you think that's hard, try verifying it. If you think verifying high-end chips is hard, try debugging a failing test

Arch Linux installer now slightly less masochistic

Re: Dumbing down

> Why does an installer need to be anything but text based?

So it can ask you what language you would like to use without assuming you speak English

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

Re: Off-grid computing

The monitor sounds nice. I wanted a photo frame from the kitchen, and the displays on Amazon were around the same price for 7". The first one had speakers, but died after a week. The second is fine, but no speakers. Both required faffing around to get native resolution from the HDMI (the displays are basically laptop/tablet displays, and they don't have EDID on the HDMI as cost saving. Hopefully this one has

Europe's largest local authority settles on ERP budget 5x original estimate

Strange that all banks and utilities can provide accuracy down to the penny, yet Brum council are happy to have accounts accurate to the nearest £1000. Is that per item or for the annual accounts total?

Cryptocurrency policy under Trump: Lots of promises, few concrete plans

Please Santa. Make someone use AI to design a quantum computer to find all the bitcoins so we can get past all this nonsense.

AI Jesus is ready to dispense advice from a booth in historic Swiss church

At least it won't rape your children

Musk, America PAC sued for allegedly rigging $1M election prize

Has Musk been reading Knuth? I think he said something like "Random numbers are too important to be left to chance", but I don't think he meant what Musk thinks he meant.

Will passkeys ever replace passwords? Can they?

Ugh. OK so an infinite amount of monkeys will produce Shakespeare, but you'll never find it amongst the infinite pile of Jilly Cooper

UK energy watchdog slaps down Capita's £130M smart meter splurge

The minute I hear about them remote disconnecting is the time I will be lining the meter cupboard with tinfoil.

O2's AI granny knits tall tales to waste scam callers' time

More theatre, while not taking action to block scam calls. There's a conflict of interest here, as the phone companies get paid for all those scam calls. They know exactly where the scam calls come from, otherwise it would imply they don't know how to bill precisely, and their business model would collapse. They could just block the origin of the calls altogether until the phone company originating the calls gets its act together. We do this for certificate authorities on the internet.

Schneider Electric ransomware crew demands $125k paid in baguettes

Re: Errr...

there

No-Nvidias networking club convenes in search of open GPU interconnect

Patent lawyers will be sharpening their quills

Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers

But if you cut him open he smells of pine.

The horror that is VHS revived for horror movie release

Re: They did it for the publicity

Given that no one in their right mind will go to the trouble of unboxing and playing it, I predict they will just relabel a bunch of old unsold stock.

Who can forget the joy of finishing a kids movie only to find the last 20 minutes of a grumble flick that had been overwritten by the guy at the car boot sale.

41-million-digit prime crunched by datacenter GPUs

If you really want to see the full version of M136279841

In binary, it is 136279841 ones.

SuperHTML is here to rescue you from syntax errors, and it's FOSS

Re: would like to see a switch back to plain old static HTML

I edit my personal wiki using MD files in emacs and publish via a filter to convert md to html in apache:

# Apache configuration directives for the local wiki pages.

ExtFilterDefine md-to-html mode=output intype=text/markdown outtype=text/html cmd="/usr/bin/pandoc --from=gfm --to=html5 --template=/var/www/html/pandoc.tmpl"

<Directory "/var/www/html/wiki">

Options +FollowSymLinks

AuthType basic

AuthName "Wiki"

AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/htpasswd

Require valid-user

SetOutputFilter md-to-html

AddType text/markdown .md

</Directory>

Google hopes to spark chain reaction with nuclear energy investment

Don't forget - radiation is only harmful to lifeforms that live long enough to die of radiation caused cancer. Let's keep the reactors away from whales, elephants and tortoises. Humans are not endangered

Hold my Pimms! Wimbledon turns to tech for line-ball calls

Looks out to me even on the hawkeye playback at low speed.

SpaceX accuses 'meme-stock' rival of 'misinformation' over Starlink signals waiver

Meme stock?

I worked on the <redacted> for AST PGA. It was designed from the start to communicate with 5G phones, and so doesn't need to blast a huge are to operate. Starlink birds were designed to communicate with dish antennas, not phones.