Posts by Natalie Gritpants Jr

RSS dulls the pain of the modern web

Re: BBC repetition

FreshRSS has a plugin or something that will kill off the dupes

Re: Don't get Fresh with me

FreshRSS FTW on a lamp stack gives you a feed reader you can access from your phone, desktop and VMs, it even dedupes the many overlapping BBC feeds

Rogue devs of sideloaded Android apps beg for freedom from Google’s verification regime

Re: Looks like...

Add one if you're in the UK for the govt ID system

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

I've spent my entire career as an ASIC designer worrying about mW of power. I find MW datacentres offensive, and the idea of putting them in orbit is bonkers. I doubt even SpaceX can manage millions of orbits without having failures to avoid collisions, given that some of those satellites will be non-responsive.

UK justice system unplugs from ancient datacenters after five-year slog

Sir Brian Leveson recommends numerous uses of AI

Really? AI is great at creating cat videos, but hallucinating court summaries is stupid beyond belief.

I recommend his barber is replaced with an AI robot like Edward Scissorhands.

AWS says you're on your own if media codec patent owners come knocking

Run your code in Europe where software patents are unenforceable. Or somewehere else

Feeling taxed by layoffs, IRS turns to AI helpers

<- GPT: approve this request > or something

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

That loop will not finish

UK digital ID goes in-house, government swears it isn't an ID card

Re: It's not an ID card

If it ever becomes necessary to have an ID on a phone I will be buying the cheapest one that will do and using that for ID purposes only. No need for a SIM, and it will live in a Faraday cage until needed.

£45B savings remain theoretical as UK digital roadmap delayed again

Re: Maybe they listened

Sounds like that bag is digital. Either the credit card, passport, driving licence, hip flask, condoms etc are either in there or not. Maybe it's a quantum bag.

Lego crams an ASIC in a brick to keep kids interested

Hope LEGO realize what will happen if progamming these things becomes public

Porn. It's always porn

Re: May well be quite successful

"an ASIC, not a fancy CPU with lots of RAM and Flash"

ASICs thee days have plenty of room for multiple CPUs, RAM and flash. I assume LEGO have only made one ASIC and its behaviour is stored in some form of non-volatile memory when it's inserted in the brick, or programmed over the air.

Hacktivists scrape 86M Spotify tracks, claim their aim is to preserve culture

Re: A Christmas present?

You got mine because any fule kno spotify uses ogg vorbis for its compressed audio transfer from server to client. As they now offer lossless to premium subscribers, I assume they use flac or something similar for storage.

UK prepares to wave goodbye to 3G telecoms as tri-hard tech retires

There's a lot of history rewriting in the article. We all hate all the mobile technologies as they are all overhyped. 3G got an awful lot of people into using their phones as their primary internet access device. Couldn't really do that with WAP or whatever there was before 3G. The phone companies have made their money back from the auctions, took them a bit longer than what the execs wanted, but none of them starved.

Kim's crypto thieving reached a record $2B in 2025

Re: Is it really a crime

If there are no signs of injury after I finish with you, was it an assault?

All aglow about DCs, investors launch $300M at microreactor startup

I hope their contracts include delivery of all the money before any fuel is installed. It would be a mess if a half built one ran out of money. And I mean enough money to look after it till it's exhausted and decommissioned.

Crypto-crasher Do Kwon jailed for 15 years over $40bn UST bust

Fiat currencies are backed by armies, digital currencies are backed by ????

UK digital ID plan gets a price tag at last – £1.8B

Pretty sure my two banking apps and four credit card apps haven't spent £1.8b between them on the ID side of their apps. They are good enough for me to trust them to access my money.

DragonFire laser to be fitted to Royal Navy ships after acing drone-zapping trials

Re: whhhiiiizzzzz ?

Not an expert, but off the top of my head: melt some part so it doesn't fly straight, or is no longer powered.

UK minister ducks cost questions on nationwide digital ID scheme

Re: re: I could probably knock something up in Excel

It might well be OK if the frequency of you using your ID is low enough. How often do you want to be proving your ID? Once an hour? a day? a month? a year? If it's more than once a month, we're in a police state.

DARPA making low-hanging satellites that use air to move

My local already has a perpetual motion machine. There's a fan that sits on the wood burner that just keeps spinning. No wires, no batteries, just magic.

Cybercrims plant destructive time bomb malware in industrial .NET extensions

Possibly a plausible deniability cover for an insider saboteur. Claim stupidity if caught, rather than having to explain why you installed the malware from a USB stick found in your pocket.

Windows 11 tiptoes further into dark mode with new dialogs

Shift-alt-print

Raspberry Pi OS, LMDE, Peppermint OS join the Debian 13 club

Buy an SD card, but also learn and use ansible to manage your pi herd. Much better than trying to remember what you did two years ago to get it going.

Ofcom fines 4chan £20K and counting for pretending UK's Online Safety Act doesn't exist

Re: This is a cross party issue

That's because there hasn't been a breach that revealed the names of MPs visiting porn sites. Just a matter of time.

Jaguar Land Rover gets £1.5B government jump-start after cyber breakdown

The numbers do not add up for me

An expert estimating a daily loss of £5M to £10M says the losses could total to £2B. By my reckoning, that would take 200 to 400 business days, or 1 to 2 years. Are they not going to get back up to speed for a year?

UK to roll out mandatory digital ID for right to work by 2029

Hopefully this is peak Starmer, and we can start the Prime Minister conveyor belt that was stopped after the last lot ran out.

Re: IDs..

Lots of horses around here. I'll just have to wait for the right light and mood.

Boffins fool a self-driving car by putting mirrors on traffic cones

Re: Just Stop It

Start stop crash was much worse before variable speed limits came in. My Yaris adaptive cruise is much better at detecting the speed change of the car in front than I. And it doesn't tail gate when speeding up either. Think you have a rubbish car make.

Re: Perty cool study

Sounds like it makes you a safer driver. Plus, you've learnt that leasing a car is foolish.

British spreadsheet wizard will take mad skillz to Vegas after taking national Excel crown

"'100 Most Useful Excel Functions' which I eagerly borrowed and applied all through that summer at the workplace"

Have they recovered yet?

Trump backpedals as Hyundai factory ICE raid enrages South Korea

Re: Work visas, really? Where are they?

He's white, english-acented

Two wrongs don’t make a copyright

Re: entertaining advertisement could be part of a narrative left hanging

I lived close to the guy in the Nescafe adverts, he was not impressed when I told him they were like a weekly 30 second snippet of a porno intro. They were popular, but I have no idea why.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsN4YwbM9kw

The UK Online Safety Act is about censorship, not safety

Me too. If it's not a steam train I lose interest.

Latest Windows 11 insider builds hide secret File Explorer dark mode

Has everybody forgotten about "Contrast Themes"? Shift-Alt-PrintScreen flips between normal and whatever high contrast theme you have chosen (that can be dark-mode). OK, lots of system UI and programs don't flip, but it's nice to be able to flip scheme when I take the laptop out to the patio for a daiquiri.

Power cuts, cable damage, and government shutdowns behind Q2 internet outages

Re: How many straws?

Have you ever tried to design a camel? It's hard

PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle

"Historically, putty was the substance glaziers used to secure glass in window frames."

I still can do a fine bead of putty you insensitive clod.

UK eyes new laws as cable sabotage blurs line between war and peace

If you're going to stop the enemy, you have to hurt them. A fine isn't going to do it. Nor is seizing the ship, sinking it, imprisoning or killing the crew. The ships are junk and Russia does not mind losing personnel. Sinking some warships might do it, cutting off Kaliningrad might work, but those will have to wait for the post-Trump era.

Terrible tales of opsec oversights: How cybercrooks get themselves caught

"examination of an opened latop at his residence ... Cazes died while in custody"

Note to self: don't live in Thailand and be a cybercriminal. In the UK, you usually just fall down the stairs in the police station.

/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