Posts by VonDutch

Google bets on carbon capture tech to clean up its mess – in the 2030s

Re: Direct air capture is dumb

It also wants to suck it up again but never as much as was emitted to make it.

People keep wanting to build things with the stuff so they keep making it.

Cyber crooks shut down UK, US schools, thousands of kids affected

Re: Prevent kindergarteners

And that interesting state of burn on contact but did nothing to heat the room.

WHO-backed meta-study finds no evidence that cellphone radiation causes brain cancer

Re: 5G sucks here

Pixel 5 running Android 14...

Settings

>Network and Internet

>Internet

Tap the cog next to the mobile operator

Scroll down to Preferred network type, set to 4G (or 3G if you really want)

Police allege 'evil twin' of in-flight Wi-Fi used to steal passenger's credentials

Re: Eh?

Michael Mouse using an info@[wifi provider's domain] logs in on a few access points around the world.

He often agrees to receive their spam emails too.

Starliner to remain docked to the ISS into July – with no new departure date

Maybe someone has a summer holiday booked

We need a volunteer to literally crawl over broken glass to fix this network

Re: Water sports

Is that: the only time you "had" to...

The rest of the time you just do it for fun?

Legendary Glastonbury farm using bovine excreta power plant adds graphene boffinry

More of these small-scale positive LCA companies should be backed. While each one seems like a drop in the ocean compared with total global emissions they start to add up quite quickly. Often these technologies are currently the only solution for smaller emitters that are a long distance from industrial clusters that are considering bulk scale capture and storage projects.

The ability to deploy this with "only" 25 tonnes CO2eq improvement drives investment in the company to be able to deploy further and scale up the technology to make it a bigger player in decarbonisation. It is also utilising CO2 to make a product that is locking away some of the carbon that would otherwise have been emitted.

It's important to note that this is being installed now. The large scale capture and storage projects that are being talked about for all the major sources of emissions are (like cold fusion power) always years away from meaningful implementation. Any CCUS project that can be rolled out today helps normalise the behaviour towards carbon reductions in industry.

I didn't touch a thing – just some cables and a monitor – and my computer broke

Re: Blonde moments

Is that the logitech one where the receiver is slotted into a piece of cardboard that forms the end flap of the box?

I've cursed about that one on a couple of occasions.

Trump 'tried to sell Truth Social to Musk' as SPAC deal stalled

Re: Oh to have been a fly on the wall....

It's how targeted advertising works.

You just bought a toilet seat so obviously you want to become a collector of them.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

Re: Hardware sales

The dropping of Dolby Vision/Atmos isn't getting as much airtime as the Ad insertion. Glad someone mentioned it.

Quarter of polled Americans say they use AI to make them hotter in online dating

Re: If you’ve fallen as far as using a dating app

For certain sections of society dating apps are quite important.

If you're in an area without special interest bars or venues and a non-tolerant society around you, they provide a safe space where the people you approach are of a like mind and less likely to punch you in the face (or worse) for your orientation or identity.

It's very closed-minded to think they're just the last resort for hopeful people to find a connection with someone.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Half Life 3

Half Life 3 will be launched.

User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work

Re: Click, click, click, nothing happens

Screenshot

Rotate 180 degrees

Set as background

Delete icons

Rotate desktop 180 degrees

That one was truly mean if people didn't know the quick keyboard shortcut (or it had been disabled) to return the desktop to normal.

‘How not to hire a North Korean plant posing as a techie’ guide updated by US and South Korean authorities

College Professor...

They could have saved a lot of time and money instead of setting up the Professor and asked the assignment topics in ChatGPT.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Re: Faux AZERTY

I have done the same. Very much confuses someone if they go to type anything on my laptop.

The only challenge is trying to do some gaming you either have to re-map key bindings for Dvorak use ( wasd becomes ,aoe) or switch the layout back to qwerty.

Pixies keep switching off my morning alarm, says Google Pixel owner

The biggest issue I found with using a playlist to wake me up is growing to dislike a song that I once fond of because it was now associated with being given a rude awakening signalling time to get up and go to work.

Top tip, put a song you hate at the top of the playlist, and the device just out of reach. It'll wake you up, fill you with the rage you need to get up to turn it off and start the morning with the contempt it deserves!

Codebreakers decipher Mary, Queen of Scots' secret letters 436 years after her execution

You're forgetting the glacial pace of University decision making that means that the successfully won funding gets eroded away by bureaucracy before you get to do anything meaningful with it.

The second round of funding is generally there to fund the first project because it only paid for you to be allowed in to the building. Ends up being a ponzi scheme to deliver research papers.

Nearly all protein structures known to science predicted by AlphaFold AI

Re: AI

Traditional modelling methods (10 years or so ago) would take the model of the amino acid sequence, simulate heating to a high energy state so the chain moves around a lot in to random confirmations and then reduce the temperature and simulate the rearrangement in to a low energy conformation. Through thousands of rounds of this a number of classes of probable conformations would be produced with a likelihood of each one being "true".

The real complication comes where there are post translational modifications that either direct or inhibit the formation of different conformations. A lot of these PTMs can't be predicted from the genome (glycosylation) and they have a temporal factor (turning on or off of a protein by phosphorylation as an example).

The exponential amount of information moving from genomics to proteomics and beyond is a real challenge but the output of this project could help accelerate the hands on research a lot.

Mars helicopter needs patch to fly again after sensor failure

"shorter days and dropping power levels"

Can't it fly south for the winter?

Thank you, FAQ chatbot, but if I want your help I'll ask for it

I absolutely detest being on hold and the messages telling me it might be quicker to go to the website. Particularly when the website has told me I can't do what I need to do online and I need to call.

Believe me, if I could complete what I need to do without picking up the phone I'd have done it already and it's just rubbing it in.

Instagram is testing feature that tells panicking users the service is broken again

Re: What is wrong with a 404?

Microfiche? You're lucky. In my day we had to join an exodus and wait for a prophet to descend from the mountain with a response carved in to stone tablets.

Samsung is planning to reverse-engineer the human brain on to a chip

Forged alliance yes. SupCom2, really no. There's a community group that are still modding and improving FA (Forged Alliance Forever).

Wow, that takes me back. Guess I'll be hunting that down to play tonight.

Coincidentally the game was 24 years old yesterday!

Tech won't save you from lockdown disaster: How to manage family and free time while working from home

Re: Use fresh fruit and veg

But Tesco always looks like that...

Freedom of Information coverup clerk stung for £2k after deleting council audio recording

Re: Million dollar question

With all the talk of novel viruses, border closures, fights in supermarkets, economic downturns... life is bad enough right now without bringing up RealPlayer.

BOFH: Here he comes, all wide-eyed with the boundless optimism of youth. He is me, 30 years ago... what to do?

I'll stop being cynical when I stop being proven right.

Flying taxis? That'll be AFTER you've launched light sabres and anti-gravity skateboards

Re: Did I get this right?

That would be a new excuse for the proctologist to hear.

A user's magnetic charm makes for a special call-out for our hapless hero

Re: 50,000 rps

Some lab ultracentrifuges go even faster.

They have armour plating on the inside to try and contain shrapnel if a vial breaks but if the rotor head fails you want to be in another building.

Cheque out my mad metal frisbee skillz... oops. Lights out!

Who me?

I struggle enough with the days of the week without you swapping On call for Who me on a Friday!

What is this madness?

Attention! Very important science: Tapping a can of fizzy beer does... absolutely nothing

Re: How rapidly were the cans opened ?

Open it a crack then lock face around it sucking hurriedly with that pained look on your face in fear of losing a precious drop of party juice.

Remember the 1980s? Oversized shoulder pads, Metal Mickey and... sticky keyboards?

Re: Been there...

Love DVORAK and it confuses the hell out of anyone if they try and do something on my computer.

Only drawback is it takes me a while to get back in to touch typing on QWERTY if I need use that instead.

Re: It was something we used to do in the 60s & 70s

In a previous job when I was called in on a weekend I found a fray bentos pie being cooked in the glassware oven in the lab. (less than 5 years ago)

Well, well, well. Fancy that. UK.gov shelves planned pr0n block

Yay!

Maybe legislate that parents pay attention to what their kids are doing online instead.

The safest place to save your files is somewhere nobody will ever look

Re: Endless recycling

My previous employer had a clean desk policy. That's fine for documents but it doesn't work for a lab.

At the end of every day you were expected to clear everything away which was not practical when you have samples that have to cure and shouldn't be moved.

Put away sensitive documents but a constantly clear desk looks like you're not doing any work.

HP to hike upfront price of printer hardware as ink biz growth runs dry

Re: Ink Needed?

It's the ultimate in document security. Prints and shreds in one motion.

When the satellite network has literally gone glacial, it's vital you snow your enemy

It didn't say that Dino was unaware of the snow. It was the engineer inside the building that was unaware so didn't think to look for tripped dish heaters.

Dino's superior knowledge of the inclement weather saved the day...

HP printer small print says kit phones home data on whatever you print – and then some

Re: Advertising ID?

Printed adverts, full page, colour and a little indicator of how much ink you have remaining and where you can order more from an authorised seller

Justice served: There is no escape from the long server log of the law

Re: Surely...

But everyone knows car park 15 is the special one! Like the innate knowledge that the university is no-where near Warwick... (caught out a number of visiting friends over the years)

MIT boffins turn black up to 11 with carbon nanotubes that absorb 99.995% of light

Re: Whoops we did it again

Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter had the right idea in "The Long Earth". Set up a serendipital lab. Because so many useful discoveries were made by accident, set up an environment where accidents were more likely to happen to increase the pace of discovery.

Full of beans? Sadly not as fellow cracks open tin at dinner to find just one

I thought that was the ability to pee through 50 mattresses

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Re: So a Gimp is a bad thing now?

But now...

god knows...

Audible hasn't even launched its AI-powered book subtitles and publishers have already fired off a sueball

Reinventing the wheel

The source material for an audio book is a book... Why go through machine learning to generate subtitles?

Just strike a deal with the publisher to supply the audio book and the ebook in one package and you can read along!

I couldn't possibly tell you the computer's ID over the phone, I've been on A Course™

Re: This is this bank

^This. Absolutely gets on my nerves. Give me a reference code, I'll go to the website to get an official number to call and do the verification that way. Not a chance I'm proving who I am when they called me.

Same goes for the cold calls about mobile phone upgrades. I have had good fun calling them out on their "we see you're due for an upgrade" schemes. First question to them is can they confirm my name?

Electric vehicles won't help UK meet emissions targets: Time to get out and walk, warn MPs

Re: 50 miles???

Allegedly: "9,300 EV charging locations compared to 8,400 fuel stations"

Buuuuuut...

Each fuel station is likely to have many more actual petrol pumps and the refill time with petrol/diesel is significantly less so throughput is vastly better.

Re: Alternatively,

Don't even have to do that, just stick a giant Pret logo over the country and you don't need to label allergens in anything!

It will never be safe to turn off your computer: Prankster harnesses the power of Windows 95 to torment fellow students

Re: W98 was OK, but W95 and USB ..

Please don't mention ME. It triggers the PTSD.

It is now safe to turn on your computer...

I remember being so conditioned by Win95 to push the power button after the PC had shut down.

When we got our first Win98 PC (with a newfangled soft latch power button) it would briefly flash up the "safe to turn off" screen before cutting its own power.

For months I'd go to "turn it off" then have to wait for it to do its boot cycle (ah the old RAM check...) before I could shut it down again. Eventually learned I could hold the power button to force it off.

Microsoft Surface users baffled after investing in kit that throttles itself to the point of passing out

It's a town in Slovakia.

Ohm my God: If you let anyone other than Apple replace your recent iPhone's battery, expect to be nagged by iOS

Re: OMG!

It needs to take 5 seconds and not involve a spudger.

Re: Quality Control

You have purchased a prestige product manufactured by a Chinese sweatshop worker.

Why wouldn't you take it to a back street repair shop? They normally have a better idea about how to fix these things.