* Posts by wegie

41 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Nov 2019

Windows 3.11 trundles on as job site pleads for 'driver updates' on German trains

wegie

Re: Windows 3.11? Nothing compared to "Token Exchange Signalling System" on Treherbert Line

And still in use on the Heart of Wales Line :-)

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

wegie

Re: Excel Errors

"Either that or it is their real financial system."

No, no, no. Keep up at the back. The real financial system is Excel plus all the positions they've got saved in their Bloomberg terminal!

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

wegie

...the worst for me is when some f*kwit replies or forwards a months or years old email with the original subject line that has absolutely nothing to do with the new subject matter. I WOULD hit these people if they were physically reachable.

Ah. I see you have corresponded with my husband.

Please feel free to repeatedly hit him as hard as you can with as many cluebats as you can find.

And yes, he's a top poster who responds with "yes" to multi-part questions.

Metaverse? Apple thinks $3,500 AR ski goggles are the betterverse

wegie

Re: Attachable Zeiss glasses

I'm going to give them participation points for not making us speccy gits wear our specs under the bloody things. But having had Zeiss lenses in the past, I'm wincing at the several hundred quid extra on top of the 3.5k starting price.

EV battery can reach full charge in 'less than 10 minutes'

wegie

Re: Still no answer...

The last few times I was back down in London, I noticed that the local council had upgraded the street lamps in a few of the streets near our flat -- the lamp posts are now slow charging points on the Ubitricity network. No need to stick a cable across the pavement to your house, still accessible if you're parked a couple of streets away. If your council isn't doing something like this, it's time to give them a prod.

Engineer sues Amazon for not covering work-from-home internet, electricity bills

wegie

Him Indoors' employer does this. HI is currently quietly campaigning for an upgrade to the coffee quality that goes into the machine. 18 months WFH with our Jura filled with organic Yirgacheffe two rooms away from the study has left him much less tolerant of coloured dishwasher than he used to be.

BOFH: Where do you think you are going with that toner cartridge?

wegie

Re: We had a copier engineer once...

Our gas supply went into the meter, so when we redid the kitchen, we put in a lovely gas range to replace the hideous 70s electric hob that had reduced me to tears on more than one occasion.

It took us over two years of back and forth to persuade BG that the meter actually existed and that we were using gas supplied from it. We quoted the serial number: nope, that meter has been decommissioned. We sent them pictures. We sent them photocopies of the Corgi/gas safe technician's paperwork certifying that the meter was in working condition when the cooker was connected. We sent meter readings. Eventually, they admitted that the meter existed, but despite the meter readings, wrote off the bill for the two years of gas supply (bet they wouldn't do that now)!

Chill out to the sounds of an expert typing on a variety of mechanical keyboards

wegie

Re: Model M was a Robust Horse

Ditto. My model M is only 19 years old (made in Greenock fae girders), but the cable is likewise still in perfect condition.

One day, I will get my study back and be able to use it again. Him Indoors, whose WFH takes precedence over my retirement, has exiled the Model M because he doesn't like it (philistine) and is using a cheapo entry-level Cherry from 2003 or so.

Lenovo ThinkPad T14s: Impressively average, which is how corporate buyers like it

wegie

Re: Hmm

"Mind you, I am waiting for a British built laptop.

I suspect it will be insanely fast, weigh about 3 tonnes but will be lavished in walnut, chrome and beige leather and come with a canvas laptop cover that smells like a waxed jacket. The Rolls Royce of laptops."

I have a British built laptop.

Made in Lancashire.

It's insanely fast, weighs about three tons, and drinks power like its going out of fashion. Sadly, it goes more for the supercar look of black carbon with added black carbon rather than the walnut with Connolly leather approach.

BOFH: You drive me crazy... and I can't help myself

wegie

Re: Lime?

When I was young (and my mum was allowing me to read Simpson's "Forty Years of Murder" at the age of 14) a neighbour of ours very nearly got away with that one, except that the pour (tarmac in this case) was a bit delayed, and his wife's family started asking questions. Given that he was a navvy/digger driver on the M27 build, even Hampshire plod could work out where to look in the hardcore...

wegie

Quicklime doesn't actually dissolve bodies

@msobkow "Now what you need is a good tub-destroying acid like in Breaking Bad. :) "

But do bear in mind that gallstones, dentures and implants take longer, and don't dump the remains in the garden ala Acid Bath Haigh.

Somehow I suspect Simon has a well-thumbed copy of "Forty Years of Murder" in his bookcase...

Microsoft doles out Office Long Term Servicing Channel for cloud refuseniks

wegie

Office 2K CD? Carefully filed next to the Windows 2K CD in the software wallet in the study.

Failing that, a perusal of the wares at theunitysoft.com can often be extremely helpful.

US Air Force chief software officer quits after launching Hellfire missile of a LinkedIn post at his former bosses

wegie

Re: A Solid 40%...

The ghost of William Howard Russell would like a word or two...

BOFH: Where there is darkness, let there be a light

wegie

Re: Anything with a network connection can be scanned

"Do you have a keyboard, mouse or screen worth more than £750?"

Given the current prices on Fleabay for IBM Model M keyboards, I soon will have...

Jackie 'You have no authority here' Weaver: We need more 50-somethings in UK tech

wegie

Re: It is not skills..

"...and ensure the dept is 51% women, 15% non-white, 10% gay and 1% people-who-use-emacs."

Female, queer, uses emacs. Anybody got a non-white person (pref bi or gay to make up for me only being bi) who wants to do a day a week?

Turns out humans are leading AI systems astray because we can't agree on labeling

wegie

Re: Google Captcha

@Stuart Castle "...Trouble is, being English, I don’t call them “Crosswalks”

Not just "crosswalks". Now identify all the "fire hydrants"...um, well, there aren't any. There's a load of streetside hose connections of some kind, but no rectangular iron plates in the road or pavement labelled "FH". The complete cultural imperialism and cross-culture blindness is breathtaking. Just imagine a car trained on that on UK roads.

Half a million stolen French medical records, drowned in feeble excuses

wegie

MIL? She's 82 and from a generation where almost every woman took hubby's name.

Well, that's my charitable explanation.

The fact that it's our 17th wedding anniversary tomorrow and she's still addressing stuff to Mrs WegieHusband'sSurname, despite being told that I haven't changed my name, occasionally leads me to think rather less charitable thoughts...

wegie

"Changing my mobile number would be a total pain for me"

Have an upvote, AC. I've had the same mobile number for 21 years and there have been five house moves and a marriage (where I opted not to change my name, not that this deters my MIL in the slightest from addressing cards to the non-existant Mrs WegieHusband'sSurname) in the interim.

'It's where the industry is heading': LibreOffice team working on WebAssembly port

wegie

Re: Deja Vu...

"...So, we're returning to the old and not-so-good days of the X terminal then... Oh my..."

: NFS Server Thor not responding

: NFS Server Odin not responding

Gaze blankly at screen

Go away and make a mug of coffee

: NFS server Thor not responding

Go and have lunch

: NFS server Odin not responding

Start writing report in longhand in the lab book.

Do we really want to go back to this? Really?

Laptops given to British schools came preloaded with remote-access worm

wegie

Re: I wonder what sort of machine you get for less then £200 per unit.

Further poking suggests that most schools IT bods are using either Office 365 via an institutional subscription or Google docs, so as long as the thing can run a browser, it should be OK -- as long as the poor student's network can manage. There is also a microSD slot for expansion if necessary -- although one report on edugeek says that the slot is misaligned and it's possible to post your SD card into the bowels of the machine!

But what horrible machines to have to use all day for school. And that's without going into all the H&S implcations for children of using a laptop all day without a proper egonomically designed workstation.

wegie

Re: I wonder what sort of machine you get for less then £200 per unit.

A poke around the Geo website was remarkably uninformative. A poke at Google suggests an entry level Celeron, 4Gb of Ram (notable silence as to the type, so DDR3, one assumes), 64Gb storage (all the other Geo lappys are eMMC).

My 11 year old Asus Zen UL30 is probably still faster (and has a 500Gb hdd) than that piece of shite.

AMD performance plummets when relying on battery power, says Intel. Let's take a closer look at those stats

wegie

Re: Zepherus G14 missing

Probably couldn't get hold of one, luckily for them! They seem to be permanently back ordered/out of stock. I've been lusting after one to replace my finally knackered 2009 Zen ultraportable for months.

OnePlus 8T: Solid performance and a great screen make this 5G sub-flagship a delight

wegie

Re: Questions...

@Shadow Systems, thank you for articulating my objections considerably better than I can myself. I bought the 6T to replace my 3T that had succumbed to an interaction with the floor of Birmingham New St knowing about the lack of an adapter, but fully expecting either OnePlus or a third party solution in the VNF. My seventy quid ten year old wired Sennheiser earbuds are perfectly fine (and would cost *considerably* more now to replace), and I really don't see why I should replace a passive solution that just works with a limited lifespan option that needs yet another bloody charging system.

No beer chez wegie this afternoon, would a large glass of very nice Saffie fizz be acceptable?

wegie

Re: Questions...

No headphone jack. OnePlus canned the 3.5mm jack as of the OnePlus 6T. I've spent the intervening two years acquiring USB-C to 3.5mm adapters every six months or so when I've forgotten to pack one of the bloody things.

More annoyingly, none of the phones come with a dedicated adapter to allow you to charge the phone as well as listen to music on wired headphones at the same time. OnePlus doesn't make such an adapter, and the third party adapters are very much hit and miss.

BOFH: Rome, I have been thy soldier 40 years... give me a staff of honour for mine age

wegie

Re: Dabsy & Simon

Who actually downvoted that?

Even us girlies snorted our white wine up our noses reading that!

If you think Mozilla pushed a broken Firefox Android build, good news: It didn't. Bad news: It's working as intended

wegie

Phew! Just in time to let me turn off auto-updating. It was sitting there ready to go...

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

wegie

Re: Which is why I always turn off email sigs...

"auto-applied-by-the-server legal disclaimer for outgoing external email..."

The other half used to work for a financial services firm whose auto-disclaimer ran to three large paragraphs. As said other half refuses to edit/trim their email, conversations could end up with multiple nested instances of the bloody disclaimer spaffed across the end of each email. Occasionally I considered asking the firm in question for payment for how much of my hard drive the sodding disclaimer was occupying.

Microsoft wants to show enterprises that Edge means business, rather than the thing you use to download Chrome

wegie

Re: Leopards and their spots

Yeah. That bastard barfed all over my screen last week, and could only be removed by the old-fashioned three-fingered salute. It then immediately anchored itself to the task bar. Not *exactly* what I'd call giving the user an informed choice.

What does London's number 65 bus have to hide? OS caught on camera setting fire to '22,000 illegal file(s)!!'

wegie

What's it hiding?

Given that it's the bloody 65, the least punctual bus in London, it's hiding that it's half an hour late and is going to kick everybody out at Ham Common.

Tor soups up onion sites with bountiful browser bump: No more tears trying to find the secure sites you want

wegie

Re: Totally couldn't get past the fact...

"When I see cooked cucumber I'll accept raw onion!"

Sri Lankan cucumber curry, anybody?

Das reboot: That's the only thing to do when the screenshot, er, freezes

wegie

Re: Funny that

"Or the old ctrl+alt+arrow keys to rotate the screen..."

Those of us with cats who sit on the laptop keyboard for warmth when said laptop is streaming something to the TV are still intimately familiar with that one.

Announcing the official Reg-approved measure of social distancing: The Osman

wegie

Re: 'Pointless' is OK,...

Thanks a bundle. Now I've got a bloody earworm of "Glorious Things Of Thee Are Spoken"!

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

wegie

Re: Mixed Feelings

The UK operation was already Y2K compliant. My model M says (squints at extremely faded label) 1992-09-02.

GCHQ's infosec arm has 3 simple tips to secure those insecure smart home gadgets

wegie

A Hammer...

Yeah, I was hoping as well that the advice would be the classic engineering solution of "just use a bigger hammer!"

Samsung will be Putin dreaded Kremlin-approved shovelware on its phones, claims Russia

wegie

Re: Makes a change

Nah. This will be *in addition* to the usual Samsung bloatware.

Mind you, it'll almost certainly be significantly better engineered.

Shipping is so insecure we could have driven off in an oil rig, says Pen Test Partners

wegie

Re: "bridging designed gaps between...engineering control systems and human interface"

Cruise ship? Nah. That's just civilian crap. You want your zombied tanker heading straight at the USS Gerald R Ford or HMS Queen Elizabeth in a port that doesn't have complete separation of civil and military vessals.

Call us immediately if your child uses Kali Linux, squawks West Mids Police

wegie

Re: Do you know someone that owns a knife?

...Why not both!?

Him indoors christened the drop-forged carving knife and meat chopper he bought for me "murder weapon" and "skull splitter" respectively. I suppose I should let up on the hints that I'd really like a hot composter for my birthday...

Hear, hear: The first to invent idiot-cancelling headphones gets my cash

wegie

Re: Last time I traveled first class

I always just used to take notes of the business conversations in first class and relay them to him indoors.

Just because the woman across the aisle looks like some scruffy tech/academic doesn't mean him indoors isn't an investment banker.

wegie

QR codes in the Marches?

The TfW bod at Shrewsbury was getting ready to help you because the sodding QR codes on their own bloody paper tickets, as printed on the train, don't work with the barriers ar Shrewsbury!

The 4G signal, though, is a *lot* better than it used to be. Up until about 18 months ago, you could tell that you'd got beyond the Shrewsbury ring road because the signal dropped to nothing pretty much until you got to Leominster. And you didn't even think about trying to use your phone on the Heart of Wales line.

BOFH: When was the last time someone said these exact words to you: You are the sunshine of my life?

wegie

Re: Putting the bodies under the floorboards

It doesn't matter what you do to their diet if you are cursed with a cat who refuses to bury the evidence...

Teachers: Make your pupils' parents buy them an iPad to use at school. Oh and did you pack sunglasses for the Apple-funded jolly?

wegie

Gaelcholaiste Luimnigh, the article says further on.