Posts by Arbuthnot the Magnificent 105 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Dec 2019
A few years ago I was working on the design and procurement of telecoms for a new hospital. One of the jobs was liaising with the lift company to connect phone lines to the call panels - these were analogue ports off our shiny new PBX. The possibility of putting on-hold music on the channels came up over a cuppa, with us trying to think of the best / worst possibilities. I suggested "Free Falling" by the now legendary Tom Petty.
I work in an office built in a wooden superstructure on the roof of a university, alongside a couple of telescope domes belonging to the astronomy group. The high-tech solution to stop us turning on the corridor lights (which would shine through the window and spoil their view) is that the switches are taped to the off position.
Thanks for the judgement. As it happens, a "dead" machine was brought in and my colleague determined it just need a Windows reinstallation, there was no actual hardware fault. To go the extra mile he ran a quick scan for lost files thinking how pleased the customer would be that we had saved their data, and immediately saw a bunch of filenames that left no doubt that it was child porn. We locked the machine in the safe and rang the police. I can sleep at night over that one.
Indeed, as a callow youth (more years ago than I care to remember) I worked as a technician at a large high street beige-box slinger, and 90% of my workload was backing up users data (pr0n) and running the factory reset disk. The most difficult bit was convincing punters that their machine wasn't actually broken, it was just crufty software.
The problem I have with Chrome OS (apart from it being Google) is the same problem I have with Android; perfectly good hardware becomes worthless because of deliberate software obsolescence. I have a 2013 LG phone that would be WEEE if it weren't for LineageOS. Even that isn't a total solution because various "important" packages such as mobile banking or MFA authenticators won't work on non-standard operating systems, so I am OK to log in to the bank on a Samsung tablet that hasn't had a patch in 5 years but not a nightly build of Lineage...
When I first decided to flee the worsening mess of MS UI, like many others I went to Ubuntu. I tried the various desktop editions, found Xubuntu and said "this is the one for me". I've long since moved on through many different versions of Linux (and indeed BSD) but I always stick with good old XFCE, because it's the closest thing to the Win9x / XP interface I grew up with. Much respect to those who want the whole "minimal window manager" thing with a million keybindings, whatever works for you, but I want a start menu and shortcuts!
Agreed, less than a decade ago I worked on the telecoms provision for a new-build hospital, the main connectivity was (new to the organisation at the time) SIP but I still had to install a surprising number of POTS lines. These were needed for emergency links to blood transfusion service, ambulance centre, lift alarm panel etc. I left that field now but whenever I hear about the death of POTS I wonder what they are going to replace these critical things with...
This is a decent choice for those of us who like to play the odd modern game. I always had to keep a Windows partition for such activities but this works pretty well with Proton and Nvidia straight out of the box. (Before anyone feels the urge to tell me, yes I know that in theory you can run Steam and Nvidia firmware on just about any distro but after a working day fighting with Centos the last thing I want to do is fiddle about with my home machine to relax). The only gripe would be you do end up downloading a lot of updates, so it's not so good if you have a poor internet connection - but if you're a Steam user you probably have decent bandwidth anyway.
I was sole admin for a sizeable manufacturer back in the early 00s, and one day I was "invited" to the boardroom to confirm to the directors that I couldn't read their email. "Of course I can," I said, "I'm the network admin". They were horrified. "But you don't have permission!" Who sets the permissions? I rejoined. After much huffing and puffing on their part I simply said "Mike, your best defence is that I don't think your email will be very interesting. But I'm starting to wonder if that's true..."
I briefly worked a contract job rejigging the network in an EV battery plant. Starting with individual electrodes the entire packs were built up on site. The individual modules were loaded into huge conditioning chargers, rows and rows of them like the aisles in a supermarket but 20 feet high, and along each row there were dozens of nitrogen cylinders ready to dump their loads - there must have been hundreds or thousands of those cylinders in the plant. We were told that if an alarm went off, sprint for the exit or you'll asphyxiate.
Given that, as others have pointed out, lithium fires make their own oxygen, I can only assume they were there to stop any fires in the electrical systems from setting off the batteries? Or maybe just for show. With that and the emergency showers everywhere in case of an electrolyte spill (get naked and get in there in a hurry or the acid will eat into your bones and kill you) it was a jolly fun old place.
Some years ago I installed a network for a startup company that was using waste heat from the cooling system of a power plant to run heated pools for aquaculture. The plant fed the Lynemouth aluminium smelter, which was mothballed about a year later so I guess that project was dead in the water...
A company I worked for instituted a fabulous (*) system of internal self-study training. For each level you passed you got a pay increment, but the levels got increasingly more convoluted and impractical to pass - you had to print out the material as hard copy and fill it in, then get a manager to authorise it. By the time you hit level 5 or something it was about 100 A4 sheets. We had one manager who had somehow been promoted up from the warehouse, he was a big burly chap with hands like coal shovels but not, shall we say, one of life's great thinkers. I printed out the relevant bumpf, filled in the first and last few pages and waited til this lad was duty manager. Sure enough, he flicked through the first and last few pages, signed it and filed it, and I got my few extra shekels a month.
* not really fabulous
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