Posts by Will Godfrey 4581 posts • joined 8 Sep 2007
My mail reader is configured to display html as plain text, and show anything else that isn't plain text as a closed attachment. It runs absolutely nothing, but I can save things like embedded images without once actually viewing them.
I never got any kind of of warning at the start of this pantomime (and yes I'm well over 60). I've not had any text messages either about not going out, nor recently that I now could. I'm not even getting any scam attempts - apart from the usual supposed bank telephone warnings and outlook folder full emails.
What am I doing wrong?
There is a wee detail you are missing. For a long time they couldn't fully support mp3 without buying licenses - not exactly the thing for a flagship FLOSS project.
I know some of the developers quite well and have the greatest respect for them.
On a broader point, regarding GUIs, somewhere on the net there there is an article discussing the merits various toolkits available, specifically with respect to high quality audio control. The author comes to the conclusion that none are suitable and the best thing you can do is design your own... if you have enough time!
Even on the small project I work on I use my fastest machine for actual development. Only when getting near to a release do I then cross-check with older and lower speced machines - these days including a raspberry Pi 3B. Occasionally I'll run it on an elderly EeePC900, or to be more correct I'll walk it
If I was in the market for a smartphone (which I'm not) I now know which phone to get to avoid all the Google and Apple slurpage, along with the American snoops of course. To the best of my knowledge we don't have a one-sided extradition treaty with China so I won't have to worry about being snatched away for some bizarre manufactured offence.
A small engineering firm I used to work for got it exactly right. They've always kept an amount of finance invested for quick access in emergencies. About 15 years ago, they started diversifying (having been previously exclusively supporting the print industry). As a result, during this period they've kept working, as many of their newer customers are in essential services - food processing and packaging. They've only started furloughing some of the more junior engineers as other work has tailed off. One of the directors has returned to do engineering work, and the other one now maintains all the office paperwork - the secretary had to be furloughed immediately as she is high vulnerability.
In the early 80s I wrote a pinball game for the BBC B. Unlike those on the market at the time, the ball in mine followed something like a parabolic curve, and you could get real control of the speed. This worked fine for me and a bunch of friends, until a new guy joined us. After familiarising himself with the game, he complained that sometimes the ball would go 'through' the flippers. We didn't believe him at first, until he was able to do it repeatedly. It turned out he had dramatically better reaction time than any of the rest of us, and (like in a real pinball machine) timed the flick so just the tip of the flipper hit the ball to get maximum velocity. The code was slow enough, and the look-aheads far enough apart that this came between two of them. The solution was one of the very first bits of 6502 assembler I did.
P.S. I was quite proud of making rebound speed dependent on where on the flipper it hit.
Without access to precision tools I had to mount a Raspberry Pi on a panel. Lining up for screw holes in the panel, and then threading them would have been a nightmare so I eventually came up with the idea of using plastic standoffs (the type with a peg to push the board onto). This presented two problems. Being able to line up the holes (again). A peg small enough to fit in the raspberry Pi mounting holes. The latter are 2.7 mm.
The solution I came up with was to use a rat-tail file to careful increase the size of the holes, then thoroughly clean and scratch up the panel, and dollop quick-set epoxy on the other end of the standoffs, then prop the whole assembly against the panel till it set - seems to still be OK after a couple of years.
Our people fitted a new central process control unit in a plastic film factory. This had just about every test imaginable before being fitted including being hit by brownouts and static discharges. However, once installed at the location demanded by their engineers all sorts of random errors were occurring. This was in the middle of the factory on a partition attached to the back wall and at the top of a flight of steps. It was months before we identified the problem, and only then because one of our engineers took a laptop there to make notes of readings and it kept crashing. One of their production workers commiserated and said that their mobile phones would sometimes freeze if they went there. In a moment of inspiration our guy asked what the partition was there for, and was told the 3 phase supply for the entire factory complex was behind it.
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