Posts by Altrux

Hm, why are so many DrayTek routers stuck in a bootloop?

Teltonika - OpenWRT with extra features on top, and regular updates. Really nice little 'industrial' rugged routers.

Confusion

The UK firmware site (and wider Draytek UK site) has been intermittently available for the last few days. International sites seem to offer different variants, and different latest versions, for a range of common router models. When presented with a list of alternatives for a given version (e.g. _std, _MDM1, MDM2, .... MDM7), which are we supposed to go for? I'm not going to upgrade until I'm sure, as I don't want to mess up the 'modem code'...

Linus Torvalds forgot to release Linux 6.14 for a whole day

Well, there have been a few slightly embarrassing breakages in the 'stable' series recently. I know Greg K-H has a very challenging job juggling lots of kernel series at once, but you wonder if the whole process is a little too ragged, in terms of accepting things that really aren't just small, obvious fixes. The stable series kernels, especially LTS ones, should /never/ break!

No big changes to UK broadband regs, despite no real competition for BT

FTTP chaos

The fibre rollout continues to be a mad free-for-all, with some areas having 2, 3 or even more separate FTTP networks. While other areas, including in major cities, still have zero. We're still waiting, waiting, waiting, nearly 5 years after CityFibre announced their arrival in town. When it finally, finally happens, my broadband will get cheaper (even with OR) as well as much faster...

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

Re: Humm - really?

It also won't import AVIF, although Gimp 2.10 does. I might be doing something silly, but it's already slightly broken my workflow, and I can't get tool settings to actually, erm, save their settings!

Euro techies call for sovereign fund to escape Uncle Sam's digital death grip

EuroCloud

Any chance OVHcloud can become the next AWS? It's incredible to think how much money must be flowing to Trumpland, continent-wide, just via these cloud titans alone.

Microsoft will kill Remote Desktop soon, insists you'll love replacement

Genius

Microsoft used to be known as geniuses at marketing - if not software development. But how silly is this? No more Remote Desktop app, but you still have to use Remote Desktop to use remote desktop (RDP) connections? And for everything else you use "Windows App"? Coming soon: Office (sorry, MS 365) will now be renamed as "Info Fiddling App". Flight Sim 2024 will be "Boundary Layer App"...

Stuff a Pi-hole in your router because your browser is about to betray you

Great tool

I've had it running on a Pi4 for a few years now - never a blip. Some minor wobbles with the upgrade to v6, but easily fixed (I waited for the first few point releases to come out). It's really nicely designed and so easy to setup. Now, where's that allowlist the El Reg? Happy to add that in if someone can provide pointers. Or I suppose I can just load a few pages on here, watch the block logs and build it up that way?

Re: Much as I’d like, not for me, not this lifetime

Oh dear - I've run about 30 of them, at home and work, without a blip. Very reliable little things, although the SD card is usually the weak spot.

JetZero teams up with Delta to drag aviation into the future

The long wait

I've been seeing pictures very similar to this BWB since I started my aerospace degree. That was in 1995 - it feels like we're gone nowhere much in a very long time. I know everything's got more efficient and more automated, but the really radical changes in aircraft configuration and energy source still remain well into the future...

SpaceX's 'Days Since Starship Exploded' counter made it to 48. It's back to zero again now

She go boom

Musk's big rockets are disintegrating at the same rate as his Tesla sales...

How Google tracks Android device users before they've even opened an app

Phone fun

I got a new Pixel phone today, but I've not fully committed to switching over yet. It's interesting to see what you can actually do on a pristine Android phone with a) no SIM and b) no Google account logged in. The answer, of course, is very little. The Google News app thing works, and you can open YouTube and Photos, but that's about it. You can't even open other apps like Messages, without the login prompt, and of course you can't install anything else. It does let you install system software updates and fiddle with settings, but it's fundamentally highly crippled. No great surprise, just an interesting experiment that I hadn't tried for many years.

The Register gets its claws on Huawei’s bonkers tri-fold phone

Retail overload

Malaysia really is the world capital of phone shops - all the malls are jammed with them! What you don't see so much is endless pre-owned phone stores that litter our UK high streets, although doubtless they're out there in the backstreet areas. I once even bought a retail Huawei phone in Malaysian mall, some years back, before deciding to switch to non-Chinese made Samsungs later.

But yes, on this device, I cannot see many people shelling out over $3,500, even in wealthy nations - quite insane! That would buy you a high end Macbook...

Under Trump 2.0, Europe's dependence on US clouds back under the spotlight

Re: "It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds"

Mercury is fine to drink. Just don't inhale the vapour!

uBlock Origin dead for many as Google purges Manifest v2 extensions

Pi-Hole

Still on Firefox here, even though it's getting harder, as we slowly encounter ever more sites that only work with Chrome engines. Anyway, regarding uBlock, it's another big potential boost for Pi-Hole, which fixes this problem at your network level. Buy a cheap RPi, spin it up, and off you go. The shiny new v6 has just been released, and is better than ever!

Beta of Unix version 2 restored to life

DOOM

Can't be long before someone gets DOOM running on it...

LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab

Re: LibreOffice was nothing to do with Sun?

Isn't Oracle always the baddie?!

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

Re: Homeless?

It nearly happened to us, during the previous Barclays IT glitch in 2016. Our house completion failed at 6pm on a Friday before a bank holiday festival weekend - there were no hotel rooms for miles. Our solicitor, thank goodness, was also a personal friend with a big house. So the 4 of us (including toddler and elderly m-i-l in tow) moved into their house for a few days, then a hotel later in the week, until we finally got our keys 6 days later. Thanks, Barclays - it cost them around £3k but we only ever got £500 in compensation out of them.

Free support

My previous place decided that a new 24/7 trading team (never part of our original plan) would need, you guessed it, 24/7 IT support. From a team of just 3 or 4 geeks. And no, we won't pay you anything extra, unless you actually deal with the problem, then we might give you £100 or something. So yeah, just spend every third weekend on call, within mobile coverage, and not too far away, out of the goodness of your hearts, OK? Sure, no problem! Funnily enough, lots of people left within the next year or so - including me.

Agent P waxes lyrical about 14 years of systemd

Not a Hater

I'm still trying to understand why I'm meant to hate it so much. I know it rather breaks the "do one thing and do it well" philosophy, and I know it forces certain ways of interacting; but it does solve some problems and brings the whole service management game up to date. I have no particular attachment to the ancient ways, even though I "should" as an old skool Unix bod (cut my teeth on Solaris in the 90s before Linux took over). Let's hear it for the positive aspects of systemd.

Palantir designed to 'power the West to its obvious innate superiority,' says CEO

Woke (2020s) - victimhood appropriation, going way too far beyond the core and valid issue of social injustice.

BT fiber rollout passes 17 million homes, altnet challenge grows

Re: There a starman....

Satellite can't compete with the speed and latency of gigabit fibre. And some of the fibre altnet packages are insanely cheap! Not that I can access any of them - but one day, one day...

The race is on

Out here in the west, in a city of 130,000, we're still waiting, waiting, waiting. Apparently there are places with 4 or 5 separate FTTP networks available to them, while we still have none. The rollout has seemed incredibly chaotic and not remotely joined-up. Apparently, Openreach and CityFibre are now both at work here, so the race is on (finally) to see who gets to us first. Goodbye, 19th century copper!

Meta blocked Distrowatch links on Facebook while running Linux servers

Re: Great Enshittening

Absolutely right. The signal to noise ratio has been lowering for years, and it's now so low as to be barely detectable. It was fun for a while, back in 2007 or so, but now it's just a time-sapping waste of neurons.

This Zucks

Another step towards abandoning the FB mind virus after too many years. Only about 2% of my feed is actual updates from actual friends anyway, so I really should have stopped bothering long ago. Looking at BlueSky and Mastodon as one possible future, otherwise just Linkedin (unfortunately necessary for professional purposes).

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Re: 23 years and counting

Maybe more extreme than our scenario, but I was doing similar with a fairly large 50-page report and a lot of changesets, working with collaborators both local and remote. It handled it better than I expected, but I'm not sure what would handle it better. Google Docs? Anyway, LibreOffice obviously cannot do anything like that, but for home users that's irrelevant.

23 years and counting

I've used Linux in various flavours as my daily desktop since 2002, which almost qualifies me as a 'veteran'. I learned my Unix skills on SunOS 4.x during gap year work placements, and started playing with Linux in the late 90s. It was harder work back in 2002 (the same year we first got 0.5Mbps "broadband"), but still fun. Now, it's as easy as anything else, or easier, and prettier.

But all that incredible power and flexibility is right there, a click away. I could never go back now. Working in Windows feels like trying to do gymnastics in a straitjacket, although I will accept that if you really need the super advanced productivity stuff, MS Office is leagues ahead of LibreOffice. But 98% of people outside a corporate environment simply don't need that.

Re: I agree with the majority of the article...

I'd love to know what those are!

UK council selling the farm (and the fire station) to fund ballooning Oracle project

Re: ****ing hell

Spot on - utterly shameful that this keeps happening, again and again. Every council follows the same path, reinventing the same wheel, bunch of hopeless lemmings!

Linux Mint 22.1 Xia arrives fashionably late

Liquorix

Try installing the Liquorix or Xanmod kernels, which I assume run just as well on Mint as on Ubuntu? You'll get 6.12.10 ready to rock, the very latest stable release. They'll advance to 6.13 fairly soon, usually once a couple of point releases are out.

Debian 12.9 arrives, quickly followed by MX Linux 23.5

Re: Another MX vote here

Might try it, just for fun. Currently running Ubuntu 24.04 with zero problems. Never had an issue with snap or systemd - these days, everything seems to work very smoothly. The only thing causing recurrent problems is Gnome Files (a.k.a. Nautilus), which is still flakey and still can't handle big trees of photo dirs, etc.

Boeing going backwards as production’s slowing and woes keep flowing

Re: Boing

The A350 had some minor delays, but had a pretty smooth entry into service and now a great track record. The 787 was years late, and the 777X is now even more years late. Boeing has really not had a properly successful major civil programme since the 90s. Perhaps the 747-8? But that ended up being a rather small volume niche product, despite being technically impressive. Again, the original 777, and the 737NG, were much less trouble than what has come since.

Re: In case anyone's wondering why they're still making 767s...

I did wonder. Assume some are for KC46 tanker conversion as well? Boing's future seems to be on the 777X freighter, but that doesn't exist either. Airbus has the only true next-gen freighter with the A350F, which will exist very soon, I believe. The first carbon fibre freighter!

Boing

Amazed they're still delivering so many ancient 767s. Mostly freighters or for KC46 military conversion, I assume?

Meanwhile, it's 5 whole years since the first flight of the 777X, and it's still nowhere near certification. A disaster for Boing and so many airline customers, including BA, who are getting very angry. The original 777 programme in the 90s was so much swifter and more successful, despite it being a radically all-new design at the time. Boing was run by engineers in those days, I suppose. Oh, and there's the 737MAX, where 2 of the 4 variants also remain un-certified.

As for the 797, I suppose we'll be waiting until 2040...

Linux 6.12 is the new long term supported kernel

RHEL 10

....is coming, and you can be sure that it won't use the nice 6.12 LTS kernel, which would effectively be maintained 'for' them. Instead, they'll use something totally random on which to base their own Frankenkernel with thousands of radical patches. Debian has this right, and bases their stable releases on the previous LTS kernel. We assume Debian 13 will be based on 6.12 when it appears some time next summer.

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

Off-grid computing

There's definitely some cool potential for power bank running. A beefy dual-output power bank could run the Pi 500 and the monitor for a quite a while (probably 25W total?), and you could connect it to your phone's mobile hotspot to have a fully off-grid desktop PC solution (assuming the mobile network keeps going during a power outage, which most of it should, with base station backup).

The monitor would be very useful for the school I've worked with, which used a stack of Pi 400s. They had these horrible, ancient, donated monitors with VGA/DVI ports, and the Pi 400s never liked them, even with a variety of HDMI adapters trialled. So a cheap, compact, dedicated HDMI monitor would actually be ideal for them, even before they potentially upgrade the Pi 400s to 500s.

Huawei handed 2,596,148,429,267,413,
814,265,248,164,610,048 IPv6 addresses

Overkill

I always thought 128 bits was just too much. I reckon 80 would have been perfect: 2^48 networks with 2^32 addresses in each.

Anyway, when can I finally turn off IPv4 on my router? Oh, not yet then? I thought we were nearly done with the transition. I'll check again in 2044...

SpaceX hits 400 launches of Falcon 9 rocket

Easy Rider

SpaceX has made space look ... easy. Which, of course, it still isn't. But their achievements really cannot be underestimated - they have rewritten the book. Far and away Musk's most interesting company, although he obviously doesn't deserve all the credit. He certainly employs some stellar engineers. I'll always remember the first demo launch of Crew Dragon in 2020 - such an incredible thing, seeing that uber-slick capsule and those uber-slick suits, cruising up to space like a bus ride to town. One of the few highlights of lockdown!

Why Google's Chrome monopoly won't crack anytime soon

Re: A Short History of Browser Monopolies....pre-installed really?..

There are still lots of websites that say "You will need Adobe Reader to view this file", like it's still 1996...

Re: A Short History of Browser Monopolies...

Ladybird? Wish them luck...

Re: No one else can afford to maintain Chrome

Roll on, Ladybird! But we have to wait until 2026 to even try it, it seems...

Public developer spats put bcachefs at risk in Linux

Re: Are we reaching a monolithic limit?

Amazing indeed - I think I first started playing with Linux off a magazine 'cover disk' (remember those?) in the late 90s. By 2002, I switched to it full time on my main PC, accepting the compromises back then. In 2024, it now runs 3 PCs, 4 Raspberry Pis, 3 phones, and likely a few other embedded devices, just in this one house. Just one tiny corner of a Linux fleet that runs into the billions, and a system that really does run the world (and space beyond it).

If I'm honest, I predicted that Torvalds would get bored and move on to something else before now - but he never has. Thirty three years in the hot seat, one man and his substantial brain, still driving the entire thing. It's an extraordinary story, although the majority of 'normal' people are still entirely unaware of it, despite using or remotely interacting with systems powered by his kernel all day long.

Where will we be in another 30 years?

Arm lays down the law with a blueprint to challenge x86's PC dominance

Re: The X86 architecture is horrible

<< RISC-V has entered the chat >>

Hopefully, being a shiny 'new' architecture, it can avoid all the legacy nonsense that plagues x86, and even ARM. Indeed, they are making moves towards their first platform standardisation, I believe. Or am I just being too hopeful?

Uncle Sam may force Google to sell Chrome browser, or Android OS

Reminds me of when I told my Yahoo-using wife that Yahoo Mail was down. "Both users affected!"

Do it, do right now!

Long overdue, although we know it will take years to actually make it happen.

The early bird gets a touch of nostalgia as Ubuntu 24.10 hits beta

Naming Nonsense

I'm still hoping the next release is called Pusillanimous Platypus!

Brit tech tycoon Mike Lynch cleared of all charges in US Autonomy fraud trial

Re: Auto-know-better

Richard Branson provides a good example here. Plenty of companies understand how to make a good culture, but too many still don't.

Re: WOW

I am too - utterly grim place to work. The worst in my long and overly varied career!

Auto-know-better

I worked for his horrible company for a while, in the Cambridge HQ. Honestly the worst place I've ever worked. The classic "burn you out like matchsticks" corporate culture. I've never felt happier than when I escaped. Lynch and his henchmen never bothered meeting junior employees. Far too conceited and up themselves. Watching this very, very long case has been incredibly cathartic, whatever the final outcome!

Malaysia stakes claim to become semiconductor superpower by luring $100B investment from … somewhere

Re: Isn't this the same Anwar

Interesting - it was many years ago that they decided to teach Maths and Science in English, then they went back to Malay. But when you go there, everyone under 50 (or even under 70) speaks English anyway, and for at least 40% of the population, Malay is effectively their third language (with mother tongue and English coming first and second). It'll be interesting to see how this plays out, but there's a lot of potential if they get past the linguistic and religious hang-ups. Diversifying away from Taiwan (which is sadly under threat from the evil CCP, obviously) would be a positive step for everyone.