Posts by logicalextreme

Microsoft Edge takes a victory lap with some high-looking usage stats for 2024

Much as I'd like PowersHell to get in the sea, if you're already using it for daily tasks then you'd probably rather kill processes via it rather than another MS UI.

Contrary to some, traceroute is very real – I should know, I helped make it work

Thanks for the read. Humbling, entertaining and a reminder that we should appreciate and pay our network engineers more. (I do not understand networking)

Microsoft hijacks keyboard shortcut to bring Copilot to your attention

Re: Seems like a pattern

And don't even get me started on the mess that Atlassian are making of the industry.

Re: Seems like a pattern

Aye, I've seen and understood conflicting keyboard shortcuts cross-appplication before and will again but never in a month of Sundays should you hit F5 expecting to "refresh" your inbox and have it straight up delete the email you happened to have selected instead.

I believe it was technically Lotus Domino that was at fault, but it really makes you question Hanlon's razor

Re: Seems like a pattern

F5 in Lotus Notes when in a list of mails would delete that mail. Learned that lesson the hard way.

WhatsApp finally fixes View Once flaw that allowed theft of supposedly vanishing pics

Re: "on Android there's a setting the app can utilise"

Or a web browser. On the occasions I'm forced to use Ticketmaster I just log in to their website in a private tab. It even does the ridiculous blue swishy thing just like the app does, you know, for "security".

QNAP NAS users locked out after firmware update snafu

Re: Understatement of the year from El Reg…

Don't call me [citation needed].

Abandoned US Army 'city under the ice' imaged in serendipitous NASA find

Re: Context in reporting....

Over 300,000 grapefruits though.

Network engineer chose humiliation over a night on the datacenter floor

Re: Speaking of losing keys

Ouch. Did that with my mum's car keys once as a bairn. They went down well, but it didn't go down well.

Techie left 'For support, contact me' sign on a server. Twenty years later, someone did

Re: After digging out an old utility

ADMINS

Do YOU know where YOUR PFYs are?

Re: Passwords

Well worth reading through. Should've been an On Call itself.

Bravo

Photoshop FOSS alternative GNU Image Manipulation Program 3.0 nearly here

Re: I can't disagree more about CSD

Yeah, I love having to click a button to take the window out of maximised mode, potentially have the window decide to pop up on another monitor and then hunt for the single pixel that lets me drag it.

I wouldn't even be using the mouse for window management on Windows if the keyboard shortcuts for flinging them around didn't spaz out more and more with every update. They were pretty much perfect and all I needed in 7 through 8, or possibly early versions of !0, but trying to use them in Win11 is just asking for chaos (no surprise there as it's Win11).

Dunno what that CSD link is on about with making things "more space-efficient"; there seems to have been a huge trend with applications and websites the past few years to include as much empty space as possible so I'm not sure how eliminating bits of the window frame is going to do anything except annoy people and continue the dumbing-down of everything good.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

Upvoted for "dreadsheet" alone! I'm having that.

I still like "if the only tool you have is a gun, everything starts to look like your foot".

My first proper proper office job was doing promotions for the website of a large pharmacy chain. I got the month-long cycle of manual work down to about fifteen minutes, scraping the company's own CMS (as we had no direct database access) with VBA opening Internet Explorer processes for each individual product to get the information we needed into spreadsheets. It was useful to almost every part of the team, but so intensive (and probably inefficient) that I had to batch it up and commandeer any free PCs in the office on the day that I ran it, or I wouldn't be able to access my email or do basically anything else.

After explaining it to a colleague (graphic designer) at lunch, he sat back and beamed "you've automated yourself out of your job!". He wasn't wrong.

Sysadmin shock as Windows Server 2025 installs itself after update labeling error

Re: Credit card slipped

Ah, I used to love using those machines. We only needed to use them if there was a problem using the electronic machines (network, bank, card, or $other including running the shop for most of a day during a power cut) but they made such a satisfying ker-CHUNK! as they rolled over the card and back.

Also put the fear of god into some customers as they bawled about us "cloning" their card…

Re: Pesetas

Assuming this is Windows, I find that changing quite a few pseudo-related settings can arbitrarily reconfigure some of the individual locale options for you (how "helpful"). When connected to a domain controller I can also get some of these options overwritten automatically from time to time.

I've resorted to having a PowerHell script thst changes all of these options to the ones that I like at an individual level and running that from time to time — it's all done in the Registry, which means learning some of the weird ways the options are encoded in there, but using such a script (a .reg script would do too) might help with your issue. You could have a script that changes your time to Berlin and then changes all the locale options for you, and another script that changes your time to local and does the same. Or you might find that just changing the timezone at the registry level rather than the GUI leaves all your locale options the way you like them.

Certainly helps me out because my eye starts to twitch when my dates aren't ISO 8601 :D

Buckle up, admins – Windows Server 2025 officially hits GA

Re: Kicking the wheels ....

I'm assuming that Server 2025 is the first Server release whose desktop equivalent is Win11, in which case I'm not surprised. I've generally liked the UI of Windows all the way from 3.1 up to 10, including Vista, but 11 tanked it for me way too far. Configuration really is a true nightmare now with things being split between Powershell, the Settings app, Control Panel, .msc dialogues, sys32 executables and the Registry, and hardening the system is a full-time job in itself.

I used to use Windows Server on my laptops as they were essentially just Windows with most of the crap bits removed/disabled, but I don't see how Windows 11 can actually be redeemed at this point. It barely seems compatible with Microsoft's own software.

Microsoft on a roll for terrible rebranding with Windows App

You have a humorous Outlook. You should consider sending your material to a Publisher.

Thank you, Reg Readers: On Call has turned 500!

Congrats to all involved

and thank you! ^_^

Re: Dear me, 10 years already ?

I thought it had been going longer than ten years for some reason. Maybe because I was used to reading thedailywtf prior to that…they're both great in their own way.

Private equity commits MariaDB takeover transaction

Nice headline

That is all

Zen Browser is a no-Google zone that offers tiling nirvana

Honestly, I've been using tiles all the time in Vivaldi since the first tt was added to the browser. I don't remember the festure being in Opera and I ditched Opera pretty soon after they moved to Chromium.and removed most of what made it Opera, but tiling pages is the absolute bomb given that since the ubiquity of the smartphone the trend has been to make every webpage about as wide as a pencil lead.

I suspect Zen will be missing far too many features that I use in Vivaldi for me to switch yet, and I'll wait to see whether it vanished into the ether, but a combination of open-source and no Google could easily make me bid a sad farewell to Vivaldi.

Missing scissors cause 36 flight cancellations in Japan

Re: Incisive reporting from the Reg as usual.

I thought you were being snippy when I read the title of your comment.

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

I was expecting "John" from the Regomizer

icon is the closest approximation to Alan Rickman's face as he's dropped that I could muster

Databricks' $1B Tabular buy raises questions around table format wars

Re: Can Somebody Translate From Gibberish

Linked and dequerystringed

https://www.coursera.org/articles/data-lake-vs-data-warehouse

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

Re: -ize

On your latter point, I believe so aye. And if I'm not mistaken that means the 'murricans actually have the unenviable task of needing to remember which words are spelt -ize and which are spelt -ise. Which presumably isn't too bad if you're an etymology buff, but I suspect that doesn't apply to the average Joe.

With OpenAI GPT Store imminent, apps are already being ripped off by copycats

Re: Who Dares Win Wins

I got to word 62 (I think) of the post proper, "Revolutionary", before realising this was an amanfromMars 1 post.

Happy new year to you, friend

What if Microsoft had given us Windows XP 2024?

Anybody who didn't use Classic View was a monster. The sheer size of the default titlebars made me shudder

Windows boss takes on taskbar turmoil, pledges to 'make Start menu great again'

Re: Honestly

Aye as soon as this kind of stuff started I just learned that Win+R for Run… and learning the appropriate $whatever was significantly faster and in fact almost universal across a range of Windows versions.

control for Control Panel

Win + I for Updates

appwiz.cpl for Add/Remove Programs

ncpa.cpl for network

I'm constantly trying to get the things that I want done in PowersHell but it's such a broken mess of a language and Windows versions are just different enough that anything I write to get an environment "just so" won't be transferable to anothet system. Add to which the registry is still a thing.

Control Altman delete: OpenAI fires CEO, chairman quits

Re: Best. Headline. EVER!

Yep, might have gone with Controller Altman deleted personally but it's pretty bangin'

IBM pauses advertising on X after ads show up next to antisemitic content

Re: Surprised? Really?

or biscuit

Re: What did they expect from Musk?

How so, friend?

CEO Satya Nadella thinks Microsoft hung up on Windows Phone too soon

Re: Microsoft Lumia 650

Signal

As it prepares to abandon its on-prem server products, Atlassian is content. Users? Not so much

Re: Ditching

I use Fork, which I swear used to be free. It had features Sourcetree didn't have (I forget which, apart from having a much nicer interface). I despise Atlassian.

It's time to celebrate the abysmal efforts to go paperless in the NHS

Re: Of course

Aye. From my limited exposure to healthcare tech, the best solution I can think of is open standards implemented locally. Share the knowledge, not the "product".

The one place that should have stellar DR/backup strategies (where the onus is not on the end user) is healthcare, if digital's the way. If the military and websites selling tat can do it, there's no excuse.

In my limited experience of using healthcare services (give it time) surname and DOB are usually used as the most salient uniquefying key when you're visiting a new or different department. NHS number would be perfectly cromulent too, but a lot of people don't necessarily know theirs and people/places can be (somewhat) justifiably prissy about the numbers being broadcast. There's also the need to expediently look up someone's data vs the need to make sure that the person is the person you're expecting, and not somebody who's maliciously impersonating another/psychotically impersonating another/confused and potentially about to receive an unnecessary and unwanted procedure.

ID cards might go some way to addressing such issues but they don't seem likely to take off and there's still a bunch of not-necessarily-edge cases to consider.

Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim

Re: What, no backup strategy?

…and my primary means of interfacing…

emphasis mine

Uncle Sam probes H-1B abuse surge: What do our vultures make of it?

Re: Its a joke

And I'm presuming I'd be buggered due to lack of the thoroughly unnecessary postgraduate degree…

Chrome's HTTPS padlock heads to Google Graveyard

Re: Gorhels htts push was nothing to do with making the web secure

I'm not doubting you but do you have a link? My G-fu is weak and I am le tired.

Aye — alert by exception, keep the signal:noise ratio cromulent. As long as people are warned on insecure pages (especially where they're actively entering information) I'm good with less cruft.

Still be a cold day in hell before you catch me using actual Chrome on a desktop, though.

Streaming apps – and maybe even Cloud PCs – coming to electric cars

Re: While charging?

Speaking as a pedestrian, cyclist and sometime passenger — not just driver safety!

UK tax authority nudges net 'influencers': You may owe us for those OnlyFans feet pics

Re: I think you'll find...

2005! I was a decade out. Knew it'd been the Inland Revenue for a longer portion of my life

Re: I think you'll find...

They always used HM, inherited from HM Customs and Excise at the time of the 1995 merger that created HMRC. There was no way even back then that the authorities would be stupid enough to expand that abbreviation knowing that it was liable to become defunct at any second, Liz II was already pushing 80.

I actually said something similar about kvinna/kona etc. at the time it happened, as I was fairly into the Icelandic sagas back then and always into etymology. But I like your revolutionary idea better. :)

Ubuntu Advantage is being wired deeper into the distro

Good point — I did initially have it on Debian but shifted to Ubuntu as stuff was ending up just a little stale for my tastes, and I like relatively up-to-date packages with minimal maintenance (fixing some broken scripts once in a while is fine, it's more likely a change in a web API is going to break things for me than a new package being installed).

Never had a direct problem with systemd though I'm inclined to trust the Reg readership and wider community on it being problematic…one thing I've disliked about Ubuntu so far is that when I do try a new major release, there's often a completely new way of doing something fundamental which may or may not be available alongside the old way of doing things, and there may or may not be some attempt at back-compatibility to go with it. Which reminds me a lot of Windows!

I imagine I'll stick with Ubuntu for ease, but upgrade time is always my chance to poke my head out there and see what else might be available. Of course I could probably suffice with a Raspberry Pi if streaming services/distributors et al. could get their shit together, but I'm one of those cantankerous types that would like to be able to actually view the next episode of something they were in the middle of watching…or view any episode of certain things.

It's basically functioning as that aye, just without any of the redundancy you'd hopefully expect from a NAS. And it's plugged directly into the telly for video stuff.

I do also have a NAS that's been running about a year longer but I think it's probably due for retirement given that the firmware's dried up, it's about five times louder than that PC and I have low faith in the RAID 5 array successfully recovering from a drive failure after 12 or so years of continuous operation. And since the total available storage over 4 disks is 6TiB, when the last single HDD I bought back in early 2020 was 14TiB, I wouldn't be shocked if I were to discover that it's the least electrically efficient appliance in my house!

Re: Users is the correct word!

I get enough of that shit trying to just buy groceries online and Tescos 5 clicks to get out of the upsale and actually to checkout is as annoying as f*** as well

I've mostly not been too annoyed by self-service checkouts of late; I only use the ones at the Co-op and local mini Tesco really as I don't drive and stay close to home. They seem to have removed the volume control/mute buttons though which means the Co-op ones SCREAM LIKE AN ANGRY DICTATOR and the Tesco one mumbles confirmation of scanning the Clubcard barcode so quietly that I never know whether it's actually done so or not.

My least favourite interface however is a cash machine at the petrol station where the user journey goes:

(Card inserted)

Enter PIN> (I do so)

Would you like to view your balance before you proceed?> (No)

[List of options, including "withdraw cash" and "view balance"]> (withdraw cash)

Would you like to view your balance before you proceed?> (No)

[List of amounts to withdraw]> (Amount I want to withdraw)

Would you like to view your balance before you proceed?> (No)

[Card returned, cash dispensed]

As someone who hides from the awful truth of knowing their bank balance wherever possible it takes some commitment to successfully evade it during this sequence of interactions.

Ah, just saw your comment — Manjaro seems to work okay for some people as a server OS. I've used Arch as a desktop before but also like minimal fuss/learning these days, I'm not as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as I once was. Might give it a whirl on a VM sometimes though; sounds like your laptop isn't too far removed from my PC which has been running since 2011; just a mobo + i3 + RAM bundle from Dabs with about 16 HDDs of various sizes thrown in because I CBA figuring out ZFS or any kind of storage pool manager for JBODs.

(Of course I expect your laptop perhaps has fewer than 16 HDDs unless your thighs are particularly beefy)

I've liked Mint as a desktop OS before, but it's been a while since I used a Linux with a desktop. I currently run Ubuntu Server 18.04 as a file/media server and it's been stable (outside of occasional weird complete freezes that I've never been able to diagnose, but am fairly confident are something to do with the now quite old mobo or maybe the GPU on the i3). I'm using it essentially headless (X kicks in to run Kodi when I want to watch something, but that's it, and I shut it down again afterwards as the majority of the freezes only happen when Kodi and/or X are running).

I haven't been too put out by this Advantage stuff but did see a message about it for the first time a couple of weeks back. I'll need to do a fresh install at some point in the future to get myself on a more recent OS version, which I was anticipating would be whatever the most recent Ubuntu LTS is when I do so (didn't get round to 22.04 or even 20.04 because I am le tired). I anticipate it would be easiest for me to stick with Ubuntu as I have setup notes and commands for the current instance that would hopefully not need too much adaptation, but what alternatives to Ubuntu are there for a home headless/server setup that I might want to consider?