Posts by Already?

Contractor quaffed his way through Y2K compliance while the client scowled

Late Night Updates

Pretty sure this has been mentioned on here before but it was fun…

Myself as Snr Dev and top server admin colleague and good mate based remotely were set for a late Saturday shift implementing major updates to our client facing service - code updates and associated db changes, an all-done or complete rollback scenario. Once MoTD was done we messaged each other and agreed we were good to go. M'colleague politely asked if I had a drink - obviously yes, a glass of red. How about you? I enquired. Small whiskey came the reply. I should add this was about 15 years ago, we had our phones on chatting to each other, Messenger for confirming specifics and a hop skip & a jump to pass any configs that were likely to lose something being copied at one end or the other due to it not being possible to copy text from my Windows session to one of the servers.

We set to it; steady, cautious, check, recheck, tick off the checklist as we went, confirm good, continue. It took longer than anticipated and the glass of red in front me wasn’t the first out of the bottle that night. By midnight the bottle was empty and we still had a way to go. I excused myself for a loo break and on returning got a suggestion to open another bottle - there was as I said a fair way still to go. So i did, and his whiskey consumption continued at its steady pace.

By 3 a.m. we were done - updates, 2nd bottle, scotch. Sanity checks showed all was well with the system and we agreed to reconvene at 11 to check and recheck to give us time to back it out by Monday if necessary. It was fine, although colleague and myself were a bit less so.

Monday morning came with plaudits from all sides - mgmt, clients & colleagues alike, for a job well done. Only one person became aware of the shenanigans a while after the event and she had the decency to keep schtum about it bless her. Happy days, but with hindsight it was a chuffing nuts idea.

Security contractor blew the whistle on support crew's viral indifference

Re: Lazy by design.

The problem with timesheets is that they don’t account for how most of us work - there’s a lot of thinking time, some checking with production staff on general well-being of IT related stuff, chatting with staff from shop floor to senior management, and the obligatory coffee with $favourite_colleague occasionally - i.e. the normal social and professional interactions that oil the process and keep things tickety-boo. Assigning that time to specific projects skews the actual effort spent doing the core IT work and no job I ever had provided a job code for ‘chatting with the sales people'. What management end up with is a spreadsheet full of lies that makes us look worse than we are.

When I ran a team I didn’t ask for timesheets, just that the job was completed in good time and to let me know sooner not later if there was a reasonable expectation of delays for whatever reason.

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

I remember our whole dept being furnished with 286 machines followed relatively soon afterwards by a bunch of 386 PCs as their replacements. Whispers quickly started that our boss had a 486, rumoured to be impossibly and implausibly fast. 640K of memory too.

While you're here, could you go out of your way to do an impossible job?

While you're here…

The complete opposite of all this high security tosh, but on our semi-regular Sunday visits to my parents (an hour or so away from where we lived then) my dad would invariably decide to ask ‘while you’re here could you just…' inevitably followed by some obscure problem with his PC that he needed me to look at, just as we’d scooped the kids up and started to make our move to leave. Bless him, it’s 7 years since we lost him and I'm glad I never said no. And full marks to the old boy for the time he gingerly asked how to delete a browser history. Well played sir.

Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell

Was usually quite diligent about locking my laptop when away from my desk but once popped next door for a literal 5 second chat with our boss, which became a discussion on something and then something else and eventually ended with him guiding me to the Sandy Denny CD* that contained her BBC session recording of Solo, as opposed to the version with Fairport. I’d been trying to find it for years, on and off. Got back to my desk and unlocked the laptop to find a very blunt message in Notepad from our chief techie advising me of various unpleasant and unnatural experiences that might befall me next time he found my laptop unlocked and unattended. It worked, although I like to think it was unnecessary.

* The Lady, another compilation but the last track was the one. Success.

BBC bumps telly tax to £180 as Netflix lurks with cheaper tiers

Re: So much scope for savings and new income streams

Except that Match Of The Day post-Lineker is a patch on what it used to be. He really was the safe pair of hands who could if required show you his medals and presented it with an amount of aplomb that the current rotating threesome simply cannot match, more's the pity.

That he had to be moved on because some people believe that paying a licence fee gives them the right to censor views they disagree with is lamentable.

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

When I was a proper developer doing proper maintenance and support on our system some of my most lucid and clear realisations of how to resolve current issues would often arrive in the small hours, sitting up in bed being able to work a problem through in minutely fine detail. By morning I’d forget that important detail so it soon evolved to getting up and writing thoughts down whilst still fresh. Hindsight allows me to believe that the lack of distractions and sensory input to the brain at 3 in the morning frees the necessary mental capacity to join the many interconnected dots and arrive at a solution.

These days I’m semi retired and do cycle training in schools, where the most challenging thoughts are why a nine year old cannot grasp the simple idea that turning in front of an oncoming builder’s van is just not a good idea. It keeps us on our toes.

In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened

Re: Analog mobile phones

Once settled into a new job in 2007 I was added to the on call rota, weekends and evenings every few weeks. It was a good deal - the on call phone that never rang, £40 per month contribution to broadband (deemed vital to provide support, and 2007 prices were closer to £25/£30 per month), a few quid extra pay for giving up a Friday / Saturday night drink every few weeks, and the business we were supporting didn’t routinely work evenings and weekends.

Eventually a bean counter from higher up the food chain spotted this nice little earner and scaled it back somewhat. We could hardly complain, but did and were quickly knocked back. Busted…

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

Re: As little tale from my former banking life .. (tenuous ATM connection)

The assumption is that you won’t forget your cash, and anyway losing £50 is better than losing your bank card esp these days with contactless payments. But…

The word was that people do easily forget. Wait long enough, card out and into wallet or pocket, mentally that’s job done and off you go. Or you’re midway through a withdrawal and an old colleague appears and starts chatting and again before you know what’s what you’ve wandered off leaving the atm to quietly reclaim the cash. Easily done and often done judging by how many we found on the rolls.

Re: The Key to Everything

All keys together in one place? Nah.

Consistent placement is errrr…. key. House key goes with car key and lives on the bookcase just inside the living room or in the front door overnight. That’s coming and going sorted. Back door key lives by the back door, other generic back of house keys like conservatory, garage, shed, other back door and patio keys are on a hook in the kitchen and have been for 20+ years except when in use. Always where we expect them to be and always available to whoever needs them without waiting for someone to come home.

Re: As little tale from my former banking life .. (tenuous ATM connection)

Blimey your mention of journal rolls has just triggered a long buried memory. My last proper job with a prev employer involved electronically scanning 3000 journal rolls from a well known bank, to identify failed withdrawals - i.e. those where the customer failed to take the cash just requested within the allotted time so the atm pulls it back in and records it on the roll. I foolishly imagined that we’d find a handful, forgetting the stupidity of the average person. There were hundreds of them, each one needing to be correctly identified and forwarded to the bank. This was a few years ago, the scanning software was very good, so were the Heath Robinson roller feeds that Facilities knocked up to make the mechanical aspect of the job workable.

Re: The Key to Everything

As a youth I knew a few people in the motor trade and can confirm - or at least they would - that hanging a big bunch of keys from the ignition isn’t conducive to its long life or consistent satisfactory functionality. Ignition barrels aren’t designed to support the weight of a load of metal swinging randomly in all directions so it’s hardly a surprise when it does fail.

My brother (bless im, but he’ll never see this) is guilty of carrying every key he’s ever likely to use hanging from his car key. It makes me cringe.

Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

Re: rddb

Rubber duck? Spooky. 12 hours on from this comment I’m sat here watching an old Top Of The Pops on BBC4 from 1976 and the current song is Convoy by CW McCall, which includes numerous repeats of the phrase 'rubber duck'.

Brill. That’s finished and now it’s Guys n Dolls singing You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me, quite terribly compared to Dusty's original, which had been a big hit probably about 10 years previously.

For the US contingent TOTP was the BBC's weekly chart pop show and veered between cheesy and awfully cheesy most weeks, but we all watched it on a Thursday night. Oh to be 14 again and not 63.

The Y2K bug delayed my honeymoon … by 17 years!

Good Times…

We’d worked our way through our client's array of source code and completed our fixes and tests before handing it back for their reintegration, so by the big night of Y2K we’d mentally moved on and treated it almost like every other Christmas and NY break. The Y2K bonus payment that was due was quite generous, and the fact that it was all effectively done and dusted made it quite a relaxing break, so relaxing in fact that at about 3 in the morning on NYD I asked my then lady friend if perhaps she’d like to get married. She answered correctly it seems, given that we’re still together with me now retired and her stopping at the end of this school year.

It’s still frustrating to read articles in the press that claim Y2K was a non event, primarily it seems because toasters continued to work and there were no plane crashes. Drives me nuts.

Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

Re: Sometimes it seemed that …

Reminds me of an iPad update a few generations ago. Apple had clearly listened and offered the update either now or use the option to set it to happen automatically overnight. I opted for that, and woke up to the iPad still waiting for my confirmation to do the update - Click Ok To Install.

When did you first realise that the slogan lt Just Works may not have been completely accurate?

Junior developer's code worked in tests, destroyed data in production

Re: Pro tip for DELETE queries

Always always do the Select Count first, then run at least three queries - select count, delete, select count and select any other useful where to prove the delete or the surviving records - all wrapped in a transaction to give yourself chance to check that you’re getting what you expect. Then go for a coffee, come back and check it again before swapping rollback for commit.

Once had an interesting chat with a co-worker who couldn’t trace why his select count where sanity check gave a different number to the delete where where where was the same in both queries. Never did find out why; I was busy, he sussed it and went home.

Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time

Shirley we remember Jim Stafford's 1974 classic, My Girl Bill. Shirley?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=7aCpEGmI0pg&si=DSZDl1Dioyrh2d3y

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Re: I touch it and it breaks!

Fully agree Noram, it reminds me of the 'care' home where my father in law ended his days on earth. With very limited mobility he was assigned an upstairs room at the end of a long corridor, where unsurprisingly encouragement to eat in the dining area with other guests was politely rejected. Why? He could about manage to make it to the landing but was then faced with three flights of stairs with 90 degree turns to negotiate with his walker frame, or struggle a bit further to the lift. The lift was very much a goods lift available for people if required, but needed a very hefty shove to open it and the safety interlocks didn’t activate without a similar hardy shove from the inside, something that this frail 86 year old simply couldn’t manage. If he was put in the lift like a sack of spuds and met at the bottom there was every chance that he’d fall during the descent. In his wheelchair he had no chance of reaching the button once the door had been slammed shut from the outside so his only means of getting out was for someone to squeeze in there with him. The poor chap had long since given up; it was almost a relief when staff found him ‘unresponsive' one morning. Sweet relief had eventually arrived.

Techie exposed giant tax grab, maybe made government change the rules

Re: Sleuthing [1]

Eeeh when aaarr wurr a lad back in't 60s und 70s our regional Sunday lunchtime football highlights programme was called Star Soccer, and although it was supposed to cover the cream of Midlands football it invariably came from either Molyneux or The Baseball Ground and only once every third blue moon did it deign to visit dear old Filbert Street.

ATV, when ITV comprised separate companies covering the different regions and long before Central TV took it over. Wolves being on every chuffing week was obviously completely unconnected with ATV's Head Of Sport Billy Wright having been Wolves' captain 15 years earlier, as well as being married to The Beverly Sisters.

User demanded a 'wireless' computer and was outraged when its battery died

EMI 2001? Lovely piece of kit. I was wandering round an old motor car show in Llandudno recently and rounded a corner to come face to face with a period (1970s) BBC OB truck and a 2001 standing next to it, on a very beefy tripod. Iconic hardly does it justice, so I grabbed a few pictures.

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: Myself

Mine too. Years ago I was a half decent COBOL programmer; ahead of a new project was asked if I knew ASP. Sure I confidently breezed before quietly borrowing the then current VS install discs to spend the weekend figuring it out. By Sunday I had a working web app. Over time the web app became a useful resource for my personal use and as new technologies arrived - ASPX, and VB.Net, then C#, newer versions of SQL Server etc - it became a test bed for getting to grips with them.

On my (semi) retirement a couple of years ago I planned to rewrite this now quite expansive and v useful web site properly, in MVC as that had been my last project. Trouble is that a) it’s huge, b) awful in places but works, and c) runs off a huge number of stored procs that I could rework as LINC etc but really CBA. I’m retired. Spending the next 6 months or so at a PC making it slightly better? No ta.

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

Re: Thunderbolts and lightning

Spare him his life from these pork sausages, surely?

Don’t call me Shirley etc…

Windows profanity filter finally gets a ******* off switch

Posted before but it still raises a smile…

Late 90s iirc, we may still have been on Lotus Notes or maybe on Microsoft's finest, regardless I sent a humorous mail to m'boss with a slightly risqué word in it and by return got a Failed To Deliver due to profanity response, which contained a list giving examples of unacceptable words. Halfway down was the C bomb. Seriously?

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Re: "built to survive minor accidents"

2028. Whoops.

Re: "built to survive minor accidents"

My understanding is that PSUs & power amps are the bigger beneficiaries of a good service as caps tend to dry out over time causing a gradual degradation in sound, and when they come back with renewed internals they sound like new. I don’t know, never owned any of their kit long enough to need a service but instead have chopped boxes in as p/x during a steady upgrade process. Ask me in 2018 when my amp becomes due.

The underlying point using Naim as an example is that cutting corners to encourage component failure might be an attractive business model in some cases; in this case going the other way gives owners a little bit of security buying their black boxes knowing that they have a good 10 years' use in them and beyond that can effectively be renewed so it’s either a sound long-term purchase, or builds in decent residual values.

Anyway. Speaking of hand-built - I recently lost my job building custom hand-made clocks. I’m gutted, especially considering all the extra hours I put in.

(c) Mr Keaveny on his CGR show the other week :)

Re: "built to survive minor accidents"

Naim Audio (UK based hifi manufacturer) build a mix of relatively high volume production line audio - Muso, Unity, Nova - and primarily hand built black box gear - pre-amps, power amps, PSUs, streamers. Their claim is that they will service any bit of equipment that they’ve sold since they began in 1973, and recommend the low volume black box gear is serviced every ~10 years. Servicing is usually replacing caps and updating other items that have a shelf life.

And on a different tack Mend It Mark on YT does a sterling job of coaxing failed electronic gear back to life by methodically tracing faults and replacing failed components. Definitely a YT rabbit hole worth disappearing down.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Windows dev tools

I’m too far invested in a Windows dev env - VS and SQL Server for the db hosted elsewhere for my domain. As a retired dev who likes to update the ASPX web app and has no desire to rewrite 20+ years worth of improvements what are my best options? WINE? Dual boot and keep Win xx anyway?

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

Re: Smart meters, but not so smart.

£20 a month? £5 when it started a couple of years ago chief and with inflation busting increases now sits at £7.60 a month. Unlimited calls & texts & 4GB of data which I barely make a dent in most months. Look around.

Compression? What's that? And why is the network congested and the PCs frozen?

“It's baffling how many people just go for the first name that pops up in the auto-suggested list.”

I work p/t in the school my wife teaches in; emails are surname initial @<school>.net. Since p/t staff were given email accounts I now occasionally receive emails that begin “Hello miss. Regarding the homework you set…”. As we’re [correctly] expected not to interact with students it’s easier to fwd them onto her at the other end of the settee, tempting though it is to reply directly with a sarcastic comment.

Re: Mental image

By a loose coincidence Ade Edmonson who played Vivyan in TYO has also been in The Doodahs. He tells the story on Desert Island Discs (repeated recently, BBC Sounds…) and probably in his book Berserker which I have but am yet to read.

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

Re: Those were the days

My moments of greatest clarity were cycling into work, going over whatever problem might be most prominent for the day ahead. An hour and a bit cycling on quiet near-deserted country lanes was a great source of inspiration and often led to a resolution being ready in my head by the time the office loomed into view. Riding home was never as productive - maybe it was end of day so work is over till tomorrow, with the morning ride in being the opposite.

One bank's brilliant upgrade was another bank's crash

Re: Breaking [physical] windows

The warm water thing, been doing that since I learnt to drive in the late 70s, never caused the slightest problem and has the added bonus of putting warmth into the screen so it doesn’t mist up the moment you get in and breathe out. But the number of times I’ve done it on a cold wintry morn whilst various neighbours faff with de-icer and scrapers makes me smile. Even when I’ve explained - lukewarm, never more than you can comfortably put your fist in - their response is always to claim to prefer to spray and scrape. Their loss I suppose.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

My niece was born into a techie household; she'll go far. By the age of about 2 she was trying to resize printed magazine pictures with thumb & forefinger gestures. I expect the current generation of kids aged about 15 & below are all pretty similar.

Making the problem go away is not the same thing as fixing it

Email. That's the answer

Having been in a similar situation, this time needing to get a production system running the day before going on hols, I sent an email to my boss and myself stating something like 'working, will be okay but needs tidying and improving. Priority on return.'

Everybody’s happy, it’s in the open and two weeks later I’m not struggling to remember what was going on last time I was here. Thinking about it I did a similar email to myself every holiday, reminding me of what was going on.

Lost your luggage? That's nothing – we just lost your whole flight!

Re: Day 2?

Most places won’t have found you a laptop or sorted logon credentials by Day 2. Maybe that’s a good thing.

Sounds similar to my experience - see the post a few above yours. Like another comment says, paranoia is a useful character attribute in these situations, hence me running it with Select instead of Delete first to check that it’s doing what it should do, then running it inside a txn to roll it back and check that it’s good to go, then leaving it - coffee or whatever - and come back to it with just one thing left to do, which is run it in full. One job, one action. And have it all ready to go. Personally, and having learned by experience, it’s almost always better to know that you don’t have to do any specific other action such as highlight all of the statement to get it right. The distraction of a manager waiting for confirmation that it’s all resolved and a client already pissed off that their data has been found wanting was enough of a distraction; I preferred to know that it was tested, checked and ready, and that there was nothing by now to go wrong.

Neat that you worked somewhere that had a whoe office. That could excuse any distractions.

Re: This one command you must not enter

SQL Server Manglement Studio allows for different coloured highlighting by server, but defaults to MS-preferred bland. It would be better for it to automatically allocate a different colour scheme for each server it connects to, with the usual options to change it manually and perhaps one to disable automatic colour selection to keep everybody happy.

There’s nothing like a bright red colour scheme to remind you that this is the !!!!!!LIVE!!!!!! server, and the yellow one isn’t.

Deletes eh?

I had to intentionally delete a large number of records from a production db, and very nearly messed up. How? Stay with me…

Inherited a system where a new database was created for each new client, each one linked back to a master db. One client reported problems; an investigation showed the daily data file that they supply to us to load into the client db was the cause, and had been wrong for a week or so. Fixing that was pretty straightforward with a few minutes faffing in UltraEdit, correcting it in the db was a bit more involved. Rolling it back would put it out of step with the master; rolling that back would put all other clients’ dbs out of step. A carefully crafted delete across this one client db and the relevant data in its master db would fix it though, so I set about it.

The delete statement in the test db was fine. Dropping that into the live system and swapping delete for select to eyeball it and confirm that it was good showed all was well, as did wrapping it inside a transaction to roll it back on completion. It was safe, so instead of diving in I went for a coffee first, knowing that it just needed one last sanity check before running it. Which I did, but as I reached across the kb to hit F5 in SQL Server Studio my wrist caught the mouse and did a perfect click drag of the cursor across the delete statement, omitting the Where clause. As any fule know SSMS runs whatever’s highlighted, and it did, happily setting off to delete everything instead of the required few hundred thousand records from the client db. I clocked it almost immediately and hit stop, then silently prayed that SQL Server would live up to its ATOM promise of all or nothing. After an age of watching the rolling back message, it succeeded. Blimey.

I’ve tried to recreate that mishap but could never get a syntactically correct statement - Where what?, invalid table name, incomplete where clause etc. Good job there was enough data there to require a long enough execution time.

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

Re: Could be worse, of course

All 4 sides of Tales From Topographic Oceans would see off more than half a day’s work.

Could have used Telephone Line by ELO - that starts with a ring tone, albeit the US one so there’s at least a stab at getting it right. Downside is Jeff Lynne warbling through the remaining 4 minutes of a quite good 70s hit. Ok once in a while but not every time the phone rings.

But but but

Some seriously shonky coding going on there if it plays the ringtone to its end even though the call has been answered. Forget the jolly jape of It's Raining Men playing to a conclusion on every call, it means that any call will be answered with the chosen ringtone still playing unless the recipient knows to answer it as the ringtone is about to finish.

Hmmm. Not sure if the developers thought this through and tested it to any degree of sanity, or if we’re being misled a little with this Who Me.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

Re: More money in music these days and far fewer groups

Whispering Grass is superb. Don Estelle had a magical voice and had been a singer in an earlier life. It’s also from a time when records were made to sound great. I was playing this the other night on the hifi - Don and Windsor Davies' voices have a brilliant presence. Don’t knock it. :)

Re: Maybe not.

“Yes, the ones with systems which they can afford and enjoy using for the music.“

That’ll be most of us then. Very few ‘audiophiles' sink themselves into debt to buy a decent system, more often (from forums I’ve been on) it’s a combination of getting to the stage where the kids have left, mortgage is paid and the career has gone well enough to provide a comfortable existence, and the desire to improve the music system meets a surplus of cash. What else should we spend it on? My sister (also nr retirement age) is away on her 3rd holiday this year tomorrow, on top of their numerous weekend breaks. Who’s right? Her doing that with [apparently] nothing to show for it, or me with a little stack of Naim boxes on Fraim shelves and nice speakers sitting in the living room? It’s taken a few years of part ex, pre-owned and the simple ‘what’s your best price?' deals to get here and I wouldn’t care to guess the actual cost, but I f I walked into a dealers tomorrow to buy it all again it’d be the cost of a very a decent car to do it. But the enjoyment factor? Off the scale esp when the house is empty and you get into a flow picking and ordering tracks to build a mood, in awesome quality. I’d recommend it.

I’ve seen pics of such an upgrade for the speaker bases. The owner cut a roughly 1 sq metre hole in his floor and removed the concrete below as a column down to a depth. Not sure where he stopped, DPC maybe. Then with something in place to separate the existing concrete base from the new he poured in a column of concrete back up to just below floorboard level, and fixed a custom plinth of steel base with granite upper to the top of that new support. Full credit, it looked magnificent, and sat with a small gap between the floorboards and the granite. Plonking the speakers on that gave him the requisite results; speakers on a very solid base instead of wooden flooring, effectively isolated from the house.

Mains cables

Thought this item had died a death but a couple of days later it’s still prominent, and I see a couple of posts busily dismissing mains cable upgrades in response to my late night views.

You’re probably right in what you say about the wire not making any difference. I have Naim gear and their mains cable upgrade is called the Powerline. It uses bog standard 3 core cable, but Naim don’t make claims for the wire, their claims are for the mechanical properties of the mains plug at one end - for which they don’t claim much at all tbh - and their own version of the kettle plug at the other. The two key claims are the firm mechanical clamping action of its prongs onto the pins in the socket on the back of the receiving box, and the isolation of vibration incurred by 240V AC. Naim are big into mains power with most of their top line kit being two boxes; a separate power supply and the main unit - streamer, pre amp, power amp.

The biggest upgrade most Naim owners find is installing a separate mains for it, taking a parallel feed from the meter to a new CU running to dedicated wall sockets avoiding the radial that feeds fridges, freezers, the boiler and everything else. That’s next for mine, given how much it improves late at night when the house is asleep.

Just to add, a huge amount of the comments on this thread confirm what I suggested in my first post - that too many people have never experienced sitting in front of a decent stereo and don’t grasp a) how absolutely magnificent top-line hifi can sound, and b) how apparently tiny differences can have such an impact on the sound, differences that with the best will in the world a £299 one-box stereo from Curry’s with its flimsy 3” drivers in a stapled together box but described as 'hifi', isn’t going to deliver.

To the guy laughing at changes in soundstage, it’s where the speakers effectively disappear and the music becomes a 3D image with height depth and width. That’s what can change with different speaker cables and different combinations of source and amplification where the one constant is the choice of speakers.

Well. I chanced on this article looking for a Who Me.

It’s a given that anything that vaguely references audio will attract the snide and the sarky, and lo - all are here. Dismissive posts about mains, about anything over £1k being wasted, how digital files aren’t up to it. And so on.

If you want to brag about how you’ve never sat in front of a serious hifi this is your chance. And not just sat for 5 minutes through half of Comfortably Numb and got bored before you wandered off. Maybe you should have made it a hobby. Wife apart and Leicester unexpectedly winning the Premier League the other year, there’s not much to beat being left alone with a serious stereo and a NAS full of your own favourite music plus a Qobuz hi-res account. And a bottle of nice wine.

Flac files beat any vinyl. Mains cables do make a difference. Better interconnects and speaker cables change the sound. Directional? Maybe not…

But being in front of a seriously good streamer that goes into a magnificent preamp then a chuffing excellent power amp and out into a pair of tremendous speakers isn’t to be sniffed at, especially when the upgraded mains cables improved things for each box. Honestly, the sound is magnificent. Not just quite good or 'nice bass', but genuinely fabulous. It’s why I’m still up at quarter to three.

If your baseline is £899 worth of Richer Sounds' finest, fill yer boots. If you’ve arrived at the top end of a specialist audio manufacturer’s range, it all looks (and sounds) a bit different. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.

Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice

Re: At least you fixed the problem.

Not the cliché MK is dull response surely?

I moved there for a couple of years 30 years ago, am still here. It’s great: drive at NSL speeds and get across town on the grid roads in < 15 minutes unlike the peak time crawl whenever I go back to what I still call home. As mentioned in other replies it’s got Bletchley Park, MK museum (fab), the theatre, The Gallery with its well worth a visit cafe too. Everywhere is within walking distance of huge green open spaces and linear parks, the same time in any direction is a great bike ride in open countryside. Pubs, nightlife, cafes, decent shopping centre, kart track, ye olde villages within and close by outside, as well as the old towns, and London 40 minutes away. Etc etc etc. Quality of life here is great.

But yeah - roundabouts and concrete cows. Yawn.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Re: Keyboard Confusion

Having semi retired from this lark I’ve quickly forgotten the less used kb s/cuts, but this morning trying to position two windows equally across the screen I thought Win + < or > did the job, but found that that (or one of them) brings up the emojis panel.

As any fule know, Win + R or L arrow places a window across half the screen.

Excel's comedy of errors needs a new script, not new scripting

Re: Clueless users

Like he says, get a a refund, and stop paying.

It’s been years since a licence was needing simply for owning receiving apparatus. You need a licence in the UK to watch or record any tv channel either live or as live, regardless of where it comes from, or to watch anything on the BBC iPlayer.

You can watch all other streaming services content without a licence, unless you’re watching a live or as live broadcast - e.g. tennis or Premier League football on Amazon.

Live or as live allows for the inherent delays in broadcasting, including the short delays added to allow for cutting away if something untoward occurs.