Posts by LastTangoInParis

HMRC: UK techies' IR35 tax appeals could take years

Re: Dumb question...

Not a dumb question. As someone who was briefly CFO for a very small organisation, you use HMRC tools or something like Quickbooks (definitely not a recommendation!) to calculate their tax and NI, providing you’ve correctly identified their NI status (not so easy as you think). You then submit that electronically and pay what HMRC says you owe to them. Much the same for pension contributions. You should be able to ask to see this if you had a dispute.

Google's Chrome OS Flex could revive old PCs, Macs

Re: @doublelayer - quite useful

So go for ultimate simplicity and get an iPad with one of those astronomically priced keyboards. Soooo much easier and faster (instant start to most video conferencing tools, anyone?).

Btw do not confuse a Kindle Fire with an iPad. Being forced to lodge a payment card with the Amazon App Store AND be forced to turn on 1-click purchasing is not my idea of user friendliness. Not even Android goes that far.

To err is human. To really tmux things up requires an engineer

Re: Step outside

Flashing headlights means get out of my way ….. Same in Turkey. Also, on village roads, working lights and door locks seem to be optional. Yes, a car went round a end and the rear passenger door opened!

Lost your mouse cursor? Microsoft's PowerToys 0.55 has you covered – with a massive crosshair

Outlook ate my cursor

It seems that Outlook 2013 running into Exchange StoneAge Edition is quite good at eating my cursor for some time while it sorts it’s life out, multiple times per day.

How to get banned from social media without posting a thing

How very Kafka-esque. Franz would have loved this!

Windows boss Panos Panay talks up 'new era of the PC' – translation: An era of new PCs

Re: A market ready for disruption ...

Same for Office. There was nothing fundamental wrong with Word 97, indeed our Tech Authors refused upgrades until they were forced. Even now I still have to hunt around Word 365 to find commands that were obviously placed in W97.

Reg reader returns Samsung TV after finding giant ads splattered everywhere

Only 3 years of updates

My 6 year old Sony stopped getting updates at Android 9. Really not impressed. But no ads!

Remember when you thought fax machines were dead-matter teleporters? Ah, just me, then

NHS still faxing

Just a couple of weeks back an NHS staffer said they’d fax my notes to another department. You could have knocked me down with a feather. Last time I tried to fax anything was when Conficker flattened our email system.

RIP: Microsoft finally pulls plug on last XP survivor... POSReady 2009

Re: It will never die!

I spotted a till running the POSReady 2009 screensaver at my local branch of The Range just this weekend!

Darmstadt, we have a problem – ESA reveals its INTEGRAL space telescope was three hours from likely death

I remember playing multi-player Star Trek on Mac SEs back in the 80's. Surely something to be considered alongside those boring meetings?

Re: " thereby presenting the best argument for ongoing remote work, for every job, forever"

Remotely piloted white van?

All I want for Christmas is a delivery address that a delivery courier can find

Some countries are worse

In South Africa, the state run postal service is so bad nobody shipping in country uses it. If mailing from outside, though, you don’t have that luxury. This is the actual journey of a parcel from UK to a large city in SA, as revealed by the tracking data. Flies to SA, so far so good. Sits at international airport hub for a couple of months. Eventually shipped to post office local to the recipient, literally round the corner. On the same day, the post office return it to the airport hub, who then eventually sends it back to us.

Is that a meteor crashing to Earth? No, it's Chromebook makers coming back to reality

Re: Wot no Wi-Fi?

Perhaps HP could do it for free under Corporate Social Responsibility to boost their street cred. This seems to be a new thing that vendors are being asked about, like offset exports but in your own country. I agree though that schools can barely afford pencils, let alone Wi-Fi.

Re: A plan to boost sales

Perhaps force all laptops sold in the UK to support the Welsh alphabet, which has a few extra letters and some accents. Welsh is the only actual de jure official language in the UK, English is de facto official.

Wot no Wi-Fi?

I'm pretty sure those HP dudes will know some people in heir own company who can roll-out an enterprise W-Fi network in the school.

But anyhow, aren't Chromebooks time-bombed with a fairly short date? See here https://www.theregister.com/2019/08/22/buying_a_chromebook_dont_forget_to_check_when_it_expires/

Meatballs, Abba, and bork: 3 things Sweden is famous for

All you need is ...

... a Raspberry Pi, kiosk software and Wordpress with the Foyer plugin. Then you can stop wasting huge amounts of electricity running Windows PCs.

If your head's not in the cloud, you're not in the right place

Re: Sounds like a cry for help.

Multiple DCs ….. can’t find it now but I recall some big public cloud DC going pop in the US and no clients were moved to other DCs. Reality 1, Marketing 0.

Fancy joining the SAS's secret hacker squad in Hereford as an electronics engineer for £33k?

Re: The ad is a declaration of intent.

I wouldn’t expect a grad to have all those skills. With 10 years experience on top, maybe, but then I’d expect considerably more than bottom end of a grads starting salary.

Microsoft releases Windows 11 Insider Preview, attempts to defend labyrinth of hardware requirements

Thanks for the (more) memory

Win 10 and now Win 7 both need 8 GB RAM to even boot and run Windows Updates. I’ve lost count of how many relatives and friends have asked me to take a look at their unusable Windows laptops, desktops etc that were all fixed by upgrading from 3 or 4 GB. For what exactly? So MS can foist more crappy code on us?

Who would cross the Bridge of Death? Answer me these questions three! Oh and you'll need two-factor authentication

Re: Ceci n'est pas une robot

Or indeed, in South Africa, “I am not a traffic light”. Perhaps the localised version there would ask to click on the robots …..

Windows 11: Meet the new OS, same as the old OS (or close enough)

Keeping up with the Jone ... er Jobs

Of course MacOS has gone to 11, and quite rightly so seeing as a huge amount of breaking stuff came in, not to mention a whole new CPU family. So Windows has to go to 11 too. But will the promo video feature Spinal Tap?

We don't know why it's there, we don't know what it does – all we know is that the button makes everything OK again

Re: The light..

I have an Epson small business printer and a homebuilt file server, both of which have blue LEDs to indicate power on. So far so good. However I swear you could see them half a mile away in the dark. Are all blue LEDs so annoyingly bright?

Crane horror Reg reader uses his severed finger to unlock Samsung Galaxy phone

Not all fingers are equal?

Anyone got elderly parents who have had issues with touch screens? My 80+ mum has a Kindle Fire she can’t use, her fingers don’t work on it. iPad is apparently better. I’ve no idea why.

The Great Borkish Breakfast: I'll have a cup of tea, a sausage roll and a side of bork, please

A coffee, sausage roll and a Windows license please

Why oh why is Windows being used in this way? Lots of perfectly good Linux builds for kiosk or signage uses, eg Porteus or Binary Emotions, plus behind the scenes software for managing them (Foyer on Wordpress for those really simple use cases). Although you could attribute this to 'nobody ever got sacked for buying Windows', it's going to cost more in the long run to deploy Windows, surely?