Posts by PRR

Scientists show it's possible to solve problems in your dreams by playing the right sounds

Nikola Tesla claimed that he dreamed rotating EM fields and AC motors.

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

> TV license fee will climb to £180 a year....

A YEAR??? I pay $191 (about £141) a MONTH for TV programming.

Spectrum TV Silver 127.00

Broadcast TV Surcharge 28.00

Spectrum Receiver 15.00

Digi Tier 2 12.00

Taxes (not fully itemized) 9.55

========================

191.55 (141.26 Pound)

That is with just one 'premium' channel. The $127 nominally gets 99++ channels (but as Bruce said in 1992, 57 Channels And Nothing On). The extra $12 is for RFDTV 30 minutes a week, but we gotta pay for a whole 'Tier'.

US appears open to reversing some China tech bans

Re: monster wolf

Great Pyrenees and similar dogs are somewhat effective in deterring wolves and bears. What they were bred for. A barky Pyr in full coat and deep snarl/growl is a fearsome thing. Makes the wolves decide to eat somewhere else. However our grrril just had to be shaved for a skin thing, and she's embarrassed to go out. Rat tail, skinny gut, and that deep resonant chest turns out to be all fluff.

They do eat more than Robo-Dogs.

True dat about eyes. Any two lights in the distance will alert my dogs.

Final step to put new website into production deleted it instead

I shopped Safeway in 1959 in California. (Well, my mother shopped, I just threw Sugar Pops in the cart.)

> Safeway was taken over by Morrisons in 2005, so it couldn't be them.

About six megamarts own all the supermarkets in the US under many store-names.

Safeway 2026 has a perfectly good and deep site https://www.safeway.com/

It is now a bud of Albertsons, but DBA Safeway.

What I found mildly amusing is: I'm now 66 years and 2,800 miles away, but I ask Safeway.com for my nearest store, it gives me a store 7 miles up the road from me. That one says Shaws on front, but I know the store-generic products are the same badging "Signature Select". In some sense I have shopped there all my life.

The big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood – they pay for proprietary groupware

Long long ago The Press toured Ford factories. Took a bus between factories.

The bus had a "GM" logo on the nose.

One wisecracker asked what "GM" stood for, expecting to embarrass the tour guide.

He was told "Giant Mustang!!"

(This would have been a New Look model like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GM_New_Look_bus#/media/File:New_York_Bus_Service_GMDD_1502.jpg )

How Microsoft's legal eagles wrangled Happy Days for Windows 95

Re: Jumping the shark indeed.

> Mr.Speed's job .... is to essentially look out of his window and tell us if it's raining or not. It's not for him to tell us if it's good or bad...

Job One is to entice/trick you into reading the ads.

This little controversy in the Comments is, indirectly, a good thing for his salary.

Reviving a CIDCO MailStation – the last Z80 computer

> shocked learning the first Apple Macintosh had a 9inch monitor.

There was a luggable, pre-Compaq, with a 4" or 5" CRT.... I forget the size or brand or O/S. I was near-sighted then, so tiny text no problem. Someone here will recall the model. I bought one $10 as-is, and set it in the hall while I parked the car..... it was stolen. EDIT Osborne 1, CP/M, 5" CRT, Z-80, 90K flops, 24 pounds

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

Re: Gullible!

> red cars go faster

For sure. I wanted a new car mid-pandemic when there was no stock. I left my finances with the dealer salesdude and told him to call ONLY with a RED car. Much faster than my old black car.

Also musical equipment. Red guitars and fuzz-pedals rule. I often tell newbies that the internal parts, or circuit, matters much less than color.

Linus Torvalds keeps his ‘fingers and toes’ rule by decreeing next Linux will be version 7.0

Re: Frostbite ?

> We have two choices: interpret a version number as a single decimal number or split at the . and....

The obvious fix, being used by several softwares, is to date it.

With any of the many date-formats the world has standardized on.

*MDY (Month, day, year) *DMY (Day, month, year) *YMD (Year, Month, Day) *JUL (yy/ddd) *ISO (YYYY-MM-DD) *USA (MM/DD/YYYY) *EUR (DD.MM.YYYY) *JIS (YYYY-MM-DD)

If issuing more than one per day, add the time (your choice of format).

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

> used X-rays to excite the phosphor.

No. Electrons excited the phosphor. Fast electrons hitting metal will make 'hard' X-rays. Slower (low voltage) electrons make 'soft' X-rays which hardly penetrate air. But the 3-way split in colored TV CRTs means we usually have to shoot the electrons pretty fast, fast enough to make hard X-rays.

I had thought the big problem in days of old was the HV Rectifier tube/valve. Internally it is a lot like an X-ray tube. It and the H-deflection tube often lived inside a metal cage.

One specific H-defection tube had such high X-ray output in the field that the maker put a bounty on every original version returned (enough to cover wholesale cost of the new-type). TV repair men (they were all male) were urged to replace all found.

Solid state reduced this hazard but you still had electrons hitting the CRT screen pretty darn hard. The HV was regulated not so much for raster stability but to stay out of the major X-ray range.

Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes

I am experienced. Gawd I'm experienced.

Long long ago I got a 30 volt supply *backward*. (In my defense they used an odd color convention; but I coulda checked.)

Then later I replaced a 8088 CPU with a V20 CPU. (20% more speed.) 40 pin DIP fits fine either way. Backward it becomes a $40 diode. In the cheap PC we had it pulled the power supply to 1 Volt and cooked. But when I got a clue, and turned it around, it ran fine for years. NEC made them tough as rocks.

Re: In the old days, we said welcome aboard

> 9V cell - .... I wonder what happens when I touch my tongue to those metal things.

In vacuum tube/valve days they made slightly larger battry but 45 Volts. I wondered what you wondered. My dad suggested my tongue would roll-up like a roller pull-down window shade.

US TikTok service restored after cloud 'that doesn't go down' went down

Does this storm-affected datacenter exist in a real world? Where?

McDonald's is not lovin' your bigmac, happymeal, and mcnuggets passwords

Re: Ho Hum

> So McDonald's sudden interest in password security includes looking at the passwords.

So can you, or anybody. "Drawing on data from Have I Been Pwned, McDonald's said...."

It may be narcissistic to look for yourself in Have I Been Pwned, like Googling yourself, but it's not a security breech.

EDIT: ninjaed 3 minutes by Pickle Rick.

Best password is no password?

Long ago, when dial-up was precious, the university made us log-in on the dial-up servers. Keep the non-matriculated riff-raff out. This was very important to them!

I was helping Floyd with another problem and asked him to connect.

Flink-flink he was in! I was logging into dialup a dozen times a day and I knew he could not type that fast.

He explained that when it prompted "PASSWORD?" he could just press ENTER and he was in.

When I tracked down who was in charge of the dial-ups he was like OMG WTF and thanked me profusely.

Techie's one ring brought darkness by shorting a server

Re: BZZZT. Oh.

> little fingers are amazingly good conductors of 240v AC electricity.

And 350V DC. 50 years ago I worked on audio. Tube audio. Several times I was caught between live parts and chassis return (I eventually wised-up). The little finger in tape recorder is numb but getting better. The other little finger exposed to 600V will never get better.

That was before GFI/RCD. The first GFI that I bought tripped-out VERY easy. I did not feel the shock when the lights went out, but it musta been me and my rubber sneakers on a concrete floor. Since then I've been militant about GFI near water, dirt, or concrete.

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

> you've all worked on Renaults...

Over here it was first-run Ford Falcons. Bob McNamara engineered-out every part-penny. To get oil from the bottom of the engine to the top, it didn't have a drilled oil-passage. No, instead, oil was fed into a head-bolt hole and ONE under-sized head-bolt used in THAT hole to pass oil. The assembly workers didn't care and the dealer mechanics never saw that memo. Many-many Falcon engine rocker-arms quit in weeks from lack of oil. (Is amazing how little oil rockers can run on, in WWI aircraft open-rockers were common, tho competing with oil-in-fuel rotaries.)

> recognising an experienced printer repair person

My uncle supported IBM Line Printers in the 1960s. They were LOUD, so were enclosed in sound reducing housings. Of course when things were going wrong it was the custom to open the enclosure and put his head inside to see (and hear) the trouble ASAP and get the operation back on-line fast. He said this caused his deafness and all his coworkers' too.

(For Reasons, ties were not required in that shop.)

'Hey! I'm chatting here!' Fugazi answers doom NYC's AI bot

" Fugazy Continental, a limousine and luxury car service in New York City in the 1970s–80s that was accused of fraud."

What goes around comes around.

I remember Fugazy radio (and TV) commercials all the time.

https://youtu.be/X1DiItcii74

https://youtu.be/d8aq63oLSOo

Bork ventures to the Middle of Lidl

Re: middl of lidl

> I suppose decades ago the software would have been programmed into socketed EPROM which might have been more robust with the signage data stored in battery backed low power (CMOS) static ram.

Decades ago I was running 24/7 signage on 5" 360k floppy disk. Do not remember any trouble with that in a 5 year run.

(The flops didn't run 24/7; code and data loaded at power-on and then it cruised on RAM.) (and prolly only 256k of that).

ATM flashes a port or two for the enterprising hacker

I remember when ATMs sang the 1200baud song, was maybe 5 years ago that my local quickiemart moved to cable(?) internet. As for interruptable power: nobody around here expects that an ATM will *always* work; and if the store has gone dark no business will be done. (I do think the local electric company prioritizes such as Caroll's Market so their line workers can get coffee and buns.)

Everybody is WinRAR phishing, dropping RATs as fast as lightning

> Not much marketing around for data compression software back in the day

IIRC, shareware on-line was all about compression AND collections, keeping as many as seven files together on BBS and CIS. It was all about PKzip, and before that ARC and ARJ and other TLAs now forgotten. In DOS of course, we didn't GUI. I remember wicked debates about who compressed what the most, or could sustain how much bit-rot; I never found it made a critical difference. (5% saving on a 13 floppy set still needs 13 flops.)

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

Re: Sounds awful

> raise a generation of "engineers" who understand nothing

I think that bus has sailed.

Emmabuntüs DE 6: A newbie-friendly Linux to help those in need

I know Emmaus

The homeless shelter in my town uses the Emmaus name. We've been helping as we can. I had no idea of the linux connection and frankly doubt the local operation does that-- really more a socks and blankets and can food distribution, low-tech. (I'm starting to think everybody does all their web on cellphones, including the younger POS people.)

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

"Why You Should Never Post Pictures of Your Keys Online!"

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/H6wtn_rrxgc?feature=share

Naomi Wu had a Youtube showing software to read key-cuts from fairly casual photos.

> a hotel .... You were supposed to leave your keys at reception when you left and pick them up when you came back, so they didn't leave the site.

The 1930s and 1940s novels I read, that happens all the time. I just missed that era so it seems strange to me. The clerk always knew who was in or out, which sometimes was a plot point. When I started using motels they had a fob with postage guarantee so you could drop in any mailbox. https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/seEAAeSw6GdpD-C3/s-l500.webp

Re: My wife was a keyholder at a bank branch

> "How will you be donating to the Policeman's Ball?"

Friend of a friend was stopped by our State Police. Hoped to buy his way out of trouble. "Can I buy tickets to the Police Ball?" reply: "State Police don't have balls"; dead stop as everybody realized what had been said and how it would sound in Magistrate's Court and the newspaper police sheet. Nothing more was said.

Raspberry Pi flashes new branded USB drives that promise speedy performance

There's a link for the Samsung, but not for the Pi. And the Pi site is getting crowded.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/flash-drive/

Ancient telnet bug happily hands out root to attackers

Re: Who still uses telnet?

> we've had web design companies moan at us as we don't give them ftp access to their client

Really? I thought naked ftp for writing went away long-long ago, any place with something to protect. Even 20 years back, a public writable ftp folder would get used to host warez until storage jammed up.

FWIW (maybe not a lot) my current commercial webhost has demanded SFTP; had me going for a bit b/c my toolbox is very old, but I discovered Ian had added SFTP to my editor.

Don't click on the LastPass 'create backup' link - it's a scam

> about as welcome as a major syphilis outbreak.

Welcome to old diseases come back! "A syphilis epidemic is occurring in the United States," https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11918761/ Annals of Medicine & Surgery 87(2):p 641-649, February 2025. | DOI: 10.1097/

Dead batteries cough up lithium after a bath in CO₂ and water, boffins say

Re: My council

> My council has a barrel. All batteries. They get sorted out.

In the US, Home Depot(#) has historically had a metal bin at the in-door, any rechargeable battery(*). BUT must be plastic-bagged!! And they are always out of bags! So wrap those rascals before you go. Nominally individually so they won't short each other, but nobody is watching, and plastic waste is a thing, but you don't want fire to start before you can leave.

(*) "Any rechargeable battery that weighs up to 11 pounds and is under 300 watt hours is accepted." So car batts and the larger snowthrower batts-- but often a mower or blow gets two battery packs perhaps to stay under some limit.

(#)Home Depot is home builders and owners supplies, nominally discount (mostly monopoly), locations in every second town across the US.

Maker fight! SparkFun cuts ties with Adafruit in harassment dispute

Re: Children children...

> Glad I buy from neither if that's how they conduct business.

Me too. I was considering a project using supplies from either or both fine firms, but am now glad that didn't go forward.

BTW: "Torrone and Fried are married." --- I am utterly baffled why the link is to a KIDS site. The fact being supported is also on the more adult Wikipedia site, so the kids link seems condescending. (Or why it matters, this day and age, that a partnership is church-blessed, or town-clerk certified, or bonded in solder.)

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: BS

> if it would work from an AC supply but

Yes, it could, and this is a "Universal" motor. Widely used for years in sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, and hand drills(*). Before large permanent magnets, car engine starter motors. High (and controllable) speeds, high starting torque, not too complicated or expensive. Noisy and sparky. A pure for DC motor will want laminated core, brush shifting, and other minor details for best work on AC or AC/DC.

(*) Power tools often rated "AC only" but the motors were fine on DC. The switches didn't last because the off-arc didn't stop 100 times a second on DC. Heavier switches could be had, but not at low-low-low price.

> a patched hole in the ceiling

Above my head here is a framed hole in the plasterboard. I was on my riding mower 30 meters in front of the house when Zing! Crash! it threw a rock through the window. I taped a cover over the shattered glass, but where was the rock? We finally spotted the dent in the wall, and hung a picture frame over it.

100psi/7bar shop air for a few seconds will NOT kill PC fans, small or large. They can exceed 10,000rpm for many minutes, longer than you can stand the noise. With luck that will break-down the fish-oil in the sleeve bearings so you can re-oil. I have never lost a fan this way; they often serve for years. (I;m a cheap SOB and won't replace a fan if I can avoid it.)

I had a diaphragm air pump once, it was heaven not having oil in the exhaust. Piston air pumps MUST have oil in crankcase and inevitably in exhaust. Breathing this slightly oiled air, as a diver, will give pneumonia, probably fatal cuz if you knew what you were doing you wouldn't do it.

I really doubt he "blew the chips out of sockets". Has anybody tried to do that?

Hacking LED Halloween masks is frighteningly easy

> there was no pairing or authentication checks

OTOH, my app will NOT pair to my hearing aid unless I power-down and re-start phone and aid, multiple times, and maybe not then. The latest discovery is that they won't pair unless the phone has internet connection--- which is the usual case when I go into a noisy restaurant unexpectedly.

Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

Re: Refuse to shutdown ?

> I'm Human. I can pull the plug.

In both StarTrek TOS, and ABC's RimWorlds books, approaching the power cord or wielding an axe around it would get you zapped with big optical printer lightning bolts and sound FX.

There was so much fraud on COVID loans, the feds trained an anti-fraud AI on the applications

Re: Fraud was a given...

> ...fraud by rich people is good They put the money in the stock market or real estate

Rich people get "reminded" to "tip" their government leaders or their programs. They do not even have to write the check anymore; they have people to do that online (instant gratuity).

Danish dev delights kid by turning floppy drive into easy TV remote

Re: Old Fart

> a long wooden stick ... On/Off and channel change ....but adjusting the volume was tricky.

That's actually easiest. Run 3-core cable out of the TV to a speaker-level volume pot at the couch. We've never been without such as that. (I was fearless about tapping into live-chassis TV sets.)

re: Disk Change--- long ago in another century I did extensive study of how Disc Change was(not) implemented on PC hardware. There were problems in the drives, the cables, and the OS. There were many fixes, mostly awkward.

'Violence-as-a-service' suspect arrested in Iraq, extradition underway

In Ukraine, not Sweden, but probably suggestive:

"As soon as a person arrested in absentia crosses [into] the state border of Ukraine, they must be immediately detained and handed over to law enforcement agencies."

https://ti-ukraine.org/en/news/arrest-in-absentia-how-it-works/

It changes the usual timing of physical and paperwork. Usually you have the guy detained and you ask to hold him longer. Here you don't have the guy but if he comes in, you have pre-permission (maybe a duty) to hold him more than a little.

ISS stint ends early as NASA aborts Crew-11 over crew illness

> I can't shift my breakfast chaps, can you crank it up....

Castor oil. You can still get it, tho last time we had to get the pharmacist involved. (It was on the shelves but shouldered-aside by all the name-brand high-profit potions.)

Mall display crashes the vibe with Windows activation nag

Microsoft is not gonna change. USERS (ie mall operators) should discover, or be TOLD, of FOSS to do slide-shows.

FWIW, I coded and deployed Digital Signage in 1985, when IBM 5150 PCs were being edged by XT machines. We also had obsolete Sony Trinitron monitors which made CGA's 40 column mode pretty.

Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause

Re: Machine Room Video

> camera(s) in your machine room

Or a "game camera". We strap them to a tree to log deer in the woods. Or kids vandalizing signs. Really fancy ones (color, cellphone access) have come down below $70. They run on batteries for months (5 months on 8 AAs once when I was monitoring vandals). A memory card holds thousands of still sightings or many video clips. They all log time/date.

Ultimate camouflage tech mimics octopus in scientific first

Re: Clever, but...

> I would dearly love to sit in on the meeting where the architect proposes literally gold-painted a building to the client.

Several US state capitol domes are gilded in Gold leaf.

Georgia's gold dome, a statehood symbol, is visible from I-285, I-75, and the downtown connector.

Iowa Capitol's gold domes need to be replaced every 30 years, costing at least several weeks to complete.

The Colorado State Capitol in Denver, whose distinctive golden dome contains real gold leaf.

Charles Bulfinch designed the dome which crowns the Massachusetts State House, but when it was built, the dome was not gold—it was shingled! In just a few years, the dome began to leak in rain and snow, so the company of Paul Revere was hired to cover the dome with copper to make it watertight. Later, in 1872, the dome was gilded with real gold leaf, and, as you know, still glows with gold today.

The Dome of the Rock in the Old City of Jerusalem .... Its outside appearance was significantly changed ...... again in the modern period, notably with the addition of the gold-plated roof, in 1959–61 ...

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Re: consumers are returning to physical media like CDs

> I understand that problems often occur on a Monday but by Tuesday they're not so bad.

The reference:

They call it stormy Monday, But Tuesday's just as bad

Lord, and Wednesday's worse, And Thursday's all so bad

The eagle flies on Friday, Saturday I go out to play

Sunday I go to church, yeah, Gonna kneel down and pray

Copper supplies set to peak just as tech needs more

Re: Hmm, aluminium wires for motor cores?

> aluminium wires for motor cores?

Obviously. It is a little bulkier, but not much/any heavier. It is a nuisance to solder well, but at factory scale is trivial; welding works too.

Nothing to declare at border control except a Windows 7 certificate error

Re: Be Sensible

> I wouldn't rely on Windows timekeeping without an NTP connection.

Come on. It is a commercial airport. How accurate does its time need to be?

I recall flights where I didn't know what day we would get out. Or worse: we took off directly into a thunderstorm which followed us all the way.

An unexpectedly fresh blast from the past, Freespire 9.5 has landed

> we missed an instantly available search facility on the "Launch" menu

Oh, fah, 21st-century problems. Back in the '80s we had to remember how to spell 'apropos' just to get pointers into the man pages.

StockHistory function becomes StockMystery as Microsoft Excel bugs out

> ...keeps a machine offline with the specific version of Excel they need...

Where do stock market quotes come from?

The last supported version of HP-UX is no more

Re: Calculators

> hp 16C calculator that I bought around 1977 and it is still in perfect working order. ...when HP (AKA High Priced) made top of the line quality products at top of the line prices. ...I once bought a TI scientific calculator who's keyboard quit working in less than a year...

OTOH: I been rocking TI's TI-30 types since ~~1980 when they were still LED. Those still work fine but eat batteries. Since then I've always had two (work and home) TI TI-30Xa by my side. Yeah they are cheap knock-outs but they sell new for $12 and used 3 for $10, even in very rural flea markets (they were school-approved for many years). When one gives me trouble, even just faded battery, or illegible LCD (they used several part numbers), I grab another. Not counting my first, I have not spent $100 yet.

And not counting two slide-rules that I still use (some problems are easier on a slipstick).