Posts by Tim Chuma

AI-assisted mushroom hunting is a recipe for a bad trip

Better asking Erin Patterson for cooking advice

Beef wellingtons for all AI tech bros!

Be a hater all you want, AI's here to stay

The Register posts too many stories about AI

Have read complaints that people are sick of your website posting too much about it.

The only people who actually care about AI are venture capitlists who want to have a pull over their money and people who are being ripped off. Sure, steal 100Gb+ off my website and bust my data cap for the website for the month to train your stupid AI!

$1K laser mosquito zapper promises precision strikes as backers itch for answers

Do not look directly into laser with remaining eye

"Ow my eyeball!"

Trump sends the US Navy back to the steam age

Hopefully this will take so long to roll out it will not be implemented

Meanwhile the US Navy is ramping up the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers as they are short of actual support ships they needed. Still not as dumb as getting 7 mythical nuclear-powered submarines that will not be delivered until after I am dead and gut the countries finances so no health system which is want Trump wants as he hates universal health care.

DEF CON dingus suspected of trying to take over Delta in-flight Wi-Fi

With NORD VPN

Clearly this is guerilla marketing to get people to use VPNs

Linus Torvalds says AI has made 'huge' Linux kernel updates the new normal

Fork me!

I see a non-AI fork in Linux's future! Happened with the GZDoom project and the civil wars continue!

Samsung and Mousterian move ahead with floating datacenter for Texas

Floating target

Exploding data centre not really going to win any environmental awards! Weird boomer campaign against batteries now?

News Corp labels some AI companies 'crass kleptomaniacs'

AI ad banners everywhere!

Their sites are now covered in AI slop ads and they have been sacking people to do "AI summaries" of news. The ads on porn sites are really mean "hey you sad loser! Stop @#$^^*& to porn when there's 100s of hot grannies in your area who #@#$#$%"

Windows 10 refuses to die, and the security bill is coming due

Not if you are running embedded systems off the network

Computers running machine tools can be decades old if they are kept running and free of grit.

If you only install stuff via USB and don't need to connect to a network you should be fine.

Recently started getting back into retro gaming again as the carts make it offline and you don't have to download patches.

Linus Torvalds tells AI haters to fork off

Linus is welcome to go fork himself

Get directly into the bin!

Watch this split the Linux community.

AI slop writing has taken over the internet, particularly LinkedIn and X

Reality or Nothing!

I am hoping the RONs catch on from Cold Lazurus if not the Butlerian Jihad.

Most likely it is going to be organised crime going after the free copper, rare earths and GPUs in data centres that are just sitting there.

Former Microsoft engineer shrinks Notepad down to size

Notetab

I write most of my gig reviews in Notetab and just copy and paste into word to do a spell check. This does not help me if I have written the wrong word however.

What gets my goat is that Copilot tries to shunt words in for you stupid ducking thing.

Windows 11 can now turn back the clock when updates go bad

What my website could do 20 years ago then?

I can do a similar thing on my website control panel. I often solve the problem by just rolling back and not doing the thing that broke something. My tech support is 11hrs behind being on GMT and I am in Australia.

Microsoft Access finally breaks free of its 22-inch form limit

Re: I didn't know that Access was still kicking

I read the two large volumes on it. You can actually set it up as an office automation tool for doing large amounts of work with other office applications.

I used it as a front end for SQL Server databases.

When the ISP got rid of Access for the database I moved onto SQL server and made a training booking system and prototype CMS (before those were a thing) for the website.

The training booking system took $300,000 worth of bookings but got retired when I was made redundant as no one could be bothered to maintain it.

EU won't force publishers to grant dead video games an afterlife

At least let people fork it!

Let people run their own servers for "dead" online games.

Rye Games has covered several of these. They have some of the best communities!

Gulf War I veterans playing old Call of Duty Games, sandbox games where people have spent thousands of hours, even one where the developer game permission (Medieval Engineers) for the supporters to fork it and run their own development as they have gone onto Space Engineers.

Windows 11 turns five, leaving some important lessons for Microsoft

tiny11

Works quite well.

Could not get the "self rolled" version to work but one off the web archive did. Also did not come with any browsers to connect to the internet!

It is either do that or not have a computer as I can't afford to upgrade at the moment.

Ukraine puts its Russian war trophies online for allies to pick apart

Just use OSINT

To be sure the governments already have AI bots scraping all the open source intelligence sources.

There are people who do a bang-up job actually fronting up for paid satellite imagery and counting.

Actually the "Lost Armour" blog is how I found out how many Bushmasters have been lost when Perun put it in one of his videos.

I am behind on the Perun power point presentations but will watch the one this week about Iran, it is almost an hour but saves having to read and watch a lot of smaller videos.

Committed skeptic finds himself warming to new Amazon AI products that actually don't suck

Dennis Potter's Cold Lazarus had the RONs

"Reality or Nothing" that would blow up virtual reality and AI.

Same as the Butlerian Jihad in DUNE where people ended up training themselves to be computers when thinking machines are banned.

It's really only pattern matching and peoples' willing anthropomorphism with the results is doing the heavy lifting. The MechnicaL Turk is never far away.

Britain sending Ukraine an extra 30,000 drones – now 150,000 all up

Still better than what Australia sent

Australia sent cardboard drones!

Also a bunch of old busted-up stuff that was end of life like the Bushmasters that were going to cost more to decommission than it would cost to ship them to Ukraine (half of them have been destroyed in Ukraine, used way-off spec).

Ukraine is making many more drones than that per month but so is Russia now. The stuff China is sending is grey market so they don't get a warranty. Also China is taking payment in Chinese Yuan so they avoid sanctions.

Commodore gets into the phone biz with Sailfish-powered retro 'Callback'

Why bother?

If you want a cheap phone there are plenty available from the pawn brokers that have been flipped by organised crime.

I got a SIM card that was supposedly "new" in the USA and got calls to it from someone. They also fenced goods at the front counter! No one knew what a SIM card was when I asked in the airport.

Firefox 152 understands 'Sssh!'

It also does not hobble your computer if you use Adblockers

Chrome was making my computer run slow if I tried to use Adblockers. Get directly into the bin!

XP-era Windows spotted haunting London's driverless railway

Embedded systems do not need to update

If you do not need to connect to a network it is fine to run old software. As long as the hardware still runs.

AI is code – and can't be prompted into being smarter

What Frank Herbert said

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. -Frank Herbert, DUNE

Looking forward to seeing Timothee Chamalet turn into a worm in DUNE 3.

The only technology that died more times than VR is AI, and that seems to have worked out

Solution in search of a problem

VR is now being more accepted as the technology has advanced enough and there are more importantly actual applications for it these days.

All I see for AI is simple pattern matching built on the backs of the labour of poor people. I did do an AI subject at university in the 1990s and it was very strongly theory based.

When the venture capital money dries up there will be a big culling.

Man suspected of Molotov attack on Sam Altman's home charged with attempted murder

Just following AIs advice to make a spicy marg

Or the film Terminator 2 that says to get rid of the CEO and blow up the company.

Windows Update is a torture chamber for seldom-used PCs

Did the genie put a cork up your ****?

No s***!

The people I use laptops they don't update also don't bother connecting to the internet to do anything.

If you just have a virtual machine you can run most things.

There is that multi-gigabyte 1990s PC game collection you can download that runs all the programs on their own virtual machine so it runs much better.

Firefox 149 adds a free VPN and finally plays nice with Linux dialogs

VPN needs Mozilla account

You have to log in and also only have 50Gb per month on the VPN.

One of the main selling points for VPNs about being to use streaming services from other countries doesn't actually work as they block you if they detect it is on!

Also some websites will not let you access the site outside of the country it is for which is a pain with Apple's Private Relay on various Apple devices.

Say goodbye to budget PCs and smartphones – memory is too expensive now

I've got some ideas

Involving trepanning tools like the ancient Egyptians used to use and various AI CEO orifices but that would get me on a watch list.

IBM says AI is insane in the mainframe as z17 sales surge

Not if the companies are still using the old systems and pretending they are not

Working for large government organisations they had databases running on AS/400 so old you could only put M/F/X as the gender choice.

They could not update the systems at all due to the age of the database. All the fancy web stuff just gets bolted on top of it.

They do however have a fancy monitoring system to stop you looking where you should not. Instant lockout and dissmisal.

Recline of the machines: Terminator felled by dodgy battery

There is a way to keep the "suicide" boards running

It does require losing another board while you connect another battery to it.

Talked to someone who ran a retro arcade, he said he had found a way to keep boards alive that required a battery of they would stop working.

Unfortunately this place is no longer running as they decided to close down and sold off all the machines!

HSBC app takes a dim view of sideloaded Bitwarden installations

I locked myself out of Bitwarden

It won't let me recover my own password as it doesn't trust me.

Goodbye Bitwarden!

Also some stupid "you are using the same password" warning on Windows 11 for a system to authorise system use that requires the same password!

Devs gripe about having AI shoved down their throats

If there is something it is actually useful for!

I will use it if it provides value.

At the moment there is nothing of the sort. Even people talking to the robot voice on the phone IVR get upset at it.

The Centrelink AI IVR seems to be there to get you to hang up as soon as possible, it is a choose your own adventure where every choice leads to the call ending!

Not to mention companies that have "auto rostering" that picks people at random to end their rosters. Why don't you marry the rostering computer? Someone still made the choice to manage staffing like that!

Outdated Samsung handset linked to fatal emergency call failure in Australia

Re: What?

Legally mandated by the government if the device cannot contact emergency services it is to be blocked due to the 3G signal being turned off. Overseas handsets are blocked also.

A lot of older Samsung devices

Amaysim contacted me about this also, is a lot of older Samsung devices.

Links:

https://www.optus.com.au/support/answer/emergency-services-samsung-devices

https://www.samsung.com/au/support/mobile-devices/issue-with-some-older-galaxy-devices-calling-triple-zero/

I updated to Android 13 and they said it was fine. Have a Samsung S20+ 5G

Telstra has its' own network and other providers use the Optus network. Supposedly meant to switch over to Telstra in emergencies but has not been doing that.

3G switch off affected a lot of embedded devices with 3G capability.

Mozilla is recruiting beta testers for a free, baked-in Firefox VPN

VPNs being advertised on a falsehood

For some reason VPNs advertise that you can use them on streaming services but whenever I try they are blocked! I don't know how they are allowed to advertise a feature that does not actually work!

If you can't use AI then it's bye bye, Accenture tells staff

Customers hate the robot's guts

When you listen back to calls you can hear people just getting more and more angry at the IVR.

As soon as an actual person comes on call they usually calm down. People can actually solve things and not just follow a script. I know Centrelink Australia uses its AI to hang up the call as soon as possible. Every single option tries to get you to end the call.

After deleting a web server, I started checking what I typed before hitting 'Enter'

I learned this working on my own site

Take a snapshot backup and then make changes. You can always rollback if it breaks things.

Also my webhost being 11hrs behind in the UK means I have often solved this issue myself by the time they get back to me!

My own website may not look too flash but after 22 years I am used to it and it is a backup as I have seen platforms rise and fall.

Commodore Amiga turns 40, headlines UK exhibition

Still being used in TV until recently

I believe RMIT and channel 31 in Melbourne still used Amiga software for video stuff until quite recently.

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

Yeah sure, are you going to rewrite all the APIs?

LOL NO.

Twitter spinout Bluesky ends invite-only phase and opens its doors to all comers

No alrogithm

A bit too easy for one person to take over your entire feed. Social media landscape now feels fractured. It is only the journalists who complain about Twitter/X going away as it means they have to do actual work and not just embed a tweet or take a screenshot.

X hiring 100 content cops in bid to tame Wild West of online safety

The FIND OUT phase commences

The legal resources of the record company and Taylor Swift plus the Swifties finally made this clown take notice.

ZX Spectrum Next Issue 2 ships out, chip shortages be damned

Still have the CRASH and ZZAP annuals to read

There are still new games being made for the Spectrum and C64. I generally only get the annuals as I am not in the UK but the magazines release bi-monthly.

Website maker Wix embarks on weird WordPress-trashing campaign, sends 'influencer' users headphones from 'WP'

WordPress can trash its own reputation thank you very much

It is 100% possible to be totally up to date with Wordpress and still get your site hacked. I did not believe my site was redirecting until I saw Google logs saying it was bringing up posts for "gay amputee porn" I didn't remember writing those articles. Had to install Wordfence.

Australian ponders requiring multiple IDs to sign up for social media, plus more crypto-busting backdoors

Yeah nah

I threw myGovID in the bin as the app wanted me to use my FACE to move the cursor around on screen, FAIL.

A government MP has been pinged for setting up 30+ face Facebook community pages to harass people so this is merely a distraction from people spoofing on desks in parliament house and such.