Posts by AaronCake

Flying car biz Alef claims 3K preorders, still hasn't done a proper demo

Poorly Made Plywood Mockup

The Alef "flying car" I saw at the North American International Auto Show (Detroit) in September was nothing more than a poorly made plywood mockup. It was a painted plywood body with a laser cut metal grid screwed to the top. Motors and rotors bolted to a plywood base plate (ie. nowhere for downdraft to flow). I'm fairly sure the rotors were lawnmower blades. I don't think the prototype even rolled because the wheels seemed to be bolted to hubs which attached directly to the body. Underneath, unpainted plywood was visible. This is all while the Alef ref was claiming to the crowd that this was a flying prototype and the crowd accepting it in awe.

I have a number of pictures on my website: https://www.aaroncake.net/misc/naias2023.asp

BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year

Out of my cold dead hands

Yep, they work great. My BB Classic does everything I need without being beholden to Google or Apple. Nothing as efficient as the BB Hub for messaging and no other mobile platform seems to understand how notifications should work. The same shortcut keys that worked on my 957 Internet Edition still work on BB10.

To me it is amazing the things that are broken in iOS and Android that RIM figured out 20 years ago.

iPhones hook up with Windows as Microsoft’s Phone Link dials up Apple's iOS

Like Always, BlackBerry Did It First And Better

Wow, they've just managed to implement a worse version of BlackBerry Blend. Since about 2014 BlackBerry Blend allowed access to the phone for PIM data, SMS, email, files, media. Though no call sharing but if paired via Bluetooth you had that. Blend still works. Use it daily.

Payments firm accused of aiding 'contact Microsoft about a virus' scammers must cough $650k

Multiple Layers

I keep a copy of Windows 3.11 for Workgroups in DOSBOX on my BlackBerry Classic for these calls. Sadly none of them have yet stayed on the line long enough after I switched them to speaker for this to be fun. I think being put on speaker for them is a clue they are about to be trolled.

BlackBerry offloads its 'legacy' patents – some of the stuff that made its phones hum

BlackBerry only 1999 - present

A sad day. Posted from my BlackBerry Classic which after Jan. 5th 2022 will never again show the RIM pips beside the signal strength meters. The shutdown is largely reported as the 4th however it didn't seem to start until the 5th. Then in the evening they started dropping off one by one until at about 8:30PM EST, my pips disappeared as my device dropped connection to the last remaining NOC up, all the way in Slough.

Dell won't ship energy-hungry PCs to California and five other US states due to power regulations

I'm replying to this from Canada and have never heard of any such thing.

Windows 11 still doesn't understand our complex lives – and it hurts

Re: Ha!

This exact thing happened to a client of mine! Somehow their domain became registered with Microsoft with an Office365 tenancy. It was a 2 week nightmare to fix it and Microsoft could not tell me how it happened. They kept forwarding me around support departments because "you don't have an Office365 subscription" and then "this is an Office365 support issue". I don't recall what the final solution was, but it happened after I told them "You have somehow hijacked my client's domain and claimed to host their services. This can't be legal, can it?"