Posts by that one in the corner

Govt suggests Brits should hand passports to social media companies

Re: Another suggestion.......

"Roll your own crypto" refers to inventing your own crypto algorithm, which Bruce Schneier makes very clear in his books, of course.

Reading the book, selecting an appropriate algorithm, finding a trusted implementation (ok, there are issues there), compiling it (at least the exe won't be *trivially* backdoored 'cos you read the code a bit?) and adding it to a comms program for you and for your friends to share isn't "rolling your own crypto".

Although doing all that is a bit OTT (but if you don't trust ssh etc, then go ahead).

UK internet pioneer Cliff Stanford has died

RIP Cliff

Thanks for starting off the Internet Adventure for us.

Along with a work colleague, I jumped straight onto the tenner-a-month group pretty much the day it appeared on CIX. Evenings hacking away to tweak KA9Q, especially when Tony decided to give it a text-based windowing UI, for PC-DOS: we posted that to the CIX group. (I can't recall if my Amiga port was ever posted; it was a bit embarasssing, a text-based app on the Amiga, especially as it already had support for PPP, if only it'd work for me!). Having a 'Net connection allowed us to learn and apply otherwise theoretical network programming skills.

I hung onto a Demon account until the bitter end when email accounts were shut down (email address nostalgia over common sense, to be honest).

One decade, 46 million units: Happy birthday, Raspberry Pi

Re: How many?

3 of them in a cupboard, doing nothing?

Hand 'em over, I can put them to use.

Apple seeks patent for 'innovation' resembling the ZX Spectrum, C64 and rPi 400

Slap on some wooden side panels

that will be novel and patentable.

Ooh, look, a SOL-20. Gotta live a compact S100 bus.

Internet connection now required for Windows 11 Pro Insider setup

Re: It's for your own good and you should want it to be too..

You are committing frequently into your development branch, aren't you?

(and that commit isn't just going into a locally held repository, is it?)

Alarm raised after Microsoft wins data-encoding patent

Re: Just copying TV

I remember reading TV21 comic and being continually amazed at the idea of the spy (I forget the character's name) who opened his briefcase and switched on the screen in the lid. "How can you make a telly like that, it must be less than an inch thick and 18 inches across! Nah, impossible."

Intel's plan to license x86 cores for chips with Arm, RISC-V and more inside

Re: Been there, done that

> Worst case you can emulate the instructions

Which is precisely what the Intel parts have done for a long time now anyway, so guess what a lot of their IP describes; looks like you'd get involved with them after all.

Car radios crashed by station broadcasting images with no file extension

Re: Mazda's fault

Or just look at the first few bytes for the magic numbers, that is all that was needed here; no need for an extra metadata field to be included in the transmission.

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

Re: A good thing

When we moved house I had a happy week dropping cables from the loft into various wall cavities behind the plasterboard (most of the time spent probing to find whether there even was a cavity, bleeping cheap building practices mutter mutter). Felt very proud that I'd put coloured bands of tape evey few metres as each stretch was unrolled from the reel of dull grey. Even remembered to put bits of paper with the colour code into the little window on the wall panel above each socket. All very neat and tidy (well, except for the squid tentacles reaching into the back of the Ikea cupboard containing the patch panels).

Now, two spectacle prescriptions later, really wish that I'd written the codes onto HUGE labels and sod the teeny, tiny little window on the wall panels. Especially as, over the years, furniture and shelves slowly grew in front of the sockets in every room, leaving them in permanent shadow!

New York Times outlays seven-figure sum for 1,900 lines of JavaScript – yes, we mean Wordle

Re: hangman

We called it "Cows and Bulls" using four digit numbers in the margins of our exercise books.

No, I've not read the screen. Your software must be rubbish

Re: Simples...

Wish I could find a programmatic workflow that could reliably find the best (whatever that means in context) section of an image to crop and resize in order to make a decent thumbnail.

Crack team of boffins hash out how e-scooters should sound – but they need your help*

Val Doonican's

version of the Marvelous Toy, select excerpts thereof:

I.e.

"Zip" when it moves, and "Bop" when it stops, and "Whirrr" when it stands still.

Re: Soooo close

'Ere, I want a word with you!

Joe Danger rides to the rescue as ageing title tugs at the heartstrings

Backwards compatibility

is not a thing in the iOS world?

Not having an iOS device I have no idea how much it changes between releases (and my Android device hasn't updated for years, so don't know much about that either) but I had the impression that Apple frowned upon apps not following the published rules or they wouldn't get into the store. So I'm assuming that this game wasn't poking bits of memory it oughtn't, which would have been *the* reason to not be surprised it didn't just continue working.

Naively assuming that, just because a PC exe I've not bothered recompiling since 1999 still runs as well today as it did back then (doing its rather dull task), 'phone apps might have a decent longevity as well.

Whatever the case, Very Well Done Indeed to the bods at Hello Games.

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

Re: Was it only me ?

Can the little red demons share the popcorn?

You can have some of our weak lemon drink.

UK government opens consultation on medic-style register for Brit infosec pros

There are plenty of medical procedures you can perform without needing to be GMC registered - everything in the First Aider's course for starters - and including sticking people with needles.

What counts as First Aid level for security? Something easy that anyone can learn that will help patch up a simple hole, such as running a port scan? Somehow, that doesn't seem likely.

The comparison to the GMC is ridiculous. My wife, the doctor, was not impressed.

Re: The new system

> computer security is nowhere near as complicated as the human body

At least the human body isn't changing every few months and you can generally rely on finding the same parts at the same locations (maybe some bits missing) all made of the same materials as in the next patient. Version changes are quite predictable over time (puberty).

Windows box won't boot? SystemRescue 9 may help

Re: Mounting the EFI partition

> It won't fix it

Well, you can access the files there, so if you have a fix for one of them you can apply it.

> You can't copy it

File-by-file? It is just a mounted drive, file copy (from an admin command line) works, except for a couple that appear to be "busy" (/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/BCD and BCD.LOG). gzip'ing works.

Entire partition? dd has just created an image of the EFI partition for me and ImDisk happily mounted that.

> or rebuild it from scratch

I'm not going to verify this by doing it today, but when I was setting this PC up late last year dd'ing the image back to the partition seemed to work; hopefully it really did and there won't be any surprises coming my way.

> or resize it

is anyone really surprised about that? If you are doing anything that requires resizing the EFI then you are surely way beyond just settng up a simple Windows box (there is still space left after Windows and a couple of other OSes) and would expect to use something external to Windows to manipulate partitions (after all, Disk Management is bleep all help with the UFS or ext4 partitions a well).

Anyway, fiddling with the EFI partition from within the OS that you just booted from said partition always feels rather precarious (especially with Windows keeping those "BCD" files in use all the time!) so thanks for pointing us towards SystemResue 9, another arrow in the old quiver.

Mounting the EFI partition

Maybe I'm missing something (in which case some kind soul will correct me, I'm sure) but if you want to get at the EFI partition from Windows 10, at least, don't you just use mountvol?

mountvol Z: /S

(run as Administrator) seems to do the job. Not sure about fixing it, but you can certainly make a mess of things by just by blindly fiddling with the contents of the newly mounted Z drive...

Throw away your Ethernet cables* because MediaTek says Wi-Fi 7 will replace them

Re: The answer is more power

LiFi + more power + security features = sharks with frickin' lasers on their heads.

Wolfing down ebooks during lockdown? You might want to check out Calibre, the Swiss Army ebook tool

Hate how it wants to copy and RENAME all the files

I stopped using Calibre because it insisted on copying and renaming the ebooks, except when it decided not to because there was already a copy in another format and it decided that it would be better to let Calibre repeat the conversion from the first copy it came across rather than, say, ask or find out which copy had the best quality.

I have the ebooks already sorted into directories that group them by purchase - a lot of Humble Bundles, for example - and it makes it nice and easy then to check things like "are there any items I've not yet downloaded from Humble?" when even the really lazy way works (kick off the downloads but click "no" when told the file already exists and do I want to overwrite it).

Other files have names that were changed when downloaded, usually to keep the numeric file id from the original source (downloaded hardware manuals, research papers, LEGO build instructions etc) but tack on some more meaningful info as well (LEGO set number - not the same as the file id - set name, booklet number x of y; or subject matter, main authors, year published, which proceedings). All really useful info when the file is sitting on an SD card to go into one of the ereaders. Most of which is lost when you let Calibre get its hands on the file. Or some weirdness means every paper is renamed "1980 Proceedings on Ferret Wrangling" so they are all copies of the same thing and only one need be kept.

I can see Calibre working well if you are happy to let it take over your files or you are happy to just keep two copies of everything. Maybe I'll just buy enough file server drives that the duplication seems acceptable.

Or, best of all, you will all chime in and point out that Calibre has had a "leave my files alone" flag for years now.

Microsoft sends HoloLens 2 into a care home... Nope, not a headline gag about retiring the tech. They actually did this

Re: What changes

+ an assistant with a phone means more man-power per examination

+ if the patient is in a confused state of mind, it can be frightening to be examined; having someone wearing ugly glasses trying to get a look at the bit that hurts is far more natural and easier to understanding, and comply with, than trying to get a good view with a phone

Relatively unobtrusive head-mounted cameras and displays have been around, in small numbers, for decades and these sorts of applications have been tried before; no need to believe that Hololens is any more special than just being the one that is currently available. Except that maybe, finally, some of these use-cases may be practical, even if only for a small subset of the care sector.

The military have had their own designs for decades as well, they have no need to think about Hololens except in that it may be cheaper and available in greater numbers. The military ones I've, briefly, tried - decades ago - were definitely not unobtrusive!

If you want less CGI and more real effects in movies, you may get your wish: Inflatable film studio to orbit Earth

Space just looks so fake

What are the chances that they'll end up tugging the actors around on elastic because the focus group says that just leaving all the motion up to Sir Isaac "doesn't look believable to the theater-going public"?

Alexa and Webex to hitch a ride around the Moon on Artemis I – what could possibly go wrong?

Suggested listening

"Travelator (Part 2)" from "The Time Machine"

"Where are you taking me?" ... "Why keep me in the dark?" ... "Are we there yet?"

You wood not believe what a Japanese logging company and university want to use to build a small satellite

Re: At last

Cork has been, and still is, a material used in heatshields, including ablative layers.

Planning for power cuts? That's strictly for the birds

Re: (plus two Amazons)

They would be ruthless.

Edge computing set for growth – that is, when we can agree what it is

Re: Everybody's already said what I was thinking...

Space for a hip new job, roller-skating from office to office in the City carrying blank quarter inch cartridges to supply Just-In-Time Tape-as-a-Service?

Epoch-alypse now: BBC iPlayer flaunts 2038 cutoff date, gives infrastructure game away

> The RTC format is determined by the actual chip used, generally it will be some representation of time in a wall clock-style format, i.e. separate fields for year, month ... minutes, seconds.

True.

> Regardless it gets converted to some other representation after being read.

Oh, if only that were universally true. Having worked on an embedded system that is still in use, timestamping every 40ms using the RTC format plus an extra centisecs field. Then they continue using that format to do temporal arithmetic and comparisons against user-defined durations. Some very weird times were reported from that lot (not least data collected in 1720, 1820, 1920 ...).

Only dealing with shifting the epoch to push back the 2038 End Of Time would have been a pipedream.

Software guy smashes through the Somebody Else's Problem field to save the day

Re: It's a sad day for this IT rag...

The vinyl LPs were (probably still are, if I knew where I'd put them) Jolly Good Fun as well. Nicely demonstrated how Mr Adams was unable to restrain himself from never quite telling the story the same way twice.

Mine has the yellow duck in the pocket.

BeOS rebuild / Haiku has a new feature / that runs Windows apps

Re: RIP BeOS

You are not wrong about BeOS being harder to program for due to the multithreading.

The real shame is that back then, people saw that MT is tricky and avoided doing it, so BeOS fell, but now it seems every halfwit thinks they know how to MT under Windows and Linux and have no qualms about inflicting the results on us.

Cue flashback to my team leader asking for a sanity check after seeing the expensive contractors' code create a Mutex as a local variable, strangely always succeeding in locking it on the next line of code. Something that worked so well said contractors decided it was a Pattern and duly cut'n'pasted it... Well, it passed *their* tests, never deadlocking.

The inevitability of the Windows 11 UI: New Notepad enters the beta channel

Re: Bugs -> Dark Mode

It always got our IT guy wound up, for some reason, but I find the best taskbar is on the left (the rhs would also work, for those with the mouse in their right hand), wide enough to fit 20 or more characters and with autohide.

All the screen space available for serious work. When it is time to change your focus, one quick flick of wrist and you get a column of window titles large enough to actually read.

Not looking forward to a greyscale 2022? Then look back to the past in 64 colours

Junkuary?

Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault

Bilsdale transmitter, by any chance?

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

Re: Zig, Rust, Rust, Rust, Go, TypeScript, Haskell, Ć, Python, C#, Elixir, Swift, Java, and Pascal

But I don't like rust!

Re: public domain

> first mage format

What, is this some kind of demonic sorcery?

> use Imagemagic

Burn the witch!

The dark equation of harm versus good means blockchain’s had its day

Re: Lack of comprehension and imagination ...

In the deep past, when a species has gone extinct because of a catastrophic change to its environment, which caused related species (e.g. its predators and prey) to follow it soon after, we weren't affected. But only because we were not there for most of these events.

Now, when, say, the bees and other pollinators go extinct, we suffer - and dramatically so.

If you want to argue against my example (please do, I have no idea how vulnerable bees are to temperature) I hope you can demonstrate a total knowledge of all the species interactions to show which ones we can "afford" to lose without any problems to us.

Re: We know it has no future

Are you claiming that the Bitcoins transacted in El Salvador are only managed (? what word should I be using here?) by the mining done in El Salvador?

You are totally sure that they aren't using the electricity generated somewhere else, somewhere with a mass of mining rigs who don't give a monkey's where the transactions are sourced, just so long as they can race to the hash first?

In other words, if El Salvador is responsible for a large number of transactions that "need" to be recorded, El Salvador is responsible for encouraging miners everywhere else. So any green power El Salvador has is irrelevant to the greenity of their Bitcoin usage.

What will life in orbit look like after the ISS? NASA hands out new space station contracts

Except that keeping them in LEO whilst we learn what to and what not to do means that, when we do what we should not have done, we can bring the poor buggers back down and help them. Swapping them for more brave souls who now know not to do that thing.

But if we just send them direct to Mars without going through the LEO experience then they - and therefore the entire Mars mission - are well and truly shafted.

Hopefully the plan is to give the people the best chance we can of getting to Mars, surviving getting to Mars, doing some decent science there and maybe even making it all the way back again.

When you think of a unit of length, do you think of Antony Gormley's rusty anatomy?

Wide, not high

Using the Angel's height is daft - driving past it in the morning is definitely a side-to-side "it were *this* big" moment.

Leaked footage shows British F-35B falling off HMS Queen Elizabeth and pilot's death-defying ejection

Are we quite sure that a Kraftwerk album would need to be taped over before being fed into a Tornado?

Can Rust save the planet? Why, and why not

Re: The language is not that important

Leaving aside the "this is not weird (names some other language that isn't exactly in the top 10 best beloved)", just because someone considers a language feature weird, especially in comparison to a newer language and all that language's offspring, in no way calls for that style of response.

Multiple entry points is definitely weird, compared to the "formulas" that you are "translating", let alone structured programming. *But*, precisely because you do know what you are doing, you may well be able to come up with a prefectly valid technical reason for using them (such as saving code space in the Good Old Days of kilobytes of core). And you then noted down that weird usage in your accompanying lab notes, didn't you?

Being able to recognise something as "weird" is definitely a Good Thing: it indicates a breadth of experience *and* the understanding - including self-awareness - that this thing isn't commonly encountered. The true measure of the programmer is then their response (which, I really hope, doesn't include just ramming this weirdness into everything they do until it becomes the norm for them: self-awareness can go down as well as up).

Academics tell Brit MPs to check the software used when considering reproducibility in science and tech research

Re: What's the betting that...

*Start* playing with data, maybe.

When you have an idea that there is something to the found in the data, move onto something - more robust.

Super-rare wooden Apple 1 hand built by Jobs and Wozniak goes to auction

> dump the ROMs, digitise the data sheets

Bundle all of that lovely digital data into an NFT, then bung that into the next auction. Ka-ching.

Reg reader returns Samsung TV after finding giant ads splattered everywhere

Re: Can you opt out of the data collection on smart TVs?

I think that it is mean not to send the data on to Samsung in a timely fashion.

Instead of letting them pile up on your server, how about, every now and then (Friday at 12:00?) selecting some that look important (use you best judgement) and then email them to Samsung?

Base64, rot13 (after all, they probably think that "their" data needs to be encrypted) and with the urgent flag set, of course. I'm sure a few quick web searches will result in the proper recipient - head of marketing, CEO - bonus points if you can manage to find a "board members" or "all staff" address.