* Posts by Richard Ball

232 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Feb 2008

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SpaceX: launch, check. Landing? Needs work

Richard Ball

Those presenters on their video feed were all so ready to move on after the 'failed' link, it's almost as if they'd practiced it that way.

Flying drug mule crashes in Manchester prison

Richard Ball

Don't need a bomb, just need to be programmed to home in on jet engine intakes.

Record-breaking cosmonaut comes back down to Earth

Richard Ball

Re: lack of gravity has wore on him well

Looks like Christopher Reeve did after many years sitting back in a chair.

Sysadmin ignores 25 THOUSAND patches, among other sins

Richard Ball

Re: Tech Coordinator

Your fourth word said it all.

Fancy a mile-high earjob? We've had five!

Richard Ball

Shame no Sennheiser and AT.

Review would have been much more valuable if you'd included their gear despite no advice from them or freebies.

I know getting ignored isn't good, but those guys are in a minority of makers that have pedigree(*) . I want to know how their stuff compared, even if you do have to spend some money to find out.

(*they have made studio-grade stuff for years. I know that doesn't mean that everything with their name on is 'proper pro')

Hillary Clinton kept top-secret SIGINT emails on her home email server

Richard Ball

Re: Rules of the road

The rules don't apply to her, she's a Manager.

And oops I read the PDF therefore my nexus must now be destroyed.

Sengled lightbulb speakers: The best worst stereo on Earth

Richard Ball

Re: The Internet of Things summarised

We get through quite a lot of nappies in our house at the moment, and I'm thinking that the regular dose of electrolyte to all these could be exploited by means of some electrodes and regarded as a source of free energy. So WiFi repeaters, Bluetooth speakers, hands-frees, weather telemetry, covert listening devices could all be built in and just waiting for an IOT brave new world. And it's really green because you can't see all the batteries you're chucking away.

(NB I know reactive and expensive metals will be involved. We'll gloss over that detail.)

Google bows to inevitable, stops forcing Google+ logins on YouTubers

Richard Ball

ftfy....

Hey, Google! What does "Schadenfreude" mean..

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Southern biscuits and gravy

Richard Ball

Looks like apple crumble that has been left out in the rain.

Crazy Chrysler security hole: USB stick fix incoming for 1.4 million cars

Richard Ball

Re: Muppets

Get car;

Cut off all antennas and short the connections;

Start engine;

Drive.

Fixed.

Time for a brutal TELLY-OFF: Android TV versus Firefox OS

Richard Ball

Re: Cast your minds back

Agree that TVs should be dumb - though I disagree as to just what constitutes dumb. I'd keep the castability itself in a separate £20 box that can be thrown away when it is no longer supported or desirable. If the Firefox box were able to command the TV's sound or input selector too then that's about as smart as I need.

Asimov's ghost! Oil and gas rigs could be taken over by robots

Richard Ball

Hmm. Proving that your autonomous, "intelligent' robot software makes for an intrinsically safe system sounds like a lot of expensive fun. Time to get into the approvals business I think.

Putting your schlong into the reel-to-reel tape machine is a bad idea

Richard Ball

Re: Either you photoshopped your current profile photo

And did you then colour in the eyes with a blue felt-tip, or are they truly as azure pools of -er- blue stuff?

SpaceX signs off on another successful mission with Pacific splashdown

Richard Ball

worms

Soylent pink.

Easy ... easy ... Aw CRAP! SpaceX rocket ALMOST lands on ocean hoverbase

Richard Ball

Re: Caffeine

OK then.

Richard Ball

..

The motion of the platform will be modelled in the flight controller and used to inform the flight plan for a big chunk of its final descent. There will be aerospace-grade inertial sensors on it and systems akin to those used for autolanding a military aircraft on a carrier. So the problem isn't so much the motion of the platform per se, rather it is the irregularity of the motion and consequent uncertainty in projections of its position over time. (Periodic motion OK, jerky not so good)

Richard Ball

Well done with the good launch and improved target practice - here's hoping for a good landing next time. Though I rarely laugh as loud as when I first saw the jaunty angle of contact last time round.

I really hope their piss filtering system takes out caffeine. If it doesn't they're all going to be permanently wired until they either retire the iss or purge the water for fresh.

(Don't know how much of the caffeine in a coffee gets absorbed by the drinker, but it isn't all of it)

Daddy Dyson keeps it in the family and hoovers up son’s energy biz

Richard Ball

Happily, that's how we came by ours. Its only redeeming fearure was that it wasnt quite do damn expensive.

Richard Ball

The emperor's new hoover

He does well for a person who has un-invented so many perfectly good things.

We have a vacuum cleaner that doesn't pick up visible dirt, whose flexible pipe contracts in a most annoying way, that makes a bloody racket, jams up with hair and that is now held together with gaffer tape.

Just give me back my Hoover please.

Salesmen have taken over the world.

Satnav launches are like buses: none for ages then three arrive at once

Richard Ball

Re: Galileo ... at condescension of the USA

Hey if the Chinese or Russians decide one day they don't appreciate these systems they'll knock them all down. Difficult to do without sabotaging your own space kit though. The USA, like everybody else, would have to think hard about that point before they start pressing buttons.

Telly behemoths: Does size matter?

Richard Ball

Sony

Interesting about the Sony modular thing. Two problems with it -

No product or product line exists for long enough that you would ever get to reconfigure or upgrade it to be different from how it was when you bought it.

Sony disappeared down the bog long ago. Today's eevblog video # 719 briefly tells the sad story. (Sorry no direct link - I'm working on a device that is making it impossible)

Reg hacks (and rest of 'Frisco) in LinkedIn measles contagion scare

Richard Ball

And I had a cold last week. It made me all snivelly, it was awful.

Is this piece news, or interesting somehow?

An item on LinkedIn constantly, desperately trying to trick us into giving them our email account details would have been briefly interesting. Or something about their latest attempt to get us to log in for some small, false reason.

Anonymous loose cannon admits DDoSing social services and housing websites

Richard Ball

Re: Emote-words Bingo

I think he's pretty much been using it as a way of publishing his life-story.

NASA: Check out this TWIRLY SPACE DWARF – and NEVER moan about our budget

Richard Ball

Re: mongo

Candygram

Plane crash blamed on in-flight SELFIES

Richard Ball

Re: So wait

What they're rightly concluding is that he was a crap pilot, and that that's presumably why he crashed.

YOU. Your women are mine. Give them to me. I want to sell them

Richard Ball

Re: Solution

Or F flat

Is it humanly possible to watch Gigli and Battlefield Earth back-to-back?

Richard Ball

Re: The English Patient

The trouble with The English Patient was the hype. I was taken by girlfriend and I had never heard of it so had no expectations and I quite enjoyed it. In a bored and confused sort of way.

Richard Ball

Spawn. Only film I've ever walked out of.

Scream 2. Where I learnt what it is to knowingly not care who did it or what's supposed to be happening.

Adobe finds, patches ANOTHER exploited Flash 0day

Richard Ball

NASA probe snaps increasingly detailed shots of MOIST DWARF goddess

Richard Ball

only question is...

Will it be Google, Amazon or < insert other evil... > that eventually hollows it out and uses it as their evil headquarters?

'If you see a stylus, they BLEW it' – Steve Jobs. REMEMBER, Apple?

Richard Ball

"to keep the cost down, the stylus will be an extra."

Yes, this way it is cheaper and people give you less money.

OTHER EARTHS may be orbiting our Sun beyond Neptune

Richard Ball

Re: Sky surveys

It's cold outside...

I'll build a Hyperloop railgun tube-way in Texas, Elon Musk vows

Richard Ball

Re: Let's be fair here

If a welded steel railway track can survive being bolted straight to the ground, so can a pipe. Sounds a lot like a conventional pipeline construction most of the way.

Young CHAP CUFFED in Blighty over Xmas Sony and XBOX hacks

Richard Ball

or...

Hand him to the Americans. That'll be a laugh a minute for him.

Soap on a rope?

This $10 phone charger will wirelessly keylog your boss

Richard Ball

Whoosh

Click

"Moo?"

Thud

World's largest ship swallows 900 MEGATINS of baked beans

Richard Ball

Re: the equivalent of 14,500 London buses"

They're bendy and one half is full and the other half is empty.

Richard Ball

Re: Article is incomplete

And the larger one might carry a gigatin of beans.

NASA closing on fix for Opportunity rover's 'amnesia'

Richard Ball

Note the guy didn't use the terms brick or bsod.

Obviously chooses his words carefully.

Healthcare: Look anywhere you like for answers, just not the US

Richard Ball

Re: Competition and choice

@Nail Barnes

Ouch.

Glad you were put back together and it worked out OK.

Richard Ball

Re: Competition and choice

Every time I hear of Choice in the NHS I just hear Blair in Monkey Dust talking about "Education, Education, Education".

It is tribal short-term politics and nothing more.

Kodak fires a Bullitt at oldsters with 3G mobe launch

Richard Ball

When Ilford come out with a smartphone I'll get one.

Mine's the one containing a couple of feet of FP4 and a good slosh of ID11.

Islamic script kiddies aim killer blow - at Bristol bus timetable website

Richard Ball

Badgers

They must have (quite reasonably) taken the view that the departure of Badgerline bus services signalled a descent for the west country into a hellish, corrupt and godless state that can only be put right with a bit of scribbling.

NORKS? Pffft. Infosec bods BLAME disgruntled insiders for savage Sony hack

Richard Ball

Re: Hell hath no fury......

Well really I was alluding to the fact that the annoyed person named is not a chap.

Richard Ball

Hell hath no fury...

No, I won't SNORKEL in your server room at STUPID-O'CLOCK

Richard Ball

Re: Big bang

It's like smarties - the only one that tastes any different is the orange.

Norks blame U.S. for TITSUP internet, unleash racist rant against Obama

Richard Ball

Re: Now we KNOW where the Sony hackers got "G.O.P" from

Such shameful accusation belches daily from the corrupt western tongue of the whining liberal.

Reg man confesses: I took my wife out to choose a laptop for Xmas. NOOOO

Richard Ball

She wouldn't have learnt the right lesson.

He would have proven his point, but only to himself.

"Yay happy xmas me, I was right."

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