Posts by Fihart

@Ken 16 Marketurds

I live in an area of London with blocks of flats popular with students from Korea, China, Japan. Cost of shipping possessions home at end of stay means a lot of stuff gets dumped. This has included flatscreen tellies, laptops, laser printers, digital cameras etc. Likely some need repairs, but often the kind you can carry out on a kitchen table with basic tools.

Probably best finds have been a 42 inch Panasonic HD TV (can fail to start in very hot weather) and a Lenovo Thinkpad T410s with SSD and touchscreen (lid was hanging off, screen separated from lid, previous owner evidently heavy smoker).

Look out for wheely bins in privately rented blocks of flats and behind offices. Bear in mind that, once in bins, stuff actually belongs to the Council refuse dept. My defense is that I'm making a small contribution to reducing landfill.

Avoid any company with "British" in the name.

According to a German friend resident in London. I mean he was right. Starting with the BBC. BMC, makers of boring badge-engineered Morris/Austin/Riley/Wolsely/MG cars, British Leyland that folded BMC into Standard/Triumph/Jaguar/Rover -- that didn't end well. British Airways, British Rail, British Steel, British fucking Telecom.

Re: Indeed on the pork ...

Got to be careful with a Rolex. Case is made from surgical steel and the bit where the strap attaches ends in a sharp edge. Apparently, Rolex-owning skydivers are advised to remove them or risk serious wrist injury on landing.

Re: This empty property thing @Teiwaz

Finally a comment about the real issue here -- so many empty properties. And so many people homeless -- or living in crappy, overcrowded, overpriced, rented properties.

Revealing the extent of underused or unused homes owned by offshore individuals and companies simply as investments deserves a medal, not prosecution.

Re: Will no one think of the printers? @Roland6

Samsung laptop recovered from the trash and extensively repaired (keyboard reassembled, screen resecured to lid, lid reattached to computer, hard drive replaced) *. Optical drive damaged so replaced, but BIOS refuses to list replacement drive in boot sequence -- BIOS will list the original damaged drive but not the off-brand replacement. Result -- otherwise now working laptop goes back in the trash. Highly irresponsible of Samsung -- and, as you say, they aren't alone.

*probably a misguided attempt by original owner to secure his data, but perhaps just a tantrum.

"....charmingly if tactlessly indicated with a green shamrock icon"

You sure that's not the Macro setting ?

Re: Linux Mint is free @LucreLout

For years I would have agreed with you that Linux was not consumer-ready -- usually hardware issues. Then a couple of years back I tried Peppermint Linux (Ubuntu based I believe) and found it simple to install and that it worked with most hardware, automatically.

Granted Linux lacks the polished apps we've become used to with Windows or Mac, but for basic tasks (email, letter writing, internet browsing, watching DVDs) it worked fine for a complete technophobe when I lent her the machine.

Re: Apple home furnishings range.

The solution would be for Apple to produce its own range of coasters to be compatible with its devices.

Re: "such outmoded tasks as buying CDs (No. 10)"

Sadly, CDs are rapidly vanishing. Used to buy them in charity shops and car boots for between 50p and £2 which is far better value than downloads. But now the choice is shrinking and, anyway, I don't understand current popular music. Now tend to buy orchestral-- the less challenging classics composers (the Russian Romantics, Spanish and French impressionist and English).

I think CD remains the best/most convenient medium compared to vinyl which is easily damaged and really needs an expensive player. Though I own several turntables, I've transcribed many of my favourite vinyl titles using a CD recorder (which gives better results than a PC, probably due to the quality of the DACs).

Re: Great!

Yes. I was puzzled when my phone displayed my postion on a map app even though GPS and Location were turned off. Cell towers will still show where you are. You could switch to Airplane mode -- but then you can't receive calls/texts.

Slightly more worrying is the way Amazon etc calculate your street address via your IP address. And get it wrong. Careful when ordering or your neighbours may get your stuff.

Re: getting photos off an iPhone

Getting photos off an IPhone isn't a problem. The issue is trying to get picture and other files onto the iPhone.

Re: "Would you rather have shit battery time?" @d3vy

"And nowadays if you bought something labelled as "genuine Samsung" or "genuine Apple" the chances of it being genuine are slim."

So true. Needed new batteries for a Lumix camera and a Samsung phone. Reading Amazon feedback, many/most "genuine" batteries were shown to be not only fake but faulty.

Instead I bought a Hama camera battery on the basis that this is an established German camera accessory brand. For the phone I bought from a supplier that had countless positive reviews (battery brand I'd never heard of before but which has been working well for 6 months so far).

It's a scandal that enormous firms like Matsushita (Lumix), Samsung and Apple refuse to police their brand names, to the detriment of their customers. Of course it would help if they charged a reasonable price for replacement batteries, sold from their own sites or official retailers.

Better still batteries should be standardised across brands (they already seem to be pretty similar in format) so that one could buy them like torch batteries, picking a trusted brand like Energiser, Duracell, etc via regular retailers. This would go a long way to reducing the number of devices which are dumped when the battery fails.

Let's not even mention phones with fixed batteries.

Re: Three of course, who abolished *all* roaming charges ...

Friend took up the Three offer for a trip to the USA. Discovered that it only applied to calls home. Perhaps understandably, did not cover calls to numbers within USA. Three offered refund of sorts. Generally, Three seem less user-hostile than EE and (apparently) Voda.

"Should have changed the name to buzzphone slab showhouse years ago".

Personally, I always referred to them as Carphone Whorehouse, though -- to be fair -- their staff seemed more knowledgeable and helpful than most of the others.

Of course, on returning to the store found it had closed and was now another coffee shop/estate agent or whatever

Re: Recycle platters from modern hard disks

Once converted a defunct hard drive to a desk fan by cutting the platter and bending it into fan blade shape. Doubtless lethal.

Re: Brownouts

Reminds me of user manual included with a graphics card. Perhaps translated from Chinese by the only person in the company who spoke any English, but who evidently to had little idea about the product.

There were various vaguely comprehensible suggestions on remedies if no image appeared on the attached monitor. The last was advice to check that the monitor's screen was not so dirty that you couldn't see anything !

Re: WiFi too

Presumably the answer to that is to keep wifi switched off until you need it.

Re: Que?

As I recall DOS progs like Wordstar and WordPerfect contained printer drivers. As the Epson FX80 had been rebadged by IBM and sold as part of early PC systems, it was the default -- many other printers of that period emulated the Epson so most worked without needing drivers.

The problem with finding printer drivers may have begun when Windows took over much of the heavy lifting for laser printers, allowing them to become dumber and, thus, cheaper. Fortunately, printer manufacturers have a relatively honourable record of supporting legacy products. I say relatively because the rest of the IT industry can be shockingly irresponsible.

Dot matrix printers could be programmed via text files to do entertaining things like wind the (sprocket fed) paper up, print a line at the bottom, change text size, wind the paper down, print another line at the top of the page and so on.

Re: Unacceptable @ stu4

To take the example of Windows, MS got into the habit of launching new versions mostly because shareholders came to expect the windfall that followed. Windows 7 was replaced to facilitate a world (phone, tablet, PC) domination strategy. So, Win 8 and 10 had less than ever to do with users' wishes.

Fortunately, the world domination strategy was doomed -- but can we expect a slimmer, more user oriented replacement for 10 ? Can we hell !