Humph. The best I've managed is York to Kings Cross and back (1st class seats are nice though)
Posts by Mark #255
482 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
Support contract required techie to lounge around in a $5,000/night hotel room
Microsoft gets new Windows boss as Start Menu man Parakhin 'to explore new roles'
I'm looking at the Win10 start menu. It has an alphabetic list of programs (some in folders), it has a configurable space where you can group stuff to your heart's content, and if you start typing it searches for you.
The annoying thing about search is that it's hard to confine the search space to the PC (and they keep changing the sodding registry key), but, having just used a Windows 7 PC the other week, the Windows 10 start menu is much improved.
Firefox 124 brings more slick moves for Mac and Android
Microsoft sends OneDrive URL upload feature to the cloud graveyard
Re: Resilio Sync
Resilio sync has an Android client (for a couple of years)
How do you lot feel about Pay or say OK to ads model, asks ICO
University chops students' Microsoft 365 storage to 20GB
Re: OneDriving Me Up The Wall
I promise I'm not trying to start a "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch...
I worked for a university a few years ago, and erroneously got put on a "this person has left, begin $LIST_OF_IT_ACTIONS" list at one point.
Fortunately(!), the first of these actions was to tell me I had 48 hours to save any emails I wanted to since that was how long I had before BIG RED BUTTON time.
Afterwards, they said that part of it was ensuring that foo@[uni].ac.uk addresses weren't abused by folk pretending to be still academic-adjacent.
UK public sector could save £20B by swerving mega-projects and more, claims chief auditor
Re: "complicated"
I remember giving up trying to claim the Pandemic/WfH allowance for office equipment after the 4th or 5th not-quite-in-agreement gov.uk web page telling me how simple it was.
And further back, we gave up trying to get tax relief on childcare because step one was, effectively, "specify how much you'll spend on childcare in the next year - no conferring!"
WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager
CEO arranged his own cybersecurity, with predictable results
Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights
British railway system is getting another excuse for delays – solar storms
Re: using varying signals
As you note, sending a varying signal down the track (instead of a static level) allows you to distinguish between <<no train>> and <<train but also interference>>.
Railway signal engineers also had this thought, which is why there are several different types of track circuit which use different frequencies and modulation schemes, none of which suffer from this particular (and known) failure mode that does affect DC track circuits.
'Return to Office' declared dead
Electric vehicles earn shocking report card for reliability
Meta sued by privacy group over pay up or click OK model
"I should not be tracked" =/= "This website should be free"
The heart of the complaint is that Meta is tracking people, and offers to not do it for a fee; not that charging for a service provided is wrong.
Meta are absolutely within their rights to offer an ad-free experience with a subscription; but that should not be tied to the tracking of their users
EU lawmakers scolded for concealing identities of privacy-busting content-scanning 'experts'
Re: Aston Kutcher's startup Thorn has its finger prints all over this push for client side scanning
This seems like it's your ISP's "all the naughty bits of the internet" content filtering, which would redirect an http:// URL to a block-page, but croaks on an https:// one.
Certainly, BT's acts in this way (it's not like https URLs have been ubiquitous for several years, or anything like that)
CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it
Boris Johnson's mad hydrogen for homes bubble bursts
City council Oracle megaproject got a code red – and they went live anyway
Re: On the RAG
Having reached an age wherein I have run out of fucks to give about how I'm perceived, I now loudly decry red/green combos as an accessibility failure (because I'm colour-blind), with the back-up argument of "what if it's printed in black and white?".
Red/amber/[yellow]/white are the colours to use, with solid/dashed/[dotted]/no borders
Beta driver turned heads in the hospital
What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?
In the UK, the Ordnance Survey's OS Locate app tells you your location, in the National Grid system (you can set it to 6, 8, or 10 digit precision).
Doesn't need a data connection.
Where is the I'd-rather-not-bet-my-life-on-a-foreign-corporation's-proprietary-algorithm-in-an-emergency icon, anyway?
IT needs more brains, so why is it being such a zombie about getting them?
Re: Exams as a system
Interestingly (in England), if a student habitually "writes" everything using a laptop in their lessons, they don't even need an official diagnosis of dyslexia to be able to use the same system of working in their exams (GCSE and A-level).
If the school can demonstrate that extra time is needed in exams (generally by doing a mock exam, and getting the student to switch (pen/font) colour at the end of the standard allotted time), then 25% extra time is available.
The school's SENCO should be able to help, if anyone's in this situation.
I'll see your data loss and raise you a security policy violation
Re: No local storage allowed ?
I recall my university had rooms of PCs (this would be '95 or '96) which had no local hard drive, everything was done over the network.
Given that we were stringing our own PCs together via ribbon cable between parallel ports for Duke Nukem, this was serious voodoo.
Google launches $99 a night Hotel Mountain View for hybrid workers
You're too dumb to use click-to-cancel, Big Biz says with straight face
Re: How hard can it be?
...and when you click that "End Subscription" button, you get a page saying how sorry they will be too lose you, pointing out all the aspects of the service you'll lose, asking you if you're sure, and at the bottom of the page (off-screen except on the tallest of monitors), a "yes, cancel".
There's then a further page where the highlighted button is "no, lols, I was joking, keep me subscribed", and the pale, barely visible button is the "godsdamnit, just cancel my fscking subscription already".
Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris
NumLock on a tiny laptop keyboard
I've been caught out by per-user NumLock settings before now, when using a laptop that's normally docked with a proper keyboard.
Unplug it, and when you first log in (on the laptop's own keyboard), the login screen uses the machine default setting (without the NumLock on).
Then, after a morning clicking buttons, go for lunch, come back and get "incorrect password" as you try to log in.
I finally worked out that the lock screen applies the user setting. I always have the NumLock on. But that switches to use the "alternative" (they were blue) values overlaid on the not-enough-keys laptop keyboard - so the right hand of the keyboard was mostly numbers.
Re: Paris...
Friends were, "Oh Paris, how glamorous!"
Been there, done that.
Three days training in a hotel in Cap d'Ail (literally, cross the road and you were in Monaco), out of season.
Spent a day either side sitting in airports for the only connection of the day.
At least the weather was clement, but that was the only positive.
Microsoft's Activision fight with FTC turned up a Blizzard of docs: Here's your summary
File Explorer gets facelift in latest Windows 11 build
When it comes to Linux distros, one person's molehill is another's mountain
Google: If your Android app can create accounts, it better be easy to delete them, too
Still Amazon Prime to tame...
Amazon still use all the dark patterns in the book to minimise cancellations...
There really should be a "it shall take as many 'are you sure' pages/dialogue boxes/etc to sign up to a service as it does to cancel" law. Can you imagine?
Are you sure you want to sign up? [Sign up]
Think of all the things you could be missing out on by signing up to this service... Click here to continue...
[The actual button to sign up is not on-screen when the page loads, you'll need to scroll down to actually sign up. If you don't click the button, we won't sign you up.]
Had enough of Android? First 'Focal' based Ubuntu Touch is out
Re: Citation
I really thought you were going to go with this one instead
Microsoft and GM deal means your next car might talk, lie, gaslight and manipulate you
For the past month or so, my car has displayed a "Service Vehicle Soon" pop-up on the info screen.
Fine, it was going in for a service.
Today, I find that the message actually means something has gone wrong with the car and you should take it to a garage.
To add insult to injury, the garage weren't, by default, going to actually investigate the issue.
Sodding Vauxhalls and sodding Vauxhall dealers.
The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 as a Linux laptop
updating...
And the main complaint about Windows is the need to update out of the box?
No, the complaint about Windows is that updating takes so damned long. The last laptop I got with Windows on took about a day to be usable.
In comparison, I updated my desktop from 18.04 to 22.04 (via 20.04) in about 2 hours (and that's mainly because I have quite leisurely broadband).
Ford seeks patent for cars that ditch you if payments missed
By order of Canonical: Official Ubuntu flavors must stop including Flatpak by default
Re: future of apt on Ubuntu?
> * How do you know what it depends upon?Mozilla wrote and compiled Firefox, if they don't know what it depends on how did they compile it? Everything it depends on (libraries etc.) should be in the tarball, with all dependencies relative to the executable ( ../lib for example),
...and then, when a security vulnerability is discovered in a library that a dozen apps installed by tarball use, I get to update them all?
Seriously?
You've just re-invented downloading Windows apps off the Intarwebs.
Package managers are one of the things I love about Linux - I don't have to faff about with ensuring everything's up to date.
There's no place like... KDE: Plasma 5.27 is out and GNOME 44 hits beta
Unplug that Anker battery pack now: House blaze sparks recall
Re: Argh!
On the other hand...
Anker have issued a recall, with enough information so that I can check whether the Anker power bank I got was affected.
If it had been a KAVNEOALDJGT "brand" on Amazon (or VEIJOAWEB, or OAWIEHBKG), would the mfr have cared, would the authorities managed to join the dots?
(Icon just because...)
You can run Windows 11 on just 200MB of RAM – but should you?
Re: 16GB of RAM is the minimum
I guess it depends what else is installed.
I got an upgrade last year, from a dual core 7th gen i5 with 8GB of ram, which had become unusable due to the amount of enterprise crud that the IT department had larded onto it.
Once it had been released to me, a fresh install of Windows 10 without 14 different enterprise-grade pRoTeCt_ThE_CoMpUtEr applications running meant that it's still surprisingly usable.
Laser-wielding boffins bend lightning to their will
Re: What about the other way?
It's not massively clear from the video, but the laser beam guides the strike towards the tower (since a big metal structure has a much lower impedance than a thin ionised pathway through the air).
This protects the laser and the focusing telescope (they called it a telescope, so I will too) as the current gets diverted away from the ionised path running down to the big ol' death ray machine.
In lightning strikes, there's typically a "small" strike from cloud to earth followed milliseconds later by a "big" return stroke. All the things affected by lightning don't really care which way the electrons are running, just that there's so many of them.
You can hook your MIDI keyboard up to a website with Firefox 108
Lash#Cat9: A radical new Linux UI for keyboard warriors
Display subsystem use-cases
Wayland [...] seems to focus on high refresh rates and banishing display artifacts such as tearing
Just about the only thing keeping me on Windows on my own PCs is gaming*, so this type of work is important if Linux is to be a no-brainer platform to support for devs.
*and if I want to play Fortnite with my son & nephews, then Windows is required
To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess
Senior engineer reported to management for failing to fix a stapler
Re: Not just in IT
#1: A courtesy car that was an automatic(!) Micra - I couldn't get it out of Park, so had to walk back into the garage/dealership and ask how to make it go.
#2: An oversized (for the UK anyway) 4x4 hire car, that needed refueling, but could I find the fuel cover release? In the end I had to read the manual to find it was on the driver's door, but at shin height.
Mozilla drags Microsoft, Google, Apple for obliterating any form of browser choice
USB-C to hit 80Gbps under updated USB4 v. 2.0 spec
Re: 240 volts?
You're amusingly/worryingly wrong.
At higher frequencies, current tends to concentrate at the surface of a conductor*. This leads to an effective higher conductor resistance and consequent lower current and power handling capabilities.
* This is why multi-strand conductors are better than solid ones for high frequency currents, because there's relatively more surface area. But if you want to transfer power, low frequency is better.