* Posts by BenDwire

659 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jun 2009

Page:

What's brown and sticky and broke this PC?

BenDwire Silver badge
Pint

Yet more racial stereotyping

The Register hopes that readers have a nice warm cup of whatever they fancy beside them

It's lunchtime in the UK, OK? Yes, we drink beer at room temperature, but there's no need to keep on about our lack of refrigeration.

/s

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

BenDwire Silver badge

Do they have people to count the beans they put into the Bean and Cheese melts then? Best thing on the menu IMHO

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

BenDwire Silver badge

I knew that I had seen a TV advert offering this, but I couldn't remember it clearly enough to register the details. (That just goes to show how effective advertising often is!)

For those unwilling to deal with overseas call centres, yet want this functionality, have a look at my ISP, the wonderful Andrews and Arnold . Not the cheapest, but in my experience the easiest people to deal with.

Exchange Online blocked from sending email to AOL and Yahoo

BenDwire Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Alternatively, perhaps just pick up the phone and have a chat

Museum? Don't you mean that box of "stuff that might come in useful" in the corner of my office?

(And no, I'm not joking)

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

BenDwire Silver badge
Boffin

V'Ger

I guess we don't need to worry unless it turns around and starts heading towards earth ...

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: And this is why

Microsoft are clearly still not listening to users

I'm not sure that I can recall the last time they actually did...

Like many others, I moved away from MS apps in the XP/Win7 days and moved over to Thunderbird, LibreOffice and other FOSS applications. When Win10 was foisted upon the world it was relatively trivial to move over to Linux and MacOS without having to relearn everything.

I have a feeling the demise of Outlook will add some major impetus for users change in ways that MS might not be happy with.

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

BenDwire Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Easy here

I'm also stuck with ADSL, yet I can see the telephone exchange from my window. There's no cabinet between us either, so no FTTC. It's a good job that I'm moving soon ...

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: Linux Mint

And that's why I always carry a bootable USB around with me on my keyring. It has allowed me to fix many a computer from forgotton passwords, viruses, and dodgy downloads. Fixing a full boot partition would be trivial, and wouldn't need much in the way of voodoo.

Supermium drags Google Chrome back in time to Windows XP, Vista, and 7

BenDwire Silver badge
Pint

The original Sentinal dongles I had were parallel port, but as you say that should be easy enough to pass through to a VM.

All this talk of dongles reminded me of my first 'Professional' PCB design package, that came with a parallel port dongle. This was in the PC XT days (4.7MHz 8086 ! *) but did what we needed it to do, and was still faster than laying out designs by hand using black tape on an A0 sheet.

Of course I wanted to work at home from time to time (the coffee was way better) but found the need to take the dongle home rather irritating. The obvious solution was to pull the dongle apart and reverse engineer it, and thankfully I had this new program that could help me do just that. Life being much simpler in the mid 1980's, the dongle was just a couple of TTL shift registers attached to the parallel port lines, so it was a trivial exercise, and I was happy. However, the sales rep who brought us regular updates on 51/4" floppies was less than impressed when he saw a familiar looking board on the screen - my draughtsman was using that file as a simple demo to test out the new features of the update ...

Ah, such simple days.

* I upgraded the PC hardware with an NEC V20 processor, which ran at 8MHz, almost doubling the performance! Yes kids, that's Mhz.

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

BenDwire Silver badge
Pint

Re: Depends on your definition of growler I guess.

How on earth did this recipe come to be 'developed'? I can't fathom the thought process of anyone thinking that a freshly run over cock would improve the taste of beer* !

* Leaving out the obvious cheep shot about (internationally available) American 'beers'

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

BenDwire Silver badge

Zaphod

Unfortunately it was a 386sx ultimately runnng WFW3.11, but it could manage basic tasks (Quattro Pro) and some others (Doom & Descent). It took me 25 years after that to get a dual headed computer, and one with 8 cores, but it's called Homer for some reason ... maybe bacause I no longer need to go to work.

BenDwire Silver badge
Meh

Ex-Boss here.

Anyone reading this forum would think that there were no good bosses around. I like to take pride in the fact that I treated my staff fairly, adhered to a policy of give-and-take and generally said thank-you for a job well done, along with a decent salary. Admittedly I had bosses along the way that made me determined to do better than them, so I understand why there are so many bitter and twisted people around.

While I accept that I may be an outlier in the management sphere (I don't have an MBA for a start, but I do have an Engineering degree) I like to think that my employees enjoyed working with me. Certainly they said as much to my face, and nobody ever left for reasons I could influence.

If your boss is an idiot, then tell them that they are being an idiot. If they won't take constructive criticism then get another job before you lose your mind / health / spouse. Life is too short.

It's friday - time for beer.

BenDwire Silver badge

OOh ! I had a Marvin, and a Zaphod too. Both horribly underpowered, but I have fond memories of them both.

I too went through a phase of naming machines after their user, but that gave rise to the problem of new staff having to use old staff's machines, making them feel less 'included' in the existing team. A lack of my time meant that the obvious wipe & reinstall* didn't get done for ages, unless I spent the weekend at work catching up - I was the MD of the place, and IT was an after-hours exercise as we couldn't afford a proper BOFH.

Changing the naming scheme to something less personalised saved me a lot of hassle.

*Inevitable the username was similarly personalised, and early versions of Windows (Workgroups) made that hard to expunge properly.

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ

Hopefully a problem shared is a problem solved for you. It's heartbreaking to watch people lose themselves due to illness or ageing, but it's very common.

I write from the other side of the coin - I'm in my seventh decade and I'm petrified of losing my remaining marbles such that I can't do what I like to do now.

One solution to both problems is a Power Of Aattorney (If you're in the UK, at least) where you can take over financial and medical issues for her. I know it's easier said than done, but having the argument now may help in the long run. There is also nothing stopping you ringing her doctor (or going in to speak to them) with your concerns.

Best of luck to you both.

Worried about the impending demise of Windows 10? Google wants you to give ChromeOS Flex a try

BenDwire Silver badge
Go

Re: But it's Google...

I haven't found a Linux distro that runs my audio correctly

What's so odd about your audio then? I use Debian, and it just seems to work. Webcam audio, external (Focusrite) USB ADC, and onboard Intel audio all happily coexist. Things really have improved on that front over the past few years.

Now if you're into music production, then there are specific distros for you, but a quick Duck Duck will give you plenty of options. And opinions.

I concurr that Lunux Mint is a good place to start, if only to see what issues might occur with your setup, but I'd go one step further than just run it from a (frustratingly slow) USB and buy a small cheap SSD. Download a few distros and have a play. With your current hard disk disconnected you won't be able to break anything* should you want to return to what you have now.

Good hunting

*OK you can, but it takes a bit of effort.

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: "hundreds of millions of Windows 10 devices are destined for landfills"

Puppy Linux, surely?

Broadcom terminates VMware's free ESXi hypervisor

BenDwire Silver badge
Holmes

Oh well

I've had a server at home running EXSi for years now, and it has an assortment of VMs that I could spin up when the need arose. To be honest, I powered it down when I went to OZ for a few months after retiring, and I've not turned it on since. I've been wondering about reinstating it and migrating the workload from my lower-powered microserver, if only to improve the performance of my Plex server. Obviously now that won't involve EXSi, which also means that I won't be able to advise people on such systems when they ask me for help.

Maybe nothing of value was lost - which might explain why Broadcom are taking this course of action.

So now I've faced with the choice of another bare metal install, or invistigate the likes of Proxmox. Given that I no longer have any use for any Micros~1 products, I don't need to keep VMs for them either. The choice appears to be quite a simple one: Bare metal Debian or Devuan?

'Crash test dummy' smashed VIP demo by offering a helping hand

BenDwire Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Ouch

When you do redesign the board, make sure to add some solder-blob or zero-ohm links so that you can use either chip in the future. That will save a subsequent board redesign and associated scrap costs when chips are lost or damaged in production.

And I know this because I too have been there, endured the product recall **, and had to put things right.

** The inspection stage missed the tiny writing on the SMT chip. The test stage didn't have 100% coverage, and the lady in goods-inwards missed one digit in a 20 digit product code.

The new AOI (Automatic Optical Inspection) machine cost me £40k, Test jigs a further £5k and finally £50 for a pair of glasses in stores. It was a great learning experience if nothing else ...

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: Size isn't everything

Have you tried partitioning it? OK, so you won't have the full capacity, but you will have better speed. Possibly.

EU repair rights bill tells manufacturers to fix up or ship out

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: I haven't read

If the bearings are just standard ball races then there should be a number stamped on them which can identify a suitable replacement. Failing that, measure them with a digital vernier and go to a bearing specialist. When I were a lad, we had a bearing shop in a small parade in a local council estate - Admittedly, RHP (Ransome Hoffmann Pollard) were one of the bigger manufacturers in the town.

In general, machine manufacturers don't make their own bearings, even though they may arrive in a Hotpoint, Ford or Kawasaki box.

That's not the web you're browsing, Microsoft. That's our data

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: does this only occur within the same account?

Interesting, thanks. I'll have to have a dig around and see what's playing up then. Most of it works, but for some reason I haven't been able to download a .csv of my transactions for months now.

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: does this only occur within the same account?

I prefer Firefox too, but more and more sites don't work correctly with it, especially banking ones (e.g. Barclaycard)

I resort to using Brave on those sites, but have no intention of letting Edge near my Debian box ...

US starts 'emergency' checks on cryptocurrency power use, citing winter power demands

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: Gosh

Congratulations on saving your carbon footprint by... offloading your Google search requirements on other people

But that's how carbon trading works, isn't it?

Plant me a tree, I'll be back for breakfast.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

BenDwire Silver badge
Windows

Re: I once had ....

That was one of the few jobs I've ever walked away from because I needed to save my sanity

And that's the important lesson to learn from all of this: If those above you on the pay grade won't listen to your demonstrably correct opinions, then leave them all to it and get on with something else.

I know that's easier said than done in many cases, but don't try to put up with it ad infinitum. Your mental health will suffer, and you'll bring your closest people down with you.

Don't bother to ask me how I know ...

BOFH: Looks like you're writing an email. Fancy telling your colleague to #$%^ off?

BenDwire Silver badge
Go

Re: "coloured pencil office"

Absolutely spot on. I live very close to an artisan bakery, and his handmade sourdough doesn't trouble my system at all. But supermarket sourdough (aka sourfaux) makes all the local wildlife sniff the breeze with fear and trepidation. And I'm talking posh Waitrose & M&S bread too.

And despite what you may think, my local bakery actually charges less than the supermarkets too. So, find a local baker, and treat yourself.

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

BenDwire Silver badge
Windows

I know correlation isn't causation, but still....

It does go someway to explain the majority of today's younger generation. Engineering is far too hard for the poor loves, so there's very little demand for decent courses.

But I'm a jaded bitter old man. What do I know.

The Post Office systems scandal demands a critical response

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: We need more articles like this one

Why do private companies like Fujitsu or Capita never seem to be held accountable for their shambolic performance ?

It used to be said that "Nobody got fired for buying IBM". Maybe history is repeating itself with a new set of names ?

BenDwire Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: It's still happening

Not only is a certain mindset required, but so is a clear specification of what the software needs to do, and how it should handle fault conditions. Then enough time should be given to do the job.

I've been in many meetings where the 'management' hadn't a clue what needed to be done, or how much time it would take to define. I even left one company mid-ERP implementation becase 'they' said I had to complete it 5 times faster than the predicted timescale and with 1/10 of the staff required. Yes, of course that system failed, £2M lost and the company folded. (Yes, it was run by an accountant).

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

BenDwire Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Fudge time!

Oddly enough, I did some consulting work for an ex-employer some years after I left. I was asked to design a memory module for some huge** inkjet printer, as the then complex 8-layer PCB was too difficult for the remaining engineers. However, this was in 1999 and the then boss asked if I would be willing to conduct a Y2K audit of everything - test gear, production machinery, networks, the lot.

After many days of lucrative but mind-numbing investigations I found just one program that actually couldn't cope with the new millennium. It was an easy fix, but only because I wrote the damn thing fifteen year earlier ...

Yes, they were meant to have replaced it with a commercial offering, but they couldn't find anything that worked as well, so were running my old 16-bit DOS program within Windows. (Clipper anyone?)

Still, it paid well.

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

BenDwire Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Code comments

Even more years back (30?) I wrote code in assembler for the then new PIC chips that I'd started to use in my company's products. As we were in to three-phase electrical measurement, most of out gear had custom transformers (wound on-site) to do all the physical interfacing. Being quite low tech, they has a bit of a phase shift which sometimes caused a bit of an issue when trying to accurately measure power, or provide synchronisation. In this particular case, I was using a differential transceiver chip to create a square wave representation of the zero-crossing points, but just couldn't get my head around the cumulative delays of the hardware. With deadlines looming, I threw in a few NOP statements and added a pithy comment that this was a bodge to be sorted out some time in the future. The code was good enough to sell thousands of products, and of course the code never got revisited.

Some years later I had moved jobs and was invited to speak on a course that involved my new company's technology. One of the delegates was my replacement at the prior company, and he introduced himself as the guy who found my comment and had to fix it properly due to a change in the chip supplier (and different characteristics). I just smiled.

Expert sounds alarm bells over upcoming NHS data platform

BenDwire Silver badge
Facepalm

Fujutsu?

Are Fujitsu involved in any of these EHR systems? If so, maybe I could get them to edit out some of my health issues ...

UK officials caught napping ahead of 2G and 3G doomsday

BenDwire Silver badge

I'm old enough to remember selling and using System 3 handsets. They were installed in such cars as Prince Charles' Aston Martin**, and 'one' had to ask the operator to connect you as there was no direct dialling back in those days.

It's amazing how far technology has improved over my relatively short lifetime.

(** Positive earth vehicle, so the transmitter had to be mounted in a wooden box in the boot. It was made by Mobira Oy, which eventually became Nokia IIRC)

Tesla to remote patch 2M vehicles after damning Autopilot safety probe

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: "recall"

You've missed "Suitably gullible customers" off your list.

Doom turns 30, so its creators celebrate seminal first-person shooter’s contribution to IT careers

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: Hated by sysadmins

One of my fondest recollections of a previous company was seeing the IT manager staring at his bit of networking kit in total bewilderment. It was mounted high up in a darkened corridor, so the blinkenlights bathed him in a glow reminiscent of the ending of 2001 A Space Odyssey. I was a newcomer to the business, and wanted to bring in CAD packages & general office kit to the design department. He was the COBOL guy, and had a token ring running across the entire manufacturing site. He wanted no part in my department, so left me to get on with it. All was fine until somebody wanted access to the MRP system which required him to link my LAN with his token ring. So far, so good.

This was 1993/4, and I had decided to use Artisoft Lantastic cards and software running on Win3.11. I remember the day that someone brought Doom into the office and asked if we could play across a few of the machines. The quick answer was no as I hadn't a clue what IPX was or did, but these were the days when technical support was much easier. I had a fax from the guys at Artisoft, telling me what drivers I needed and which bulletin board to get them from. Each machine got its own multi-boot menu and at the stroke of lunchtime there would be a dozen beeping machines and several concurrent games of Doom would spring into life.

Of course what we didn't realise was the bridge that had been installed for our MRP access happily passed everything onto to the token ring, hence the Dave Bowman moment. To his credit, he bought in another bit of kit to solve the problem, after initially just unplugging us and walking off.

We eventually progressed onto Doom2, Duke Nukem and Quake, the multiboot menus growing ever larger each time. We even got the resident softie to write our own WAD of the factory, which made it even more fun (except only he knew where he'd put the BFGs that day).

The then MD thought this was an excellent bit of team building and insisted on scheduling his important factory tours to conclude in my department at lunchtime, as if it was all his idea. Tosser.

Good times ...

HP TV ads claim its printers are 'made to be less hated'

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: Which is worse?

I have a Dell desktop and a HP printer, and they're both wonderful !!

Admittedly the Dell got wiped and Debian thrust upon it, and the HP is a Laserjet 6p that just works, albeit with a network print server dongle (PrintSir) I bought 20 years ago.

I'm planning to move in a couple of years though, and at that point I may well treat myself to a Brother all-in-one and ditch the separate Epson scanner too.

Veteran editors Notepad++ and Geany hit milestone versions

BenDwire Silver badge

As I mentioned earlier, have a play with Notepadqq. It's very similar, and may be good enough, depending on your needs. No snap reqired.

BenDwire Silver badge
Linux

Notepad++ Linux alternative

I always used Notepad++ back in the day when I ran Windows 7, but since moving to Linux I never really got on with it running under Wine (well, Crossover actually). It's probably a look and feel thing, as it otherwise functions perfectly well.

I ended up switching to the native "Notepadqq" as it integrates better into my desktop environment, and does most of what Notepad++ does and everything that I need it to do. YMMV of course.

BenDwire Silver badge
Trollface

Re: EMACS or death

Surely you meant to type Vi ?

/s

40 years of Turbo Pascal, the coding dinosaur that revolutionized IDEs

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: Lazarus IDE

There is, but I couldn't get my Delphi Programmer to change over (thus saving me the cost of the frequent Delphi upgrades) and nor could I wean my Test Equipment Manager off VB6 and onto something more portable (I wanted to use Linux in some test equipment).

It's a while back now, but from memory the basic core of Lazerus was good enough, it just didn't work well with the third party libraries we had to use.

I'm fairly sure all parties have retired now, so who knows what their successors are using ...

HP printer software turns up uninvited on Windows systems

BenDwire Silver badge
Joke

Just be thankful ...

Just be thankful it wasn't the latest album from U2 that downloaded automatically. At least an HP driver may be of use to some people.

Plex gives fans a privacy complex after sharing viewing habits with friends by default

BenDwire Silver badge

my only gripe is that it doesn't seem to be able to handle libraries - e.g. for Anime - that contain both TV shows and films

But Plex can't do this either (out of the box) unless you use a custom agent such as Colima (Combined Library Metadata Agent). Is there not a way to add custom agents to Jellyfin?

I bought a lifetime pass for Plex when it was on offer, so I'm not inclined to waste that investment and start over with something new. However, I have a low tolerance for being messed about, so if the Plex developers make too many stupid decisions then I'll be looking far more closely at Jellyfin.

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: "on by default"

Actually I just checked my own plex server and it clearly states that whatever you change the setting to now it will revert back to 'private' in 2 years time. (Unfortunately only for those in the USA). At least that seems to be a token effort in the right direction.

However, I will keep a weary eye on it just in case, but as it only sits on my LAN with no remote access then I'm not that fussed ... especially as it's not registered in my real name, and uses a unique email address that doesn't identify me. Oh, and there's a PiHole on my network too that really messes with all that tracking.

Meta sued by privacy group over pay up or click OK model

BenDwire Silver badge
Windows

I binned FB 10 years ago, and despite all the FOMO I haven't lost contact with any real friends since then. Sure, it does take a bit more effort to send out multiple messages via SMS, Signal or even email, but not that much more. Vague acquaintances have fallen away as might be expected, but that's no real problem being the curmudgeonly git that I am.

Half a kilo of cosmic nuclear fuel reignites NASA's deep space dreams

BenDwire Silver badge
Pint

There are some very odd people about on the internet these days. Have an upvote to balance things out! (And a virtual beer)

BenDwire Silver badge
Mushroom

Come get some ...

My dyslexia caused my brain to start thinking about RPGs. Duke Nukem anyone?

User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work

BenDwire Silver badge

Maybe she'd seen Harry Potter with its moving photographs?

Suits ignored IT's warnings, so the tech team went for the neck

BenDwire Silver badge
Pint

Re: Wait a minute...

I think you meant NZ, but they made a very good film about those sheep going baaad!

Black Sheep

X looks back at year of so-called 'engineering excellence' under Musk

BenDwire Silver badge
Facepalm

Nope!

It's not going to happen. Xitter will have to wrench my financial details from my cold, dead, hands.

My opinion of Mr Musk is becoming lower every time he makes an announcement. He's lucked out several times in his life, and from what I can make out has stood on the shoulders of giants to get where he is today. If I were him I'd just kick back and let other people run the businesses he's bought - I don't think he has anything more to offer.

But what do I know? I never used Twitter, and never will.

After nine servers he worked on failed, techie imagined next career as beach vendor

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: Full circle

Many people started their IT career from selling stuff at the beach.

And most of the customers were in the sea up to their necks in sh*t from the local sewage works.

Boris Johnson's mad hydrogen for homes bubble bursts

BenDwire Silver badge
Holmes

Start right, now

As others have correctly stated, heat pumps only work well when the houses are properly insulated. So why not mandate that all new houses built from (say) 2025 meet a much higher standard**, have underfloor loops fitted during construction, and maybe even have pipes under the garden for ground-source pumps if applicable?

Of course we all know why that won't happen, but in reality that's the only way to kick start the transition.

** We could borrow the German building standards as a good place to start.

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