Posts by Japhy Ryder

Re: 4K?

Hmmm ... you may be underthinking this...

Higher quality cameras will result in better images even when downrezzed, all else being equal

Conferencing video codecs are pretty clever these days

There are a lot of different working environments - I can still save anything up to an hour over a "walk across the office" by delegating that to our high-speed, low latency campus network.

Even at the home office, (4g wireless broadband 70/25 Mbps), the video and audio quality is still noticeably differentiated

Also at home, we have no aerial, no landline and no trouble streaming 4K in a semi-rural environment

Back in the days when we were all on-campus, team meetings could easily generate 20-30 mins of faff/overhead even with a meeting room on the same corridor as all our offices

Guest speakers are a breeze

Online support is a breeze

I have an HD webcam on top of my desktop monitor and a 4K cam on my laptop. The built in cam on the laptop is a POS and my regular meetees can tell the difference between all these setups both in audio and video quality.

You don't need a whole other setup to make high quality video lectures/presentations (you can switch the lights on and select the pro-grade mic for a little extra when needed). These can be uploaded to YouTube, Vimeo or our in-house video portal according to purpose.

The world is your oyster...

In non-work contexts, people are really quite up to speed with Teams and Zoom

Network reliability is somewhat better than transport reliability and miles cheaper (a month's connectivity is approximately 2 days on site)

YMMV but there are lots of wins to be had :-)

Re: Windows 10 continues to be a lure for PC buyers in the wider enterprise space(?)

All the answers to your questions are here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/13853/windows-lifecycle-fact-sheet

Re: HTML-only calculator?

23 lines of HTML, actually, plus 77 of CSS3 and a single line JSON config. Life w/o JavaScript. Refreshing. https://gist.github.com/tsironis/1622077

Re: Whoosh...

Skyhooks are real: skyhook

Re: Chrome meddling

I'd suggest you give these steps a try to set your mailto link to see if they help:

1. Open Gmail in Chrome and click the Protocol Handler icon in your browser's address bar.

2. When prompted to "Allow Gmail to open all email links?", select "Deny" or "Ignore" and click "Done." Then you're done! Skip steps 3-5.

3. If you were unable to see the Protocol Handler icon overlapping-diamonds, click the Chrome menu icon chrome-menu-1 in the top right corner of your browser, and choose "Settings."

4. Click the "Show Advanced Settings" link at the bottom of the screen. Then click the "Content Settings" button under the "Privacy" header.

5. In the pop-up window, scroll down to the "Handlers" section and click the "Manage Handlers" button. Then select Gmail from the mailto dropdown, click "Done," and, well, you're done!

Adapted from: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/oxPLcXhbt9w

Edge on W10?

A while back (lets say approx 1 yr), an employer gave me a Surface with W10. Since it was a managed device with Roaming Profiles, we couldn't actually use Edge, which after the first run would just crash on launch. Changing the default browser to something usable was necessary to get some work done, but the help system search box in the start menu would insist on trying to open its results in Edge, so that was broken too. Shame really. It looked like it might have been a nice device if things had actually worked.

Re: Updraft102 Not really a "survey"

"... yet he still calmly insists Apple are the nadir of design and reliability" LOL

Re: I'm waiting for..

Have they fixed the thing where Edge crashes if you're on roaming profiles yet?

Re: MS is daft.

Fortunately for MS, their competition is even dafter. I used to work for an org which bought 70 Surface Pro's for something like £600 a pop (yes,after the volume discount, someone must have been feeling rich). After 2 years, MS EOLed them. Core i5, 4MB, 128MB, perfectly usable piece of kit but IT policy mandated replacement if no vendor support. So, we asked all the usual suspects for samples to evaluate. Keystone Cops aren't even in the running. Couriers turned up to take back samples we hadn't received yet. Everybody we asked to evaluate them complained about keys being in the wrong place (US keyboards), the hideous colours, etc, etc. Despite all this nonsense, one or two of them had decent enough scores to consider buying so we asked them for prices. The response from all of them was "Oh no, we don't sell that anymore!" You might conclude that they weren't really interested in actually selling anything. Perhaps MS isn't either. Oh, and £50 for a stylus? You can get perfectly usable styli from Hong Kong for a tenner. £70 for a BT mouse ... don't get me started ...

Re: Same here

"Don't waste your time on me" or something in a foreign language usually does the trick.

Re: Tea Bags For All Brews?

Some 5 years ago I bought a Windows 7 laptop with no optical drive. To make up for that, they threw in a USB one. I used it to make DVD backups of the system software and put them in the drawer. They are still there. So is the USB DVD drive.

"Valet Parking" Mode

I think it's a side effect of a "valet parking" mode whereby you can have the key in a mode whereby you can hand it to a dodgy parking attendant to park/return your car for you without being able to empty the valuables out of the boot while he's at it.

I once had a Fiat which had this "function" implemented via physical keys as well as the fob. It always seemed utterly pointless as accessing the boot from the interior of the car was a key part of the vehicle's design.

It was also ludicrously easy to get things out of synch by pressing the wrong button on the fob and generating a steady stream of expletives which soundly jammed any human auditory systems within earshot.

The only vehicles I've never had problems with had physical keys only and no central locking or other "convenience features" whatsoever. Under such a system, the overhead in locking/unlocking and checking the status of the various locks is a matter of seconds and any errors could only be blamed on the owner, which makes you wonder why the manufacturers didn't just stick with it and save themselves a fortune in R&D while retaining a cast iron "not our fault."

Re: And how many people...

Which is why it soon will be a criminal offence to put you in that difficult position. It may not deter all, but some, perhaps most, is better than none.

The other thing that those who force people to do SARs perhaps have not thought of is the potential for MITM attack on the material?

Re: Correction

Komodia are very explicit on their website about what their stuff is, what it does and how it does it. To whit:

"Our advanced SSL hijacker SDK is a brand new technology that allows you to access data that was encrypted using SSL and perform on the fly SSL decryption. The hijacker uses Komodia’s Redirector platform to allow you easy access to the data and the ability to modify, redirect, block, and record the data without triggering the target browser’s certification warning."

That is right in the middle of the home page. I don't really see how you could miss it unless you wanted to.

Komodia now say their website has been DDoSed offline following the media attention, but you can see how it used to be on the Internet Archive.

Re: @AC @Charlie "unfixable on Server 2003."

Whataboutery

Re: Batteries not included

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_and_evasion_map

I have some of these. Since they are 70 odd years old and somewhat historic, I don't use them in anger. So it's nice to see the principles of into practice once again. Tally ho!

I'd rather they signed a deal with Julbo - but there you are, the nub of the problem is how to embody and interface with ubiquitous computing on the next step up from the smartphone, which simply replaced the dumbphones in our pockets. Not quite so simple, this one.

All kinds of financial instruments are used in all kinds of illegal deals, so you could say that anyone using, for example, "cash" has been 'associated' with narcotics financing for a heck of a long time now.

I would also hazard a guess that just about every form of human communication has been pressed into service at one time or another by those engaged in nefarious deeds - are all those similarly tarnished?

Or is it just those associated with the "Internet" that get tarnished?

Re: Insane

Oh, you youngsters, its all ME ME ME!

Re: Icon says it all

Totally with you on the K800i - on of the best pocket cameras I've ever had. It would surf passably and even make calls. Android smartphones make much better pocket computers but do not impress as cameras. Luckily they can still make calls.

Re: Hello? Get your sensible head on.

"Long term usefulness" - How about a 2003 vintage Inspiron and 2008 Vostro? Both these machines were well specced from the outset (and upgradeable) while the second was a grand cheaper than equivalently specced MBP (including 3yrs onsite). They are now in the hands of offspring who do not exactly cosset them. Current Vaio will probably suffer a similar fate.

In my experience, OSX server based environments with tons of apps on the clients are just as messy as equivalent Windows shops, but I guess that if your kit is sleek and shiny it is not quite so unpleasant as you are being shafted.

Granted finding a laptop with screen res other than 1366x768 is hard these days but not so hard as to make it absolutely necessary to go over to the Apple side.

Re: Because of the unique way the BBC is funded.....

"If you only watch catch-up services online, then you don’t need a licence. For example, you don’t need one to use BBC iPlayer, or ITV player, to catch up on programmes after they have been shown on TV."

http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/technology--devices-and-online-top8/

"You do not need a television licence to catch-up on television programmes in BBC iPlayer"

http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/help/playing_tv_progs/tvlicence

If the both the BBC and the TV Licensing authority for the UK, say that you don't need a licence to watch catch-up on iPlayer then they could be right. If you want to watch the simulcast option, you do need a licence.

Re: The viPad

Actually, the "u" in "nu" was originally an ypsilon (υ), which should be pronounced as the "ee" in "knee" so perhaps this should be a "KneePad" or maybe even a "NiPad" (as in Knights who say).

It makes more sense once you realise that malwares are better off not infecting users with clue.

Hey!

You've been peeking in my bag!

aha

That explains my yesterday when Win7 64 Pro went into recovery screen - and recovered, thank god. However there is now another little window from AVG saying a reboot is required. This one is 426/3293 - so my question to the assembled is: how safe is this one? This has all occurred while travelling and is something I could really do without. Additionally, has occurred having replaced the even more painful McAfee which came pre-installed, following years of trying new avs when the previous became to bloated, too naggy, missed things, whether paid for or free.

The moral of this story really is that everything will let you down or annoy you in one way or another sooner or later and whether you can do without as an alternative depends on how well you can control your environment. As a teacher and a traveller, moving rapidly between network environments and with ever promiscuous USB ports and devices, my requirement is that I have to have some defence and I would prefer that that some defence would remain simple and effective, not feeling the need to load up on "features" and complexity as a way of justifying its existence, retaining existing users and gaining new ones.

This may well be the rub - that everything which starts out good will inevitably fail as a result of market pressures rather than simply technical problems...