Posts by Peter X

Re: In an alternative reality...

I guess Apple got the chance to have a second go at building the machine they intended to build (Mac vs Lisa) so it's a shame Sir Clive Sinclair didn't manage to *properly* fix the issues with the QL and build a successor. In particular, if ICL had managed to re-engineer the micro-drives to make them somewhat reliable, I am left wondering *WHY* Sinclair didn't do that themselves or at least licence back the fixes? I *can* see the logic of going with cheaper microdrives over floppy-drives since (going on other comments) that reduced costs considerably. Although the target business customers were likely slightly less price sensitive than regular consumers, so the QL probably could've been another £100 more (in 1984 money) without adversely affecting sales. I think Sinclair just needed another C-level person to sanity check products before they finalised stuff.

Re: disposable vapes

I know I'm prolly over simplifying, but couldn't they add (say) £5 to the purchase price of a vape, and give that cash back on return. So people would be incentivised to return old vapes rather than bin them.

Yeah, set the gravity level with the dial on the side?

Oh, I guess a design consideration is making sure the dial can be manipulated whilst wearing space/moon gloves! Or maybe it should be a foot activated pedal?

Oh shit... another consideration... you'd need to bolt the matt down because otherwise it'd just stick to the sole of their moon boots? Or even fly up and stick to the ceiling of the lander?!!

Pretty difficult to figure it all out actually.

Still, at least the gravity dial/selector thing is sorted! :D

Re: My experience so far

Linux user using Windows for the first time (properly anyway) in years. I don't completely hate it... winget is a bit shit when compared with anything on Linux, but good considering it's a Microsoft product.

One thing (aside from not being able to move the taskbar from the bottom to the side of the screen) that I find irritating is:

1. Finding the setting to change the key repeat rate was bloody hard; the old control panel is hidden away and the new settings thing is... sometimes lacking.

2. Once I found it (checks notes... oh yeah, Super+R "control keyboard"), it turns out that the repeat-rate is already at it's fastest. However, I'd like it just a smidge faster!

So after Googling, it seems I can change the keyboard repeat rate, but the GUI keeps such things within reasonable limits. But maybe a bit too reasonable? Anyway, I can change it but this involved faffing around with the registry.

Whats annoying is, I'm fairly certain that Cygwin allowed access to the WIndows registry via the file-system? If MS supported that, then I could easily manage it. As it is, I can't be arsed... making the key-repeat-rate a smidge faster just isn't worth the time Googling this, and then backing up my registry and all that crap.

Otherwise though, Windows 11 is... a lot less shit than previous versions. I like that OpenSSH is on it. I like that Windows Terminal is... not terrible.

Windows still takes for ever to update anything though... why is it sooooo slow at updating?!!! And even winget installing anything is slow.

Still, I don't like to complain. Their terminal font is quite nice!

Re: 123-Reg still have customers?

@doublelayer

Not for the domain mentioned above, but on my own personal domain I was previously using Google Apps largely for their gmail integration... but Google started charging for that. To be fair, if you like gmail and particularly if you do make use of Google Apps, then that isn't the worst product so it may be worth you looking at. But I'm sick of Google having a product and then changing it!

So, I'm now using Mythic Beats for my personal email... I think I'm on the basic £20 per year package (listed as Email only):

https://www.mythic-beasts.com/hosting

In the recent past I did start getting a bunch of spam to an old address at my domain and so I had to investigate Mythic Beasts own spam detection stuff; it's not quite as easy to use a Gmail but is doable! But everything works exactly as solidly and reliably as one would hope.

Re: They don't make it easy.

With Tesco, most items I don't want substituted whilst there's just a couple of things that they can substitute.

However, I have to globally enable subs for this, and then at the end of ordering, uncheck every ****ing item except the few I am happy to have substituted. I'm sure it used to be simpler... but they've updated the app... so... :(

AFAIK, Hilary *was* investigated and found guilty. AFAIK, Hunter Biden *is* being investigated and it doesn't look good (for him).

Re: She was a good one

I hope a few days prior to that, she told Boris exactly what she thought of him. One can hope... can't one?!

Re: It does suck

IMO the current Ubuntu / GNOME desktop gets it right. I'm keyboard-centric so the 'super key + start typing' thing works really well for me; it's the Windows 7 scheme without the folder-structure to fall back on.

Unity desktop was good once they'd ironed out the bugs; here you had Super work similar to GNOME, and Super + A (works in Ubuntu 22.04) bring up apps, but Unity also had Super + F which I personally found really really nice for easy access to recent files.

Plus Unity was good for easily adding things like /tmp/ or ... my (at the time) Truecrypt mount point to a list of places not to remember. With bloody Linux-Mint in particular, my recent files is always full of a ton of crap in /tmp/ largely including Meld comparisons which I don't even care about at all!

So... whilst I quite like Ubuntu/GNOME these days, I did find Unity a little more keyboard friendly.

Re: Sign up?

If you only need to check for expiration, there's plenty of scripts on Github.

This one for example (completely random example - honest ;-) ) is so simple, you can audit the code yourself in a few short minutes.

I wrote use it to make sure my certbot installation is working correctly!

Re: Clutter must go

My entire knowledge of orbital mechanics is based on KSP! So with that in mind, if something was happily orbiting at a given height/velocity and it gets hit by a projectile causing it's height to be raised, wouldn't it then be more likely to de-orbit quicker due to not having the required velocity to support the new orbit?

Re: Interesting.

I/O is always likely to be awkward on a device that size, so I'm used to ignoring it now... and I suppose there are a few boards available now that use the computer-model-4 (CM4) that may provide alternative I/O layouts.

However, I will just mention that having swapped the side where the ethernet jack is on the Pi4 is surprisingly more annoying that I originally expected. I think the (my) problem is that some ports are static, e.g. power, HDMI, ethernet, and things like USB are more likely to be hot-plugged. But with the re-positioned ethernet, the Pi4 puts the USB ports between those static ports.

Might just be me though; I thought I'd get used to this, but, nope!

Otherwise loving my Pi's!!! :D

Re: Bait

Maybe they should've given people a bit more notice then? Otherwise it does feel like they're slamming the door shut and demanding money to get out.

Re: Why after 3 versions of a Mac layout keyboard is there still no fullsize option.

Agreed. There are so many lovely looking keyboards available, but does no one want/need a numeric keypad these days?

Re: Disgraceful ...

Modded up, but...

"and those seated comfortably in the upper echelons of Whitehall"

I'm prety sure he was in Crete at the time. Paddle-boarding*

"This whole episode will no doubt feature in some future textbook as an example of how NOT to organise an evacuation."

I'm sure it will, but I'm equally sure that Raab's successor won't read it, same as Raab wouldn't have read it had it already existed. Sadly.

* I've mentioned this in a conversation with people before, but I said "water-boarding" instead of "padding-boarding"... which totally changes things. Although, somehow, I'm not sure it isn't plausible!

Re: What was I thinking?

^ ditto. I suspect for me it was the accent that made it particularly memorable, to the extent that *any* time I see Accrington Stanley, I hear it in _that_ accent.

Was it a milk advert?

Re: The example given seems to be incorrect

I was wondering that... also, surely everything after RLI would need to be reversed? And then, it is not possible to detect shenanigans when RL/LR codes are not (1). balanced, and (2). contained within comments or string-literals?

What bothers me is that if at some point this does turn out to be a GDPR violation, it'll be the NHS that ends up paying the costs... which in turn undermines the NHS, and costs tax-payers.

Summary: I'm not sure the people making these decisions give a crap; they win one way or another whatever the outcome. Perhaps the only way to solve that would be if it were possible to make specific individuals (i.e. head of NHS digital) personally liable?

Re: F**** it!

I agree with you... but in this case, he was also attacking the democratic process, so personally, I think he's got off lightly considering.

Re: 1st July, 1st September

and the EU trade war

Re: If StackOverflow didn't use Fastly

Flip-side, they could've been call Slowly. So all things considered... ;-)

Re: Let's call it the "GPDPR"

My guess is - they don't care. If it did fall foul of GDPR, then worse-case, the NHS will be fined for leaking data, but that won't affect all the companies that hope to access the data... i.e the same companies that all the people concerned likely have shares in or are on the boards of.

^ This.

I wouldn't be bothered if the NHS was doing entirely in-house R&D, but all this stuff seems to be spun off to private companies just looking to make money and not actually looking to solve problems*

* Private companies will develop drugs/threatments to threat a problem... but there's less incentive to actually fix things. Whereas if the NHS were doing R&D, there would be incentive to fix things simply to lower their own costs.

Still entertaining though! :D

I do find myself wondering "why now?" and I suspect he's figured out that he (and probably Chris Whitty... or some other medical/science adviser) will be thrown under a bus after the enquiry is completed so he's getting his jabs in (no, not those ones) now whilst he can.

Re: customized food

moded up for use of the word "howler" in this context. :D

I saw briefly saw a thing on the news recently with - (from memory) - the CEO of Next PLC, and he was saying how rather than looking at online sales tax, they should move taxation on retail outlets to warehouses. Which did seem to make sense to me. And also seems to agree with what you're saying too.

Or maybe, just enable automatic updates by default *but* provide a method that sys-admins / technically aware users can disable this. I personally don't like automatic updates... but I do usually apply updates as soon as they're available.

Re: It's a different world

Speaking of helicopters and spaaace, I saw this a couple of days ago; it's from 2019-08-10, so not new, but does describe how hard it is to fly on Mars: https://youtu.be/GhsZUZmJvaM (16 minutes long btw)

Lands on Mars on Thursday I believe?

Re: Time for UK based (and UK nationality) entrepreneurs to step up to the plate

Good luck with any of those duffers. You'd have a bout as much chance as getting money back from the PPE cronies - who, probably do have a few £million spare.

Re: Geeks versus Politicians

Thanks for your reply - points noted! :D

I should've said what the thumb up/down scores were at time of posting, but it was a surprising ratio where > 50% were thumbs down... which people are entitled to, but given the tone (at least in my head), that was unexpected.

Also, minor point, but I didn't actually use all caps!!! I did use strong-emphasis (aka bold) though, so I might try to use plain italic (plain emphasis) in the future. I am a serial abuser of exclamation marks though- I have no shame!!!!! ;-)