Posts by AJ MacLeod

Re: Inscrutably bad router

Have you seen how many flaws have been found in Netgear devices? DrayTek are clearly not perfect but there's a reason the vast majority of SMEs I've dealt with use their routers and it's not price. "Vibes" are really not a good way of choosing IT equipment where the important stuff is invisible... I've nothing in particular against Netgear, if I only have the budget for bargain basement stuff I will use it but there's no way I'd use one of their routers over a DrayTek.

Re: Dump Outlook and replace it

While I agree completely with the sentiment, this appears not to be about the "outlook" iOS app but the "outlook" mail service itself even using the default iOS mail app. Why anyone continues to use Microsoft for anything email related I have no idea - of all the major providers they seem to be easily the worst for reliability.

Re: Why do these things still exist?

They exist for the same reason that nobody really prints books as small as a normal phone screen. Also, they exist because most people who read books don't like their batteries running out every second chapter. Also they exist because staring at a bright backlit screen is very uncomfortable after a while.

Re: Banking apps, Use a browser

This was the bank I changed to! In every other way they are vastly superior to my previous bank (who actually paid me to leave them)...

Re: Goodbye Windows 11

To be fair, LibreOffice is just a recent descendent of StarOffice. I don't often use an office suite but have had to use LO quite frequently over the past week and it's impressed me with how well it has rendered Excel, Word and even WordPerfect documents other people have been sending me. I have used it fairly infrequently since the Star Office days and it's one of the few pieces of software which has genuinely improved over that timeframe.

I stopped bothering with HP servers when they decided that firmware updates would only be available to people with a current warranty... that might or might not be the case now but I'm never going to bother to check.

Mind you, even back then it wasn't worth the stress of messing with HP's website, I just emailed my requirements to a reseller who came up with the goods.

Re: 200 Seats

I know they do, I can go and see them at their desks if I so desire...

Re: UPSes are a common feature of...

Funnily enough one of my more dramatic (OK, terrifying) UPS failures was also with a big Dell branded APC rackmount UPS... those have some very large capacitors in them which make very loud noises when they are unhappy. When you're the only one in the building (and it's not your building and you can't get to the main power switch without leaning over the exploding UPS) it's even more exciting!

I do have some experience of bigger Riello UPS - not sure on capacity off-hand but they're the big floor standing units on castors (with a train of big batteries on castors too). Had a couple of them fail too (in a non-exciting manner) but to be fair they're working in a pretty warm and not particularly dry environment.

For all that, the most scary for me was the much smaller 1500VA APC I previously had looking after my PC... I noticed a weird acid kind of smell when I came through the door one morning, eventually traced it to the UPS which was too hot to touch for more than a split second. Somehow I managed to rip the cables out and literally threw it out the door before it set fire to anything; the batteries had been boiled to death and were swollen enough to have become one with the case of the UPS.

I haven't a lot of confidence in these devices for some reason!

Re: It's one of the *only*

Glad it's not just me... this is perhaps the very most stupid phrase currently doing the rounds and it irritates me like nothing else. Either it's "THE ONLY" or it's "one of the FEW". It's really not that complicated.

Re: re: A keyboard and mouse not only work better and faster

Yeah - loads more effort required to hold your hand up in an awkward position to smear your greasy fingerprint onto the screen. If only someone could invent some sort of pointing device that just sits conveniently on the desk, on which your hand could rest...

Re: Is there no product liability at all?

It's the SNP way... do exactly the same as what Westminster does but at least slightly worse or more inefficiently

Re: So if they licence the software they can resubmit the paper?

It's CFD, they can't be sure the data it outputs is completely correct anyway...

Re: I disagree

As someone who lives in what most people would consider the far North of Scotland I completely disagree. By this time of the year it's dark at getting up time anyway, changing the clocks makes virtually no difference. On the other hand, now that the clocks have gone back it's practically dark by the time lunch is over - it's plain stupid. I'm all for going GMT+1 all year round or even +2.

Also, as someone who never wears a watch but can mostly tell what time it is anyway through long practice, the changing of the official clocks mucks up my body clock for days at both ends of the summer.

Re: Western Dataloss

Hard to tell whether Seagate or WD were worse for HDD failures, but to be fair I've used quite a lot of WD's SSDs without any issues so far.

Re: What I don't understand

Come on, think about this for a minute. NOBODY needs to agree on how big a <tab> is - that's the beauty of them! All that matters is that one tab is one level of indentation, two tabs are two levels of indentation. If you like your indents to be the size of one space, that's fine; configure your editor to display that and use tabs. When I have to look at your file it'll look as perfect to me as it does to you, as my editor is set to display tabs the way I like them. Everyone wins. I genuinely don't understand why people find this so hard to grasp...

Re: CUPS seems to be turned off on Macs

I don't trust Apple or their judgement...

Re: What I’ve learned about this from the French media

It's the French... they couldn't possibly just call them what everyone else does, could they?

Ionos do a basic unlimited bandwidth VPS for £1/month (plus VAT). All you need to do is choose a bare bones Debian image and install Wireguard. There are scripts available if you don't want to do it manually, eg wireguard-install. I did that myself a few weeks ago as I'm (still!) waiting for my new ISP to allocate a static IP address to me and it works fine - the client setup couldn't really be easier, particularly if your device has a camera to scan the QR code...

I can only go on what I was told by the manager on the ground overseeing the altnet's rollout - and given the physical evidence that they've had their equipment in place ready to go for nearly a year I don't see why he would be lying. He also told me that OR were being so obstructive about connecting up the next nearest village that they dug in five miles of their own fibre in order to get that village online in a sane timeframe.

These are not small towns, they're small (some would say tiny) villages - Openreach simply aren't interested. Frankly they should have had all the cities and big towns done years ago, but instead they've just sat on their heels enjoying their privileged position for as long as possible. Of course they have their legal obligations but we all know there are always ways and means of ensuring that they break these whilst maintaining plausible deniability.

Re: Aim that blame thrower

The article specifically states that the government pressure was in 2021 and from the Biden administration - how much clearer would you like it?

Re: If only there was a replacement for outlook...

Outlook is also very far from free - probably a fair bit more than whatever the Thunderbird add-on costs. There is also the slight issue that Microsoft have a stated aim of killing off Outlook in the near future (the "replacement" New Outlook, a completely different animal - is already being foisted on people.)

Re: Interesting, but ...

WordStar 2000 had a component called PC-Outline which I think did what you are talking about... it also allowed you to display all the control codes in the document in a very usable manner.

Re: Number 4

While I'm quite sure that a few women can drive better than most men, I'm also quite certain that it's definitely not true of any of the women I know. In general they are far more prone to harsh braking, unnecessary acceleration and reacting too late - very poor at considering the conditions well ahead.

I know a few men that drive like that too, but whilst there are always exceptions there's often a good deal of truth in stereotypes.

Re: Very risky move for Apple.

It might be fine for your particular area but it's certainly not even barely adequate here. We had the police at the door one night (technically morning since it was about 2am!) asking for a particular house which they couldn't locate. Apple maps had directed them to us, approximately a quarter of a mile from the actual address which didn't even sound remotely similar and has a totally different postcode.

My own limited experience has been pretty similar...

Re: Thank you Carnat

I won't use it on servers due to the ridiculously short life cycle of each version (6 months IIRC) - I also seem to recall reading that upgrading between versions was discouraged at one time.

Either way, the thought of performing upgrades to a new OS version every six months on a server does not appeal at all. It's a shame really as otherwise I like the OpenBSD ethos - though last time I gave it a go I did find it dog slow in comparison to several different Linux distros I tried on the same machine which surprised me a little.

Re: Fingerprint ?

Apple devices seem incapable of recognising any of my fingerprints more than about 5% of the time and I'm currently still alive... probably would be the simplest way though I'm not sure how many attempts you get before it demands a PIN instead?

Re: UnDeadly to Whales or Wales

On the other hand... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c7240nex4ljo

I've a massively long VGA cable here - unfortunately the picture goes in sharp at one end and comes out all vague and blurry at the other so it's only ever been used in occasional odd cases of desperation...

Re: Why?

Here's an example from this very morning... customer with a 60ft catamaran workboat, one of its large diesel engines refusing to go to working revs. Diagnostic software for said engines uses serial comms and is only available for DOS... in this case I used DOSBox but the point is, DOS software (and the knowledge to use it) is still very relevant in the real commercial world in 2024. I've come across it in such varied fields as solicitors to chicken farms, not to mention what must be vast quantities of large and very costly engineering machinery...

I'm afraid late last year's experience is already out of date... I had a batch of Lenovo desktops to deal with the other week and none of the tricks I've seen (and previously used) worked. The "launch a shell and run msoobe" method now seems to result in a machine that sits there asking you to wait for ever more (certainly nothing happened even after several hours), forcing you to reboot and leaving you unable to log in. (The temporary user created for the install process has a randomly generated password I believe, and I didn't have ntpasswd on hand.)

The only option left to me was to restore to the factory image, which wasted an awful lot of time I didn't really have to spare.

Re: Sounds fair

She lied, sorry. Insurance companies never pay out immediately and in fact very rarely pay out fully, if at all - they are perhaps the most scummy of all legal entities. Certainly easily the most scummy of those I've ever had to deal with...

Re: WD FileCard

Still got one of those that functions (though sometimes needs the little wheel spun manually to get the heads to start moving.) Fortunately Dad kept the box so I can send it back to WD if it stops working!

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

Well I AM offering a testimonial - paper comes in to my office, gets scanned, shredded and binned. Only REALLY important things like birth certificates / driving licences go to the safe after being scanned.

Funnily enough it was my experience of dealing with my father's lifetime accumulation of paper documents (of which he retained basically everything) after his death which pushed me into doing things differently. Somewhat ironically, mid way through sorting out his affairs his office went on fire (lithium battery on a charger we weren't aware of due to the mounds of paper on the desks) and most of the actually important paperwork was destroyed - just mounds of illegible rubbish left. His electronic data was fine, despite the blackened exterior of HDDs and SSD...