Posts by Oldfogey 309 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jan 2008
I recently took my elderly mother-in-law to the cashpoint, to discover that they had installed a fancy new touch device. Unfortunately, it seemed to be quite unable to register her fingers - even when we found where the actual touch point was (not always easy).
She will not be using that machine again.
Apart from the fact that it is next to the chippy, and rapidly developing a good layer of grease.
A very long time ago I placed the contract to install those big generators in the basement (someone else ordered the huge battery banks need whilst the gensets were running up).
They weren't just for strikes or war emergency - a large proportion of London's phone and TV went through the tower.
During the Royal Wedding (Diana) transmission, some idiot in a JCB put the bucket straight through the main power feed to the tower. Nobody watching noticed. Job well done.
I wonder how these gadgets would stand up to a substantial localised EMP?
Easily generated by any hobbyist, and I imagine it would fry the chips. This is their kit, so they are responsible for fixing it. Again, and again, and again.......
And I bet they would never figure out what was going on!
It runs slower that Hotmail, because it downloads a lot of junk.
The right hand pane is a nuisance - full of junk I don't want, leaves less room for message titles, and I can't see any way to turn it off.
Logout is hidden - should be there up front.
Not impressed - generally a mess.
I think I will gradually be moving
What is this Dead Reckoning of which you speak? Do zombies use it to find Brainz?
The correct term is DED reckoning - short for deduced reckoning, in that your current position is deduced from a previously known position, using knowledge of your course, speed, wind/tide drift etc.
Of course if you get it wrong you may end up dead.
For several years now I have been on Plusnet (owned by BT, but operated independantly) I have had good service, and since I do a lot of my surfing after midnight, their 10Gb deal works out very good for me. Only spoken to them a couple of times - once for a phone line fault, and once to set up a service for someone else, and found them knowledgeable and willing to accept that I did not know what I was doing.
I also bought a smartphone a month ago on Orange - I didn't particlularly want Orange, but did want the phone offer. Orange were utterly useless, as I was unable to set up an account to spend money with them! Passed me from department to department, never called back, refused to accept that what I told them was possible, and seemed to be located on the far end of a very cheap VOIP link.
Sent off for a new sim - that didn't work either, as it was impossible to find out what it's phone number was until you had put money on it, and you couldn't put money on until you knew the phone number.
I didn't bother talking to customer services, just binned it and got a t-mobile sim, which worked out of the box, no problems, set up account, paid in money, made calls. Sorted.
Artists never have had any rights over second sale (except, recently, for paintings sold in France) - whether sold for less, the same, or more, or many times more. This is the deal in copyright - the creator is given a limited monopoly to enable them to earn a return on their creation. In this context, the recent extensions to the copyright period are immoral, as they apply to existing copyrights, thus fundamentally changing the deal in retrospect.
One new way media creators will be able to generate new profits for a while is from all the people who copied their CD's to MP3, then sold the CD on eBay. When their hard disk crashes, and they haven't backed up, they will have to go and buy a fresh copy. Same will apply if they have stored it in the cloud, and the company goes bust overnight.
My neighbour did not realise she had NFC enabled on any of her cards - did not remember ever having been told.
Went into a shop and bought something about £25.00. Handed over her card, and without asking, touching or putting in a pin, the till printed out a slip for payment of £20, £5.00 to pay. She was most perturbed by this, as am I.
There was no "bonk" involved - the card just happened to pass near the machine.
The limit was supposed to be £15. I found it had gone up to £20, with no advice or discussion.
The bill was for £25, and so not valid for NFC. I had never heard that it can take a part payment.
I do not like NFC, I do not trust it, and I do not trust the banks, but there appears to be no way to avoid it. I have spoken to several banks with whom I have accounts, and they all say there is no choice - if you want a card, it WILL have NFC enabled, for whatever amount they say.
Given the amount of £Billions our beloved government is proposing to blow on the HS2 rail lines, wouldn't it be better to spend this money on decent broadband infrastructure everywhere - fibre to all cabinets should be affordable - so that far fewer people need to travel, and there is no need for expensive and damaging new train lines.
This may be the original Batmobile from THE series, but it was not the only one. As with the General Lee, imitations were used for a number of purposes, either to shoot two scenes at the same time, or when there was a stunt (such as they were) that risked damaging the primary vehicle.
A car dealer I knew in Coventry had one of them for a while, as a publicity gimick. I believe it was on a Lincoln chassis, and weighed tons as the bodywork was just metal bashing by hand. It was good for about 40mph in a straight line, the turning circle of a lorry, and the brakes off a bicycle. The suspension didn't bounce as Americars normally do, because it was hard down on the stops at all times.
House Rules Post your own message
It would help a lot if banks etc. would stop sending out emails containing links, OF ANY SORT! The say they will not ask for your security details, but any link is dangerous as it could be to a trojan or whatever.
It would also help if they would not ring you up about something, and ask you to prove your identity without being able to prove theirs. Every time it happens they seem to be startled that I do not automatically believe them.
Last year I said HMV were on their way out. Put simply, they had a high street business, which made huge losses. And they had a live music business which made a decent profit. The first was in a dying market, the second was in a thriving market.
So they sold the profitable, growing, live music biz, in order to prop up the dying retail music biz.
Idiots. If they had dumped the shops and kept live music they would be prospering now. Though I don't think that they had really cracked it in live music. Something that is possible, has been done at small venues, but could be a killer for big bands, is to sell a recording of the concert you have just heard, the actual concert, not just the songs, as you leave the venue. I think fans would go mad for that.
Ah well, I will just go on buying CD's & DVD's from the charity shops, car boots and ebay, where people who have ripped them to their ipods sell them off - at least till their hard disk crashes and they don't, of course, have a backup.
CFL's contain far more in the way of unpleasant chemicals than incandescents.
incandescents always ended up in landfill, but this presented no particular problems.
Almost all CFLs still end up in landfill. Most people have no idea that they should be recycled, and no readilly available method of doing so. I pass my local tip most days, so no big deal to drop in. My elderly mother in law cannot walk the 50 yards to the other end of the block of flats, where the recycling bins are - so everything has to go in the nearby landfill bin. To get to the tip she would have to take a taxi, cost around £15. Not going to happen.
The trouble is that postal ballots are readily subject to fraud of several type;
False applications
Intercepted ballot papers
Forced voting - where one person in a household or community ensures that everybody votes in an approved way
They should be banned unless you can provide a medical certificate to say that you are physically unable to get to a polling station
Contactless is now up to £20. So you can get ripped off for up to £60 if it is nicked - and that's per card in your wallet.
The correct answer to calculating a tip is to round it to £0.00. I tip only when I have received quite extraordinary service, way beyond that called for in any reasonable job description. Tip somebody for squirting boiling water through some low grade coffee - why?
Oh, and I haven't seen a card payment device in a restaurant prompt for a tip in ages - and I would never tip that way anyway as it will be pocketed by the firm, not the staff.
Sorry, no loose change in the pocket.
Over the last few days I have opened a number of accounts on Outlook.com.
The all have the same simple password.
This is because they are intended to be disposable accounts for websites that insist I join with an email ac in order to use their facilities or download something or buy something - you know the sort of thing.
There is no link back to me, and as soon as one account starts getting too much spam or junk I will dump it. Who cares if it gets hacked?
The old myth again.
You do not have to have a licence to own a TV.
You do not need a licence to watch pre-recorded shows (DVD/VHS)
You do not need a licence to use iPlayer.
You only need a licence to watch TV as it is broadcast.
Read the BBC website. It is very clear on this, as was the last, very polite, letter I received from TV Licencing, asking whether my circumstances had changed and I might now need a licence.
So many myths, so much nonsense.
A good security system for sensitive data will have "3 wrong passwords and itr's locked". If you suspect you are going to be asked for this, before you go try and log in twice - hten you can just have a slip of the fingers and you can't get in.
Make up a false Facebook identity and load it with a carefully calculated set of data, with just the odd slightly embarrassing item.
"Blimey, I haven't been to the doctors for years, I've no idea how to log on"
So the council prematurely announced that there was a contract, when there actually wasn't. Not unusual for negotiations to fall over at the last minute, often because the supplier had left insufficient margin in the price to give in on a few points and still make a profit.
Poor negotiation by somebody, but not a big deal.
I refer of course to "The Coldest Place", which appears to be set on Pluto, but at the end turns out to be set on the dark side of a tidally locked Mercury, subject to some libration.
When it was discovered that Mercurary was not locked, he thought about re-writing it, but left it alone in the end.
Now we discover there is probably ice on Mercury, so the story might still work anyway.
I wonder if anybody has told Niven yet?
I'll leave my coat - need to freeze to sub-zero extra fast to achieve a superconducting brain.
The three Mr Vampire movies.
We showed these at an SF Con at the NEC, in a professional Cinema but using our own (experienced) projectionist.
We spent a long time trying to figure out how to show them, as the reels didn't make any sense. In the end we settled on No1, No 3, then No 2, but even so we were never sureif we had all the reels in the right order in the right films (or even if we had all the reels, or if the reels were all from these films.
They were Chinese Kung-fu style vampire movies, with much leaping about as per Hidden Dagger etc., often for no apparent reason. Also they were subtitled, apparently by somebody who had done an evening class in Mandarin, but had only the sondtrack to work from.
Aweful, truly aweful. (and I mean that).
They will have to significantly improve one particular aspect to tempt me into the market - the programmes.
I was staying somewhere with a TV for the last 2 weeks, and hardly switched it on apart from news and weather (and that mainly because the internet was only 2g, so very slow.
I have a great stack of DVD's to play at home - why would I bother with a TV and all the cost of a licence?
I would love to give people my house number. Unfortunately I don't have one, nor a street name, despite the fact that I live in an urban area. And you can't even see my house from my postcode centre about 200 yards away.
When the Fire Brigade came round to do a safety check, I gave them a 10 digit ref, and they still had to phone me and ask.
I have no idea how good their repair guys are, as I haven't actually bought anything from them for years.
But recently I was in urgent need of a new washing machine, so I checked t'internet, then went inot all the local stores to see what machines were available (relatively) locally. Comet had one we quite fancied, a bit over budget, but within the margin, so I found an assistant (which took far too long anyway) and asked about delivery.
The answer was that "Premium" delivery would be done in only 6 working days, for a fee of £20.00, but I could have free delivery in about 5 weeks.
It was probably rude, but we both burst out laughing, and left. Down the road in a small local store we found a perfectly satisfactory machine for 20% less, whcih was delivered free the next morning, installed, and the old one taken away.
This sort of experience is normal in Comet (if you haven't left for lack of a sales assistant) and explains why they have been steadily going bust for years.
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