Posts by Alan Edwards

Re: Depends...

"So you say "Did you call Fred? That absolute (&(£*"&$ of a man, what a moron, why doesn't he grow a pair?" etc. with your iPhone in your pocket and Fred gets to hear it all."

No he wouldn't. You would need to preface that with 'Hey Siri' before she would do anything. If you did you would hear the double-bong as Siri activates, and she would say something like 'OK, calling Fred' before connecting.

I've had zero success with Siri on my iPad. I tried to use it to find out about a foreign city I had no clue how to spell - nothing. It kept mis-interpreting 'Paul' as 'Call' and got huffy about not being able to do voice calls on an iPad. Useless.

"The only reason I'd want that is to hook it to my big screen and do some gaming"

You can if you have a gaming PC as well. Put that in another room and use NVidia GameStream (AMD probably has an equivalent) to stream the game to the NUC hooked up to the TV.

Re: Works 4 me

" I've got nothing to hide, how about you?"

You almost certainly do. You may not know it, but you do. An innocuous example - I just bought a bunch of those foam things that go on doors to stop rugrats trapping their fingers when the door shuts. I don't have kids, they are to stop the doors slamming when the windows are open, but Amazon now think I do.

At the moment it means I get adverts for baby car seats and stuff. It could in the future be connected to other non-rugrat-appropriate things and attract unwanted attention.

It's not now you need to worry about, it's the future.

Re: The investigation should center on...

" I'm don't recall a single simple hardware failure leading to a crash of an Airbus plane"

Kind of a combination of both, but a frozen up attitude vane (measures the angle of the plane relative to the airflow) led to the anti-stall system not noticing the plane had stalled and doing nothing about it.

Daft thing is they were testing the anti-stall and had deliberately stalled it. I can't remember why they couldn't recover it - possibly just ran out of altitude trying to make the anti-stall do it's thing.

Re: Good idea

"Can't you even swap out the spinning disks for an SSD?"

Yes, but you have to take the glass front cover and LCD out to do it. All the gubbins is behind the LCD, the only thing you can get at from the back is the RAM - https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+Retina+5K+Display+SSD+Replacement/30537.

It takes a special tool and a fair bit of force to unglue the glass, so it's probably best to get a specialist to do it for you. It may be cheaper to pay for Apple's SSD upgrade when you buy the machine.

There was a problem with TRIM being disabled by OSX on non-Apple SSDs. I think that's been sorted now.

Re: Arrrrrgh! Zuck has bought the rights to Belgium?

> Not having a facebook (or twitter) account makes me unable to find out about flights now?

No, it's just that the Belgian air traffic control system's communications division is now down to an intern's iPhone after the power was killed to the rest of it.

Re: Am I the only person...

"Personally I would like to option to take my £150 and spend it elsewhere."

You can, you just can't watch broadcast TV if you do.

Can the TV licence, use iPlayer/4OD etc, and sign up for Netflix (Amazon, whatever) if you need to. Job done.

"Would it be possible to fit this one or more of this ballistic parachute system into say a 747?"

One of the engines on a 747 weighs more than that entire car/plane thingy. You could probably do it, but there wouldn't be much room for passengers afterwards.

I wonder if you could use these as escape pods for a 747? Strap a load of them under the fuselage, ram the people in and drop 'em, and hope the smoking remains of your airliner doesn't land on you afterwards.

Re: Honestly, what is wrong with an ordinary coffee pot?

"Just make a whole pot of coffee for cripes sake"

Fine if you drink gallons of the stuff, or have an office full of people. I'd end up with stale overheated sludge before I finished the pot.

I'd rather use the Senseo machine to make myself one at a time. No DRM on that either, works out at about 10p a shot when you bulk-buy the pods off Amazon.

Re: Meh

> Alienware but I've never been a fan of them in a corporate environment.

> Anyone know of any alternatives out there?

Razer Blade?

Depending what you're after, a Scan 3XS could be worth a look. They go up to a GTX980M, and desktop quad-code CPUs, and there are workstation graphics options too.

Re: Apple TV

> And even when I was in GB, I would never have subscribed to Sky

You don't need to, the NowTV box is basically a Roku 2LT running custom software, there's no requirement to subscribe. It has the UK catchup services pre-loaded, and you can side-load Plex. It'd be no use in the US though, the channel store is severely restricted.

There's a new NowTV box due out soon too, already out on the equivalent in Germany.

The Roku 1 is down to £30 too.

Fire TV/Plex

Plex on a Fire TV only does stereo audio out, multi-channel audio doesn't work. It's a limitation of the way third-party apps can use the Fire's media player software, it's not fixable by Plex.

Unless you need the internal storage I'd still go for a Roku, the 1 is down to £30 now.

A/C Fails

I had a couple of -- "interesting" -- AC failures at our old office.

Some bright spark decided that the ideal place to put the wall-mounted AC in the server cupboard was above the Meridian phone system's main box. The heat exchanger in the AC froze solid, which killed the AC. The heat from the servers rapidly melted the ice, which dripped water into the Meridian and killed that too.

Shortly after that we got a proper lock on the server cupboard door, so none of us office plebs could get in any more. The first we knew of the next AC failure was when the partition wall that separated the server room from the office kitchen was hot to the touch.

Re: yes but

> FreeNAS would run like crap on this, AFAIK it needs a reasonable CPU

> and lots of ram (4gb+++)

Only if you're using ZFS. I'm running it on an HP MicroServer with an Athlon Neo and 3Gb RAM and it's happy with bog-standard RAID-5.

> Bring back WHS

There is Windows Storage Server 2012. I've downloaded the DVD image but not played with it yet.

Re: Urgh, how I loathe rain sensing wipers.

> AND YOU CAN'T TURN IT OFF

Yes you can, on a Ford anyway. The automatic setting is where Intermittent is on the lever if you haven't got auto wipers. You've still got 'Off' below and the two continuous settings above it.

Also, there is a sensitivity roller in the middle of the wiper lever. It always runs the wipers once when you turn the sensitivity up, so you can flick it up a notch and back down to get the wipers to run once.

The auto-lights means you can't leave the lights on and kill the battery, and it ties in to the auto wipers and puts the lights on when it's raining.

> I'm confused how one geo-stationary object could be deployed over

> "Latin America, Canada and Alaska", without also including USA etc.?.

Alaska is roughly level with the top of Canada, so you could have one satellite in geosync orbit with two beams. One covering Alaska and Canada and one covering the middle of South America, neither would cover (much of) the mainland US.

Re: Hang on

>Doesn't the DCMA declaration they're required to provide state that false declaration

> is perjury?

It does, but it doesn't mean what you think it means.

The declaration says we believe we own the copyright to whatever we are trying to pull down. It doesn't say they actually do hold the copyright, or that what they're pulling down is what they say it is.

Provided they believed it at the time, it's all good. Good luck proving they didn't, given it was all automatically generated.

There is no penalty for filing false claims, so no incentive to get it right. That has to change, IMO.

Re: I don't watch much TV.

> What is a 'selfie stick'?

When combined with the wifi viewfinder function on a Go Pro, a handy way of getting your head 3 feet above everyone else at the sporting event of your choice.

The next evolution should have a motorised pan/tilt head that integrates with the motion sensors on an Oculus Rift.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQk1u_kvQSA

Animation of a 2-stroke diesel.

Re: Push-button gear change? Really?

> a button activated handbrake on manual which will work only if you put your foot on the

> footbrake so you can no longer "start off handbrake uphill".

Unless they've changed it, it will automatically release the parking brake when you pull away.

If you want worse, try a 2013 Mercedes E-class. The "hand" brake is a foot pedal, released with a lever next to the steering wheel. Mine was an auto, so maybe the manual is different.

Re: What happens to the grid ...

> What happens to the grid when a large percentage of the population plugs their cars in?

If Robert Llewelyn is to be believed, it will be happier.

People charge their electric cars overnight, when they are asleep (i.e. not using the car) and power is cheaper because no-one is using it.

More use overnight will even out the peaks and troughs of demand and avoid having to start and stop generating stations.

> DNLA stream mkv files from my media server

It's DLNA, BTW...

VLC Media Player on the iPad will play MKVs from Plex's DLNA server.

I have found that not all DLNA servers will do all the formats though. The one in my Kingston mobile wifi drive doohickey doesn't do MKVs.

Re: Got it the wrong way around.

> The proper way to undo the damage is to change it so that people who want

> to be monitored can Opt In, specifying exactly who can get the feed.

People do know you can sign up to get a feed of *every* public tweet, don't they? http://gnip.com/products/realtime/firehose/. Samaritans could have signed up to that and monitored the entire (Twitter) world and no-one would be any the wiser.

Apparently not just Twitter either. FourSquare (location) is on there too, and WordPress (blogs) and Disqus (comments).

Re: Let me get this right?

> Mozilla want me|you to install an application on a smartphone which will, as we wander

> around, sniff any wireless points as we pass, and hand that information off to Mozilla?

Sort of. It's recording the SSID (the public name that comes up in the network list) of wireless networks and the GPS location where it spotted it. Not sure how it's going to tell one 'linksys' or 'netgear' from the rest though. It doesn't record traffic

> that it's very bad for anyone else to know where I am and where I've been.

Turn the location services off then. Added bonus, you'll get better battery life - turning GPS off on my Fire HDX adds about 2 hours run time according to the power management app.

Re: box vs stick

> anyone know what the box gives you that the stick doesn't?

It's quite a bit more powerful. The box has a quad-core Snapdragon CPU and 2Gb RAM, the stick has 1Gb and a dual-core Broadcom Capri.

The game controller works with the stick, but it might struggle with some of the higher-power games.

The box comes with the voice search remote, the stick doesn't it's a $30 extra.

The OS is the same AFAIK.

Re: Very worrying!

> you can simply purchase a PAYG soft sim over the web from a provider local to your

> arrival destination

No, you can't. That's the whole point - the 'soft SIM' is built in to the hardware and operating system of the tablet, you have no control over what providers are available. Apple (or whoever made the tablet) are the ones that decide what you get to choose from.

The current iPads have a removable (hardware) SIM. My speculation is that the next generation won't - it'll be Apple SIM or nothing, either through software or by gluing in a nano SIM. You will get to choose from a pre-approved list of carriers and plans.

Re: Philip K. Dick

The estate of Philip K. Dick kicked off when the Nexus One was launched in 2010. The replicants in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep (filmed as Bladerunner) were called Nexus 6s.

Given they are still calling things Nexus I'm guessing they sorted it out, but a quick Google didn't get me any details.

Re: Limitations ?

> Is it x watt per axle or per bike ?

250w per bike, as far as I know

> How much heavier is your bike than a hybrid racer with 27in + wheels,

> long cranks and high gears ?

The Vanmoof Electric 3 is 19 Kg. A 13 Intuitive Beta (random 27 gear hybrid on halfords.com) is just under 14 Kg.

Re: ROTM

> I wonder what a fight between a herring gull and drone looks like

It would almost certainly end badly for the drone.

Gulls are vicious sods, I've seen them intimidate geese that are bigger and heavier than them on the pond outside the office.

Re: Heh

> you can't really assert fourth ammendment protection over some property

> *and* claim the property isn't yours

Why? "It's not my server, and even if it was you didn't have a search warrant". 4th amendment protections apply no matter whose property it was.

The wrinkle in all of this is that the server was in Iceland, so no search warrant was applied for. If it was in the US, if there wasn't evidence the server had a connection to Ross Ulbricht a search warrant wouldn't have been issued (or would be thrown out later).

Re: DIY

> DIY Solution of a HP Proliant MicroServer with FreeNAS (or similar) in this round up

It would be interesting, but it's not in the same league (IMO).

I have a MicroServer, one of the first ones with the Athlon Neo, with 3Gb RAM, 4x2Tb drives in a RAID 5 array and FreeNAS 7 on a gigabit Ethernet network.

I don't get anywhere near the throughput they got from the standalone boxes. I sometimes see 50-60Mbytes/sec writes, more often than not it's in the 30s. Disc throughput seems to be the problem, the HD access light is jammed on.

Setting my version of FreeNAS up was not a beginner job. I played with it in a VM first to get it right, but you had to set several objects up in the right sequence or you got nothing.

You can't upgrade FreeNAS, it's a nuke it and start again job. You might be able to import the array into the new version, but it might not work. If it doesn't your data's gone, hence mine is still on the old version.

You can't expand the volumes if you fill it up, by replacing the discs with bigger ones. I've not had a disc die on me yet, but I doubt it's as simple as throwing a new one in and letting it sort itself out.

If I was starting from scratch again now I'd buy a stand-alone NAS - probably a ReadyNAS 104. But it was cheap (cashback on the server, and the discs were bought before the factories flooded) and it does what I need for now.

Re: Tiles should replace icons fully - everywhere.

> Why not having a mail or messagin app tile (on the desktop)

> showing you incoming messages?

Because the window containing what you're actually working on will be in front of it, unless you have a 3rd (4th etc) monitor just to display the desktop tiles.

You're probably better to use a Windows tablet for that.

Re: Reanult has a problem, called 'marketing'

? A 1 litre lugging round a giant lump like the Mondeo? Can you say over-strained???

The top output of the "normal" 1.0 Ecoboost is 125PS, and there is a new version in a special Red and Black Fiesta that has 140.

The current entry engine in the Mondeo is 115PS, so a 125PS 1.0 Ecoboost would be no ball of fire but should cope OK. It's a turbo, so you don't need to bounce it off the rev limiter to get anywhere either - peak torque on my 100PS 1.0 Fiesta is about 2200rpm.

Re: How much do you care?

I'm with you, it should be 'couldn't care less'.

It's American vs. English English again. This came up on A Way With Words a while back, the 'could care less' is more common in the US, 'couldn't care less' more in the UK. It was probably an American being quoted in the title.

Tempting to end with 'like I could care less', but I do care, so I won't...

Re: Waterproof...

> But will it survive a trip through a washing machine at 60 degrees and 1600 rpm?

Should do, provided it's dried out properly before you try and use it.

My Fitbit Ultra survived that, powered up and all. I thought it was a goner for sure, but I'm still using it now.

Re: Moonraker

Oh, I don't know...

Holly Goodhead (the name, and Lois Chiles)

"Mr, Bond. You appear with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season"

Re: It's obviously a Mondrian

Looks like Mondrian did the original UI design for Metro :-)