* Posts by TheBully

31 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Aug 2009

Fake 'U's! Phishing creeps use homebrew fonts as message ciphers to evade filters

TheBully

Re: People stil falling for the fake email.

What annoys me is how legitimate companies are sending marketing emails that look like they have gone out of their way to make the email look suspicious. I keep getting one from Parcel force, click here to download your free whitepaper on growing your business. A quick google of the domain in the URL doesn’t bring up results that would confirm either way since they use a different potentially phishyish looking domain for the download. I have even had genuine invoices come in where the wording of the email is really vague and it screams phishing attempt. Also local councils now seem to be emailing businesses with these really vague non relevant requests for tenders requiring users to click here and log into so and so corporate sounding thing to bid for business and the users are like eh wots this is it a virus. Just assume every email is a virus or a scam unless you are expecting it.

Found yet another plastic nostalgia knock-off under the tree? You, sir, need an emulator

TheBully

CD32

I was playing a lot of old games over Christmas using WinUAE on an old ThinkPad with HDMI I salvaged connected to my TV and a cheap Trust joypad and one of those little handheld keyboard/trackpad contraptions. Mainly CD32 games as it doesn’t require fiddling with the settings to swap the floppy images. There are lots of compilation CDs out there that let you boot WinUAE from the iso image and then select the games with no swapping also lots of old abandonware cover CDs. What strikes me is how some of the early A500 games look better than the more recent AGA games because they better used the colour palette available to them and put more work into the graphics. A great example is Xenon 2 Megablast the limited palette seems to improve the look and feel of the game. Other ones I was playing were Fire and Ice which felt very Christmassy, Apidiya, Alien Breed 2, Project X and one of my old favorites Moonstone which still seems to crash randomly like it used to on my A500. :)

On the first day of Christmas, Microsoft gave to me... an emergency out-of-band security patch for IE

TheBully

Re: remote-code execution hole in the browser's scripting engine.

I use noscript on Firefox but it is a pain in the gulliver it keeps forgetting that I have whitelisted some sites and I keep having to go twiggle with the little icons in the top right only to then get the cookie warnings and paywalls. If I want to say book a ticket and buy something and I want the payment to go through I switch to chrome as otherwise I will be faced with endless barriers and refreshes.

Mirai variant turns TalkTalk routers into zombie botnet agents

TheBully
FAIL

Is there a hard and fast way to know if your router is pwned

I have talktalk router at home, tried a port scan on mxtoolbox to my public IP and its not showing anything open. Really I should change from TalkTalk but I think my contract restarted when I upgraded my fibre to the faster option last year (before the data leak). I originally got it for the youview box and having a few included sky channels but the thing drives me and any guests at my house up the wall as its so slow.

Press the channel you want and 5 seconds later it goes to the channel only to hop back because all the impatient button presses on the remote are cached in the buffer. ;) Also I think the box has a dodgy dry joint in the HDMI socket as its keeps going all pixelated like I have bad reception and I have found that wiggling the HDMI lead in the socket fixes it for a while. Being able to scroll back in the guide for catchup is useful though or is if you have the patience.

Internet is alright otherwise, good and fast.

Meh

Samsung in second SSD slowdown SNAFU

TheBully

Got 8 of these

I have 8 of these 120GB ones in a HP DL380 G6 (RAID 10) and performance has not been what I envisioned...

Russia, China could ban western tech if they want to live in the PAST

TheBully

Re: Heck no...

Well I have found a few others have had the same issues when I have been searching forums for a fix, one guy modified his antenna with foil. I was really chuffed to bits with the phone up until two weeks ago but now when I use it its so annoying it makes me want to smash it. Have to hold it up to the window to get enough signal to send a sms message, people complaining that my phone rings their end but I don't even get a missed call notification. I am getting onto the seller to see if I can return the phone for repair or something.

The 990 is a nice phone a friend of mine bought one after seeing my 980 and that one is still going strong. Back to my old Nokia N900 now and it gets full signal in the places the zopo used to get none.

TheBully

Re: Heck no...

Well my Chinese Dual Sim Zopo ZP980+ has just gone tits up after 4 months with dodgy or non existent reception on both SIMs. Thats £220 down the swanny and now I have to buy another phone HTC one or S4 probably. Chinese phones. :(

Xenon: Bitmap Brothers' (mega)blast from the past

TheBully

Somewhere at home I have the CDTV version of this knocking around, I had the A500 with A570 CD-ROM drive :) The CDTV version had a better soundtrack and has extras on the CD with pictures of the artists etc.

My last Amiga was a CD32 with an SX1 expansion that allowed me to use a floppy disk drive and keyboard and mouse effectively turning it into an A1200 with CDROM.

Apple Mac Pro: It's a death star, not a nappy bin, OK?

TheBully

Multiple Screens?

I only see one HDMI port on the front of it can it support dual screens out of the box?

El Reg BuzzFelch: 10 Electrical Connectors You CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT!

TheBully

Re: #3 - terminal blocks

One day back when I first started there was a stink in the server room on Monday morning. A rat had got tangled up in the rats nest of patch cables that lay in front of the rack cabinet and had died. ;)

HELLO LENOVO. Do you really, really want to make smartphones?

TheBully

Thinkpad phone

I cant wait until they release a nice quality Thinkpad style android slider with a built in keyboard sort of like the Nokia N900 but with a 5 row qwerty keyboard, fast processor aluminum alloy chassis and high screen resolution. :)

Analogue radio will CONTINUE in Blighty as Minister of Fun dodges D-Day death sentence

TheBully
Pirate

Dab in the car

I have DAB in the car but tbh I have been listening to FM lately. I had to retune my set to another London only feed which was supposed to offer much higher quality. However it doesn't sound very good at 80kbps and reception is not as good anymore. So much for being cultured, I am listening to random pirate stations now ;)

OK, so we paid a bill late, but did BT have to do this?

TheBully

Re: Why? @Pen-y-gors

I have had good service on Talktalk got residential FTTC and its pretty fast. There support is good if you go on the user forums. Post your problem on the forum and the staff will get back to you and fix it or book an engineer that's how I got my issues with the Youview sorted anyway. I once had Plusnet business ADSL at home and for 4 months I could not authenticate with the details they gave me until finally I got through to someone technical who knew what they were doing and fixed it for me.

'Liberator' 3D printed gun enters London's V&A Museum

TheBully
Windows

>>>The Liberator is not unique in being a dud product that nevertheless made it into a prestigious museum within months of its launch. IBM's 1995 ThinkPad 701, better known as the butterfly thanks to its folding keyboard, made it to New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1996.<<<

That ThinkPad 701 looks awesome, what was dud about it, didn't it actually exist? I certainly couldn't find any old ones for sale online.

Microsoft: YES Windows 8.1 is finished, but NO you can't have it

TheBully
FAIL

Annoying problem

I had an annoying problem with the Windows 8 on my work desktop yesterday. Returned from holiday to find someone had turned off the server room air conditioning and a couple of servers had hung. My windows 8 was playing up the music app Xbox Music was taking over the whole system replacing my desktop with an orange screen and a picture of headphones. ALT F4 or CTRL ALT Delete would not get rid of it. I tried moving it to my second screen but it was constantly grabbing window focus so I couldn't use the desktop. It still did it after logging out and back in and after a restart it started doing it after half an hour. If I killed the app in task manager it just started up again instantly lol. I ran windows update and it has not done it since but it happened just at the wrong time when I needed my desktop to remote in. :(

Curiosity photographs mysterious metal object on Martian rock

TheBully

The shadowey shape under the object looks a bit like a Ceti Eel lurking under the sand.

Sheffield ISP: You don't need a whole IPv4 address to yourself, right?

TheBully
Meh

Re: I dont really understand

>>Let me ask you. Do you know, off the top of your head, any IP addresses of servers on the Internet?<<

Pretty much just public IP addresses of my networks and dns server addresses for configuring forwarders and troubleshooting connection issues etc. I have not got my head around the ipv6 what address ranges to use for internal hosts etc try to avoid it all together if I can all I know is I once installed SBS 2007 and thought it would be a good idea to disable it which made the machine run like treacle until I put the tick back in. I have not disabled it on anything else since except for dialup vpn settings. Its all a bit here be dragons.

TheBully
Meh

I dont really understand

IPv6 the addresses are too long and have hexadecimal I can work with IPv4 addressses and have certain ones commited to memory dns servers etc. I remember studying how to work out subnet masks etc for IPv4 and that seemed complicated for my little mind how are you supposed to do all that with those addresses. Too complicated might as well just jack it all in and become a dustman.

Amazon-bashed HMV calls in administrators, seeks buyer

TheBully

I went in HMV last year

Looking to buy a vinyl record of Amy Winehouse but they didnt sell any Vinyl so I had to buy the record off ebay. Last thing I bought from there was a boxed set of the Godfather movies for a tenner as computer exchange didnt have any second hand ones cheap.

Do users have enough power?

TheBully
Trollface

Re: Whatever.

This is my network. There are many others like it, but this one is mine. My network is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. Without me, my network is useless. Without my network, I am useless.

Heroic Register reader battles EXPLODING COMPUTER

TheBully
Mushroom

Exploding PSU

I once had a really good quality £100 PSU blow up (one of the ones with the aviation modular connectors) but luckily my motorboard survived. Nothing to do with the PSU though.

I had a picture hanging above the computer on a nail and a month or so before the the event the picture fell off the wall with the nail lost in the rats nest of cables. Turns out the power socket had worked its way loose from the surge protector strip and there was a 3mm or so gab between plug and socket. Some how the nail found its way in between the plug and socket and caused a short the BANG gave me quite a fright it did!!! ;)

BBC in secret trial to see if you care about thing you plainly don't

TheBully

Fitted dab to my car this week

I bought a new fangled Kenwood DAB car head unit with a usb socket that can take a flash drive this week. Was having trouble with analogue reception unless i wanted to listen to BBC radio or Kiss etc only about 4 channels I could get on FM without very bad interferance. The radio came with a new antenna which stuck on the corner of the windscreen but found I was losing reception on the DAB stations on my drive home over the south downs and didnt like the look of it a bit messy. I bought a splitter device that goes behind the head unit for 20 quid and converts the existing car aerial into a DAB one and the signal is much better just cut out a couple of times right in the vallys bits or near big hills. I have noticed some stations have very low bit rate though, one station last night Absolute Rock I think had a 60kbps bit rate which seemed to make the talking sound way too deep and harsh like speaking into a mic thats too close.

Much prefer DAB now as cant seem to get anologue reception very easily, my old sony radio alarm clock is waking me up with horrible static buzzing now because I cant find anything on that either well except for Radio 4 but I dont trust that to wake me up ;)

Dole office to roll out digital benefits to north-west – 6 months early

TheBully

Are there no prisons, no poor houses?

Nuke support in UK hits record high

TheBully
Happy

Why dont they did out huge underground tanks the size of lakes and fill them with acid and great big lead plates like giant car batteries. Then put windmills everywhere to charge up the giant underground lead acid batteries.

Or they could put all the solar panels out at sea and then have reams and reams of copper cable or spiralling around so that the power would take 12 hours to travel down the cables to the consumption point so the mornings power would arrive on a 12 hour delay for at night when its needed.

Hands on with the Sony PlayStation Vita

TheBully
Thumb Up

Last week I bought a PSP 3000 used on ebay for £60 with a couple of UMD games after finding myself struggling to play games on my SGS due to fingers missing the button images on the touch screen and not being able to see all the screen due to it being obscured by thumbs. There is a world of difference between the commercially produced games I have played on the PSP compared to the ones I have downloaded on Android Marketplace. I might get one of those these when the price goes down :)

Also as for the issue with the new memory stick I bought an adapter that is basically a memory stick pro case wtih two microsd card slots in the side of it. I imagine they will bring out the same sort of thing for the new cards.

Will News of the Screws reappear as Sunday.co.uk?

TheBully
Thumb Up

Lord Archer must be pleased :)

He must have a big grin on his face reading about this. :)

BT cheerfully admits snooping on customer LANs

TheBully
Big Brother

BT Home Hub

I have an old white BT home hub at home (only used as ADSL router) which has started to worry me since it now has sprouted a second IP address and a port scan shows that said IP is listening on Port 1723 which I find no mention of on the web based interface. Might swap it with something more generic.

Samsung Galaxy S II dual core Android smartphone

TheBully
Boffin

I got the Galaxy S a couple of weeks ago

I got the original Galaxy S a couple of weeks ago and found that the OS was really flakey (wifi crashing every 2 mins) and the battery was lasting less than a day. I found a guide and flashed it with a third party rom (Darky's Rom) which is based on Gingerbread and now I am really happy with the phone and get a couple of days out of the battery. I can only imagine that the SGS2 will have similar issues on the stock firmware but think it will be a while before the bugs are ironed out. Samsung released Gingerbread a few weeks ago for the SGS but then retracted the update from their Kies software a week or so later because it was causing problems, so there was no official upgrade to solve the issues I was having with the official Froyo. So even after a year of the phone being supported I had to risk bricking a brand new phone installing unofficial firmware to get it to work properly :P

LinkedIn sets float price

TheBully
Unhappy

Closed my account

I recently closed my account because I kept getting emails every day reminding me to connect with random sales people. I never used to get the constant reminders only in the last few months.

BOFH: Little ups and downs

TheBully
Thumb Up

Genius :)

Great to see the BOFH back on form again :)

Pressure group aghast at Hillingdon ID card scheme

TheBully
Unhappy

MIFARE

Mine turned up on Friday and I stuck it in my wallet. Found that I couldn't swipe my wallet on the oyster card reader with the card in there so took the hillingdon card out. Seemed to be interfering with the Oyster reader so maybe it uses the same tech.