Posts by Kiwi 4368 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Sep 2011
Poor guy died from liver cancer not too long ago. Quite sad really. Nice bloke.
That's a nasty one that one. A guy I knew died from that some years back (also an electrician in Oz, though QLD IIRC). 5 weeks from diagnoses to funeral, and he went to the doc at the first sign of symptoms.
RIP Steve :(
Should have told the friend to get a better designed bike. "Better" meaning that servicing requirements are taken into consideration as part of the design.
If one keeps up the oil changes and maintenance then these issues do not happen with these designs.
If one uses oil not ideally suited to the bike, uses the oil well past its number of Ks, leaves the oil sitting in the bike for years at a time "unstirred", well.....
These machines are designed to be reliable, to be played with on the roads rather than in garages. This is one - the reliability is very good (bikez.com gives it 88.8 vs 74 for the average - no I never read far enough to see what/how they rate :) ) if maintained. If he and previous owner's had kept up the oil changes (or he'd done what I said when he first got the bike - give if a serious oil flush because you really don't know what's been used in it!) and used decent oil then this problem probably would never have occurred. This is not a common service part, and with sports bikes things like timing changes are more likely to last the life of the bike - chances are high it'd be totalled or rust in place than be run long enough to ever need a replacement timing chain.
For my own bike - there's actually no listed replacement schedule. When you have the rocker cover open you measure the distance between 2 pieces of metal and if it is below a minimum distance you replace the chain. You only have the head off when you're doing stem seals or very rare cam/shaft replacement or a few other jobs that many bikes can live without (or die long before they need it).
It's not a high-service part so the ease of accessibility is surrendered to other design features that help make the bike more reliable and/or give it better performance.
Thanks for your post though - you actually got me digging through some stuff and doing some learning/rethinking about parts I've never needed to look at before (like my bike's oil pump - never considered it before but now know how it comes apart should I decide to risk inspecting it - really must get into metal casting so I can re-make some of the less-available parts. Burt Munro made his own pistons in his garage without the use of the internet or modern techniques/materials, so it should be a doddle for me to do it!
Actually, having just found this very interesting article it seems as if Clive did this more than once!
Thanks very much for that! Quite an interesting site.
A 48K Speccy was my introduction to computing (aside from those weird ][E things the school had in a room occupied by even weirder people), and I've had an interest in Sinclair stuff since then though not read too much on the guy or those who worked with him.
Afraid I shan't follow your links..
Years back I ran the sound gear for my church, and in doing that (and other musical stuff I did - I'll just say I've performed live "quite a few times") I got to meet some interesting people, got invited to some fun events, and go to play with some nice kit.
I've not long had the carpet cleaned.. If I follow your links I fear it won't just be drool that I have to clean up! (although I wouldn't have to water the garden (such as it is here) for a month!)
I'll read the page on Sir Clive, but if you want me to look at mixers you'd better have a long chat to Noah first!
I commend someone who could find a rogue registry entry which would cause the cursor to move randomly around the screen.
Never come across it either and it'd be low down on my lists.. But I have seen the entire USB subsystem disappear down the back of the registry..[1] And with some of the faffing registry issues I've spent ages faffing around with, TBH I'd not be surprised if a registry error could cause that.
[1]Had a machine with dead USB hardware. Told customer that a new machine would be needed (one of those models with a specific shape of MOBO for a specific shape of case), prepped a USB with something to let me do some other checking or analysing work (maybe we'd talked of getting a new HDD as well so maybe I was about to clone it). Got started then twigged.. Duh, I'm using the mouse, it's not HW at all! (Oh, IIRC the network was also down - too many years ago and too many otherbroke machines come my way)
That's the day I discovered tweaking.com's tools. Only thing that got the machine going properly.
(Thinking further, I could've been seeking their office keys or something else that would moan with a large scale HW change)
I sometimes pay people for jobs rather than do them myself. When I do, it's because I expect them to be proficient and get it done quickly.
I sometimes do it just because it's a job I really don't want to do myself and can afford to give someone else the $$$. Mounting and balancing tyres is one I usually do that with. Can do it, have done it many times, don't have the space for a fancy machine so I'd rather chuck an extra tenner to the shop.
Though when it comes to re-bores or new rings/honing etc, I would prefer to pay an old hand than to do it myself - decades of experience is worth paying a bit more (though I also really wish I'd done it myself at least once :) )
--> Looks like a car and I swear sometimes they're demon-possessed!
That's where I love the likes of JTUK's comment above. Some people just don't get that there can be a hell of a lot of work involved in diagnosing a fault, and sometime just getting to a part (cars/bikes/trucks) can be hours of work.
You deserve a few of -->these. I know full well the utter joy one feels when one's work gets treated so contemptuously.
To be fair, that job shouldn't have taken 2 hours+. Being charged 2 hours labor to replace a £5 is the sort of thing you associate with dodgy mechanics and rip off TV shows.
I agree in this case that the time to diagnose the fault was a bit long..
However...
A couple of years back a friend's bike was showing signs either of a stretched timing chain or a faulty timing chain tensioner. He brought it round to me (given he doesn't have nearly the mechanical experience I do).
The job required a lot of work. First, we had to take the fairings off to be able to get the tank off - you're looking at some 30 minutes to get it off, and 45 minutes of fiddly annoying work to get it back on.
Then the carbs have to come off. On this model that means removing the air box, which is much more easily achieved with the rear wheel removed. It's about 5 minutes to get the wheel off but at least half an hour to get it back on (several parts have to be lined up and a rear wheel isn't overly light, then there's getting the chain tension right and alignment done - some bikes are very easy to go back together some are a pain). The coils and plug cables also have to come off - but that was only a 5 minute job, and about the same to refit them.
There's a rubber heat shield just above the engine - that's something you can pretty much yank off in seconds, but again it's a good 10 minutes of fiddly damned annoying work squeezing your fingers into really tight blind spaces to get the thing properly clipped in.
Then the rocker cover comes off - basically the top cover of the engine. This is quick to take off and quick to put on, 2-3 minutes coming off, 4 or 5 going on (including some time to put some liquid gasket on).
This is a twin cam bike with a centralised timing chain (4 cylinders). Each cam shaft of course has the associated valve rockers, and although this was a fairly modern bike there's manual adjusters. They all need checking during the assembly even though they shouldn't be out of adjustment. That's often easily a 10 minute job but can me much more on some bikes (the engine has to be wound over manually to a specific position for each valve on some models, and a 16 valve engine requires 16 separate engine settings).
To get the tensioner out, the cam sprockets have to come off the shafts to give enough slack to get the cam chain off and get the shafts out of the way.
Then you can pull the cam tensioner out and diagnose what was wrong. 10 years of few oil changes and no flushes, some crud had clogged part of it's mechanism (it's a hydraulic adjuster) thus it needed cleaning rather than replacing. The part was IIRC more than $NZ400 to replace, 2nd hand ones available but the risk of them failing prematurely would not be worth the saving given the effort required.
The engine's an "interference" engine, IE the valves drop into the cylinder and if a valve is down when the cylinder is up they meet - and a LOT of damage can be done. Thus, it is very important to get the timing right. That's not a particularly hard endeavour but it does take time to do it right. Best case the engine misfires or runs poorly, worst case the engine is destroyed beyond economical repair. It's not one for the inexperienced to try without another set of eyes, and again takes easily 15 or 20 minutes - that's once you have the timing chain in place and the cam shafts mostly lined up. Again you have to wind the engine over to a certain point and then set the cam shaft into place, then repeat for the other one, and repeat a few times to make sure everything works right. You also want to slowly wind it over by hand as if you do screw it up enough it's going to stop hard, and if that's hard enough you might find a valve stem snaps some weeks or months later. That sort of failure can be messy when out on the road.
Of course there's the reassembly as well, and just for a small job on a bike, no parts replaced. More than 5 hours, 2 of us on it, one experienced one intelligent.
I've also done very minor engine work to replace a faulty crank angle sensor in a car. Some cars were made well with them being in fairly external places, others require getting deep into the innards of the engine and require the engine itself is removed than the majority of components stripped (crank case and cylinders have to be separated). A quick check on ebay for "crank angle sensor" shows the prices for varying models ranges from $6NZ to $98NZ, so the part itself could be very cheap but the labour required to remove, strip then rebuild, reset and re-mount the engine is considerable.
TL;DR Yes, some mechanics can be dodgy but many aren't. Some parts do take a few hours to replace and some of those parts are quite cheap. I have plenty of experience rebuilding bikes and a few cars.
here had been a lightning storm and since then a home PC's sound had failed. I arrived and within 2 minutes of arrival figured out that the speaker was unplugged.
While I normally check basic things, it's uncommon for lightning to unplug cables! :)
It worked fine when that was removed and replaced with a replacement from a more reputable manufacturer.
One of my favourite tricks is showing people how sometimes the "name brand" and "cheap no-name" stuff differ only in the labelling, sometimes only in the what's on the box and maybe a sticker stuck on there somewhere :)
One of my favourites was some recent snobbishness by a friend who'd gotten some fairly expensive "quality" hole saws from a 'prestigious' brand. I showed him my cheap kit. 2 differences, the colour of the paint (his yellow but mine red - with yellow underneath!) and the cardboard insert in the case that has the brand name and blade sizes on it. No other difference.
Have seen that in bike parts/accessories and all sorts of other kit over the years. The same machines make the cheap stuff with the same components to the same quality as some of the expensive stuff.
I think I would have jumped into a few troubleshooting steps before re-installing an operating system.
Same. Old wires get "noisy" when the number of still-connected strands drops below that necessary to carry the power. That would've been my first check.
(Also I like to go for the easiest check first - sure sometimes I waste 20 seconds swapping out the mouse, but sometimes it's only the mouse, or only the cable, or only the...)
The only person I know who is scrupulous about paying me for help is a somewhat impoverished ex-con. People with cars that cost more than my house, however, think a cup of tea will probably do.
My dad taught me that when I was quite small.. Rich people seldom get rich by spending money, and like to hoard it as much as possible.
Poor people know how big a difference a little can make, and like to help out as much as possible.
When they said they couldn't afford it I ended up 'wasting' several hours getting the fscking piece of sh*t software modem w**king!
I do a lot of work with pensioners, often people who've been injured for years and do have very little income.
Thus, my habbit is to take someone at their word when they say they can't afford something (and that meagre $15 might be most of their food budget for the week, or all of their travel budget, or...).
If it's so cheap as you imply, I'm often happy to get it for them myself - especially if it's for someone I'd call a "friend" :)
I've done that more than once when I could afford it.. If they can't buy it, then rather than "waste hours" doing something I don't want to do I save myself some time and help make my friend's life a little better :)
(ok we both know I'm weird...)
I like to think that I'm pretty capable with hacking software & hardware together, since that's also my profession, but at this point anything beyond command line Linux gets a big pass from me. I use Linux as a development target (commercial and hobby projects) and am probably more familiar with Linux internals than the average Linux user. Maybe I'm just cursed.
You kinda remind me of a "computer expert" friend of mine (someone who'd give StargateSG7 a run for his money!). He has all sorts of really really weird problems with his systems.
He also believes he really knows his stuff and is constantly messing with his system. The OS builders didn't really know what they were doing so he has to go in and change things. A new machine for him takes him easily 3 or 4 weeks to set up, he messes around that much.
Yes, he claims he knows his stuff but his system is always such a mess. Not long back I gave him a better mobo + PSU etc but asked him to look after it because although it was spare to me it was a loan that I valued. I assumed his problem was a hardware fault. It didn't last long. He did have to try and make it work with his very ancient 5 1/4" FDD which suffered a "significant electrical failure" and also took out the PSU and MOBO somehow (or so I am told - the FDD clearly did have some components experience 'extreme rapid disassembly" but I struggle to figure out how it could fail like that and take out a fairly decent 550W PSU and a good once top-of-the-line Mobo).
His system fans are nearly always screaming when the machine isn't doing much - I guess because he has every monitor and whatever else he can find installed and running. I suspect he actually tries to install every package his manager can see, and he also installs stuff from "other parties" as well. Like I say, he knows his stuff well and knows how to avoid any malicious behaviour by said "other parties".
He knows his stuff well, and all the faults on his systems (I've chopped lots out that I had started to mention) are the fault of others, not him, even though no one else has a system messed around with as much as his.
Me? I have systems run for years without anything other than the initial build and then updates every few weeks. I use them, sometimes abuse them; this laptop is quite old yet runs Devuan happily and gets carried around a lot with me, and my faster machines don't get turned on so often. I do some graphics and video work with it but not much (mainly just cropping or combining stuff).
Pretty sure if he only installed what he actually uses, left the default configs in place etc, his machines would see months or even years on end of trouble-free functioning, not sometimes struggling to stay up for 10 minutes before thermal cutouts get in the way of his enjoyment.
I'm not saying you are like him of course, just that you remind me of him with how you worded things.
I and every other Linux user I know personally manage just fine without issues. But we do the bare minimum with our systems and nothing really special (I mean I do have an M200 and a D630 running server duties but again, nothing special. Default config changed as little as necessary for my needs - oh and the M200 server was built in 2012 or 2013, has not had any significant downtime since 2014 and that was due to PowerCo failings)
If Linux didn't "just work" for me, I wouldn't use it. I am quite lazy when it comes to computers and these days I really do dislike stuffing around with them. I used to love digging in to them a lot but these days it just doesn't interest me, there's a whole different world of fun outdoors and my bike is just the start of that.
.I've got both facts *and* user numbers behind me as proof.
Given your repeated claims that GIMP cannot do layers, when others of us use that feature quite often... That says a lot about the quality of your "facts".
I know a number of professionals who use GIMP, some moving after Adobe's screwups with licensing servers (making their tools unavailable when the server was down some years back), others moving because of the uncertainty, a few because they find GIMP and other tools easier to use, some because it's cheaper.
I'm talking people who design and/or publish books, pamphlets, large-scale mailers (by NZ standards) that go out to a few million homes, posters, shop signage. Around those I know it's rarer to find Adobe products these days then it is to find GIMP - and that's largely because Adobe seem to have worked hard to create an image of unreliability and instability. When your entire workforce cannot do their jobs because some distant server is playing up...
I myself am not a professional graphics designer or editor although I have been well enough paid for some of that work, but I have friends and work-aquaintances who are and these days most of those I know use GIMP and/or other FOSS products, and use it quite well. If these people found Adobe products better that's what they'd use, as they use the tool the find best for the job. They don't use Adobe products because they don't find them to be the best tool for the job. It is, after all, their livelihood.
But while you're claiming your "Facts" and "numbers" as "proof" that people cannot use GIMP, you have people here telling you that yes we do use GIMP. Your claims about what it can/cannot do are simply wrong, and I'd be interested to know why you're here making so many false statements.
Oh, and as to your"'But then you're just adding yet another layer of complexity, having to admin, debug and maintain both a non-native-to-Photoshop OS plus the compatibility layer. Plus any dependencies." - Ive spent more time in admin on my Win7 machine in the last 2 weekends then I have in Linux for several years combined. You actually act as if it is hard to do. And I cannot actually recall right now if I've ever had to "debug" anything at the OS level on Linux (pretty certain it's a "NO" but there may be something long forgotten). I did once have Photoshop Elements installed in an old laptop but I could never get my head around it, whereas I found GIMP intuitive I could not work some stuff out with Elements. I did not have to do any "debug" work on that Linux, I had no "compatibility layer" issues with it - I just slapped the CD in, installed it as I would any other Windows program, and used it without OS issue. Learning issue yes, it really wasn't something I could grasp in the limited time I played with it, but nothing at all with the OS.
I tried PSE several times before reverting to GIMP to do stuff - PSE for an hour, give up, do the job in 5 minutes with GIMP. Someone familiar with PSE perhaps could've done what I wanted in 5 minutes, but I couldn't work out a shorter way so wasted a lot of time with the supposedly better product.
Speak of what you know, don't make up false claims about what you do not.
https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/all/2020/01/24/windows_7_open_source/#c_3960464
Funny isn't it.. Those who claim they know what they're on about make claims like that (see Snake's earlier post at https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/all/2020/01/24/windows_7_open_source/#c_3960464 : "..."Just use GIMP!!" is the call to use a product with NO layer abilities...").
Those of us who actually use GIMP know it handles layers quite well actually. Those of us who use GIMP and share files with full-fat Adobe users find the Adobe users get quite amazed at how we're able to do stuff with GIMP that "only Photoshop can do!"
To a RAW photographer who uses GIMP as his primary workflow it comes across as very ignorant and rude.
Have to agree. I've barely touched RAW stuff, but I have a few times used GIMP in collaboration with someone firmly and fully in the Adobe camp. I had no problem processing her files in GIMP, and when she got over the shock at what I was able to do in GIMP she had no problems processing my work either. The sole reason she sticks with Adobe is she knows it well and has invested heavily in their ecosystem. Yet I learned a lot about GIMP by watching her use Photoshop or whichever program she was using.
I guess I too must be "angry" and "hostile" by pointing out that my work flow works well for me and has earned me money. And it's not like we're common users - today I briefly visited a truly basic user to get his requirements for moving from W7 to Zorin - he uses a huge array of software - Chrome for browsing, Thunderbird for email and Picasa for photo management. Oh and free Comodo AV.
These anti-linux threads go on about how somehow most people could not use it for a desktop, yet fail to see that most people don't even use desktop anyway. While us nerds were fighting the "desktop wars" the rest of the world passed us by with nary a glance in our direction :) (the guy I visited today is too far down the tech skills tree to manage to use a phone for more than calls/txt, hence Zorin to help keep his OS familiar)
But, as the old saying goes, a bad worker always blames their tools.
Some of these arguments remind me of certain garages/tool sheds (the home kind not the "garage" as a "place you take your car to get fixed").
Me.. I have a few hundred dollars worth of tools for mechanical and carpentry purposes. Jigsaw, multitools (one battery one mains, just on $100 worth between them), a couple of hand drills (again 1 batt 1 mains), maybe 30 bucks in a couple of sets of sockets (one large set that's mine that lives at home, a smaller set that goes in the toolbox), some screwdrivers, various spanners, pliers, cutters, soldering tools etc. Some I've been using for more than 30 years now, some I only purchased a few months back. I do all manner of work with them from gardening (including installing irrigation) to automotive mechanics/electrical (my most expensive tool I think is my automotive multimeter, still shy of $100) etc. I've stripped and rebuilt engines with these tools, and used them in computer work and all sorts of other stuff. IE with a few tools I do a lot.
I know people who're fairly well off and have pristine clean garages with big wheeled tool cabinets. A single cabinet costs more than the entire replacement value of my stuff. Said cabinets will be rolled out from time to time when a headlight bulb gets replaced (which usually doesn't require any tools!) or they'll fire up the big compressor to check their tyre pressure. Most of the tools have never been used, the drill press hasn't had power since the day it was purchased, same for the grinder and lathe. Yet these people take their cars in to a shop to get stuff done because their tools somehow cannot be used for it, and they smugly rubbish those of us who have to do our engine work outside because we cannot always get access to a garage for a few days.
Yet somehow.. We do our work with the tools we have, not complaining about how poor they are or how they cannot actually be used for a certain job. There are some specialist tools I lack, eg cylinder honing tools (and I won't try it without the proper kit), and a couple of years back had to hunt far and wide to find some proper valve lapping tools, but for the most part a set of spanners and a good set of sockets will see you right.
I see people talk about home GIMP cannot do what Photoshop can, but I've done paid-for work with GIMP and even more basic tools than that - if the source is good enough then most picture work consists solely of cropping and putting the pictures on a page. I've done site design work, tons and tons and tons of computer repair, set up file servers and the like all with free tools (and contributed to some developers). Like most people I don't need the fancy expensive tools to get stuff done, I can do it just as well without.
There may be stuff I cannot do on Linux but that all f A few mechanics might change their overalls every time they change jobs just to keep an image upalls into the realm of stuff I don't need to do (and most is in the realm of "don't actually want to"). I'm happy just to be able to come home, turn my machine on, and expect it to be working without waiting for updates or needing an AV update or to be slowed down for hours while it gets scanned or... I made this choice to make my life easier, and that is what I have.
Linux DOESN'T have good imaging editing support, as "Just use GIMP!!" is the call to use a product with NO layer abilities (no non-destructive editing) *AND* no CMYK support (no professional-level design/print support).
Funny, I do layer stuff in GIMP quite often. I also export send stuff to professionals who
The print shop I use from time to time uses GIMP, as do several others in the area. They don't seem to have trouble with it.
Not sure you can do CMYK in W10 anyway. I do know one designer who has been having a lot of trouble with it and is still on 7 simply because 10 does not support her printers. Maybe it's a driver thing or something, after all her printers are very ancient where printers are concerned. I think one is 5 years old so not surprised MS doesn't support HW than ancient.
But.. As a % of the general population, how many people need to do CMYK printing each day? How many people actually need to do photo editing that is any more than cropping? Hell, how many even bother to properly frame or crop their images in the first place? 1%? No, I doubt even 1 in 100 people do that on a regular basis.
Whatever reasons that've slowed the adoption of Linux on the desktop, MS have made sure it is succeeding elsewhere. There's far more Android devices than Windows devices now, and W10 is certainly boosting its use considerably. I cannot recall the last time I saw anything older than 7 outside of a retail shop, none of my clients use it, it's not visible on any shop tills (though 7 and even XP still often are)..
It seems that some Windows users are desperately pointing out that they have more deck chairs than anyone else in their little area, while every one else is headed for the lifeboats. I prefer "real computers" to phones/tablets/consoles any day myself but so many people just don't need them any more.
There was a time we didn't need a home computer, very few people had one and they were only used in the office. Given most people don't create much material at home, we're heading back to those days where the home PC is something that just does not exist and the tablets/phones/consoles are widespread (mostly phones). My mother had 8 siblings and my father had 4. Most of them had 3 or 4 kids each as well. Some of those kids are parents and some even grandparents. Across all that lot, there are less than 20 functioning PCs/laptops (counting all those turned on in the last 18 months). No one under 25 in this lot has ever owned a computer or laptop, and none under 18 have used one.
For home use the desktop and even laptop are dying breeds, phones and tablets are what are used. Surface has some small market share there but they're negligble compared with the stats I've looked at today (eg https://www.statista.com/statistics/276635/market-share-held-by-tablet-vendors/ 1 which shows MS as a 1.8% share in 2013, otherwise they don't rate their own mention in any other quarter from Q2 2011 to Q3 2019).
For now the Windows desktop still has a big chunk of the market, but it is declining year on year losing ground to Android and IOS. Not many years ago Windows had absolute market dominance while the idea of people using phones and tablets for general computing devices was laughable. Now, more and more people just don't need them.
I have family members who run businesses using a tablet as the main office machine and the rest done on phones, mostly out in the field. Email, orders, invoices - all done through phones or on the tablet and 'cloud' stuff (and yes, I'd rather they didn't rely so much on it but it makes their business work with very little physical hardware (though with the cost of a single phone I could build a pretty decent server/network for small business use!). While it is just one family I've been noticing more and more the lack of beige boxes in many offices especially newer businesses. And homes? On my little cul-de-sac only 2 homes have laptops and only one of them has any desktops. There's probably 3 "computers" per person if you count mobile stuff, but there's bugger all that's not Android or IOS.
TL:DR The market has changed and PCs/laptops are disappearing from home use. IOS and Android rule there, MS is a tiny blip in the "others" category.
1 I'd make it clickable but that trips recraptcha which I cannot use due to barring google from my machines. About time a tech rag like El Reg came up with a better way to handle that!
no matter how much you try to tell them newer cars are much safer
Efficiency can be argued on a like-for-like basis, ie a landrover vs a SUV. Most minis and other small cars of the 50's and 60's will still outperform many SUVs on fuel use and all will outperform them on manufacturing resource use.
As to safety, no for the most part newer cars are NOT safer. The amount of automatics and distractions mean the drivers are less engaged and are much more likely to be at fault in a crash whereas the older cars take much more effort to drive making the driver more engaged.
Plus, safety tech people say they can only protect you up to around 80kph and then the likelihood of you dying starts to very quickly increase above that - whereas that old granny in the old Morris Minor holding everyone up is unlikely to even reach 30kph let alone 80! :)
But seriously... There are many crashes where no amount of 'new car' is going to help you, but with good 'situational awareness' and well-practised emergency evasive/braking manoeuvres you're much more likely to see the event happening and have time to react to minimise the impact and perhaps even avoid the crash.
[El Reg - we need a "I'm so far off-topic I'm in another galaxy" icon! - could be coupled with a "this is my favourite soap-box du jour" one]
I can assure you that these "responsive" sites are utterly reliant on javascript (mostly imported). Seriously, check out one of your "responsive" sights with noscript--they are utter garbage, and tend to be nonfunctional.
You're correct that many responsive sites - even the vast majority - require JS (and that from untrustworthy 3rd parties), but it is not actually required. Sometimes it's laziness, but much of it is trying to get a page done for a client with management breathing down your neck or every second you spend on the site being a big chunk out of your pocket. Of course, you're up against the free/cheap hosts who have templates that cover most use cases fairly well - these sites are both very commonly used (including by some less scrupulous "developers" who'll charge 10 hours "developing" a site where the stock standard images and most of the stock standard text is used).
Common, and many of the tools around use JS and make it hard to extract (eg Coffee Cup's "Responsive Site Designer" which uses a ton of excessive JS last time I used it, whereas the earlier "Responsive Layout Maker" made JS for something but you could remove the JS later and still have a perfectly functional site).
Of course, that it's easier to cave and use google JS has nothing at all to do with their push for "responsive" designs. That they have extra potential to get more data from you is just an unhappy side effect and nothing at all to do with them encouraging the use of their products which all accidentally have extra data gathering tools embedded...
"trying to make a responsive website" does not depend on CSS as you suggest, it depends on three things; javascript, more javascript and, err... oh, yes, cross-site scripting (You have Google shit on there as a minimum, don't you?)
I dislike "responsive sites" as much as the next decent person, but yes you can do them purely in CSS and HTML. And no need for any of the google garbage spyware.
That said, for many sites they're not being designed to be used with phones or tablets but are designed to be used for decent sized screens. And of course in this specific example we're talking for a person who is mostly if not completely blind (sorry Shadowsystems, I cannot recall whether you have a small amount of vision or not) - "responsive design" can make things much harder for them.
But yes, you can do "responsive" without JS BS and without google spyware.
Why is that Windows 10's fault?
MS says not to use Edge for this purpose, and Win10 cannot connect to the internet. I'm guessing that might have something to do with it (again, the clues are hidden away in clear precise plain text in his first post)
It's not use being stuck in the past with IE and Win7.
Actually what he said was, and I quote :
"...and your own advisories to the assistive tech using public is NOT to use Edg, rather use your own IE11 or a third party browser instead."
So MS themselves tell blind people that Edge is not suitable for people with disabilities (aren't there EU laws around accessibility of sites and software etc?)
He also said :
"...there's no point in even turning my Win10 machine on since it can't even find the internet. Via the same bit of cat5 I'm using through which to type this rant"
So his W10 machine cannot find the likely very common and obviously working NIC or connect to the LAN through it - which is a pretty common complaint. Hardly "more usable than W7" as you claim when it cannot connect to the net now is it?
If that's your level of reading comprehension, perhaps it's no surprise that you think 10 is better.....
Things move on
I see you're also one of those idiotic insensitive twits as well. Are you going to ask him next it "have you tried not being blind?"
People with disabilities can't "just move on" as easily as those without. I realise it may be quite a stretch for you to consider that people who are legally blind just cannot see the world in the same way that you do.
--> Shadow Systems - have one on me, while we imagine together how much fun it could be to 'educate' some people in ways that might make Tarantino have nightmares.
I was on my z440 Kwakker going down the Kaikoura coast road (in pre broken times) behind a guy on a GPZ900. He would pull away from me on the wide sweeping bays but I'd pull up behind him on the corners round the points.
Shh! You'll spoil one of my secrets! My ancient cruiser easily outpaces many new litre+ bikes for 2 basic reasons. First, the shorter wheel base gives me an advantage over the larger bikes even though they're "sports bikes" and 2nd - almost without exception the people who ride them are "weekend warriors" who get out one weekend a month, 3 or 4 months of the year - they barely know their bikes whereas I am on mine almost every day, and I love to push it! (my chicken lines cause me to just about crap myself when I see them, just 2mm from the edge of the tyre)
As to the speed boards... My scariest moment was not too many years back when on SH45 (Taranaki coast road). Went into a corner at 100Kph that turned out to be one that'd normally have a 45Kph sign on it only the sign wasn't there. That day I discovered how far over my bike is before I'm scraping steel. I also discovered the true meaning of "pucker moment". And discovered much gratitude for having learned "trail braking", and aggressively so. And reminded of how important practising "emergency handling" is!
XP used MBR, but from Vista onwards GPT has been preferred, if only to allow use of disks bigger than 2TB
I have to disagree. I did dozens if not hundreds of installs for 7. Unless I had a special reason to my preferred method was to use a 'raw' disk and let the installer figure it out itself. The 7 installer always used MBR to install.
In a few cases I had disks that were already formatted GPT. 7's installer could not see the existing partitions at all and we had to use another disk (sometimes as an intermediary - we could clone a partition to the existing HDD after doing the install and it'd work OK with some changes to the boot loader).
The installers used were the bog-standard images downloaded from MS's own site. I do recall being quite shocked at how the 7 installer couldn't manage GPT, at least on "Home" installs (did 'Pro" a few times, "Ultimate" once or twice).
How dare Google have that option put right there in the installation process instead of buried in some other software settings page of another tool. Soooo evil!
Correct. Most people don't really grasp what those things are, and years of MSI etc have trained people to double-click the file in /downloads, then click on 'install" without looking at anything else. The defaults are fine and who needs to read them?
While this wasn't always google directly (other maliciious sites like cnet also did this - though I suspect they were 'encouraged' by Google), it was basically a hijacking of the machine and installing malicious software on it (yes, changing MY choice of software without explicitly asking IS malicious, especially when the option is tucked away in a place relatively few people ever look. ISTR some had a button for 'click here for other software you may like" but nothing to indicate that software was already selected for installation.
A lot of chrome installation were bundled with other software installer, with a tiny checkbox (checked by default) saying 'Install chrome and make it my browser by default'.
Worse, many had that tucked away in the "custom" or "advanced" installer pages, where few people would normally bother to go (I mean that's where the geeks change the path and other generally minor/irrelevant things, why would I look there? Hmm, Firefox looks a bit different today, wonder why that is?)
Would love for these companies to go for a skate under 'computer misuse" acts!
I have two hi-fi systems in the house as well as a Sonos system, why? convenience... I can quickly say "Alexa play Solar Radio" and it just works, don't have to find my phone or touch anything.
Are people really so lazy today that they'd rather pay someone to record their most private conversations then pick up the remote or walk over to the stereo and flick a button or few?
What is convenient about paying Amazon money to record everything you say in your home?
If you want to be *smart* about predropped runs, when you go to run that cable, also -- add another string to pull the *next* cable with.
Pulley at each end, string on a loop... But yes, I should've mentioned adding a 2nd pairing. Maybe even a 2nd hole right next door in case you want to run signal and mains next to each other and limit interference :)
I actually fitted the tow bar to my last Vauxhall. Last one I had because they stopped making them in favour of giant Vectras.
This thread has reminded me of the importance of checking towbars out properly when buying..
I was probably 14, out with a friend of my parents who was looking to buy a 1st car for one of his kids (a few years older than me). One in the papers was promising complete with towbar, recent oil changes and so on.
The father called me to the back of the car at one point and asked me what I thought was wrong. Part of the tow bar mount was visible in the bottom of the boot, under the spare wheel well. What was wrong? well, it was 4 holes drilled through the bottom of the boot with the bolts for the tow bar through that. Nothing more.
Oh, and the recently changed oil? That still sticks in my mind as well. Watered-down Worcestershire sauce would be thicker than what was in there, and probably better for the engine as well. We did spend a bit more time looking at the car but it was a teaching experience in how to spot what was being hidden, and how to use any one problem to tell you to expect more, and give you some idea of what you'll see.
And please please please don't get me thinking about what I've seen for trailer wiring. The last car electrical job I did was to clean up the mess from what I think was a dealer-installed trailer socket. I need some sedatives and a lie down before the screaming starts again...
That 100m roll of lamp cord from the home improvement store is the very very very best value for speaker cable, bar none. Anything labeled "Monster" is a ripoff.
Pretty much, though you can shorten your comment to just "anything labelled is a rip off" :)
One place I used to spend a bit was on guitar cables - but they were being connected and moved so much you wanted something where breaking conductor strands wouldn't quickly become a problem. At least till wireless became viable.
Get a pair of used Magneplanar speakers, pricing is a lot keener than the Quads on the second hand market and they have better bass... in my opinion (and I have had both)
Thanks for the heads up!
Not many showing online, cheapest locally buyable comes in at a mere $32,000.
However, I do from time to time visit the 2nd hand stores that specialise in audio gear. The may have or know of something (plus a lot of the music stores know people selling stuff that is still never offered online)
Nothing bought in the past year should be broken?
Now.. But what about next year?
The newest piece of my normal kit is my Dell D630 laptop, circa 2009. The amp may be as recent as early 2000s but could be older. Not sure on the Panasonic speakers I use for some of it but they're probably late 90s or early 2000s. Main speakers are 1970s. Barring accident, I have no reason to think any of this will stop working in my lifetime.
Last year? Nothing brough in the last decade should be broken!
My speakers are connected with bellwire.
Do you not realise the damage you've done??? Why, at least half the audiophiles will drop dead in horror the moment they read that!
Well done that man! Clearly you're doing your bit to "combat climate change" by both reducing the population and getting rid of some worthless waste! :)
Light wire here (as in the things you stick in your ceiling to provide illumination).(joyous sounds of distant thudding as even more audiophiles expire)
I couldn't disagree more, having a 'proper' wired speaker system with a descent Pioneer network receiver in a house of an appropriate size is a selling point.
Are your speakers the right style for the sort of music I like? (yes it can make a big difference!)
Are they located suitable for how I want to organise the room? Pretty unlikely. I might love the view out the window and organise things so I am looking at that more than the TV, but I might also hate the view or the wall may not be suitable for having the TV there. If they're in the wrong places (trust me, they are) then they become a negative. I either have to leave the eyesore there, remove them and re-plaster or re-panel, or perhaps remove the speakers and turn the ghastly holes into some sort of nook. Maybe I can put some nice bits of wood in the back/sides and a nice pot plant or something...
Whatever I do with them, they're probably the wrong sort and definitely in the wrong place. And Pioneer kit? Well, ok, not really played with anything they made since 1990 so would be interested for a few minutes. But my ancient amp connected to my ancient laptop makes a decent 'network receiver'. I could run something like MPD and control it from anywhere with Windows, *nix, Android, probably OSX/IOS....
There were a few perplexed faces that the music was exactly the same throughout the house.
That wasn't something I found too hard to achieve..
Appeasing the neighbours afterwards, however.... :)
When I was at school in the '80s friends had quite a bit of stuff around the house, built-in speakers that could be patched into other sources (so the lounge stereo could also be outputting to the garage, and/or the bedrooms etc, or you could have them off another source).
The idea has actually been around a very long time, even though the IoT generation seem to think they invented it :)
I find the ability to synch music playing in different rooms a positive feature.
With a basic FM transmitter (or more than one if you want) this can be done pretty easily.
You can also (I believe) do some streaming via Nextcloud which could manage this - I've not actually played with this myself so not sure.
And you can just have an amp in a room hooked up to a PIR and the same music source as the next room, so when you enter the room the amp comes on automatically and plays the same source... (ok maybe I should be in bed, start to get weird when I get this tired :) )
One other thing you may find useful...
Get a few string-line drops run in parts of the house. These are holes in the walls (say in/near corners of rooms) with a line of string running through them. If, later, you find you want to move or add cables, you can cut into the wall where one of these lines are (be sure to have them measured properly :), attach the cable to the string, and pull.
Microsoft are at least up-front and clear about how long their support will last for, from day one, and what will happen when that support ends. They're far from a perfect organisation, that's for sure, but they don't deliberately stop an old operating system from working just because it's 'out of support'. Yet.
Yes. W7 with GWX and the trickery they employed to get users to "upgrade" to 10 (like the "close window" being "install" instead of the ususal "take no action".
5 years ago they did say that this month W7 support would end. They did not say there'd be nagware updates, attempts to shovel spyware in via security updates and so on
As for drivers, if you're unable to connect a decades-old scanner to your new PC because there's no driver for it, that's hardly the fault of the OS vendor. Would you blame Ford because your old Vauxhall's towbar didn't fit your new car?
Bad example :) I know I have the skill and could easily borrow the few necessary tools I don't yet own to do that. Pretty sure Jake would have both the skills and several options of tools old and not-so-old (and maybe very very old).I'm also certain a few others here at least would find such a job reasonably easy, depending on a) motivation and b) desired quality of finish.
[EDIT : Probably can add MJI to that list :) ]
Drivers could actually have been written in a manner that would've allowed stuff to work long after the OS has moved on. Like at least one other here has mentioned, I personally find the piles of e-waste we must make quite disturbing. Sure, some changes are better - I enjoy working on my 47" LED more than many of my earlier (and hungrier!) CRTs, and I certainly am glad my 70KG 32" TV is no longer around, I even find tablets enjoyable. But many companies made my old tablet harder and harder to use, no updates for the OS and as time wore on programs would be updated and break or "because security" they'd no longer be supported by the other end.
Yes some modern hardware is better, some is more efficient and does the same or better quality of work. But some isn't nearly as good as what we've got, and some is expensive to replace. Sometimes it's wasteful as well to have to replace good enough HW because of OS changes.
you don't really want to constrain it by using shitty entry-level patch cables.
It's basically a physics/electronics thing. Your cable needs to be of a suitable capacity to carry the signal, and may need to be shielded. I guess certain wires may perform better than others but the core is what counts, whatever it is plated with doesn't matter.
The connections do matter, but again a cheap RCA plug is as good as a gold-plated one so long as it fits properly. Any 'looseness' could cause problems - but I prefer screw/clamp terminals myself, it's not like I move stuff around much. But hey, if a cheap/free pair of speakers has RCA then RCA is what I use. If it's DIN, DIN that's what's in...
I have met some horrible cables and wires, ones I cannot for the life of me figure out how something so simple gets made so wrong..
(My priorities - 1) Speakers 2) Amps 2.00000001) Source 3-10) intentionally left blank 11) wire)
I'd really love to hear electrostatics sometime, comparing against the setup I built. Sadly they're fairly rare these days.
Not sure I'd like to do that.. I may've built out my stuff good enough that the dream of the memory I have of that one time would be shattered.
Then again.. I'd have electrostatics available to me!!!! I think just to hear a pair playing the sort of stuff they're intended to play would be a real treat.
Last pair I came across was 2nd hand pair at a 2nd hand audiophreak store (the guy has a LOT of stuff, not "audiophile" but knows his stuff and loves audio gear).. Priced WAAAAY out of my league, in fact priced more than all my furniture, lifetime of cars and bikes, all my audio equipment including a couple of nice bass guitars and one generic solid 6 string combined. One day...
So you've never bought a TV, digital or analogue?
Well... The only Philips "signal" that has ever been shown on any Philips TV's I've seen is the Philips Test Pattern.
I've seen some Sony TV's displaying Sony movies, but they're not dependant on Sony - you can play movies from other makers on them.
I've not seen any "Sanyo" signal on Sanyo TVs, ditto for LG, Akai, Teac, Technics, Panasonic (and National), Samsung etc etc etc.
So as far as I know, no TV's are dependant on the company you get them from to keep working. Some Smart TV's may lose some (or all) of the "smart" stuff over time, but pretty sure you can still plug in a DVD or PC or STB and keep using them as basic TVs.
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