* Posts by Muscleguy

1873 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Aug 2008

To cut off all nearby phones with these Chinese chips, this is the bug to exploit

Muscleguy

Re: ...booming mobile security market

Depends, a banking app doesn’t mean you have a payment system. I have the former but not the latter. I’m limited on what I can do on the phone vs from a proper computer which don’t forget could have a keylogger on it.

Muscleguy

Re: Google will roll out this fix in its upcoming Android Security bulletin

I have a Moto phone, not high end. I have had at least two updates since buying it 18months ago.

Amazon accused of obstructing probe into deadly warehouse collapse

Muscleguy

Re: So... this is why Baldy

Of late I find eBay to be fairly consistently cheaper than Amazon.

The next time your program is 'not responding,' (do not) try these steps

Muscleguy

Re: VMs?

Back in the days when Powerpoint was new a young lab head worked up her floor talk saved it to CDrom. Then took the disk down for her talk. Her slides had text but no pictures. She had chosen to link them rather than copy them in. Since she was no longer running it on her laptop PP could not find her pictures.

We all thought “that could have been us, phew!” and did not make the same mistake.

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

Muscleguy
Boffin

Re: Two types of workers

When doing an in situ hybridisation (labelling gene expression in tissue) there is a step where you are just doing saline washes. You are instructed to remove your gloves (it now being safe). This is so the rnases which drip from our fingers* can get into your samples and reduce the background.

The method used to have an ‘add RNAse H’ step. Then someone realised you could skip that and save on it.

*A first line defence against RNA viruses, like Covid. Things would be much worse without this.

Muscleguy

Re: Everybody knows...

Bear in mind the Semitic languages do not have vowels. They are indicated by the little marks above the letters. If you paid attention to that level you might find differences.

Muscleguy
Boffin

Re: Everybody knows...

I often have to print labels for little bottles containing things like acids, alkalis etc. The HSE have downloadable standard warning icons. We have the online version of Word. If you make a label with an icon on it it will not show up in the print label dialogue. This caused me quite some angst until I figured out it didn’t matter.

Still it’s a curious thing that the graphic is not shown.

Engineer sues Amazon for not covering work-from-home internet, electricity bills

Muscleguy
Headmaster

Not slacking

While on Universal Credit during the lockdown period I was working part time as a science tutor. After being advised by others I claimed for power, internet etc costs to defray some of the 63.3% marginal tax (at that time) rate on my earnings. All my claims were accepted (because they were reasonable). All tutorials were online then.

Drone ship carrying yet more drones launches in China

Muscleguy

Re: ROTM

At which point shipping grinds to a halt as does any sea based installation as out of control robot craft cannibalise anything they can to repair and replicate themselves.

Flying over the oceans will also not be possible as the drone ships will shoot down anything as a threat and of course resources.

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Muscleguy

Re: Don’t know about you

I wear gloves in the corridor. Often to and from dissection demonstrations to the pupils. I would be happy to do this without gloves, I’m not squeamish at all. The gloves are so that afterwards I can take the right glover off so I can put my hand in my pocket to unlock the door of my cave (I have no windows and automatic lights).

Gloves in labs are worn for two, sometimes overlapping, reasons.

1. to protect you from what you are handling/working on.

2. To protect what you are working on from you.

If I have been wearing them for 1 but they remain pristine because I’m careful and have VERY steady hands then may decide not to require another pair and wear them while going to speak to a teacher.

Back when I was a researcher we wore double gloves in the Hot Lab. With our finger monitors over the first pair. The nucleotides were working with could not penetrate two gloves with their radiation. Short lived things like 32P. Made the counter scream but had a use by date. We regularly got fresh nucleotides.

These days a lot of that is done with fluorescence since the detectors have become very much more sensitive. The labs of my later career had no hot labs. I did not miss it.

Muscleguy
Headmaster

Re: Don’t know about you

That’s just a variation of the medieval practice of digging pits fitted with sharpened wooden stakes. It was traditional for the installing troops to shit on the stakes so injuries would fester.

Used by Robert Bruce at Loudon Hill. The recent film was fairly accurate except King Richard was never there. The Scots knights were dismounted to encourage the English knights to charge them. Angled pits to either side fo the road, road sown with caltrops. Bogs either side. Scots archers on the hill behind so they can fire over their own troops.

The Bruce was made king because he was clever.

Muscleguy

Re: Next time

Technician where I did my PhD had a Lifestyle Block (NZ term for a house and enough land to keep few animals, mini ‘farm’). They penned their sheep in a corner of the field with an electric fence.

Except several kept escaping. One had figured out the fence was only live when it ticked. So timed their run at it so they were through between the ticks. Others had then copied that one.

I worked with a guy who had worked on mentally deficient sheep, a myelination (nerve insulation) mutant. They had to be reminded to eat. We think sheep are stupid when they are merely, usually, placid and content.

Remember the commando sheep lying on cattle grids so the rest of the flock can walk over them and cross it? Sheep can be smart.

Muscleguy

Re: Next time

Shrooms not having any extracellular space or fluid are therefore rich in potassium there being more K than Na inside cells and vice versa outside. Our cells swim in the ancient ocean still. In a real sense the fungi are the only properly terrestrial multicellular organisms.

Muscleguy
Trollface

Re: Next time

One of the ultra light laser accelerated probes we are proposing to send to Alpha Centauri etc will of course fly right into said cupboard and have the gear to scan, interpret and relay their contents back to earth.

That counts as someone going there.

Amazon puts 'creepy' AI cameras in UK delivery vans

Muscleguy

Re: Getting on the wrong side

Over the pond in NZ they cameras will be completely empty. No Amazon at all. No eBay either. TradeMe got there first. Made two guys rich by local standards.

Muscleguy

Re: "The police forces have given up patrolling"

That is because they are too busy dealing with Dave/Diana who someone has been ‘mean’ to on the internet making a criminal complaint.

Rocket Lab successfully catches falling rocket booster with a helicopter

Muscleguy

Re: "a supersonic ballet"

Their chopper costs (fuel. pilot) are paid in NZ$. The launch fees are paid in US$. NZ has lots of good chopper pilots, like ex All Black Captain Fantastic Richie McCaw.

Muscleguy

Re: Does it work economically

Erm you do know they 3D print their engines? No tooling other than some 3D printers. Want to change the specs? Download a new file to the printer.

Elon Musk wants to take Twitter public again 'within 3 years'

Muscleguy

Re: Libtards meltdown

That’s because they’re the type who get their jollies from getting people who disagree with them banned from twitter. Musk threatens to ruin their sport.

Microsoft Paint + car park touchscreen = You already know where this is going

Muscleguy

Re: Who got out of bed on the wrong side today?

We went there once on the train. We lived just around the corner from a Thameslink station so it was convenient. Door to door almost.

Driving there, from NW7 fraught and stressful and time consuming.

On Christmas night, a computer logs a call to say his user has stopped working…

Muscleguy

Re: It's all broken...

I have had a rather beery one. Processing the homebrew. My clone of Hobgoblin* had to be taken from the fermenting vessel, put in a pressure barrel with enough dextrose to fizz it up and the rest into a demijohn for bottling later. Everything had to be cleaned and sterilised of course. So it took a while, a large bottlebrush was deployed inside the barrel.

Then I bottled the gallon of Czech Dark from the minimally heated bedroom used in want of a fridge controller to mature it and fizz up the barrel (rather well as it turns out). The bottles are in the cool bedroom. Later the fizzed up barrel will be put in the beer fridge overnight. After pitching the yeast it has never been at more than 13C and often much colder. It is CRISP.

*I did not have any fuggles (how can I not have fuggles?) when the wort was boiling so I used Celeia instead. So not a clone exactly, a variation. It is suitably dark red for Hobgoblin. A quite taste of the dregs in the syphon tube are very promising. Third weekend in January i will see how it is, and bottle the demijohn while drinking the barrel. Hic!

Dutch nuclear authority bans anti-5G pendants that could hurt their owners via – you guessed it – radiation

Muscleguy

Re: Double take

It might make them drop off though. A tough ask but kill enough of the skin . . .

Apollo 17 samples yield fresh insights 49 years after mission left the Moon

Muscleguy

Re: troctolite

There are lots of sorts of fish around the world called ‘sea trout’ due to their physical resembles or eating resemblance. The kahawai in NZ was known as such before the Maori name took precedence.

What came first? The chicken, the egg, or the bodge to make everything work?

Muscleguy

Re: The chicken or the egg?

All life contains mutations. It has been estimated at birth we contain 100 mutations neither of our parents do. Mutations provide variation which might make your descendants the pick of the crop.

One of the sprogs has TypeII diabetes the other is hypothyroid. Neither myself nor my wife are either. One is also cross lateral, no innate sense of right or left or preference. That one might be me, I’m ambidextrous. I can do anything left handed except write legibly and that is lack of practice. Neither of my parents are.

Muscleguy
Boffin

Re: The chicken or the egg?

So you can tell a chicken embryo from a quail, a turkey or a guinea fowl can you? At what stages of development pray tell? Have you ever seen a live chook embryo? I have, lots. Manipulated them, tried to introduce genes into. In a lab which went through 70-80 dozen fertile hen eggs a WEEK.

BTW I’m on 4 papers doing the embryology on two mouse knockouts and two knockins. I can spot a mouse developmental defect from 20 paces.

Muscleguy
Boffin

Re: The chicken or the egg?

There is an unbroken chain of interbreeding animals between the Theropod dinosaurs and your chicken. Trying to draw a line and say THAT egg hatched the first SE Asian jungle fowl is essentialism and Biology knocked that on the head, disembowelled it, burnt the remains and threw in a hydrogen bomb explosion.

The question also devolves into ‘when did sex evolve?’ also anisogamy (different sized gametes). Then you have to ask how big the difference has to be before the large one is an ‘egg’?

Nature does not carve at lines just because us puny naked apes like to draw them to make the universe more tractable.

One white cat and a volcano short of a Bond villain: Rocket Lab's Peter Beck shows off the 'Hungry Hippo'

Muscleguy

Mundane

In NZ former volcanoes are ten a penny. Embed your house in a hillside and you could describe it as a lair in a volcano.

The whole of Dunedin sits in or up the sides of the caldera of the Dunedin volcano with attendant former cones. There are organ pipes. Giant’s Causeway type hexagonal columns but seen tall and side on.

If you live in or on the caldera you have a lair in a volcano.

Feds charge two men with claiming ownership of others' songs to steal YouTube royalty payments

Muscleguy

Re: 20m, 5 years stir, 250k fine

New Zealand has proceeds of crime recuperation laws. There their entire suite of assets, their bank accounts etc would be seized and either forfeit to the Crown or go to recompense the victims.

Wide application. Get caught illegal fishing? Your boat even if a multi million $ trawler is forfeit along with your entire catch. Many companies buy their boats back.

If you are personally fishing in fresh water and you put your rod down with the line in the water, your boat and all your fishing gear can be forfeit. You can’t hand it to someone without a fishing license either. I remember a case prosecuted where that happened in front of a fisheries officer.

People are always taking too many or too small paua (NZ abalone) and again if caught all their dive gear, their boat can be seized.

Co-Operative Bank today 'terminated' Capita's outsourcing contract years before it was due to expire

Muscleguy

Re: So

Many supermarkets don’t have windows. The local big Sainsbury’s only has them beside the cafe. Our local Coop was originally a Safeway so they cannot be held responsible for the lack of windows.

Muscleguy

Coop’s site is pants

I have a Coop CC. I can never get into the site. I recently rang them first off without bothering to frustrate myself. They reset my account, I got in set it up, recorded what I needed to. Then four days later I needed to get in again. I get to input the texted number. I do that, I am not cross eyed. It then says something went wrong.

I can get into both my bank here and in NZ and my new zero % card (being paid off) with someone else just fine. The Coop is the ONLY site I have this problem with. I answered my query by putting my card in an ATM and getting a balance, amount subtracted from my credit limit told me what I needed to pay to zero it.

When I have paid the Zero card off I shall ring Coop and tell them I no longer want their card since their IT stinks.

Big challenge with hardware subscriptions? Getting what we need, not what someone else wants us to have

Muscleguy

Which is exactly what my wife, BA Maths, BSc CompSci, MBA concluded. I bought my present phone outright through Argos. Stomped through deep fresh fallen snow 1 mile to go pick it up as the buses were not running.

I have just bought a car but next financial task is saving enough for a new laptop. This one is finally beginning to creak too much wrt modern software. Mid 2010 15" Macbook Pro. A hand me up from the youngest. She is BSc (Biochem/CompSci double major), PhD in Bioinformatics.

Swooping in to claim the glory while the On Call engineer stands baffled

Muscleguy

Re: Hands On

Wrong. I’m a school science tech. We have a plethora of bits of wire with plastic handled banana plugs on the ends, occasionally a crocodile clip which may be insulation shrouded is there.

The banana plugs when the kids pull the wires out of them are often reluctant to come apart. The metal slides up into and out of the plastic. I have a big geology hammer which must be used fairly delicately. I have yet had to grasp the end of the hammer and WHACK! something. Judicious taps suffice.

I only started mid April. The kids are told to pull the plug not the wire but bare wires with separate plugs keep coming back. I have started to hold the metal part in chunky pliers enabling maximum torque to be applied to the wire fixing screw.

Amazing the appreciation you can get for putting some plugs on some wires. They were without a regular technician for 2 years before I applied. I’m handy with a multimeter and a soldering iron as well as pliers and screwdrivers. So I do that stuff in addition to making up solutions and doing dissections for the non biologists.

Music think I’m wonderful too. 4 amps fixed and counting. A drum kit and a keyboard too.

Sweden asks EU to ban Bitcoin mining because while hydroelectric power is cheap, they need it for other stuff

Muscleguy

Re: RE: heat pumps

Mine is a Samsung, so solid Korean. They used them routinely in Korea, have done for years. They leveraged their domestic experience into an export industry. The sort of thing we used to do.

Muscleguy

Re: RE: heat pumps

Mine can be put in even quieter mode as well. As for noise the gas boiler it replaced was both noisy and unreliable. In the week before my heat pump install in August the heating stopped working. Just had HW.

Sitting here in Dundee with the remnants of Storm Arwen blowing about outside making things Arctic I’m nice and toasty. The hot water tank has moved from the attic into what used to be HW cupboard upstairs. The warmth in there is useful for conditioning my homebrew in. Just put 9 bottles of a Caledonian Porter in there. Currently enjoying a barrel of it.

Genetically modified E coli bacteria produce ink for 3D printing programmable objects

Muscleguy

Re: nano bioroids

We are very good at crippling bacteria. E. coli in particular. For eg the sort used in bio labs cannot make the amino acid tryptophan which is very rare in the environment. So to grow them you have to supply in the growth media/plate. It gets used up, growth stops.

So that can be done here with these bugs and almost certainly has been done. So in essence we can switch the bugs on or off, on or off, on or off. Biotech has had this sorted for Decades. Google the Asilomar Conference for the start of it.

NASA boffins seem to think we're worth saving from fiery asteroid death so they're shooting a spaceship at one

Muscleguy

Re: Let's see what damage is done to diddymoon.

A large piece fell off NZ’s highest snow capped alp Aoraki/Mt Cook once. The geologists were interested to get a look inside. “it looks just like weetbix” was the conclusion. IOW this sharp pointy alp is just a gravel pile.

Some guys were recently rescued from high up it in a piece of rescue derring do for the history books.

Muscleguy

Re: Impacts are not always bad

Not the only issue. Both the eruption of the Siberian and Deccan traps triggered mass extinctions. The Siberian ones did the Late Permian, one of the biggest. That gave us the Dinosaurs etc

Though there’s a school of thought which thinks a large impactor on the other side of the globe might trigger flood basalt eruptions by cracking the crust there. A search is on to find evidence of it. Last I looked nothing. Ditto the Deccan Traps.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it an Electron rocket descending to the ocean?

Muscleguy

Re: Helicopter catching

NZ does have very good chopper pilots. They are used a lot there. For mustering sheep on some of the big high country stations for eg. For search and rescue missions as well like plucking an injured crewman off a fishing boat down in the Roaring 40’s. They’ve plucked people off high alpine peaks, they routinely put conservation rangers etc down in otherwise inaccessible places and pick them up again. You can go heli skiing on the glaciers.

And your pilot might be Captain Fantastic himself Richie McCaw in his post rugby job.

Reg reader returns Samsung TV after finding giant ads splattered everywhere

Muscleguy

Re: Opted out

I have too, when my left me I happily boxed up the big flatscreen (non smart) I bought her to game on and put it in her car for her.

Apart from finding myself switching it off most evenings despite having all you can eat Virgin Cable at the time I object on Scottish political bases to paying the BBC tax to be serially lied to both by commission and omission.

I tried Netflix online recently but cancelled after finding no time or motivation to watch things. I have too much to do, too much to read both online and off. There aren’t enough hours in the day in fact.

Remember when you thought fax machines were dead-matter teleporters? Ah, just me, then

Muscleguy
Boffin

Science!

Faxes had their uses. Towards the end of my PhD in NZ I applied for a fellowship to work with a guy in London. I sent the application by courier in plenty of time. 10 days later the courier co rang. The package had been left on the tarmac at Changi and lost. Fortunately they let me fax it in given the circumstances.

Saved by the fax machine. BTW back in the mid 80s NZ had more fax machines per head of population than anywhere except Japan. Being at the arse end of the world in the wrong time zone for the rest of the world made them invaluable as tools of business.

Nobody cares about DAB radio – so let's force it onto smart speakers, suggests UK govt review

Muscleguy

Re: try visiting the Scottish Highlands

My understanding as well is that DAB is mono. While FM is stereo (which is the point of FM over AM). Has that changed? Going back to mono just seemed highly retrograde to me.

Ancient with a dash of modern: We joined the Royal Navy to find there's little new in naval navigation

Muscleguy

Re: Suggested podcast

The person he’s talking to might be cross lateral like my daughter. She has no innate sense of left or right, is not handed in any way. She writes right handed simply because she was taught to.

Sample driving conversation from recently, she is navigating: not that left, the other left!

Muscleguy

Re: Thank you

Same reason why blood bags are still written by hand, in big letters. When a natural disaster hits the power to the tech can easily die and you may find yourself operating (literally) by lantern light. So you need to be sure you are giving the patient the right blood type.

Canon makes 'all-in-one' printers that refuse to scan when out of ink, lawsuit claims

Muscleguy

Re: No print? No buy.

That’s bit of a turnaround. Brother used to be notorious for high ink/toner costs. Cheap printers, high running costs.

Dishing up the goods: Square Kilometre Array moves out of the theoretical and into the contractual

Muscleguy
Boffin

Look up the academics involved in this and contact them.

Scoot on over for a wheely tricky mystery with an electrifying solution

Muscleguy

Re: School science.....

And being arty types probably still subscribed to the vitalist idea of the vital spark, Dr Frankenstein animating his monster etc. All bunkum of course.

There is no possible definition of Life with includes the viruses but excludes Chemistry. Because there’s a continuous line between a self replicating string of RNA in the pores of a black smoker and us. The first is arguably just chemistry, but RNA can be both information store and enzyme and where there is variation there is Natural Selection.

Quantum computing startups pull in millions as VCs rush to get ahead of the game

Muscleguy

Just in

New Scientist reports that the Joint Quantum Institute in Maryland have found how to make the error correction 99.4% reliable. A major jump which means quantum error correction no longer makes more errors than it corrects. This is pretty big if it pans out.

Open Sesame, says Google... to voice identification: Speech ID adds biometric security to call-centre bots

Muscleguy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqAu-DDlINs for the referenced Burnistoun sketch which is very good. Note it is Scottish people taking the piss out of Scottish people.

Pretend starship captain to take trip in real space capsule

Muscleguy

Re: One condition …

Though his rendition of Common People is fantastic and greatly appreciated by the now bearded composer.

Revealed: How to steal money from victims' contactless Apple Pay wallets

Muscleguy

Re: Need a stolen powered on iphone

My UK bank only requires a confirmation code when making payments to new recipients. So I can pay my CC for eg without needing it.

My NZ bank texts me a code to simply log into it. Mind you when I was last in NZ, debit card expired, I went into a branch near Auckland airport presented my passport, was issued with a card there and then, they have card impress machines and 20min later it was active. It was a nice day so I sat on a bench in the sun.