Posts by Alan Edwards 514 posts • joined 25 Apr 2007
One of the best speaker cables I had was solid core twin-and-earth building power cable, cost me nothing.
I asked a relative who was working on a building site putting up warehouses if there was any chance of some scrap ends they were throwing out, they gave me about half a drum's worth.
I've still got the heavy granite isolation platform I adapted from a piece being chucked out by a stone masons. Stuck some rubber feet on the unpolished side, job done :)
Would they not be better building the display (flexible OLED or e-ink) into a collar that goes around an existing wine bottle? For extra points, add a handle that makes it easier to pour?
Do wine bottle labels have barcodes? (sorry, non-drinker here) If so, add a laser barcode reader to automatically read the code and download the wine information over wifi and a web service. Otherwise, use a mobile app pull down the info and Bluetooth it over to the display unit.
> Windows 10 runs quite happily in 2GB of RAM
Windows 10 itself runs in 2Gb, but none of the stuff you need to do work does. At a minimum I need Outlook, Chrome and Skype for Business, and 2Gb RAM on an HP Pavilion x2 isn't enough. It spends it's life swapping bits in and out.
4Gb is enough though, just. I briefly used a Celeron-based Acer with 4Gb, and that was happy.
If this was a T430-era laptop, the fix would be to remove the back cover and give it a quick shake to get the loose screw out. Instructions for doing that is in the freely available hardware manual.
Of course the battery on those was hung off the back, so a loose screw inside wouldn't set fire to it anyway.
Every day I seem to end up hoping more my T410 never dies.
"I'm Fred Bloggs, and I'm 42"
"OK, how do I know you're really Fred and not his 15 year old son"
"Trust me, this is Fred"
This will last about a week before age verification credentials get posted to a FacePalm page. It needs 2FA or it's pointless, which means it's not anonymous..
It's always the same, the first half hour after an update installation is spent turning off the crap you don't want, doesn't work properly, or wants to upload a running commentary to the mother ship.
The OS is supposed to be there to work for you, you shouldn't be fighting the OS for control of the hardware.
No, because it's not "produced solely or principally for the purposes of sexual arousal". The main purpose of a modelling site would be to sell modelling services, if you get your rocks off to it that's your business.
It would be a Rule 34(b) - if it exists, someone will be "into" it. Nothing would survive.
My phone has two SIMs on two different networks, one for work, one is mine - does this mean I am two people when the census-by-mobile counts people? If I've also got my LTE tablet with me am I three people?
I really don't think this is going to be accurate enough to use for a census. You'd need to follow it up with more accurate measures to correct for errors, so you might as well do it properly in the first place. The census is supposed to be a count of people, not a rough guess.
> I really don't understand the opposition some people have to progress.
I'm not sure it's opposition to progress, it's opposition to handing it all over to an external 3rd party company.
My opinion? It should be an extension of the existing NHS-run non-emergency phone service, not an all-or-nothing that makes you switch GPs.
For all it's failings, at least you know the NHS is not going to sell your medical history to advertisers. Or insurance companies.
Ob. Douglas Adams reference: "I've gone off the idea of progress, it's over-rated"
As the system requires a transponder, I'm guessing this will only detect DJI quadcopters? Even then you can nobble it by removing the transponder module or it's antenna.
At best it will only catch people who accidentally fly too close to an airport or lose control of their drone, it will do nothing against the people who are determined to do it (who are the ones you want to worry about).
If you want to fly across an airport's controlled airspace it's not exactly rocket science to build a drone that does it autonomously with no radio emissions, no controller signal, and nigh-on undetectable on radar.
Had quite a few ThinkPads over the years, and loved most of them.
The T43 was a bit of a donkey, that went in favour of one of my favourites, the T61. My T510 was dropped by it's previous user hard enough to break the plastic fan vent and bend the heatsink fins, and was still working when I was made redundant.
My personal laptop is a T410, I have an X240 from work, and my mum has a T410 I set up for her. I've played with getting a X230 or T420 for myself, but I don't really like 16:9 screens.
> But who wants a san attached loud fan blowing server running 24/7 in their home.
I have a self-built VMWare ESXi server and a NAS running 24x7. The HP MicroServer that runs the NAS is give-or-take silent, the PSU fan in the VMWare server is quiet enough that I don't notice it.
The noise factor has stopped me getting a cheap ex-corporate server off eBay though. We once powered up a de-racked ProLiant DL-something in the office, damn that thing was loud. Lots of tiny screaming fans.
> I spend some hard time preparing a presentation for MS Office,
> it turned out they had OpenOffice.
I can (just about) beat that. I was supposed to be being trained on JSP, Java Server Pages. The course they sent me on was JavaScript. Hey, it's got Java in the name, it's all the same thing.
Turned out I really liked JavaScript, and make part of my living at it now.
There's a meeting room at the office in Bracknell that got nicknamed The Fridge because everyone thinks it is too cold in there. I suspect it got partitioned off after the AC was set up, so gets cold air all the time.
Handy for me when I visit because a) I like it cold and b) no-one else ever books it.
> My experience with the Spectre X360 i7 version has been the worst
> of any piece of hardware I can recall in at least 2 decades.
You've not used a Pavilion X2 then.
2Gb RAM and an Atom X5 make for painful progress, 32Gb storage means you can't install OS upgrades without an external drive, plus a MicroSD slot that works fine until you actually try and use it, at which point it sometimes dismounts the card without warning.
Piece of junk.
Not as bad as a Dell Venue 8 though. 1Gb RAM that is mostly taken up with the Android-to-x86 translator, leaving not enough to do anything else with.
The gas-turbine motor alone is 3.4m long? Does this "drone" happen to have a human pilot and a couple of machine guns too :)
The gas-turbine engine in Rover's experimental turbine car was tiny, smaller than a petrol engine and produced a hundred and something horsepower.
Maybe they mean the entire craft is 3.4m long?
> Ever try using an Android device to do work?
Yep. I've sat in a coffee shop in Birmingham with a Nexus 7, monitoring our incoming ServiceNow queues and doling out incidents as they come in.
Once you persuade ServiceNow to not load the tablet interface there's not a lot you can't do, especially with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. I wouldn't want to write JavaScript on a 8-inch screen, but you could if you *really* had to.
A Windows 10 machine with 2 gigs of RAM though? Forget it, it will spend it's life swapping bits of it's brain in and out once you've got Outlook. Skype and Chrome open.
> It will be excellent if ISIS' drone fleet get bricked soon.
Actually it may not be. Brick the COTS ones they're using now and they learn to build their own, using open source flight controllers and ESCs. They then have the knowledge to make something *way* more capable than DJI makes.
You want a beast that uses 8 motors (two in push-pull on each corner) and can lift a crate of beer? Have at it, the controller already supports it, the motors and ESCs are cheap.
In short: build yer own! It's more fun, and you end up with something better.
Just got back from a holiday on the Isle Of Man, first time trying out this free roaming malarky.
Tablet, phone and wireless router all roamed on Sure, which has just launched there. EE sent a 'Welcome to Guernsey' SMS, which got giggles from all the EE users on the ferry.
EE roamed onto the 4G network, Three got HSPA+. No problem with speed off either, but I wasn't exactly hammering it. It all just worked, apart from the router that took about 5 minutes to register itself the first time.
> external rail fitted with an infra-red homing missile
Missile's decision making process - "Shall I lock on to the tiny point that is a few degrees above ambient, or the giant ball of fire over there". Jet engines run rather hotter than drone motors, you'd end up shooting yourself down.
Trying to hit an Inspire 2 from a motorised 50-cal turret would make for better in-flight entertainment than any of the movies though.
It's more about the mundane uses of a pocket tool for me.
Yes I could use my Leatherman to cut the seatbelt in a car wreck, but it's far more likely to be used for slicing a parcel open, cutting up fruit, cutting the top off an instant coffee packet with no perforations, chopping an errant branch off a bush that's about to take a layer of paint off the car. All things I've done with my Leatherman.
An office where I used to work had a small room that housed the servers, network gear and phone system, and had a wall-mounted AC unit.
One day, we came in to find no servers and no phones. During the night the AC had died because the heat exchanger was a solid block of ice. The dead AC meant the servers rapidly heated the room up, the ice melted, dripping water into the phone system's main box which was mounted directly under the AC.
They may have uses (not to me, I don't like voice control generally) but they need to fix the authentication before I'll even consider getting one. A device that can be taken over by a random voice on TV has no place anywhere IMO.
At the very least the activation phrase should be customisable to anything, not just 'Alexa' or 'computer'.
"I love the way people scream monopoly over Microsoft then go all quiet when you mention goggle..."
The difference with ChromeOS is that they didn't take an existing OS and nobble it so you can't run Firefox or change the search engine, and there isn't a magic "pay $50 to turn it back on again" switch.
If Google wanted to screw you over with ChromeOS they could, they have full control over the OS. Lock the search engine down, and only pre-approved Chrome extensions allowed, so no AdBlock or uBlock.
> they will have to make the transmission and storage of any information in an
> encrypted format illegal
Trouble is, what is encrypted data. I can see a lot of conversation like:
Gov: Why are you sending encrypted data?
Me: WTF? I'm not
Gov: Explain this then...
Me: It's the install keys for a bunch of products on our shared MSDN account
Gov: (eyes glaze over, understood some of those words) Rubbish, it's encrypted, decrypt it
Me: It's not encrypted
(Rinse and repeat)
Of course it would also ban SSL and WPA encryption on wifi. It would be the end of e-commerce, at least on wireless networks.
My example is ServiceNow, It displays everything, then shuffles stuff into tabs if you have that enabled, then the UI policies kick in and hide stuff that shouldn't be there. Buttons and fields you're trying to click may not be even close when it actually registers the click.
It also had an annoying habit of putting an Insert button where Update used to be before it shuffled everything around. This means it creates a duplicate record instead of overwriting the old one if you click too early.
My pet peeve is menus that disappear because the mouse pointer is 1 pixel outside it's border. I click on your header to get you to display, just stay put until I select something!
Can I add the Ericsson R520m and T39m to the resurrection list please.
I reckon a T39m with 3G, modern Bluetooth that plays nicely with car kits, and maybe the spring-loaded keypad cover from the T28, would go down well.
Bonus points if they can make it work with the MP3 player and radio add-on modules from back in the day.
Makes me want to dig my 6310 and StarTac 85 out of storage, while the 2G networks are still running.
> Whats the point of an autonomous tractor?
It's more about efficiency than yield. GPS knows *exactly* where the tractor is so doesn't need to overlap to make sure the whole field gets ploughed/seeded/whatever, so diesel isn't wasted. The tractor will get pulled off course by ground variations, the GPS can spot that better than a human.
"getting the network operator to transfer your number to a new sim "
The fact that your phone has stopped working is a bit of a giveaway, though.
Plus the network will send SMSs to your phone warning you that the SIM will stop working soon - at least O2 does, I assume the others do similar things.
If you can get physical access to the phone for a little while, using Pushbullet or Continuity to echo the SMS to a computer would be easier, and the target would be none the wiser.
I got myself a Corsair mechanical keyboard, ages back.
Took it home, plugged it in, tried to log on to Windows - wrong password.
I started to wonder what sort of weird settings it was set to and how I was supposed to fix it. It was only when I watched the dots going into the password field that I noticed one was missing - problem turned out to be a dodgy switch under one key that happened to be part of the password.
The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing
Join our daily or weekly newsletters, subscribe to a specific section or set News alerts
SUBSCRIBE
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2020
