* Posts by dermots

22 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Nov 2010

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

dermots

Re: Query: the timing of ads

Advertising on the Channel 4 app (or whatever they are calling it these days) has to be the worst though, surely? 3+ minutes unskippable each ~12 minutes or so and if you are just trying to catch the last 5 minutes of something you missed it makes you sit through multiple of those blocks to get to it...

dermots

Re: Large DVD collection in the attic format shifted to a NAS for viewing.

Or songs essential to the narrative and complete missing episodes!

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

dermots

Confusion between climate preconditioning and battery pre-charge conditioning

The comments about the climate control pre-conditioning and sitting with cabin heating on indicates a bit of confusion. There's the ability to advance set your climate control to pre condition the interior of the vehicle. That's manual in the app or set on a schedule you want it. Pre-conditioning the battery for charging is a different thing and is done automatically when you add a supercharger stop into the navigation. So you don't set that 30-45 minutes before leaving, necessarily, even if that's about the time it starts to precondition the battery before charging.

Bitcoin mining rig found stashed in school crawlspace

dermots

He pleaded not guilty

From the linked article: “a debit card in Nahas’ name was used to purchase Coleman 48qt coolers, insulated flex ducts, extreme weather foil, insulation sleeves, and a water-based sealant tub, all items located in the crawl space”.

The accused is clearly going to be desperate to find out who stole these items from him and used them to construct the mining rigs in his very own workplace. The nerve of those unknown criminals!

More victims of fake crypto investor scam speak to The Register

dermots

Re: You can be *too* cautious

"How did they know your work phone number"

"Had to be delivered to work (for safety and convenience)".

The sender would have included a phone number for the receiver in the shipping submission, in case of delivery problems but also used for gathering of taxes/duties.

Samsung’s Smart Monitor tries too hard to be clever

dermots

Where is this PC you must remotely connect to?

The get out of jail of being able to remotely connect into a PC requires a PC, so where would it be? Local? Then just use it directly with none of the downsides of the ‘smart monitor’. In the office? At whose hot desk and who manages it? Seems this terminal was built for the 2010s not the 2020s.

Sage accused of misselling perpetual licenses it knew would soon be obsolete

dermots

Similar with QuickBooks

Intuit forced all perpetual license owners of QuickBooks Desktop (the PC application as opposed to the cloudy app, QuickBooks Online) onto a subscription basis when HMRC demanded we file VAT directly from our accounts package (Making Tax Digital) a couple of years ago. We still have the data on our in-house servers despite paying monthly for the right to use the program.

Now QuickBooks have announced that QuickBooks Desktop is being discontinued and after February 2023 we won't even be able to access our own data going back 25 years. The export options are raw ledger information, impossible to interrogate or unwieldy PDF reports with truncated descriptions.

We have been begging Intuit to free the program into a read-only perpetual license without support but they have outright refused this, even if we offer to pay for it on an ongoing basis. "Move to QuickBooks Online" they say. QuickBooks Online is missing many of the features of Desktop. I won't be moving to QBO I can assure you.

Clonezilla 3: Copy and clone disk images to your heart's content

dermots

Clonezilla is powerful, flexible, comprehensive and great for confident and knowledgeable users. But Macrium Reflect is rather more user friendly.

Home office setup with built-in boiling water tap for tea and coffee without getting up is a monument to deskcess

dermots
FAIL

£8K for lukewarm tea, no thanks!

I can tell you from experience that without a drain under that boiling water tap, not only will you get puddles on your desk from the inevitable drips, but the tea will be lukewarm and not properly brewed. The water in the pipes will be cold, you need to run that first without your mug underneath until boiling water starts to come out.

The torture garden of Microsoft Exchange: Grant us the serenity to accept what they cannot EOL

dermots

Re: Situation normal for Microsoft

Message tracking used to be so simple. "Did a message from this sender arrive in the last 3 days?" should be trivial to answer on the spot. Now you have to make a request and wait for it to decide to answer you some time later... Grim.

The 40-Year-Old Version: ZX81's sleek plastic case shows no sign of middle-aged spread

dermots

Re: "Some dealt with the RAM pack with..."

I started saving my pocket money for the ZX80 and before I could afford it the ZX81 was launched. After begging the advance to get the ZX81 I didn't have enough for the RAM pack. But I well recall the advice to use a frozen milk carton - it put me off even wanting the RAM pack! Space Invaders in less than 1K - amazing, but you had to shoot the left and right half of the invaders separately!

The lighter side of HMRC: We want your money, but we also want to make you laugh

dermots

"...and someone else said they were too short to reach the post box. (If that last one is genuine, things are only going to get worse for this person, as MPs are pushing to ban low-level letterboxes.)"

Sorry to pour cold, humourless water on any part of an article demonstrating the absolutely incredible sense of humour that exists at HMRC, but the MPs were discussing (as your wording rightly says) letterboxes, not post boxes (as your wording also rightly says). But I suppose it is possible that the chappy was hand delivering to HMRC in person.

More interesting would be to hear HMRC's laugh-filled ripostes to these zany justifications they've received. I'll bet there are zingers such as "late filing fine" and "penalty surcharge enclosed"...

Fixing a printer ended with a dozen fire engines in the car park

dermots

I was one of just 3 pupils in the first ever Computer Science A Level course at my school and our teacher wangled a very memorable visit for us to IBM in Chiswick. There we had the opportunity to see this imposing beast of a laser printer in action - with the continuous paper feed as single sheet handling just wasn't up to the job at the time. Our guide said they had issues selling it to many customers because most of the existing install base of computers didn't have data processing that could keep up with the printer, leaving it mostly idle. At the time only the major banks were happy to shell out for new printing *and* computers.

Car-crash television: 'Excuse me ma'am, do you speak English?' 'Yes I do,' replies AMD's CEO

dermots

I really wish she had dropped that it at the end when he looked at all her passes. "Well as CEO of a multi billion dollar company there are a few perks...".

It was a longer interview than the article here makes out and Brundle rightly wasn't red-faced.

Wearables are now a two-horse race and Google lost very badly

dermots

Re: Misfit Speedo Shine 2

Between myself and my partner we had 3 Misfit devices, one failed within warranty and was replaced by them. This replacement and the other original one then failed just after the warranty period ended. Support is bad, quality abysmal.

Have been using a Samsung Gear Fit2 for over a year and despite some occasional glitches I love it.

VW engineer sent to the clink for three years for emissions-busting code

dermots

"Only an engineer"?

Hi defence may have been that he just an engineer following orders, but he was more senior than that:

'Liang, 62, whose title in the U.S. was "Leader of Diesel Competence"...'

(https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkiley5/2016/09/09/the-first-vw-exec-tumbles-in-dieselgate-with-more-sure-to-follow/)

Whoever requested it, approved it, allowed it to proceed is also guilty, but if the "Leader of Diesel Competence" devises and implements a way to avoid regulations, he'd appear to be culpable.

Cloud price wars resume as Microsoft cuts by up to 51 per cent

dermots

Re: Classic Microsoft

Correct. The pricing announcement is accurate but sounds more general than it is in reality. The article is also accurate in that only "wimpy" VMs have had a price cut. The recent price increase is unchanged for other VMs.

Windows 10 with Ubuntu now in public preview

dermots
Facepalm

Amazing breakthrough features

"...so your PC can inform you, for example, of low battery on your phone"

Is that because you're more likely to have your PC with you than, you know, the phone itself?

Dim-but-rich buyers targeted with million pound laptop

dermots
Facepalm

Not a decimal problem - a price tracking issue

As the original spotter of the problem I can say it is certainly a "price tracking" type of problem. In this case the idiots are tracking two of their own products - they probably meant to track the Amazon offered listing.

On Friday the Amazon one jumped from 899.99 to 999.99 and that's when the independent seller's listed items went bonkers. I notified Amazon and they were not in the slightest bit interested saying (correctly) that pricing was a matter for the sellers themselves. I think the more expensive one peaked at £1.2M before they spotted the problem, perhaps tipped off by an El Reg reader.

They have "fixed" it now so the prices are "only" 15% and 70% respectively more expensive than Amazon's own listed product (which is the highest spec model). I bought that one, from Amazon. It's very nice so far but I would not value it at a million.

Partners, kids force iPad owners to take more tablets

dermots
Thumb Down

Apple have engineered in the need for multiple iPads

By not allowing multiple user profiles in even the simplest form, Apple have purposely (cynically) engineered-in the need for multiple iPads rather than sharing. Anyone who has basic access to the iPad has access to any email accounts etc set up on it. It's not even possible to give a guest casual access without your email etc being accessed. Given that it was sometimes advertised as the ideal casual "pick it up and use" device this is woeful and is the reason I cannot recommend the iPad to anyone who asks me.

Monster iPad Case Test: Folios

dermots

Point taken, but...

Point taken about the manual brightness control, but the auto brightness definitely uses the ambient light sensor at the top centre of the screen surround, hence the hole in some covers at around this point.

More often, cover are far thinner around the edge and simply do not obscure the sensor at all.

dermots

Not a hole for a non-existent camera

The hole in the top centre of some screen surrounds is for the ambient light sensor, not (necessarily) for a future camera. The cases that block this light sensor make the iPad very difficult to use as there is no manual brightness control. I bought one such case and had to manufacture a hole over the light sensor position.