Posts by bag o' spanners

Anyone who relies on a single line of defence, even at consumer level, will have their faith tested to destruction in fairly short order.

Hourses for courses. As a comms device with much better wifi and sim reception than the average phone, a 16gig SSD and a useable keyboard, I still take my eee901 on the road with me in preference to a 15" laptop.. A de-bloated version of XP runs fast enough for comms, entertainment, and a couple of corporate web extensions, and gives me a reliable link to the webslaves at the hollowed out volcano via email, text or Skype, without filling my manbag. My banana fingers are allergic to fiddly multipress phone keys, but can somehow type perfectly on a netbook. Four years on, it's still giving me five hours of video when I can't find a power socket.

I have a dumb phone just for shouting at people who phone me out of working hours, but for the mobile data side, the humble sim-equipped netbook craps from a great height on any smartphone, especially in terms of power, cost and versatility. And it doesn't give me eyestrain or distract me when I'm crossing the road. Utility trumps shiny every time.

It will appeal to squares. Is every genius obliged to take a protractor to their personal hot table every morning to make sure that it's precision parked parallel to the wall? Expiring minds need to know.

It provides a bit of light relief from the hipster spam and junk philosophy. I wonder if Facebook will find a happy medium between revenue streams and the jizz industry. They gots the dollars, and the investors want 'em.

Or will socmedia's search for profitability drive a kind of triple tier consumer bundle? Social, branded lifestyle, and sheer desperation?

Pie in the sky, mom's apple pie, or creampie?

Yahoo is your dad playing squiffy air-guitar to "We Built This City".

They shafted their huge YM and Groups user base with the execrable 360, and it's been downhill all the way since. I still have a legacy email addy for junkmail notifications that I bulk bin once a month. The only purpose they serve in the UK is as the Barclays footie channel for highlights. It's the Poundland of search and social.

A pint for your thoughts.

Is it possible that its output wavelength is oscillating from gamma to x-ray spectra and back? Overmodulation of the output signal, for whatever wibbly cosmic yoyo reason, might be creating a funky meandering square wave that's defining what we can record from our limited perspective with our primitive earth technology..

Alternatively, wouldn't it only require huge pulses of intense x-ray to mask the visible gamma frequencies, or vice versa? I'm sure some of those fancyarse disco lights use similar trickery in the visible spectrum..

I can't help thinking of it as an early Moog star with oscillators that randomly drift in and out of tune.

I'm on a shiny at home, but only so I can admire my gorgeous reflection when there's a dark background colour.

I noticed that a lot of self regarding went on in the reflective screen areas in my last open plan environment. I specifically asked for matte screens when the kit upgrades rolled through, because they don't get so fizzy when you're doing intensive audit log forensics. It took me a while to convince my staff that their eyes would also hurt less if their screens weren't facing the windows. They were more worried about having their unguarded backs facing the door while they were poncing around on the interwebs. Baby steps.

For FB users, it's a chance not to be remotely, mindlessly spammed with more hipster junk content. They can still go through the incredibly time consuming process of posting a link on their status if it's really that important

Once upon a time, dweebs would upgrade their processor, mobo, and ram when the clock speed doubled, and the price arrived at a sensible median.

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but until I see a means to drastically improve my productivity on the pc front, I'm going to spend my beer tokens on storage and backups.

Nowhere in the slablet flimflammery and ultrabook hype do I see much more than the constant reinvention of alloy rims and spoiler kits..

Office, web, and entertainment playback reached their resources sweet spot on the pc platform a few years ago, and it seems to me that manufacturers are now obsessed with bells, whistles, and exterior design, to butter the egos (and rinse the wallets) of those who want a consumerist lifestyle accessory, rather than build a solid piece of kit that just works transparently. I don't care if a gizmo is pretty. I just want it to work smoothly until it's obsolete, and allow me to tinker under the bonnet from time to time to get a performance boost...

The only interesting aspect of this new toy is the screen res. And that isn't likely to inspire me to spunk a grand on it when a/ there's a bluddy great big recession going on, and b/ it's woefully underspecced in every other department.

I hope that won't prevent Steve Ballmer from cutting some fresh discodad shapes on the 9th of February. His meme-presence has been slipping of late.

I'm sticking with my circa 1958 joke shop Groucho Marx nose, tache and specs combo. Cheap, effective, and a guaranteed pull in the Scar and Goiter.

Sniffer wars! Build a better mouse.

If they're bitching about Iran, they're probably unaware of the amount of deep penetration by Chinese, Russian, and sneaky Yurpeens. If a Matthew Broderick style basement hacker can stroll into their "secure" military systems, it's a fairly safe bet that the professional crypto builders and breakers all have genuine looking logins, or dupes of genuine security cleared access control rights. There's always a pea brained higher echelon type who wants full oversight on security systems for reasons of professional vanity, but has no idea about the basics of personal security.

Homeland Insecurity is necessary to maintain the stock price of the Parallax Corporation.

Given the current issues with the Dreamliner, I'd be more worried about Boeing putting a time bomb under my seat.

This only makes commercial sense if there's a premium service for brands and business pages. How legal is the process of skewing results for the benefit of the paying commercial customers? How much astroturfing will I need to do to artificially enhance my ranking if I'm competing with Tard the grumpy cat. Can I get away with embedding a subliminal metatag in my outsourced memes of the week? Where do those godawful manipulative "like and share to win" links fit into the grand scheme of things?

Sensible photographers physically (visibly) tag their web-accessible work. That generally occurs in the editing part of the publishing process, prior to the jpeg scrunching and the launching of optimised product webwards.

If you've spent large amounts of readies on a dslr, posh glass, lights, models, MUAs, and all manner of studio and location gubbins, you'll most certainly tag anything that started life in RAW or Tiff format, before uploading it to its jpegged destination.

Not sure that they'd really be arsed to do that for the badly lit, fixed focus jobbies that dribble out of your average phone. Anything which is going direct from a blurry phonecam lens covered in takeaway grease and pocket fluff, to a vanity web podium for instant gratification, is unlikely to be regarded as particularly theftworthy. It's the equivalent of an instamatic snapshot.

Squirting some oversaturated colours into said snapshot to make it look amazingly "artistic" to a few drunk mates may satisfy the average airhead's desire for peer recognition, but it doesn't produce much in the way of commercially viable artstuff.

It is, of course, perfectly possible to painstakingly potatochop the visible semi-transparent tag out of a pro photo, but the cost of getting someone to do it properly doesn't really make commercial sense in the real world. They'd be working on an optimised jpeg version that contains a max of 200-400kb of data, rather than the 25-50 mb in the original. Producing the original RAW or Tiff file in court with all the EXIF data intact is a guaranteed win, no matter how big and greasy the copyright violator happens to be. Which may explain why digital content creators are so obsessive about backups.

Ah done read the book when ah wuz young. Those thar triffids are the devil's tumbleweeds.

There can be only one...

Charlie Sheen.

Belize is notorious(ly popular) among squaddies and travelers for the excellent herbage which flourishes there.

"Apple did not return a request for comment from El Reg"

Perhaps they activated the "Do Not Disturb" function?

Perhaps we can set an army of dispossessed urchins to work, foraging for scraps of value in the ever expanding digital landfill.

Even organisations which claim to be totally compliant, and clued up about the data they create and hold, are surprisingly lax when it comes to risk management and forward planning. They may think they've implemented foolproof policies to stream a wide variety of data and file types by value and retention date, but we can always build a better fool.

If businesses and public sector orgs managed their data responsibly from the get go, ICO hits would be rarer than vegetarian lions. Slipshod strategies employed piecemeal by poorly trained and badly informed staff make that an unlikely scenario.

Bring your own shovel.

Does this mean that I won't be able to fiddle my exes unless I become an MP?

It's a stretch houseboat. I'd confidently expect someone to be puking out of the only window that opens as it enters port.

I've yet to run across a cloud provider who could inspire me to leave my data security in someone else's hands. Especially someone I've never met, and who has zero regard for the content, or its replacement value.

Danger, Will Robinson!

mmmmm...shi-neeee!

Do commentards get reward points for spamming their tribal brand loyalty?

It's a non-story, dressed up as a security blanket for fruitbois.

Most of the tekky nerds I come into contact with, are rooting their droidphones, and being annoyingly public about it. The managerial classes are just purring laboriously about the user experience on their fruitphones.

They're only techtoys. I find it very difficult to be ragingly enthused by any of them, beyond the basic functionality.

Having the interwebs in the palm of your hand merely expands the intrusion of tech into free time that began with mobiles. You WILL answer that fatuous email, you WILL rebutt/"like" that snarky fb post etc. To the point where life going on around you is abstracted out of all recognition.

The volume of zombeez completely absorbed by their phones at every possible moment, whether as a means to avoid social contact (public transport), or as part of some curious ritual that involves being constantly connected to the matrix, is kinda weird. There's a macabre element of compulsive herd behaviour to it, which, as a student of human behaviour, I find slightly sinister.

Alerts and relentless geotagging in particular have a strong whiff of imminent O.B.E.Y. about them.

I thought the world's entire stockpile of nasty fonts had been used up by the original Myspace. In magenta on a puce background. Aaah! Sweet innocence of yoof.

Re: Disdain for free stuff...I still use Cool3D occasionally for texturing and tweaking true type fonts for banners.. Just because it was free on a cover disk, didn't make it any less useful for rapidly creating sets of unique graphics. The UI was way ahead of the game in the late 90s. Horses for courses.

I use an organic filter called free will to determine what I wish to see or not see on teh interwebs. If it could be monetised or taxed, this gubmint would have done it by now.

When gubmints fail in their attempts to drive public opinion through choreographed scare stories, they inevitably struggle to understand that opinion isn't a monolithic entity with a single dogmatic worldview.

With luck, Theresa May is about to get her opportunity to flip-flop gracelessly on the gibbet of political hubris.

I'm all for building enormous Faraday cages around every courtroom in the land to avoid contamination of evidence. .

It's a resupply mission for Thunderbird 5. Dansette stylus upgrade, new carpet sweeper, and a large bottle of Pledge.

Mine's the one with a furry humbug in the pocket.

Please don't mention this to homo-erectus. You'll only excite him.

A maggoty apple. (All purpose)

A bowler hat to represent the establishment view.

A Shoreditch Triangle...in case of breakdowns.

chickory dickery

Once upon a time, it was quite legal to blend low grade coffee with chickory. It not only tasted disgusting (a bit like freeze dried granule zombie coffee), but turned out to be quite hazardous to health. If you're going to drink coffee for the hit, giving it fancy names and throwing milk at it will only hasten the demise of the Arabica bean. Robusta is the low altitude variety that just gives you a sticky taste in the throat instead of the gorgeous crystal meth Arabica tilt, and a desire to pop open the Gold Blend and stirr in some sodium aluminosilicate and hot water and have another cup and another until you take on the appearance of a lizard creature. (it sez here)

whirly bits

If memory fails me well, don't the ejector plumes inevitably reach a distance where the goo they've spewed starts to be affected by the gravitational effects of other gigantic celestial gooblobs. Using the Vulture scale of unimaginability, I'll hazard a guess that this one is just a tiddler, and that something much larger, and moodier, is lurking in the background with a celestial yoyo thingy which it's using to snare its prey.

The most unimaginable thing I can't quite imagine is what this looks like from the other side..

*Paris, because I brainfarted in the lift.*

Please refrain from feeding the lawyers

Notwithstanding EXIF data, which you can strip from a photo by bouncing it losslessly through an image editor which doesn't bother to read and re-write EXIF, a great big 50% transparent banner tag with pr0n connotations ought to keep the flies off squiffy low res web jpegs. Too much effort to potatochop the pixels, too little reward..

If you value your art, don't place unoptimised / untagged versions of it online.

air pollution

I can't recall ever using a piece of software as glitchy as Air (trust me, I'm trying, even though it's Friday), which is probably why it was chosen for so many public sector online training fiascos. Horses for courses.

all mod cons

Can I get an olive and one of those pretty umbrellas in my Rambotini? And a side order of jerk unicorn?

I bless the day that I decided not to join a cowboy procrastination enterprise and get a real job instead.

The quality of shmooze in the real world is petayears ahead of the Dopium Triangle's tiresome overpriced hostelries. And much less wankersome. And I get paid in beer tokens. Hallelujah!

a couple of inner forearms gently pressed into the neck arteries of a sweet young thang is a much better hit for all concerned.. Breathplay tends to turn into deathplay as soon as it goes solo.

Asphy is the reduction of bloodflow to the noggin.

Easily confused by idiots.

Paris: cos I'd help her with the teethproof poly bag and fifteen laccy bands