Posts by daftdave

It should just work?

I put 20.04 on my Dell Precision tower and have had multiple breakages caused by updates.

I mean I naively installed linux-image-extra (or something) to get a driver for my Wifi card, and clicked something in the gui to get an NVidia driver, thinking that once it was working, it would stay working. But no.

So it turns out the image-extra metapackage only gets you extras for the currently installed Kernel, another one comes along and boom the Wifi driver is gone. Then you can't get on line to Google the problem. So this it turns out is because I needed to install 20.04-hwe which then gets you the "extras" on every update.

But potentially breaks the NVidia driver. Usually in a way in which you can't boot. Or was it something else that caused that? I don't know, I got mightily confused trying to trouble shoot. Lucky it keeps the old Kernel eh? Usually a few days later another update comes along and fixes it, but once (and I don't know if it was me) but I got in a complete mess with it altogether and had to remove everything to do with NVidia then work out which version (of many) actually was required for the current Kernel.

Remember Ubuntu's philosophy used to be "it should just work"?

Who'sidea to use Bluetooth

I have enough problems connecting to wireless speakers, never mind a country wide decentralized network of other phones.

I am highly skeptical that there is a strong enough correlation between who you've been in Bluetooth proximity with and who you've been in infectious proximity with. For example, as a delivery driver I frequently come close to peoples front doors (that they may be stood behind, with their phones in their pockets) but am always stood well back when the door is answered. Yet I could get infected from a pedestrian crossing button hours after the person who left the infection there had left the vicinity.

Finally, my phone manufacturer hasn't pushed out any updates so I don't even have the Gapple API.

Is there any evidence from other countries, (which are ahead of us) that any of this is having any benefit.

Heard of Uber Eats?

I do a part time delivery job for a well known take away firm, and we recently "partnered" with Uber Eats, right at the peak of the lockdown-induced rush.

So here's what happens. Something pops up on a device telling us the order and the ETA of the driver. Except, that the driver might not actually turn up for hours, if at all. Often, food goes in the bin and the customer gets a refund. To circumvent the situation where customers end up with cold food, we now prepare the food but don't cook it until the driver arrives.

This of course, just pushes the frustration onto the drivers. So in turn, they now press the button that tells us they've "arrived" when in fact they haven't.

This is the problem with Uber, it's not a coherent organization, it's just an app that attempts to stitch together different organisations and individuals in an ad-hoc way. As a company they take no responsibility for the ensuing chaos, the wellfair of their "self employed" employees, the integrity of said people or the wellbeing or concerns of their customers (as has been proven time and again with Uber taxis).

Failure is inevitable

We had an error message in the bootloader which read:

"Wrong FAT version - suggest using monitor to reformat disk" - this would show up on screen if the hard drive or its filesystem could not be read for whatever reason. The "monitor" in this case was a serial port console.

I'm pretty sure the message was only meant for developers, but inevitably with time, machines in the field would display this due to hard drive failure (mainly due to ageing). This would lead to messages on the product forums like

"It's telling me to format the disk.... using the monitor!!!!!"

James Veitch gets emails like this too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p50pXcDu_4s

Well know we know...

"Mr Parker, who lives off Haxby Road, said he was visiting Nortons Heating off James Street when his car was damaged."

Crypto wouldn't have helped

Alice has her e-mail client set up to send encrypted messages to Bob, and Stoke city council. She writes a message to Stoke City council, but sends it to Bob by mistake.

So her mail client, being clever, encrypts it for Bob. So, Bob can decrypt it (because Bob is allowed to decrypt mail that's been encrypted for him right?), and sees a confidential message that should have been sent to Stoke.

To put this in the context of PGP encryption. Alice would have a public key for Bob and a public key for Stoke. If she sends a message to Bob using, say, Thunderbird, then Thunderbird will select Bob's key, because it will naturally be unaware that Bob isn't the intended recipient.

Video doesn't work in Firefox...

Indeed I can confirm this, doesn't work on my Firefox 6 on 64-bit Linux.

Works with Chrome though.