Posts by Nick Kew

Re: Recycling

Chain is high up (stairs to attic), and on the far side of the house from the river.

I expect it used to support something heavy (it looks like it would hold a few tonnes), and was kept as decorative in the conversion to houses.

I can't see myself or neighbours getting planning permission to generate from the river, but I've tried to get anyone to quote me for installing a heat pump using the water. Could put a great big hot tank in the underground area notionally designated for parking.

Re: Recycling

This one was disused for some time before being converted to houses.

Elsewhere nearby are others that were converted when an old business owner died and his son saw more gold in houses than in his late dad's business (a very much bigger site). One of them features as house 2 in this rant.

I had a case like that with my .com domain receiving small amounts of legit-but-misdirected-looking email for the owner of a .net namesake. The email bounced (I don't use a catch-all), but I saw it in the logs with non-spam subject lines. I contacted him, confirmed the situation, and set up forwarding on that address.

Re: Possibly not companies per se

How many projects actually moved over MS ownership? Anything that was more than a vanity project?

If you have nowhere cellar-cool in the heat of summer, the appliances sold as "wine coolers" in Blighty will do the job for fresh fruit&veg. Not to mention cheese&butter. And of course, English beer.

A fridge the size of that Samsung could presumably take all those Reg lunchboxes without getting overcrowded, yesno?

I've been contemplating a bigger fridge-freezer since moving to a kitchen with more space, so I've thought a bit about what I would or wouldn't pay more for.

YES obviously: sensible size, layout, power-efficiency, quiet running.

YES if not cynical about it working: frost-free, condensation avoidance.

MAYBE: my little indulgence - a dispenser for chilled water and ice, all plumbed in (would be a YES except that it's only available on "american style" models).

NO but would have some merit: IoT availability to inspect contents while in the supermarket.

NOT BLOODY LIKELY: big screen attached to the thing!

Re: Dont give the contract to...

They were here today: my FTTC was due. But it seems I still have to wait for any such luxury, while they fix something between here and the cabinet.

Of course if they don't give it to Openreach, maybe they'll have a tendering process ... like the trains. I wonder if Grayling is available to demonstrate how serious they are?

The price of snake oil varies rather a lot - as in this instance.

... how does it know, from 9 ASCII characters, whether an African American posted it or not?

How does a human know that? Why does it matter?

If you say that to a stranger with no context, you're obviously out of order. If you say it to a close friend, it might be perfectly OK depending on the relationship - but noone outside your close circle could judge that, nor is it any of their business. If you say it in the course of a debate, that's fine as far as I'm concerned - and El Reg haven't censored you - but would get you deleted and possibly even banned in some fora.

Don't all of us say things within the family that would be highly offensive if addressed to a stranger?

Re: Basic Aptitude

As a software developer, I regard it as my business to make software usable.

The smart user understands it - with use of regular tools like Google as appropriate. The user who can't do that should fail gracefully, not have illusions of mastery.

Re: No lineage?

Older than Pratchett. Can't place it right now, but I'm sure Wilde was one earlier comic/witty writer to use it. Going back much further, Newton's shoulders of giants sounds like a man familiar with the remark.

Re: Okay, 'fess up

Downloads is fair.

I'll sometimes do a bit more there. For example, if I download a package that I'm not hacking on but perhaps just running through a test suite or installing as-is but from a tarball, I might unpack and build all within Downloads. But I always know things there are fair game for freeing up space: anything that matters from that package got installed in /usr/local.

Re: Finally forced to get a new work laptop

I wouldn't've read that as blaming windows.

And he'd've had the same problem if he'd had an NFS-mounted $home on *X.

Re: Been there. Done that.

More to the point, EDIT would save your file as plain text, whereas Word would give you lots of proprietary bloat dealing with formatting and appearance. Word for writing a letter; EDIT for a program.

Though ISTR using a vi clone called pcz in preference to EDIT.

Re: Been there. Done that.

It's not a saying. Just a witticism from Dorothy Parker, when challenged to make a joke with the word "horticulture". And Parker of course used the obvious pronoun.

Re: Deja Noooooo!

I'm sure it's featured before now in this very column.

Though nowadays, why not "Who, Me"?

Re: Endless recycling

Working from home, I used to make extensive use of FBFS[1] working under that principle. Less so since my 2013 house move to somewhere it wasn't my only available space, but my recent house move demonstrated how much still lives in the PBFS[2].

[1] Floor-based filesystem.

[2] Pile-based filesystem.

Re: Could be useful for us in the West?

Lets make a simple comparison between China and the EU

That looks like no such thing to me.

to create a "social score" ...

Here that's more sophisticated. We call the basic social score a "credit rating". But then we also have a lot of additional demographic classification, based on family, education, work, postcode, etc.

Re: TV Licence

My good cause is a regular chuckle at the silly letters from Crapita, against whom I have a minor vendetta on the grounds of the horror that is (or rather, was) Capita Registrars.

Hmmm. Since they disposed of the registrars, maybe I might re-evaluate, and see if their system to tell them I have no telly works sensibly enough to use it?

Re: You want Kafka? I give you Kafka.

You have my sympathy (though couldn't you use a bank account from your home country to bootstrap?).

It was bad enough returning from my six years in Italy: I didn't exist as far as bureaucracy was concerned. Fortunately I had an existing UK bank account from before I left, and found a lettings agent who was non-jobsworth enough to accept various evidence of my recent time abroad. But getting a 'phone contract was a true nightmare!

Re: This requirement for paper bills/statements...

That's Post Offices.

The Post Office is somewhere you go when you leave school, and reach the front of the queue just in time to collect your pension.

Re: This requirement for paper bills/statements...

And the city office will hand you a new one as soon as you register your new address with them.

Now that you mention it, registering with the city office (or rather council, as we call it) was one of the more troublesome bits of bureaucracy in my move. Their website didn't work, and going into the office in person I took one look at the queue and walked back out.

Only returned to the matter when I got a very aggressively-worded tax demand from the ******s.

Re: Bureaucracy: Infocom text adventure

Both my banks were trivial: just tell them online and they update my details.

Re: This requirement for paper bills/statements...

's funny.

I moved house on August 23rd. And though there's been lots of hassle, things that need expensive fixing, etc, I only recollect the 'proof of address' red tape featuring once[1]: Royal Mail needed proof of the old address to set up redirection.

My main problem with the usual proof of address nonsense is that with electronic billing I don't have the bits of paper they want.

[1] That is, once since the move. Various people like my solicitor needed it before the move.