Posts by Stevie

Re:poxy pine framed construction.

Spruce on today's houses here, on mine, maybe. But the grain is very very tight. Hardwood tight. If I'm driving nails in a part of the house that was reframed in the late sixties I can tell when I'm moving from an original stud to a Beatles-era one.

You really need to let go of your preconceptions, AC. There certainly are shitty aspects of my house's construction, but the frame ain't one of them.

Re: Is your house a caravan?

No, it is a wooden framed, brick and aluminum siding clad structure on a corner lot in a place where the summer temperature can exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer with extremely high humidity, and dip below 8 degrees Fahrenheit in winter with no humidity to speak of.

Even Pyrex changes size over that range.

Re: relying on biometrics has all the same problems it always does.

I urge anyone who has the opportunity to visit NASA in Florida or Universal Studios, and to make use of their Biometric Lockers before forking over 700 notes for a front door lock.

Your own experience might be a good one but look around. The locker bank is a massively parallel proof-of-concept experiment for the tech and in any group of a couple of hundred you are guaranteed to see at least one person with an assistant placed strategically to unlock doors that prove recalcitrant.

If you double those odds, once every 15 months or so you will stand a good chance of being outside wanting in with no recourse (unless you hire the bloke for Universal with the Magic Swipe Card).

If I suspect someone has copied a key without my permission I can replace the locks for less than 50 dollars spent in any local DIY store (there are 7 within easy driving distance of my house) and 15 minutes work.

Put that up against the chance that someone will wander virtually in without opening the door, turn on the heat and turn off the fridge on the first day of your two week vacation because your door lock is insecure and was the entry point for the hackers that rooted your home network for fun.

Re: American door jambs are pretty much hollow cardboard.

Yours might be, but mine was a pre-hung Stanley door I installed myself, and it has a substantial frame properly fitted so that the important bits mount properly into the frame of the house.

Said frame is made from wood so tough nails have been known to bounce out when driven - the last time I encountered wood with this tight a grain it was in a forklift pallet I was trying to repurpose.

Frame on house dates from 1950, when forests were still around. The Stanley door dates from 1988 or so, when he concept was new and the materials used were of the usual first-run high quality.

I freely concede that the framing on todays houses and the construction of today's Stanley pre-hung doors may be made of ticky-tacky.

30 years from a door before the frame goes 1/8th out of true ain't bad in my opinion.

Re: Eeek

"What have they been snooping on"

Never mind that; what's this "350_Million_Quid_A_Week.exe" then?

The amount of crap I had to remove was unbelievable.

Do they still pack in a keylogger?

A colleague bought two HP lappies at Xmas and his son spent Xmas afternoon stripping out the crapware *including* the HP Keylogger.

Nice one, HP.

If you can find decent footage of Canadian Pacific grain trains going through the Kicking Horse Pass helix your son might enjoy the sight. You can see the back end of the train entering one tunnel as the loco exits another right above (or below) it. I don't have a link because my footage was taken with eyeballs some years ago.

Re: before stuffing new PCs with crapware

Toilet? Never heard of it, but I'm sure it was worth the trouble of talking to Microsoft vis-a-vis '95.

I just fitted the plus package that let me use themes - including icons I made myself.

Re: Echo

"stuffed shirts"?

Have a care. In these days of wanton hound-releasing you stand perilously close to an accusation of sexism with that sort of blatant double-entendre. (fnarwhosaidthat?)

Re: Thankfully some more sensible countries (4 Alan Brown)

Well this ex-pat was recently put in the position of explaining why the Slade original of Merry Christmas Everybody has the colonially confusing and dubious lyric "Does a ton upon his sleigh" after I noted with disgust the inaccuracy of an American cover version on the wireless that opined that Santa "Has a ton upon his sleigh".

And I should add that before any revisionist foetuses wade in, the term is "Do a ton" and *NOT* "Do a tonne". The term comes from pre-frenchified-UK biker slang in parlance when I were a lad and the Vincent Black Shadow were King o' road and people weren't afraid of things that came in fractions other than tenths and tenths of tenths and would tell the French, Belgians and Germans to bugger off if they told you to buy petrol in litres.

Few vehicles of the day were capable of "tonning up" and all were completely incapable of stopping in a safe distance when they hit the magic 100 mph* should danger and excitement rear their heads, which was kind of the point.

"Sensible countries". The recent round of voting should have put paid to that conceit on all fronts. Pfft!

*That's miles per hour an' orl, not namby-pamby frenchy-metres.

Re: normal people (4 JulieM)

"That's what normal people would refer to as the kilowattage of the system (i.e., how many thousands of joules of heat it can move in one second of time)."

Presumably the Tower of London's A/C needs are calculated in crown joules.

Re: Bombastic Bob

Are you saying that BB is not only a bot, she's a Fembot?

Re: Where was the Joke Alert Icon, you clown?

Obvious git is obvious.

Lack of editorial oversight is not a strength, as everyone with skin in any game will tell you.

*cough*LinusTorvalds*cough*

I'm sorry. I did that wrong, didn't I?

LACK OF EDITORIAL OVERSIGHT IS NOT A STRENGTH YOU TWIT!

Question:

Does being loud and personally insulting make me right, or just a loud git?

Re:Britannica contains many inaccuracies,

And if you know of specific inaccuracies, I'm sure that dashing off a quick letter to the editorial board citing the problem and your authority to contradict it will get the offending entry changed by the editors once they've verified your contention.

Or were you implying that you aren't allowed to just go in and deface the original? If so, my answer is : good.

Re: The vegetarian alligator

If Jimmy Wales has some insight on how to deal with fake news why hasn't he trialed his ideas on Wikipedia?

I think that was the thrust of the Register article.

And calling the bunch of idiots infesting Wikipedia as a "community" is to imply a common purpose that does not exist.

Re: BY ALL MEANS, TAKE 5 F'ing MINUTES and CORRECT IT!

And watch as someone takes down your informed change and re-instates the more popular fuckwittery.

Ask me how I know this.

Re: Wormold

Mystic Megabyte, I accuse you of being Alec Guinness and claim my five pounds.