Posts by Stevie

Bah!

Ah, I see it now. Geolocking isn't to protect the little guy from Big Bad Hollywood. It all makes sense now.

Wait, what?

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It's DIN Plug 2.0!

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Wouldn't an equally valid safety protest involve the cyclists dressing up in those suits that bomb disposal experts wear when on the job?

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Thanks for the nifty article. I think it worth pointing out that while indeed the sewers were designed with excess capacity, they wouldn't work long if not for the gangs of civil engineers armed with shovels and gas masks.

These workers are always up a certain creek and often up to their knees in it. Spare them a thought the next time you feel moved to use the metaphor for some mildly tedious desk-job problem.

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One should always don a finger stool before giving anyone a "poke".

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All your croc are belong to watch.

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You don't have to look much further than an iPod for an example of over-convergence in the control design. No separate volume control means that you have to hope the on-board computer figures out that your frantic anticlockwise scrolling means "turn the fucking radio volume down, my eardrums are bursting" and not the half-dozen other things it does. (The iPod radio volume levels are usually many times higher than the mp3 playback volume for a given setting, so switching from, say, Led Zeppelin IV to the BBC World Service without first either dialing down the volume or removing the earbuds usually results in a similar experience to being flashbanged in a telephone box).

Or even car radios that cannot be turned off if the ignition is off. That idiocy is over a decade in the market and still going strong.

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China will never be considered to have properly entered the 21st century until these women are allowed to mourn the dead in their own fashion.

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While not entirely happy about running the exploit to prove it works without authorization, I am flabbergasted that Starbucks would sic the Fraud Dog on the hacker.

I have a method for evaluating actions I often espouse to my younger, more hotheaded peers. Ask "what's the best thing that could happen?" and phrase the answer as the negation of the worst thing you can think of happening.

Which would possibly have the Starbucks Fraud Dog constructing the following exchange: "What's the best thing that could happen as a result of me threatening this idiot with fraud charges? The case does not become a public cause celebre, the public does not start staying away in droves as the newspapers pile in and the Starbucks brand does not take a damned good thrashing in the market as a result."

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Sounds like the police just wanted a cuddly pet of their own.

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I'll give him this (amongst much else), Steve Jobs understood the downside of multi-user login: a drop in actual device sales. My observational data suggest people are buying extra iPads so as to not have the kids play with theirs.

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Quitters don't get to be president, Mr Paul.

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Makes as much sense as the Windows EULA does.

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So the answer would seem to be to stay away from this insidious "Website A" at all costs.

Or not to use the Safari browser of course. Speaking for my own experience using it on an iPad Air with an intermittent internet broadband connection (using it on my train commute) it is much less robust in terms of being able to cope with the webs going away and then coming back after a "post" has timed out than my browser of choice. Firefox over WIn7 has no problem with the same scenario.

Trying to edit a "favorite" today had me snarling in rage as numerous attempts failed to update the bloody thing. I ended up deleting it in the end and starting over from scratch. Hands down the worst f*cking browser/platform combination I've ever used.

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*sighs* All your lightulb are belong to Blues Traveler.

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Tsk! Australians, eh?

Speaking as someone who loved the quickfire audio-visual mini-jokes larded into Road Warrior & Thunderdome I can absolutely believe the post apocalyptic tongue was intentionally firmly in radiation-scarred cheek.

Iconic movies, all of them. Everyone yaps on about the "aerial shot everyone steals from Bladerunner" but how many times have you seen a recapitulation of "the disarming of Max at the gates of Bartertown"? The Hobbit was only the most recent "homage".

A sadly underrated series. This latest one is high on the Stevie Watch list (I never go in the first few days as I prefer to watch without an infuriating field of tiny oblong foglights shining back at me).

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So the story is really that an electric lockpicker uses 3d printed bits to hold the lock in place?

I have to say I find the headline just a whole lotta misleading there. It seems to me that the one completely disposable component in the solution is the 3d printer.

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Does this also explain those Amazon book listings where one might obtain, for example, a secondhand copy of Unix in a Nutshell for $1400 (or alternatively, a new copy for $4)? I used to keep a list of the more outrageous and inexplicable prices quoted by ANY_BOOK.

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So at least someone is hiring IT bods.

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I'm afraid the jury is out on whether this technology is old, new, innovative or been done before until it has been properly explained in something other than impenetrable science technoblither by Stephen Fry.

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This sort of idiocy gives scum (and idiocy) a bad name.

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For true art-house cred, directors should be looking to make the definitive 2.5 hour big screen Sandbaggers or small-screen faithful Callan.

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I'd love to swap my laptop for a tablet but after 5 months of iPad ownership I'm in agreement with the view that while the iPad makes a decent platform on which to consume content, it falls way short of my needs when I get creative. Yes you can shoot videos and write memos but the as-sold software on it runs a poor second to Works (surely a baseline in useability).

Using the iPad for pdf textbook usage, which involves flipping hither and yon and switching between different texts is an exercise in How To Get Really Bad Carpal Tunnel as I try and bend the "multitasking" metaphor to my needs. Would it kill Adobe to add tabs and a flyback button to their iPad app?

Even the music player fights me, presenting the least useful (to me) "Radio" screen as the first choice when it should be able to spot the 80-odd gig of music stored inside the iPad and figure out that that might be the best place to go when I launch the app.

The spreadsheet looks useful right up until one tries to use it, when it displays some distinctly useless features such as not displaying a stored calculation when the cell pointer is placed over it so the bloody thing can be edited.

The only app I've bought that has not had buggy performance or stupid unswitchoffable design naffery is Skyguide, a rather nifty planisphere on steroids.

And while I'm on App Naffery:

Please Crom could *someone* add a feature to the Register app to hide the sidebar or make it configurable so accidentally hopping to a different article as I read because my right thumb brushed the screen is a thing of the past? I'm right handed. I hold the device in my right hand as I read. Take a leaf from the BBC World News app and then improve it by making the geometry configurable. I mean, this is supposed to be a haven of tech know-how FFS.

Gah! Where's the Tylenol!

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But when Jen showed us The Internet it was wireless.

Someone nip up to Big Ben and check it hasn't been swiped.

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This is old news.

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Sometimes, to get things done you gotta work outside the law.

Of Physics.

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The only downside I can see is that using this technique would undoubtedly undermine any later attempt to deploy the industry standard Asperger's Defense.

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Well, fair enough, Mark, I've not enjoyed everything I've read by Reynolds myself. But why lead off with the fuck bits unless you were going to use them somewhere else in the review?

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Can you even read the iWatch screen in bright daylight? I can't read my iPad or iPod screens under such conditions.