I can add
A SCSI version of the Iomega ZIPdrive, to complement the parallel, USB and IDE versions. I even still have some disks
Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson
4257 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
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My hoard of obsolete hardware might be useful… one day
Windows 10 Pro goes Home as Microsoft fires up downgrade server
Premiere Pro bug ate my videos! Bloke sues Adobe after greedy 'clean cache' wipes files
Thursday 8th November 2018 10:14 GMT 
Re: Man...
Well, I actually do back up all my photos and videos on an external back-up drive, and back that up on a different drive as well, and have them in lower resolution in the cloud as well, should all my drives fail. Having said that, I do feel I will add some more back-up storage, just to be safe.
You can't have too many back-ups, and Lu Tse would say (doffs hat to Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter)
FYI NASA just lobbed its Parker probe around the Sun in closest flyby yet: A nerve-racking 15M miles from the surface
Thursday 8th November 2018 08:47 GMT 
Brilliant stuff!
In more ways than one. Hats off (mine is the grey Tilley today) to the entire team at NASA.
The sun is rather quiet now, but hopefully the Parker probe will be able to study the sun as it reaches maximum in 6 years or so. As an avid amateur solar astronomer, I will be following this mission closely (but at a safe physical distance).
Astroboffins spot one of the oldest, coolest stars in the universe lurking in the Milky Way
Wednesday 7th November 2018 13:34 GMT
Re: Bah!
Astronomers have the slightly weird habit of calling all elements beyond helium in the periodic table "metals". Statistically, they are right most of the time, but it confuses those with any education in chemistry. A low mass, ultra metal poor star like this will only cook up helium from hydrogen during its extremely long main-sequence lifetime, i.e. no metals even by astronomical standards. When its main-sequence life ends, it may start creating carbon, but I doubt it will produce any real metals
Dawn of the dead: NASA space probe runs out of gas in asteroid belt after 6.4 billion-mile trip
Planet Computers straps proper phone to its next Psion scion, Cosmo
Roscosmos: An assembly error doomed our Soyuz, but we promise it won't happen again
Clunk, bang, rattle: Is that a ghost inside your machine?
Friday 2nd November 2018 10:54 GMT
RFI ghosts
In my first programming job I wrote code for image-analysed microscopy both for the Department of Medical Microbiology and for the Department of Dermatology at our University Medical Centre. Both departments had a PC with a Matrox MVP-AT/NP board both as frame grabber and accelerator of the image processing we were doing. My code ran flawlessly at Medical Microbiology, but whenever I used the accelerator options of the neighbourhood processor (the NP in MVP-AT/NP), it became erratic at Dermatology. It frequently crashed or froze. After much research, I found the source was the HUGE, clunky Leica power supply for the mercury lamp used for fluorescence imaging at the latter department. It was throwing out so much RFI and polluting the mains supply with a variety of spikes, that the card simply became unreliable. The much smaller, and far more modern power supplies of the Olympus microscopes (for the same type of mercury lamp) used in Medical Microbiology did not cause this trouble. No manner of shielding prevented the problems (probably because the computer had to be close to the microscope), so I had to maintain a special version of the code which avoided the use of the NP unit of the Matrox card. Even then we had to instruct users to switch on the mercury lamp first, and only then boot the computer up. I was so pleased when they got an update to their microscope so they could ditch that horrible power supply, and I could maintain just a single code base of the MVP-AT/NP machines.
Nikola Tesla's greatest challenge: He could measure electricity but not stupidity
Goodnight Kepler! NASA scientists lay the exoplanet expert to rest as it runs out of fuel
Manchester man fined £1,440 after neighbours couldn't open windows for stench of dog toffee
Boffins have fabricated microscopic sci-fi tractor beams for real
Apple's launch confirms one thing: It's determined to kill off the laptop for iPads
Wednesday 31st October 2018 08:17 GMT
Re: "as fast as the fastest PCs."
It will probably work fine for most users, but I run rather heavy (and well parallellised) image processing code, like stacking 44 1,000-frame 6Mpixel monochrome uncompressed videos (250+ GB of data) to create 44 6 Mpixel panes to stitch into a 100+ Mpixel lunar mosaic. I would be very curious to see how much time that takes on the iPad Pro. On my laptop it takes some 12 hours, on a Core i7 desktop it is quite a bit faster.
Regarding the MacBook Air: no SD-card slot is a definite deal breaker for me. If I want to transfer a lot of photos from my camera to the laptop, popping the SD card into the laptop is the easiest and fastest way by far
Woman who hooked up with over 15 spectres has found her forever phantom after whirlwind romance and plane sex
Tuesday 30th October 2018 14:44 GMT 
As major Winchester of M*A*S*H 4077 said:
"It is the inalienable right of each and every human to make a fool of themselves in public"
True words.
Will she be applying for child support for her spectral child? Doesn't really matter, I suppose, we can afford to spend a lot of invisible spectral banknotes
Watch closely as NASA deploys the world's biggest parachute at supersonic speeds
Should a robo-car run over a kid or a grandad? Healthy or ill person? Let's get millions of folks to decide for AI...
It's big, it's blue, and it'll be raining down on you – it's 3200 Phaethon
Memo to Microsoft: Windows 10 is broken, and the fixes can't wait
Wednesday 24th October 2018 07:53 GMT
Re: Microsoft clearly has abismal QA standards!
Of course they have QA standards! They copied them from the Complaints Division of Sirius Cybernetics! Share and Enjoy!
(or was that "Go stick your head in a pig"?)
Sorry, couldn't resist. The coat with the HHGTTG radio play cassette tape in the pocket (yes, I am that old)
Wednesday 24th October 2018 07:13 GMT
Re: Please Please
My latest laptop came with Win 8.1, and once Classic Shell was installed, and I had sorted out the settings (which are all over the place) I have got it working well. It is almost (but not quite) like W7 with a service pack added.
I am very, very wary of touching anything W10 with anything shorter than a very long, preferably pointed barge pole (halberd or pole axe might do as well). Telemetry aside, I have fellow astronomers complaining that W10 will happily start an update halfway through an imaging session, wrecking data. Getting scope, camera, guide system, computer all working nicely is quite a hassle, and given the rarity of good, clear nights, the last thing you want when you have got everything working is for the OS to throw a spanner in the works. Call me old-fashioned, but I always thought two key roles of an OS were keeping programs running smoothly, and keeping data safe. Quite clearly, farming out testing to well-meaning enthusiasts is no replacement for professional software testing.
Patch me, if you can: Grave TCP/IP flaws in FreeRTOS leave IoT gear open to mass hijacking
Tuesday 23rd October 2018 11:45 GMT
Is it just me
who thinks the "design" of many IoT products makes the marketing division of Sirius Cybernetics look smart?
<sigh>
Next we'll have a load of chatty computers, talkative fridges, doors generating an intolerable air of smugness whenever you approach them, elevators sulking in basements, and a drinks machine that only ever serves cups filled with a liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea (hang on, I think we have one of those in our coffee corner at work)
I'll get me coat. Doffs hat (grey Tilley once more) to the late, great Douglas Adams
F***=off, Google tells its staff: Any mention of nookie now banned from internal files, URLs
Silent running: Computer sounds are so '90s
Friday 19th October 2018 15:22 GMT
Re: Ringtones are cringworthy
An alarm cock?
I hope your good wife doesn't hit the snooze buttons too hard.
Whoops, that was probably a Freudian slip of the keyboard!
We used to have several alarm cocks in the neighbourhood, but people got sick of the crowing in the morning (and you couldn't change the ring tone), so turned them into variations of coq-au-vin
Friday 19th October 2018 14:41 GMT
Re: Ringtones are cringworthy
I have my ringtones set inappropriately (Dr Who theme, Smoke on the Water intro, or Tom Lehrer's Poisoning Pigeons in the Park for general use, Imperial March or Highway to Hell for the SWIMBO, etc), but never really use them as I have it on silent mode the whole time. I still like tweaking the ringtones (only free ones, I am too cheap to pay for such frivolity), let's say it keeps me quietly amused. The only time I really use the sound is for the alarm cock. My wife wasn't too amused I had set the alarm to Chop Suey from System of a Down (hey, it starts with "WAKE UP!!"). Good Morning from Blackfoot also raised hackles, so now I use the intro from AC/DC's Hell's Bells.
It's Two Spacecraft, One Mission as BepiColombo gets ready to launch
Friday 19th October 2018 11:30 GMT
Nice of ESA/JAXA
To give all space enthusiasts in the Netherlands a Sinterklaas present in 2025. Looking forward to it. Fingers crossed for a successful launch and journey
Haunted disk-drive? This story will give you the chills...
Good news: Largest, most ancient known galaxy supercluster is spotted. Bad news: It's collapsing on itself
Friday 19th October 2018 07:42 GMT
Fascinating stuff
I am currently involved in developing new algorithms for faint-object detection in the EU-funded SUNDIAL project, and it is fascinating to see how rapid developments in instrumentation and software is allowing measurements and discoveries to be made that we could only dream of not so long ago. Often the new discoveries throw up more questions rather than they answer, which is of course how science progresses.
Party like it's 1989... SVGA code bug haunts VMware's house, lets guests flee to host OS
Thursday 18th October 2018 07:33 GMT
That brings back memories
Back in 1988, in my first programming job, I remember having to support Hercules, EGA, VGA, several flavours of SVGA and two different Matrox frame-grabber and image processing boards (PIP-1024 and MVP-AT/NP) both for my graphics packages and for text output. Great fun. The VESA standard made life a lot easier, taming the explosion of different SVGA options available.
In Windows 10 Update land, nobody can hear you scream
Tuesday 16th October 2018 13:08 GMT
Re: "It has been a hellish couple of weeks for the Windows giant"
'My students love it. It's the next excuse for missing assignment deadline and asking for an extension.'
When my (computer science) students come up to me with an excuse like that, I simply point them to all the Linux machines in the computer lab (they can be booted to Windows too (I think 7, I never use that), we are not an anti-MS shop).
Alexa heard what you did last summer – and she knows what that was, too: AI recognizes activities from sound
NASA gently nudges sleeping space 'scopes Chandra, Hubble out of gyro-induced stupor
NASA's Chandra probe suddenly becomes an EX-ray space telescope (for now, anyway)
Take my advice: The only safe ID is a fake ID
Astroboffins may have found the first exomoon lurking beyond the Solar System
JAXA probe's lucky MASCOT plonks down on space rock Ryugu without a hitch
Laser-sharp research sees three top boffins win the Nobel Prize in physics
MIMEsweeper maker loses UK High Court patent fight over 15-year-old bulletin board post
NASA's Kepler telescope is sent back to sleep as scientists preserve fuel for the next data dump
Haven't updated your Adobe PDF software lately? Here's 85 new reasons to do it now
Tuesday 2nd October 2018 12:50 GMT
Plenty of alternatives to the sluggish monster that is Acrobat Reader. I really avoid using it at the moment. I am also always annoyed at how it wants to "save changes" to a PDF presentation (made using pdflatex), in which I have edited exactly NOTHING in Acrobat Reader. What does it feel it needs to change to the file? Does it want to add ads? Custom malware? I seriously doubt any addition made by Acrobat Reader would be useful to me in even the widest sense of the word.
UK ruling party's conference app editable by world+dog, blabs members' digits
Brit startup plans fusion-powered missions to the stars
Facebook: Up to 90 million addicts' accounts slurped by hackers, no thanks to crappy code
Monday 1st October 2018 07:41 GMT
Re: Has anyone been informed by FB?
I did get a vague message that "Your security is our greatest concern </hypocrisy>" and got logged out, but nothing to state my account was compromised. I am not terribly worried. As with all online stuff: I avoid putting anything online (even if purportedly private) that I wouldn't want others to see, don't use Facebook (or Google) to log in to anything else, and keep separate passwords for different sites. I keep in touch with some friends and colleagues on FB, I post some hobby stuff, which may be of use to those selling cookery items, astronomy and photography gear, and camping equipment, but I get plenty of adverts for those kinds of things anyway (or I did till I installed adblocker).
Why are sat-nav walking directions always so hopeless?
Friday 28th September 2018 13:43 GMT
Re: As you might expect...
Love Ordnance Survey maps! However, living in the Netherlands it doesn't quite make sense to get the app, although I am tempted to get it when next we go on holidays to the UK.
Regarding tea: It is possible to get good tea at my work, but only because I make it myself from ACTUALLY BOILING WATER and REAL BLACK TEA (are you listening, catering staff? No? Thought not). As my (German) colleague who also likes a proper cuppa always says: "The problem with the Dutch is that they always make tea of boiled water". He may be right. The water may actually have boiled in the distant past (and don't get me started on the difficulties of getting actual tea-flavoured tea).
Microsoft gets ready to kill Skype Classic once again: 'This time we mean it'
Friday 28th September 2018 13:29 GMT
MS-ICE
is the only product from Microsoft I really do like. It allows me to make really HUGE mosaics of the moon painlessly, and it is completely free.
New theory: The space alien origins of vital bio-blueprints for dinosaurs. And cats. And humans. And everything else
Good news: Sub-surface life on Mars possible, moons from big impacts. There is no bad news
Scottish brewery recovers from ransomware attack
Curiosity's computer silent on science, baffling boffins
30-up: You know what? Those really weren't the days
Thursday 20th September 2018 13:45 GMT
Thanks Verity, that brings back memories!
I started my first programming job in 1988, coding image processing stuff on an 8 MHz 80286 with Matrox PIP1024 frame grabber. The latter had ONE WHOLE MB of video RAM so you could actually do something useful. I really needed some clever compression schemes to store images on the 20MB HDD. I still have some old Dr. Dobb's Journals from that time lying around, and even the last few issues of Micro Cornucopia to appear in print here in the Netherlands.
I still use some of the C code I wrote in those days. Stuff that ran quickly on a 286 runs like the clappers on modern kit, even without creating parallel versions of the code.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
