Re: Write your MP
Yeah, same here in Norwich North - MP is a total waste of protoplasm. For the amount of good she does, the job could be more than adequately filled by long-dead roadkill.
Posts by DJV
2397 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2009
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Remember the bloke who was told by Zen Internet to contact his MP about crap service? Yeah, it's still not fixed
The cockroach of Windows, XP, lives on in London's Victoria Coach Station
Monday 26th July 2021 18:09 GMT 
Re: Ironic
Some years ago a friend of a friend asked my advice on the secondhand laptop he wanted to buy. I took one look, saw it was Pentium 4 and said, Don't touch it with a barge pole - it will overheat and burn itself out. So, of course, as he was an idiot, he ignored my advice and bought it. Within a year it had overheated and the CPU died. I took pleasure in saying, Told you so.
Latest Windows 11 Preview a well-rounded update – literally
Will it bend? That is the question: Arm boffins boast of first flexible 32-bit chip
Mountains on neutron stars are not even a millimetre tall due to extreme gravity
Northern Train's ticketing system out to lunch as ransomware attack shuts down servers
Windows 11: What we like and don't like about Microsoft's operating system so far
Impromptu game of Robot Wars sparks fire in warehouse at UK e-tailer Ocado
OpenAI shuts down robotics team because it doesn't have enough data yet
Try placing a pot plant directly above your CRT monitor – it really ties the desk together
Friday 16th July 2021 16:43 GMT
Re: The call
Yeah, I know what you mean. Mine did come around to the front again and stand with their front legs on the monitor tops and back feet still on the desk staring at the reduced "top"ology of the new arrangement, no doubt wondering where the nice wide/warm shelves had gone, and giving me the evil eye for some days afterwards.
Friday 16th July 2021 13:11 GMT
Re: The call
My cats used to do that when I had dual CRTs on my PC. They'd leap up from the desk and spend hours curled up on top of them. They were very confused the day I swapped the CRTs out for flat screens - they leapt up and then fell down the back of the desk, the looks on their faces a joy to behold!
Friday 16th July 2021 12:57 GMT
Re: BOBSMEDS
Back in my youth (mid 1970s when I was about 19) I was a trainee TV engineer for Rediffusion. I was once at a customers house with the back off the TV and the valve-packed chassis angled slightly downwards from its normal vertical position so I could fault find. The customer, an elderly gentleman, sat next to me watching interestedly at what I was doing. Then he did something I suppose he thought might have been useful. He said, "It was sparking a bit round about here," and put his fingers on the PCB in the high voltage area. It sparked once more, using his fingers to earth the current.
"Ow," I think he may have said (or possibly something stronger).
I looked at him, deadpan, saying something like, "I know where to poke my fingers safely. You don't. Don't do that again."
At least he learned his lesson first time around.
BOFH: But soft! What light through yonder filing cabinet breaks?
All hands on Steam Deck: Fancy a handheld Linux PC that runs Windows apps, sports a custom AMD Zen APU and a touch screen?
The lights go off, broadband drops out, the TV freezes … and nobody knows why (spooky music)
LibreOffice 7.2 release candidate reveals effort to be Microsoft-compatible
tsoHost pleads for 'patience and understanding' as sites borked, support sinkholed
Boffins find an 'actionable clock' hiding in your blood, ticking away to your death
Imagine a world where Apple shacked up with Xerox in the '80s: How might it look today?
With a straight face, Putin agrees to do something about ransomware coming out of Russia, apparently
South Korean uni installs lavatory that pays out when you spend a penny
BOFH: Where there is darkness, let there be a light
Windows 11 still doesn't understand our complex lives – and it hurts
Monday 12th July 2021 15:55 GMT
Fully agree...
However, it seems that MS haven't baked the TPM/Secure Boot requirements too deeply into the mix and people are very quickly finding ways around them. This one is particularly interesting:
https://www.xda-developers.com/install-windows-11-unsupported-pc/
I used method 3 (creating a hybrid W10/W11 insider ISO - not too difficult if you follow the instructions - all it does is replace a single file) and now have W11 running on a 2009-vintage Compaq Presario (no TPM or Secure Boot whatsoever). When it first managed to boot up the Settings app front-end was the W10 version instead of the restyled W11 version but the update to the latest 22000.65 insider fixed that.
Of course, there's absolutely no guarantee that these bodged versions will keep running but I believe there are FAR more resourceful people outside of MS than within it so I suspect this little cat and mouse game will continue indefinitely!
The human-devoid AI-powered Saildrone Surveyor ship just made it to Hawaii from SF
Linux Foundation celebrates 30 years of Torvalds' kernel with a dry T-shirt contest
Friday 9th July 2021 09:56 GMT
How about...
..a picture of Linus clipped from around the 12 second mark of this video saying exactly what he says here:
Robots still suck. It's all they can do to stand up – never mind rise up
Wednesday 7th July 2021 09:25 GMT
Not many people think of walking through a doorway without hitting the walls as sophisticated
Dunno about that - after pub o'clock it definitely gets a bit trickier to achieve.
Then again, getting back to robots, this is really quite mesmerising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE&t=5s
Gov.UK vows to chop red tape in the digital sector. What could possibly go wrong?
British Airways data breach lawsuit settled: Airline coughs up potentially millions to make sueball bounce away
One good deed leads to a storm in an Exchange Server
While some Apple employees aren't happy with hybrid work plans, those on the retail front line are probably delighted
Saturday 3rd July 2021 10:42 GMT
You unbox the laptop and it automatically FaceTime to a salesperson
I think Wally had a solution to that! https://dilbert.com/strip/2020-12-03
The PrintNightmare continues: Microsoft confirms presence of vulnerable code in all versions of Windows
Go to L: A man of the cloth faces keyboard conundrum
You wait ages for a neutron star and black hole to collide, then two pairs come along at once
Five words everyone wants to hear: Microsoft has 'visually refreshed' Office
UK watchdog fines biz £130k for 900,000+ direct marketing calls to folk who had opted out
Thursday 24th June 2021 16:03 GMT
Re: Epic title error
Yep, that's why there's a link at the bottom of the article called "Corrections" - just click it and tell someone at El Reg that there's a problem and they will fix it, just like I did a few minutes ago. Hey, they're only human (and currently short of staff)!
Oh look, the title now says "900,000+".
Monitoring is simple enough – green means everything's fine. But getting to that point can be a whole other ball game
Wednesday 23rd June 2021 17:37 GMT
Enjoy the downvotes
Dave Cartwright is someone who was one of the administrators (sorry, I can't remember his exact job title) handling the rather extensive IT systems at the University of East Anglia in the UK when I was there as a mature student back in the mid-1990s. Given that he had to deal with a vast array of kit - Windows (3.1 at the time), a very early Linux lab, tons of 680x0 Macs and various Unixy type things elsewhere along with all the infrastructure that held all that lot together, his experience and expertise is, therefore, something that should be appreciated, absorbed and not insulted, which I suspect was your intention.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
