* Posts by Stoneshop

5951 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009

Maker of ATM bombing tutorials blew himself up – Euro cops

Stoneshop
Headmaster

a large variety of used ATM machines

Next you'll be telling me they're automated ATM machines, and to operate them you enter your personal PIN number.

Stoneshop
Mushroom

Icon = Seems to have 2 fingers & a thumb.

Quoting Derek Lowe: "Hexanitro? Say what? I'd call for all the chemists who've ever worked with a hexanitro compound to raise their hands, but that might be assuming too much about the limb-to-chemist ratio. "

Stoneshop
Mushroom

Re: Ignition!

I can't recall the exact wording, but one of the oxidisers that was investigated was "hypergolic with fuels, sand, asbestos and lab assistants"!

Chlorine trifluoride.

>>It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water —with which it reacts explosively. <<

2FA? More like 2F-in-the-way: It seems no one wants me to pay for their services after all

Stoneshop

Re: A brilliant demonstration of how phones can become useless annoyances

I was using such a phone, a Nokia indeed, as my work phone until quite recently. That's when I got a call from someone in Ops Support whether I was still using a 2G SIM? Well, no, but it's in a phone that does 2G only. "$PROVIDER will cease offering a 2G network, so you'll have to change."

After a bit of cursory checking and finding that most of the 4G nonsmartphones were six of one, half a dozen of the other, I settled on some Alcatel that $PROVIDER was offering. Which turned out to be right in the middle of the 'meh' range I expected it to be in. But it works as a phone with little of the cruft[0] that smartphones tend to come with, and runs several days on a battery charge.

[0] which I have no intention of using, so why should I lug around a phone that offers them at the cost of battery life, and bulk?

Stoneshop
Headmaster

Nunyabiznis

What about when somewhere in the distant past you were forced to set it up, and are suddenly confronted with 'what is the name of your pet?'

All my pets, parents, parents' birth places, schools, first loves, streets and whatever else they think they can authenticate you with are curiously enough named "forgotthat", in a particular bastardisation of a local dialect[0].

[0] Easy enough for me to remember the exact spelling, plus I have to use that sufficiently frequently to keep it fresh.

Stoneshop

Re: SMS and 2FA

A backup phone can't easily get the same number

My provider offers the option of a second SIM[0] that you can stick in another phone for an emergency switchover. Of course, they state, you can not have both phones active at the same time; that second SIM is in its predestinated phone with a fleck of kapton over its contacts.

[0] you're actually getting two new SIMs, as they have to do something unmentionable to get the PINs to match.

Stoneshop
Holmes

Re: time for change

We need to get and there and PROVE that these security-obsessed arseholes are the first against the wall come the revolution.

But now the parting on the left will be a parting on the right.

Stoneshop
Headmaster

Password parser fail

What frustrates me most though is that the most labyrinthine and non-standard password restrictions are invariably for some crap entity that I will never use twice in a year.

The password entry box had an accompanying text stating that my password had to be "At least 12 characters, of which one digit and one non-alphanumeric character".

Entering "atleasttwelvecharactersofwhichonedigitandonenonalphanumericcharacter" it horked up an error that it was too long[0] and didn't conform to the set requirements.

[0] What hidden part of "at least" was there that implied "not more than"?

Stoneshop

Re: A brilliant demonstration of how phones can become useless annoyances

I hate smartphones.

As do I. Still I have one. Sort of. A Sony XperiaX that exclaims on startup that it can't be trusted[0], then offers me a screen with apps I deem useful. And just those.

It's also not my phone because I prefer phones that don't need to be recharged every night, so it get used more like a small form-factor tablet.

[0] Orly? how about all the info that ChocFac is siphoning off your phone while it's running its stock Android?

Computer shuts down when foreman leaves the room: Ghost in the machine? Or an all-too-human bit of silliness?

Stoneshop

Re: Power and lighting together

That two circuit requirement sounds a bit odd. Why would a bedroom need more than one circuit?

It's not that the average rooms (and bedrooms in particular) are power-hungry, but rather that you still have power to those rooms in case a fuse blows, and you're not left in the dark.

My hobby room has five. Plus a 3 phase 3x16A one.

Stoneshop

Hotels

Or they use access cards which you're expected to slide into a slotted device inside the room when you're in, enabling power to every light and socket. Fortunately those slots just have a microswitch at the bottom, and any credit card sized object will do. So you just insert some ancient and worthless loyalty card, and the power stays on to charge your gear while you're out.

Stoneshop

Re: Power socket on the lighting circuit?

There's an episode of Jeeves & Wooster where Jeeves is doing the ironing with the iron plugged into the ceiling bulbholder.

Somewhat recently came across an iron that was apparently meant to connect to a lighting circuit. A gas (UK, not US) circuit, as it still had a small length of a now crumbly and brittle hose fitted. Another one had a small petrol tank. I knew of coal-fired ironing irons, but these were new to me although their existence wasn't very surprising.

Stoneshop

Re: Power and lighting together

Over here there is no inherent separation of lighting and wall socket circuits, at least for domestic buildings, but code prescribes that every room (excepting toilets, bathrooms and probably lit walk-in closets) should have two circuits feeding it.

Offices will likely have them separated, primarily for maintenance and load distribution reasons.

Stoneshop

Hunting for the breaker

The breaker panel in this house has individual GFCI/CB combos per circuit, twelve in all. The most certain way to switch off the right breaker is to create a ground fault in the circuit you need to work on.

On a Benning Duspol circuit tester you'll find two buttons precisely for this purpose, and text on the breakers state that you should test them each month, so that's two birds with one stone.

Anonymous: We've leaked disk images stolen from far-right-friendly web host Epik

Stoneshop

Re: Must have taken them HOURS

Hours, only back in the 2400 baud, BBS era. Downloading FigLet using Kermit, then finding that it had been packed with a compression program new to you so you had to download _that_ too. And your telephone line was cursed with crosstalk from hell by a chatty neighbour. Using a modem that did not yet have these newfangled Hayes commands, so dialling had to be done using a Real POTS Phone, then flipping a switch once the screech started.

Nothing works any more. Who decided that redundant systems should become redundant?

Stoneshop

if the apartment had any space suitable for doing any hardware projects..

I've had hardware stores cut plywood panels exactly to size so that I didn't have to haul a bunch of tools to the place where they were to be fitted or take a full panel home first and cut it. In your case you could just get two pieces making up the required extra height, or two full-height side panels and a lid at the new dimensions. Then it's just screwing it together using a couple of angle brackets, in situ. Not much space needed.

Stoneshop

don't buy any sort of printer that uses liquid ink.

Inkjet printers are like cats: ignores what you want them to do but just continues cleaning itself instead.

BOFH: You'll find there's a company asset tag right here, underneath the monstrously heavy arcade machine

Stoneshop

using their GPU to heat the workspace

I know someone who does.

He co-manages a decomissioned 1980's communications bunker turned museum, and that underground lump of concrete would normally be heated using air ducts fed from the generator's cooling circuit. But running that requires expensive diesel oil, and lots of it, whereas their electricity supply is a) plentiful and b) as good as free. So he rigged up a bunch of miners, controlled by, basically, a thermostat.

Stoneshop
Facepalm

Re: A little power

on a docking station with real screens you'd have to open it ,

It's open while on the docking station too, else you're needlessly reducing available screen area.

(it's to the side, displaying the Teams chat log. The real work happens on the two big screens in front of me)

Stoneshop
Facepalm

Re: Free Coffee & Tea

We also have a separate hot/cold/temperate/sparkling water dispenser. ( free, even for the sparkling one )

We used to have chilled water dispensers in every kitchenette (one wing with nine floors, the other with three), installed at noticeable cost because the water supply needed to be plumbed in. One year later they were removed again as the cost for the inline filters was deemed prohibitive.

One kitchenette was also equipped with a quooker, until H&S[0] figured that one could receive serious burns from that tap[1], and ordained that they were not to be installed in the other kitchenettes. The one that was installed already was not removed; I suspect that anyone who would tr to do so would end up in the nearby canal.

[0] Halfwitted and Stupid

[1] a separate one; there are also models dispensing through what looks like the standard hot/cold mixer tap which might cause an unpleasant surprise for the unwary, with actually boiling water coming out instead of merely 70..80C or so if you turn the wrong knob.

Stoneshop
FAIL

Re: Personal heaters

That's... it actually took me a few minutes to understand what you meant, and now I'm horrified that someone can conceive of it, let alone actually do it.

Couple of years ago I came across a 110/230V transformer that came with a cable with one end an Euro plug, the other an US plug. The transformer itself had one each matching sockets. It was supposed to work as follows: in the US, you'd stick the Euro plug into the Euro socket, the US plug into a wall socket and the US socket on the transformer would give you 230V. In 230V-land the US plug on the cord would go into the transformer, the Euro plug into the wall socket, and you would have 110V coming out of the transformer's Euro socket. The non-matching of the output socket on the transformer with the provided voltage was puzzling; the cord ending in two plugs was "Let's not use this abomination, ever.". As we suspected the unit's design philosophy not to be restricted to just the cord the lot was subjected to some percussive and abrasive modification before it went into the scrap metal bin.

Catch of the day... for Google, anyway: Transatlantic Cornwall cable hauled ashore

Stoneshop
FAIL

Re: cable effort

Cantennas are not well suited to getting mains power to one's shed, and if you're digging anyway wired network is by far the better choice.

Stoneshop

Re: The Rain in Spain

And agriculture.

We're going deeper underground: New digital project to map UK's sub-surface 'assets'

Stoneshop

Re: digging it up seems to be the only sure way to do that.

Depends.

Now this was a minor matter, but when I had to connect a drain for the new bathroom to the existing one, under a 10cm concrete floor, no crawlspace, the drawing suggested it would be parallel to a particular wall at 90cm distance. The new drain would be running towards it at right angles, the trench in the floor had been cut and dug to the right depth, coming from the other side relative to that reference wall. So I widened the end of the trench into a hole and dug down. No main drain. Enlarged the hole, still nothing. So the drawing was incorrect, and I could either cut out some more of the concrete floor and get the sand out, or I could call a plumber to wave an electronic divining rod over the floor and tell me where to dig.

I opted for the latter.

He came and from one of the existing toilets snaked in a drain camera with a location sender, then waved a receiver thingie over the floor and marked the highest signal strength. The existing drain turned out to be just 40cm out from the wall, half a meter off from what the drawing said. This was confirmed by poking sideways from the hole, and finding the pipe. Saved a lot of guessing, and digging. But of course such a sender won't work that well in cast iron pipes, or live water or gas mains.

Stoneshop
Holmes

Re: Not all in Blackburn, Lancashire

And as one Albert Hall is about 85000 m^3, or 162337662.3377 grapefruits, one thousand of them would be 33961 Olympic swimming pools.

I sincerely hope the inhabitants of Blackburn are avid swimmers.

Stoneshop
Joke

Re: Prior art

I guarantee that even the owners of some assets do not know where they are.

Well, it's being said that a lot of people are unable to find their asses without a map, so they clearly do not know where those are. Maybe they should listen for braying, or they should have put a GPS collar on their donkey.

Oh, assets. Never mind.

Report details how Airbus pilots saved the day when all three flight computers failed on landing

Stoneshop

Re: how long is each FCPC allowed to be failed for?

Might be this one.

Alpha adds to tally of exploding rockets, takes out space sail prototype with it

Stoneshop
Facepalm

Bloody hell

That's one bad camera operator.

Rockets can be expected to go up, although not all of them actually do. Still, you put the cam on a tripod and check that when you tilt the thing it stays pointed at the rocket. So that when the rocket actually goes up you actually, you know, just have to tilt the cam instead of having to hunt left and right to keep it in view. Any decent tripod can be set so that tilting is smooth while resisting panning.

Stoneshop
Mushroom

Re: It is rocket science

Tricky it may be, but there's well over half a century of experience, both successes and failures, to build upon. If you try something new like SpaceX landing and reusing their first stages you can expect some irreversible rapid disassembly before you get things right, but launching a rocket like this should be old hat by now.

Virginia school board learns a hard lesson... and other stories

Stoneshop

Re: 100 tons?

Airships have their use cases.

Hauling stuff into (or out of) places that don't have suitably-sized landing strips, for instance. They also have their restrictions, of which weather is probably the largest factor. Still, they're being built and used.

Stoneshop

Tactical uses

a sea monster loaded with 50 anti-ship missiles approaching a US carrier group at 250 mph at 60 feet and then firing.....

Might have been halfway feasible at the time these were developed, but even then I'd expect it not to have been their primary use case. Carrier groups in a war zone tend to have patrol aircraft up. Those would spot the ekranoplan(s) hundreds of miles out, allowing attack aircraft to get airborne, or just getting sea-to-sea missiles launched in their general direction. And ekranoplans are way less maneuvrable than fighter jets. They would probably not even be a match against the better WW2 carrier based prop planes, given their respective speeds and lack of defensive armament on the 'plans.

My guess is that they would primarily have been used for anti-submarine action and softening up land-based defences that they can get within missile range of.

Oh! A surprise tour of the data centre! You shouldn't have. No, you really shouldn't have

Stoneshop
Devil

Re: year 2000

but the first time is a bugger.

Especially if that beep is more of a metallic blip, like one of those clicker toys.

The people who design smoke alarms to signal battery depletion to sound like that should be locked in an echo chamber for a week, with several dozen of smoke alarms spread around a ceiling just too high to reach, batteries nearly dead.

Stoneshop

Re: year 2000

Using the fact that beeps from a smoke detector are unlocatable, you should have put the mozzie simulator in a smoke detector case.

This was early 1980's, autonomous smoke detectors weren't really common back then, and it was built from opamps, a 555, a sprinkling of discrete resistors and caps and an LDR, and about the size of a fag packet. And actually in one; as the guy smoked it was a most innocuous enclosure.

Stoneshop
Devil

Re: year 2000

Reminds me of the time, must have been right before the year 2000, that I woke up around three in the morning, realizing I'd heard a short, faint and muffled BUZZ a number of times in my sleep.

Ah, an annoy-a-tron. Smoke alarms are also in that class: single short beep with several-minute intervals to indicate a low battery, and due to the pitch and volume of that beep it's hard to pinpoint. And of course those units don't then blink a LED, as that would take valuable energy.

I once built an actual annoy-a-tron, an electronic circuit that would generate the sound of a mosquito a couple of minutes after the light was switched off in the room it was hidden in. Light on it went silent immediately. The room in question being one of my fellow students' who had a couple of annoying habits himself, so this revenge was justified.

Stoneshop
Windows

Similarly

One weekend, way back, I was assigned to be on call (although that was not in my contract), for the DBA to if he ran into problems with a large and critical database something. DBA had remote access, I did not. I would also be busy that Saturday preparing a moto trials event, and would be camping out on the terrain to the odd moped youth from getting themselves and the non-stops into disarray. But I had my phone charged and on me, and of bloody course the DBA called at about ten o'clock in the evening. So, sitting at a small campfire (it was late October) I guided him through the more intricate incantations of stuffing a database dump into a backup saveset, then on to another system to free up space, after which he could get on with whatever he needed to inflict on the database. Took about an hour in all.

So far so good.

Coming into work Monday I was immediately pounced upon by a philosopher who had managed to become head of the IT 'department' (just five people, him included), demanding to know why I had been unreachable that weekend during a most urgent database something. Now, being on the phone with the DBA might have resulted in not being able to simultaneously answer other calls, but there had actually been no other calls at all, before, during or after. So my best guess was (and still is) that nITwIT philosopher just had the wrong number for me, and just mashed 'redial' every time instead of looking it up. But he insisted the number was right , so mine must have been unright which obviously was my fault.

Well, end of contract then. No big loss.

When everyone else is on vacation, it's time to whip out the tiny screwdrivers

Stoneshop
FAIL

Re: Two observations:

and if you install a 6mm in the place of a 4mm, you break something expensive.

There are laptops that have hardware maintenance manuals that clearly show which length of screw goes where.

And if you tighten a screw by feel first instead of using a powered tool like a wowstick you'll notice a screw being too long or too short.

Also, M3 screws are rarely found in laptops.

Stoneshop
Mushroom

Re: Two observations:

I bought my first Wowstick after I had to open HP Elitebook 840 G3s...

HP laptpos are best opened using an axe. Or a chainsaw.

Of course you then not get to "reverse these steps to reassemble", but the disaassembly is extremely satisfying.

Stoneshop
Flame

Re: Haynes Manuals

And after that, the blowtorch.

Live, die, copy-paste, repeat: Everything is recycled now, including ideas

Stoneshop

Previous housing

The house I was born in, knocked down so they could widen the road to the 14th century abbey.

Every house I lived in prior to 2005 still stands, just the school I attended at age 7-8 is gone (and good riddance). It's just that three of them are rather out of the way (although I currently happen to be quite near one house/school set)

Beige Against the Machine: The IBM PC turns 40

Stoneshop

Re: "agile" or "faster"?

But that meant the hardware requirements were "hefty", and when run on the sort of setup most people could afford, it was "a bit slow".

Back around the time of the first 486 a friend had just switched to W98, and complained that his 386 was slow. So I suggested upping the memory to 16M (from 4), which was what I had in my OS/2 system. So he went to a nearby computer store, who instead of selling him 16M memory, got him to buy a 486/66 with, again, just 4M memory. No gain at all, where in comparison my 386/40 flew.

Stoneshop
Boffin

Re: "What a piece of crap"

Man, that's a shock. I don't think I've EVER seen a PHB that didn't want the latest greatest newest shiniest sitting on his desk... doing nothing.

That's what you get when a PHB carries the Beancounter gen, which in several cases becomes dominant: the shininess desire becomes sufficiently suppressed so that the carrier is satisfied with a less shiny but cheaper object.

Stoneshop

Re: Memory

Anyone else recall the large expansion cards stuffed with discrete memory devices ?

Recall? I handled two of them not a year ago. One was chock full of 41256 DRAMs for a total of 2.5MB, the other used 30-pin SIMMs. RAMPage was the name on one of them, and IIRC it had a config tool with which you could split the installed memory between EMS and XMS as well as backfilling upper memory and setting the EMS window.

Also, two words: QEMM and LOADHI.

Stoneshop

Re: expansion slots

What a good idea expansion slots were !

The Apple ][ (and obviously its clones) already had them for a couple of years.

There was also the S-100 bus, but that one is basically just an interconnect bus instead of a mainboard which already carries most of the functionality a computer needs. Similarly the vendor-specific buses like DEC's Omnibus, Unibus and Q-bus.

Elevating bork to a new level (if the touchscreen worked)

Stoneshop
Thumb Up

Re: Network missing AI

"If you don't open that door right now I'll zap straight off to, errrhm, OK, never mind."

Stoneshop

Re: "A touchscreen, by itself, is not going to enhance anything"

[1] it allows system design cock-ups to be rectified more cheaply and easily than a hard wired button panel does;

An elevator control panel tends to have one button[0] per floor that it can stop on[1], and any cockup in the mapping between the buttons and the actual floors, in so far as one can make them in the first place, can be corrected in the software behind the panel.

[0] hard, soft, whatever

[1] buildings with multiple elevators may have particular ones dedicated to specific (groups of) floors.

Stoneshop
Big Brother

Re: Network missing AI

Alternatively, a wealth of questions will be shown on the screen

"Would you like to post this uplifting event to your Social[0] Media? If yes then please enter username(s) and password(s) at the prompt.

[0] Anti-, in reality.

Boots on Moon in 2024? NASA OIG says you better moonwalk away from that date, because suits ain't ready

Stoneshop
Coat

Boots on the moon

Simple.

As long as they don't have to have an astronaut wearing them.

Wireless powersats promise clean, permanent, abundant energy. Sound familiar?

Stoneshop
Flame

Somerset

One of somerset's few natural disadvantages - is it's not in the tropics

Be glad; if it were you Englishmen would shortly fall victim to the mutating properties of the >750THz radiation you would be experiencing there in quantities you'd be unaccustomed to, making your skin turn red and in a matter of days fall off.

Stoneshop
Facepalm

Re: Casual reference to 5G sceptics as 'wingnuts': author already is on wrong side of history

the upper end of the 5G spectrum "SHF" or "EHF"

Stupendously High Frequencies and Exorbitantly High Frequencies; everybody know that.

Stoneshop
Boffin

Re: the 100mpg carburetor story

ITYM 262% efficiency.