* Posts by Stoneshop

5951 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009

Tech support scammer dialed random number and Australian Police’s cybercrime squad answered

Stoneshop
WTF?

Re: Do not call list for Scammers?

Phone: "Bleedledeedle"

Me: "Hello, $me speaking."

Them: "I'd like to inform you of the advantages of $service."

Me: "Ah, telesales."

Them: "Nono, not telesales. We'd like to inform you of the advanta"

Me: "Telesales."

Telephone: "Klick. Beepbeepbeep"

Clock: "It's now ten seconds later"

Phone: "Bleedledeedle"

Me: "Hello, $me speaking."

Them: "Why did you hang up?"

Me: "Observe, I'll be doing it again."

Telephone: "Klick. Beepbeepbeep"

Stoneshop

Re: Windows start sounds

Some kind of YouTube downloader... (thanks RIAA)

DWhelper.

Stoneshop
Windows

Re: Can you got to your windows computer ...

"My windows have a computer? I don't think so, I have to open and close them manually."

Let's... drawer a veil over why this laser printer would decide to stop working randomly

Stoneshop
Headmaster

A manually-operated, pedal-force augmented, composite soil transfer and reshaping implement.

With less than two months left, let's check in on Brexit: All IT systems are up and running and ready to go, says no one

Stoneshop
Facepalm

Re: Check an HGV is Ready to Cross the Border

CHRCB.

Sounds like an HGV with a manky gearbox shifting gears.

Remember when the keyboard was the computer? You can now relive those heady days with the Raspberry Pi 400

Stoneshop

Re: External HDD support is a question

The write protect switch needs to be interfaced to the write line not like that stupid switch on SD cards that tells the OS you would like for the card to RO but still allows the card to be written by software which ignores the switch.

Sorry to disappoint you, but there is no R/!W line on an SD card; all you can do is not send write commands, so it'd be all down to software anyway.

Stoneshop

Because the port layout of the Pi 400 would be a better match than a standard Pi for any keyboard you would want to convert?

Stoneshop

Re: All it needs..

Now if only this could work the other way... record data on the cassette tape :-)

Shouldn't be too difficult; a bit of software to turn the file you want to save into an audio file with the correct frequencies representing the ones and zeroes, then blast that out the audio port.

Although i seem to remember Sony's minidisc was able to do that? Memory a bit foggy on that one...

AFAIK there were a few models that could be used as a data drive because, after all, those MiniDiscs were just some form of binary storage.

Stoneshop

Re: The keyboard is everything

Ive got a Pi4 with the Pi touchscreen and a BT keyboard, and also a Pi3 with the Pi touchscreen and an USB keyboard; both work fine and have done so from day 1.

Stoneshop

Re: External HDD support is a question

On this particular unit, I'd want to see an internal USB C, with mounts ready for a 2.5" drive, and ready support for the drive

An M.2 SSD stick, rather. Less space, less power, and a spinning disk would not be a great match for something that weighs maybe a few hundred grams, easily moved about on a desk.

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

Stoneshop

Re: Why are sockets switched?

Screwdriver/testers that I trust[0] to work as expected are few and far between, and aren't ever purchased at one's common hardware store. Apart from that, the screws involved are almost always PZ/SL now, and the common size 2 slot blade that those screwdriver/testers offer tend to not fit those very well.

[0] and still test to verify they do.

Stoneshop

Re: Why are sockets switched?

We have actual hot water coming out of the hot tap,

augmented with bits of sacrificial anode and possibly legionella.

I'll boil my water from cold, TYVM. And even with a 1.5kW kettle a large mug worth doesn't take long.

Stoneshop
Mushroom

We never worked out what the lightning actually hit, but it was very close because the flash and (very loud) bang were simultaneous.

A nearby lightning strike killed my POTS modem[0] and a soundcard. There had been some distant strikes with the rumbling delay at about 15 seconds, so 5-ish km. Then nothing at all for maybe ten minutes, an utterly deafening bang as a strike hit a house right across the street, and nothing more.

Street lights out, POTS out, cable TV out, RCD tripped. Modem was just dead with no visible damage, the sound card PCB was twice as thick around the sockets compared to the rest of the board due to what must have been a ground loop in the external cables.

[0] not even cable internet back then where I lived, so mid 1990s. ISDN a couple of months later, then cable internet, then ADSL

Stoneshop

Re: Safety First

I thought the heart being on the left was a myth?

With most people it's on the left, but one classmate from secondary school was exempted from military service when the medical examination found[0] he was mirrored, with his liver and spleen being on the right as well. Can't remember if he was left-handed, although that would fully make sense, in his case.

[0] of course he, and his GP doctor knew about this, but the army medicos ignored the supplied documentation to that effect.

Stoneshop

Is the backbox size compatible?

No. BS1363 stuff is larger, and also has square backboxes with M3.5 mounting points where ones for Schuko gear are round and use M3 screws.

Stoneshop

Re: Failing switches?

My toaster is an old model that doesn't have a switch.

For this, in Schuko-land, there are plugs with an integrated switch. I've recently fitted one of those, with an illuminated rocker. to an immersion heater. Others present in this house are fitted to work lights and such.

Remember 2013? This coffee machine does: If I could turn back time – I'd reboot this PC

Stoneshop
Thumb Up

Re: Put the vending machine out of its misery.

Yes, the purported coffee that these contraptions emit is also almost entirely but not quite unlike tea as well.

Stoneshop
Thumb Up

Re: Put the vending machine out of its misery.

Those machines invariably present you with something almost entirely but not quite unlike coffee, so it deciding not to serve you anything will keep you from misery.

Trump's official campaign website vandalized by hackers who 'had enough of the President's fake news'

Stoneshop
Devil

Re: A sign of the times

maybe go for the lesser of the two evils?

Bah. Just vote Chtulhu.

Machine learning gets semi conscious... Waymo, Daimler vow to bring self-driving trucks to American highways

Stoneshop
Pirate

Do they have protection against hijacking?

Well, if they'd be using Google Traffic the AI could deduce that it's just one car in each lane without congestion further ahead, and decide to take appropriate action.

Trouble at Skull-Top Ridge: ESA boffins use data wizardry to figure out Philae probe's second touchdown site

Stoneshop
Boffin

Re: Frothy?

Direction of impact, and area.

Impact site 2 appears to have been scraped by Philae. Or skimmed, as we're talking about cappuccino. So little force perpendicular to the surface, and if that was by one of the lander's flat sides it would not have made a deep impression indeed.

We know there are a lot of, er, distractions right now but NASA's got some sweet video of its asteroid rubble raiser

Stoneshop

misplaced comma

while speeding up to an orbital velocity of 7.6 m/s (54.2 linguine per second)

That'd be 7.6km/s (542000 linguine/s).

Stoneshop
Go

Re: Collecting dust

Simples. Just wrap the asteroid in a dust bag,

Pity Christo has died earlier this year; that would be something right up his street.

Stoneshop
FAIL

Re: descend under parachutes, it is hoped

I was wondering (not having read up on the project), if it might be tasked with docking at the ISS

So instead of coming straight back it has to reduce its radial speed (vis-a-vis Earth) to zero, while speeding up to an orbital velocity of 7.6 m/s (54.2 linguine per second) and ending up in the ISS orbit.

to offload it's cargo so it can be pre-analysed before entering the atmosphere

Which the ISS is a bit less than perfectly equipped for, with respect to the tests one wants to perform while simultaneously not contaminating the samples in any way.

So in short: you haven't thought this through. At all.

Stoneshop
Holmes

"And seeing as all life has this common ancestry"

Citation needed, as they say.

Then again, enough cosmic flotsam has crashed into us,

And cooked on the way in to a degree, compared to which English cuisine can only be labelled 'raw'.

FYI: NASA appears to have scooped dirt from an asteroid 200 million miles away and plans to bring it back home

Stoneshop
Boffin

Or is that just sour grapes?

Losing your sense of taste, are you?

Stoneshop
Facepalm

Re: I [...] have followed it ever since.

The nearby Hoover is not only a plain vacuum cleaner[0], it also has a rotating bristle that should sweep up the dust, even if it sticks a bit, and deposit it in the dust bag.

And there was a scoop specified for filling the ziploc in the case he hasn't taken the Hoover, for instance because there weren't enough extension cords available

[0] so, meant to clean a vacuum, innit?

Stoneshop
Holmes

Re: "While you were out..."

They handed you a "while you were out card"

Handed? You mean tossed in the general direction of your letterbox radio telescope and filled in with the transmission equivalent of an unintelligible scrawl using an out-of-ink biro.

Stoneshop
Thumb Up

I [...] have followed it ever since.

So you can take some more Bennu dust if OSIRIS-REx fails to collect enough? Have you taken a Hoover with you, or just a scoop and a ziploc baggie?

Got an irritating itch you just can't scratch? That'll be Windows wanting an update

Stoneshop
Headmaster

What other language is there?

Greek.

How else would Anglophones have been able to coin the saying "It's all Greek to me"?

When you tell Chrome to wipe private data about you, it spares two websites from the purge: Google.com, YouTube

Stoneshop

Re: "We asked Google for an explanation."

Reprimanded in front of the customer? Wow, how utterly unprofessional (even if it was a ruse).

Totally credible a hundred years ago.

2020 hasn't been all bad – a new Raspberry Pi Compute Module is here

Stoneshop

Re: Still not pleasing some

Unlike the earlier dev boards, the new one allows existing hat's with it (one of my gripes with the old ones) but again some complaining about that.

You can find dev boards for the SODIMM CMx from a rather basic one that just offers the standard pin header, micro-USB (one data, one power), microSD slot, and a camera connector, to one with every interface broken out plus an area to plug Arduino shields in.

On AliExpress.

Of course.

When you gaze long enough into the bork, the bork will gaze back into you

Stoneshop

Re: Why use a screen?

How many times do you need to change the instructions?

The last time I used[0] a public toilet, which was some time about a year ago[1], there were screens between the mirrors over the wash basins[2], espousing the virtues of proper hand washing, the care with which the managing company keeps an eye on having a sufficient amount of bog rolls available and in place, and inviting you to replenish the lost fluids and/or solids at nearby establishments.

[0] Nearly couldn't, as the entrance gate only took coins or contactless payment. I have expressly demanded a bank card that does not possess that option, and I was 10c short on coins until I found one on the floor.

[1] Because Progress they've probably morphed into something more interactive as well as intrusive in the meantime[3]

[2] They were grander than mere sinks. Very much so.

[3] May have been put on hold though due to low visitor numbers recently.

Elizabeth Holmes' plan to avoid her Theranos fraud trial worked out about as well as her useless blood-testing machines

Stoneshop

Re: One narcissist runs a fake company

you'd be astonished how little the average American cares about what people in other countries think of us.

This is not at all mutual.

Stoneshop
Holmes

Pity

that those who promote these treatments don't ever want to lead by example.

Ring glitch results in global ding dong ditch: Doorbell bling flings out random pings but they're not the real thing

Stoneshop
Facepalm

Re: Ring needs visual bell

Yes, I have one - it's better than my old bell and as I'm in a 3 story town house, I have a chance to let the caller know I'm on my way. That and see who it is in case it's someone I don't want to answer the door to.

Gear to deal with that has been around for decades, and needs no more than a length of cable between the front door and your apartment.

Stoneshop
Flame

Why would you develop such a device in say sunny California

Ring TNG will be fire-resistant.

Stoneshop
Devil

Re: Ignorance is bliss

c) someone delivering something that they can't drop off without a signature so they'll drop it off anyway, preferably in the garbage bin if that's outside.

Stoneshop
WTF?

Re: Ignorance is bliss

As I said elsewhere we use one in the care of an elderly relative.

And you solve that problem by fitting an overblown doorbell?

Stoneshop

Re: Look on the bright side.

Bur does it give an angry squawk ?

For a modest fee the ringer can be replaced/augmented with additional sound generators, programmed with sounds almost entirely but not quite unlike a standard doorbell ringer or buzzer. For the technically gifted among you a relay contact can be provided to allow triggering of a sound generator of your own design.

(at University I built an electronic doorbell that initially produced a birdlike chirp, but after tweaking a few component values it started to resemble those US police sirens, but decreasing in pitch and tempo over a few seconds after releasing the doorbell button. One transistor, a few resistors and capacitors, a small audio transformer and a speaker)

There ain't no problem that can't be solved with the help of American horsepower – even yanking on a coax cable

Stoneshop

Re: the difference between an engineer and sn installer.

You'd be surprised how often this happens

I know, but in this case the cabling between buildings was in concrete sewer pipes (no, NOT dual-purposed), so, while it was on our minds we didn't consider it a very probable cause.

Stoneshop

Re: The other side to IBM cables.

A customer site who had been using IBM mainframes since the early seventies had, by the nineties quite a collection of redundent cables under the 2 foot deep floor.

That's why the (erroneously specified) 3ft floor at the site I was the resident engineer for was really nice to have. Even with cabling strata going back to the mid-Pleistocene, when PDPs roamed the Earth, you could move about at leisure with just the two tiles at each end of the cable to be taken out or rerouted being lifted.

Stoneshop

the difference between an engineer and sn installer.

Quite.

One evening, some two decades back, we were upgrading the firmware on the FDDI hubs strewn around the site, a veterinarian pharmaceuticals research/production plant. Topo was a double ring, so one hub being rebooted should not have affected any of the other hubs. Still, it turned out it did as with a number of reboots a couple of the other hubs started complaining about the loss of one ring.

So, two of us grabbed the keys to the buildings and their data cabinets, a pair of walkie-talkies and flashlights, and set off into the night in the general direction of where the problem was. Now a break in a fiber could really be anywhere between hub A and hub B, although it probably wouldn't be somewhere halfway in a multicore run in an underground duct, as it would be very unlikely a disturbance would have taken out just a single strand. So we started with checking the patch panels and the leads to the hubs.

Nothing immediately obvious, so checking the connectors was next. And pulling out one of them the cause of the problem glaringly presented itself as the fiber just dropped out of the connector body.

It turned out there had been a couple of new CAT5 patches installed the day before, and apparently one of the installers had dropped a screwdriver or something on the hapless fiber connector below, somehow breaking the fiber in such a way that it came loose inside of the connector body after which that installer monkey just pushed it back in.

The next day facility services were instructed to put plexiglass covers over the fiber patches in all data cabinets.

Burning down the house! Consumer champ Which? probes smart plugs to find a bunch of insecure fire-risk tat

Stoneshop
Holmes

If you see that issue, it's a big clue that other important factors were missed, and you should do some more digging.

Those IoT thingies don't compost very well; it's preferable to deal with them according to WEEE directives.

Hydrogen-powered train tested on Britain's railway tracks as diesel alternative

Stoneshop

replacing/reboring low bridges and tunnels

Maybe some kind of hybrid supply, with batteries or fuel cells to power the set in tunnels and on longer bridges too low to fit an overhead wire; it should be able to coast through shorter tunnels and bridges, although they should be able to deal with getting going from a full stop in those places.

Stoneshop

Re: Not as green as 25kv overhead

A few hydrogen-powered LINTs are used in northern Germany*

They've also been testing a hydrogen-powered iLINT in the north of the Netherlands, resulting in an intention to order them as replacements for the diesel units currently servicing the lines in Groningen province.

Help! My printer won't print no matter how much I shout at it!

Stoneshop

Re: HP

Off-topic slightly but does anyone make PC gear to last anymore?

Unicomp keyboards. Your venerable Model M, now with USB.

Also, SuperMicro motherboards and SeaSonic PSUs.

Stoneshop

Re: HP

Although at least you can still get a disassembly manual from HP for them.

No need for those. Unless maybe you want to use the eternal Haynes maxim: "Reverse these steps to reassemble".

Stoneshop
Happy

Re: HP

A laser may be more expensive to buy, but it sure as hell is cheaper to run. You'll probably have made that saving on a colour laser by the time you've had to replace your first set of toner cartridges.

I got a Brother colour laser, duplex, wired network and their implementation of PostScript, off our local classifieds for less than the price of even the shittiest HP inkjet. Status printouts and a test page were shown in the ad, indicating clumpy magenta toner and very little use. That clumpy toner was dealt with by merely transporting the unit home, and the (original) toners ran out several thousand pages later.

Brexit travel permits designed to avoid 7,000-lorry jams come January depend on software that won't be finished till April

Stoneshop
Trollface

It's the Underpants Gnomes style solution.

One must then ask whether there are still Underpants Manufacturing Facilities operating within the UK, as well as those having an adequate supply of raw materials.