For some reason a mental image of Mrs Doyle arises.
“Will you not have a cup of tea install Copilot? Go on, go on, go on go on go on GO ON…”
“Best to just say ‘yes’, your Grace. It saves time.”
Posts by David 132
3846 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
Page:
HP printer software turns up uninvited on Windows systems
Microsoft .NET MAUI devs vent over bugs backlog, response times
Thursday 30th November 2023 09:36 GMT 
Re: .NET WinUi3
I'm confused, AC. Are you me? Did I accidentally write your post and then suffer amnesia?
'Cos your complaints are all exactly what I've been banging my head against my desk over, for the last week.
Having developed quite happily in WinForms for years, and WPF a little, I thought I'd keep my skills up-to-date and try WinUI3. Acrylic/Mica textures, new controls, auto scaling layouts... yum.
But as you (I?) so succinctly described, it's an absolute, unfinished train-wreck. Your post should also have mentioned the total absence of a visual UI editor within Visual Studio. Microsoft's best response at the moment is "create the UI by hand-editing the XAML, then use Hot Reload on your project to tweak the XAML and quickly see the result in the running code." <bangs head on desk again>
The cert thing is a nightmare. Microsoft's attitude is "You can build as an MSIX and battle with certs, or you can build as unpackaged, which means even the smallest Hello World takes 200MB+, and as an additional bonus 'fuck you' to our loyal devs, unpackaged projects can't use some of the system UI framework, like notifications"
I liked - hell, I like - WinForms. Easy to build a functional UI - drag and drop controls in the visual editor. Build your own user controls if needed. Quick & simple build process that creates, in most cases, a single, compact .EXE that you can copy to as many other PCs as you want & immediately run. Sure, it doesn't handle transparency well, and manual DPI scaling can be tricky if you want pixel-sharp interfaces, but it's like a familiar and comfortable pair of slippers.
To echo Knightlie's sentiment above, the fact that WinForms is still, in many ways, the best option for a project in 2023 is a damning indictment of Microsoft's utter inability to think of their developer community.
I do wish I could justify spending the $1000 for the DevExpress Winforms toolkit!
AWS plays with Fire TV Cube, turns it into a thin client for cloudy desktops
Tuesday 28th November 2023 07:53 GMT
Re: shuttle to mission control SAY AGAIN
Thank you, I hope you're right. As written, it is ambiguous, and I interpreted it in the same way as yetanotheraoc.
"Dear Amazon, I hope you are well. Please sell us 5000 of your thin client devices. The usernames and passwords to be pre-loaded onto them are below:
1) jdoe / sw0rdf1sh
2) fbloggs / 0p3nsesamE
....etc..."
Monday 27th November 2023 22:49 GMT
Re: Er, is this article 15 years old ?
The article may or may not be 15 years old, but I'm not sure the hardware specs are any newer. 10/100 Ethernet? Really? On a box that's got no local smarts or storage and needs everything piped to it from the network?
What is this, 1996? I can't remember the last time I saw a client device whose ethernet wasn't at least Gigabit.
Plex gives fans a privacy complex after sharing viewing habits with friends by default
Wednesday 29th November 2023 05:01 GMT
Replying to myself, to relate a tale of hilarity/incompetence/woe...
So, following the above advice, I've just sorted my /Anime folder into two subfolders - /Anime/TV and /Anime/Movies.
I then created a new library of type "Mixed films and programs", and added those two subfolders to it.
Utter, utter shambles ensued.
Jellyfin is now grimly determined that all of the TV shows in there - Black Clover, Cowboy Bebop etc, all named according to Emby conventions - are actually seasons of "Scream - The TV Show", a show that I didn't know even existed, and would have less than zero interest in anyway. Oh, the movies - Suzume, Weather With You - are apparently all episodes of a TV show called "Unknown".
Entering the appropriate thetvdb/imdb IDs into the metadata editor didn't make any difference. "Oh, it's Cowboy Bebop - but it's still part of Scream The TV Show".
(bangs head on keyboard)
So I reverted the change and went back to the old, ugly method.
Like I said, JF has a few rough edges :-D
Wednesday 29th November 2023 04:32 GMT
Cool! Thanks for the pointers.
I'll happily admit that my understanding of what solutions exist for the two problems is a few months out of date; neither irritate me enough for me to have seriously dug into ways to fix them. But I do have time on my hands, after an unfortunate parting of the ways with my most recent employer, so I'll check out that Jellyfin Vue project.
And I don't recall seeing the "mixed films and programmes" library type, but I created my libraries 12+ months ago and haven't had cause to create any since, so that could explain it.
Thanks again!
Wednesday 29th November 2023 00:05 GMT
I ran Plex on my Linux Mint NAS box quite happily for a few years, until one day it just died and refused to serve pages. Wiping, nuking, reinstalling... nothing fixed it, so I bit the bullet and went over to Jellyfin. Plex had been starting to annoy me anyway with its incessant nudging towards subscriptions and online accounts.
JF has a few rough edges compared to Plex - minor things, like the list of your content is paginated in the browser because they can't or won't do an endless-scrolling type arrangement. And some people say that JF is a bit fussier than Plex when it comes to naming content, although I've not run into that. Honestly other than that my only gripe is that it doesn't seem to be able to handle libraries - e.g. for Anime - that contain both TV shows and films; it's one or the other, it seems, although if anyone can set me straight please do!
I'd highly recommend Jellyfin.
Activist Investor Elliott calls for a management reboot at Crown Castle
Tuesday 28th November 2023 18:56 GMT
Re: Activist investor
One of those “we can sell the tower assets to a shell company and lease them back, giving us as shareholders an immediate windfall but costing the company $$$$$$ in the longer term, but who cares because by that time we’ll have moved on to asset-stripping the next company” type plans, presumably.
For some reason, the name “Reacher Gilt” comes to mind.
Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files
Tiny11 shrinks Windows 11 23H2 down to pocket size
Monday 27th November 2023 21:04 GMT
Ouch. Your comment hit home. After years of developing in WinForms and WPF, I've recently joined the 21st century and dipped my toe into WinUI3, which for those who aren't familiar with it is Microsoft's "latest and greatest" framework for developing Windows 11 applications. Sorry, "apps".
Well, apart from the whole thing being unfinished and very much a work-in-progress (no visual UI editor at all? really? just hand-editing of raw XML files?) what's beyond my comprehension is that a simple "hello world" level program compiles to.... about 130MB. Yes, Megabytes.
There's things you can do to trim it down, but even with trying all the tricks, I haven't been able to get my simple prototype app - opens a window with some buttons, no code-behind functionality yet - below 90MB.
When I think of the miracles I've seen performed in mere kilobytes of space, 90+MB for a simple Hello World is utterly obscene and Microsoft should be red-faced.
Surface Duo crashes the party as Doctor Who celebrates 60th birthday
Sunday 26th November 2023 06:49 GMT
Re: Tom Baker
Hmm. Not claiming to be a serious Whovian, and I'm sure those here that are will have their own opinions, but...
First thing to remember is that compared to 2005+ Who, the classic episodes are a) slow-paced, and b) often have really, really dodgy production values. The former is just a question of readjusting your mental pace; they take 6 episodes to tell a story that New Who would wrap up in a single episode.
The latter issue just requires you to remember that they're of their time, when "decent special effects" were a dastardly American thing that Auntie BBC disdained. What they do have - at least sometimes - is crackingly good stories. Honestly with some of the best, I get so wrapped up in them that I utterly forget the rubber-masked cardboard shonkiness of it.
My personal recommendations would be the Season 14 Tom Baker story "The Talons of Weng-Chiang", and the Season 17/19/19 Peter Davison stories "City of Death", "Black Orchid" and "Time-Flight".
With the first one you do have to ignore the slightly-dodgy-by-modern-mores Chinese characterizations of the first one and enjoy the really good writing and dialog :)
City of Death was written by Douglas Adams, and is rather inventive.
Time-Flight has a missing Concorde landing millions of years in the past; what more could you want?
OpenCart owner turns air blue after researcher discloses serious vuln
US nuke reactor lab hit by 'gay furry hackers' demanding cat-human mutants
Robocar tech biz sues Nvidia, claims stolen code shared in Teams meeting blunder
Thursday 23rd November 2023 02:54 GMT
Every year at my former employer we all had to complete mandatory training - antitrust, ethics, and so on.
A game I played - hey, I had to find my amusement where I could - was, when asked by my manager whether I'd done them, to rack as many "violations" as possible into my response.
It ended up as something like "sure, boss, I bribed an underage child of a North Korean government official to do the training for me by offering to get him a job in return for that and finalizing my Confidential company project..."
OpenAI meltdown: How could Microsoft have let this happen after betting so many billions?
Microsoft dials back Bing after users manage to recreate Disney logo in fake AI-generated images
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's ejection sparks theories as odd as some ChatGPT output
Copilot coming to Windows 10 to help navigate the OS's twilight years
Friday 17th November 2023 18:15 GMT
Re: Plan to slow Windows 10 - try the other side, its less hassle (mainly)
I thought this line in the article was particularly damning:
“…Microsoft intends to further squeeze further value from its Windows 10 user base…”
Time was when a company would sink or swim on how much value it gave to its customer base, at risk of being outmaneuvered by competitors.
How quaint, I know.
Look out, Scattered Spider. FBI pumps 'significant' resources into snaring data-theft crew
Friday 17th November 2023 02:16 GMT
Paying ransoms should be made illegal.
And/or should invalidate ransomware insurance and trigger shareholder lawsuits.
The West learned a lesson after the spate of terrorist plane hijackings in the 70s - don't negotiate, don't pay ransoms, don't give in to demands.
And surprise surprise, the hijackings stopped.
HP sued over use of forfeited 401(k) retirement contributions
Microsoft takes aim at on-desk, non-cloudy developers with Windows AI Studio
You get a Copilot, and you get a Copilot – Microsoft now the Copilot company
As the Top500 celebrates its 30th year, with a $5 VM you too can get into the top 10 ... of 1993
Canonical shows how to use Snaps without the Snap Store
Saturday 11th November 2023 10:22 GMT
Re: Nailed it
@Ian J
Hmm. That’s puzzling. In my experience Firefox, when I give in and close it to finish its update, automatically saves the state of however many tabs I have open, and invariably restores them when the new version launches.
So I only lose a few seconds of time (which is why I said “irrational” in my original comment :) …) but fortunately no work.
I wonder if I’m just missing something? Or if you had some extension(s) installed that were interfering with the auto-tab-save mechanism?
Saturday 11th November 2023 04:51 GMT
Re: Nailed it
Running Firefox here on Mint. Does anyone else get irrationally annoyed when FF has been updated via Update Manager, and then refuses to open new tabs until it's been closed & restarted to finish its update - or is it just me?
Yes, yes, logically I know why it refuses to spawn new tab processes mid-way through its update, but it still irks me cos it interrupts my workflow.
Saturday 11th November 2023 04:45 GMT
Liam: It's about making stuff easier, for maintainers and for users, at the cost of some disk space.
That, on the face of it, is not a bad thing.
In a world where storage space is way cheaper per byte, and more capacious - and security is far more of a headache - than in *nix's formative decades, this does seem to be a reasonable trade-off, I'll semi-grudgingly agree.
Robot mistakes man for box of peppers, kills him
Thursday 9th November 2023 10:06 GMT
Re: It Happened Decades Ago ...
Similar and from 80 years ago…
https://magazine.punch.co.uk/image/I0000oS38YV8ZmfY
(Sadly, Punch have taken to putting an obnoxious watermark over their archived cartoons now - I have the unmarked version saved locally, but this is the only online one I could find with a cursory search from my phone)
Apple exec defends 8GB $1,599 MacBook Pro, claims it's like 16GB in a PC
Wanted: Driver for rocket-powered Bloodhound Land Speed Record car
Thursday 9th November 2023 04:00 GMT
Well, I seem to recall reading an interview with Andy Green a few years ago, and him saying that there's a fair bit more to it than that. Less of it is computer-automated than you might think. The driver has to be closely monitoring the throttle and the airflow surfaces, lest the vehicle go airborne, at which point he's (briefly) not a driver but a pilot.
Oh and even the "flat" surfaces they're planning to use aren't really "flat" to a metal-wheeled vehicle travelling at 1000mph. Even a small pebble could unsettle the car.
Bored Ape NFT party is a real eyesore, say irritated attendees
YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues
Monday 6th November 2023 17:45 GMT
Just set up a PiHole on your LAN and configure your router to point to it as the local DNS server when handing out DHCP leases. Job done, your wife will see fewer ads and you won’t have to touch her machine - well, unless her browser has DNS-over-HTTPS enabled (AKA Cloudflare’s end-run around PiHole) :)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
