Posts by Pen-y-gors

Cyber?

"for an unnamed company that set up a UK cyber range in mid-2019"

So this is what they meant by having a career 'in cyber'.

And there was the rest of us taking the piss about Government PR agencies not having a clue. Red faces all round.

A question

Can one hide a satellite dish on the ground? Inside a shed for instance? With a thin roof? Like the big radar domes?

'Faster'?

Meh!

The speed the browser renders pages is a minor factor. The biggest speed factor is dodgy websites that make several hundred https connections to get all they need to render a single page - slow even over 300Mbps connection.

1 million users?

So Starlink, 4000 satellites messing up the sky, can only provide connectivity to 1 million users?

I was expecting hundreds of millions

What happened to "Don't Be Evil"?

Now it seems to be Kill everyone in the World! Mwahahaha

Surely this is a hardwaare issue for Apple?

I have a large number of electrical devices in my house that will break ('be bricked') if they are fed too much power. Fires, kettle, toaster, microwave, lights - in all cases they are protected by inserting a clever little gadget into the circuit called a 'fuse'. If too much power is supplied then the 'fuse' goes pop, and prevents the device from 'being bricked'. All that is needed then is to find a better power supply, and replace the 'fuse' (at a cost of pennies).

Can I patent this idea and sell it to Apple? I'm sure it wouldn't add more than $1000 to the price of a MacBook (or 50cents to the price of a PC)

Going out on a limb here...

But, just a wild, crazy thought.

How about employing some staff with the necessary skills, on a decent salary, to create some sort of in-house 'department' who can do the work. For a lot less money!

Wind

Sitting at home on Earth, listening to the wind blowing outside.

Click on the audio link, listen to the wind blowing on Mars.

Surreal

Mind-blowing.

Mice/trackballs...meh

Having started to get nasty Carpel tunnel some years back, I switched to trying to use a trackball. Nah. Just ended up with a sprained thumb.

For quite a while now I've been using various incarnations of the Anker/Perixx vertical mouse. Basically a different shape so the hand is vertical, and larger than a standard mouse, but otherwise you still move it around. Very comfortable. No carpal probs at all now. They're about £15 from You-kno-who, and tend to conk out after 2-3 years, but well worth trying.

Starlink?

Will this work once people can get internet from the sky via Mr Musk?

Can you disguise the satellite dish so they don't know you have one?

Game time

For some odd reason I looked at that keyboard and wanted to play Mah Jong.

How fast is fast enough?

I'm currently on 300Mbps FTTP with BT. Do I want/need to blow an extra £10/month to get 900? Decisions, decisions... (This is in rural northern Ceredigion)

What pisses me off with fibre is the fact that general web access is virtually the same speed as pre-fibre. It's making the 50-100 connections to Facebook, Twitter and god knows what else that slows it. (Just loaded a Daily Heil story as a test - 283 connections!) It's great for moving large files, but people expecting lightening-fast page loads will be sadly disappointed.

Am I a Druid?

Okay, if it's a legal requirement, I confess. I am a Druid.

I'm a fully-paid up member of the Gorsedd of Bards of the Isle of Britain, Urdd Derwydd (order of druids) - green robes. I was inducted at a mysterious and ancient ceremony involving a big sword and strange oaths, in the former Dr Who Experience in Cardiff in 2018. Strange but true (it was raining outside)

Could I suggest

'Shitloadsa' abbrev $

e.g. 5 shitloadsabits = 5$b

Horse/bolted

I prefer the Welsh equivalent "Codi pais ar ôl piso" - to lift up one's skirt AFTER you've pissed!

Alternatives?

I've never come across the idea of renting ink before. Curious.

My Brother laser has a much more sophisticated system. It came with some toner cartridges. I bought a set of replacement ones from Amazon. When a cartridge ran out I replaced it, and ordered another. Toner for ever!

Bit of a faff

I do development on Apache on my laptop. Really don't need https there. But anytime a page fails Firefox heads off to google instead of giving me a 404. I'm sure I can fix it but I just can't be asked!

And I have a load of public sites that I need to add Lets Encrypt to. Great idea until it fails to renew and I have to force it manually.

Shirley...

There must be an option to just partially clear the existing site and then rebuild using the latest materials and technology? Presumably the site is the ideal shape?

I must admit

I assumed this piece of sillyness was another Gartner crystal ball job. I was wrong!

Elephant in the room?

One has to wonder what kind of person would be crazy enough to WANT to move to the USA to work.

No need to panic

All this fuss about thousands of lorries getting stuck and not knowing what to do.

Silly.

All HGVs moving between UK and EU after 1/1/21 will need an ECMT permit. They are hard to come by as they are limited in number. To be precise, UK has a total of about 3,500 - to cover 300,000 vehicles. So with a max 3500 vehicles somewhere between their base and destination in the EU, the lack of software is the least of their worries!

How many permits are available?The UK has a base limit of 102 annual permits, which can be converted into a higher number of permits if their use is restricted to EURO VI vehicles or if they are converted into monthly permits. A permit is allocated specifically to a company and can’t be transferred to another company. Each permit can be used only by one vehicle at a time.It can be used by different vehicles successively as there is no mention of registration number.The UK notified OECD of how it will distribute its quota between short-term permits and long-term permits, and between permits restricted to EURO VI vehicles and permits for EURO V vehicles. The UK will only be able to issue and allocate:

Currently, 300000 UK-registered powered vehicles travel from the UK to the continent every year, to which we need to add vehicles travelling to the Republic of Ireland

Mature technology?

"However, if we are to meet 2050 targets, we are probably well advised to use technologies that are relatively mature and can be manufactured at a larger scale right now," Jansen said.

But, given that present 'mature' technology is massively capital intensive, would you invest in any if you'd just read this article? That's a big problem in many areas. A technology is developed that works, but someone already has something in the lab that will be simpler, cleaner, 50% faster, and 90% cheaper. Granted it will take 2-3 years to fully develop, but it means anyone investing now have to recoup all their capital costs in that 2-3 years before they become redundant, instead of over 10-20 years that the plant could probably run for. Which seriously increases prices for users, who won't switch.

See "Cost of EVs and problems charging them" as an example

Justice?

"Some of them are even under investigation by the justice system for their failings during the initial COVID-19 outbreak."

That could never happen in good ol' Blighty. Here we just let them keep killing and bunging billions to their mates. All perfectly legal. And now they can kill people legally if it's "in the national economic interest"

Tories. Donncha luv em.

Win 10 ver 2004?

That's what I'm running and it isn't in the list of available updates.

Bishop Airlock?

What's his diocese?

'Ow do you tell?

Tattooed on the back of his neck.

Could be useful data

Never mind the tracking of problem areas of dumped bikes, scooters etc. Potentially the data can be used to identify areas where there is clear demand for parking the things, but insufficient supply, and so allow the councils to repurpose some existing car parking bays into bike/scooter parking areas.

Veeery interesting...

But stupid.

Never mind YouTube. My first thought was to embed an entire webpage in an iframe - but after a few microseconds realised that wouldn't work, because there would then be no search terms recognised as there would be no content in the actual page! But is there a compromise? Load a basic chunk of plain-vanilla text with the critical phrases, suitably non-displayed, and then put the rest of the page into an iframe? Be interesting to experiment, until it gets blocked.

How I long for the old days when content was king and SEO meant having useful terms in an <h1> tag and in the first few K of the page.

Rural peace...

It's normally pretty quiet in this bit of the paradise on earth that is rural Cymru. There's a bit of traffic on the main road - sadly you can hear a car for a minute in each direction. The odd aircraft defending us against trrrsts, or taking rich people to the New World, tractors ? Meh.

One of the best bits about Lockdown I - How It All Started, was the silence. Sitting on the bench outside, and no human-made sounds. Just the stream, the birds, the wind in the trees, the sheep, the cows, the horses. And no aircraft. At one point I looked at FlightRadar24 and there wasn't a single aircraft in Welsh airspace. I could get to like that.