* Posts by jake

26588 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007

Page:

A real loch mess: Navy larks sunk by a truculent torpedo

jake Silver badge

Re: Of course it was going to hit the boat!

I tend to drive very defensively on the street. Some might say I'm paranoid, but the idiots really are out to get me. I suspect this has something to do with the fact that I understand the math(s) involved.

My 31 and 32 Fords don't have seat belts. I drive them on the street regularly. They haven't killed me yet. But then, I return the favo(u)r and don't put them into harm's way.

jake Silver badge

Re: Of course it was going to hit the boat!

1) If you are cycling in such a way that you can't maneuver fast enough to avoid an obstacle, you are cycling over your head. No number of personal safety devices will protect you from your own stupidity. Even if the bike ::koff koff:: was drunk.

2) I was taught to stay out of traffic when on my bicycle. To the proverbial thinking man, Newton's laws of motion quite obviously trump the new-age "share the road" bullshit. Simply put, if you play in traffic, you might die. Helmets don't increase those odds as much as you think they do ... worse, in some it makes them feel invulnerable, which compounds the underlying problem.

jake Silver badge

Re: Of course it was going to hit the boat!

I was taught how to ride my bicycle, not to fall off it. (I was also taught how to land after a fall, but that's another story ... )

Keeping kids wrapped in cotton wool will only get society to ... well, where we are now, afraid of every "what if" scenario, no matter how unlikely, or even ludicrous.

Fuck that. I taught my daughter how I was taught ... how to live for herself, not how to live according to some fuckwit on Capirol Hill who is afraid of their own shadow (or worse, afraid of getting voted out of office by similar fuckwits, intent on telling others how to live because they are too afraid to have lives of their own).

Strangely enough, she has never fallen off her bicycle. Neither have I.

She has fallen of her horses a few times, though. So have I. Is your daughter even allowed to touch a horse? How about riding one? What else is she not allowed to do because you are afraid to attempt it yourself? Poor little kid ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Of course it was going to hit the boat!

I'd recommend more fiber in the diet.

jake Silver badge

Re: At least the O-ring wasn't frozen this time...

My reply was to Tom 7, not Re: the Austin 7.

jake Silver badge

Re: At least the O-ring wasn't frozen this time...

I use a test tank, not a dust bin. Less chance of the water pump cavitating and destroying itself with a good amount of water in a properly shaped tank.

Note that in my previous scenario the pisser[0] working isn't necessarily a sign that all is well ... as the tube becomes more and more restricted, it is capable of providing plenty of water to piss, but the amount that actually cools the motor falls off. You can't see the decrease in water flow because the bulk of it exits below the waterline.

[0] I spent several thousand dollars going to OMC school so I would know when and where to use that technical term.

jake Silver badge

Re: Oops!

If it did a 360 it would carry on in the intended direction. A 180 would send it back to the boat it came from.

jake Silver badge

Speaking as a sometime rural fisherman ...

... who knows a lot of rural fishermen, he probably didn't get the Navy Memo. And if he did, it obviously didn't apply to him. All he was doin' was goin' fishin', ain't no Navy in this little bit o' fresh water, they hang out in the ocean. Besides, I always go fishing at this hour.

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: At least the O-ring wasn't frozen this time...

Pre late '80s or early '90s Johnson/Evinrude small single cylinder outboards in the 4 to 6.5 hp class (sometimes called sailboat pusher motors) have a copper water line from the waterpump down by the prop up to the powerhead. The connection between engine block and tube is sealed with a simple o-ring. When the engine is run, the o-ring gets wet. When the engine is shut off, the o-ring dries out. Leaving behind anything dissolved in the water. Especially salt, if the motor is run in the ocean.

These deposits build up over time, gradually putting pressure on the o-ring. Either the iron block, or the soft copper has to give. The copper loses, of course. So eventually, the copper pipe is pinched off, and the engine no longer gets fresh water, and so it overheats.

The fix is simple. Remove the copper pipe, heat it up, run a mandrel through it to pop out the pinch, replace the o-ring (a 19 cent part) & Bob's your Auntie.

Unfortunately, R&Ring the pipe involves pulling the entire powerhead, which is just short of a complete engine overhaul. About a 4 hour job. At $165/hr shop rate. Plus any parts that may need to be replaced because they are too worn to be reassembled.

Bottom line: It can cost well over $1,000 to replace a 19 cent o-ring ... on a motor that is worth maybe $500 if it runs well and looks pretty. And that is from an honest shop.

Bloody O rings indeed. This round's on me.

Hooray! It's IT Day! Let's hear it for the lukewarm mugs of dirty water that everyone seems to like so much

jake Silver badge

Isn't the link between kidney stones and drinking infusions of tea rather tenuous, at best? Seems to me I read some research somewhere that said the teabags themselves were more of a hazard than the tea inside them ...

jake Silver badge

Re: ISO 3103

I'm not paying to find out ... But I've found these instructions make a perfectly adequate cuppa.

(What kind of standards organization forces people to pay to know what the standard is? That's truly fucked up, that is.)

jake Silver badge

Re: I drink both and I speak for me

"Coffee was just giving me heartburn."

You're not roasting it right.

jake Silver badge

A better word ...

Grappa ... because it is built especially for breakfast (who needs/wants excuses to start the day?).

jake Silver badge

"Classier than a Sports Direct mug too."

So is an old, battered, now label-less plastic water bottle that you've been refilling from the tap every morning for 12 or 18 months.

jake Silver badge

I think I see your problem ...

"I've always found it strange that Starbucks, a coffee company"

Contrary to popular belief, Starbucks is not a coffee company. They are a confectioner.

jake Silver badge

Re: The East India Company?

It's the only reason I entered the thread :-)

jake Silver badge

Re: I'm with you

"American coffee here, which has all the intensity of dishwater."

That stuff isn't coffee any more than Lipton makes tea ...

Trust me, many Yanks know what real coffee is (this does not include Starbucks/Peet's aficionados, BTW). Some of us even roast our own. When was the last time your neighbor in Blighty offered you a cup of home-fermented tea?

jake Silver badge

""small beer" which had something like a 0.5% alcohol content, much like most modern canned beers."

Not going to bite on the obvious drivel .., but I'll take the opportunity to point out that "small beer" can mean a couple of things in the brewer's canon. All are worth perusing/persuing at home, some for historical knowledge (how far we've come), and some because they are a really valuable addition to your beer fridge and brewing budget ... particularly the second runnings version.

Don't worry ... few variations on the theme are as low as 0.5%.

The Register calls for aid, and Microsoft's Rohan Kumar will answer... our questions about SQL Edge and Azure Synapse

jake Silver badge

Re: Surely you mean...

It's only Micros~1 when they aren't paying for the advert.

Bionic eyes to be a thing in the next decade? Possibly. Boffins mark sensor-density breakthrough

jake Silver badge

You forgot ...

... blockchain in the cloud.

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: Who turned the lights out ?

Thank you for helping to shed some light on the subject.

With references, no less. This round's on me.

Railway cables overpowered errant drone's compass and flung it back to terra firma

jake Silver badge

Indeed.

"It's as if you need a specific degree in radio to understand stuff that in the Good Old Days* they used to teach at, at worst, A level."

In the late 1960s a couple of 10 year old boys in Palo Alto decided that they would revisit the early days of radio for their Science Fair project. They built a couple of fairly high powered spark gap transmitters and matching receivers. Testing them between their homes (a couple blocks apart) on weekends and evenings was done in short sessions because their families bitched about radio & TV interference. They alternated who was transmitting, and cycled to a nearby park[0] to compare notes (local telephone calls cost money back then).

Come the day of the Fair, one was setup in their classroom, the other in the "Multi Purpose" room with the other displays. Everybody wanted to get a good look at their dangerous looking and sounding contraptions in operation. It took the police from Moffett Field NAS almost 45 minutes to show up and shut them down.

The resulting kerfuffle lasted a couple hours. Turned out that the Navy had been trying to find the source of the randomly occurring noise for a couple weeks, and were not amused. At all. It was a Cold War thing. However, no charges were filed ("kids will be kids!" was still an acceptable mantra). The boys were even allowed to keep their kit ... with the admonishment that they were not to ever turn it on again, in no uncertain terms.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if a couple kids tried this kind of thing today ... sadly, however, at that age they aren't taught enough of the basics to even contemplate the concept, much less attempt to implement it. Sad, that ... we've lost something as a society.

[0] Meadow Park, now called Ramos Park, if it matters to you ...

Driveway karaoke singer who wanted to lift lockdown spirits cops council noise complaint

jake Silver badge

Re: An annual problem

One weekend per year? Cry me a river. Try living in any location when the bloody tourist-ride hot-air balloons are launching on what should be a quiet weekend dawn. You wouldn't believe how intrusive the things are until you have to live with them. I had the misfortune of discovering this in Yountville in the Napa Valley while we were waiting for this place to close escrow. Never had a Saturday or Sunday lie-in. Awful, awful things, hot air balloons. Should be outlawed for tourist use.

[0] That's pronounced "yont", not "yount".

Could it be? Really? The Year of Linux on the Desktop is almost here, and it's... Windows-shaped?

jake Silver badge

Re: Actually, it can be quite convenient

"Just go with the flow guys and gals."

No thank you.

Didn't your DearOldMum teach you that the flow is always downhill? Personally, I'd rather not wind up in the pool of shit at the bottom.

Onwards & upwards!

jake Silver badge

Re: @jonha - Why do you believe this ?

Just remember that when it comes to servers, the choice between Linux and Windows is obvious: Run BSD.

jake Silver badge

Re: Nothing to do with Linux, all to do with Windows.

"In the early days of Linux, when it was distributed as free disks with computer magazines"

Haven't browsed a dead-tree magazine rack recently? Linux disks still get distributed with computer magazines.

jake Silver badge

Re: re: You'll pry my emacs from my cold, dead fingers.

I use one varietal or another of vi on the various un*xen that I admin (because it's near universal and works nicely, even over dial-up). That would be elvis or vim specifically almost everywhere, with the odd stevie in strange places. All work well enough. On Apple kit I use vim. I almost never need to edit anything on Windows anymore, but when I do I use stevie. Basically, vi works on everything, what's not to like?

I admit that I still use EMACS occasionally, usually when I need psychotherapy or to play tetris or anything else that obviously belongs in a text editor that is lacking elsewhere.

jake Silver badge

$ Vi

bash: Vi: command not found

$

jake Silver badge

Re: If only!

"WSL doesn't prevent developers using Linux to develop Linux apps if they want"

Well, THAT's mighty kind of our overlords in Redmond! How magnanimous of them. Makes me want to rush right out and purchase their take on a system that I've already been using for decades for free.

Beer gut-ted: As many as '70 million pints' spoiled during coronavirus pandemic must be destroyed in Britain

jake Silver badge

Re: Home delivery

The obvious answer is for each brewery to only deliver within a certain radius decided by themselves. Which makes sense for many logistical reasons.

Please note: Even if it's allowed, I have no plans to do this any time soon.

jake Silver badge

Re: Home delivery

"Or a high-speed train."

In the US? You must be joking.

A little quick research shows it is about 2430 train-miles from San Diego to New York. There are 9 trains leaving SD for NY per day. The fastest makes the trip in just over 72 hours on a good day (or three). That's an average of about 33.7 MPH ... I can drive cross country faster than taking the train.

jake Silver badge

Two words.

Chain hoist.

jake Silver badge

"How do you get full barrels out and maintain social distancing?"

Forklift with a keg/barrel attachment. Some places have dedicated keg lifts, or simple goods lifts that pop up from the sidewalk/pavement. People who do it with manual labo(u)r will find a way, as they always have.

jake Silver badge

Re: It's probably not actually "bad".

"brewhouses I've been to in the US since the late 90s were never full of chunky-sweatered beer bores."

You've never been to Russian River Brewing when they have Pliny the Younger on tap, then? For an OK beer that is hardly earth-shattering in its ordinariness, it astonishingly draws crowds of the faithful faster than a television preacher on tour.

Don't get me wrong, it's a drinkable beer ... if you are into big, hoppy American IPAs. But is it worth spending between 8 and 24 hours in line for? Not in my opinion. In the same amount of time, you can easily visit several other Northern California breweries in the area, each with equally good beer. And few, if any, beer bores.

jake Silver badge

Re: It's probably not actually "bad".

The Motörhead one doesn't sound like any American Pale that I've ever sampled/heard of. Doesn't much sound like one I want to sample, either.

The Bastard ... Would you by any chance mean Arrogant Bastard? I've been aging several cases of each iteration of that since it first hit the market. I like it fresh from the brewery; for such a big beer it is extremely well balanced ... but as it ages, it just gets better.

jake Silver badge

Re: Milk consumption?

Cheese makers (and butter, yoghurt, sour cream, ice cream, etc.) are making as much as they always have. Their production lines, storage/aging, delivery, and what have you are cranking along as fast as they were designed to go. They could probably run double or triple shifts and make more product ... but where do they store it (and/or age it) until it can be delivered to the consumer?

jake Silver badge

Re: Milk consumption?

I've stored milled "white" flour for up to a year at room temperature and not had any problems. So-called "whole wheat", on the other hand, starts going off in a few months. Gluten doesn't break down in dry flour for the simple reason that gluten doesn't actually exist in dry flour. It is not until you add water to the flour that two proteins (gliadin and glutenin) combine to form gluten.

More likely, the yeast you were using was past it's sell-by date, causing your pizza issues.

jake Silver badge

Re: Milk consumption?

I've been able to get 50lb (~22.5 kilo) and 100lb (~45 kilo) bags of flour all along. As have bakeries. There is no flour shortage. The shortage is in people, who are not allowed to fill "non-essential" jobs such as filling consumer-sized bags of flour. And bog-roll.

Yeast is free, it's in the air all around everybody reading this. There are plenty of online articles explaining how to catch live yeast for yourself, and how to use it, so I won't re-invent the wheel.

I go out with a jug to get milk twice per day, when I milk my cows. It's a quality control thing. I like cows, they are inherently honest critters.

Rogue ADT tech spied on hundreds of customers in their homes via CCTV – including me, says teen girl

jake Silver badge

Re: And this is why I don't do cloud based access.

"Could you upload it so we can judge for ourselves?"

It's already available, with the rest of the junk stolen from the unaware. You can usually access it for yourself at IP address 127.0.0.1 ...

jake Silver badge

ADT had logs going back 7 years?

And they didn't notice until now?

Some "security" company ...

OnePlus to disable camera colour feature with pervy tendencies in latest flagship smartphone

jake Silver badge

Just to stir thingas up a bit ...

You can often make a standard video camera into a IR camera with a bit of over-exposed film in front of the lens.

(I wonder how many of the kiddies reading this know what over-exposed film is.)

Attorney General: We didn't need Apple to crack terrorist's iPhones – tho we still want iGiant to do it in future

jake Silver badge

Re: Murdering scumbag

Because it worked so well when Tutankhatenmun's handlers completely erased Akhenaten from history, right?

Don't ignore it. Instead, teach why it is wrong. (Note that I'm not commenting on the rightness or wrongness of atenism vs polytheism in ancient Egypt. It's just an example.)

"Those who forget history ..."

jake Silver badge

Re: Exactly.

Last time I heard that one I was taking my PDP-10's SA-10 attached IBM Winchester for a spin.

jake Silver badge

This statement:

"The trove of information found on these phones has proven to be invaluable to this ongoing investigation and critical to the security of the American people."

has all the earmarks of a marketing campaign ... and is probably equally truthful.

jake Silver badge

Ol' Bill of Occam sez ...

... they are lying.

Windows invokes Sgrîn Las Marwolaeth upon Newport

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: Llundain

Apparently someone has no sense of humo(u)r ... Perhaps a beer would help?

jake Silver badge

Re: Llundain

Thanks, but I'll stick with obfuscated perl ... it's much more comprehensible.

AT&T tracked its own sales bods using GPS, secretly charged them $135 a month to do so, lawsuit claims

jake Silver badge

Re: Telekom

"The AT&T model seems very counterproductive"

They don't care. They don't have to. They're The Phone Company.

Microsoft gives Office 365 admins the heads-up: Some internal queries over weekend might have returned results from completely different orgs

jake Silver badge

Re: Metadata *is* data

Out of curiosity, why are you continuing to pay them all that money? They have had decades to get it right, and yet somehow they never have. Their shit constantly leaks, has never been secure, and has never really worked right. Release after release after release. For decades. Yet you continue to pay into their brokenware. Are you a glutton for punishment? Or is it simply a case of hope springs eternal?

Page: