* Posts by spudmasterflex

78 publicly visible posts • joined 4 May 2011

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Microsoft to supply US Army with 120,000+ HoloLens units in contract worth 'up to $22bn'

spudmasterflex

April fools already....

Grotesque soundbyte alert: UK government opens wallet to help rural areas get 'gigafit'

spudmasterflex

I am luck enough to have a Gigabit leased line at home, but last week I received my Starlink Beta kit in the UK, the future looks very promising for this tech, I can consistently get 250/300Mbps down and 60up with 25-30ms latency. There is downtime as to be expected but for user who lives in the middle of nowhere this will be a game changer.

Nvidia cripples Ethereum mining on GeForce RTX 3060 to deter crypto bods from nabbing all the kit at launch

spudmasterflex

Green mining

I run 4x3090s to mine eth, each one gets around 110MH/s and draw 330 watts each plus 100 wats for the cpu etc. This generates around £55 a day profit and as I run mine all of PV and battery storage I’m not contributing to the crypto energy crisis, and the cards were essentially free which was nice.

Going underground with Scaleway's Apple M1-as-a-Service: Mac Minis descend into Paris nuclear bunker

spudmasterflex

Re: Why, oh why ?

I have had a look back through some of his previous posts.

Fantasist springs to mind here...

Why make games for Linux if they don't sell? Because the nerds are just grateful to get something that works

spudmasterflex

lovely Linux games

I remember first dipping my toe in Linux 3D gaming with Tuxracer bundled with Suse Linux distro all those years ago. Then Loki games if I remember correctly released a Linux binary of Unreal Tournament and that was me sorted for years amongst many other games until they went bust :-(

Then came Return to Castle Wolfenstein amongst many other Unreal engine games, those were my halcyon days for Linux gaming.

Nintendo revives Game & Watch portable proto-console, adds color to 2.36-inch screen

spudmasterflex

“Nintendo’s sites outside Japan offer no evidence that the device will be offered to global customers.”

Do what, it’s been for sale in the UK at exactly the same time as Japan.

Smyths, Game and the Nintendo store all have them for sale since last Thursday in the UK

Uncle Sam to blow millions on getting fusion power finally working – with the help of AI

spudmasterflex

Re: But how long will it take to get there?

Again, you’re way off the mark, you’re firstly presuming panel size which is incorrect, probably based on a misconception from panels of years gone by, secondly your costs is over by £5000 and that included my batteries, sure it doesn’t suit everyone’s needs but mine it does, my energy costs per month were in the region of £180 and now I’m down to less than £45, Panels dont need cleaning or maintaining, the lovely UK weather does that for us, every part has 25 years warranty with guaranteed 98% output of the pv in 20 years. My lithium phosphate batteries are good for 8000 cycles before they drop to 80% effiecncy with a DOD of 85% so that’s around 9 years with my current use cycle before they start dropping capacity. All my heavy power use is during the day and my battery storage will happily provide power from sundown to sun up with 60% left in the morning. Yep I did save some cash by designing and installing my ac coupled unit and batteries myself, but that’s the bonus of prior research

spudmasterflex

Re: But how long will it take to get there?

You couldn’t be further from reality there, I’ve just has 26x 550 watt panels installed on a modest size four bed bungalow and a self designed battery storage system for 23k of off grid storage, even with todays crappy weather in the mid UK I’ve generated 48Kwh and charged my batteries full for the evening run and charged my EV. Acres is a bit of an overstatement.

India to run optic fibre to 450,000 villages in 1,000 days and give 1.3bn a digital Health ID

spudmasterflex

BT, I hope you’re reading this.

White elephants in the mist: Google's upcoming Pixel 4A may ship without Soli motion recognition, per FCC filing

spudmasterflex

Re: Telekinesis

Wrong way round

Whatsapp blamed own users for failure to keep phone number repo off Google searches

spudmasterflex
Facepalm

‘hoover up your users’ phone numbers’

Vacuum you mean

NASA mulls restoring Saturn V to service as SLS delays and costs mount

spudmasterflex

Happy April everybody

Where do you draw the line? Escobar Inc doubles down on cut-price gold phone buying demographic with second pholdable

spudmasterflex
Coat

The reception is terrible on these, I only barley get one escobar of signal indoors.

Talk about a ticket to ride... London rail passengers hear pr0n grunts over PA system

spudmasterflex

Tannoy....

Is a brand name like hoover, I would expect the Reg to get this correct ffs, public address is the term.

Virgin Media? More like Virgin Meltdown: Brit broadband ISP falls over amid power drama

spudmasterflex

Boils my piss

You can guarantee the Twitter moaners are on a residential service but are using it for business, expect tier one SLA’s but on the cheap service.

Typical with this kind of event, somebody has no internet, lost three clients but magically happens to have “enough internet” to rant on twitter. Wankers.

TalkTalk plans to bail on mobile in major shake-up for beleaguered biz

spudmasterflex

I stupidly made the decision to move our business phones to EE away from Three based on their supposed coverage,

With Three, most places I went always has 3G as a minimum and patchy 4G coverage, consistent speeds 8-10Mbps and for an overseas call centre pretty good.

With EE I find I'm dropping back to edge 2G quite frequently, business Supoport staff are total garbage, the 4G coverage is better agreed but the speeds are some times non existent.

My commute along the A1 every morning I could stream Spotify with Three, with EE I lose signal completely for a five mile stretch and this is a fairly busy stretch around Cambridgeshire.

Massively regretting the decision now.

10 minutes of silence storms iTunes charts thanks to awful Apple UI

spudmasterflex

Bollocks, my Android phone starts off where I left it playing in spotify and google music, Ive never seen it go back to the first track ever.

Science megablast: Comets may have brought xenon to Earth

spudmasterflex

Re: Oh thanks, now I'll have bloody Bomb the Bass stuck in my head all day!

Up vote because I can here to say the same thing.

Reg now behind invisible HTML5 Bitcoin paywall

spudmasterflex

Loving the way the text subtlety changes from grey to black on the article, thought I was still drunk.

Microsoft’s ‘Home Hub’ probably isn’t even hardware at all

spudmasterflex
Coat

Cortana

Cortana, how high is mount Fuji?

Sorry I cant reply now as im updating to windows 10 millennial edition.

Dyn dinged by DDoS: US DNS firm gives web a bad hair day

spudmasterflex

Plenty of sites down in the UK

Any UK site with Paypal integration is down, I have tried to purchase from Steam, Qnap license site and lastly Argos, all not working.

Additionally PlayStation network, Netflix and fleabay

Samsung intros super-speedy consumer SSDs, 'fastest M.2s ever'

spudmasterflex

I have the 512GB version in my desktop alongside 4x traditional samsung SATA SSD's of varying sizes.

Its boots so quickly from post to usable desktop ~6 seconds and opens any application in the blink of the eye, totally immense and the world away from traditional spinning rust.

I just wonder if a bottleneck exists, is it's elsewhere in the system now.

I can easily achieve a sustained 1500MBps + file transfers totally bonkers.

Apple is making life terrible in its factories – labor rights warriors

spudmasterflex

Re: Thoughts

Think you are missing the point slightly.

The purchases I make aren't small cheap objects they are in the $70-80k range per item.

My company along with all the big players in the same business all source their products from the same company or group of companies so we have a very limited choice in our supply chain.

I get your last point, however I could say the same thing probably about most of the electrical items you have at home.

Is your TV viewing pleasure well worth the employees who suffer manufacturing your set worth it so you can sit on the sofa at night and relax?

It's the same for pretty much all cheap and high end electrical goods that most of us use everyday.

We are all guilty in that respect somewhere along the line, however a majority of people are happy to be blinkered in the belief that their shiny new gadget comes from a shiny shop somewhere in their home country.

spudmasterflex

Thoughts

Having personally visited many of these mega Chinese factories over the past few years in Shenzhen I was in awe just how bad the conditions are for many.

I can't go in to specifics or supplier for several reasons but I will say the following.

Seeing young women and men working in 43-45 degrees C heat pulling plastic parts from a injection moulder then cutting off the excess material with a bare blade for a pittance wage in conditions that I would describe as hellish.

I basically had free roam of the 6.4 km2 buildings although assisted by our guide, I saw from the very top of the building where the electronics are made in nice air conditioned rooms by people in clean suits to the very bowels where the cases are fabricated.

I like many other businesses am guilty of buying these products from our supplier and haggling for a reduction in price, on the flip side my clients want a low price here in the UK, If I were to source the same items from the US, or European suppliers (of which there are a few) I wouldn't have a business to run here in the UK.

Oculus Rift will reach UK in September – and will cost more than two PS4s

spudmasterflex

Bit late to the scene

During my course of business I have acquired 30 of the HTC Vive units which we ship to test/review and games conventions etc.

I was slightly dubious to this tech being I've been there and seen the 80s/90s effort plus the original oculus which made me sick.

However with the Vive I was blown away at just how good it is at tracking and giving you the sense of 3D dimensions and room scale movement. It's a need to try to realised kind of thing.

Yep it's early days, 60% the games/apps are like poor demos, but there are some real promising games, applications like the human body and solar system environments and has real potential for education.

Negatives It's expensive, needs a decent pc to work with, needs Windows :-( but I love mine.

NASA 'Kilo-Kitty' Super Pressure Balloon goes aloft at last

spudmasterflex

Still a smaller gas bag than my wife.

Samsung's dimmer Galaxies can make calls when locked, cabled

spudmasterflex
Coat

I'll make a NOTE of that

Aluminum-wrapped robbers fail to foil bank

spudmasterflex

Foiled again

Every cloud has a silver lining.

Congressman called out for $1,300 video game binge

spudmasterflex
Coat

I be they are in Crysis talks right now about this.

Microsoft to add a touch of Chrome to Edge

spudmasterflex
Joke

That should add a bit of bling to edge.

30 years on from Challenger, NASA remembers the fallen

spudmasterflex

Sadness on another level

I remember watching this a kid on the TV when it exploded, just recently I caught a documentary of unseen footage, even now it fills me with horror watching it explode.

OnePlus ends rationing. You can now buy its phones just like that!

spudmasterflex

Too late

Could have had my money a long time ago, the stupid idea of invited and the long wait finally put me off.

I get the reasons above about production runs and limited credit, but the marketing they put in suggest otherwise.

Feds slap Rentboy.com boss with further charges

spudmasterflex

Smashed the doors in made me spit my drink out.

You’re an IT pro working in AV? This is the show for you

spudmasterflex

That time again

Already booked in, fifth year in a row for, wife thinks its real work.

Samsung turns to smart home, wearables chips as mobile declines

spudmasterflex

Oh Samsung

With my recent experiences of Samsung, my brand loyalty is over with them.

Having had several Samsung phones since switching from apple, from the first note series on to the s4,s5 and most recently note edge.

The glass broke through my own fault on my note edge, I called the repair centre and was greeted with a cost of £200 for the glass only plus labour charge depending on how long it took to fix, this is the walk In service in Wembley btw. I asked on lead time and was greeted with well however long it takes to get the parts in I guess, at which point I hung up and flogged it on eBay.

Along with the crap firmware rollout on most of their gear, I'm done.

I'm not an apple hater or a lover but at least the fixed cost they offer is reasonable at £70 all in for a screen repair.

Intel lobs out new Core m3/m5 Compute Sticks, shouts 'Fetch!'

spudmasterflex

I hope they have sorted the wifi issues out, I have the original unit bundled with Windows 8, and while good,the wifi suffers from horrific 3-4 Kbps transfer speeds when the Bluetooth is on and a snails pace 1-1.5 MBps when Bluetooth is disabled. Forums are plagued by people with the same issue. Does the same on Linux as on Windows with multiple wifi routers.

Using a usb Ethernet adapter makes the whole thing clunky for using with kodi.

FOUR STUNNING NEW FEATURES Cook should put in the iPHONE 7

spudmasterflex

Best thing I've read all week, cheered me right up

And it begins: Ashley Madison bonk-seekers urged to lawyer up

spudmasterflex

Shall I tell the wife that we might be able to afford that new car after all?

Budget UHD TVs arrive – but were the 4Kasts worth listening to?

spudmasterflex

Re: @Little Mouse

Be careful, I took the dive and bought a Panasonic 48" 4k for my office. Over hdmi on normal graphics cards you can only get 30hz refresh at 4k unless you have an hdmi 2 compatible graphics card.

It worked fine at 1080p but defeats the point.

This make everything jerky as hell even mouse movement, most TVs don't have display port that is needed.

My only option was to stump up for a gtx 980 currently the only card with hdmi 2 out at 60hz

Monitors and TVs are two different beasts in this respect with regard to inputs for PC.

If you installed Windows 10 and like privacy, you checked the defaults, right? Oh dear

spudmasterflex

Re: 'Cheap' in terms of food, now means selling your privacy too.

I like this parking, but I also like this parking

Spooky ghost town vid perfectly sums up YouTube's 8K playback: It's virtually no use to anyone (yet)

spudmasterflex

If anyone wants to watch it, feel free to come view on our 38m2 smd 1.5mm pitch LED video wall.

Gonna RUB MYSELF against the WALL: Microsoft's Surface Hub 84" monster-slab

spudmasterflex

I currently use and supply the Phillips 65" capacitive multitouch units with 20 point touch for £2200 no lag or IR, bang on a decent spec PC with windows 8 for a £1000 job done.

Appreciate this is 80 odd inches but still.

First production car powered by Android Auto rolls out – and it's a Hyundai

spudmasterflex

Re: My Car Is Not a Phone

And the difference talking to a passenger is? I disagree that holding a phone to ones ear is no more dangerous that hands free. Surely it's better to be totally hands free on a call that to have one hand on the steering and one pushing a phone to your ear!

Rap for fap stack in hack trap flap: This XXX site caught an STI (Script Transmitted Infection)

spudmasterflex
Coat

Good job I run hardened security

TalkTalk email goes titsup FOR DAYS. Cheapo telco warns: Changing password WON'T fix it

spudmasterflex

Not on your own

I'm with you on this, had their 80Mb fibre for two years, using standard bt supplied modem and a sonic wall, never had any issues at all, get a constant 76-77 Mb and regularly download 150-200GB per month with no caps, slow downs, inbound VPN works fine as do all my web facing servers.

I think maybe in densely populated areas they have congestion, but I live in a tiny village with maybe 30-40 houses so that could be the difference?

Reg bloke zips through an iPHONE 6 queue from ZERO to 60 SECONDS

spudmasterflex
Pint

Why?

Got mine on pre-order and sold to some poor sap for a massive profit on flea bay( didnt want a 2007 iphone with a bigger screen)

I just dont get the thing of waiting and having to be first or even paying top dollar for something that will be available to everyone in a month or so.

Back to my lovely Android and £300 beer token money for the weekend.

Thanks mr iBuyer for lining my pocket :-)

Vodafone pay-by-bonk launch may signal iPhone 6 NFC plans

spudmasterflex

Re: TL;DR

"Because everything is did have worked, worked very well and had a use"

Like the quality apple maps

And the home lock screen with built in bypass feature

Or the Bluetooth unit that can't be used with most standard profiles with other phones

Or the excellent storage upgrade path available

I ll stop there.

Disclaimer" written on my iPad"

Audio tech upstart DTS takes on Wi-Fi speaker juggernaut Sonos

spudmasterflex

Bollocks

While I am not adverse to any new wireless speaker tech, this does stink of false info or a sales pitch by El reg.

"Play-Fi works inside the range of the building’s Wi-Fi system, meaning it can work outside, an area of weakness for Sonos". err I have my sonos bridge directly next to my wifi router and I can't get wifi down the bottom of my garden but my play 5 works perfectly down the end, and yes I have tried new routers and different wifi channels on both 2.4 & 5Ghz.

"DTS also says the signal going to the speakers is lossless – again, unlike Sonos and others – and especially Bluetooth-based systems" Sonos has supported lossless for some time now using online streaming services and FLAC local streaming direct to the speakers, and update last year brought lossless direct to the amp / speakers.

Yes having a bridge is a bit of a PITA but it bundles it for free in most cases now when the offer is on with the play series.

Most of my kit is cabled anyway but it's handy having a play 5 that can be used anywhere in the house/garden where my wifi fails, maybe due to the meshing nature of the kit?

Scoff ye not: Chap carves crunchy carrot-copter

spudmasterflex

Whole new meaning

Of UAV

Unmanned aerial vegetable

Japan plans SEVEN satellite launches to supercharge GPS

spudmasterflex

Re: Is this just WAAS?

Isn't egnos a Christmassy drink involving milk and whipped eggies?

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