Posts by DropBear

Re: "those PVC sheets every single sex shop sells "

You've been into every single sex shop? Wow, that's dedication.

Naaaah, I'm not that thorough. On the other hand, every single sex shop I've ever been in (and rest assured, it's LOTS) _was_ selling them... :)))

Re: Deinstall parts of W10?

@Waseem Alkurdi admittedly, my router stops anything incoming "at the gates", and I have a habit of not clicking of fishy stuff. I can't guarantee this to work for everybody, but it honestly did work for me all these years - and trust me, I visit a _shitload_ of websites of, uh, questionable integrity. Naturally, I cannot _guarantee_ I'm not infected, but considering the level of paranoia I'm comfortable admitting to, I find it seriously unlikely. That said, I really mean it - no Windows machine I ever installed ever saw any updates, and they're still fine - if nothing else, Clam AV / Malwarebytes / Avast / Bitdefender / Spybot S&D would have spotted _something_ by now; but none of them ever did.

Re: In the good old days....

"We didn't need to search"

That would have been before a single application could routinely install anywhere between ten and a hundred thousand files (yes, really) - except we did need to search to find our shit even back then. And that's from someone* who still ignores that "my documents" exists and still keeps partitioning his drive based on specific categories of things to store, from all the way back when having a smaller sector size actually made a difference...

* I can neither confirm or deny baseless allegations regarding the existence of folders like "E:\Temp\tmp3\stuff\legacy\olddrive\unpack\test" on said disk and anyway you can't prove it!

That was probably true for the first generation of remote controllable heavy machinery. These days though I'm wondering how much off-the-shelf wireless networking equipment they include if any...

Re: Some justice is still available for The People

You're trying to reverse entropy. It's like growing older (in a mental sense) - the changes cannot be undone, the innocence is not coming back.

♫...I get knocked down

but I get up again...♫

Re: This is all blasphemy

No, that's strictly your fault for being in said bed instead of outside, talking to the rabbit.

Re: !!!!!

"I rather doubt that you can buy an adequate PC for £150 - unless it's a diskless one"

I just did that, and not for £150 but for £38. And guess what, not only does it have a half-Tera disk but it's a multi-core PC that happily runs windows 7 and the latest browsers playing Youtube in 1080p. Yes, it _is_ a refurb, but I did buy it retail and it did come with a 2-year warranty for any hardware faults; and while it's certainly not a "gaming rig" I would choose for myself it is an absolutely adequate "parent-puter" that can do just fine everything a business thin(ish) client would need to do. And no, it wasn't a sale - I could do it again any time.

Re: Good

There are other maps one can use, to stay off the geo-slurp - some of them might be more suited in specific areas to specific needs than others. I never open GMaps on my phone - I use an OpenStreetMap based completely offline app, but then again I'm a bit partial there...

Re: Monty Phaethon?

No. But it's full of Smurfs...

That "analogy" is reasonable only if you're postulating the de facto existence of a fourth spatial dimension. Otherwise we're back to square one and the question remains unanswered.

Re: Unexpected load? Really?

Well, they'll also need a long ladder for that... :))) Blocks of flats do have _some_ advantages....

Re: Hashes are not encryption

"the process of converting information into code to prevent unauthorised access"

There are rather huge differences though - "encryption" usually kinda implies that the information can be recovered, which is not the case with hashing which is simply a fingerprint of that hashed data. Nothing can be recovered from it, it can only be compared to other hashes (usually produced from what you suspect the password might be).

Re: One reason for removable batteries...

"When the craze for personalised (loud, obnoxious) ringtones was at its height, it was an unfortunately common occurrence for people at my then workplace to wander off to interminable meetings leaving their phone behind on their desk. "

What do you mean "was", and why are you stalking my life?!?

Re: Employee poaching?

And I regard the vacuum of deep space as the only appropriate location for asshats who try to "own" your acquired experience. It may or may not be quite legal to pull it off, mind you - I wouldn't know; but if it is, it damn well shouldn't be.

Re: Walled Garden

Hear, hear! If you can't make your own judgements regarding what you trust and what you don't, if you're trying to defer responsibility* for what you install on your hardware, then you have no business operating it. You will NOT get more security** by using a centralized store, but you WILL get extra walls, arbitrary rules of what is "allowed" and what is not, loss of privacy by definition concerning what you have installed, having your choices screwed with by definition through the order in which your search results get ranked and sorted, being bombarded with shit about "you might want to also install / what others use" and much, much more. Woohoo, what's not to like...?!?

* That's not something you can do anyway; that responsibility is yours regardless of whether you accept it or not and whether you are capable of handling it or not - the consequences won't give a shit either way. It won't be Google who stays safe or get pwned: it will be _you_.

** So is stand-alone app "X" trustworthy _enough_ to install, yes or no? No...? Okay, you can get it from the app store too - did that suddenly make it trustworthy enough? See, of course it didn't. It's completely irrelevant how much "more" secure that allegedly makes it. If your judgement hinges on having "X" scanned by an app store, you absolutely deserve everything you gonna get.

Re: Alternatively - as a weapon ...

I'd very much like to know how you define "small", seeing as how the Sun in NOT a point source - but rather a sphere (disc) with a diameter of one and a half million kilometres, each square foot of which is still illuminating Earth unless you have some part of your "small" disc covering it. The shadow of an object smaller than the Sun, placed between it and the Earth is actually a cone tapering off into nothing behind said object because of that. And notably, the Earth isn't a point target either. To black out just one single parking lot on Earth you would need an object of at least that equal size between it and the Sun, in close Earth orbit. How would you propose blacking out anything larger, with a _single*_ object of realistic dimensions, disc or not?

* Yes, you might be able to send up lots of cargo launches of innumerably many small objects and try to disperse them into a huge cloud to cover a sizeable chunk of the Earth, but that is an entirely different thing and still definitely nowhere near "small"...

Re: With the pay-check this guy's making ...

"I absolutely have no idea why I'm studying medicine."

...when you could be studying IT instead and end up working for less than €10000. Yes, per year. Yes, within the EU. Yes, it's still considerably more than the hoi polloi's loot. Dreaming about what it would have been like being a proper human being like a lawyer* or a doctor instead.

* Okay, fine, semantics; they clearly aren't human by any other definition.

Re: "replete with a hidden ribbon cable"

Still a piss-poor choice of words. Synonym or not, I have never seen "replete" used instead of "complete".

"Did You Know?

Given that one of the roots of replete is the Latin verb plēre, meaning "to fill," it isn't surprising that the word has synonyms such as "full" and "complete." "Replete," "full," and "complete" all indicate that something contains all that is wanted or needed or possible, but there are also subtle differences between the words. "Full" implies the presence or inclusion of everything that can be held, contained, or attained ("a full schedule"), while "complete" applies when all that is needed is present ("a complete picture of the situation"). "Replete" is the synonym of choice when fullness is accompanied by a sense of satiety."

Re: TANSTAAFL

Wow, this got some attention... Thanks to everyone who replied! Let me try to address some of it...

@Come to the Dark Side "Not sure I follow what you mean by "non-web-access email"

Email that can be accessed not only trough a web interface, but also from a desktop client via POP3/IMAP. Last time I checked, this was a very serious problem with free hosts in the sense of "haha, nope" which is somewhat understandable seeing as how they can't even fling ads at me if I'm not using their web interface. Admittedly, that check was some time ago.

@_LC_ "Is this a joke? Employ your search engine of choice and enter “best free e-mail providers”

Rest assured, certainly not a joke. See reply above. I did, and quite literally the only free ones I found were Google, Yahoo and GMX. Concerning the latter, see also below.

@Jamie Jones "Is your issue with the service, or the apps?"

Strictly speaking: neither, or both - While Gmail is perfectly usable as-is, I'm not appreciating all the snoop going on; but if I leave Google, obviously both the app AND the service would need to go.

@DavCrav "I downloaded WeMail for that. Works like GMail, accesses your GMail inbox [...]"

Thanks for the suggestion, that app might come in handy yet...

@Dan 55 "You need a webmail provider that offers IMAP IDLE and an Android client. If you can't find the info any other way you can test if it's got IMAP IDLE by telnetting to the IMAP server and port. If you want a quick answer try GMX.com with K9 Mail on Android."

Ok, IMAP IDLE might work, further studies needed. As for GMX, they can die in a fire, hopefully. I did have an account with them which they simply booted me out of without explanation citing only unidentified ToS crimes. Which is bullshit, considering that I really, really, REALLY wasn't doing much anything at all with the account and absolutely definitely nothing that would have been against their ToS . Nevertheless, after an appeal the only answer I got was that their decision stands, for mysterious reasons that continue to be none of my business, apparently. So pardon me if I hope to see them firebombed some glorious day, because they definitely deserve it.

@David Nash "Just get a domain and a simple mail service from one of many providers (I use 1&1)"

See above - last checked, there was NO such thing as POP/IMAP accessible free mail outside those Big Three. I am not sure how to find any non-free but reasonable ones that would be worth moving to from Gmail (after all I really don't want all the exact same downsides and some more with none of the upsides) ,but thanks for the tip-off, I'll look into 1&1.

@ Claptrap314 "I find it weird that no one attacked your premises that 1) an email client with your desired features should be available for free and 2) you should be notified about personal emails instantly while at work."

1) You may have overlooked the "or low-cost" part in the original post; at least concerning the service - I do have a free email client on desktop (Thunderbird) thank you very much and my phone does have a built-in generic email client - all I would be interested in is some mechanism that would notify me near-instantly when I get new mail, like Gmail Push does. Which brings us to:

2) You may be forgiven for not realising that very much unlike some people's Facebook stream, my email gets 5-6 mails total on a good day, essentially none of which are personal in nature (but rather formulaic notifications from standard sources such as merchants, Kickstarter, Patreon etc.), which I spend roughly thirty seconds on to parse, each. And my employer can fuck the fucking fuck off and die if he doesn't like that - hell will shatter to a zillion tiny bits due to frost shrinkage stress before you'll manage to guilt trip me for spending that kind of amount of "my employer's time" on that. No offence, natch.

"I'm not ready to cede either of these points."

That's OK. Me neither.

Re: @Trilkhai re @amanfromMars 1

No. "You're an idiot" is an ad-hominem. "Your posts are literally unreadable" isn't - it is addressing the substance of your "arguments".

Re: WTAF?

I don't get the use case either. Apparently it does ALL of the exact same things as your main phone, except... on a smaller screen? And using the same phone number...? But what can I do with it that I can't with the main one?

If I wanted a second phone, I could just get a small new one for $30 or so or just re-commission an older one I still have and charge (now only for alarm clock purposes, but it's working perfectly fine nonetheless...). And bollocks to the "less distractions" angle - it looks like it has all the exact same sources of distraction, and besides there's nothing preventing one to set up one's main phone to distract less. WTF?