* Posts by John Presland

102 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Sep 2015

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All I want for Christmas is a delivery address that a delivery courier can find

John Presland

Re: A lawn 2.7 Km away

Odd. In seven years in Spain I've only once have a courier fail to phone and find us.

Why can't passport biometrics see through my cunning disguise?

John Presland

Re: walking in parallel lines

Good pronunciation of "a" rather than "o" in "adin", but it's then "dwa" and, phonetically, "tree".

I'm still not that Gary, says US email mixup bloke who hasn't even seen Dartford Crossing

John Presland

No, Gary does glitter. What you meant is "Not all that glitters is Gary".

Criminal mastermind signed name as 'Thief' on receipts after buying stuff with stolen card

John Presland

Re: I'm seeing a much bigger crime here...

How much do you spend on petrol and other car-associated costs getting to Oregon and back?

Quick question, what the Hull? City khazi is a top UK tourist destination

John Presland

Re: Great Victorian tilework

When I first read this I thought the Philharmonic Dining Roms must be some elegant establishment that I never got to, but Dr Google informs me that it's The Phil, in which, as a woollyback visitor, I mispent many evenings in my youth. Truly splendid urinary facilities, which I recall later taking a girlfriend into to admire.

AI has automated everything including this headline curly bracket semicolon

John Presland

Re: TOO REAL - YouTube Link broken Mr Dabbs

WOT!? No VPN!?

John Presland

Re: Dabbs has been told right

Predictive text doesn't.

Hi! It looks like you're working on a marketing strategy for a product nowhere near release! Would you like help?

John Presland

Master of Bullshit and Arrogance (I'm one).

All's fair in love and war when tech treats you like an infant

John Presland

I totally agree, apart from one small point: popular music uses rather more than three notes but rarely more than three chords.

How many Reg columnists does it take to turn off a lightbulb?

John Presland

Re: CorelDraw

Did Corel teach Microsoft how to fuck things up?

Skype used to be perfect for contacting my now 91-year old mother. In its latest version she's besieged by incitements to chat and offers to translate our conversations.

LibreOffice 6.2 is here: Running up a Tab at the NotebookBar? You can turn it all off if you want

John Presland

Re: 646464

I'd love to deal with a 2038 problem; my start date wasn't in 1970 but 1950.

We did Nazi see this coming... Internet will welcome Earth's newest nation with, sigh, a brand new .SS TLD

John Presland

Re: terminology

Two walls, named after two Roman emperors.

Pants-purveyor in plea for popularity: It's not just any pork push... it's an M&S 'love sausage'

John Presland

Re: missed opportunity

and Polish, and Spanish, and doubtless many more.

Data hackers are like toilet ninjas. This is not a clean crime, you know

John Presland

Re: Inquiring minds want to know...

The lottery is a voluntary tax paid by the poor.

John Presland

Re: Inquiring minds want to know...

With increasing age increasingly damaging my memory, I try to limit the number of passwords I have to use on a variety of devices. The password I use where I judge security needs are modest - no money involved - is composed of the characters of a name in the language of country B combined with a date of relevance to country C; I am a native of country A.

An honest request for advice: how secure is this password? How great is the risk that I may have to spend a day changing my password on some 200 sites?

My 2019 resolution? Not to buy any of THIS rubbish

John Presland

Re: Bah!

@+) and the square foot of artwork was perfect for three Rizlas plus.

The Great British Curry: Put down the takeaway, you're cooking tonight

John Presland

Re: Cooking Basmati

nor nice.

Mark Zuckerberg did everything in his power to avoid Facebook becoming the next MySpace – but forgot one crucial detail…

John Presland

Re: Arkel v Pressdram

Real

30 spies dead after Iran cracked CIA comms network with, er, Google search – new claim

John Presland

Re: How long has Goggle supported boolean operators ?

"a b" = a AND b, "a -b" = a NOT b, "a or b" (or its equivalent in another language, e.g. Polish "a lub b", Spanish "a o b") = a OR b.

With the 6T, OnePlus hopes to shed 'cheeky upstart' tag and launch assault on flagships

John Presland

Re: why all the fuss over a headphone socket?

High quality sound is delivered by wire.

Why are sat-nav walking directions always so hopeless?

John Presland

Re: Actually most satnavs are still remarkably unreliable

Garmin is humorously wrong in northern Spain. When I drive through a motorway tunnel that was completed before I moved here four years ago it shows me driving through a field, it hasn't a clue about the one-way system in Leon and in Oviedo it recommends driving straight through the old town, which has been pedestrianised for 20 years. Google, whose map pp I crises earlier, does not make these mistakes.

John Presland

Re: waist-high jungle to save 100m

Bloody Google maps. In Santander it took me in a straight line to where the coach was parked - up and down the hill. I could have had a pleasant walk by the sea round the hill.

It's true – it really is grim up north, thanks to Virgin Media. ISP fined for Carlisle cable chaos

John Presland

Re: Marketing

That should be "up to 100Mb". What does speedtest report?

Want to know what an organisation is really like? Visit the restroom

John Presland

Re: Sit down wee

Alistair: English is a Germanic language.

Tech bribes: What's the WORST one you've ever been offered?

John Presland

Re: First of all, I don't accept bribes. Ever. Personal policy.

There was a young fellow from Johns

Oh the primness of today's youth! The version my father learned in the 1940s referred to buggering rather than fondling the birds. And the loyal retainer spoke of "them swans"

There is no perceived IT generation gap: Young people really are thick

John Presland

Re: Education is no longer designed to teach.

Bloody awful indeed! I and my friends made a point of being at home on transmission night so that we could discuss the genius of the episode at school the next day.

Best thing about a smart toilet? You can take your mobile in without polluting it

John Presland

Re: Seen in an analogue lavatory years ago

That's inflation for you. In my day we paid a penny, which scans much better.

John Presland

Re: The cuckoo clock

Errrr ... Beethoven was born in Bonn to parents both of whom were born and raised in the Rhineland. One of his grandfathers was, true enough, a Dutch immigrant but surely that's not enough to make him other than German.

Ex-GCHQ boss: All the ways to go after Russia. Why pick cyberwar?

John Presland

Give us details of this scam, please.

John Presland

Reason, sadly not one that our courts would recognise, for confiscating their property and throwing them out of the country: they stole it from the Russian people.

John Presland

Re: Tougher sanctions

Brexit! Brexit! Give us Brexit and we can do this!

John Presland

Re: Tougher sanctions

We must remember that the Great in Great Britain is there not to mark our magnificence but rather to distinguish us from Lesser Britain, now known in English as Brittany.

BOFH: We want you to know you have our full support

John Presland

Re: All true

No, it's Amazon's poxy system which, if a potential purchaser of the product X submits a question about it,asks everyone who recently bought an X whether they can answer the question. Too many of us are so polite that instead of thinking they've nothing useful to say they answer with something close "I don't have the problem you describe and I don't even own this product, but it seems like it might/should work for you" and Amazon's demented bots publish that.

Shopper f-bombed PC shop staff, so they mocked her with too-polite tech tutorial

John Presland

Re: PC world

"its" not "it's"

Google slaps mute button on stupid ads that nag you to buy stuff you just looked at

John Presland

Re: Gee, thanks

Many people who are not IT professionals but are interested in IT look at El Reg. For their benefit could you explain how?

John Presland

Re: Can't remember the last time I...

loser

Renewed calls for Tesla to scrap Autopilot after number of crashes

John Presland

Re: 98%

Nerd was funny, but you ...

Why did I buy a gadget I know I'll never use?

John Presland

Re: Interference

Evidently one of El Reg's USian followers. In more civilised parts of the world "fair market value" means precisely one "could have sold it for". (This may not be true if you're large enough to be advised by one of the Big Four.)

US says it's identified six Russian officials as DNC hack suspects

John Presland

Social inequalities in the US, massive and disgraceful as they are, are actually smaller than those in Russia. (World Bank Human Development Indicators: 2013: GINI - US 40.8, Russia 40.1.)

Car trouble: Keyless and lockless is no match for brainless

John Presland

I empathise. I've a 1985 Mercedes 190D. The engine's good for 500K km; it's done 220K. I'd like more horses under the bonnet but for so long as it works I'm sticking to this over-enginered marvel that I can fix with spanners.

John Presland

Re: Reminds me of the time

Cortina 1600? Sheep in wolf's clothing.

Home Sec Amber Rudd: Yeah, I don't understand encryption. So what?

John Presland

Remarkable: 209 comments from people who know something about IT, and 209 are hostile to Rudd. Do you think that might make her think that maybe she's wrong?

Want to keep in contact with friends and family without having to sell your personal data?

John Presland

Re: Get Out of the Way of My Lawn

Mine is mowed very effectively by a robot made by Husqvarna.

Shock! Hackers for medieval caliphate are terrible coders

John Presland

Re: People who want to kill other people for stupid sky fairy reasons are not clever

"Intifada" means nothing more than "uprising". Thus the Warsaw Rising against the Germans of

1944 is referred to in Arabic as the "Warsaw intifada".

Numbers war: How Bayesian vs frequentist statistics influence AI

John Presland

Re: If there is no infection at all then 1% of the population will still test positive.

It is not safe to asume that anyone who does not look like a zombie is a zombie.

Canadian sniper makes kill shot at distance of 3.5 KILOMETRES

John Presland

From the Italian campaign:

The Germans fly over - the Brits duck; the Brits fly over - the Germans duck; the Americans fly over - everyone ducks.

PC rebooted every time user flushed the toilet

John Presland

Re: Replaced the pump

An old pump's more likely to have replaceable bushes than a new one. Modern kit's built for replacement not maintenance or repair.

Smart burglars will ride the surf of inter-connected hackability

John Presland

Re: WiFi? No problem.

Simple? Tell me how to, please. (Seriously)

America 'will ban carry-on laptops on flights from UK, Europe to US'

John Presland

Re: America hasn't banned anything - America is a continent not a country.

Not in Spain.

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