The computing stuff rant thread

[JonBuoy]

There has been no email service on my Plusnet account for over 24 hours.  Apparently I am not alone.  I am definitely not impressed!

Last update from them was at 1509 yesterday afternoon and stated '...we expect affected customers to be able to access their Plusnet email account by tomorrow morning.'  Well it is now tomorrow morning and it still isn't working 

Next update is due at 0800.  It had better be good news!

[nicknack]

No, you weren't alone. But mine's working again now.

[Kim]

Plusnet being bad at email?  That never happens...

[mrcharly-YHT]

Word!

Previous versions of word had a decent search and replace. This included being able to search for special characters, such as line feeds - very handy if you wanted to convert these to a windows CRLF.

I had a stack of text with just LF. Select text, replace LF with 'paragraph marker'.

Two things were wrong. One, the option to just 'replace in selection' has gone (WTF). Two, it replaced the LF with a paragraph marker symbol. Just the paragraph marker character. The moronic engine they are using now literally inserted the character, not the CRLF that the paragraph marker is supposed to represent.

Pathetic. Bug report submitted.

[JonBuoy]

No, you weren't alone. But mine's working again now.

Lucky you!

Mine spluttered into life, spat out a few emails and has now died again   

[ian]

Word!

Previous versions of word had a decent search and replace. This included being able to search for special characters, such as line feeds - very handy if you wanted to convert these to a windows CRLF.

I had a stack of text with just LF. Select text, replace LF with 'paragraph marker'.

Two things were wrong. One, the option to just 'replace in selection' has gone (WTF). Two, it replaced the LF with a paragraph marker symbol. Just the paragraph marker character. The moronic engine they are using now literally inserted the character, not the CRLF that the paragraph marker is supposed to represent.

Pathetic. Bug report submitted.

Still works here – you have to use the full-fat Ctrl-H search and replace not the crappy search boxes. Has all the special character and wildcard options, seemed to work here swapping paragraphs for line feeds.

By default, if you do 'replace all,' it seems to do within any selection if you have made one.

[mrcharly-YHT]

Word!

Previous versions of word had a decent search and replace. This included being able to search for special characters, such as line feeds - very handy if you wanted to convert these to a windows CRLF.

I had a stack of text with just LF. Select text, replace LF with 'paragraph marker'.

Two things were wrong. One, the option to just 'replace in selection' has gone (WTF). Two, it replaced the LF with a paragraph marker symbol. Just the paragraph marker character. The moronic engine they are using now literally inserted the character, not the CRLF that the paragraph marker is supposed to represent.

Pathetic. Bug report submitted.

Still works here – you have to use the full-fat Ctrl-H search and replace not the crappy search boxes. Has all the special character and wildcard options, seemed to work here swapping paragraphs for line feeds.

By default, if you do 'replace all,' it seems to do within any selection if you have made one.

I was in the full fat find and replace window, using the special characters dropdowns.

Sounds like it works sometimes but not in all cases. Probably something up with the underlying XML schema.

[Beardy]

Social science academics really should not be allowed to ‘design’ spreadsheets and then mandate that their colleagues use them. I don’t care if he’s a Doctor Doctor Doctor, his abilities as an IT ‘guru’ do not match his own perception of the same.

I’ve just had to go and provide IT support for Dr Beardy (Mrs) because she lost her work again. (She hadn’t, it was just of screen and without the scroll bars she couldn’t get it back again.

[chrisbainbridge]

Social science academics really should not be allowed to ‘design’ spreadsheets and then mandate that their colleagues use them. I don’t care if he’s a Doctor Doctor Doctor, his abilities as an IT ‘guru’ do not match his own perception of the same.

I’ve just had to go and provide IT support for Dr Beardy (Mrs) because she lost her work again. (She hadn’t, it was just of screen and without the scroll bars she couldn’t get it back again.

Design spreadsheets?  I will see that and raise you the people who design forms in Word for online completion! 

[lissotriton]

No, you weren't alone. But mine's working again now.

Lucky you!

Mine spluttered into life, spat out a few emails and has now died again   

And still seems to be broken. The SMTP server isn't working anyway.
I'm not using the Plusnet email address for receiving anything, but do use the SMTP for sending from a domain name.

[CommuteTooFar]

I had a windows update yesterday. When it restarted it wanted to change my web browser. I said no.  It wanted me to install some form of office 365. I said no.

[Tim Hall]

I had a windows update yesterday. When it restarted it wanted to change my web browser. I said no.  It wanted me to install some form of office 365. I said no.

That reads like a verse of Rehab that didn't make it to the final version.

[Jurek]

I had a windows update yesterday. When it restarted it wanted to change my web browser. I said no.  It wanted me to install some form of office 365. I said no.

That reads like a verse of Rehab that didn't make it to the final version.

Very good.

[Mr Larrington]

I had a windows update yesterday. When it restarted it wanted to change my web browser. I said no.  It wanted me to install some form of office 365. I said no.

Better get used to that sort of thing.  If the latest Windows 11 really wants to use Edge, it will use Edge no matter what.

[Pingu]

Windoze Groove Music 

It's like it's channeling exactly what I don't what I want to listen too

[Mr Larrington]

Dear Brother,

If I click “Do not remind me again” on your wanky pop-up offering a 40% discount on software I do not want, then I mean “Do not hassle me again”, not “Bring back the wanky pop-up a couple of weeks later in the vain hope that Mr Larrington will have forgotten about telling us to fuck off previously”.  Got it?  You don’t want The BEAR to come to visit your UK offices.  His table manners are simply appalling.

kthxbai

[mrcharly-YHT]

Word 365

Specifically, the removal of control over the content and its appearance.

I'm inserting cross-references. I want them to appear like hyperlinks.

Nope, won't do that. They specifically force them to appear like surrounding text. You can't even manually apply the hyperlink character style.

From MS

As you have noticed, hyperlinked cross-references are not formatted as hyperlinks. This is by design.

[barakta]

That's just rude to override what the user wants things to be.

I want my hyperlinks to LOOK like links so people know it's a link rather than having to over a mouse over it or guess.

This is going to make people go back to "link here for" in the text which fucks things up for screenreader users.

I do not understand why Microshite has gone SO far backwards in accessibility terms this past few years.

[mrcharly-YHT]

That's just rude to override what the user wants things to be.

I want my hyperlinks to LOOK like links so people know it's a link rather than having to over a mouse over it or guess.

This is going to make people go back to "link here for" in the text which fucks things up for screenreader users.

I do not understand why Microshite has gone SO far backwards in accessibility terms this past few years.

EXACTLY

You also used to be able to set up cross reference 'styles' that showed heading numbers plus text, or just numbers and so on. That has gone as well.

[barakta]

Ugh, my place are testing 365 for general use which is worrying.

It's bad enough when I had to do work on a file which I can only access through a browser cos it won't share properly if anyone opens it in Proper Desktop Excel.

I can manage for the odd file, but I strongly prefer to keyboard navigate to save mousing and the more we webbify office, the less I can do that or have quick use shortcuts as I need them so I can make documents green backgrounded with 1 click etc. It's bad enough we're using 1 colleague's OneDrive as a filestore for the team so I can't configure display of hundreds of folders and space is wasted with a "status" field which comes back each time I open a new folder. *swears a lot*

[Kim]

It's bad enough we're using 1 colleague's OneDrive as a filestore for the team

Can't you make them sort that out citing data protection or something?

[barakta]

It's bad enough we're using 1 colleague's OneDrive as a filestore for the team

Can't you make them sort that out citing data protection or something?

You're talking about the place that has no data protection deletion strategy despite having an online and filestore system....

And whose idea of data protection is *WINCE*.

[Mr Larrington]

What’s that, Thrustmaster?  No-one would want to route the cable connecting the pedals to the wheel up the back of the desk and creeping round the centre speaker and under the keyboard?

Well, I do.  But I can’t.  Because your poxy cable is too fucking short.  And it’s got an RJ4512 connector on it.

(Wanders off to Google “ RJ4512 extension cables”)

Edit: cable now ordered from the Bay of Thieves.  This had better work.

[Mr Larrington]

Oi, [“redacted” – Ed.]!  Aren’t you embarrassed to release a mod containing so many stupid fucking errors on an unsuspecting world?  Do you, in fact, CHECK THE FUCKING LOG FILE AT ALL while testing it?  Did you even test it at all?  And how the fucking fuck of Fuckhamptonshire did you manage to change the internal name for North Dakota from “ndakota” to “ndakot” without even noticing?  You witless fucking cloacas

[Mr Larrington]

Twenty-four hours on and I've still only managed to drive my virtual lorry from its virtual HQ to the virtual dealer down the virtual road.  SCS Software: if we can have paintable accessories on the vehicles you've recently managed to licence, why in the name of the FSM can’t we have them on the indescribably ancient ones too?  You gorm-free mountains of llama dung.