A random thread for small computing things that don't really warrant a thread of their own

[Mr Larrington]

Odo in a wig, I reckon.

Does that make Quark the prime minister?

No, it makes him a soft cheese.

Strange, why did you bring that up?

All part of his innate Charm.

I knew you'd get to the bottom of it.

I'm right up on top of it, actually.

[Pingu]

Odo in a wig, I reckon.

Does that make Quark the prime minister?

No, it makes him a soft cheese.

Strange, why did you bring that up?

All part of his innate Charm.

I knew you'd get to the bottom of it.

I'm right up on top of it, actually.

Fundamentally, it's down to you then.

[Mr Larrington]

Odo in a wig, I reckon.

Does that make Quark the prime minister?

No, it makes him a soft cheese.

Strange, why did you bring that up?

All part of his innate Charm.

I knew you'd get to the bottom of it.

I'm right up on top of it, actually.

Fundamentally, it's down to you then.

I charge you with trying to spin this out as long as possible.

[Chris S]

Ah, bless you Mrs Google.

Me: "What's the highest road in England?"
Mrs Google: "Cairnwell Pass, Scotland"

 

[Greenbank]

$ date +%s
1599997519

Not long to go...

[woollypigs]

did it happen ?

1600000784

Should we panic ?

[grams]

I'm still partying like it's 1234567890.

[Chris S]

According to Wikipedia (so FACT, yeah?):

Ubuntu: "a quality that includes the essential human virtues; compassion and humanity."

So why does it make me feel so threatened whenever I shut it down?

"Are you sure? All your unsaved data will be LOST!"

Aaaaaaaarrrghh.... I'M DOOOOOOOMED 

[Mrs Pingu]

The old telly that brought down a village's broadband.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/sep/22/the-old-telly-that-brought-down-a-welsh-villages-broadband

[Feanor]

Old CRT TVs are massive noise sources, but this is quite exceptional!

I have at least one neighbour who cranks up a CRT TV,  because it produces a bright spectral line at 16.625 kHz, on my VLF receiver.
This is the line scan frequency of a 625-line PAL TV, which also doubles up as the source of the Extra High Tension (EHT)  25kV for the CRT.
This EHT is massively noisy, and can be detected by nothing more than a pack of sammitches in a TV detector van.

Presumably, they have a DVB-T - SCART box or similar in the mix, or the TV would be in the skip.

[Kim]

That's a classic failure mode of CRTs:  The charged surfaces attract grime, which accumulates to positively disgusting levels.  Combine the accumulated mildly-conductive gunk with bad design or some sort of insulation breakdown, and it starts arcing over.  Normally what happens then is the picture goes on the blink and the owner takes it to be repaired, because it's the 80s and TV repair shops exist, but broadband internet connections don't.

[ian]

It's to be expected, they're basically ray guns.

Wait till the world learns that bananas are making antimatter.

[Ham]

Best use of teleconference backgrounds yet: A barred prison window

[woollypigs]

ooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhh new shiny "wireless" chargers for the iThing, but what is that bit of wire I see sticking out of the thing? That is a FECKING wire !!!! OK I will give in to your wireless talk the day you make it so I can walk around my own house with my phone in my pocket and it is charging, then I will accept your LIE that it is "wireless". As long as I have to put my iThing on another iThing that is wired up it isn't fecking WIRELESS (same goes to manufactures of Android things)

* woollypigs needs a sit down after that rant

[woollypigs]

* woollypigs didn't know that /me worked on SMF too, nice

[grams]

OK I will give in to your wireless talk the day you make it so I can walk around my own house with my phone in my pocket and it is charging

Alas, unless you'd be happy with either microscopic amounts of charging, microwaving your flesh, deafening your pets or firing thousands of watts into the room, or some exciting combination of all of the above, this isn't a technology that's ever going to exist.

(although plenty of fraudsters have tried)

[Kim]

I suppose 'plugless' would be a better functional description of inductive charging.  It's the problem of the plug that it solves, rather than the constraints of the wire.

[fuaran]

You could get a wireless charger built into furniture, so no visible wires. The Ikea chargers look quite neat. Or they have a desk lamp with charger built into the base.
https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/cat/wireless-charging-accessories-41069/

[woollypigs]

OK I will give in to your wireless talk the day you make it so I can walk around my own house with my phone in my pocket and it is charging

Alas, unless you'd be happy with either microscopic amounts of charging, microwaving your flesh, deafening your pets or firing thousands of watts into the room, or some exciting combination of all of the above, this isn't a technology that's ever going to exist.

(although plenty of fraudsters have tried)

That's just mere details

[Greenbank]

A magnetic attaching (and charging) phone holder for the car (to use as a SatNav) would be great. No having with faff with clamping it in and fiddling with cables!

(It'll be ~3 years before I end up with an iPhone model with magnetic charging though, I never bother paying £££ for the latest and greatest...)

[Ham]

Anyone got a W7 ISO please? Unfortunately all my licenses are OEM, so can't download from Microsoft  (and I can't find what I've done with my old one)

[Mr Larrington]

Note to self: you will finds it a lot easier to replace the side cover on this 'ere PC if the network cable is not jammed between the cover and the case

[BrianI]

I'm pondering a replacement PSU to replace my current 3 year old Kolink 500W jobby.

I recently upgraded to a Radeon Rx580 GPU, from a GT1030.  Had a strange case of display corruption during full load yesterday. So perhaps the old 500W is a bit on the low side...

Rest of system is a AMD A8-6600K cpu. 16gb of DDR3 ram (4 x 4gb sticks). 1 120gb SSD, two 1tb hard drives. 

So replace with a 750W  / 850W PSU? Ideally i'll be upgrading the rest of the system within 6 months to a year, so hopefully whatever PSU i buy will be future proof for then. 

[Mr Larrington]

Crivvens!  This FruitCo fondleslab has just asked me if I want to change the default browser from Safari to Chrome.  Since when did the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia allow us to do that?

[woollypigs]

HA ! while on hold with our ISP yesterday, I DM'ed them on twitter asking in a joking way if they knew how long the wait would be since the phone line was busy promoting stuff I don't need instead of updating me on wait times. Now 24 hours later I got a reply asking me : Please stay on the line when you are asked to hang up, this will then add you to a queue as we prioritise customers who call from the unique numbers provided at the end of our online help guides.

I ended up waiting 55min and a very nice person tried to sell me much stuff, but clearly gave up when it finally clicked, that he should just click skip on the script when he came to a promotion part. So after 10min of dancing about, I managed to get £17 knocked off our monthly bill.