The computing stuff rant thread

[JellyLegs]

Still, with a name like Dropbox, it was only a matter of time before they were a candidate for the Shite Courier thread.

Personally I haven’t touched them since they kindly dropped my details all over the web in 2012/2016 along with the details of 68 million others. If they can’t keep my username, email address and password secure then I sure as hell don’t trust them with my files.  Seems from a quick Google that they were breached again last year so my caution may have been justified.

[Mr Larrington]

O hai Thunderbollocks!

Why does the installation of, er, you keep dishing out this message:


Thunderbollocks by Mr Larrington, on Flickr

on the Estate Office PC but not on the Great Hall one?

[Mr Larrington]

O hai Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia!

That! E-mail! No! Longer! Exists! On! Yahoo’s! Server!  Nor does it exist in any of the Thunderbird installations dotted around the place.  So when I tell iOS mail to delete it, delete it.  Permanently.  Don't keep sneaking the fucking thing back into The Bin a few hours later

Sort it out you muppets!

[rr]

O hai Thunderbollocks!

Why does the installation of, er, you keep dishing out this message:


Thunderbollocks by Mr Larrington, on Flickr

on the Estate Office PC but not on the Great Hall one?

I get that as well, although it then proceeds to download said emails anyway. I suspect it may be an artefact of timing misalignments due to me running thunderbullocks on the SSD but keeping the mail files on the spinning rust.

Sent from my motorola edge 20 using Tapatalk

[mrcharly-YHT]

Word. Please stop renumbering my sections and paragraphs. 

Hahahahahahahaha
Hahahahahahahaha
Hahahahahahahaha
<gasp!>

Good luck with that!

We use a number of systems, but all feeding into an ixiasoft CCMS.
Multiple people get grumpy about this "why can't I just write something in Word".
Because the pagination, numbering and formatting is sh!te. the only thing word does semi-decently anymore is table column widths.

[Mr Larrington]

O hai Thunderbollocks!

Why does the installation of, er, you keep dishing out this message:


Thunderbollocks by Mr Larrington, on Flickr

on the Estate Office PC but not on the Great Hall one?

I get that as well, although it then proceeds to download said emails anyway. I suspect it may be an artefact of timing misalignments due to me running thunderbullocks on the SSD but keeping the mail files on the spinning rust.

Both the program and the mail files are on SSDs on both machines, albeit not on the same SSD in either case.

[Mr Larrington]

Thank you, DJ Random, for playing “The Man On The Silver Mountain” from Rainbow's first album.  Now if you could kindly get on with the rest of the tracks on your list rather than playing the rest of the record, why, that’d be just peachy!  You electronic fucking feeb.

[Mr Larrington]

O hai Mega-Global Chocolate Factory of Mountain View USAnia!

Not content with the utterly pointless "Open new tab in Chrome for iOS after you ent used it for a while" nonsense, you also have the "Update" thingie in the top RH corner of your The Product for Windows.  Click this and you shut down and restart inna-updated-stylee, yes?

Noes.  You have to click a further twice to make it actually do what you told it to do by clicking the "Update" wossname in the first place.

Do you do it on purpose Undermanager?

[Kim]

People who make video slideshows of still photographs!

Makes storing blurry photos of grandchildren as email attachments seem sane.

(Why yes, the MIL is low on disk space...)

[Mr Larrington]

O hai Microsith!

Would it be too much to ask that, when making a copy of a table in Access, you keep the the fields in the same fucking order?  Yes, even if some of them are calculated?

It would, you say? 

OK, sorry to have bothered you miserable bastard troglodytes 

Kthxbai

[Pingu]

Access - eww 

[Polar Bear]

Dear Micro$haft,

How many times do I have to tell you that I do not wish to upgrade to Windows 11 at this time?  Once should be enough, twice is one time too many and six, yes six fucking times is harassment.

Please JFO.

[Mr Larrington]

Access - eww 

Yes, I know, but some things give me too big a migraine when trying to do them in Excel.

[Kim]

Hmm.  Is it possible to justify the use of Access without mentioning Excel?  Never seen it happen...

[SoreTween]

Dear_CUPS_PDF_please_effing_stop_putting_effing_underpants_in_my_PDF_Filenames.  There's_feck_all_wrong_with_spaces_in_a_filename_on_a_civilised_OS_such_as_this_is_which_is_why_the_filename_opened_contains_spaces_not_cretious_underscores.

[Kim]

tzdata, tzdata, means you won't get your car till an hour later...

*spends a quality ten minutes amending bookings on the Co-Wheels website to account for DST, because their webby SCIENCE doesn't*

*emails info@ to report the problem*

*gets hilarious 'mailbox full' bounce message containing an exception that's the Microsoft equivalent of a numbers station*

*tweets at them that their email is bouncing*

*receives helpful reply to the email that supposedly bounced*
 
*replies with "BTW, get them to look into why your mailbox is generating bounces while they're at it"*

*gets a bounce for that, too*

[Kim]

*turns up at car at 8pm, UTC+1 for those playing along at home*

*waves RFID card at reader*

*ORANGE ORANGE ORANGE  GREEN GREEN GREEN*  *conspicuous absence of a central locking clunk*

"Oh, for fuck's sake!" said Kim, the words coming easily through force of habit

*phones out-of-hours number*

*gets recorded message*

*interrupted by a polite geordie*

*explains problem*

"Oh, it's probably the signal luv, let me try putting it through again for you..."

*Is about to question the logic of this, but remembers that 'signal' is Young Person for any kind of network connection*

"...try again now luv?"

*GREEEEEEEN* *ker-clunk!*

*momentarily speechless*

[Kim]

The saga continues with a tyre pressure warning, but I traced that to a lack of pressure in one of the tyres, so is ultra vires for this thread.

[Mr Larrington]

Microsith, why do you have to make it impossible to paste records from THAT table into THIS one?  Yes, it’s my fault for failing to add them in the first place but even so…

Edit:  Oh, you can after all.  Why didn’t you tell me that instead of sending me off on a tangent involving append queries which then don’t work

[ian]

(Re)setting up online banking for HSBC on a mobile phone. I remember it being bad. I had evidently repressed the worst parts of this process (and there assuredly aren't any better parts). Many instructions written in a language that looks like it's English, but isn't even a close cousin. Ended up talking to a robot that seems to run on a ZX80, enunciating my requests carefully, and we seemed to be getting on fine, till I'd run up a big phone bill and she declared, perfunctorily (and I suspect accurately), that THIS BRANCH IS NOW CLOSED. I salute their enthusiasm for branch closures, they're not closing the virtual ones.

Of course, any challenge will how have resulted in the complete lockdown our main account, any subsidiary accounts, credit cards, and any and all access to any money we might have. Ah, had we only been Russian oligarchs or Colombian coke merchants, I'm sure we'd be good at this point.

[rogerzilla]

I paid for a genuine Windows 11 DVD but apparently my PC doesn't have TPM 2.0 and it can't be enabled, so it's useless.  It is well above minimum specifications otherwise.  It would cost about £500 to buy something of very similar spec with TPM.

[Polar Bear]

On Friday evenings a number of us still do ZoomPub.  That is so 2021 I hear you say.  I agree but it's a far more pleasant experience than a town centre pub on a Friday evening.  Sitting on your own sofa with your own drink and snacks of choice chatting with your mates just works for us.

Anyway, most of the Zoomers are using various flavours of Windows, one is on an Apple Wotsit and two are using Linux on older PC's.  Sometimes somebody even joins us using an old android phone.

We have an ongoing strange and amusing quirk: the user of the older Linux machine is presented with various popups and menus when the user of the oldest and lowest spec Windows laptop joins the call.  Sometimes he drops from the call completely and struggles to rejoin. 

Nobody else is affected and there could be a dozen or more of us on the call but the consequence is amusing mainly because this particular Linux user is a bit of an evangelist who loves to slate micro$haft and fruityco at every opportunity.  It is worse for him because his fellow Linux user is unaffected just like the rest of us.

Out of pure curiosity and nothing more, anybody got any ideas why this happens?

[Feanor]

I paid for a genuine Windows 11 DVD but apparently my PC doesn't have TPM 2.0 and it can't be enabled, so it's useless.  It is well above minimum specifications otherwise.  It would cost about £500 to buy something of very similar spec with TPM.

Use Rufus to create a bootable USB with the various hardware requirements like TPM 2.0 removed:
https://rufus.ie/en/

I'd ignore your DVD and download the ISO directly from MS. The current version of Rufus has an ISO download tool built into it, I think. So you don't need to go search for it.

The only thing you should need from your purchased DVD is the product key.

(I've not done this myself, so YMMV..  My machines don't even have TPM 1, and I don't know if the Rufus bypass method requires a fall-back from 2.0 to at least 1, or if it will work with no TPM at all.)

[matthew]

This could go here or in the Div thread depending on if you think the problem is in the computer or the chair.


Last night I spent ~4 hours planning the menu for scout camp, determining the shopping list and getting the prices for the various ingredients from two websites, tabulating the whole thing in Libra Office Calc. I finished at about 22:30 and realised that I needed to save the file before I emailed it to the other leaders who are organising camp. Unfortunately when I went to Save the file libra office crashed and then didn't recover the file on restarting, just a blank spreadsheet. Now the problem could be in the chair as I have become complacent regarding saving due to 365 autosave at work and the crash happened when I first tried to save the document. Or the problem could be in the computer as why would the software crash at save time which surely is the worst possible.

Anyway I'm blaming the software and putting this here because it took a further two hours to regenerate the spreadsheet, I got to bed just before 1am and am therefore dragging my feet through work today.

[rogerzilla]

I paid for a genuine Windows 11 DVD but apparently my PC doesn't have TPM 2.0 and it can't be enabled, so it's useless.  It is well above minimum specifications otherwise.  It would cost about £500 to buy something of very similar spec with TPM.

Use Rufus to create a bootable USB with the various hardware requirements like TPM 2.0 removed:
https://rufus.ie/en/

I'd ignore your DVD and download the ISO directly from MS. The current version of Rufus has an ISO download tool built into it, I think. So you don't need to go search for it.

The only thing you should need from your purchased DVD is the product key.

(I've not done this myself, so YMMV..  My machines don't even have TPM 1, and I don't know if the Rufus bypass method requires a fall-back from 2.0 to at least 1, or if it will work with no TPM at all.)

I researched that workaround and the risk is that MS won't release security patches for non-TPM machines.  Essentially it's at their whim whether they fully support "broken" versions.