The computing stuff rant thread

[ian]

I am the proud owner of a Croydon postcode (ok, I share it with next door).

[jsabine]

There are many parts of Croydon that could be improved with a tractor.

I think you misspelled bulldozer. Or possibly tactical nuclear device.

[Mr Larrington]

If you performed the kind of contortions normally associated with circus acts or limbo dancers at the skylight in the loft of Schloß von Brandenburg you could probably detect the baleful presence of Croydon on the horizon.  And that’s as close as I'm prepared to get unless I'm driving a tank.

[ian]

I can't see the badlands of Croydon from here, not even the iconic Ikea chimneys and the Beddington sewage works.  I'd have to walk up the hill to the secret airforce base. From the balcony, I can see the wilds of Woldingham where posh girls are schooled in undoubtedly dark arts.

[Bledlow]

WTF should some files sent from Japan for me to check be impossible to copy to a USB stick? Out of 10, six or seven were fine, but I got an error message when trying to copy the others. Same on every USB stick in the house except Naomi's work one, which I didn't try.

No obvious fault with the files (ppt & docx), & transferring between an external HDD & computer worked perfectly.

I presume some obscure fault somewhere. Never encountered it before.

[spesh]

There are many parts of Croydon that could be improved with a tractor meteorite impact.

Amended for accuracy.

[ian]

There are many parts of Croydon that could be improved with a tractor meteorite impact.

Amended for accuracy.

They were going to drop a Westfield on top of it (I'm not sure they planned to tell everyone first), but I presume that got kiboshed.

There are worse places in London (though probably not to cycle), but they're mostly called Tottenham. The borough of Croydon sprawls quite a ways though, from the grimmer northern badlands (where I used to live, ha) to the more genteel south where it eventually washes up into the jungles of Surrey.

You don't get better public transport fights than on the Croydon Tramlink, not even on night buses.

[Feanor]

WTF should some files sent from Japan for me to check be impossible to copy to a USB stick? Out of 10, six or seven were fine, but I got an error message when trying to copy the others. Same on every USB stick in the house except Naomi's work one, which I didn't try.

No obvious fault with the files (ppt & docx), & transferring between an external HDD & computer worked perfectly.

I presume some obscure fault somewhere. Never encountered it before.

Memory sticks which are failing formatted as FAT32 with no unicode support for Japanese character set, versus some sticks and the external HDD being formatted NTFS which can do unicode filenames?

Or something like that.

[FifeingEejit]

Ninja’d by Pingu…

At least Microsith had my location right.  Most webby SCIENCE tells me I am in Croydon.  Not quite as bad as Farcebok thinking I was in York and wanting to buy a tractor, at almost exactly the same time as Zuckerberg was on live television explaining how THE ALGORITHM generates shitverts micro-tailored to a luser's every whim and fancy, but really.  Croydon?

Go to Google maps, don't feed it any other info particularly  a Google account as that knows where your phone is, it almost certainly tells you where your is has decided you are.

So on my work PC I'm normally in Glasgow where SWAN meets teh interntez
When we were on N3 iirc it was a usually Manchester.
My parents bt account used to have us in London but last time I looked it was Aiberdeen.

Nothing to do with microsith just IP addresses being shit for determining geographical location when it's the only option available.

Sent from my BKL-L09 using Tapatalk

[ian]

WTF should some files sent from Japan for me to check be impossible to copy to a USB stick? Out of 10, six or seven were fine, but I got an error message when trying to copy the others. Same on every USB stick in the house except Naomi's work one, which I didn't try.

No obvious fault with the files (ppt & docx), & transferring between an external HDD & computer worked perfectly.

I presume some obscure fault somewhere. Never encountered it before.

Memory sticks which are failing formatted as FAT32 with no unicode support for Japanese character set, versus some sticks and the external HDD being formatted NTFS which can do unicode filenames?

Or something like that.

Correct, it doesn't (and who knows whether the encodings are even Unicode, there's lots of weird when it comes to double-byte character sets).

Fond memories of dealing with this very problem on, erm, floppy disks. I am getting old.

[FifeingEejit]

There are many parts of Croydon that could be improved with a tractor.

I think you misspelled bulldozer. Or possibly tactical nuclear device.

Never underestimate what a tractor can do, I mean have you seen what happens to fields when they go in there with a plough? And the road when they leave it?

Sent from my BKL-L09 using Tapatalk

[Mr Larrington]

There are worse places in London (though probably not to cycle), but they're mostly called Tottenham.

Don’t forget Wood Green, the place that makes Edmonton look like Hawaii.

[Jaded]

Oi! I lived in Wood Green.

It sounded nice.

[ian]

You can look up at Ally Pally from Wood Green and pretend you live in Crouch End or atop Muswell Hill though. You just need enough plasticine in your ears to blot out the sounds of sirens and drunken screaming.

Anywhere with Green in the name is bad news. Edmonton Green. It's definitively not very green.

[Mr Larrington]

You can see Ally Pally from the Grand Bedchamber of Larrington Towers, provided you stand on tiptoes.

Since our local Homebase closed the nearest branch is in Haringey.  Whenever I go there, I always think it’ll be quicker to get home via Wood Green.  It never is.  Plus I have to keep the doors locked and the windows closed so the locals don’t drag me out of the car and barbecue me at the roadside.  It's worse than St Louis.

[Bledlow]

WTF should some files sent from Japan for me to check be impossible to copy to a USB stick? Out of 10, six or seven were fine, but I got an error message when trying to copy the others. Same on every USB stick in the house except Naomi's work one, which I didn't try.

No obvious fault with the files (ppt & docx), & transferring between an external HDD & computer worked perfectly.

I presume some obscure fault somewhere. Never encountered it before.

Memory sticks which are failing formatted as FAT32 with no unicode support for Japanese character set, versus some sticks and the external HDD being formatted NTFS which can do unicode filenames?

Or something like that.

A problem with that theory. Yes, the USB sticks are FAT32 (all I've checked) & the external disk is NTFS, & yes, the first batch all had Japanese characters. But most of those with Japanese characters could be copied, read & edited on those sticks without trouble (same for hundreds of others I & Mrs B have copied to & from over the years), & one file of a second batch failed despite none of that batch containing any Japanese. Why would it only affect a few files, all from the same source?

Would a straight file copy care about the contents?

[Feanor]

Probably not the content, but the name or other metadata that can't be represented correctly in FAT32.
Even a character that appears to be a western character may actually be some unicode character under the hood.

[philip]

FAT32 has a couple of limitations: 1) the file size has to be less than 4GB and 2) the length of the filename, and the length of the names of any folders, has to be less than 255 characters.

[perpetual dan]

Anywhere with Green in the name is bad news. Edmonton Green. It's definitively not very green.

Greenland is a barren land, a land that bears no green...

I spent a ludicrous amount of my day installing stuff. Most frustrating was the library that refused to be seen by pandas. Anything that’s gone from version 0.17 to 4.0 in a year has to be a bit suspect.

Two bear references in a reply to ian. I’m feeling quite pleased with myself now.

[Bledlow]

FAT32 has a couple of limitations: 1) the file size has to be less than 4GB and 2) the length of the filename, and the length of the names of any folders, has to be less than 255 characters.

Yes, but none of them affect these files.

It was irritating & puzzling.

[Afasoas]

2 related mini-rants today.

Mini-rant 1:New PC comes pre-loaded with subscription Office 365.
You are steered down the road of setting up a Microsoft account, and a subscription.

I don't want this, I want to use a perpetually-licensed version of Office.
Trying to remove Office 365 is like trying to get rid of Japanese Knotweed infestation.
Even after 'removing' it and installing normal Office, on first start-up of Word, you are right back to the 'setting up a Microsoft account, and subscription' one-way corridor, with no side doors.
You really need to rip this bastard out by the roots, and the roots run deep.

There is, however, an Office Removal tool which is claimed to make a 'proper' clean job of the un-install.
Let's give that a go.

In PowerShell:

Code: [Select]

Get-AppxPackage
Remove-AppxPackage -Package "MicrosoftOrrificeBlahBlah1_1.0.0.0_neutral__8weblahky"

Should work.

[Bledlow]

That might be handy. Ta.

[Mr Larrington]

Machine, when did “Shutdown” stop meaning “shut the system down” and start meaning “sign out”?  I'll tell you: fucking never.  Fucking never, that's when!

Now stop it.

[Lightning Phil]

And stuff just starting. Teams fires up every time I start. There's no stopping it. It's relentless. It's a fucking virtual machine, why do I want Teams to start on it? No, I don't want to install Edge. Stop. No. I said stop. Shopping mode, what the fuck is shopping mode? Stop it.

It’s a bit like that sub version of Skype that recently turned up in W10 and is in startup and can’t be stopped. If it did any checks it’d realise my PC has no webcam and no microphone. So fuck off with the video conferencing software starting up every bloody time.

[Kim]

It’s a bit like that sub version of Skype that recently turned up in W10 and is in startup and can’t be stopped. If it did any checks it’d realise my PC has no webcam and no microphone. So fuck off with the video conferencing software starting up every bloody time.

Does Skype still do that evil peer-to-peer thing where it turns your computer (and copious amounts of network bandwidth) into a node to route other people's phone calls?  That would explain this behaviour...