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

[Mr Larrington]

This Unit is currently pondering the "logic" by which someone decides to include 11560 files (occupying 3.8 MB) of type .mat in his game mod, of which precisely one (1) is actually needed

[Beardy]

I’m worried. I’ve just renewed my driving licence on line. It was a government website. It was sensible and all worked and even the payment was reasonable. I’m sure I must have used a scam site.

[Kim]

I’m worried. I’ve just renewed my driving licence on line. It was a government website. It was sensible and all worked and even the payment was reasonable. I’m sure I must have used a scam site.

It's okay, the process will be thwarted by everyone at the DVLA coming down with coronavirus.

[Bledlow]

A friend in Swansea got her second vaccine dose today. She's 80. Seems a bit late for someone her age. Doesn't bode well for the DVLA staff.

[Beardy]

I’m worried. I’ve just renewed my driving licence on line. It was a government website. It was sensible and all worked and even the payment was reasonable. I’m sure I must have used a scam site.

It's okay, the process will be thwarted by everyone at the DVLA coming down with coronavirus.

As I’ve reported elsewhere, I’ve already received my new driving licence which kind of negates the scam angle. Apart from the inclusion of the Union Jack on the licence and the use of my passport photo with no offers alternative, the whole thing has been efficient and cheap. I’m shocked.

[TheLurker]

Of course the BIOS* switch to disable Bluetooth is filed under, "Security" after all, it's not as if it has anything to do with networks or comms is it?




*An ancient Thinkpad T520

[Kim]

There's an argument for putting it under 'sanity' I suppose.

[Mr Larrington]

This Unit is currently pondering the "logic" by which someone decides to include 11560 files (occupying 3.8 MB) of type .mat in his game mod, of which precisely one (1) is actually needed

This Unit is now pondering the “logic” by which someone decides to include a couple of hundred files of type .mat in his game mod when a little application of common sense could have cut that number to seven (7)

[rafletcher]

So this morning I got the text of doom from my wife... "no internet".  I ask if the landline is ok. "no addresses listed"     Does it have a dial tone  "yes".  Ok, so ask her to check the Deco (the "white round thing on the widowsill" and see if it has a green light on it  "no". Hmm.   Ok, so the mesh wifi is down.  At this point I decide it's simple to call her, and remind her how to turn on both the iMac and it's mouse, and hey, presto!, we have internet (it's cabled to the router).  It's at this point she tells me "the white flying saucer - it's got a red light on". That makes more sense, and at least it's not dead. And the landline phone - seems all the stored numbers have disappeared  .  Goodness knows what caused that!

Guess what I'll be doing when I get home this evening.  (I did offer to talk her through connecting to the router direct - I still have one channel runnimg on that becasue one of my Garmins refuses to play with the mesh - but she declined)

[Mr Larrington]

This Unit is currently pondering the "logic" by which someone decides to include 11560 files (occupying 3.8 MB) of type .mat in his game mod, of which precisely one (1) is actually needed

This Unit is now pondering the “logic” by which someone decides to include a couple of hundred files of type .mat in his game mod when a little application of common sense could have cut that number to seven (7)

This Unit is pleased to report that it has cut down the size of the thing from just over 1GB and more than 20,000 files to ~200 MB and just over 2000 files

<== ph34r mi l33t 5k1llz

[Mr Larrington]

Somewhere in tens of thousands of files and hundreds of thousands of lines of text is a missing “/“ character.

I will find you…

I ent found it.

Yet.

Bah!

I found it.  Or rather I didn't, because the error message was being economical with the truth.  But I did find the cause of the inaccurate messages and subsequent crashes and have nuked them from orbit.  Hurrah!

[Kim]

Ohai mystery packet loss.  That explains the weird latency problems.

Explaining the mystery packet loss may involve Hardware jibbling, and it's too perilously close to midnight for that.

[grams]

Mr Zuckerberg has recently decided I'm a blue collar American and now while scrolling through pictures of friends on bikes, adverts for bike products, bicycles for sale and bicycle memes I get a Facebook "suggested post" with a tepid JPEG-artefacty pertrolhead/trucker/motorbiker/offroading meme.

[Kim]

Ohai mystery packet loss.  That explains the weird latency problems.

Explaining the mystery packet loss may involve Hardware jibbling, and it's too perilously close to midnight for that.

It's now the other side of midnight, and it turns out that if the processor is using a completely different 50MHz clock source to the Ethernet PHY, the network still kinda-sorta works, though intermittently not very well.  Who'd have thunk it?

[Mr Larrington]

Somewhere in tens of thousands of files and hundreds of thousands of lines of text is a missing “/“ character.

I will find you…

I ent found it.

Yet.

Bah!

I found it.  Or rather I didn't, because the error message was being economical with the truth.  But I did find the cause of the inaccurate messages and subsequent crashes and have nuked them from orbit.  Hurrah!

Oh arseburgers!  Found another one.  At least finding this one only took forty minutes instead of six months.

[citoyen]

Mr Zuckerberg has recently decided I'm a blue collar American and now while scrolling through pictures of friends on bikes, adverts for bike products, bicycles for sale and bicycle memes I get a Facebook "suggested post" with a tepid JPEG-artefacty pertrolhead/trucker/motorbiker/offroading meme.

You probably know this already but the latest Mac OS update blocks apps tracking your activity on other websites/apps, thus breaking targeted ads - you now have to explicitly opt in to receive them. Mr Zuckerberg is, as you can imagine, not happy and has started an anti-Apple campaign on Facebook.

[hellymedic]

Mr Zuckerberg has recently decided I'm a blue collar American and now while scrolling through pictures of friends on bikes, adverts for bike products, bicycles for sale and bicycle memes I get a Facebook "suggested post" with a tepid JPEG-artefacty pertrolhead/trucker/motorbiker/offroading meme.

FB adverts amuse me. Sometimes they are appropriate. Sometimes they are so wrong...
I've had denture fixative, incontinence products, retirement homes, funeral plans, Kosher food, much Church stuff, quite a lot of music, a £17,000,000 des res on Millionaires' Row and lots of cars...

[Tim Hall]

I had todo some stuffs on the Scout Association website which entailed me entering some address info. The only way seemed to be by typing in the postcode and selecting the particular address from the twenty or so options. So far so normal.
But what's this?
"There are two towns named $foo."
Followed by a check box choice of $foo in x county or y county.

I've already located $foo town you numpties,through the magick of post codes.

[SteveC]

Mr Zuckerberg has recently decided I'm a blue collar American and now while scrolling through pictures of friends on bikes, adverts for bike products, bicycles for sale and bicycle memes I get a Facebook "suggested post" with a tepid JPEG-artefacty pertrolhead/trucker/motorbiker/offroading meme.

FB adverts amuse me. Sometimes they are appropriate. Sometimes they are so wrong...
I've had denture fixative, incontinence products, retirement homes, funeral plans, Kosher food, much Church stuff, quite a lot of music, a £17,000,000 des res on Millionaires' Row and lots of cars...

Twitter ones are the least appropriate for me. I keep getting quite detailed adverts for farming supplies and equipment. I'm not a farmer, nor do I follow any on Twitter. 

[ian]

I really should change my broadband as I'm on lazy prices, because really, who wants to spend their evenings looking at broadband deals. I know it's probably all the same wires, and it's just branding. BT have been OK, tbh, but I don't think £48/month for basic* 70Mb/s is bargainalicious and far more than I'd pay as a new customer. Virgin always claim I can have fibre but that to date has been a fat lie and it always turns out that the bears have eaten their fibre. It's not fucking ursine All Bran, you beardy Branson fuckers. Then, of course, there's the hassle of them fucking up the transfer, which is the real threat, the knife at your throat. Change your deal, and the wires might get it, punk.

I find all this pointless choice soul-destroying. It must be a Finestre thing. I hate modern life. Let's bring communism back. What do you want for tea, comrade? Beetroot or cabbage? I'll have the beetroot. We don't have beetroot.

And a cream trimphone. I want a fucking cream trimphone. My parents have been on a waiting list for one of those since 1983.

*yeah, I'm old enough to remember my first 28.8kb/s modem.

[Bledlow]

28.8k? I remember doing overnight & weekend support with a rather heavy but small screen laptop with a 9.6k dial-up modem. Those were the days! Text only, line editor . . . .  paper bag in' middle o' road . . .

[Mr Larrington]

9.6k?  Laptop?  Fookin' luxury!  2400 and a VT220.  Although we did have EDT at the other end of the line.

[Kim]

I really should change my broadband as I'm on lazy prices, because really, who wants to spend their evenings looking at broadband deals. I know it's probably all the same wires, and it's just branding.

No it's not:  It's only the same Openretch product between you and your ISP, or in the case of an LLU provider, between you and your telephone exchange.  LLU backhaul, the ISP's connection to the onward internet, and services they provide like DNS and email, are a tangible difference between providers.

None of this makes shopping for deals any more fun.  That's why I don't shop for deals and just pay the going rate for a decent internet connection.  No point being cheap about that in 2021.


I saw the crushed remains of a trimphone in a pile of flytipping a few weeks back.  It wasn't cream, unfortunately.

[SoreTween]

Trimphones, not cream.
https://geemarc.com/uk/product/trimlines/

[ian]

I really should change my broadband as I'm on lazy prices, because really, who wants to spend their evenings looking at broadband deals. I know it's probably all the same wires, and it's just branding.

No it's not:  It's only the same Openretch product between you and your ISP, or in the case of an LLU provider, between you and your telephone exchange.  LLU backhaul, the ISP's connection to the onward internet, and services they provide like DNS and email, are a tangible difference between providers.

None of this makes shopping for deals any more fun.  That's why I don't shop for deals and just pay the going rate for a decent internet connection.  No point being cheap about that in 2021.


I saw the crushed remains of a trimphone in a pile of flytipping a few weeks back.  It wasn't cream, unfortunately.

That sort of the problem though, the only thing you can really decide on is price – is the Vodaphone 'backend' better than BT, or EE, or PlusNet, or a raft or other suppliers that I've never heard of? Is the known stability of BT worth paying twice the starting rate of others? You cannot really make a rational, informed decision. It's same for all these utilities, where you could – and I'm sure some people do – spend your life searching for and rafting cheap intro deals and griping to the internet when it goes wrong.

This is an MLIR grumble, of course. And my parents did, if I recall, try to the cream trimphone when we got our first phone line back in the mid-eighties and, despite the generous half dozen options in the BT catalogue, they got a grey rotary phone because that was all they had.