Author Topic: The computing stuff rant thread (Read 404019 times)

ian · « **Reply #1700 on:** 07 November, 2018, 07:00:36 pm »

Well, it's only ever needed to save my bacon once, many years ago went a Macbook disk went cluck-cluck-whrrrrrrrrrrr like an unwound clockwork chicken.

Other than that, the occasional roll-back to a previous version is a handy feature of TM. Important stuff floats atop the cloud thing.

But still, some kind of warning that there's no longer a TM disk available and thusly no backups being made would be useful. Invalid record count, apparently. Off to disk heaven you go, chunky old Maxtor.

grams · « **Reply #1701 on:** 07 November, 2018, 07:15:15 pm »

It'll warn you after 7 days of failed backups, so you just had to wait slightly longer. It should still be doing local snapshots to the internal drive during that time, assuming they're enabled on your combination of OS version and software.

(I used to use this as a reminder to rotate between a pair of backup drives, when I used to keep one of them at work)

ian · « **Reply #1702 on:** 07 November, 2018, 07:22:46 pm »

You know, I never knew it was doing that – but yes, it evidently is still keeping snapshots. Obviously not super-useful if your HD dies, though it seems rare for SSDs to go the ways of spinning rust.

I'd still have liked a reminder before a week, mind you.

SoreTween · « **Reply #1703 on:** 12 November, 2018, 09:14:26 am »

A while ago a safety notice went round about Dell laptop batteries rupturing. Mine was on its way, one cell of 3 bulging so I requested a replacement. It took two painful weeks to get it inspected by shIT, replacement approved by manglement and a charge code divulged by the bean counters. Three weeks later I still have no battery. Can I chase it up by email? No, that method of contacting shIT was discontinued. Log in to the portal? Not working. Try a Skype call? Also not working (2 months and counting). That leaves enduring the phone line to India with its audio bandwidth measured in bits per month. Printers are down too.
Sigh.

ian · « **Reply #1704 on:** 12 November, 2018, 09:25:26 am »

Quote from: ian on 07 November, 2018, 07:22:46 pm

You know, I never knew it was doing that – but yes, it evidently is still keeping snapshots. Obviously not super-useful if your HD dies, though it seems rare for SSDs to go the ways of spinning rust.

I'd still have liked a reminder before a week, mind you.

Ten days apparently.

As I am replacing the disk with more svelte Toshiba replacement. (Well, to make life complicated, swapping the contents of the previous external disk with the new one, and then using the older, smaller disk for TM – a process that is still slowly drawing a progress bar across the Disk Utility window, oh well at least one of us working this Monday morning, the other needs coffee first).

ian · « **Reply #1705 on:** 12 November, 2018, 11:55:06 am »

That was surprisingly unrantworthy. Restored the previous disk to the new one and erased. Set the now blank old drive as the Time Machine drive. Now slowly backing up 204 GB of, what, I'm not sure. Well, I'm sure it's not what you lot (or my wife) thinks.

The dead drive is apparently alive. I think the issue is that it, for some reason, doesn't correctly unmount when the machine sleeps and if it's halfway through a backup, then it corrupts (always restarts with a 'disk didn't correctly...'). Inexplicably (to me), the other USB drive (and now TM drive) always unmounted properly when the machine goes to sleep. It wouldn't seem to much to ask, given one of the more convenient features of a Mac is the instant sleep and wake (did they ever figure that out for Windows?)

Not sure what I need another half terabyte of storage for. To the understairs cupboard of IT shame and spaghetti-esque wiring it goes.

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #1706 on:** 15 November, 2018, 01:11:59 pm »

Wondows, you useless, cretinous POS! All I want to do is set a file association such that files of type .sii are opened in notepad++ by default. It used to, and now it doesn't. Why will you not let me do this?

Edit: fixed after much jibbling in the registry. Say after me, Microsith, "C:\Program Files (x86)" and "C:\Program Files" are not the same thing.

Pingu · « **Reply #1707 on:** 23 November, 2018, 12:28:32 pm »

I know it's been ranted about before, but fucking Excel and fucking 'dates'

ian · « **Reply #1708 on:** 23 November, 2018, 12:53:10 pm »

Heh heh.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Microsoft for switching the keys (on a Mac) for creating an array formula from cmd+enter to ctrl+shift+enter which, as the former is engraved into my brain, means I always press the wrong ones and then have to go and fucking well reselect everything.

Jaded · « **Reply #1709 on:** 24 November, 2018, 12:07:52 am »

I'll never forgive them for taking away the ability to click on a number of cells and have them added to a formula as '+cell'

ian · « **Reply #1710 on:** 28 November, 2018, 08:08:10 pm »

Buggerymacfucknuts, the fuzzy match add-on isn't available for Mac Excel.

woollypigs · « **Reply #1711 on:** 29 November, 2018, 01:50:50 pm »

So before I go full Office Space. What magic trick to get an HP printer to move its ink tray out to I can put new ink into it?

I open it up, tray moved out and I took the ink out. Left it on and lid open. Went to the shop to get new ink. When I returned the little fecker had moved the tray into its naughty corner.

AND NOW THE BLEEPING THING DO NOT WANT TO COME OUT AGAIN !

All the little fecker says there ain't any ink to be found, please open lid to put some in !

ian · « **Reply #1712 on:** 21 December, 2018, 03:30:19 pm »

Another special festive shoutout to Cisco and the team behind the abominable AnyConnect VPN client and anyone responsible on foisting this second-rate piece of shit on the denizens of any corporate mothership. I hope you all fucking get run over by a runaway sleigh this holiday. And that the reindeer have rabies and come back and bite you in the face.

TheLurker · « **Reply #1713 on:** 21 December, 2018, 08:29:00 pm »

Quote from: ian on 21 December, 2018, 03:30:19 pm

Another special festive shoutout to Cisco and the team behind the abominable AnyConnect VPN client and anyone responsible on foisting this second-rate piece of shit on the denizens of any corporate mothership. I hope you all fucking get run over by a runaway sleigh this holiday. And that the reindeer have rabies and come back and bite you in the face.

Oh fuck. They're swapping us over to that from a.n.other VPN in the next fortnight or so.

chrisbainbridge · « **Reply #1714 on:** 26 December, 2018, 02:35:26 pm »

Magelok monitors. Supposed to be touchscreen PnP! Plugged it in as per booklet. Monitor - yes

Touchscreen - NO

tried it on 2 other computers, exactly the same.

Bought another one in case it was the monitor. No touchscreen.

Buy a different brand - works perfectly out of the box.

Conclusion: Magelok is a load of C**p

Kim · « **Reply #1715 on:** 31 December, 2018, 12:40:11 am »

Never have children. Don't allow your siblings to have children either. And never get into a relationship where niephews might be on the cards. In fact, a complete worldwide ban on any form of reproduction might be a good idea.

This is the only guaranteed way to prevent your parents from accumulating endless gigabytes of misleadingly catalogued^[1] blurry smartphone photos of random children. And emails with blurry photos of random children attached. And emails with attached word documents of embedded wrong-aspect-ratio bitmaps of blurry photos of random children. And scans of inkjet printouts of blurry photos of random children. And folders where random selections of blurry photos of random children have been uploaded to a photo-printing service so they can be made into booklets to be given to elderly relatives. Some of it's video. And so on, all the way down. With the occasional important legal document buried n layers deep where nobody will ever find it except by accident.

And it's all precious and irreplaceable, which means it's your job to protect it from the disk fairy. The only sane approach is to channel said parent's money to the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia in the hope that iCloud will maintain a secure copy of the whole sorry mess.

I fear for the archaeologists of the future.

_{[1] The trick of prepending filenames with increasing numbers of 'A' characters to denote importance is as close as it gets to a system. The EXIF data with a creation date two years later than the last modified date (neither of which were 1970-01-01) was a particular work of art, I thought.}

Karla · « **Reply #1716 on:** 31 December, 2018, 01:14:48 am »

Aah, you're reminding me of the Christmas holiday I spent a few years back, trying to get a bit by bit copy out of a technophobic relly's laptop hard drive: he'd decided to 'fix' said laptop by throwing out on the floor. Fun times

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #1717 on:** 05 January, 2019, 11:14:42 am »

Dear Messrs Nemetschek

Jolly decent of you to provide a free viewer to open .mcd files. Two things:

Telling me the files I file to inspect are "too old¹" is Not Helpful
How the bastard fuck do you uninstall it when it appears neither in the Programs & Features list in Control Panel nor the equivalent in CCleaner?

Now there will have to be undignified rolling around on the floor with a tape measure.

1. I mean, they're only twenty years old, FFS (and created on a Macintrash)

TheLurker · « **Reply #1718 on:** 08 January, 2019, 07:20:52 pm »

Quote from: TheLurker on 21 December, 2018, 08:29:00 pm

Quote from: ian on 21 December, 2018, 03:30:19 pm
Another special festive shoutout to Cisco and the team behind the abominable AnyConnect VPN client and anyone responsible on foisting this second-rate piece of shit on the denizens of any corporate mothership. I hope you all fucking get run over by a runaway sleigh this holiday. And that the reindeer have rabies and come back and bite you in the face.
Oh fuck. They're swapping us over to that from a.n.other VPN in the next fortnight or so.

Great. Years* of trouble free use of the previous VPN client. Third day with NayConnect and it fucks up. Tells me I'm connected, but can I see any of the network? Can I cocoa. And to rub salt into the wound IT support have contrived it so that calls disconnect when you press the button to wait for someone instead of, "Using the intranet to log your problem." You know, the intranet I cannot effing well connect to. Words fail me.

*At least 2 since the last glitch and that was caused by large network outage so not the VPN client's fault.

Feanor · « **Reply #1719 on:** 09 January, 2019, 10:56:20 am »

Bah! I'm at work, and have lost access to all my home network.

Mail server, webmail server, FTP server all timing out.
Line still in sync and PPP is up. (AAISP control pages )
Can ping both WAN and LAN sides of the firewall, but nothing beyond.
Looks like core switch failure from here.

Will need to wait till I get home to investigate.

fuaran · « **Reply #1720 on:** 10 January, 2019, 12:19:22 am »

PDF forms. What is the point in them? Why can't you just use a webform, or a Word doc if needs to be a file.

Is there any decent PDF software with proper forms support? Adobe Reader and Foxit Reader are both full of bloatware, adverts, and bundled crap in the installer.

Kim · « **Reply #1721 on:** 10 January, 2019, 01:38:52 pm »

Quote from: fuaran on 10 January, 2019, 12:19:22 am

PDF forms. What is the point in them? Why can't you just use a webform, or a Word doc if needs to be a file.

Is there any decent PDF software with proper forms support? Adobe Reader and Foxit Reader are both full of bloatware, adverts, and bundled crap in the installer.

This might be a barakta question. AIUI PDF forms are usually an opportunity for organisations to cock up accessibility in exciting new ways, but done properly they avoid the dog's breakfast that Word tends to produce when people try to use it for, well, editing documents.

"Why can't you just use a webform?" is presumably because J Random Office Worker is more likely to have access to Acrobat than a suitable CMS or whatever, rather than any offline idealism.

ian · « **Reply #1722 on:** 10 January, 2019, 02:40:36 pm »

Honestly, the clusterfuckup that Adobe made of both forms and annotations in PDF has been a mystery for a long time. Initially, it was a quest to keep everything proprietary until they realised that no, people weren't going to buy Acrobat to fill in a form. The result: a useless mess.

spesh · « **Reply #1723 on:** 10 January, 2019, 02:48:21 pm »

Quote from: ian on 10 January, 2019, 02:40:36 pm

Honestly, the clusterfuckup that Adobe made of ~~both forms and annotations in PDF has been a mystery for a long time. Initially, it was a quest to keep~~ everything ~~proprietary until they realised that no, people weren't going to buy Acrobat to fill in a form. The result: a useless mess~~.

Kim · « **Reply #1724 on:** 10 January, 2019, 03:39:34 pm »

Quote from: spesh on 10 January, 2019, 02:48:21 pm

Quote from: ian on 10 January, 2019, 02:40:36 pm
Honestly, the clusterfuckup that Adobe made of ~~both forms and annotations in PDF has been a mystery for a long time. Initially, it was a quest to keep~~ everything ~~proprietary until they realised that no, people weren't going to buy Acrobat to fill in a form. The result: a useless mess~~.

Their Type 1 fonts were okay...