The computing stuff rant thread

[woollypigs]

Why the feck is call centre queue music so horrid. It is all computers now of days, but the quality is no better than the old wireless. When I tried to tune into Atlantic 252 on my clock radio back in the mid 80s, it sounded better on the broken mono earpiece, than this. Piercing sound, crackles, volume goes up and down, low quality that you can't hear what is said/sung, pretty much just horror film nightmare noises. From what I could make out it was rather good and original tunes - like Al Green, Rolling Stones - not covers or synthesized remakes that would make elevator music embarrassed.

[Greenbank]

Why the feck is call centre queue music so horrid.

To make you hang up.

[David Martin]

VBA.

[TheLurker]

VBA.

Points and larfs out loud. 

My grumble.  Visual Studio 15's bloody razr / javascript intellisense-parser thing.  Sort your fucking act out.  I remember all too well what it was like working remotely over a 300 baud modem I do _not_ need to revisit the experience on a high powered modern computer when editing a small cshtml file in _memory_. 

Anywhere between 5 and 20s to echo keystrokes?  Locking up the IDE for 30s to a minute while you take your socks off to count up to 12?  Piece of shit. Thank $deity$ for Notepad++.

[Afasoas]

Out of interest, are you using VS 2015 Update 3?

[Andrew]

Just been trying to get the newish unix distro BunsenLabs (debian based) running on an old nettop. I wanted a lightweight desktop environment for performance reasons and as I liked CrunchBang (BunsenLabs forerunner) I thought I'd give it a go. Sadly, I've had to throw in the towel and put Xubuntu on it instead.   

For reasons I really don't understand, I could not get a decent screen resolution using the recommended legacy driver (it's an Nvidia 930 graphics card). All I could get gave the desktop a very 'my first computer' look. With the generic (?) nouveau driver, I could get a decent resolution but the display was slightly (and annoyingly) off-centre. I tried a number of things to get it to work but to no avail and I could only assume that the Debian/Bunsen/Nvidia combo meant the monitor's EDID was not being correctly read... if at all in the case of the legacy driver. I hate having to give up. 

That said, Xubuntu 'just works', picks up the supported resolutions, and now I can get on with pissing about with the stuff I like pissing about with 

[TheLurker]

Out of interest, are you using VS 2015 Update 3?

Not on the offending box.  Every time I've tried to install U3 the damned work firewall/proxy has banjaxed it by killing the download part way through.  The offending piece of crap is slated for replacement this month; or so I've been told. We'll see.

My other dev machine, yes I have two, does have U3 but of course I can't use that one for the stream of work* I'm doing on the POS.

*Don't ask. Too involved for a sane explanation.  BigCoBureaucracy is probably the simplest answer.

[woollypigs]

Crunchbang was brilliant, had to to very little fettling. Bunsenlaps just worked and even installed WiFi drivers that <insert and letter>buntu, debian, mint never did and I had to download over LAN to get it to work.

[Mr Larrington]

Microsith, if you draw a line on a map from Battle Mountain through Idaho Falls and Billings and then extend it, guess what?  Yes, it reaches Canada!  So why act all surprised when I fire up my laptop in said Dominion?

Particularly when there wasn't a peep out of you when it first connected to the intertubes from USAnia

[SoreTween]

Dear Microfuckers.  I stop and disable the windows update service through the week because you've fucked up WU so badly there's no point running it weekdays.  It requires 48-72 hours of continuous effort each month for you to send down a few new bugs fixes.  I am not having my laptop in hovercraft mode in my room in digs, it can be noisy all weekend in the office at home.  So please you motherfucking shitbiscuits STOP TURNING THE SERVICE BACK ON.  I disabled it, it's my fucking laptop so please just die the shithead lot of you.  Preferably painfully.

TVM.

[mcshroom]

Laptop!

First you start with the 'not approved adaptor' errors again, and now your down button is b0rked. Is this because I decided to make you go in the bag and travel to Devon instead of getting your usual place in the front room? Sort yourself out!

[Mr Larrington]

Look, Microsith, just fuck off with your updates.  I do not want you to wake up my hibernating laptop in the middle of the fucking night to apply updates because I wanted to make an early start this morning.  Now you're "Restoring your previous version of Windows" which suggests you're in it for the long haul.  If you have bricked the bloody thing I am extending my car hire, rebooking my flight and bringing my trusty Zippo to Redmond 

[TheLurker]

So please you motherfucking shitbiscuits STOP TURNING THE SERVICE BACK ON.

I have a suspicion that Media Player switches WU on when you start it.  Like you I run my machines with WU stabbed in the heart with a dirty great stake, but every now and again I find it has risen from the dead unbidden.  It may be coincidence, I really _cannot_ be fussed with investigating further as life's too short, but it always seems to be shortly after I've used MP to play something. You won't be surprised to hear I normally use VLC instead of MP.

[SoreTween]

I haven't used MP in years on this laptop, only time I play stuff is the occasional Amazon film in a Firefox tab.  Coincidently tonight when I resumed the machine the WU service didn't rise from the undead for the first time this week.

I agree about life being too short.  I don't waste time investigating microsoft annoyances any more, I use the time progressing my goal to get my company migrated off Microsoft.

[Mr Larrington]

Oh, fucking well done, Microsith   During your fucked-up attempt to "update" my laptop last night you have deleted the entire directory tree containing all my e-mail settings, spam filters, passworms and EVERY FUCKING MESSAGE I'VE SENT OR RECEIVED IN THE PAST FOUR WEEKS.  Nice one.

[mrcharly-YHT]

Oh, fucking well done, Microsith   During your fucked-up attempt to "update" my laptop last night you have deleted the entire directory tree containing all my e-mail settings, spam filters, passworms and EVERY FUCKING MESSAGE I'VE SENT OR RECEIVED IN THE PAST FOUR WEEKS.  Nice one.

That seems surprising.

I've never seen an MS update do this or anything similar.

[Mr Larrington]

Surprising is one adjective that would fit the bill, I suppose, but not necessarily the first one which springs to mind.  Thunderbird was behaving as expected when I hibernated the machine in the evening and lacking most essential features ones I'd had a stab at sorting the horribleness left by Microsith in the morning so the possible culprits are, in order of probability:

• Microsith
• l33t h@xx0rs
• a sleepwalking Mr Larrington drilling down umpteen layers to C:\Users\Dave\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles and deleting the folder in question
• 2D Thomas

[Kim]

Thunderbird was behaving as expected

Intermittently maxing out the CPU and using an improbable amount of RAM, while still being marginally less irritating than all the other GUI mail clients, and infinitely better than the current situation, then.

[Zipperhead]

Mr. Larrington, when you set off to teach Redmond a lesson would you please be so kind as to toss an extra nuke in for me.

I had the Windows 10 Anniversary update last week, which announced itself, so I left it to restart overnight - but the next night was another update which restarted without warning me. In fact it woke up the computer to restart it.

One or the other of those updates has really screwed up the displays. I know that Windows 7/8/10 can cope with multiple displays it just doesn't seem to like them being different sizes. Since the update mine behave differently when they wake up from the screensaver. But that's not the really annoying thing. The really annoying thing that means that Redmond should be a glowing pile of radioactive dust is that now when it comes out of screensaver mode, every single fucking time, it resets the monitor profiles. The option to reload the profiles is greyed out. I've ended up finding a utility that will reload the profiles for me, manually.

[Mr Larrington]

Setting Redmond ablaze will, alas, have to wait until next year coz I'm back in Blighty now chiz.

[Bledlow]

Bah! I was waiting for the news reports of the Redmond apocalypse.

[ian]

May I take this opportunity to remind you all that I once-upon-a-time did an impressively large and splendidly aromatic poo in the Microsoft Redmond campus loos.

I'd do the same in Cupertino if Apple would invite me. Probably unlikely if they're reading this.

[Greenbank]

Forgotten the password to get in to one of my raspberry pis. It's not any of the usual/default ones, and the username is definitely pi as that's what I've got saved in putty.

Removed the micro-SD card, stuck it in a card reader and attached it to one of the other pis, mounted the root filesystem and fiddled the entry in /etc/shadow and I'm back in.

I guess I'll have a couple of days of that nagging feeling about not knowing what it had been set to.

[Mr Larrington]

Will whatever it is that's nomming all my internets bandwidth either make itself known or fuck the fuck off   This is as bad as the Battle Mountain Super 8, FFS

[Kim]

Will whatever it is that's nomming all my internets bandwidth either make itself known or fuck the fuck off   This is as bad as the Battle Mountain Super 8, FFS

All downloads take 3 minutes 20 seconds?