@sockpuppet7 I’ve also seen at least one that had a picture of a tricycle in it, which as I recall, I needed to click else it didn’t think I had clicked on enough bicycles.
Posts made by Gurth
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RE: Is it a bicycle?
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RE: I hate printers, with a passion
@BernieTheBernie said in I hate printers, with a passion:
@Gurth Um, "reliable" ... You can be sure that it won't report higher ink level than it is, but the other way round....
Exactly. It’s the part that the manufacturer really wants to have working as designed. Everything else … who cares?
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RE: I hate printers, with a passion
@Arantor The only thing in a printer that’s reliable by the standards of other technology, is the gadget that checks ink levels.
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RE: I hate printers, with a passion
@DogsB So, two pieces of technology in the house?
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RE: Fun with maps
@dcon What’s confusing about it? If you’re ever lost there, just keep heading north and you will get to the nearest sea.
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RE: “iPad doesn’t recognise fingerprint anymore, and the code also doesn’t work!”
@BernieTheBernie said in “iPad doesn’t recognise fingerprint anymore, and the code also doesn’t work!”:
That may have some effects.I would be a bit surprised if it did, as I don’t think I’ve ever seen either of my parents drinking wine.
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RE: UI Bites
@BernieTheBernie said in UI Bites:
create an error, e.g. with
NA()
.
Of course, that failed. And you can guess the reason, can't you?
It is localized, too.
In German Excel, I have to useNV()
instead.And Excel gives you no indication that what you’ve typed isn’t recognised as a keyword as you entered it?
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RE: The Belt Onion club
@boomzilla said in The Belt Onion club:
That looks like somebody had been recently playing Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards when they came up with that verification system. I wonder if pressing Ctrl+Alt+X will get you past the questions.
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RE: Fun with maps
@Arantor said in Fun with maps:
“mh” being a v sound is only weird because you’re used to seeing those letters and associating different sounds to them than what the Irish did long ago.
Well, yes — all spelling is essentially the assigning of arbitrary symbols to the sounds that people make. The problem with Irish is that they seem to have gone for entirely different (combinations of) symbols for many sounds than the rest of Europe that uses the same alphabet. Which would be understandable if there’s a shift in pronunciation but not in spelling, like with English vowels — but what I’m saying is that I don’t quite see how /mh/ or /mʰ/ would shift to /v/, given the very different ways in which those sounds are actually produced.
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RE: Fun with maps
@Bulb said in Fun with maps:
That's kinda weird, this was outskirts of the medieval Europe and everybody who'd learn to read and write would almost certainly also learn some liturgy in Latin to associate some sounds to the letters
That’s what I would expect too. But somehow, they seem to have gotten the idea that you need more letters than Latin to transcribe the same sounds … Irish words all seem to start out fairly normally (<n> for /n/, etc.), but by the time you get to the end, their spelling usually bears no relationship at all anymore to normal European pronunciation of the letters. It’s consistent in Irish, I guess, but WTF would you write things like <mh> for /v/? I can’t find any way in which /mh/ shifts to /v/ when trying to say them.
Welsh has a far more logical spelling. Sure, it has a few oddities, but every language does to some degree or other. Few come close to Irish, though, not even English.
though sounds quite different from what English used.
English has the problem that its modern spelling reflects vowel pronunciation of about 300–500 years ago — which is to say, from back when they pronounced vowels like the rest of Europe does. <a> being the /a/ and /ɑ/ sounds, <e> for /e/ or /ɛ/, etc. rather than <a> being /e/, <e> being /i/, and so on (except when they’re not).
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RE: Fun with maps
@Bulb said in Fun with maps:
@Gurth Who the eF created the orthography for Welsh‽
Largely William Salesbury and William Morgan, I gather. But if you mean to ask about those names, they’re Irish, not Welsh ;)
Trying to decipher those names got me thinking about Irish spelling the other day, and it gave me the thought that Irish has similarities to the Cherokee syllabary. The latter was invented by a man who had heard about writing and knew some Latin letters but not the sounds associated with them, so he basically invented a writing system from scratch. Whoever came up with Irish spelling must have been in a comparable situation, but have the added disadvantage of having the idea that using more letters makes words better.
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RE: Fun with maps
@Arantor said in Fun with maps:
People used to names like "Meadhbh", "Caoilfhionn" or "Tadhg" will faithfully copy any string of printable characters no questions asked.
For bonus points how we are pronouncing those?
Meadhbh: /miːjvʲ/
Caoilfhionn: /kiːlʲʊnʲ/
Tadhg: /bɔb/ -
RE: I hate printers, with a passion
@CodeJunkie said in I hate printers, with a passion:
You should be able to. I bought a roller replacement kit for $20 for my HP LaserJet 4100n off Amazon about a year ago. That thing just keeps on working.
Yep, those had already been replaced a few years earlier, when they stopped working properly. I don’t remember the reason for getting rid of the printer eventually, but it was some other paper-feed problem that wasn’t the rollers but something more involved.
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RE: WTF Bites
@topspin My first thought is to wonder whether that USB stick is still good.
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RE: Fun with maps
@ixvedeusi said in Fun with maps:
I have perfect confidence that someone will correct me if I'm wrong
Doesn’t look like you did, except for calling them “surnames” which implies a family name. Something like 90% of people from Iceland don’t have that at all; IIRC the ones that do are all descended from immigrants, who get to keep their family names when they become Icelandic citizens.
Not really related to the above at all, but Iceland apparently also issues passports on request in which the father’s “surname” appears for all members of a family, to avoid foreign immigration officials thinking that they might be dealing with kidnappers or something (“Man called Jónsson, woman called Porsdóttir, a supposed child of theirs called Bjørnsson …? Time to call in reinforcements.”)
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RE: WTF Bites
It’s graphics software. Every layer has an alpha channel, always. Why would it not?
Because it’s the background.
No idea (anymore) if GIMP works that way too, but Photoshop does for reasons I’ve never been able to fathom. It makes for slightly smaller files, though, perhaps that was originally a good reason to have a background “layer”?
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RE: Fun with maps
@Carnage Could be just a case of Jón being the most common men’s name in Iceland, and that by some fluke, men called Jón on average have more daughters than sons. Even if there’s only one more Jónsdóttir than Jónsson, it makes Jónsdóttir the name to appear on this map.
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RE: Fun with maps
@Zerosquare One problem I spot there: Iceland. Few or very few people will have Jónsdóttir as an actual last name there. Iceland is also somehow coloured blue for the name “signifying patronage” instead of red for “Patronymic, matronymic, or ancestral” when you can’t get more patronymic than names like this.
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RE: WTF Bites
@Arantor I’ve purchased exactly one thing off eBay in my life, and yes, I think it was a good idea. However, I do realise this experience may not be completely typical.
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RE: Quotes Out of Context
@dkf said in Quotes Out of Context:
Why run them inside? Remember, the UK has a climate that is generally mild enough that waste pipes freezing aren't a big problem.
The Netherlands has a milder climate than the UK (you get the occasional blizzard every couple of years, the last one in this country was in the 1970s) yet nobody here would put anything except a drainpipe from the gutter on the outside of the wall.
Maybe it makes sense if you live with people who take their time washing their hair every day.
Yeah, that’s about the only semi-reasonable scenario I can come up with too — but even then: you can also just wait for each other to finish.
- Asphalt roads in a residential area already feels wrong
I think I'll mark that as "@Gurth being weird". Asphalt is pretty good for residential areas; low maintenance and fairly cheap to install if you don't need a roadbed for heavy loads.
Not weird, cultural differences. Asphalt in this country is for roads that see a good deal of traffic — I can’t think of ever having seen a residential area with asphalt on the street, except when I was on holiday in the UK. Pretty much every street is paved with bricks in this country.
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RE: Quotes Out of Context
@dkf said in Quotes Out of Context:
@Gurth You might want to take a little time to explain why these are such heinous crimes against humanity.
- House walls are generally thick enough to put waste pipes inside — they have been since the invention of cavity walls at least. Though I would not be surprised if British pipes break often enough that you need good access to them.
- British home owners seem to regard a downstairs toilet as a luxury (“so guests won’t have to go upstairs” says it all, really), but en-suite bathrooms in at least some of the bedrooms as a must-have. I just don’t understand this: I consider a toilet on both inhabited floors of a house to be a much greater necessity than for everyone to have their own bathroom. Just the amount of extra cleaning you have to do with the latter speaks against it for me. Never mind that they even seem to install en-suites in houses where only one of the bedrooms is actually in regular use.
- Asphalt roads in a residential area already feels wrong, asphalt pavement even more so, let alone asphalt in a garden. (This said, I also very much don’t like the gardens full of paving slabs you see everywhere in the Netherlands.)
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RE: Quotes Out of Context
@ixvedeusi said in Quotes Out of Context:
@Gurth has a dim view of the current state of UK housing:
I have watched a fair number of British TV programmes about houses, so yes, you are exactly right. They’re mostly bland, even many modern ones have the waste water/sewage pipes on the outsides of the walls, they frequently have too few toilets but too many bathrooms, and people insist on putting asphalt up to the front wall.
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“iPad doesn’t recognise fingerprint anymore, and the code also doesn’t work!”
My parents went on holiday the other day, and just now I got a chat message from my father saying that my mother’s iPad doesn’t recognise her fingerprint anymore (“she’s got a cut on her thumb”), and also refuses her access code. Not great when they’re halfway through France.
Of course, I respond by asking questions to see what might have gone wrong (are they sure they’re remembering the code correctly?) as well as warning them not to keep trying because the iPad will erase itself if they enter a wrong code too many times. Yes, he says, he already got a warning that he had to wait five minutes before he could try again.
After some minutes back and forth about this, my father suddenly says:—
Mistake found, really stupid, your mother had my iPad and I didn’t notice that either …
I mean, hers has a lavender cover and a black bezel, his has a multi-coloured cover and a white bezel … I’m starting to think they really are getting old.
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RE: Error'd Bites
@boomzilla said in Error'd Bites:
Those look like new-built houses in the UK, judging by the drainpipes. What surprises me most about that photo is that there still isn’t a fire escape. Nobody wants to give up a metre or so of their garden so they don’t need to bring everything in through the house, and incidentally also have a way to get out of the back garden should their house be on fire?
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RE: Fun with maps
@PleegWat said in Fun with maps:
@loopback0 And then they'd been in Edinburgh/Geneva (Cross out what is not appropriate). Why would they do that to themselves?
To lay down at your door, of course.
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RE: I hate printers, with a passion
It made me wonder if you could still get toner for a LaserJet III, and apparently, yes, you can, though everywhere I found it, it said supplies were limited.
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RE: I hate printers, with a passion
Not watched the video, but the best printer I ever owned was an HP LaserJet III that I bought second-hand, early this century, when it was already approaching ten years old. Worked fine, every time, no hassle at all. The only reason I eventually replaced it was because some parts of the feed mechanism had worn out so it wouldn’t reliably pull the paper through anymore, and good luck finding spares for that.
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RE: Fun with maps
@ixvedeusi said in Fun with maps:
@Gurth That's the other way round, countries that incorporate flags into their weapons.
It’s a weapon in a flag, though. (Granted, I only posted that one because I couldn’t quickly find a photo of a weapon wrapped in a cloth flag.)
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RE: WTF Bites
@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
I want to commit unspeakable acts of violence to the person who designed the animated background of this page:
The culprit is mentioned at the bottom of the page. If you can keep that on-screen long enough to click on it, you can get to http://coolwinddesign.com
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RE: Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space
@Arantor said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
@Gurth you’re turning TM off? obvs.
After the experience a few years ago of both my iMac’s internal hard drive and the external TM one beginning to fail within days of each other, I’m most definitely not turning it off. But the generic you can, if desired.
(The computer suddenly wouldn’t boot from the internal drive anymore and re-installing the OS from the repair partition also went wrong in ways I don’t remember. After installing a new OS on a temporary external drive, I could boot from that. New drive in the computer — always fun with an iMac — then restore from a TM backup back … nope, the hardware of that turned out to also be going to shit :( Luckily, I could still get the data off the internal drive via a USB adapter, to manually copy it back to the replacement drive. And had to buy a new drive for the TM backup.)
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RE: Error'd Bites
@Zecc Interesting. I thought I’d find out which country would export a lot of undefined, and instead found there is a port by that name in the UK:
I did also find the country name, BTW. It’s epiforecasts/covidregionaldata.
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RE: Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space
@Gern_Blaanston said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
You can't turn off Time Machine?
Of course you can — though, after just checking, I notice it’s not as easy as it used to be. macOS seems to be starting to suffer from Windowsitis in having to go through several menus/windows to get to settings you actually want. The window for it used to look like this:
You got there by clicking on the Time Machine icon in the menu bar and choosing to go to the TM settings. All you needed to do to turn it off would be to uncheck the “Back Up Automatically” box.
Now, though, you still click on those same menu items, which takes you to this screen in the system prefs:
… where you have to click the Options button pointed to by the arrow, which brings up another window with volumes to be excepted from the backup, and a pop-up menu to select when to make backups:
… where you have to choose “Manually” … IMHO, this is not a user-friendly improvement.
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RE: WTF Bites
People are cleaning the button? How will pushing it kill them, then? I mean, in order for you to push it you will probably have to get the cleaners out of the way first, so they’re not cleaning it anymore and therefore presumably safe from whatever will cause them harm while cleaning the button.
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RE: Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space
@acrow said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
not back up the files the user deletes next.
Time Machine doesn’t back up files you’ve deleted anyway. It’s not a thing that tries to make backup copies of files you’re deleting in case you decide you need them again, it’s a thing that makes a backup of your entire hard drive(s) every hour (essentially by copying everything that changed and hardlinking to the previous backup for everything that didn’t change).
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RE: Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space
@PleegWat said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
@boomzilla Well obviously emptying the recycle bin necessitates creating a time machine snapshot.
It would the next time Time Machine fires up. That could be a few seconds after you delete things, but also almost an hour later (since it makes a backup every hour).
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RE: Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space
@PleegWat said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
Pure hypothesis, it needs space to move stuff to its equivalent of the recycle bin? Which windows is willing to bypass if you merely hold shift.
macOS too, if you delete via the File menu in the Finder (rather than by dragging the file or folder to the trash) and keep the Option key pressed, or — if you prefer the keyboard — by pressing Option-Command-Backspace instead of only Command-Backspace. But I gather from the article that it was impossible to delete anything at all, including from the terminal, which was my first thought: just
rm
some stuff to make room. It’s that bit that has me puzzled as to why it wouldn’t work. -
RE: D&D thread
It was nowhere near as fancy, but someone I played RPGs with twenty years ago, when he moved house, bought a dinner table seating eight people specifically so it would be big enough for the whole RPG group to sit around. Though it was a regular dinner table, it was hand-made and quite expensive. When he got some cats a bit later on, he also wouldn’t let them onto it for fear of getting scratches on his table.
At one point during a game, somebody knocked over a glass and spilled a drink over the table. Nothing to worry about, happens every so often and we got the character sheets and books out of the way quickly enough.
I then noticed there was a puddle of drink on the floor under the table, despite the puddle on the table not having reached the edges.
It was at this point we found out that this expensive table, that its owner was so proud of, had been made of unseasoned wood. Several of the planks in the tabletop had cracked all the way through, up to several millimetres wide in places …
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RE: Error'd Bites
@Zecc Isn’t the question , though? When the border between two countries is entirely in the sea, they generally aren’t considered to be neighbouring countries as such, AFAIK.
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RE: D&D thread
Crap quality, but:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8fTkXQ1tY0
I wouldn’t want any of this for playing RPGs, though. Draw a map when it’s necessary to clarify the situation, sure, but other than that, I maintain RPGs work better in your head than out in front of you. But I guess that just shows my age …
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RE: Error'd Bites
Probably made in a place where people get sent against their will, like a prison, a workhouse, or a reintegration-for-the-unemployed scheme. When I was in one of those, we had to (among other things) fill little plastic satchels of herbs for some brand that sold them in supermarkets. Since a fair amount of those herb leaves had mould on them, I made sure those were the ones prominently behind the little clear window in the satchels.
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RE: UI Bites
@ixvedeusi said in UI Bites:
The moral is: If you want your solution to indeed be temporary, make sure it isn't Good Enough
Some 25 years ago, when I did the occasional bit of writing for a game publisher, they deliberately gave an upcoming book that they were soliciting submissions for, a ridiculous title for exactly that reason. Too often, the temporary, descriptive, but not very gripping title had ended up on a book’s cover because everybody in the office had gotten used to it.
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RE: UI Bites
That sums up basically everything about web-based UIs.
Not just web-based ones. Even 20, 25 years ago, any Windows program wanting to be hip did its own UI completely unrelated to that of Windows itself. OK, that was largely limited to things like music players like Winamp, but still. Oh, and let’s not forget WindowBlinds, for when you really want to fuck with the expectations of guests using your computer.
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RE: Glassdoor to un-anonymise accounts (at least internally) if they can...
@Gern_Blaanston said in Glassdoor to un-anonymise accounts (at least internally) if they can...:
Glassdoor acquired Fishbowl
But if you put a glass door in a fishbowl, won’t the water run out when the door opens?
Heh, I think I inadvertently stumbled on a good metaphor for what’s going on there while trying to make a poor joke.
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RE: YouTube and cookie warnings
@HarryTuttle said in YouTube and cookie warnings:
https://www.androidpolice.com/youtube-stops-showing-recommendations-not-logged-in/
I think you’re right. If I go to YouTube.com without being logged into Google, it gives what seems like the same warning as the YouTube app did for me yesterday:
I had more or less read the notice before pressing “Reject all” but I had not connected “personalized content and personalized ads” with “Warning: this will clear your viewing history and recommendations based on it!” — largely because I didn’t expect that to be stored in cookies.
FWIW, I still did not log in last night but did re-enable cookies. I then searched for some channels and watched some videos, and after about three it began to recommend stuff. Checking the app today, it still shows recommendations, so at least it looks like it will continue to work without having to log in.
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RE: YouTube and cookie warnings
@BernieTheBernie said in YouTube and cookie warnings:
Looks like you have to find out how you can access the cookie settings.
Even that is a bit of a search, as oddly, you can’t just get to the settings from anywhere. I don’t have my iPad here now, but IIRC you have to first tap on the “me” (or whatever it’s called) icon at the bottom of the screen, which takes you to the login page, and only there is there a gear icon at top right that takes you to the settings. Where you then have to search for an option that may be cookie-related. Except that didn’t help, all I could do was re-enable it, but that didn’t get me back my history because I suppose it would have been erased immediately.
And then find out which of the cookies will allow you to use the history.
I suspect that would only be doable by restoring the cookie files from a backup. Good luck doing that on an iPad, though …
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RE: YouTube and cookie warnings
@PleegWat said in YouTube and cookie warnings:
@Gurth So, you got exactly what you asked for and now you're complaining about it?
Technically, I did get exactly what I asked for, true. But in my defence: I didn’t expect a cookie warning in something I never realised is actually a web browser; and it’s not as if it asked, “Are you sure? If you continue you’ll lose your viewing history here and now!” which to me seems a reasonable warning for a destructive action.