jcsager

Web banking means you need the card reader gadget as well for the authentication. The app uses secure features of the OS to aid authentication so you don't need to read the card. Web access on your phone still needs the card reader gadget.

I guess he didn't get to Corsica. Casu martzu. Don't look it up unless you have a strong stomach!

+1 I put as much as I can on wired ethernet. The WiFi is mostly for laptops & phones. I have a couple of APs (OpenWRT) that aren't meshed but I run 802.11r on them.

Nope. FORTRAN code is still very performant in this area with modern compilers, which is why it is still used.

It's an example of Chesterton's Fence.

Apostasy is treated very severely by many (most?) religions. The cults have just borrowed that concept.

Yes, we travelled to Cornwall in 1999 but it was cloudy. Got a marvellous view in Oregon in 2017 though. A friend of mine travels to all the solar eclipses he can wherever they are in the world. That's a bit too obsessive for me though. I'm in Devon this time but only 95% cover.

Assuming that a plain Linux phone had succeeded early on, once banks, retailers and media companies refused to provide apps because of security concerns, then either the phone would die in the marketplace or it would have developed security solutions similar to those provided by iOS and Android today and no longer be a 'plain Linux phone'.

My last desktop before Linux was SunOs4 on a Sun Pizza box. Before that I used Macs. I had to use Win3.1 as road warrior kit until I got a laptop that would run Linux. So I've been using a Linux desktop for at least 30 years both at work & at home. I still use Windows (not 11!) sometimes where I can't avoid it but that's in a VM under Linux.

The lane asist totally annoyed me in my replacement car (2022 VW Golf) -jerking the steering around when it felt like it. I eventually bought a OBD2 dongle with associated app and managed to change the setting to 'remember last setting'. I recently rented a Renault Clio in France and that was always beeping at me about the speed limit. I was very grateful to the rental lady for pointing out how to disable the lane assist when starting the car!

My dad helped me build a crystal set when I was about 7. I still remember listening to a serialisation of Lorna Doone on the (MW) Home Service on headphones under the bedclothes.

Sad that the LW sevice had to close but the BBC is short of cash and it won't get better either.

He's not a Manc, he's a Scouser originally.

I found that, even using the STM32 IDE and HAL/CMSIS, I needed to deep dive into the hardware documents, compiler section attributes and linker scripts to build what I wanted (a digital graphic equaliser with optical I/O and a display/control screen on a Nucleo-H753ZI board). DMA and cacheing don't mix! That was my first adventure in ARMland but the experience helped a lot for subsequent hacking on RP24040/2350 kit.

Fjord ferries in Norway are up around that sort of charge rate, but for 30 mins instead of 5. That kind of battery charging performance is pure marketing until our local LV supply network is uplifted!

'Balloon Gas' for inflating party balloons is a mixture of Helium and Oxygen, at least in the UK, to stop Tweety Pie asphyxiating him/herself breathing the gas. So although it still is lighter than air, it's not as good as pure He.

We got one of those years ago. I had already written a Sudoku solver using Knuth's Dancing Links, so I modified it to find the Bedlam solutions. The program worked mostly but gave duplicates for some of the solutions. It was also fun to develop solution search criteria for placing the pieces, e.g. to get the reds all down one corner.