andyking

Mine was given a random name by my ISP, which consisted of the name of the ISP followed by a random string of three characters (it's a small ISP).

I was amused to get the piece of paper with my router telling me the SSID was "OriginBroadband_hax". I never did change it!

I also use Opera regularly - it's my main browser on my computer and my phone. I've been using it since the 90s, and actually paid for it back when it displayed an ad for free users! It just has so many useful little extra features, and I generally trust them not to use my data for nefarious purposes.

If this happens--and I've seen nothing as yet to suggest it's anything other than a rumour to get the pageviews up on certain tech blogs--I'll be uninstalling it after nearly fifteen years of use, and probably making the move to Firefox. I don't have a Facebook account, so why would I want to use a Facebook browser? Instead of just tracking me across Like-enabled sites, it'll be able to follow me around the whole internet, logging goodness knows what.

I seem to remember a social networking browser was tried out before, as a forked Firefox and subsequently Chromium, in Flock. Whatever happened to Flock?

I paid for Opera years ago, and I'd actually pay real money again for a good quality, feature-filled browser that was guaranteed to not include tracking. I'd rather pay with my money than my privacy. Money can always be replaced, and earned again. Once privacy's gone, it's gone.

At an old workplace, we had a piece of equipment with a European plug that we regularly had to shoehorn into a UK socket. It was a case of shoving a screwdriver or a pencil into the earth hole on the socket to simulate that pin being inserted and unlock the others, then fumble the EU plug into the live and neutral holes. (All while the socket was powered down, of course.)

Not particularly safe, and the result of someone who found you could buy equipment cheaper from Germany!

This is going to get quite annoying, fairly fast, for those of us who browse on-and-off in incognito mode.

I 'love' the British voter registration process.

"You can do it online!" say the commercials.

Yes, you can fill in a form online, you're then presented with a PDF that you have to print off, sign, and post back to the local council office. Huh?

I guess most people get it from their distribution's repository, so there are no centralised stats kept for downloads.

How do you find Concrete5? I discovered it relatively recently and I've been investigating it in comparison to WordPress, which is starting to feel more than a little bloated. (A WordPress installation with a bunch of plugins installed starts feeling like a Windows installation with a bunch of crap set to start automatically, with everything putting its little infobox, ads, and all manner of dross all over the place. I was turned off it totally the other day when a plugin update filled my entire screen with an ad.)

I'd love to jump ship to something a little more modern, that's been developed from scratch with today's tech instead of patched together over the years. Do you find Concrete5 a decent replacement for WordPress for relatively simple content sites?

Not really. I'd just use another product. I'm not so attached to Chrome, or Android, or iPhone, or any other tech product that I couldn't switch.

And aside from that, none of these 'bans' will ever come to pass--they're just lawyers flexing various muscles.

Is it just me who finds these little spats between huge companies a little tedious? It doesn't affect my life, or my work, if Microsoft or Adobe or Apple takes Google or Motorola or Samsung to court for another expensive round of willy-waving.

I find it incredibly hard to want to cheer for any of these organisations, or get behind any of this stuff. These are just big, faceless corporations, each the same as the next, when it comes down to it. It's a bit like supporting professional sports teams, I guess.

These cheap pay-as-you-go phones are subsidised by the network--normally, you have to buy at least a £10 topup to get it, and if you look at the website of a phone shop like Carphone Warehouse, you'll find the exact same phone listed at different prices on different networks.

Of course, once you actually go into the shop and buy it, you find it's the same (unlocked) handset. But because you bought it on, say, O2 instead of Orange, you get it cheaper.

What a fascinating problem, especially when it comes to personal photos that aren't really that 'personal.'

A thousand people will all visit Paris today, and all take a picture of the Eiffel Tower, and all upload said picture to their favourite cloud storage platform.

Is there any reason why we need a thousand, ever so slightly different, pictures of the Eiffel Tower from one day in April, stored in the cloud for eternity? Would people even notice if their images were quietly 'de-duplicated'?

It's very much an American newspaper thing--I've never seen it in the British press, but it seems to be house style at the New York Times and its ilk.

Ubuntu 10.04 is still there, and still great. I'm still using it on my home and work machines--Gnome 2-based, PPAs and backports to update any apps that are a bit tired, and the whole thing's really stable. I'm not sure what I'll do when support runs out for it, though. I'm kind of holding out that they'll announce another two years of desktop support!

I find that the most banal things on the radio suddenly become endlessly fascinating when the alternative is getting out of bed.

"This advert for conservatories? Oh, I'll just stay in bed until the end of the commercials.. ooh, I've not heard this Rihanna song for a few hours, just one more song.."

I'm similar. I never made a conscious decision, or said to myself "right, I'm never reading TechCrunch again," it was just something that sort of happened.

I gradually unsubscribed feeds in Google Reader that were generating too much uninteresting stuff, I stopped visiting sites, I got busy doing things of my own.. and before I knew it, I was tech-blog-free.

It's not like I know any less about what's going on in the world of tech without them; I just get a lot less clutter in my life.

Spain and Germany are hardly insignificant countries.

What you mean is "it's not in the US, and if it doesn't mention a country, I immediately think it's the US. I feel like an idiot for doing that, so I'm going to rant."

I regularly do a Google search for "Ofcom MCA maps", a rather specialist subject that takes you to the following page that's impossible to find on the website itself: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/static/radiolicensing/mcamaps/MCAs.h...

When I first searched on this, Google didn't suggest it at all, and the page itself was half-way down page 1. Now, it's up there at the top (even when logged-out). I can't imagine very many people search this term--so I can only assume my regular searches have pushed it into the search engine's consciousness.

Are you happy to share your contact details? (If yes, say which) Are you happy to share your contact details? (If yes, say which)

You may not be able to supply all this information at this stage but please do register as much as you can with them to be in with an opportunity to be part of this. You may not be able to supply all this information at this stage but please do register as much as you can with them to be in with an opportunity to be part of this.

I'm reminded here of a piece I read here on HN just the other day - about jobs being obsolete, or something.

We're now living in a world where a lot of jobs are being automated away, and we don't need as many people in employment as we did, say, 30 years ago.

Having automated away menial and administrative tasks, smart companies are now spending some of their vast profits on employees who are nice to have, rather than absolutely necessary for the running of the business. A few extra shop workers to save people waiting in line, a few extra people at the end of the phone.

I'd much rather live in that world, than the alternative, which is a few people having jobs and the rest in the dole queue.

And perhaps this is stating the obvious - but one ex-toll collector could efficiently repair and maintain 10, 50 or 100 toll machines.

Just like those self-scanner checkouts at the supermarket, where you've got one guy supervising five or ten checkouts, where previously he would have had five or ten colleagues working.

The same goes for their BBC World TV channel. It is available on pan-European satellite within the UK but reception is, as far as I'm aware, actually illegal (or at least breaking the terms of the TV licence) as it contains advertising.

The channel is actually quite good--I've watched it in the US quite a lot, to keep up with news from home, but it is a slightly weird feeling sometimes to see "this BBC news programme is brought to you by 1st Source Bank." (I believe it is relayed by a local / regional public TV channel where my partner lives, so this sponsor tag could be added by them.)

Incidentally, if you use the Opera Mini mobile browser to view the BBC News website, you see advertising on the page as it uses proxies in Norway and the US to compress the pages.

I dread crossing through American border control at the airport every single time. I use O'Hare, and they literally look and talk to you like dirt. I'm doing nothing wrong, I'm visiting America for legitimate reasons, yet I'm barked at like an army recruit.

Last time, I couldn't tell what the guy behind the glass screen was actually asking me to do, which irritated him immensely. "Lef'and." "Lef'and." "LEF'AND." It took a few tries for me to realise that what he was trying to say was "Can you put your left hand on the scanner, please?"

Maybe it's because I'm British, but I find the British border and security people far more pleasant, which is strange because on the whole, I find British people colder than Americans. Even when something goes wrong, they're apologetic (I was randomly picked for a full pat-down last time I flew out of Manchester, and it was all done with friendliness, good humour, and apologies for delaying me slightly.)

"Please" and "thank you" cost nothing, and would likely be quicker than these repeated barked orders. I like the American people--on the whole, I find them pleasant, polite, good-humoured, decent people. I mean, I am marrying one! So where do they find these people who work on the borders? Every single time I go through, I'm incredibly nervous of doing something slightly wrong, which makes me more nervous because I look nervous and worry they'll think I'm up to something. It's terrifying.

123-reg in the UK go one better. Passwords on there have to be eight characters long. No more, no less, exactly eight characters. I couldn't believe it when I saw it.

I don't think they ever did switch to full 3D, did they? Certainly, SimCity 4 was still in the top-down style. There was a competing game, Cities XL, which was fully 3D but never really gained much traction (partly because it was pants).

One of the biggest employers in my hometown is the Swedish company AstraZeneca's huge Alderley Park research centre, employing around 3,000 people.

Why does this have a redundant "free" in the title?

Where I work, we listen to BBC 6 Music (http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music). It's eclectic enough that no-one gets annoyed with the choice of songs (if you don't like one, you'll probably like the next) and there's nothing particularly noisy or distracting on there (loud over-processed pop/dance music, shouty DJs or ads). There's also far less repetition than on similar stations.

I'd much rather this, than one person's choice of "concentrating" music. One man's concentration aid is another man's hell.

The BBC's programmes aren't, as far as I'm aware, geoblocked.

I loved Americana... until Radio 4 removed it and replaced it with an interminable panel game featuring four of the usual suspect "comedians" who seem to take up an inordinate amount of the station's airtime.

Now, I go the other way, and listen to a lot of stuff on NPR stations from the US.

I'd love it if there was a way to view or highlight new comments in a thread. Quite often, I'll read an interesting thread that's got 120 comments, come back a few hours later and see the same thread with 180 comments--but I have no way of knowing which are new without trawling through the whole thing again.

A similar technique seems to be in use by at least one other UK network.

I'm with 3 (one of O2's rivals) and if I access my account information from my handset connected to their network, it takes me straight to the relevant info without a pesky login. (If I try the same via wi-fi, I get a page asking me to disconnect from the hotspot and go back online via 3G.)

I always did wonder how they achieved this--sending the mobile number in the HTTP headers is likely.