Saying that this code was poor would be an understatement.

The report (page 17) has this code as an example - describing it as "Whoever wrote this code clearly has no understanding of elementary mathematics or the most basic rules of programming."

Public Function ReverseSign(d)
If d < 0 Then
d = Abs(d)
Else
d = d - (d * 2)
End If
ReverseSign = d
End Function

The code could potentially be worse because the font that the report uses makes it hard to tell if they are testing "if d is less than zero" or "if d is less than the global variable o".

You'll feel a lot better when it isn't controlling your life.

I'm no doctor, but I don't think that the mere appreciation of the option to (say) listen to an interesting podcast to while away a couple of hours waiting for an aeroplane to land is much of an indicator that my phone is controlling my life.

Once you get over the DTs, you'll find that you never needed a pacifier to get through the day.

It's been 26 odd years now and I've never ever felt my phone to be a pacifier but, if it gets to that stage, then I'll be sure to heed your advice. Hopefully you're in a better place now.

What is you use case for "a load of cards"?

I used to also carry around a number of loyalty cards, membership cards and a library card - which would invariably bulk out my wallet.

Now I digitise them and carry them on my phone. I still carry a debit and credit card as backup, but the size of my wallet is significantly reduced.

If carrying around a flip phone works for people, then I'm happy for them.

That said, I remember the bad old days of carrying around a separate calendar, address book, pocket map, notepad, book and music player. Not to mention the inability to look up something instantly, entertain myself during a wait, and the need to lug around a load of cards in my wallet.

As someone who lived through that, I have absolutely zero desire to go back to anything remotely close to it.

You are using a different definition of phonics from the parent post. Phonics as used in educational circles means _only_ teachning what sounds the letters (or clusters of letters) make and not reading whole words by sight. Method currently popular in England according to my sources there.

Yep, I'm in England and my kids were taught using phonics as you describe.

The other interesting thing about phonics is that they have the concept of "alien words". These are words that are nonsense, but the idea is for the kids to apply the phonic rules they've learnt to work out how they should be pronounced, rather than using their memory.

Some examples are: Steck, Hild, Quemp, Geck, Chom and Tord.

Last time I considered Apple's Password Manager for my parents (who use iPhones, iPads and a Windows laptop), I found that, without an Apple computer, it was impossible to bulk import credentials from ... well ... anywhere - not even a bog standard CSV file was supported. This seemed rather counterproductive, considering that Apple should be making it as easy as possible for people to migrate existing credentials to their service.

Even more concerning, it was impossible (without buying an Apple computer) to bulk export the credentials in case you decided that Apple's offering wasn't working for you.

At that point it seemed to be far more hassle than it was worth, so I gave up and switched them to Bitwarden instead.

Here in the UK the newest (2023) 55" TV from LG will cost you 600 GBP for the LCD version and 1700 GBP for the OLED version.

I think OLED is great, but persuading the other half to spend 2.8x more money on OLED (when she thinks that the LCD screen is good enough) is an extremely tough sell.

Since no-one else has pointed it out, you can disable WDDA quite simply by SSHing to the Synology NAS and entering the following:

sudo synosetkeyvalue /etc.defaults/synoinfo.conf support_wdda no

You shouldn't have to do this, but at least you can.

Related: Is anyone else sick of every single site popping up a dialog box in the corner asking "Do you want to login using your Google account?" even for web sites where I have no intention of logging-in ever? It used to be like 1 or 2 sites, now it is a lot of them.

I used these instructions and it reduced (but did not eliminate entirely) the popups.

I set up a simple batch script on my parents computer which would copy photos from the photo stream into a folder, which itself was monitored by their photo album software. It basically meant that any time they took a photo on their iPhone, it would be available to view on their Windows computer the next time they turned it on.

I'm now going to have to experiment with a couple of python scripts I've found on GitHub which claim to be able to do a similar thing.

If you want an Android device for gaming, your best bet is to buy one of the SBC devices coming out of China - such as the Retroid Pocket 3+ or Anbernic RG405M. They'll happily play all Android games as well as emulate any retro console up to and including PSP and Dreamcast (often with 2x or 3x integer scaling).

Yes, a Steam Deck is a lot more powerful, can emulate almost anything and can play more modern games - but these devices are half the price and half the size of a Steam Deck.

Since this is the last version to support WMC, I guess it means that platform is officially dead dead. Still the only system that worked well and consistently with DRM protected channels on cable TV.

In fairness (and speaking as someone who liked it, wrote software to work with it and still run it today) even though it's been running in a supported operating system, WMC has been dead-dead for many years now. Here in the UK you cannot get OTA EPG data without having to resort to using something like EPG Collector.

That said, some enterprising soul has wrapped it up into a MSI that can be installed on Windows 10 and 11. It installs in any location (thereby avoiding a WIndows update detecting the ehome folder), you can add or remove it without losing configurations or databases, the satellite/transponders in the resource file have been updated, the tuner limit is now 32, buttons that no longer work have been removed and (since it's an MSI) you can do a repair if anything goes wrong.

We've been running it for a couple of weeks now on Windows 10 and it seems to be working just fine (with UK DVB-T2 mind you, YMMV). You'll probably also want to also install HideVolumeOSD to remove the Windows 10 on-screen volume pop-up whenever you change volume

I live in Europe but my Gmail address is blindly given out by people who live in the USA as if it is their own. Most of the time I tag it as spam and move on.

My fear with Google's approach is that I will now get political spam that they've signed up for (which is of no relevance to me) and there is no way for me to mark it as spam.

So the site has a Unicode whitelist of supported characters - basically the printable ASCII set, and as a protection against hacks, it also strips off the high bit.

So knowing very little about unicode but putting my PHB hat on - does this mean that all that needs to happen is some junior developer identifies the top 80% of unicode characters used in comments in the past year (looking at comments rated 4 or 5 to avoid the spam), do a quick manual review and then add them to the whitelist?

That sounds like a job which would take no more than about half a day - followed by whatever time it takes for the usual testing and deployment process.

This doesn't need to violate anyone's privacy to work. All they need is a database of image hashes, provided by the police. Then if someone tries to post an image that matches the hash, the software simply declines. No need to even log it.

I've got some experience of working with CSAM scanning and what you've described is exactly how it works.

You get a free licence to use Microsoft's PhotoDNA algorithm (they also provide source code in common languages). PhotoDNA is like other common hashing methods, except that it can survive small amounts of photo manipulation (such as recolouring, rotating, cropping and so on).

You then subscribe to a hash list from the Internet Watch Foundation in the UK (or NCEMC in the US), hash the photo and compare to the list. If you have a match, then you need to come up with some process to investigate and, if necessary, report it.

All major organisations that allow someone the ability to upload an image (including all the social networks, Google and Amazon) scan images using this method.