Owners of Bose QuietComfort 35 headphones are still trying to get the company to either fix or roll back a firmware update that removed noise-cancelling functions from their over-ear gear. The problems date back to July and some owners seem to have managed to get Bose to exchange their cans for the company’s shiny new Read more about Bose customers beg for firmware ceasefire after headphones fall victim to another crap update which kills noise cancelling[…]

An experimental feature silently rolled out to the stable Chrome release on Tuesday caused chaos for IT admins this week after users complained of facing white, featureless tabs on Google’s massively popular browser. The issue affected thousands of businesses’ terminal servers, with multiple users on the same server experiencing “white screen of death” at the Read more about White Screen of Death: Admins up in arms after experimental Google emission borks Chrome – yay auto updates[…]

DoNotPay helps you get out of parking tickets and cancel forgotten subscriptions, and now it can call you when it’s your turn in a customer service phone queue. The app today is launching “Skip Waiting On Hold.” Just type in the company you need to talk to, and DoNotPay calls for you using tricks to Read more about DoNotPay app waits on hold for you, cancels subscriptions, helps you out of parking tickets[…]

Deep TabNine is what’s known as a coding autocompleter. Programmers can install it as an add-on in their editor of choice, and when they start writing, it’ll suggest how to continue each line, offering small chunks at a time. Think of it as Gmail’s Smart Compose feature but for code. Machine learning can seriously improve Read more about Deep TabNine AI-powered autocompletion software is Gmail’s Smart Compose for coders[…]

Some models of Airbus A350 airliners still need to be hard rebooted after exactly 149 hours, despite warnings from the EU Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) first issued two years ago. In a mandatory airworthiness directive (AD) reissued earlier this week, EASA urged operators to turn their A350s off and on again to prevent “partial or Read more about Airbus A350 software bug forces airlines to turn planes off and on every 149 hours – must have borrowed some old Boeing 787 code[…]

Smart meters in England are suddenly switching to Welsh language displays, much to the confusion of owners. Several people report that the meters, made by energy provider Bulb, are spontaneously opting for Welsh instead of English, sometimes after freezing and being restarted. This would be unhelpful even for many residents of Wales, but the problem Read more about Bulb smart meters in England wake up from comas miraculously speaking fluent Welsh[…]

Starting today, Windows 10 users are finding that the /sfc scannow feature is no longer working and that it states it found, but could not fix, corrupted Windows Defender PowerShell files. The Windows System File Checker tool, commonly known as SFC, has a /scannow argument that will check the integrity of all protected Winodws system files and Read more about Windows 10 SFC /scannow Can’t Fix Corrupted Files After Update[…]

You might not even know what options you can tweak (or turn off) in your operating system, which is where the cleverly named O&O ShutUp10 application comes in to play. It’s a simple application that makes it incredibly easy to tweak various aspects of Windows 10 that are normally buried or otherwise inaccessible to regular people. Read more about Increase Your Privacy in Windows 10 With ‘O&O ShutUp10’[…]

I have been a bit critical of Linux Mint in the past, but the truth is, it is a great distribution that many people enjoy. While Mint is not my favorite desktop distro (that would be Fedora), I recognize its quality. Is it perfect? No, there is no such thing as a flawless Linux-based operating Read more about Linux Mint 19.2 ‘Tina’ is on the way, but the developers seem defeated and depressed[…]

Microsoft is introducing a really useful feature for Excel on mobile devices. The company is rolling out a new update to the Excel app for Android that makes it really easy to capture data. If you ever had to manually enter data from a paper in real life into your spreadsheets, you are going to Read more about Excel Can Now Turn Pictures of Tables Into Actual, Editable Tables[…]

At least 2 machines are needed to operate spacedesk. These machines must be connected via a Local Area Network (e.g. Ethernet or Wireless) supporting TCP/IP network protocol. Each one of the two machines is running a different spacedesk software: 1. The Primary Machine is a Windows PC, laptop or Surface Pro tablet. It runs the spacedesk DRIVER Read more about spacedesk – extend or duplicate your desktop on a smartphone or tablet[…]

Smartphone users in South Korea will soon be able to have the option of deleting unnecessary pre-installed bloatware, thanks to new industry guidelines commencing in April. “The move aims to rectify an abnormal practice that causes inconvenience to smartphone users and causes unfair competition among industry players,” said the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Read more about South Korea rules pre-installed phone bloatware must be deletable[…]

Supermarkets create cheap “magic boxes” with end of life food in them. You can see where to pick them up on the app. Jumbo NL has started a pilot in 13 shops.   Het van oorsprong Deense initiatief Too Good To Go heeft na één jaar in Nederland meer dan 200.000 maaltijden gered van de Read more about Too Good To Go app – anti supermarket food wastage, in 9 EU countries, including NL[…]

The current DNS is unnecessarily slow and suffers from inability to deploy new features. To remediate these problems, vendors of DNS software and also big public DNS providers are going to remove certain workarounds on February 1st, 2019. This change affects only sites which operate software which is not following published standards. […] On or Read more about DNS flag day – 1/2/19[…]

The US National Security Agency will release a free reverse engineering tool at the upcoming RSA security conference that will be held at the start of March, in San Francisco. The software’s name is GHIDRA and in technical terms, is a disassembler, a piece of software that breaks down executable files into assembly code that Read more about NSA to release a free reverse engineering tool GHIDRA[…]

The HTTP-over-QUIC experimental protocol will be renamed to HTTP/3 and is expected to become the third official version of the HTTP protocol, officials at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) have revealed. This will become the second Google-developed experimental technology to become an official HTTP protocol upgrade after Google’s SPDY technology became the base of Read more about HTTP-over-QUIC to be renamed HTTP/3[…]

Amazon Alexa devices stopped working in the UK and reportedly in parts of continental Europe this morning, with some users still complaining of intermittent outages at the time of writing. The digital blackout began at around 0800 UK time and though it appeared to be recovering by 09.30, some folk – including Reg staffers – Read more about Amazon Alexa outage: Voice-activated devices are down in UK and beyond – yay cloud services![…]

Folks around the planet are today unable to use Microsoft Skype and Office 365’s Outlook due to a baffling “Throttled” error message. The weird text box pops up in the chat software and cloud-backed email client, preventing people from sending messages, and talking to contacts. This is, according to Microsoft, due to a botched update Read more about Outlook, Skype ‘throttle’ users amid storm cloud drama, can’t login. Yay cloud![…]

Guido van Rossum – who created the Python programming language in 1989, was jokingly styled as its “benevolent dictator for life”, and ushered it to global ubiquity – has stepped down, and won’t appoint a successor. In a mailing list post on Thursday titled, “Transfer of Power,” he wrote: “Now that PEP 572 is done, Read more about Python creator Guido van Rossum sys.exit()s as language overlord[…]

We have a project running in production on Google Cloud (GCP) that is used to monitor hundreds of wind turbines and scores of solar plants scattered across 8 countries. We have control centers with wall-to-wall screens with dashboards full of metrics that are monitored 24/7. Asset Managers use this system to monitor the health of Read more about Why you should not use Google Cloud – it just turns your project off with no warning and no customer support![…]