Since this was good old Blighty and Kevin was dealing with a RAF chap, I’m quite sure that he dived, not dove.

Why does this particular past tense so irritate me? That and “fit”?

...I wince at 'burlarized'.

A buglar burgles, and the property is burgled.

Waiting for US Olympic coverage of when athletes 'hurdlarize' the jumps...

And no, it does not follow the same language route / rules as vandalize

/ Off to fetch coffee

No, a buglar plays music on a horn. And nobody 'burlarizes' anything. Q.E.D.

No - a bugler plays music with a bugle.

A horn can be a post horn type thing, or something like a tenor horn, which looks like a tuba that shrank (a lot) in the wash.

Isn't burlarizing a type of strip tease?

In the 1980's it was common to see very large (Heavy) Video Terminals - The ones used for graphics were particular expensive, large and complex. I get a call out to a customer who has 3 new 29 Inch colour VT monitors and he is unhappy as they are using them to display technical drawings (Early CAD stuff) and the lines are "Wonky" on the side of the screens on all 3 monitors.

These are new monitors, I do a check on one to check if there is any damage due to shipping and to check the calibration - All looks good - Checking the serial number with our service DB I was informed these monitors were ONLY intended to be sold and used in Southern Hemisphere and would not be supported in Northern Hemisphere.

Turns out a lot of monitors back in the day were calibrated for the southern or northern hemisphere use.

Customer had acquired these as they were going cheap (Comparatively speaking) - Was not happy when told we could not resolve as this was a factory calibration and we had no way of fixing in the field.

I think in the end he traded them in for the correct hemisphere ones and paid nearer full price .........

Due to differences in the local electrical supply, presumably?

Gullible ol' me initially assumed you were referring to some effect of the Earth's magnetic field or similar. Duh.

It's because on the southern hemisphere they'd be hanging upside down, so the gravity must be distorting them differently, innit?

The moon is upside-down, Orion's sword points up , and the sun tracks the wrong way across the sky.

Something's definitely amiss down there.

Due to differences in the local electrical supply, presumably?

Australia is basically the same as the UK, nominally 230v 50Hz, so that wouldn't make a difference.

Is this really a thing?

Surely even rotating a CRT (e.g. so the screen is facing east instead of west) would then affect the influence of the magnetic field of the Earth?

Well, the magnetic field on a CRT from both the scan coils and the correction magnets on the neck are _ever_ so slightly stronger than the earth's magnetic field. They can pick up a magnetic field on the frame and the shadow mask; that's why colour screens always had a degaussing coil built in to operate when they were turned on. But the effect is of such a magnitude as to move the scanning electron beam from one colour phosphor dot to an adjacent one, and change the colour slightly.

Back in the 1970's, when I was a student earning a bit of cash-in-hand with a part-time job in a TV shop, a common task was to visit the home of customers who had just bought a new colour TV. We would ensure the TV was in the final place the customer wanted it and then we'd connect a pattern generator and spend up to an hour or two getting the beams and masks aligned across the whole screen. If we didn't get it right, the customer would likely be on the phone complaining about colour fringing or picture distortion. Those early sets would sometimes need a further visit because the customer decided to turn the set to a different viewing angle. We also advised the lady* of the house to never switch the vacuum cleaner on or off near the TV - fine to vacuum the carpet around it, but always switch the cleaner on or off on the other side of the room. Ror the early sets with the common shadow mask, the Earth's magnetic field had a big influence; things got better after a few years, as the control circuitry became more sophisticated. The shop also sold Sony Trinitron TVs and those never needed a visit or such precautions.

*Yes, men do sometimes do the cleaning but telling the lady ensured the information was received.

There's always a reason why it's cheaper. Find out said reason to see if it's important to you before thinking you got a good deal.

In the 80s and 90s I used to work at Quantel, who made videographics gear. For devices for the printing industry we had much higher resolution monitors (Sony HDVS series). Although nowadays everyone's home TVs and computers can do that kind of resolution, back then it needed to be massive, very heavy, CRT devices. One of the controls on the device's calibration panel was a 16 way rotary switch labelled with the 16 primary compass points. The device was sufficiently sensitive to the earth's magnetic field that it needed to be told in which direction it was aligned.

Had a similar problem with a tablet constantly going off when the case was opened. Turned out the magnet sensor was a bit too sensitive and triggered when the case tab was on the back of the tablet. Wound up rotating the table 180 degrees in the case so the sensor was the other side and the problem stopped.

... https://www.theregister.com/2017/06/16/on_call/

Bloody internet, nothing but repeats.

Such a good story, they published it twice.

At least it proves that the Regomizer is working.

ZOMG, it was Dell he was working for all along? I had no idea!!!

Oddly enough, I had this problem when I placed one Dell laptop on top of another; the magnet convinced the topmost laptop that it's lid was closed and so it dropped to a single external screen mode. Annoying until I worked it out (by accident!)

Now On-Call need to check for plagiarism as well...

How can we be sure it wasn't ChatGPT?

Obviously a case of history repeating itself!

But you could have made the link [1]clickable...

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2017/06/16/on_call/

The capacitor bulge in the GX series, 260 and 270s I believe. They turned off randomly too! Glad desktop support is way behind me!

I saw this many times at the Fruit Store. Metallic bracelets would trigger the sleep function on Macbooks for this exact reason.