A random thread for small computing things that don't really warrant a thread of their own

[Mr Larrington]

Oh for goodness' sake, Excel!  That spreadsheet only contains a little over 200,000 INDEX/MATCH wossnames!  What's taking you so long, eh?

[Beardy]

It’s probably trying to work out why you are using a spreadsheet for a database task?

[Mr Larrington]

If I could remember how to Database I probably would, but it's been:

• about twenty years, and
• Microsith Access

Edit: actually it’s more like thirty

[Beardy]

I’m going to have to sort out my online assets. I’m not looking forward to this at all because I’m going to have to understand and attempt to unravel the labyrinthine network of domains, service providers and email addresses. Oh, and devices. Deleting it all and starting again, while a somewhat nuclear option, has a certain appeal, but who knows what Communications I’d lose in the process and anyway Dr Beardy, and assorted family members also have email accounts hang off some of the domains. 

Such fun(T2) I’m going to have over the coming days and weeks.

[Ham]

Ah those pesky little words, who bothers with Terms and Conditions, eh? Clearly not the owners of a significant Covid-19 test website https://dam-health.com/terms-conditions/

Quite apart from the T&Cs making multiple references to paragraph numbers which have all been stripped out and replaced with occasional <li> tag, the start of para 3 amused me

There are other terms that may apply to you. Our Privacy Policy [INSERT A LINK] explains how we may use your personal information.

Such perfeshunalism.

[Mr Larrington]

Oh hai Microsith!

ROBOCOPY is a most useful utility but does it really need to create untold thousands* of empty directories when copying 24 files from one disk to another?

kthxbai

* I set the machine to counting them but I got bored before it did.  Then I did it again.  322,190

[HTFB]

Oh for goodness' sake, Excel!  That spreadsheet only contains a little over 200,000 INDEX/MATCH wossnames!  What's taking you so long, eh?

Real Excel these days -- since the end of 2018, I think -- has "dynamic arrays" which let you do proper data manipulation with just one formula: UNIQUE, SORT, etc. It can't quite do JOIN natively but it does let you write just one INDEX/MATCH cell which then processes the entire column toot suite. In a bizarre development Excel has suddenly become fit for purpose, just after everybody round here finally learned R and python to avoid it

[Mr Larrington]

I'm still on Office 2013, which may or may not have had similar things added to it by the hundreds of updates it applied after reinstalling Windows the other day, but since its major use in these parts is to assemble Stuffs that can then be passed to the command line for manipulating myriad small files I don’t suppose it matters too much.  I can always read a book while waiting for the wretched thing to recalculate.

[orienteer]

Have a Toshiba Satellite L70 laptop at least 4 years old and the battery is only lasting about 20 minutes now, though I usually use the power adapter as a matter of course. Have ordered a new battery. My question is, do I need to keep the power adapter plugged in when I change the battery to avoid losing any settings (Windows 10)?

Thanks!

[Kim]

Have a Toshiba Satellite L70 laptop at least 4 years old and the battery is only lasting about 20 minutes now, though I usually use the power adapter as a matter of course. Have ordered a new battery. My question is, do I need to keep the power adapter plugged in when I change the battery to avoid losing any settings (Windows 10)?

No.  Windows keeps its settings on disk (which may be flash memory on a modern machine with an SSD, which is equally non-volatile).  There may be some BIOS settings (boot device order and the like) in battery-maintained CMOS memory along with the real-time clock, but this will have its own power source (typically a primary lithium cell) which is independent of the main battery and mains adaptor.

[ian]

Oh for goodness' sake, Excel!  That spreadsheet only contains a little over 200,000 INDEX/MATCH wossnames!  What's taking you so long, eh?

Real Excel these days -- since the end of 2018, I think -- has "dynamic arrays" which let you do proper data manipulation with just one formula: UNIQUE, SORT, etc. It can't quite do JOIN natively but it does let you write just one INDEX/MATCH cell which then processes the entire column toot suite. In a bizarre development Excel has suddenly become fit for purpose, just after everybody round here finally learned R and python to avoid it

I was wondering a while back why Excel was doing my sums (an index-match on two criteria ranges) fine even though, as it turned out, I'd forgotten to {}.

[Kim]

The jam in barakta's $ork Babbage-engine is particularly viscous today.  There have been many Bad Swears, and she has resorted to invoking a remote IT-monkey to attempt to fix it.

Update: Monkey seems to have got the jam flowing smoothly (for now), but $important_database is now b0rked.

[orienteer]

Have a Toshiba Satellite L70 laptop at least 4 years old and the battery is only lasting about 20 minutes now, though I usually use the power adapter as a matter of course. Have ordered a new battery. My question is, do I need to keep the power adapter plugged in when I change the battery to avoid losing any settings (Windows 10)?

No.  Windows keeps its settings on disk (which may be flash memory on a modern machine with an SSD, which is equally non-volatile).  There may be some BIOS settings (boot device order and the like) in battery-maintained CMOS memory along with the real-time clock, but this will have its own power source (typically a primary lithium cell) which is independent of the main battery and mains adaptor.

 Thanks Kim!

[delthebike]

Just finished setting up my new Macbook Air, M1 processor. Used migration assistant to get the set up from my Mac Mini and that was it. A few adjustments via an app called Rosetta so a couple of apps could work on the Mac silicon and done.
Beautiful picture, lovely sound, easy to use and it has a nice heft to it (not too heavy just weighty enough). 

Later this year I shall enter the 21^st Century and get a smartphone. iPhone SE is current favourite and rumour are flying of various Apple updates and releases including a new SE phone, possibly with M2 Apple chip.    I can wait...

[Feanor]

Fettling a colour laser printer.

We bought Junior a small Dell colour laser when he went off to Uni some 6 or more years ago.
It has since migrated it's way back here as surplus to requirement, with the comment that it didn't work any more due to paper jams.

I have reason to re-purpose it now, and sure enough, paper jam every time.
The paper is jamming solid trying to enter the fuser unit.
Major dismantlement involving mostly snappy plastic, and I have the fuser unit out.

Hmm, this will be the problem then.
There's a section of nylon webbing strap jammed in the paper path against the hot roller.
The nylon strap is a melted mess.
It's totally destroyed the roller, with a massive gouge out of it all the way round, and bits of red rubber crumbs everywhere.
This has clearly been dropped into the printer by the PSO, and worked it's way into it's jammed position.
Photo is with the melted strap removed, and the worst of the mess cleaned up!


Fuser by Ron Lowe, on Flickr

New fuser unit on order.
Bah.

[Jaded]

that certainly doesn't look like it would work very well...

[Kim]

Puts bratchild spilling potpourri in the Epson in perspective...

[Mr Larrington]

Machine!  Since that NAS has been attached to TowersNet for the thick end of two years would you kindly explain why you only now* think it appropriate to bung up a message saying “AirPort disk is now available” and inviting me to connect to it?

* at audax o'clock this morning

[rafletcher]

Managed to attach the recently acquired second hand NAS to my home network, storage of FulGaz ride videos for the use of. Next up is replacing the puny 250Mb SSD in the Dell laptop used for running said cycling simulator with a 1Tb one. Amazon tells me it’ll be delivered tomorrow.

[Beardy]

It occurs to me while I sit here mentally grappling with Joomla and Nicepage while trying to get them to play nicely together that web design was a lot simpler in the old days. Bash out a bit of HTML defining borders and the like, add a bit of colour and the odd photo and it was done. These days clients have such high expectations that you’ve got to learn a new software package or two just to get the damned think to work. 

[ian]

We are moving away from writing any code, the machines are doing it.

Don't ask me who writes the code for the machine that write the code. Probably more machines. Say hello to our robot overlords.

[Mr Larrington]

We are moving away from writing any code, the machines are doing it.

Don't ask me who writes the code for the machine that write the code. Probably more machines. Say hello to our robot overlords.

I saw a movie about that once.  I think Arnold Schwarzenegger was in it.

[Beardy]

We are moving away from writing any code, the machines are doing it.

Don't ask me who writes the code for the machine that write the code. Probably more machines. Say hello to our robot overlords.

Yeah, but it means that you've got to learn what to tell the machine what you want, and as any developer can tell you, IF the client actually knows what they want, they'll have hanged their minds by tomorrow.

[SoreTween]

Two weeks ago: Spent my day off trying to get an i2c sensor working with a Pi nano.  At the end of the day I'd got past several errors when running the example but couldn't get any data out of it. It showed up in a bus scan but that's all I could get. Very frustrating day involving increasingly bad swears.

Day off today: Fire up the pi, fire up the nano, run the program as I couldn't remember where I'd got to & the latest error message.

Serial: <long number>
Identifier: Si7021
Temperature: 22.36978
Humidity: 30.1824

Le sigh.

[Mr Larrington]

Since when did Windows Updates have a “Cleaning up” phase?  Not like Microsith to start caring about cruft all of a sudden.