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

[Kim]

The new owners of our current building (which we are in the process of moving out of) came in at the weekend to do some electrical work, inadvertantely cut through our fibre-optic cable and neglected to tell anyone what they'd done.
Thanks guys.

Saw a toot (or possibly a tweet) where they'd done exactly that, and then attempted to reconnect it using a jelly crimp.  Yes, really.

[Mr Larrington]

Over the last few days, when I prod Chrome after waking this 'ere fondleslab from a period of slumber it opens a new tab.  Since there ent been any updates from FruitCo for a while the finger is pointing squarely at the Mega-Global Chocolate Manufactury of Mountain View, USAnia.  Yes, Google, you.  Stop it.

[Ham]

Over the last few days, when I prod Chrome after waking this 'ere fondleslab from a period of slumber it opens a new tab.  Since there ent been any updates from FruitCo for a while the finger is pointing squarely at the Mega-Global Chocolate Manufactury of Mountain View, USAnia.  Yes, Google, you.  Stop it.

Whilst I can't be certain the most recent chrome update includes a load of changes to tab management, which would likely be worth reading about. It sounds like you may be falling foul of this?

Right click on a tab to see some of the new options

[Mr Larrington]

“Right-clicking” is a bit tricky on a fondleslab Press'n' hold does nowt and I can’t find anything in “Settings” either chiz.

[Mr Larrington]

Well, that was a bit odd.  Switch the telly input to the PC, fire up iTunes and the display promptly turns into Mondrian-on-acid   Rebooted and all is well apart from my blood pressure, which went up several notches when it started doing the old check and repair thing on startup.

[Bledlow]

The new owners of our current building (which we are in the process of moving out of) came in at the weekend to do some electrical work, inadvertantely cut through our fibre-optic cable and neglected to tell anyone what they'd done.
Thanks guys.

Saw a toot (or possibly a tweet) where they'd done exactly that, and then attempted to reconnect it using a jelly crimp

Yes, really.

I recall some people with a metered water supply (Aylesbury Canal Society, lessees of Aylesbury canal basin at the time) having a sudden huge increase in their metered usage. Thames Water were not very helpful.

Then the road leading to the canal basin (& also, at the time, a timber yard, the rear entrance of a bakery, & the car park of the Ship Inn) started collapsing where someone had been working on (IIRC) an electric cable.

The water pipe had what looked very much like marks from a digger. Turned out that the bloke digging the hole to get to the cable had gone off to the side & punctured the pipe - & filled that bit of the hole back in. 

[chrisbainbridge]

Just thought I would say thank you again for the advice about PoE.  Massive improvement to the tidiness of the setup with no mains cables or plugs.

Also to say what fun NDI is.  4K video streamed around the church with virtually no latency and the equipment just works.

Put all the cameras and decoders on the same IP "address", give each camera a name and they just see each other.  Like Magic or how things should be

[Paul]

My scroll down button has started thinking that it's a home page button sometimes.

Why dis?

[Morat]

GMAIL
AGGHHH

Why do threads suddenly start in the middle and older emails randomly disappear so you can never just scroll down a the whole thread?
)("$%" )"£$")£$( ($£% agagga

[Mr Larrington]

O hai PC!

Plz to not lose contact with that NAS only to regain it before I've had a chance to check WTF you think you’re doing.

kthxbai

[Mr Larrington]

Euurrggh!  MOAR sub-desk grovelling required to correct Mr Thrustmaster's steering wheel's pronounced list to starboard 

[Kim]

Euurrggh!  MOAR sub-desk grovelling required to correct Mr Thrustmaster's steering wheel's pronounced list to starboard 

That sounds a lot more pr0nographic than it ought to.

[Mr Larrington]

iTunes, normally you bimble along using ~ 260 MB of memory which, compared with hogsters like Chrome, is not really that much.  I do not know what caused you to suddenly stop playing Masters Of Reality’s “The Eyes Of Texas” and announce that there was insufficient memory to update The Database because you'd suddenly decided to nom 28 of the 32 GB of RAM in that Babbage-Engine but I'd be obliged if you were to cease and desist such activity forthwith.

[Mr Larrington]

Installed a wifi range extender at Fort Larrington.  Hopefully this will mean an end to terrible wifi in the conservatory.

[Pingu]

I think this laptop may be on its last legs. Its got a busticated hinge and the socket for the charger has started playing silly uggbres 

[Mrs Pingu]

I think this laptop may be on its last legs. Its got a busticated hinge and the socket for the charger has started playing silly uggbres 

We have sprung for a new Thinkpad. I thought it was ridiculously expensive but a rootle through the emails suggested it's only x1.5 the price of the one we bought 10 yrs ago, so mustn't grumble I s'pose.

[Ham]

My video card went buggerup yesterday and I rootled around and found the previous card before the current upgrade (probably originally bought just after Noah landed).

I've not been one for GPU spending, preferring instead something which can drive the two monitors without additional cooling. I'd noticed it's deficiency in recent months, but only when video rendering or using photoshop. Anyhow, after a bit of wrangling I got it running again, with the old Radeon 3450 card which appears to date from 2008. I thought to myself, let's see how it copes with STUFF, let's fire up photoshop.

"Your video card is not compatible, KTHXBAI"

  

[Pingu]

I think this laptop may be on its last legs. Its got a busticated hinge and the socket for the charger has started playing silly uggbres 

We have sprung for a new Thinkpad. I thought it was ridiculously expensive but a rootle through the emails suggested it's only x1.5 the price of the one we bought 10 yrs ago, so mustn't grumble I s'pose.

It has arrived. I'm in the process of trying to Pingufy it.

[Pingu]

Well, that was remarkably pain-free 

[Kim]

It has arrived. I'm in the process of trying to Pingufy it.

I'm imagining a special PURPLE Linux distribution...

[orienteer]

For the first time suffered the fate of water splashing the keyboard of my Toshiba Satellite laptop. Problem is the touch pad is now very erratic, if it doesn’t dry out wondering how easy it is to buy an external mouse to bypass it. The windows settings page includes an option for mouse settings. How do I tell the system to use the mouse rather than the touch pad? Thanks in advance.

[Kim]

There's usually a way to turn the trackpad off, though exactly where will depend on the drivers.  Have a poke around in mousy settings, or devices.

USB meece are a case of plug them in and they just work (if you have multiple pointing devices, the pointer gets the sum of their inputs^[1]).  Again, the usual settings to adjust speed, button behaviour etc, which should be independent of the trackpad.


_{[1] For example, on this machine I have a mouse for my left hand and a trackball for my right.  If I move them both at once I can wrestle with the position of the pointer.}

[Pingu]

It has arrived. I'm in the process of trying to Pingufy it.

I'm imagining a special PURPLE Linux distribution...

Firefox has a PURPLE theme. I don't use Firefox, Mrs P does and she likes PURPLE.

[Mr Larrington]

There's usually a way to turn the trackpad off, though exactly where will depend on the drivers.  Have a poke around in mousy settings, or devices.

USB meece are a case of plug them in and they just work (if you have multiple pointing devices, the pointer gets the sum of their inputs^[1]).  Again, the usual settings to adjust speed, button behaviour etc, which should be independent of the trackpad.


_{[1] For example, on this machine I have a mouse for my left hand and a trackball for my right.  If I move them both at once I can wrestle with the position of the pointer.}

If only my laptop automagically disabled the trackpad when a meece was plugged in and reënabled it likewise when Idiot Boy left the meece at home over Chrimbly 

Fortunately it wasn’t required to set up the wifi range extender at Fort Larrington coz I already had the TP-Link app on my phone.

[Kim]

If only my laptop automagically disabled the trackpad when a meece was plugged in and reënabled it likewise when Idiot Boy left the meece at home over Chrimbly 

That sounds like the sort of thing that starts with "I wonder if I can..." and ends in either downloading some obscure piece of shareware that will vanish from the internet without a trace before you next reinstall the OS (Windows) or 3 hours of fucking around writing udev scripts rather than whatever it was you were supposed to be doing (Linux).

Related: Did I mention that the previously dust-gathering dedicated 'email' button on my keyboard now toggles the default arseaudio output device between the onboard sound (headphones, for the use of) and the monitor's mediocre but occasionally useful squeakers?