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

[Mr Larrington]

Whatever happened to that keystroke recorder wossname that used to come with Windows?  Record a sequence of <RETURN> & <DELETE> and loop it in an empty Notepad file

Or you could rig up a bass drum or hi-hat pedal to allow you to tap the space bar to the rhythm of of the war drums.

At least the NAS which goes under the name of "El Gordo" has been restored to health by unplugging it from the mains, plugging it back in, rebooting the PC, downloading a program from Seagate, discovering I already have it, shouting abuse, running the program, forgetting my password, poking it with the stick I normally save for the lion-taming act and swearing.

Now, VLC.  Why does that particular skin switch from full-screen to titchy window every time a new track starts playing?  Twattish is what it is.

[menthel]

You need a mouse nudger.

[Oaky]

You need a mouse nudger.

Now you make it sound like a job for ian's cats-of-limited-typing-ability.

[simonp]

So my 2011 MBP died last night - possibly the known issue with GPU failures due to dodgy solder.

Waiting for a call-back from Apple Support. Would quite like the free repair.

[ian]

So my 2011 MBP died last night - possibly the known issue with GPU failures due to dodgy solder.

Waiting for a call-back from Apple Support. Would quite like the free repair.

Yeah, don't try to book an in-store appointment, they're unavailable forever as I just discovered when I planned to take a noisy mouse in for a swap. Great advice, support drone.

[simonp]

Checked online already. There was one slot in a week and the cribbs store and nothing at Cabot circus. Probably gone now. Clearly geniuses are in short supply.

[ian]

That's going to be my joke. Nothing in London or the burbs for the next six days. I just wanted to pop over to Bromley and wave it under someone's nose. Who knew Bromley on a Wednesday afternoon was so busy.

Anyway, I was doing them a favour, I can't be bothered wrestling for an appointment, I think I'll just ask for a replacement.

[Mr Larrington]

OK, Mozilla, what the blazes does this mean:


Thunderbird message by Mr Larrington, on Flickr

And should I be worried about it?  I don't know how that "t" got into the "Location" box, though my stubby peasant fingers are probably to blame.

[Phil W]

It means click cancel

[Mr Larrington]

I did, but this is about the third time it's come up in the past twenty-four hours so I'd quite concerned to find out what's causing it so I can conduct an experiment to determine the exact temperature at which the culprit's face catches fire.

[Afasoas]

I started the day with a stonking migraine.
The home server did too. I realised something was wrong when I couldn't get a network connection on any devices around the home - which wasn't ideal with an overdue bill to pay.

I plugged a monitor into the server and any numpty would have seen the sad state of affairs. The SSD boot disk in the home server expired. *sigh*
The good news I did have a backup.
The bad news - it was 18 months old.

I've got Stan's latest and greatest mutation of a cold virus, so I've not been able to do much except scavenge an SSD and restore the backup, which was at least enough to make the t'interwebs work again.

I've got a great big long list of things I need to do. Which ends with,
1 - take new backup
2 - configure backup server


I'm almost loathed to configure the backup server just now. On account the hardware I've got is crappy - it needs it's own power station to turn something that's commensurate with a hamster wheel.
My preferred option is actually adding a dual port Intel network card to the home server and some more ram. Then I can virtualize the firewall with PCI pass through on the network cards. That would mean reducing energy consumption by a bit and freeing up it's rather splendid (server grade-ish) atom board to use in the backup server instead of the current P-o-S.

And next year I'd like to do some jiggery pokery with disks in the home server so that I can mdadm RAID the boot drive and avoid a recurrence of this sorry state of affairs. Sadly it all requires DOSH and time and both are in rather short-supply.

Anyway. that's enough rambling on.

[simonp]

That's going to be my joke. Nothing in London or the burbs for the next six days. I just wanted to pop over to Bromley and wave it under someone's nose. Who knew Bromley on a Wednesday afternoon was so busy.

Anyway, I was doing them a favour, I can't be bothered wrestling for an appointment, I think I'll just ask for a replacement.

Looking like a new logic board, which would be over £500.

Not sure that's an economic repair for a laptop that's nearly 5 years old.

[ian]

That's going to be my joke. Nothing in London or the burbs for the next six days. I just wanted to pop over to Bromley and wave it under someone's nose. Who knew Bromley on a Wednesday afternoon was so busy.

Anyway, I was doing them a favour, I can't be bothered wrestling for an appointment, I think I'll just ask for a replacement.

Looking like a new logic board, which would be over £500.

Not sure that's an economic repair for a laptop that's nearly 5 years old.

It isn't. But I'd ask if the expected lifespan for a logic board should be fewer than five years? I'd hazard that that the main component in a modern computer should have a lifespan beyond that. If so, they owe you.

[simonp]

That's going to be my joke. Nothing in London or the burbs for the next six days. I just wanted to pop over to Bromley and wave it under someone's nose. Who knew Bromley on a Wednesday afternoon was so busy.

Anyway, I was doing them a favour, I can't be bothered wrestling for an appointment, I think I'll just ask for a replacement.

Looking like a new logic board, which would be over £500.

Not sure that's an economic repair for a laptop that's nearly 5 years old.

It isn't. But I'd ask if the expected lifespan for a logic board should be fewer than five years? I'd hazard that that the main component in a modern computer should have a lifespan beyond that. If so, they owe you.

It's a valid question, but it took a petition with 18,000 signatures and a class action lawsuit to get them to move on the widespread GPU issues.

[ian]

When they got sniffy about my wife's out-of-warranty Mac I merely pointed out that they were perfectly fine to disagree with my interpretation but as a senior partner at Boze and Hartford specialising in consumer law I was more than happy to dispute their disagreement.

[Afasoas]

Home server is now somewhere near. I've still got to create new single use SSH keys/re-write the scripts for backing up three VPS. Oh, and re-install/re-configure the UPS monitoring software.

Various experiments now under way with the backup server. It's Mobo is suppose to support Wake-On-Lan. Does it bu**ery. The embedded NIC might very well do, but I suspect it's not plumbed into the MoBo in such a way as to receive any electrons when the server is powered off and plugged in. I've enabled the various BIOS options and also tried waking it from a suspended state versus a powered-off state. No dice.

The whole point is that the main home server can wake up the backup server, run the backups and shut it down again. Bah.
It looks like there's a wake on timer option which I'm going to try shortly. I don't hold out too much hope - it looks more of a wake from suspend, rather than a wake from powered off. And I'm wondering if it's a one time use thing, rather than a wake up daily at x time. The BIOS and the manual are all in chinglish, which doesn't help much.

At this point I'd dearly take recommendations for a motherboard
 - with an embedded processor (atom/celeron - CPU power is not important)
 - 5x SATA ports (or PCIe slot to add a SATA controller)
 - supports wake-on-lan
 - < £50
 - Linux friendly

Cheers
A

[Mr Larrington]

After discovering that iTunes can be made to use different libraries, I seem to have reverted to using it for playing audio.  Although the Babbage-Engine in the Great Hall is wired to route both its sound and vision via the anbaric distascope, iTunes allows me to send audio direct to the (networked) amp, so I doan 'ave to have the telly on once I've told it what to play.  As a bonus, DJ Random automatically updates himself when new Stuffs are added.

You may now start collecting faggots in order to burn the heretic.

[Biggsy]

Sound Taxi on my Babbage-Engine has punished iTunes by making it play 12 hours of Morrissey reading his autobiog*, to convert the Audible files, in real time.  Bit strange as I don't use iTunes for anything else.

* Heaven knows why I bought this.  I've never much liked the man, and I like him slightly less now.

[Pingu]

Sound Taxi on my Babbage-Engine has punished iTunes by making it play 12 hours of Morrissey reading his autobiog*, to convert the Audible files, in real time.  Bit strange as I don't use iTunes for anything else.

* Heaven knows why I bought this.  I've never much liked the man, and I like him slightly less now.

You're miserable now?

[David Martin]

So my 2011 MBP died last night - possibly the known issue with GPU failures due to dodgy solder.

Waiting for a call-back from Apple Support. Would quite like the free repair.

Mine has been through that and survived. I am typing this on it now.

[Chris S]

Enabling concurrent project builds in Visual Studio 2012 on a multi-core PC sure does find holes in the dependency tree quickly  .

[Torslanda]

So the kittens walked, sat, fought and generally f*///*d up the laptop. It still works - I'm typing this on it now - but the header and the footer have disappeared and i have no idea how to bring them back.

Windows 7 OS. any suggestions?

ETA. Teh Kittehs managed to hide the toolbar and taskbar simultaneously. Not something I have a clue how to do . . .

[fuaran]

Press F11 to switch full screen mode on or off, which hides the toolbars etc. Sounds like your kittens have done that.

[Torslanda]

Fab. Thank you.

Order is restored...

[Pingu]

Every ten minutes, on a minute ending with a 7, the computers in this office 'freeze' for a couple of seconds