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

[Jurek]

If memory serves, some early Macbooks had keyboards which could be unclipped from the body of the machine, and the keyboard immersed in water (I know it sounds drastic, but it might be worth researching) to rid it of anything causing the keys to stick.
Heavy Duty drying with rice / airing cupboard would, needless to say, have to follow.

[Kim]

Yes, pure IPA^[1] if you're going to do that sort of thing.  Problem is that the contacts are sandwiched between sheets of flexible plastic, so it may not penetrate without dismantling.


_{[1] Not the beer, that's strictly for slippy Brompton seat posts.}

[Jurek]

Yes, pure IPA^[1] if you're going to do that sort of thing.  Problem is that the contacts are sandwiched between sheets of flexible plastic, so it may not penetrate without dismantling.


_{[1] Not the beer, that's strictly for slippy Brompton seat posts.}

Indeed. But the stickiness may be taking place between the outer surface of the membrane and the actuator / key.
As I understand it, the membranes themselves are sealed - although I've no idea  to what IP...

FWIW my No.2 iMac (2015)  is on its third bluetooth keyboard.
Thanks to spillages.
Meh!

[Jaded]

The 'Down' cursor key on my MacBook Air seems dead.
Everything else works OK.
Suggestions?

David thinks there could be dirt in the contacts. I don't really want him to attempt to dismantlethis...

turn it upside down and knock and shake it. and flick the key.

it is astonishing what laptops try and collect...

[Jurek]

The 'Down' cursor key on my MacBook Air seems dead.
Everything else works OK.
Suggestions?

David thinks there could be dirt in the contacts. I don't really want him to attempt to dismantlethis...

turn it upside down and knock and shake it. and flick the key.

it is astonishing what laptops try and collect...

A very good starting point.

[hellymedic]

I had actually tried the IPA before posting, to no effect as the screen had gunk a keyboard print on it and I thought keyboard, screen and this down key might benefit from this.
No effect on down key.
Screen is shiny.

Key travel is OK and doesn't feel gritty. Nearby up key works OK.

Will try shaking but doubt this will help.

[Gattopardo]

Is there any way to scan software downloaded from the net?

Background - Downloaded a few mac os from tactic.com, via google docs, and would like to check that there is nothing hiding.

[hellymedic]

I think a scholar has hacked into Google Maps and school website...

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.0719162,-1.3070747,16z

[citoyen]

Bizarre Word glitch #35,927:

I regularly get sent copy from a writer who uses what must be an ancient version of Word - files have the .doc extension rather than .docx. I presume he is using Windows, though I haven't asked him. I'm guessing it's not a recent edition of Windows either, probably XP or something.

When I open these files in Word on my Mac, they are invariably missing the last few lines of copy - or at least, the copy is hidden and I can't access it.

The solution I have worked out is to open the files in Word, save them as plain text, then re-open the text files and save them as .docx. This works reliably.

It's a little irritating, to put it mildly, but I somehow suspect there won't be an easier fix apart from telling the contributor to update his bloody software to something from the 21st century.

[freeflow]

You could try saving as rtf or as pure xml before reloading and resaving as docx. Alternatively try loading into libre office writer and saving as docx.

[citoyen]

You could try saving as rtf or as pure xml before reloading and resaving as docx. Alternatively try loading into libre office writer and saving as docx.

That doesn't sound like any less faff than what I'm doing though.

[TheLurker]

I can see why you'd find it irritating, but the Luddite in me is on the side of your correspondent.  He or she has a WP package that works.  It almost certainly doesn't issue nagging messages to upgrade to the latest "whizzy" cloud* enabled dependent version every 5 minutes.  The fact that you have to jump through a few hoops is not his or her problem. And I'll bet your correspondent is perfectly happy running that WP package on an ancient piece of kit that with an OS out of the ark that doesn't report every damned keystroke to its electronic overlords and most certainly does not need replacing cos it still does what's needed thank you very much.

Of course you could just ask him or her to send documents to you as RTF rather than DOC.  I'm assuming it's most likely to be Word 97 or slightly later which has RTF as one of its supported file formats.  It's an approach I've used successfully when exchanging documents amongst people on wildly different versions  (i.e. the current one and the one just preceding - don't ask) of MS-Word.


*Let someone like Microsoft keep copies of all my documents on a server not under my control?  And edit them with a SAAS programme that I have to renew a licence for every year or lose access forever?  Aye. Right.

[citoyen]

The fact that you have to jump through a few hoops is not his or her problem.

Yeah, that's kind of true... up to a point. Needs to be a bit of give and take both ways though. If I had to send him files, would it be my responsibility to convert them to .doc format?

Tbh, it doesn't bother me enough to feel the need to do anything about it. It's irritating but nothing worse than that, otherwise I would have had words with him about it already. I also have to deal with Pages files and Google docs on occasion. I also seem to spend a lot of time helping out technologically incompetent colleagues who can't work out what to do with Pages files and Google docs... FML

Arguably, I'd be within my rights to refuse to accept submissions in any proprietary format (which .doc is), and enforcing such a policy would make life easier for me in some ways, but I don't feel strongly enough about it.

*Let someone like Microsoft keep copies of all my documents on a server not under my control?  And edit them with a SAAS programme that I have to renew a licence for every year or lose access forever?  Aye. Right.

That's fine as a principle, and obviously I'm not obliged to use Word when there are plenty of other WP packages out there using open file formats.

Different story with Indesign - it's no longer possible to buy it as a standalone program, you have to go down the subscription route, and there are no substitutes because pretty much everyone else in the industry is using Indesign. Quite simply, I wouldn't be able to do my job without Indesign.

I probably do still have an old version of Indesign on disc somewhere but it almost certainly wouldn't be compatible with the OS on my current work computer and even if it were, it wouldn't be able to handle the shared files I work on.

[citoyen]

Interestingly, opening the .doc files in Google Docs through my web browser doesn't suffer the same glitch.

I think the real problem is that MS only provides half-hearted support for the Mac versions of its own products. I expect there are plenty of other similar glitches that I haven't encountered... yet.

[ian]

Every MS product suffered from the 'what about Windows' problems, every decision made was inflected by Windows, and every product became subservient to needs of Windows, and how that product would benefit Windows. Far enough, it is their biggest product, but it was a business myopia that made it difficult for them to diversify. And they still struggle. That said, they have a huge mountain of cash regardless, so they're probably not about to call me up for business advice.

I do hate the subscription model. I used to have my own copy of Office and I didn't begrudge the £100 or so for a copy that I could use on a couple of years and would be current for five or so years. I'm not paying to subscribe, I don't need continuous development, it's a word processor, spreadsheet etc and already has far more features and functions that I'll ever use. It's a dramatic increase in the cost of ownership (yes, you can still buy a standalone Office for Mac, but of course they deliberately stunt it, and the licensing is one computer only where it used to be five).

I think Adobe are sowing the eventual seeds of their own demise with their subscription model. Photoshop's familiarity, for instance, was gained through wide (and often not entirely legal) usage. They've locked it down to corporates and professionals and tbh, their products while full-featured are starting to look a bit tired. Yes, a lot of workflows are tied into their tools and there's business inertia. But then again, they might want to remember that everyone used to use QuarkXpress, and Indesign was the pretender.

[Mr Larrington]

Is there an easy way to determine whether a sudden loss of intertubes in the wee small hours was an issue at The Man's end or my router showing signs of droid rot?  No unusual blinkenlight activity on the latter, but it swore blind it was connected when ping was unable to find Microsith, Farcebok or Google.

[woollypigs]

I have had the same, with my ISP between 6-7am and some times at night but not linked to a soap cliffhanger time as this was often random. Though ping tanked to something silly that all the websites I tried to visit my browser kept saying nope nothing to see here or it's dead Jim. I even set up a speed test script that clearly said that my speeds dropped to now't and pings went to yawnville, mostly because there was not pong to my pings.  Should have had about 48 down and 9 up, but doing these times I had about .5 down and .1 up or just nada.

I moaned to my ISP and they said there was no sign that the internet had been cut near or at me. The little green light saying that it was awake and on the ball was on, the light saying that there was a phone line was also on but the most important green one was sometimes not seen.

After some nagging and tos and fros I was told that the ISP don't check or care about the ping.

[Kim]

I moaned to my ISP and they said there was no sign that the internet had been cut near or at me. The little green light saying that it was awake and on the ball was on, the light saying that there was a phone line was also on but the most important green one was sometimes not seen.

After some nagging and tos and fros I was told that the ISP don't check or care about the ping.

This is what AAISP are for.

[Afasoas]

Is there an easy way to determine whether a sudden loss of intertubes in the wee small hours was an issue at The Man's end or my router showing signs of droid rot?  No unusual blinkenlight activity on the latter, but it swore blind it was connected when ping was unable to find Microsith, Farcebok or Google.

Some external monitoring on both connections might be beneficial..
You could try uptime robot, for instance. At it's free tier, it will do checks 5 minutely and that includes pings.

If you want minutely checks, you can use pingdom. But you only get one check for free (or two if you send a tweet) and at the free tier they are http only. Which means running a webserver. To be fair you could setup a raspberry Pi at each site, install nginx and forward port 80 to them.

The tricky part, is the IP address of the internet connections constantly changing. So you would need a Dynamic DNS service (I think there are some free ones, noip.com?) and a client for the dynamic DNS service at each site.

None of the above is unfeasible but, it's probably not worth the effort for most folk.

[cygnet]

Clickbait fail:

[Ham]

Thought I'd post this as others may be Arirbnb-ing, too.

Airbnb now ask for ID verification

Cue a conversation with their hell desk

You have asked me to submit sensitive personal information for the purpose of identity validation. Please confirm that you will effectively destroy this information once you have validated my identity and provide me with confirmation that this has been done, thank you.

Hello Ham, this is Glenda from Airbnb. I will be here to assist you with. ID verification is essentail [sic] for security purposes, rest assure that Airbnb has the best security practice with the data we are collecting. Thanks

Thank you for that reply, but you have not answered my question.

Unless you can tell me otherwise, once you have used my personal info to validate my ID (and frankly, I am uncertain why you even have to do that) I can see no reason for you to continue to hold this information.

Please therefore destroy it and confirm to me the process you use to destroy it. Thank you.

You can read everything to our Airbnb Privacy Policy. You can be assured that everything is for safety purposes of all Airbnb users.

I have read your privacy policy, including where you describe the use you put that data to.

However none of the uses quoted indicate why, having validated my ID, you require to continue to hold this data.

Having verified my ID, you have no more need to hold my sensitive personal information on file. You may claim to have effective security in place but you will be aware that the Internet is littered with well secured systems that have been hacked and lost millions of users' data.

Please explain why you need to continue to hold this information on file, as opposed to simply holding the validated status.

I totally understand your concern. I will be escalating this to a team that is better equipped to handle such queries. Thanks

To Be Continued

[Kim]

From Arch OTP:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/FRbJiX-rtgU&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/FRbJiX-rtgU&rel=1</a>
https://youtu.be/FRbJiX-rtgU

[hulver]

The latest version of Windows 10 that was foisted onto me by Windows Update has hosed my computer.

Attempting to start 90% of programs gives a message that "The application has failed to start because the side by side configuration is incorrect please see the application event log or use the command line sxstrace.exe tool for more detail."

I can't even check the event log, because guess what error I get when trying to start it.

Thanks a lot microsoft.

[D.A.L.E.]

The latest version of Windows 10 that was foisted onto me by Windows Update has hosed my computer.

Attempting to start 90% of programs gives a message that "The application has failed to start because the side by side configuration is incorrect please see the application event log or use the command line sxstrace.exe tool for more detail."

I can't even check the event log, because guess what error I get when trying to start it.

Thanks a lot microsoft.

Spent this afternoon fixing my aunts laptop that went West after the latest update too. Completely goosed. Fuck you Bill.

Posted from my beautiful wee MacBook Pro, swoon emoji.

[hulver]

The latest version of Windows 10 that was foisted onto me by Windows Update has hosed my computer.

Attempting to start 90% of programs gives a message that "The application has failed to start because the side by side configuration is incorrect please see the application event log or use the command line sxstrace.exe tool for more detail."

I can't even check the event log, because guess what error I get when trying to start it.

Thanks a lot microsoft.

Spent this afternoon fixing my aunts laptop that went West after the latest update too. Completely goosed. Fuck you Bill.

Posted from my beautiful wee MacBook Pro, swoon emoji.

One of the solutions I found online was to reinstall the VC++ 2013 Runtime. Guess what error it gives when I run the installer?

Looks like I'm reinstalling Windows.