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

[ian]

I never did get networking to work on my PC, things would show up randomly or generally not at all, so I was subject to sending files in 'USB packets' which worked until the PC starting barking about bitlocker encryption having decided that yes, to use a USB drive I had to encrypt in a format that other computers don't understand, just so I could transfer the file from one side of my desk to the other.

Weirdly, printing to a network printer attached and shared by a Mac always worked, even if I couldn't connect to a drive on it.

[Kim]

Windows has always been uniquely terrible at discovering shares on a LAN.  It never really got the hang of the switch from NetBEUI to TCP/IP.  Unless there's a domain controller involved, it always seems to end in pain, with each machine assuming someone else is going to take responsibility for maintaining a list of who's there.  Working DNS for LAN hosts sometimes helps, in as much as you can side-step the whole browse list process and say "try connecting to this", but it's no sure thing.

Tragically, it seems that if you want Windows file-sharing to work reliably, you should do it between *nix or Apple machines.

[ian]

It used to periodically spit out some message about activating Windows Network Discovery Services which never did work, neither the activation or discovery.

[woollypigs]

That said win 11 did find my HP printer over same wifi. After it had download loads of 1s and 0s, right away.

And it promptly printed two of the three doc/pdf I wanted too, before normal service returned to my system.

And I had to apply swear words and stern staring while it got turned off a few time and finally spewed out the last few requested pages.

[Mr Larrington]

Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia and your networking; plz to be not dropping the wifi connection every couple of minutes.  My laptop ent doing it

[Bledlow]

Anyone interested in crypto currency, I recommend the last 4 episodes of Tech Tonic, an FT podcast, compulsive and informative listening

https://www.ft.com/tech-tonic

That's a long time to say 'pyramid scheme.'

I've been impressed with the FT's data journalism lately (and during the covid era), will have to check this out.

I wonder what history books will say about crypto-"currencies". Will South Seas be mentioned? Tulips?

[ian]

Well, they are quite blatantly a Ponzo just jazzed up with words like 'crypto' and 'blockchain' and with assorted techbros saying 'no, no, it's different.' I imagine there was some kind of 17th-century technobro-equivalent telling the world, that no, this is different. Grifters always gonna grift.

[Kim]

To be fair, there's a lot more to crypto than ponzi schemes; many other types of scam are also possible.

[rafletcher]

A colleague has just been given a new MS keyboard. It's QWERTY - but oddly has additonal keys for A and O with an umlaut, plus functions for oe and ae dipthongs, plus other keys relocated.

[Kim]

A colleague has just been given a new MS keyboard. It's QWERTY - but oddly has additonal keys for A and O with an umlaut, plus functions for oe and ae dipthongs, plus other keys relocated.

IIRC the German one has those, but the Y and Z are swapped.  Maybe Swedish or something?

(I spent a few hours typing in Belgian on my UK keyboard last week, because reasons.  Passwords are particularly irksome, and it took me far too long to find the '/'.)

[Mr Larrington]

Two weeks of updates onto clockwork Windows laptop.  Ag.

[Auntie Helen]

A colleague has just been given a new MS keyboard. It's QWERTY - but oddly has additonal keys for A and O with an umlaut, plus functions for oe and ae dipthongs, plus other keys relocated.

IIRC the German one has those, but the Y and Z are swapped.  Maybe Swedish or something?

(I spent a few hours typing in Belgian on my UK keyboard last week, because reasons.  Passwords are particularly irksome, and it took me far too long to find the '/'.)

German keyboard is QWERTZ and has extra keys for ä ö ü and ß.

Makes a noticeable difference on an iPad or phone keyboard as the keys are all a bit smaller to fit the extras in.

Things like brackets, commas etc are in different places. I ended up buying a German laptop as it was doing my head in switching between UK keyboard at home and DE keyboard at work. It’s all DE now.

[Ham]

I have just discovered that Microsoft Office ".x" files are, in fact, zip files that you can open, look at, and marvel at the proliferation of crap within it (including quite usefully, anything embedded and code)

My. Mind. Is. Blown.

[Kim]

I have just discovered that Microsoft Office ".x" files are, in fact, zip files that you can open, look at, and marvel at the proliferation of crap within it (including quite usefully, anything embedded and code)

My. Mind. Is. Blown.

You know it's The Future when Microsoft are using open standards.

[woollypigs]

Ah yes a PowerPoint is a zip file of a silly size you can rename it to .zip open it up click around the folders within find that stupid massive file, say like a .mp3, hidden within, which is inside the PowerPoint but might be hidden inside the template of the PowerPoint but not used. Delete it, save it, rename it back to PowerPoint and it's not 50mb but 1.5mb.

Great thing to do to if you want to send and share your PowerPoint presentation. Don't save, instead Save As a PowerPoint picture presentation, as that will remove all the template, unused pages/slides and images or random videos within the PowerPoint presentation.

That makes it much smaller and removes unused things that might contain company information within the PowerPoint presentation template.

[Kim]

And on a higher circle of hell, it means you can write programs that can input and output excel spreadsheets...

[ian]

And on a higher circle of hell, it means you can write programs that can input and output excel spreadsheets...

There are entire Python packages that do just this, so you don't have to do it yourself (most simply with pandas, which sounds more fun than it might be).

You can also create or write to existing Powerpoint presentations. You'd be horrified how often we do this (for reasons we have to create hundreds of Powerpoint files).

Macs have had package files for ages, Windows was slow to the party.

I had some Excel delights earlier, when a file refused to open because it couldn't find the linked file, which it helpfully pointed out might have been renamed or deleted. More helpfully, the missing file was right there, not renamed or deleted, on the exact path. For bonus points, it wouldn't actually open the file at all, so I couldn't even break the link. I fucking hate Microsoft.

[Mr Larrington]

Switching Stuffs back on the other day after returning from consorting with FOREIGNS in Abroad, discovered a network switch seemed to have gone “Phut” while I was away.  Nary a blinkenlight to be seen.  Might just be the power wossname and at least I had a spare switch knocking about, even though it’s one of those utilitarian “hide it somewhere” ones instead of the pretty variety with the unsightly cables at the back and the blinkenlights on the front.

Bah.

[Kim]

I've been celebrating my recent eye test and the impending collapse of the BRITISH pound by trying to bring myself up-to-date with the world of graphics cards and monitors, with a view to upgrading to something 32", 4k, lunix-friendly and flicker-free while I can still afford to do so.

This is the same kind of Type 1.5 fun that you get when researching mobile phones, though hopefully the outcome is more satisfying.

[Pickled Onion]

And on a higher circle of hell, it means you can write programs that can input and output excel spreadsheets...

You could do that with the old closed-source formats, by the magic hideousness of Interop and COM. This, of course, requires you to have a licensed copy of Office wherever the software runs.

Developers who wrote such monstrosity and then moaned "but it works on my machine" should have been roundly slapped, but instead of telling them to bugger off and do something sensible, management issued purchase orders to install Office on all application servers. 

[Beardy]

why are computer networks so illogical? Im trying to sort out emails on my own domains for a number of devices and the home WiFi Mesh network has decided to throw at curve ball by by losing connectivity to the internet but without bothering to throw an error message.

And of course, because I originally used my own email address to set up my first Apple account back in the mists of time, I can't just add that to my newer Apple account (that Apple forced one for some reason I have now forgotten. I can't of course, simply delete the original account because I can't transfer purchases made with that account to my newer account.

I hate doing network stuff.

[Kim]

why are computer networks so illogical? Im trying to sort out emails on my own domains for a number of devices and the home WiFi Mesh network has decided to throw at curve ball by by losing connectivity to the internet but without bothering to throw an error message.

Pick at least one of:

Hysterical raisins
Microsoft
The Devil's Radio
DNS
Aliens


(I'm currently shooting thrilling videos of the BHPC's timing tag software failing to maintain a TCP connection to the race timing software, in the hope that it might help the developers fix the problem.  I had to re-upload the first one, becuase I hadn't realised the microphone was live, and had captured barakta swearing at a completely unrelated computer system in the background)

[Mr Larrington]

Trying to persuade Dropbox that I don’t need $SHARED_FOLDER cluttering up my Babbage-Engines any more, because it pertains to LEL, has been an exercise in bad swears and incoherent growling.

[Mr Larrington]

I am reinstalling Thunderbox on three two* Babbage-Engines.  It is this: tedious.

* Don’t think I'll bother doing the laptop coz I'm intending to replace it with one not “powered” by a blind crippled idiot vole sooner or later.

[Afasoas]

it would be grand to see the drive I have shared via samba on a puter that is connected to the same router as this laptop is, in this house.

You need to configure samba on that box to be the master browser - if it's always on.
Or run your own DNS server and rely on that, so that \\myFileServer\share will always resolve without relying on NetBIOS

Samba settings of interest in the global section of smb.conf are:

Code: [Select]

        domain master = yes
        local master = yes
        preferred master = yes
        os level = 65