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

[woollypigs]

Me too, though watch out for the app, Google Authenticator, as it have had a problem for the last two years, what it struggles with the summer vs winter time change (the period that US or UK has changed over but UK or US still drag their feet). The Key it tells you is about an hour out.

So I swapped to FreeOTP, which has worked fine for me on Facebook, LogMeIn, Dropbox and Google.

[woollypigs]

It does tell you that your IT is getting a bit old when you need to:

1/ Turn on old dead HP All-in-One (where the printer is dead but the scanner works just fine)
2/ Plug USB cable into it and the laptop.
3/ Insert your 2Gb CompactFlash into the HP.
4/ Press scan on HP and tell it to save scan to CF.
5/ Find file of the scan on the mounted CF and copy it over to laptop.

[hellymedic]

My Facebook page is talking to me in Spanish.
I have changed nothing on my Babbage engine.

[tiermat]

Que?

[hellymedic]

I was wrong; it was Portuguese (Brasil). Seems quite a few others had this or Polish.

[Karla]

I'm on a LabVIEW training course.  We spent the first hour this morning doing for and while loops, with several people having a detailed discussion about these fascinating new concepts that they'd apparently never come across before.   

Give me strength.

[David Martin]

We all started somewhere. Be patient.

[Karla]

True - but the course was very much a case of 'Introduction to programming ... using Labview' rather than 'Introduction to Labview'.  We spent the first couple of days going over the basic constructs that you find in any high level language (data types, boolean logic, different types of loops, arrays) in great detail, then spent the last day covering the bits that are the reasons why people use Labview (e.g. controlling hardware, gathering and exporting data from said hardware) at a gallop. 

I'm a bit less annoyed than I could be though, for two reasons: I paid an academic discount rather than full price, and in the rest of the week I've managed to do what I wanted with Labview so the last day's skim coverage was in fact sufficient.

[T42]

The monitor I thought would hook up nicely to my Pi has interfaces from before ye Fludde.  Have to pinch the Inlaw Paw's 22" Dell.  Seems incongruous, a thing the size of a box of Swan Vestas driving something that size.

Shame we gave away the old 42" TV...

[David Martin]

Try a £10 hdmi to vga converter. Works just fine for me.

[Tim Hall]

Try a £10 hdmi to vga converter. Works just fine for me.

There's an olden days output on the Pi too. Component or something. The yellow RCA one anyway.

[Kim]

Composite video.

Unfortunately, fonts that are readable at sensible sizes on a PAL/NTSC display died out with the Amiga.  So it's only a practical solution for very specific applications.  Playing games in emulators, for example.

[Mr Larrington]

Bruiser McHuge's mouse appears to have drunk itself utterly to DETH on contact cleaner after I tried to cure its annoying habit of assigning no/one/two clicks to a single prod of the right button chiz.

[Kim]

I successfully replaced the microswitch in my mouse when it got like that.  Even more shockingly, when one of barakta's rodents (of a completely unrelated molishment) went a bit iffy, it turned out to use the same switches (of which I now had a bag of n-1).  It turns out that standardisation is fine when you don't expect people to even think of repairing things.

[T42]

Try a £10 hdmi to vga converter. Works just fine for me.

Cheers.  I was looking at DVI converters - the Pi site says to use powered ones, that come in as pricey as a 7" touchscreen.

Just ordered a VGA converter for 7€ on Amazon.

[Mr Larrington]

I successfully replaced the microswitch in my mouse when it got like that.  Even more shockingly, when one of barakta's rodents (of a completely unrelated molishment) went a bit iffy, it turned out to use the same switches (of which I now had a bag of n-1).  It turns out that standardisation is fine when you don't expect people to even think of repairing things.

The clickiness was still there after The Treatment but cursor movement decided it had had enough.  The LED inside the trackball housing lights up but that's all chiz.  A new one was twenty quid

[David Martin]

Try a £10 hdmi to vga converter. Works just fine for me.

Cheers.  I was looking at DVI converters - the Pi site says to use powered ones, that come in as pricey as a 7" touchscreen.

Just ordered a VGA converter for 7€ on Amazon.

I've got one working just fine on the Pi Zero.

[T42]

Mine arrived today. Maybe get at it this weekend.

[David Martin]

Just had a Pine64 board arrive. Now to decide what to do with it. It is supposedly a grown up version of the Pi with more IO, bigger processor and memory.
And OS distros for android and many other things.

[SoreTween]

Ah the sweet satisfaction of success, I have won my battle with Adobe ARM.

I've tried all the suggestions on the net - fecking thing comes back.
I've scoured and cleansed the registry of all related settings - fecking thing comes back.
I've disabled the service  - fecking thing comes back.
I've deleted the service and the executables - fecking thing comes back BUT Mr Adobe you've now made a mistake.  That kind of activity is not self repair, it's virus like behaviour and it WILL get killed.  I'm no longer metaphorically idly hitting delete, you have my full and focussed attention.

I'm slightly disappointed.  All it took was replace the executables with zero byte files marked read only.  Every time in future I run Reader and get two windows errors telling me Mr Adobe's shitware AdobeARM.exe cannot be run I shall smile.

[Phil W]

Regenerated my osm maps for GB and Ireland to the latest mapping data as in osm upto last night. Edited my style files and finally got it to generate maps where it won't auto route down footpaths, bridleways and off road tracks and will avoid trunk roads unless I explicitly click down them. Yeah routing fit for purpose.

[Mr Larrington]

Been fiddling wif ETS2 Studio to make custom truck paint jobs.  Market value of this l33t 5k1ll: 0

[dave r]

I upgraded to Lubuntu 16.04 a few weeks ago, I now find that though a DVD operates normally, I insert disc and the little window opens for me to decide what I'm going to do with it, if I insert a CD I get the message Location is not mountable, though I can access it through the music player, strange! It mounts the camera and USB stick normally, very strange.

[Kim]

Audio CDs *aren't* mountable, except when there's some trickery going on to pretend to the user that they are.  There's no filesystem on them, just an audio stream.

Why it doesn't recognise them as such and offer to open a music player or something is a good question.  It's the sort of thing you'd expect a distro like that to do.

[dave r]

Audio CDs *aren't* mountable, except when there's some trickery going on to pretend to the user that they are.  There's no filesystem on them, just an audio stream.

I know, normally inserting one just brings up a little window similar to the one a  DVD brings up, but now I'm getting the error message instead, which is very annoying. It looks like a reacurance of a problem they had a few years ago, I found plenty about it when I searched but it was all old stuff.