Fettled any computer stuff today?

[Kim]

Just finished configuring privoxy to replace all instances of "Black Friday" with "Gazpacho Soup Day".

*shakes fist at the proliferation of https*

[Mr Larrington]

Relocated Lt. Col. Larrington (retd.) Win 10 laptop to where it can talk to a proper monitor, during the course of which I discovered that it'll actually deign to talk to an elderly Canon printer via the medium of a Win 8.1 driver, in spite of Canon's helpful advice to Win 10 owners having been "buy a new printer".

I shall give it a thorough inspection with Malwarebytes tomorrow, and a pin a notice to it reading 'The next time you let a cold caller have access to your PC you can just buy a new one'.

[woollypigs]

@Feanor please use the spoiler tags next time you post photos like these

[mcshroom]

I replaced the failing keyboard on my laptop. It's nice to have all the buttons functioning again

[Joe.B]

Carried out a bit of a midlife upgrade to the family PC I built up in 2009.  New RAM, up from 4G to 8G.  New much quieter PSU and a new and much, much quieter CPU fan.

[DrMekon]

Found out that Neato linked up with Alexa, so grabbed an Echo Dot at black friday price from Argos - and it works, despite me forgetting I didn't have my teeth in. I haven't got time to play with Alexa yet, so jury is still out.

https://youtu.be/7UJveqcrSIM

[Maverick]

Stage 1 of the upgrade to my home built NAS completed (see this thread https://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=100483.0). 2x 4TB installed and configured as ZFS mirror and RAM upgraded to 8GB. Data copied over from the existing disks and those now set up as a mirrored pair too. Just leaves me to upgrade FreeNAS from V9.1 to V9.10 which requires a new install on a larger thumb drive rather than an in situ upgrade. It is a lot speedier at finding and displaying files now.
While I was about it I installed Plex media server on the NAS and can now access my music collection from anywhere. Means I can think about ditching iTunes for media playback. which required my iMac to be available. 

[Mr Larrington]

Nowt to stop you putting iTunes database on a NAS drive though it does behave a bit strangely if you have two instances of iTunes running on different machines at the same time.

[tiermat]

Currently backing up a Samsung laptop so that I can then a) rebuild it and then b) "upgrade" it to Win10.

This is Mrs T's hand-me-down, TLD is getting it and Office 365 doesn't like printing text boxes or pictures from Word on Win7, which she has on her Acer laptop.

Luckily I have a load of free time at the moment, so I can spend hours watching a backup progress bar!

[Maverick]

Nowt to stop you putting iTunes database on a NAS drive though it does behave a bit strangely if you have two instances of iTunes running on different machines at the same time.

I used to have it set up like this but after a couple of incidents where the library got corrupted it went back on the iMac, also it didn't seem to work well with the AppleTV. With 2k+ albums & 500+ films, sorting out a corrupt library is a major pain. I'm going to try replacing the AppleTV with a RasPlex (http://www.rasplex.com/).

[Feanor]

Junior #2 showed up last night with a non-booting iPhone5.
Just sitting at an Apple logo. Forcing a re-start didn't help.

I don't *do* Apple.
So I then spent the next 2 hours doing Apple.

I had to install iTunes on a PC ( first big download of the evening )
Then force the iThing into recovery mode, to allow iTunes to hear it's whimperings.
Then iTunes needs to download the phone's software which was over a Gig ( second download of the evening ).

Then it took an hour at least to install the software onto the phone.
It spent most of that time 'Verifying' the software on the phone.

Finally, the aged phone creaked back into life.

[Kim]

I don't *do* Apple.
So I then spent the next 2 hours doing Apple.

Funny how that happens, isn't it?

[Vince]

Rebuilt the desktop with the 64 bit version of Mint instead of the 32 bit version.
Rebuilt an old laptop replacing Vista with Mint to use as a stage light controller. Assembled a DMX interface kit to use with it.

[Feanor]

I don't *do* Apple.
So I then spent the next 2 hours doing Apple.

Funny how that happens, isn't it?

Yes, but I have to grudgingly admit that the recovery process did actually work exactly as advertised.
I didn't have to root it, install a custom bootloader, download the ROM of the Day, SSH into it and vi some config files and re-compile the kernel.

I'm not sure what the hardware is, but it looks to me like the boot-loader is in hard ROM, and then loads a firmware image out of flash and passes control to the firmware.  That means that if the flash firmware image is broken, then the ROM bootloader will still run, and has enough capability to get a new firmware image from iTunes and flash it.

I think that 'Recovery Mode' is exactly that: Boot into the Rom Monitor, and wait for orders.

This is exactly how hardware should be.  Cisco stuff is the same; you can always get to the ROM Monitor to start from the ground up.

[Dibdib]

I don't *do* Apple.
So I then spent the next 2 hours doing Apple.

Funny how that happens, isn't it?

I've just had the opposite - trying to troubleshoot Mother Dibdib's Win10 wifi issues over the phone from a Mac-only household. Got there eventually though.

[Chris S]

Although the data on the attached drives gets backed up, it occured to me last night that I haven't done updates or sd-card image backups of my PIs since 2013; they are that reliable, I just forget they're there sometimes.

So I'm rectifying that this morning by lavishing them with attention, updates, and dd backups.

[woollypigs]

Well you have jinxed it now

[Chris S]

Well you have jinxed it now

Haha! Probably  .

After all, it violates one of my long-ingrained sayings - "Never try and do a working computer a favour."

Fingers remain crossed.

[SoreTween]

Yesterday: Renewed SurgeMail & upgraded to the latest version.  Very simple, very straightforward and worked exactly as it should at every step
Yesterday: Updated BitDefender on main desktop and commenced battle to get it working - failed.
Today: Completed and won battle with BitDefender.  Have they fixed the bug whereby it silently undoes the changes that Spybot Antibeacon makes to my hosts file?  Have they bollocks.  Fortunately IS2017 does have a switch to turn off hosts protection which is half a solution I suppose.
Today: Upgraded BitDefender on mail server, only a minor battle there.
Today: No motivation at all to complete updating BitDefender on the rest of the fleet.

[drossall]

So-far-unsuccessful attempt to revive Windows updates on a laptop. I noticed, this week, that it hasn't been updating since the attempt to get a free upgrade from Windows 7 to 10 failed in the middle of last year.

I'm sure I've read that that is a common problem. I've certainly Googled plenty of solutions for general Windows-doesn't-update issues. Keep trying...

[Jaded]

Trying to convert a Word document to a database friendly file. 

[DaveReading]

Trying to convert a Word document to a database friendly file. 

Cut-and-paste into Excel, tidy and save as a CSV.

[Tim Hall]

Got, with much help from The Boy, NFS sharing working on my Pi.

[Jaded]

Trying to convert a Word document to a database friendly file. 

Cut-and-paste into Excel, tidy and save as a CSV.

Nope.

Take the text out, put it into a plain text editor with REGEX and Grep

Fine a way of identifying the record delimiters from all the other carriage returns. Of which there are legion.
Replace them with @@@@@
Note some 'fields' in 'records' have multiple paragraphs and some don't. Establish a routine to deal with that.
Test the routine and fix the multiple instances where a sight check is the only way of dealing with the variations.
Replace all the munged characters caused by printers quotes and other weird characters.
Replace CRs with Tabs
Replace @@@@@ with CR

Have a glass of wine and then think about the best way of making the column 'Name' work. It has multiple forenames and a capitalised surname so a multi-step process.

Finally Hate Word and its acceptance of formatting with TABs and CRs. Hate it a lot.

[Feanor]

Finally Hate Word and its acceptance of formatting with TABs and CRs. Hate it a lot.

As any fule know, the only way to format text is to use a


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