I used to use two monitors. Being able to quickly maximize windows side-by-side is extremely useful, especially when photo/website editing, but my flat hasn’t the space for two large CRTs so I traded them for one widescreen LCD when I moved in. I’m very happy with it as a monitor, but it’s not the same. I recently got hold of a spare 15″ LCD, and hooked it up this morning. The resolutions don’t match and the two are at very different height - moving the mouse from one to another is a weird experience - but it works well nevertheless. I’ve a bunch of Google Gadgets taking up much of the screen currently: Gmails, Google Talk, a scratch pad, a disk/bandwidth monitor and BBC News. The background nature of the Gadgets means they’ll happily sit behind anything I drag over there. It’s helpful being able to shove chat windows out of my main work area.

From the Emerging Technology conference in San Diego:

Webb … demoed a little plastic robot that falls over when your friends go off IM and stands up when they come back online.

I want one! I’d like different poses for different people. Some would have happy raised arms, others a snap salute, ‘talk to the hand’ or a gorilla stance, and I know one person who definitely deserves Saturday Night Fever pointings.

On my desk I have a small magnetic chair that keeps hold of paper clips / screws / pins etc., and a few days ago I knocked it off the edge while playing with iDog cleaning. It landed on top of the printer, sending assorted tiny bits of metal down the paper feeder. The printer is now rather broken. Bugger. Epsons aren’t really designed to be taken apart (it’s not responding to the turn-it-upside-down-and-shake-it technique, sadly), but it’s either that or buy a new one. Bad Rowdy.

Plus, Windows just let me know that it restarted itself due to a ‘hard drive read error’. Urgh. Oh well, my computer’s been circling the drain of b0rk for a while now, what with being scared of USB devices and all, so this is probably a good early warning that it needs scrapping. Extra hard work for a while, I think.

I finally managed to fix my parents’ network this evening. A few days ago I’d replaced their original router, which was starting to play up after 15 months of heavy use, at which point everything went crazy and putting the original router in place didn’t solve the problem. If there is a time in an accountant’s year that you don’t want this to happen, it’s the end of January when all the tax returns are due in. I shored up their six computer network so that it mostly worked, albeit very slowly, and they had to jump through a few hoops to read and send emails for a couple of days. I couldn’t find any kind of software explanation, so resolved to start replacing hardware until it started working again. It turned out that the replacement router was broken on arrival. This was always a possibility, but had seemed unlikely enough that I checked everything else first. A shiny new Netgear is now sitting in its place, and everything (as of this evening, anyway) is going swimmingly. Phew.

Just back from dancing, where the teachers were working on my posture. Good grief. I had to start taking notes in the end, there was so much to remember. I must not lead with my arm. I must keep my ribcage up. I must move forward with the body rather than the feet. I must rise and fall less in the foxtrot. I can make outside steps easier using ‘contrary body movement’, where the left shoulder comes forward with the right foot and vice versa. And this is all walking in a straight line! I’m glad they’re getting more picky with me, but it’s difficult to concentrate on all of it at once. It feels great when I get it right, but that didn’t happen often this evening. Hopefully I’ll get there with practice.

Speaking of dancing¹ here is a Cockatoo named Macky doing the Makarena:

and speaking of things…that…are…er…something to do with the sky²…I like this picture of Comet McNaught too:

Time for bed, I think.

1. bow to my segue awesomeness [↩]
2. lost it [↩]

It’s 0215 and I’m only just home after trying to fix my parents’ network for much of the evening. It has, to lapse into technical jargon for a moment, gone completely doolally. Their old router makes no sense at all, and a replacement seems to drop to 1/5th of its usual speed as soon as it gets an IP address from the cable modem. I’m hoping it’ll all become clear in the morning.

On the bright side, at this time of night my route home is full of bunnies who stand up and watch as I drive past. It’s like Watership Down, except not so frightening.

I don’t like wireless networks. Well, that’s not true. Wireless networks are actually great, what I don’t like is supporting wireless networks. There are approximately 900 causes than result in the same symptom: the network disconnecting. It’s surprisingly difficult to even start pinning down the reason, you just have to try things until it starts working again. And even the most stable of connections will just drop off sometimes - that’s just the way it is (once every couple of months is perfectly reasonable behaviour). As you may have gathered, I’m struggling with this at the moment. It seems to disconnect at all security levels, on all channels, with the latest router firmware and card drivers, and never when I’m around and watching. I’m close to replacing the hardware bit by bit, which isn’t a very sophisticated solution.

Ah well. Today was nevertheless good, as I saw a kingfisher. I like kingfishers

Phew. I didn’t really fix anything, I just reinstalled Windows and it worked this time. The only difference was my firewire drive, which I left plugged in during the install in case attaching it afterwards had caused driver confusion before. I haven’t yet dared plug in any of the USB devices which were causing crashes - think I’ll leave that until tomorrow.

I recently applied for another job at the local library, after unsuccessfully interviewing for a position back in April. I spoke to the lady in charge of job applications to check there was nothing from before that would cause them to reject me immediately, and was told there wasn’t. She did mention, though, that the new position would involve dealing with the children’s groups that come into the library. I had no problem with this, but figured my chances were probably slim. I had a letter this morning to say I didn’t even make the interview shortlist, which is a shame. Never mind.

It looks like AMD have / are in the process of buying ATI. Interesting. Won’t mean anything to people outside of the tech industry, but it’s a fairly major move. AMD make processors while ATI handle the graphics cards. I wonder whether this’ll lead to NVIDIA allying strongly with Intel. Hmmm. Hard to predict where this’ll lead or if anything will really change - even the folks at Digg aren’t too sure what to make of it. Interesting times, though.

Me: I have won.
Laptop: What is this? I am running smoothly and without issue? I bow to your greatness.
Me: Don’t say that. It’s not even true. It only took half an hour once I had access to IDE connectors. I’ll be putting this conversation on the website, and that kind of statement would just be tempting fate.
Laptop: Oh glorious master, I…
Me: Shut up.
Laptop: As you wish. By the way, did you dream of somebody wanting you to repair their dead horse?
Me: Yes I did. How could you know that?
Laptop: I am the devil.

Just back from London. I went to see my uncle, and to replace the hard drive in his laptop. The task was:

Replace a hard drive, using only the surrounding laptop, a USB hard drive enclosure and a replacement drive, preferably without reinstalling Windows.

Not to be smug, but this is the kind of thing I can normally do with without much effort. It’s easy, especially when the drive is dying extremely slowly (chkdsk fixes it for a few days), and the whole process only takes a couple of hours. This time, however, my tech conversation went something like this:

Me: Hello, computer, I’d like to change your hard drive.
Computer: Dunno what you mean, I’m a plant.
Me: No, I think you’ll find you’re a computer. Look, see, you’ve a keyboard.
Computer: No I haven’t.
Me: Yes. Yes you do.
Computer: Don’t believe you NAA NAA NAAAAA NA.
Me: That’s as maybe, but, happily, I’m the one in control here, and I shall force you to my will.
Computer: Well, if you’re going to be like that, I’ll just break in mysterious and infuriating ways, until you either die of exhaustion or hurl me through the wall.
Me: I’ve faced stronger than you, my friend. Prepare for battle!

[three days later]

Me: See my white flag? I mean it. Give me a chance. Please. I’m begging you.

After three days, I had to give up and bring it back with me. I shall break its spirit. It will be vanquished. I feel like the various problems I had should be mentioned, although I’ll hide them from the front page…

Continue reading ‘Back, with a laptop’

Dear Broadband Provider,

I am very happy with my broadband service. I have had no problems since signing up with you three months ago. Indeed, I have recommended your service to others. I’d like to make one small suggestion, however.

If my payment method fails for any reason (let’s say, I changed bank and forgot to update the card details in your system) it would be pleasant if you could let me know before disconnecting the service. An email, a phone call, or perhaps a couple of days leeway would be appreciated. This would spare the feelings of a poor innocent router, who was on the receiving end of a number of insults this afternoon.

I note that your notification email does state I’ll have 14 days to fix the problem, so I imagine this whole thing was due to a glitch rather than actual policy. Please, though, think of the routers.

Andrew

When you turn up to a computer job to find a dot matrix and a 5.25inch floppy disk, you know it’s going to be an interesting hour.

For somebody who makes a living fixing other people’s computers, I do seem to break my own on a worringly regular basis. By 1100 yesterday I’d swapped out the motherboard, and spent the rest of the day trying to talk the hard drive into booting properly so that I can install Windows. I think I need (mother of all evils) a floppy disk¹, which is problematic since I don’t have a floppy disk drive. I think I know one I can steal. Back sometime, hopefully in the near future.

1. so that I can press F6 and load SATA drivers during the initial install procedure, which currently works ok. The motherboard claims to ‘emulate PATA’ for SATA drives, but, well, doesn’t. [↩]

Generally, when I get a phone call about a computer problem it’s something like “Word won’t load”, or “the network icons don’t work any more”, or “the printer won’t do landscape.” Nine times out of ten the problem is software-related, and doesn’t take more than twenty minutes to fix. Not, however, this weekend.

In the last five days I’ve had four computers Just Stop Working. The first went down after a power cut, refusing to boot from a cd, let alone the hard disk. I diagnosed a motherboard b0rked beyond all hope, and put in an order for some replacement hardware. On Sunday my sister’s laptop abruptly stopped booting with “load needed dlls for kernel”, which was a new one on me. With a bit of luck that’s some kind of massive software cockup, and a repair install will fix it up. This morning one of the office PCs didn’t even get so far as booting, simply beeping like a demented droid. To be fair, it’s nearly six years old and is due for death fairly soon, so I ordered a replacement motherboard / cpu / ram for that too. This evening I’ve been told that my uncle’s laptop - only six months old - is stuck in a nearly-get-into-windows-but-conk-out-and-restart-just-before-anything-happens-loop, even in Safe Mode. First thoughts are that it’s a dying hard drive, but I’ll need to take a look.

It’s really not all that common to have such major problems. I must have upset the electron fairy.

I’ve finally been forced to buy a new motherboard, and it arrived yesterday. It’s an Asus A8R-MVP, and features include:

• Use incredibly complex USB devices like webcams / iPods / card readers without taking down Windows!
• Plug in firewire drives without completely kakking up the boot process, requiring a keypress on every restart!
• No ridiculously broken¹ hardware firewall!

The above problems were inherent in my Abit nForce4 KN8 motherboard, and seem to be quite common in the nForce4 line. I’m staying well clear of that particular brand from now on. The new mobo is an entirely different chipset, and is reputed to Actually Work Properly.

Motherboard replacements are probably the most annoying operation to perform on a computer. The whole case has to be taken apart and reassembled, and then Windows must be completely reinstalled. It’ll certainly be worth it, but will take a fair while, so I’ll leave it until next week.

1. some have claimed that it is possible, with windows reinstalls and all sorts of software manipulation, to get this working properly - even if true, it’s still crazy [↩]