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October 14 Snow Leopard Problem It appears there is a potential problem with the guest account that could wipe all your data Click here September 01 Why I couldn't post from Brands to the album hereNumskull. I hadn't got the email address right. Just sussed it and posted a test pic and it's OK July 14 Microsoft are going to introduce a free web based office suite like Google Docs More on the BBC Web Site I use Google Docs quite a bit. When it came out it was very limited but they have stuck with it and introduced more features. OK, if you want lots of features to set up a model to track your business this may not be for you. But if its keeping track of the household bills, write a few letters etc then its fine. The big thing here at Chaos Manor is that we can access it from any of our computers. And of course there are no worries about backing up the files. Google take care of all that for you. June 22 Taken the feeds to the blog and Twitter out of the main site The main site had become very slow to load. Problem seemd to have been the RSS feeds to this Blog and Twitter. I think the problem lies with Feedzilla, the RSS feed reader. This isn't the first time we have had this problem and the only way out was to patch the feeds out. So to goto the Blog or Twitter you will have to go to them directly. March 12 Maybe, Just maybe, the Front Page problem is sorted These computers, never going to catch on February 13 Bloody Computers. The Clouds Playlist works in Firefox but not Explorer despite upgrding to the latest version of Flash Bit brain dead on this at the moment. Is their a rocket scientist in the house? January 08 I seem to have got the tweets feeding through to the main site using an RSS feed so I should be able to do lots of live reports during The Exeter using my mobile. Got a feed for Mike working as well. Be nice to have some more Why the Twitter thing? When I have done live reports before I have used an RSS feed from my Blog (which is on Windows Live). The problem here is that I can only update that by email. That was fine when I had a genuine Blackberry with a nice keyboard. Unfortunately now I am semi-retired the day job doesn't provide one! The mobile I have should work as a real Blackberry but the reality is it doesn't. I can send email but its a real pain as I need to be online during the whole process. Not so easy when you only have a few minutes in a queue. Twitter is designed to send short sharp messages by SMS text. So lets give it a try. The other advantage of Twitter is that it should be relatively easy for anyone to do the same. Then if I pick up their RSS feeds I can publish them on the site. Live reports from every competitor, there's a thought. Seriously, trials organisers could sit in front of their computer in mission control and follow the whole event from the comfort of their armchair, directing operations by mobile phone! July 12 I seem to have fixed the computerMike came and collected his computer today. Seems to be OK now. I think the re-format and re installation of windows was necessary as it was riddled with worms, viruses and goodness what else, to the extent it couldn't identify its own hardware. I have ditched Norton and installed the free AVG Virus protection. All the problems occurred while his computer was supposed to be protected by Norton! As you can tell I am no longer a Norton fan! Software wise I think we may go for Open Office. I plan to use that on my own Dell as well. July 07 Fixing a sick Computer I think I have previously commented previously on the problems with Mike H's computer. Anyway its over here at Chaos Manor. Mike has backed up its data and the plan is to reformat the disk and reinstall windows. June 18 Chaos Computing adds a UPS and a Western Digital My Book With the Dell established as the main machine here at Chaos Manor it was time to re-examine data security. I reckon the problem I had a few weeks ago (Click Here) was caused by the power cut. So, as planned, I have invested in a Belkin UPS. This powers the Dell, the old HP which is still on-line as Networked machine as I haven't transferred all the data from it, and the two USB hard drives I use for Data Back-Up. The UPS is connected to the Dell by a USB cable. The Dell has some Bulldog softwate installed so that if the UPS goes onto battery power it triggers a soft shutdown of the Dell. All good stuff. Tested it and it works. The only problem is that the USB connection fails when the Dell goes to sleep (I never switch it off). However, it seems to reconnect automatically when it wakes up which i hope it would do when the UPS switches to battery power. (memo to self, must test this). The Western Digital My Book is a 1TB USB external drive. Its quite small and seems to switch itself on and off as needed which is neat (there is no on/off switch). The Dell came with Norton Save and Restore 2 (set to backup to drive D on the Dell) and I have reconfigured this to back up to the WD My Book. So the Data security set up here is now:- Dell (Main Computer)
May 14 Computers can be irritating!OK, I guess many of you came to that conclusion a long time ago! The situation is that the new Dell at Chaos Manor is functioning OK after the Raid 1 drama. In fact it seems to a very nice computer, but.... It has Vista of course, which I like. Lots of ways to personalise it, including being able to set a nice display of your pictures as a screen saver. But I have found when I use this the sleep feature doesn't function. That's important as I am one of these people who doesn't switch their computer off, so I rely on "sleep" to make some modest energy savings! Searched all over the net and discovered that's one of the joys of Vista! My MacBook allows you to use photos from your hard drive as an ever changing desktop. But that doesn't seem available in Vista. May 07 A busy day at Chaos ManorThe plan had been to take an early morning bike ride. Started biking again yesterday. A nice eight mile route along Bromham ridge and back through Stagsden. All but a couple of miles off road. There was to be no biking this morning though. It all started to go wrong on Tuesday night when there was a power cut from around 9pm through to the early hours. Restarting the computers, yes there is more than one here now, I immediately noticed the the Raid on the new Dell wasn't initialising. OK lets talk about Raid. I specified Raid 1 on the new Dell. It has two 750GB hard drives that Mirror each other. So if one goes down you can just carry on working using the one remaining as they are exact copies. Then when you fit a replacement drive it rebuilds the data on the replacement, from the good one, all by itself. Back to this morning. What to do? Answer panic! Looking at the Disks I could see that both were there, working and apparently OK. call Dell. Lets start with the weather. "It's always Sunny here in Bangalore". OK sarcasm aside I have found Dells Phone Support un-failing helpful. I gave them remote access to the computer and they checked everything and said it was OK. But no Raid 1! They said that the Hitachi Drives should rebuild themselves and they would ring in two days to see all was well. The computer still worked so lets try. The drives churned away, the disc light flashed and three hours later it initialised the Raid configuration and all seems to be well. I can only think that the power outage sparked some data loss, Raid 1 recognised it and set to work. nervy time though. I think I will invest in a UPS and a 1 TB USB Drive to provide extra insurance. No biking tomorrow. I am off to Yorkshire to look at a possible new trials car!! April 24 Its all go with the computersThe Dell seems to work OK. Have spent all day sorting out the office here at Chaos manor so it sits in prime place on my desk. Cables-bloody-cables! have still got the old HP live as there's stacks off stuff on that still to be transferred. The LAN will help with that! Still can't get the Internet to work on Mike's computer. It's connected to his ISP but will not connect to Explorer - Firefox - Outlook Express or Skype. Pretty much exhausted the possibilities I can come up with so all that's left is a Windows re-install and I have never done one of those! |
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