Losing sight of my remote disks

I discovered that my two remote disks cannot be seen on my W10 laptop, nor my elementary OS laptop. I worked round this by rebooting the disks which are connected to the network via an RJ45/USB connector to a BT Home Hub. This should work better than that. This is no longer a problem as…

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wannacry and W8.1RT

After the Shadow Brokers released the NSA treasure trove, it became necessary to determine which personal windows systems required remediation. All my windows systems have been upgraded to W10 and so would seem to be clean, except the Nokia tablet, running W8.1 RT. Intelligence says it should have been patched by Windows Update, and so I wrote…

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PC to SMS

There are still people who only use feature phones or even simpler. How can one use a key board to send messages via SMS. Here are my notes, Twitter, ICQ and SMS gateways at the moment. I marked this as deprecated today. The CMS states that this article was created in March 2017, but the…

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Windows 8.1 apps

Microsoft are encouraging the use of online accounts with windows. Not everyone wants this. I was asked by someone without an account, who uses so-called local accounts how to get into their mail when challenged for a password.

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Hotpoint Fridge Freezer HMB312AAI

Our fridge freezer is a Hotpoint HMB 312I or maybe an HMB312AAI. I need some spare parts. I no longer own this fridge and some of the links have gone away; I have replaced them with web archive copies. I hope this is useful to someone!

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Exporting ello.co

This it seems is no longer relevant. I have marked it deprecated. The ello URL syntax described i.e.  http://ello.co/username.json no longer works. They weren’t very helpful to the project when I first looked at it. This post morphed into a generic web login via scripts page. I will consider splitting it and making the ello…

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Auto-translating a web page

This page was originally set up in 2015 when looking at using REST to invoke web site translations. My original code is still available on the test web site and below but Google & Babelfish have changed their APIs. I decided to refactor the page in 2022. The changes in the google API have been…

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Multiple Audio channels on Windows 8

For various reasons at work, I am mucking around with multiple audio channels, from mic to disk, from mic to app, etc.. Windows 8, doesn’t seem to have an easy way to switch, or at least the sound control panel applet is hidden away behind several buttons…. no it’s not, searching for sound will find…

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pump.io and microblogging

I returned to pump.io in Oct 2016 and again in May 2017 when I rebuilt the page deprecating aged content . The page had remained unchanged since I had to stop my 2015 experiments.

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Managing RFEs & Wish Lists

It’s been a while since I looked at get satisfaction and user voice. Both are now focused at selling to the supplier and it would seem that one can no longer take a single whinger view.  This page was deprecated in Nov 2020.

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Pidgin & TRM Runes

While trying to configure pidgin to act as a console for TRM once known as Reuters’ Messenger, I came across this page at their sourceforge site which documents the magic runes, critically the User Name.

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Launching unindexed programs in W8.1

With windows 8.1, my usual desktop metaphor for calling programs and the optimal alternative are less easy to implement; this is especially true for programs that are only occasionally used. I have historically created a folder called “More” and placed favourite’s to the program into the folder. (This is in order to keep my desktop…

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Leaving a W7 laptop

I need/want to recondition my W7 laptop. This was written in 2014; it is quite detailed on how to rebuild a wondows 7 laptop, and not totally wrong today although there are better versions of the tools today (1/1/2023).

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Mac Appstore won’t upgrade

I hit the problem with my Mac Book Mavericks build that the App Store wouldn’t run an Xcode Upgrade. It offers me the terms and conditions but there’s no continue button. A, now disappeared thread on the Mac support forums offers a very complex diagnostic process or proposes that you download a free application to…

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