@sawboman
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I have just been dealing with my own PC. I left it for a while and when I came back I could not do anything with the beast. I tried to wind back to a previous image and did all the usual things but no go. Happily it turned out that the issue was a failing and then failed keyboard which lost the ability to deal with certain keys. I have not had a problem like that before but it did show me how easily really stupid things can trip you up. Could it be that it was not the update but a machine error or failure that caused the issue? On the other hand it could be worth checking that the device in question is not one that HP have noted as having driver issues and did not want to update at this stage. As Dave suggested an alternative OS could confirm the hardware status and allow a better diagnosis. Do you have access to an older Windows 10 ISO to try?
Ed, I guess that the world of options for other inflation failed currencies was just too rich to cover them all, that example was a bad one but it has been just one of many. It is interesting that the trading vouchers have not really taken off except perhaps within very limited areas and even then I doubt that they have penetrated very far into trade.
Richard we were both wrong on the composition of Jetex fuel: “Jetex rocket engines were quite popular with model airplane, boat, and car builders through the early 1970s, at which point the fuel supplies began to disappear. Most Internet sources posit that Imperial Chemicals Industries (ICI) ceased making the fuel pellets due to a combination of liability and regulation issues. ICI, based in Scotland, manufactured the Jetex fuel pellets* from a measured blend of guanidine nitrate, 2,4-dinitroresorcinol, potassium nitrate (aka saltpeter), iron oxide, kaolin, and asbestos. Today, obtaining the required chemicals, or even doing an Internet search for them (as I just did), will probably get you a big red flag in the Department of Homeland Security’s database. There are probably a couple agents on the way to my house as I write this.”
I am not surprised that I was wrong, back in the 1950s information was scarce as you had to rely on paper publishing or word of mouth. It was a circle I fell out of touch with by about 1962.
For purely fun types of rocket there were the pump driven types that were simply pressurised with said pump or the non pyrotechnic ones that relied on weak acid and something like bicarbonate of soda. I saw one demonstrated in the channel 4 programme on food last night. They both have the advantage of no fire risk.
Yes I played about with the Jetx motors in days gone by. They were really rockets not jets I was told at the time their fuel was based on picric acid, though how it was ‘detuned’ to be a safer rocket fuel from its explosive roots I have no idea. I had more success with models using compression ignition engines.
It has been no surprise to many who could not see anything behind the craze. It felt too much like many of the old pyramid style games beloved of many. While many paper or Fiat currencies (thank you PM for the link) have a vestige of something behind them such as a government, the lack of such recourse simultaneously attracted some and repelled others. I never worked out how you could value such an ephemeral item, though other paper items do sell and appreciate, just look at e.g. first day covers in the stamp world. Worthless in a postal sense but nearly priceless in a trading market. Was it popular for being popular or was there a real value proposition? I never worked that one out.
I saw this being discussed a while back after experiments to compare the effect of such as background aromas, sounds, the shape of drinking glasses, the weight of the drinking vessels and lighting with lighting winning ‘the upset everyone race’.
As for remote control systems apart from remote control for some window blinds which has been a godsend, we have struggled to think of ways that our life would improve with more more in the way of automation. Since my wife’s various treatments her mobility has noticeably deteriorated with the greatest hit coming from the major cancer clear-out operation three weeks back, that may or my not have succeeded, she has a ‘surprise’ appointment with the oncologist on Wednesday. I wondered if her physical limitations might spring any new automation thoughts but so far we have continued with no new needs emerging. One of the operation sites is looking a bit suspect and was termed ‘wound breakdown’ in telephone discussions, so we are wondering how well the issue will be received on Monday when yet another check up will be encountered, the next three days have at least 4 appointments already. The good news is that our disabled daughter has finally been moved into supported living style arrangements. Our only special black Friday, cyber Monday and week style purchases have been some support style garments to assist my wife’s recovery and a new mattress for said daughter.
How do PCs know that times are stressful?
Having spent time taking my wife’s car out this morning to keep it going after a couple of weeks when I did not have the time I then followed up with collecting daughter via a 40 plus mile round trip as she wanted to see her mother. The grand idea was to await the new mattress and take it and daughter back after its arrival, for another 60~90 minutes 40 plus mile round trip. So off I went to the PC I went to check the progress of the goods, only to find the PC acting bizarrely. For some reason it later turned out, the keyboard was cancelling all attempts to do anything, but the mattress turned up anyway, then it was taken with daughter to her new home where both were happily(?) set up. Every previous attempt to recover the PC having failed an old keyboard was pressed into service and all was well once more. The PC’s odd behaviour was a bit of stress I could have done without, though I suspect that a key could have become stuck and subsequently released itself, the usual plethora of restarts, attempts at restoration and so on all having failed – they appeared to have been simply cancelled by the gremlin. Perhaps I cleared the keyboard’s issue by accident while moving it about.
As for the lights, perhaps more than 80% are still the original 1992 vintage ones we put in place when we moved in, most of the others are LEDs replacements with a few CFLs outside. I did want to think about LEDs through the house, but with somewhere close to 50 or more bulbs involved even cheap LEDs cost a fair amount and would they pay me back in my lifetime?
Welcome back Bob, sepsis nothing to be messed about with so I know you will have had a rough time of things, glad you are better now, and keep on trucking.
The pharmacy wait has been a feature of hospital discharges for a very long time. Fifteen or twenty years ago the local hospital set a record for us of 48 hours to get the medicine available. Happily there was enough at home to tide things over until the hospital came up with the goods. Now with a different hospital it is the same. My wife was discharged last Monday, no discharge letter and no medication available. The letter was posted on afterwards, we think it was written about another patient as it said the admission was an emergency case – it was not and said my wife was free of allergies, she is not. They did go to extensive efforts to avoid triggering an allergies, which was more than they achieved with the lady in the next bed whose stay was extended by 8 days…
As for the discharge drugs, we hope to collect them today as there are appointments for this afternoon. I was not happy to make the 40 mile round trip before, as it would mean leaving my wife alone for three hours at a time when leaving her was contra indicated. There was no postal option given. Since some of the items are controlled drugs I can understand restrictions but it was fortunate that we had our own semi private stash of the medicines in question.
Dave, chemists have always been private contractors as have GPs and most dentists since the foundation of the NHS, though having a contractor run pharmacies on hospital sites is not one I have encountered before. The local hospital has about a 3 hour turn round time on a good day if you are a walk in patient, ward deliveries take longer. We have persuaded the consultant to issue an open prescription that we can take to the local pharmacy where service is usually about 20 minutes.
The first two machines to get 1809 were the oldest and the slowest, both are portables. The three desk tops are still awaiting their call to arms on 1809 – and one has had the graphics updated by a recent replacement. I guess there is a method, but it is not always easy to work outwhat it could be.
Ed, agreed. I was not knocking the Chinese products as such, but the tat end of the market where no thought has been applied to the product at all From What Dave said the vast number of patents on the technology are held by Chinese owners so the basic components will very likely come from Chinese sources. But for the £25~ £50 range and possibly for a bit, the thought given to the software and more importantly the support will be at a very reduced scale and price. I can believe that most of the hardware will be very consistent across a wide range of devices allowing for increased economies of scale, but the softer stuff like support and software itself should differentiate the offerings.
I was referring to the bans on networking iron from the likes of several Chinese makers, e.g Huawei as announced by a number of countries, though BT remained major users at the last count. There is a vast difference between the tat end and the networking ends, in size, capability, complexity, price, and throughput.
Interesting Dave, some councils will loan out nose recording equipment to residents to allow an assessment of noise levels. I wonder how good one has to be at dictation to take down verbatim what was shouted through a party wall? A party wall is not a situation I suffer but if the noise from outside is great enough to be intelligible inside it would have to be a likely subject for noise abatement issues. To be honest there are a whole lot of other issues that spring to mind – though I will leave them out. Overall the suggestion would appear to rule out the use of any recording equipment, even within the confines of one’s own home; a pretty draconian situation and one I have certainly crossed, though not to date fallen foul of, e.g. by use of a home video camera in the past.
If you are selective, need something and know the ‘normal prices’ then you are best placed to find if a bargain exists, but nothing is certain. If you are lucky you can pick a winner, but do not be fooled by the hype into buying over priced or unnecessary ‘bargains’. I did get a replacement for a failed item at about 30% less than the usual market rate yesterday. I considered it worth a snap buy action.
@Tippon, I have not closely followed the news, I am long out of the baby alarm market! Though I have seen ongoing comments that nothing ever get retro fixed and since the publicly available access codes were hard wired, change was not possible in many of the rubbish devices. Even those which had a user definable set up, often had retained the default hard wired access capability.
Twenty years ago I could sit in my lounge and go into network systems in many countries and, should I so wish change most parameters affecting their operation. However, I was then operating far above the consumer device level more gateway and main network level. What has exited the ban hammer in several countries are concerns that such remote access may have been defaulted into some supplier’s code bases, allowing them the possibility of turning access on or off or diverting copies of data flowing through the remote network. I am not commenting on the ease or difficulty of such measures, though my own experience does support the idea that changing key parameters is trivially easy once you have the required access. I do stress that such access concerns are at the higher levels of networks, the tat end of the market is mainly of interest to the mischief makers and local petty crooks who could watch coming and going at places of interest.
Dave, is recording voice along with video inside your own dwelling a major issue?
I understand that public areas, e.g. the road outside is a completely different matter, but an internal monitoring system armed by your action on leaving the premises or on retiring to bed (- a condition of some insurance policies), appears a very different can of worms. While I do have a monitored alarm system, I do not have any video or voice options, though several neighbours do have video recording, (which they have shared with the police). Too many other issues have intruded to distract me from making any advances in the video direction and in the absence of a proven need, I have lacked a driver.
I’ve now decided that any product the US or UK warn us off because they are insecure, actually means, they can’t get access to them. And as I’d take an ‘enemy’ state spying on me over my own, I’d take the product the gov warns me off. Quite sad when you think about it.
Steve that is all a bit fake news to me. The complainers about the tat end of the market junk were not government agencies from either the US or the UK or anywhere else, but consumer organisations and even magazines in a range of countries. They investigated such ‘useful?’ events as silly barstewards swearing at babies over internet miss-connected baby alarms. I am not quite sure what gain most of us obtained from the spread of the mirai bug/worm via the wide open junk. I have severe doubts that such junk is ever considered remotely useful to any government agency anywhere other than those keen to multiply cash flow by supplying the crap. I do agree that you view you put forward is sad given its down sides.
I think I’ll stick to cameras that can upload to Amazon, or one of the other big names. I’m not sure any of them do upload to “Amazon”. Watch out for “Works with Alexa” as that’s another empty phrase and from what I saw of the Arlo is pretty much just show on Fire TV or the Echo Show. On the security side of things I’m not sure how much is “state spying” and how much is just crap product. I think it’s the latter. The noises coming out of the USA are largely propaganda and talk about pot calling kettle black! Companies like Hikvision now go to great lengths to have their products independently scrutinised. The Chinese hold all the patents on IP cameras because the once dominant USA ignored it and just stuck with analogue.
I agree, the crap end of the market is all trussed up so do not be surprised if the kit stinks. You do not have to be a state organ to break in via open doors. Russian bedroom hackers appeared to have been the main game players the last time I read anything and for them it was a game, though they might sell on their better hits if there was any money to be made. The devices are simply insecure by design and lack of thought as to the consequences of limited ‘cheap’ efforts. IOT is more IDIOTIC (Internet Direct Integration of Threats Including Chaos) in their case by allowing the connection of really dumb ill conceived devices. As Dave suggests, it is not impossible for others to try to inject a little sanity into the mess.
No @Tippon, the issue with the cheap tat end of the market is very different to the issue with the so called Big Iron end of the market. Trump was taking primary aim at the networking kit as this is where the big money is spent. The tat end of the market is closer to used tissues in his mind, (does he even have a mind?), think mirai worm and other people watching your child in bed, or your living room type security. Cheap tat has common weaknesses allowing anyone with the desire to do global searches for affected devices and then exploit them at random for whatever purposes they wish. This end of the market does not care about security – it costs money so why bother.The weaknesses in this kit were widely talked about before Trump blasted onto the scene.
The networking kit is produced by others and is suspected of having embedded security weakness allowing traffic of interest to be skimmed off and copied to China, a very different can of worms if you will pardon the expression.
Some doubts have been expressed about handsets from some Chinese makers allowing all sorts of criminal activity, though so far Apple kit, which is about as Chinese as anything else has dodged the bullet – so perhaps Trump’s efforts there are just political games.
I am really sorry to hear his news, please on pass my best wishes for speedy progress when you can. Richard
Tippon, I thought that Xiaomi were recently roasted for their near total lack of any security in their devices which allowed them to be subverted for any purpose the subverter cared to name?
Nice chair, I did not come across those wheels, but they look to be a very good choice, far better than the sharp edged metal ones. I might go for something like that when the present chair or pads wear down a bit. My current chair has had a number of years’ use and it gets used a lot.
Oh well, perhaps I did something I should not have done as the machine ran into a problem and has restarted after a stack overflow issue while running the Dell device checking program. Perhaps I should leave that out for the future, at least the error message was different. The PC came with Vista and is not really supported for running Windows 10.
My laptop that had troubles is once more about to stick a toe into the 1809 troubled waters. None of its troubles were of the type noted in the recent reports so I wonder how well it will go this time. The previous issue was stated to be due to driver errors affecting the USB server function, but the reports looked hard to stand up.
Now it will be watch this space!
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