[Richard]

JayCeeDee wrote:

Mine, that couldn’t get past Anniversary Edition, has now just updated the last 3 or 4 updates without any drama – searching for a tree to cuddle!! – but they have all been relatively minor ones.

That is a strange thing, I had a similar pattern, my wife’s PC did one of the big ones three big ones back, but nothing else did and they were getting left behind. Someone I know suggested down loading the update to a USB key so I did that and all of the machines bar one went straight through the remaining machine then woke up, (did not disturb the rival to the bear with a sore head) and completed its updating in one giant leap to be ready for said user to go ahead with their day. Since then all, have for the most part been happy machines. I still avoiding prodding the bear’s rival.

[Richard]

Why use an ‘ape’ to do what you can do better yourself. I have nothing from the tumble Weed-Park, sorry MS Store, it needs an MS log in and is a waste of money venture.

Libraries or whatever sound and are crap.

[Richard]

That sound entirely reasonable and could account for the watch hell freeze over time it takes.

I hate the really stupid way that the file browser miss-operates. You open it up, try to find what you want on the ‘X;’ drive and the stupid thing send you back to where you don’t want to be, forcing you to scroll down a second time. The time lost while it goes nowhere is a really stupid farce. I saw an account of the reactivation project for the old file manager, it cannot be worse than the failure in Windows 10, but it was not clear how easy it would be to compile it to a working executable. I have not compiled anything for a good many years probably back in the late 1980s or very early 90s.

I do not want hopelessly slow and totally pointless libraries, I want files, and preferably the right file(s).

[Richard]

I understood that in a recent school shoot out the available armed presence followed LDV, Look, Duck, Vanish. Perhaps the gun totting state of US schooling makes home schooling popular. Though, allowing those with mental health issues easy access to armaments is never going to end well. One mother’s self defence ‘arsenal’ took out the mother sundry other folks as well as school kids – but the mother, and I think the unbalanced son had fire arms training.

Sadly the drug and gang (non) culture in parts of London is now making that an ugly hostile place.

[Richard]

I have only seen a few bits of yesterday’s master class. The comments suggest he had a book of scripted answers, was more wooden than a chidren’s puppet and that the questioners were due for a retirement home sometime last year or the year before. I am not sure how they were chosen but it was not apparently on the basis of having any relevant knowledge, the time of day as a question would probably have needed 24 hours notice. As a dog and pony show the dog was wooden and the ponies could not trot.

[Richard]

Ed P wrote:

You almost certainly need to have the working fluid topped up. (Probably propane + lubricant is used today ). Kwik-fit and others do it. Probably best to have a specialist do it so they can vac rest it for leaks. When I lived in the Tropics this was a regular 3 year job (freon in those days).

I don’t know why you thought that the refrigerant is propane, HFC R-134a refrigerant was used for cars approved before the end of 2010 with HFO-1234yf replacing it over time for new cars. Some time back it was R22 as far as I remember. A bit of research suggests that using a slightly wrong gas in a system can produce some though provoking issues. Add the wrong lubricant and stand back…

[Richard]

I am not a great fan of sun roofs as the sun on my head causes me problems when driving, but they can be useful to vent excess heat before the AC gets going if we ever get a sunny day again. I have only ever tested mine or demonstrated it to my wife in a year and a half of ownership, perhaps this year that will change, but then perhaps not.

[Richard]

Yes, even on older hardware it can give a real boost, perhaps it is even more effective in terms of a performance boost when it replaces an old asthmatic spinning rust bucket. Perhaps it would help the youngest family portable which now feels rather dog slow, but I cannot face the work and hassle for the moment. It does make me wonder how useful benchmarks are to the average non-enthusiast.

[Richard]

My or rather the families newer portable threw its toys out of the basket and it was the whole stop this stop that and rename the other folly to get the install to go ahead, so four done and one to go. The user of that is really not famous for tolerance on a good day, today is not a good day. Forget bear with a sore head, the bear would come off second best so I am now settling for 4 out of 4 done, three good but…

[Richard]

The older one done going straight through, but the newer one failed the first time and now ‘undoing the changes‘ very slowly…

[Richard]

I agree with your wife, we paid the original mortgage off as fast as we could and left it there. Back in the 1990s I used to get calls offering me a better rate on the mortgage, after a few such calls I was mighty fed up. I adopted a very funeral tone of voice and said, ‘I am sorry there has been a death, my mortgage died a few years back due to excess gluttony, the account was stuffed full of cash. So I no longer have any mortgage.’ That shut them up very quickly as they digested the bit about the ‘death’.

The odd thing about the accounts ClearScore recognise is that it knew about one opened in 1992, though others opened in the 1960s and 1970s have been ‘lost’ along with other active, though little used accounts. The missing accounts do change the details significantly as the debit on one ‘about to be cleared’ account that is not yet due, rather than being well under 50% of the available borrowing limits is well under 10%.

I see there are some mails in from ClearScore no doubt with more highly avoidable loans.

Generally if we want something we use our assets, at worst that ‘costs’ us damn all in interest so why borrow and pay many time more than 0~1.5%? The cars were handled the same way, no PCP, balloon payments or whatever.

[Richard]

Oh don’t say that I had that issue last month with one of my portables and I have yet to do the two family machines, one starting at this moment…

[Richard]

Wheels-Of-Fire wrote:

Why do so many apps insist on trying to be Media managers these days ? I first noticed this annoying trend about 15 years ago when I finally replaced Adobe Photo Deluxe Pro with Photoshop Elements and it wanted to catalogue my “Media Collection” before it would let me do any editing. Sometimes I just want a program to do what it says it does as quickly as possible. I used to use the picassa photo viewer to quickly look at my pictures but now Google has dropped support for that in favour of an even more bloated than before Google Drive.

I totally agree, I abandon them before they get anywhere.

[Richard]

@jayceedee, I thought that I would have a look at my ClearScore file but it is a bit like the barbed wire bikini, what it reveals could be interesting, but there is a lot which might be more important is missing. It picked up a bank account I had as an executor that has now closed though that was not picked up, but did not appear to know any active accounts.   It appears heavily geared to assisting people to get loans, credit cards and the like. I would go so far as to suggest that was its major objective.

[Richard]

Its a yank outfit so no doubt the world class thicko will leap in and sort them out. Perhaps Trump as the world leading moron will ask his mates in the NRA to post a automatic weapon carrying moron at every entry point to FB? So like his response to the school shootings, or will they be too busy tilting at Syra’s windmills?

[Richard]

BL, it is not a substance you can nip down to the corner shop to buy. Sadly it carries no trademark on ever molecule but there is only one known source/developer/user. Perhaps it was old stock starting to go off, mishandled rubbish, whatever, but who allowed fumble handling? There is too much reliance on the old so called plausible deniability with a side dish of FUD for which the internet is such a lazy easy option. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, swims like a duck and lays eggs like a duck, its a duck or put another way if blocks all possible competitors and scores by a hostile action in a foreign country to ‘win; a fixed election, then its a Putin.

Governments are always good for cheap shots, try catching a train in France at the moment, or accepting the Hungary has an elected Government that many outside Hungary hate, especially in Brussels, that the EU does not have its own hidden issues arising, the list is endless of potential cheap targets. At least we don’t yet have the rob on sight anti Semitic party following its TAW ways – tax and waste. I left the country to get away from their lot back in the 1970s, now I regret coming back. for a possible rerun of the past errors courtesy of comrade another Corbyn.

[Richard]

I agree with you on the need for the masses of small users for any business. I sold this the other way. To win a big customer you need wafer thin margins as everyone else wants one of them. But if you can sell to small business, masses of them then (a) it is hard for others to eat your lunch, (b) you can usually keep your margins, (c) you are potentially less vulnerable to shifts in sentiment.

Like you I hold no candle for FB, but I hear all sorts of stories that alternatives are already stealing their limelight, I don’t care, I don’t use FB either. Adblocks are wonderful however you exercise them, if I see another damned stupid advert for loans at intergalactic levels of interest I might want to withdraw from the world of stupidity. The same goes for all the must have rubbish that I just do not want or need, ever. Having an ‘image’ product is beyond top of my list of ‘never want’ junk, e.g. daps, sorry trainers with some name on them.

[Richard]

You can spin this out every which way and more, alternatives exist such as we are embarrassed that we goofed up. If it was a disgruntled member of staff, then who is responsible for their actions?

[Richard]

My ‘collection’ stretches back to the 1960s, many have been scanned and painstakingly digitally retouched to recover lost colours and cleaned to remove spots and scratches. –  I hate the way TV programmes just scan and use spotty images. My scanned images are often quite large, perhaps that caused ‘Photos’ to stumble, but recent efforts have focussed on short term items. e.g. work in progress, or this is what I want and the suchlike. I should go through and cull those once they have had their day.

[Richard]

What is ‘Photos’ supposed to do? Prompted by your prod I had a look. I am not sure I have bothered before, it appears that it wants to find every image on the computer and do something to present them in its own way. With a number of tens of thousands and more on the network, it could clearly be going to take some time. After several minutes of disk activity, (there are 4 one SSD and three spinning rust, so several disks it could play with), I gave it up as pointless and cancelled.

[Author]

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