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Dave Rice wrote:

My DP to HDMI just worked. plugged it into the DP port on the PC and the monitors HDMI lead in the other. It was this one.

I’ve done something right for once – that’s the same one I bought ?

I’ll send you a PM now 🙂

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Dave Rice wrote:

Bingo, there’s an i5-2400

Brilliant. Let me know what you want for it 🙂

I’m not having much luck with the DisplayPort yet, but the Thinkcentre’s quite a bit behind on the Windows updates. I’ve got it running through VNC now so that I can control it from my PC, and it’s slowly updating. Hopefully the updates will help.

 

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Welcome to the ranks of the work free 😀

Take the time to realise that you can do anything that you want to for a while, even if it’s just getting out of bed later and getting dressed at dinnertime, or telling someone to p*ss off, safe in the knowledge that they can’t fire you 😛

Have some fun with it 🙂

 

Richard wrote:

John, (JCD?) put it very well when he said work out what works for you. So apart from a welcome from an old timer at the pensioner game, 17 years or so now, I do urge you to set yourself some sort of balanced plan. Plans can be yours to follow or change as needed,. However, no plan equals endless drift and you end up with a basket of life filled with the dross not wanted by others. Or and perhaps this happens anyway, a basket of medical issues. I will not advise you on job searching, that can be the fastest route to the black hole of depression, so just be yourself and plan to please yourself.

I’ll second that. I’ll only disagree that job searching is the fastest way to depression. If you don’t *need* a job, keep it in the back of your mind that you can just walk away from the process, even if only temporarily. The fastest route I’ve found is not having anything planned, or not having something to do.

I’ve caught myself a few times just sitting in front of the TV all day, purely because I’ve had the day to myself and nothing specific to do. An episode of something while I have breakfast has turned into ‘that was a cliffhanger, let’s watch the conclusion’, then realising I’m out of tea and making a fresh cup near the end of the episode, then thinking I may as well watch the next one while I finish my tea etc. etc. Next thing you know, the day’s gone, and it feels like a waste. Even planning to sit in front of the telly all day feels better than that, just because it feels like I’ve actively made a choice.

What I’m trying to say, probably clumsily, is a little bit of effort makes your free time a lot more interesting. Even something like ‘if the weather’s nice on Friday I’ll go to the beach, otherwise I’ll start on the odd jobs at home’ can be enough to break up the boredom.

Enjoy yourself ?

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That sounds great, especially the fact that they’re paying attention and not just trying to get you on any old regimen.

Have you tried noise cancelling headphones? I got a pair to try with Alice when we had to fly recently, and even a bad pair made a huge difference with background noise. If I go down the gym route in September, I’ll probably invest in a decent pair (if not I’ll probably have loads of random cycling questions, so brace yourself! 😛 )

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Thanks WoF, but they still seem to be holding their price. If I’m going to spend £50+ I’ll hold on until I can get a more energy efficient new card instead, and claw back some savings through the electricity bill.

The DisplayPort adaptor turned up today, so once I’ve done the usual catch up with emails and forums I’ll try out the Thinkcentre and see how it goes. As Dave suggests, I won’t hold my breath, but I will have my fingers crossed 😀

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The current box is a Phenom 9550, so it’s about the same age as far as I can remember. I can’t access the Thinkcentre at the minute, so can’t check anything, but I vaguely remember comparing the two when I first got it, and discounting it mainly because of the lack of SATA ports rather than anything else. I’m pretty sure that it uses DDR3 rather than 2, so is slightly newer, and can take more that the Phenom system’s max of 4GB. There’s also room to upgrade the CPU if one turns up cheaply on Ebay, where the Phenom is about as good as the other system can go.

Again though, it’s basically a free try at this point, so it’s either going to be a crutch until I get around to saving up and doing things properly, or it’s going to keep me busy for a few days and might give Ellen some peace and quiet 😀

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I remembered this morning that I’ve got a retired Thinkcentre M81 in the spare room. I got it quite cheap a few years ago, but because it only has two SATA ports I discounted it as the media centre system, and eventually replaced it with a Fire Stick (I’ve got 4 drives in the combined media server / media centre). I had a look and it’s got a DisplayPort. From what I can tell it’s a 1.2 DisplayPort, so I’ve ordered one of the adaptors from Amazon. If it works, I can do some rearranging and use it as the media system and eventually upgrade it as needs be, whereas the current system is maxed out and starting to struggle. If not, I can still order a cheap Quadro and haven’t lost out.

The other advantage would be that it doesn’t need to run the media organisation software I use, so I could switch to a low powered Linux distro and just boot straight to Kodi, getting rid of some of the bloat.

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It’s the Toshiba 49u6863db. I got mine through the Richer Sounds clearance page, but the main link is here:

https://www.richersounds.com/tosh-49u6863.html

It’s a 3480 x 2160 D-LED panel with HDR10 and Dolby Vision HDR. It upscales 1080p Amazon content really well, and most of my ripped films on the computer are improved too (the old 480p Willy Wonka was a stretch too far 🙂 ).

Following Ed’s idea, I may get an older Quadro from Ebay. There are a few K600s floating around for about £15 – £20, and Amazon have the Display Port to HDMI adaptors for about a fiver. It’s not exactly urgent though, so I may just wait until I’ve got a bit more spare cash. The idea of not getting everything out of my new toy bugs me though 😀

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As far as I know you need the paid version. I haven’t seen anything for free, but I haven’t looked into it properly yet as I’m still sorting my music out.

There is a $5 version there, and it gives you one media server with two family share accounts per year. I’ll be setting that up as soon as I’m ready 🙂

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Thanks guys 🙂

Yeah, it’s mainly the video playback that I want, so I was hoping that there was something a bit cheaper out there that I’d missed. Everything seems to be geared towards gaming, and is priced as such. My main system should do it with the onboard graphics apparently, but I don’t really want to sacrifice that just for a prettier picture.

I think I’ll just leave it for now and upgrade when I actually need to. It’s not as if I’ve got a stack of 4K films yet anyway… 😀

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PlaneMan wrote:

He just wanders if no one is right next to him. Mum was maybe 6 feet away at most when he wandered.

Possibly a daft idea, but I’ve just ordered one of the small luggage GPS tags* to try with Alice. Alice is still at the age where we dress her, but depending on the style, it could be put on a chain like a short necklace, so it can’t be taken off over the head. If she wanders off it will hopefully alert the responsible adult before she wanders too far. In your mother’s case, the full tracker can be used if they’re going out, and the smaller one for day to day use.

*This is the type, but I got mine through Wish:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Car-Motor-GPS-Tracker-Kids-Pets-Wallet-Keys-Alarm-Locator-Realtime-Finder-Device/263840172840

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I’ve ordered a cheap ADSL2 router to replace it and see how it goes. I’ll let you know if it makes a difference. It won’t be here until at least the middle of next week due to the bank holidays though.

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From the setup page, mine is

TalkTalk Wi-Fi Hub
version SG4K10001E00t

I’m hoping that mine is just dodgy though. I haven’t had a chance to get onto TalkTalk about it yet, other than the standard ‘My internet is slow’ troubleshooting.

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Wheels-Of-Fire wrote:

So on to my real question. Is their new router any good because the one they gave me last time is rubbish.

Mine appears to be the source of at least a few of my problems. My fibre speed with Vodafone was 13 Mbps pretty consistently, and with TalkTalk it’s dropped to about 10 Mbps on a good day. The routers seem to be the same, but the TalkTalk router has had most of the settings removed. Changing the DHCP pool for my fixed IP devices took about three days of trial and error as the router page would just refresh, or not save the settings. Once they did save they were rock solid though.

It won’t connect to my smart bulb, no matter what I do. I tried an old Asus N 150 Mbps router and it connected first time.

 

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Thanks Dave 🙂

Most of my kit is used in the living room, so I’m just going to concentrate on that for now. The phones work on 4G through the house, so that’s not too bad. We’ve got a fire stick downstairs (the living room’s upstairs), and I use the tablet in the garage and bedroom, so they can be annoying. I’ve got some cheap wireless extenders that I’ve tried in the past, but I don’t get enough of a signal in the other rooms.

I think I’ll go for the router and see how it gets along 🙂

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Thanks for the replies guys, and sorry I’m slow getting back to you. Apparently the mild flare up I’ve been having isn’t quite so mild. I couldn’t move my right knee or shoulder on Tuesday ?

I’ve tried connecting to ethernet, as well as wifi with a known working adaptor, and the built in adaptor works in Mint. I think Dave’s hit the nail on the head, and a reinstall is in order. I’ll hopefully be doing that over the weekend.

I was hoping that I’d missed something and could avoid a reinstall, but that doesn’t seem possible.

 

Dave Rice wrote:

Don’t install two antiviruses and I wouldn’t install either of those in any case

Wait, you thought I’d installed two antivirus, and used Norton and McAfee!? I’m shocked! Shocked I tells ya*! ??

*Well, I would be shocked if it wasn’t the sort of daft thing that I’ve done in the past ??

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Sorry, I tried to post this a few days ago and just found out that it didn’t post:

 

Ed P wrote:

Incidentally if you suspect your account has been hacked, use haveibeenpwned for a quick check. Maybe its something Hotmail users should use on a regular basis.

Thanks for the reminder Ed. I did have a look when the news of the huge leak broke recently. I’ve been working my way through my accounts and updating the passwords, but an email and password combo is on one of the dumps listed. I’m going through everything with that email address and changing the passwords today.

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The Duke wrote:

My car seems to realign itself every time the lights come on. Ive noticed on start up at night, the lights move up and down left and right. I just see it as someone’s future headache and cost. I’m not a fan of tech for the sake or it.

I like this idea. I couldn’t count the number of times that I’ve been dazzled by misaligned lights, especially when the car seems to be carrying something heavy.

 

The Duke wrote:

Earlier today I was reading an artical that recons laws will be coming in around 2022 stating that all new cars will be gps speed limited based on the road, (no more speeding), auto braking, Lane keep assists, us a whole host of safety inspired kit..

This one worries me. I can easily imagine a car driving along at a few miles below the speed limit with the GPS limiter, capturing photos or video of anyone who overtakes them and automatically sending them off to the police for prosecution. Fine when someone’s doing 50 in a 30 for example, but there’s way too much of a grey area on a normal drive for sensible drivers to get caught out.

 

Richard wrote:

Its the number of what appear to be motorcycles until you get close enough and can see the vehicle details that gets me, the Cyclops brigade as many call them.

I had a big bust up with one of these when I first passed my bike test. As you can imagine, the roads in the valleys are quite narrow, and lots of places are narrowed down to a single vehicle in either direction, with the opposite direction waiting their turn. I was on the bike one evening when another bike was coming towards me along one of these sections. I kept going instead of waiting, until I found out that it was a car with no driver’s side headlight. If he squeezed to his left, I could tuck my mirrors in and get past, and that would have been it, except he decided to block the road and try to have a go at me.

One double barrelled mouthful later, including a few questions about his parentage, and quite possibly an ancient Klingon curse or two, and he was back in his car with his tail tucked firmly between his legs ?

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Happy birthday! 🙂

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The Duke wrote:

Luckily I got a great domain name. The pub is called The Glanglasfor, locally its known as The Glan. TheGlan.co.uk was free and cost me a whole 88p for the first year. So i’ll be using that once I set it up.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the full name is available for that sort of price too. If it is, it’s probably worth getting and redirecting to the theglan.co.uk page. Just remember that the cost will go up after the first year or two.

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