@tippon
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Happy birthday Bob 😀
Good luck 🙂
It’s been raining here again, and most places seem to be managing. It was on the news that one nearby town has been flooded again though. Apparently Natural Resources Wales did some tree clearing recentl of diseased trees, and the cuttings weren’t cleaned up. The rain washed them into a culvert, completely blocking it, and redirecting the now fast flowing water straight into an already flooded street.
Faeria and Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate are this week’s freebies:
I just tried it on the laptop. It opens the OneDrive site, then opens the file automatically, as a text file.
Compatible toner cartridge prices seem to be all over the place.
Funnily enough, I just found that out. Someone’s just advertised on Facebook a free office printer, one of those huge ones that does everything. I thought I’d have a look to see if it was worth having, and the toners are about £100 each. The compatible toners were £130+ for the same size.
I think it’s the roller that’s gone in my Samsung laser, but I haven’t got the energy to try to fix a printer these days. I tried swapping the toner and giving everything a clean, but it’s still knackered. I might give it another go before it goes to the tip next week, but I’ve got a feeling that I’ll be spending money >.< 😀
It’s been interesting up here…
We got home on Saturday just before the worst of the rain came, and one of the two roads into the valley from one side was flooded. Not long after we got home, the other one flooded, but this one was the road through a village and flooded lots of houses. The river burst its banks a few streets away from us and flooded another bypass and major route at about the same time, and several other roads were locked and flooded.
We were lucky because we’re on a hill, but there have been lots of people evacuated up here, and the weather warning was changed to red – a serious risk to life.
Pontypridd, the nearest big town, was underwater, and there has even been at least one major landslide, and roads collapsing.
For once I’m happy to be living on a big hill.
Although going to the loo has been a painful experience since yesterday. As in, peeing iron filings, until the last of the gel makes its way out. How come it has an anaesthetic effect on the way in, but the opposite on the way out? Gritting my teeth a lot.
I had the same after my camera. I was told to have a full bladder going in, so by the time I was done, I needed to go. Luckily, they were thoughtful enough to put a toilet between the treatment room and waiting room. I went in, started to do my business, then got the iron filings feeling. I let out an involuntary ‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’ along with the accompanying wobbly legs moment, finished up, and left. I opened the door to see a nurse with an amused smirk on her face asking if I was ok. I laughed it off and said that it caught me off guard, and followed her back to the waiting room. She’d gone in to call the next patient, who was now looking terrified after apparently hearing my little outburst 😀
it may be that the wrong springs were used
Believe it or not, I managed to do that to my motorbike once >.<
The rear shock gave up, so I ordered a second hand replacement online and got my mechanic friend to help me fit it. He was new to working on bikes, so we both took it as a learning opportunity. We got the bike jacked up and spent a few hours swapping the shocks over, between doing the actual work and trying to figure out what we were doing. When we were done we noticed that my bike was sitting higher, but put it down to the old shock being completely knackered. He had the same model bike, but it had been lowered, so we didn’t think that anything was out of the ordinary.
Our bike club was holding a rally a few miles away, so we went up on the bikes to test the suspension and let it bed in a bit. When we got there, the first few guys who saw us burst out laughing and asked what had happened to my bike. They even called the rest of the club to come and see. I got off the bike with some difficulty, which was a bit odd, and asked why they were laughing. When I looked at the bike, the back end was about eighteen inches above the back wheel, much higher than it should have been.
It turned out that the ‘compatible’ shock wasn’t, and had completely unbalanced the back end. Ooops 😀
To get running costs down to inkjet levels you’re talking £1200+
Is that the same for compatible inks or toners? I’m looking for an all in one if I can’t get my curent Epson inkjet working ( hasn’t been used to print for years so has dried up), and some of the lasers look tempting.
Brilliant news Bob 😀
Holy crap, I’ve fixed it! 😮
I put the screwed up drive to one side last year with the intention of coming back to it, but never got around to it. I’ve been feeling rough over the last few days, so thought I’d have another go as a distraction. I ran through everything in this thread and the saved links I had, to remind myself of what I’d already tried, then took to Google. In the middle of a page full of command line examples and registry edits, someone mentioned having the same problem because of a clash between their Nvidia and Intel graphics. They uninstalled the Nvidia card through Device Manager and it worked.
I thought there’s no harm in trying, so I uninstalled mine. I lost any sort of display for several reboots, then lost access to the command line and the programs that I got running through it. I managed to get the command line back, but when I tried to reinstall the Nvidia driver, it wouldn’t work, I just kept getting a generic error message. I wasn’t getting a mouse at this point, so I was running Windows setup from a USB drive, as it was starting the mouse driver. I was about to restore the backup to start again, so I thought I’d give Windows setup another try, even though it failed every other time (as I’m typing this, I’m realising what might have happened*).
Setup ran and asked me if I wanted to keep my files and settings. It got this far last time, but crashed not long afterwards, so I let it run. About an hour or so later, it had not only finished, but had updated Windows to 1903 too. Apart from everything being months out of date, and lots of my passwords needing to be updated, everything seems to be running properly. I’m tidying a few things up now before doing a backup.
I’m a bit annoyed that it turned out to be something relatively simple, especially when I’ve tried uninstalling drivers previously, but I’m quite chuffed that it’s fixed, even if it has taken so long 😀
* Part of getting the command line was editing the registry to basically trick Windows into thinking that setup was running. I’ve always just closed the command prompts or reset the computer. This time I typed exit to close the prompt, and I’m wondering if that told Windows that setup had finished, and previously it thought that it was still running. I’m wondering if that affected the Nvidia driver too, which is why it’s only shown the error now.
Thanks guys 🙂
I’ve gone for Bob’s option, mainly because I’m hopeless at making things without making an awful mess 😛 I found a version on Amazon’s UK site here:
Sorry guys, I thought I’d replied here, but I didn’t get as far as typing it out >.<
We’ve been lucky so far in that Alice isn’t too bad for excluding people. She does block you out if she’s doing something that she finds more interesting, but tends to respond after a few calls. Give her a phone though and she’s awful. We’ve taken hers away this week as she was completely blanking everyone, and wouldn’t even eat or drink when she was zoned out. I know that kids zone out with phones anyway, but we couldn’t even get a grunt of acknowledgement out of her. I’d cover the screen to get her to eat etc. and I noticed a few times that she’d seem to snap out of it, as if she genuinely didn’t know that we’d been talking to her. She’d have a meltdown if we turned the phone off or took it away, but we’ve been very lucky in that she follows me and if we could get her to focus on something else for a few seconds, the meltdown and tantrum would be forgotten.
Richard – I was the same as far as reading goes. In the first year of junior school, s0 7 – 8 years old, I’d raced one of my friends to read the school books, and we finished the lot. At the time they were grouped by age, with the highest being 13+, and we got through them and the associated exercises by about halfway through the year. Luckily for us the headmaster was fantastic and found us some decent books from the school’s very limited library. As far as I can remember it, he was the one who encouraged our race too. He made sure that we understood the books though, and wouldn’t have let us take any shortcuts. Our education system could do with more people like him 🙂
Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride are the new Epic freebies:
Has Alice been flagged by the Play School for assessment?
She has, yeah. We were lucky, in that the first playgroup we went to was council funded, and had targets for pretty much everything, so they had regular training and would keep an eye out for any sort of issues the kids might have. The staff were amazing too, and picked up on things that we hadn’t noticed. Alice had eye contact issues too, but tended to be a lot better when she was dealing with immediate family. The little bit that we noticed we put down to shyness around strangers. She also made up words and babbled when she was there, but very rarely did it with us, and apparently that’s a flag for autism in children.
As they were council run, they had access to all sorts of specialists and assessors, so would get them in whenever they picked up on any possible issues. We’ve had Alice seen by a few teams, and she had a one to one in both playgroups, and we’re waiting for the neurodevelopmental team to approve an official one to one in nursery. She’s got someone who works closely with her, but deals with the other kids too. For some reason everything’s slowed down since Alice officially entered school.
Strangely enough I was looking at a theatre group for Alice last night. Our local working men’s club has been sold and repurposed, and the new owners put an advert for classes up yesterday. One of her problems is concentration, so I may try her for a few classes and see how she goes.
Thanks for the replies guys 🙂
Alice is in nursery now. Some schools start here at three, while others don’t start until five. She was in playgroups until she started school this year.
We gave Alice a customised phone (OnePlus One with a kid friendly launcher and apps) at the beginning of the school year, expecting them to be using tablets if they were using any computing tech. She’s started using the class computer now for spelling words and some basic maths. They’re old Dell type desktops with a proper keyboard and mouse, so for now I’m planning on giving her something similar, but will use the touchpad on the laptop to get her a bit more used to using her finger to control it. She’s fine with using the phone, but so far there are no apps that she uses in school, so I’m guessing my way through it. I’ve got a touchscreen stylus, but can’t decide whether that or a graphics tablet would be better for getting her to use a pen.
Alice is very similar to me, in that she doesn’t like using a pen or pencil, but loves to type. I’ve got a little rubber grip that helps her to put her fingers in the right place on a pencil, and we’ve got a load of books and activities to help her get used to holding a pencil. I still want her practicing her spelling and word exercises in the meantime though, which is where I was hoping that something like Edubuntu would come in.
So far, the lists I’ve found online are either out of date, still showing Edubuntu as the main distro, or they complain about the state of educational distros these days. Some of them suggest the Pi as the way forward, but they seem to be aimed towards older kids and programming, which is a bit too advanced yet. I can obviously stick with Windows, but the last time I looked, the educational distros were a lot simpler and brighter, and more attractive to kids. Also, the laptop I”ve got for her is a bit old, so Windows may be sluggish. I haven’t had a chance to tidy it up properly yet to see how bad it is.
As an aside, we suspect that Alice is autistic / on the spectrum. She’s almost the stereotype for what most people think autism is – she’s very intelligent, but struggles socially. She could read the names on the coat hooks in preschool, and has been able to read childrens books completely independently since she was about three and a half. I started teaching her adding up around her third birthday, as she could already count to about fifty, or ten in Welsh and Spanish. She struggles with her social skills though, and was hitting and biting for the first few months of school. She loves other kids, and loves playing with them, but didn’t seem to realise that hitting them would mean that they wouldn’t want to play with her.
She tends to focus on what she likes, rather than what she needs to learn, so she’ll spell words out loud, or type them into the computer, but will draw squiggles if she’s using a pen or pencil and try to convince us that it’s actually letters and she’s done it right. This is one of the reasons that I’m hoping a laptop will help, and that she keeps practicing the things she likes while we’re convincing her to do the things she doesn’t want to.
Thanks again for the help so far 🙂
Thanks Ed 🙂
Oh, don’t worry, Dan’s going to get lots of questions! 😀
Install a Linux VM on the working laptop and save money.
Which virtualisation software would you recommend Ed? I usually use VirtualBox, but am always open to suggestions 🙂
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