pc tips

When Windows 10 fired up this morning it offered to make our life better by selling us Office 365 for eighty quid a year and linking our mobile to the pc.  We thought it could make our life better by leaving us alone but despite this perhaps foolishly gave it our mobile number for linking.  After texts/passwords/verifications we now have Microsoft's Edge browser on our iPhone ... we'll let you know if our life gets any better.

Sunday we had our first virtual dinner London-Dorset-Framlingham-Zurich via application Zoom and an iPad.  Quite touching to see and hear Lady KRJ's two little boys chattering and eating spaghetti.  Helps if you can get your device a little away, it puts you in context:)

The BBC red button text service didn't switch off today.  After a petition from the National Federation of the Blind the decision will be reviewed in the spring ... though the red button itself doesn't seem to know this yet.

Useful keyboard shortcut is Windows + E which pops up file explorer with Frequent folders and Recent files ... go on, try it.

We upgraded an aging laptop to Windows 10 from aging media.  It was a bit of a struggle but in the end leaving it alone to sort itself out sorted it out.  It then kept failing during update.  The Internet thought the problem was an elderly version of Win10 and it should be  ... more here

We have friends who were living down an unmade road between Dennington and Stradbroke.  Their dish washer overheated and filled the house with thick smoke.  They heard the fire engine siren approach the end of the road ... and then go away.  The what3words app would have helped.  It divides the world into a grid of three metre squares and assigns each a unique three word address.  We hadn't worked out even a modest house will have more than one address.

The last pager service provider in Japan has closed for the 1,000+ remaining users.  We had one, it beeped when the battery was running low, mostly in the middle of the night when the temperature is lowest.

Oh poo, flickr have started putting adverts in when flicking through a free account photostream and in the Martlesham Tesco a couple of weeks back there was a £20 personal cassette/radio with built in speaker and mike ... cassettes eh?

The BBC is considering phasing out info on the red button .  That's a very great pity because for a tv not connected to the Internet it's news, sport, and information on demand and in a concise format.  Should it happen we will regret the passing of a service that started 45 years ago as Ceefax.

Recently we've had two admittedly elderly desktops struggle with Window 10 updates significantly slowing the machines.  In both cases Windows 10 Assistant fixed the problem.  On one machine it pointed out that 8Gig free space was needed on the hard disc and there was only three, a little tidying steamed the broccoli.

After Twitter's recent makeover you can no longer save a tweet's large pic by right clicking on the small pic you have to click through to the large pic and save that.  The large pic is now default saved with a jpg extension rather than the previous and unhelpful jpg-large.

Here in what was the industrial South of Framlingham the broadband has been down for some 20 hours.  If you're getting Internet on your mobile phone you may be able to use the phone as a modem for your computer.  It's might be called tethering or possibly hotspot.  Use your mobile to Google using <mymobilephone> as a modem.  If you succeed your computer will be using your mobile's data allowance.

Last Friday we spent well over an hour resetting and then configuring a new to us camera body so it would behave as we expected.  Saturday after a photo op in Bedfordshire we found it had defaulted to jpg not RAW file format.  Sunday in Norwich we noticed it wasn't auto-rotating portrait orientation pix.  MORAL: Expect it to take time to sort out new kit.

Perhaps obvious but if your wireless mouse/keyboard gobbles batteries get some rechargeable batteries and a charger.  Rechargeable batteries come in ... more here