Getting your car serviced in the midst of a pandemic

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I’m not sure why I was so keen to have the car serviced and tested. It’s not as if I’m going to be needing it much. Just put it down to my mildly compulsive nature. Anyhoo, we took the car down to the garage this morning. We got there nice and early because there was hardly any rush hour traffic. The dealer was very prepared with one way signs on the floor, Perspex dividers on the counters and plenty of hand gel.

The whole thing passed off very smoothly and I now have a shiny car that should be good for a couple more years. Now I just need somewhere to go and permission to go there.

The Living Computers Museum has closed

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living computers closing.png

I’d planned a trip to the Living Computers Museum as part of my attendance at the MVP Summit earlier this year. I’ve been there a few times and loved it. But, thanks to a nasty little bug I couldn’t get there. And I’ve just found out that the museum itself has closed. Which is a terrible shame.

In the great scheme of things, and considering all the other awful events of the last few months, the loss of a computer museum might not be seen as a biggie, but it is a fantastic place that keeps history properly alive. If we don’t watch out, we’ll be surrounded by technology but no idea of where it came from. The museum does a great job of telling this story and I hope that something can be done to keep it going.

Sunday Quiz Questions

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We’ve started having a silly Sunday quiz every week. On Sunday. These are my questions for this week. Which of these is not:

  1. A Teletubby: Dispy, Tipsy, Laa-Laa, Tinky Winky

  2. A Knitting instruction: knit, purl, waft, right twist

  3. A unit of distance: furlong, light year, hectare, angstrom

  4. A baking term: dust, drizzle, glaze, unfold

  5. A Ben and Jerry’s Ice cream flavour: Moo-phoria, Chubby Hubby, Raspberry rampage, Netflix and Chill’d

  6. A blend of coffee: Jamaican Blue Mountain, Equal Exchange Women Farmer Roast, Taylor’s of York Java Blend, Percol Black and Beyond Espresso

Answers eventually.

Readly looks to be good value

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If you like magazines you should definitely take a look at Readly. For the price of a couple of magazines a month you can get to read pretty much all of them. The reading experience is very good on iPad. The magazines load up smartly and moving around them is a breeze. You can also read on your PC. There are quite a few crossword magazines which I thought was a bit silly at first. Turns out that you can screen shot the pages and then print them. So if you like word searches etc etc then that must makes the deal even more compelling.

Some of the “magazines” are those collection ones that you find in the newsagents. I like reading these and there are quite a few, from photography to piano playing.

Our local library uses the RB app to make available a bunch of free magazines (you really should be reading these) but the Readly app is much better and the range of reading is enormous.

If you’re looking for a few things to read during the lockdown I reckon this is a good bet. And you get two months free membership if you sign up.

Note: I’ve not got anything free from Readly, I just think that they provide a good product.

Thanks for the free book. Whoever you are.

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Whilst enjoying our government mandated walk in the outside earlier this week we came upon a blue Ikea bag full of kids books in splendid condition. Over the bag was displayed a note that said “From our house to your house. Please feel free to take one of our books”. What a nice thing to do. And number one granddaughter loves books. So I picked up a book, checked the location of the house (it was the one with rainbows in the window) and then we completed our exercise.

The next day we headed out with a “thank-you” note. When I get to the location of the blue bag I look for the rainbow in the window and find that two adjacent houses have rainbows. Dratt. Now I don’t know who to thank.

So, in the extremely unlikely event that the generous family actually read my blog I’d like to say thank you here.

Just had a thought. If I find out who they are I could give them a free copy of Begin to Code with C#. Not sure what they’ve done to deserve that though…….

Busy Fibre

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Earlier this month I re-imaged my PC. Using your skill and judgement, can you work out from the above graph of internet usages when this was?

The two peaks are around 60G each, which is rather impressive. It’s a good thing I’m on an unlimited contract. It’s also a good thing I’m on KC Lightstream fibre to the house. I shudder to think how long it would have taken to download this much content a few years ago.

The case of the haunted HomePod

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Well, that was spooky. Being a lazy sort of person I have a habit of asking my Apple HomePod to play my favourite tunes. This used to work well, with the device duly serving up a bunch of what my sister used to call “middle of the road cr*p”. However, lately it seems that the HomePod has decided that my tastes have changed to jangly guitar rock and obscure Japanese bands. Most strange. At first I thought it was Apple’s algorithms deciding it might be fun to test the limits of my taste, but today I resolved to try and find out why the HomePod thought my tastes had changed to much.

The answer is kind of interesting. The latest release of the HomePod software has the ability to recognise the voices of family members. But you have to enable this. And if you don’t enable this recognition the HomePod uses a default account for the person doing the talking. And for some reason it had fixed on number one son’s account. It must have picked up his presence on the network a while back and decided that his was the voice of power. So for the last couple of weeks I’ve been living with his tastes.

I just had to set my account as the default user and enable voice recognition and I’m back in a world of Steely Dan and the like.

Home Networking Tips

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I’m sure that most of my readers know this stuff, but just in case you don’t, here are some home networking tips. Feel free to add yours at the bottom in the comments.

  • If you can use wire, use wire. Nothing like a wired connection. If your laptop doesn’t have a socket you can get a USB adaptor (search Amazon for USB network). It makes a big difference.

  • You can also get boxes that let you send network connections over the mains wiring in your house.

  • Switch your router off and on again. It really works.

  • Try changing your WiFi channel to improve performance. Some channels are susceptible to interference from Microwave ovens and the like. Your KC router should automatically scan for a quiet channel when you reboot it, so you might find this will ease your problems a bit. There are WiFi scanner apps that you can get to tell you which channels are in use in your area. Take a look at Vistumbler if you have a PC.

  • Look at WiFi signal boosters if you have any “hard to reach” parts of the house.

  • If you keep files at home remember security. Don’t have only one copy, and don’t leave important data lying around. Tools like Microsoft Onedrive are a great way to put your files in the cloud so that they are secure. They can even find old versions if you make a bad edit.

  • Remember to “switch off” every now and then and just do something that doesn’t involve the computer (that’s the one I’m worst at following)….

Crocodile Dentist is still a thing

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When our kids were a lot younger than they are now we had a lot of fun with a game called “Crocodile Dentist”. The gameplay is simple enough: pull teeth out from the crocodile and be careful not to pick the one which makes him close his jaws and chase you across the table. Last we we got out our old copy and played it with a new member of the family and discovered that it still retains its nerve wracking charm.

It’s very pleasing to find that you can still buy it. I guess this means that there might be someone out there who has spent nearly all their working life producing copies of the game. That would look great on any CV.