Category: Blog

I’ve just entered the Twilight Zone

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There I am, having a conversation with someone on IRC about them knowing someone called Andy who works in IT in a high school, then I mention that I’m one, and I know three others and one in IT at a university: [18:12] deKay: *another* Andy that works in a local high school?[18:12] deKay: Preposterous[18:12] rachel|laptop: yes, my friend andy that works as an IT tech in the local high school, freaky isn’t it?[18:12] rachel|laptop: almost beyond belief[18:12] deKay: 🙂[18:12] …

GoBack from whence you came

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I was staying with my inlaws at the weekend, and they’ve bought a new PC. I offered to transfer all their files from their seven year old Windows 98 PC over to their new one for them. However, this was fraught with complications. My usual method of doing this would be with a USB drive of some kind. Unfortunately, we’d called in at the inlaws on the way back from our holiday in Bournemouth, so I didn’t have any with …

Climbing for the lulz

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I’ve just been to see Durdle Door, which it seems wasn’t the unicorn tourist attraction I thought it was going to be, instead it actually existed despite the silly name. After that, we walked seven thousand miles up a cliff to see this scene – Lulworth Cove. See? For the lulz. See? See?

That house wot was on Grand Designs – I sees it!

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Yes, I’m in Bournemouth, and in this picture is the house (well, flat) that was on Grand Designs on Channel 4 last week. I suspect it was actually a repeat of the programme, but it was last week that I saw it. The actual flat is the bit at the very top – the dome and the floor directly underneath. It was very exciting seeing it. Then we went and ate pasta in a restaurant a few yards down the …

Breaking the TB barrier

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This is me using gparted to clone and expand the partitions on my old work machine boot drive to my new one. I also upgraded by data drive too, and kept the old drives as backups. So now, I have a staggering 1.5 terabytes of storage on that PC. I remember just ten short years ago when I bought a “cavernous” 4.3 GB hard drive, ad thought that would last me forever.

Vista: Worth the wait?

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And I don’t mean how long it took to come to market, either. Today, I took delivery of an Acer Aspire 5051AWXMi (yes, all them letters), that comes with Vista Home Basic. It’s a cheap (¬¨¬£255) and cheerful laptop, but it’s only for internet and office use and replaces an older, heavier, less powerful laptop that had an accident involving a flight of concrete steps. I didn’t actually want Vista, but they don’t have any other OS option, so I …

Corrupt kernel32.dll solution

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It isn’t all fun and dongles, you know. Sometimes error messages happen and they need to be decyphered before you can even make a start on fixing the problem. Take this Acer desktop I have in for repair. It says “Stop: C0000221” on boot. Then there’s some stuff about “image kernel32.dll is possibly corrupt” and “header checksum does not match”. Thankfully, I found a solution. Kernel32.dll resides (on this XP Home machine at least) in c:\Windows\System32. And, having booted into …

Back to the 80s: Dongle Power!

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Remember dongles? They’re devices that often came with (usually expensive) software. You plugged them into a port on your computer, and the software wouldn’t run without them. It was a stone age anti-piracy device, basically. Well, lookee what arrived this morning: That’s right. It’s a dongle! A USB dongle, in fact. Ah, the memories. The hideous memories. Memories of software not recognising you have a dongle plugged in and calling you a pirate. Memories of losing the dongle and being …