Today, just before 6pm, I paid a visit to our local Maplins, the electronics retailer, in King Street Hammersmith. It could be my last visit to one of their stores. The branch on Kensington High Street closed last month, the Hammersmith shop has big signs announcing its Closing Down Sale and the chain as a… Continue reading Farewell Maplins
In these two pieces last month (Anthony Trollope never had this trouble and “Let’s cross this one off your list”) I recorded my latest experiences with Windows 10. Rather a lot of time was lost to software updates. Instead of dwelling on this lost time and the frustrations caused by these updates I will report rather more… Continue reading Reading View and Slide Shows
We live in an era of Big Data. More information is being recorded and stored in more ways than ever before. I am reminded of a phrase that a friend uses, light-heartedly, about the super-rich: they have “more money than a million people could count in a million years”. That phrase, and the way he… Continue reading Big Data and small data
Updating Windows 10 is not on any of my lists. If you’re a Windows 10 user may I ask how it’s working for you? Are you happy? I mentioned, in this piece from earlier this month, some issues of my own with a Windows 10 update. I had restarted my laptop, as recommended by both… Continue reading “Let’s cross this one off your list”
Wednesday is usually my busiest day for drafting and finalizing Blog Posts. I aim to post a certain amount of words each week and if I haven’t managed them by Wednesday I will often get up early enough, and stay up late enough, to do so. I was up just after 5.30am this morning to… Continue reading Anthony Trollope never had this trouble
As predicted yesterday, in this piece (“Typing one-handed”), I am experimenting with dictation and am currently speaking these words to my laptop. It is surprisingly easy, although I still have to go back and amend the punctuation, one-handed. Over the years, on numerous projects related to software upgrades, I have tested various versions of Dragon… Continue reading Voice Recognition
Most of the words published on this Blog have been drafted on a Mac Book Pro which, all being well, will celebrate its fifth birthday early next year. It has had its troubles, mostly related to hard drives, documented in this piece from last year. In September the charger started playing up. The thin white… Continue reading The price of things (November 2017)
Back in February I wrote this piece about Breakonium, a non-existent element described by Nicholas Lezard in the New Statesman as “the most fragile substance on Earth”. I noted that a search for the word on The World’s Most Popular Search Engine yielded “about 19 results”. At the time the World’s Most Popular Search Engine… Continue reading More about Breakonium, and Search Engines
The Windows 10 laptop that we bought nearly 18 months ago, for family use, goes through prolonged periods of inactivity. We all use it from time to time (our two children, my wife and I) but during the summer it was hardly used at all. We have a variety of tablets, I use a Mac… Continue reading 942,000 files on a Windows 10 PC
We still have a video player that works. It’s an ION VCR2PC “Video Conversion System”. It plays VHS tapes but is not a video recorder. On the box that the machine came in are the words, “Convert your memories to your PC”. I keep it in the box most of the time but last month… Continue reading Copying Home Videos
The Compartments 