COMPUTERS, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

[Stanley]

Later.... see THIS government report on using the water supply network to get water into people's homes. I seem to remember this cropping up before but now some money is being put into the idea.

[Tizer]

They're also proposing to use it to get fibre broadband into people's homes.

[Stanley]

Yup! That's what I meant of course, must proof read more carefully....

[Tizer]

It gave me a laugh to start my day.

[PanBiker]

Our Jack has just signed up for 1GB fibre to premises. Not coming through the water supply though. He has an install date later this month.

[Tizer]

`China tech giant Xiaomi aims at global smartphone top spot' LINK
`Chinese technology giant Xiaomi has said it plans to be the world's biggest smartphone maker within three years. The comments by the Beijing-based firm's boss come after it recently overtook Apple to become the second largest mobile brand. South Korea's Samsung Electronics currently holds the number one spot. Xiaomi's founder and chief executive Lei Jun was speaking ahead of the launch of the company's new Mix 4 handset. "Our current task is to cement the number two position in the global market," Mr Lei said, adding: "We aim to become global number one in three years."...

[Stanley]

Meanwhile, if we have a tech related company that is doing well we sell it off for a quick buck.

[Tizer]

Yet another failing system...
`Bank website access hit for Sky Broadband users' LINK

[Big Kev]

Sky broadband issues are affecting a few things. The corporate VPN not working for some, hasn't impacted me as I'm no longer with Sky and, even better, I'm off shift

[Stanley]

I note they say 'should' be back online....

[Tizer]

Allow me to get this off my chest - the domain hosting company IONOS is utter cr*p.
My domain used to be hosted by a Plusnet subsidiary but they closed it some years ago and I was directed to IONOS. Shifting the domain should have been simple but IONOS made it a nightmare. After that I thought it would be OK because I only needed to contact them once a year to pay my subscription. Then a couple of years later they sent me an email that seemed to imply they'd closed my domain for no obvious reason. It turned out they'd irritated thousands of other subscribers by sending them the same message and they were inundated with complaints. It was confusion because they were really referring to a similar domain name with a slightly different ending to .co.uk. Apparently they'd set up a free first year sub to try and entice people into it but forgot to tell them about it - until at the end of the year when they emailed everyone to say their domain was being closed. Talk about dozy!

Today I got an email advising that they would be taking the money for the next year from my credit card within the next 7 days. They're one of those companies that make you leave your card details on their site and tick a box to say they can take money next time in the future. That annoys me because whenever possible I remove my card details from web sites. I have a new card so I needed to change the details in my IONOS account. I only access the site once a year so I'm not familiar with their byzantine web site design - it took a while to work out how to do it. When I started entering my card number I thought `Oh no, it's one of those sites that doesn't automatically put in spaces after each set of four digits'. I regard that as a sure sign that a web retailer doesn't care about helping its customers - even the little one-man web sellers that I buy mineral specimens etc from have the auto function. It makes it so much easier to see that you've entered the number correctly. But of course IONOS aren't going to do anything to help customers, so I just tapped in the string of 16 digits and carefully checked it. Guess what? Up came a red warning: `Invalid card number'. I had to write it in again and insert the spaces myself!

Companies like IONOS are in the Stone Age, not the Silicon Age, and don't deserve to stay in business!

[PanBiker]

Hard luck Peter. As I am sure you are aware, One Guy is hosted by IONOS. I have to say that I have not really found any insurmountable problems when dealing with them. They have been very accommodating allowing our American friend access when doing recovery work for us and were very helpful when setting up the VPS instance that the site runs on now. My advice would be to invoke a chat session that is always my preferred access method with any big conglomerate when you need to interact with them.

[Tripps]

I expressed some ignorance and a little scepticism, (no change there then) about 3d printing on the News thread a couple of weeks ago referring to Hope Cycles of Barnoldswick 3d printing titanium bicycle parts.

Cancel all scepticism - take a quick look at this- though I still dont want to go to Mars

[Stanley]

Include me out also David. I might change my mind in twenty years when they have proved the technology.

[Tizer]

I've had a problem with Thunderbird (TB) and couldn't find anything about it on the Web but eventually found a work-around. There was a TB update recently and it may have been due to that - I expect things will revert to normal after a while and another update! In the meantime here's the story in case it helps someone else....

Problem: Using Thunderbird in Ubuntu. Forwarding a message as an attachment is sometimes blocked.
I needed to forward a message as an attachment rather than inline. By default Thunderbird forwards inline but it gives you the choice to change to attachment for any given message. So usually it's just Forward, then choose between Inline or Attachment. I now find that if I choose Attachment some forwarded messages are sent as expected but others won't send - the send button is greyed out. It doesn't seem to matter who the recipient is but works or fails depending on the sender of the original message that I'm forwarding. In all cases that I tried the senders where trusted relatives with I regularly share emails. I couldn't find this problem anywhere on the web, nor could I find any helpful information.

Solution: simply click the attached file name.
I found the solution by accident. I'd set up another failed forwarded message and filled in the To address and decided to see what happened if I deleted the attached file - would it then respond to the send button? But when I put the cursor on the attachment file name the greyed out send button lit up again. I was then able to send the message successfully. I've no explanation but I expect the bug will be solved in the next TB update. I repeated the operation a number of times with different files and it always worked.

[Stanley]

I never noticed it Peter. Probably because i only forward complete messages as text.

[Tizer]

Most times when I forward an email it's going to someone whose address is in my TB address book. I type in the first few letters of the address and it fills in the rest for me. That's what I'd been doing when the Send problem arose. I then found that the greyed out button was happening even when I tried to send a new email - something has obviously changed in TB recently! TB now also drops down a menu with address matches. I've found that if I click the appropriate address in the list the Send button lights up. I guess the changes they made with the address dropdown menu have had the unintended consequence of corrupting my way of filling in addresses. It's another triumph of the mouse over the keyboard!

[Stanley]

I tried that way of addressing mail Peter, I didn't know you could do that, and sent a test message. Couldn't see any problem. I got the drop down list and picked the right address.

[Tizer]

The latest TB update seems to have corrected much of the problem.

This article by the BBC News Technology of Business reporter is interesting. I keep my backups on two external hard disks...
`How to back up your data and keep it safe' LINK

[Big Kev]

I have 2 x 2TB HDDs and a 4TB HDD in a NAS plus the 1TB SSD in the desktop machine, these are purely for data storage the majority being images. There's a 500GB SSD for the OS and programs. I also have a bit of cloud storage with Google but am not reliant on it, it's mainly used for file transfer between devices. Images I want to keep are on 3 separate bits of hardware so hopefully I've got it covered

[Tripps]

I'll do a photo of all my backup devices today. You'll be impressed, or phone for the 'van' . Don't ask me to find anything on them though - it's all a bit of a shambles. Not to mention my several cloud storage options which are mainly a mystery to me.

[Stanley]

I have always relied on external drives for backup, I have two (by different makers). After reading the link I think I need another, an SSD
However the safest storage is dissemination to other sites. I copied all my images to flash drives and gave one to each of my daughters. The LTP is fairly safe now I think, there must be a lot of copies out there... Nice to know that this is what the expert advises.....

[Tizer]

I've just noticed that the Thunderbird spellchecker which starts when you press the send button now tries to correct the email address - or at least the bit before the @ symbol. I was writing to the local hospital audiology department and its address starts hearingaid@. TB wanted to put a space between the two words. I could easily have assumed the `hearingaid' was an error somewhere in the text and clicked replace. Odd.

[Stanley]

Never noticed that Peter. I shall keep my eyes open. It might explain why some of my mails fail....

[Stanley]

See THIS BBC report on the moves by Apple to combat a vulnerability on all its platforms including phones to a 'no click' spyware, whatever that is....