COMPUTERS, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

[Stanley]

One of the things that strikes me about digital communications is that they have no mid states, they are either on or off. Old copper technology used to give you notice if it was failing. Have you noticed the trouble the BBC has these days with outside connections, I swear there are more drop-outs today than in the old days.

[Tizer]

And more poor quality voice transmission.

[Pluggy]

Telling bone is still dead, rang EE again, decided it isn't a mass fault, an enginneer is booked for Thursday afternoon.....

[chinatyke]

Last week we installed a land-line telephone in our second apartment. Service provider is China Telecom and the job was done within 36 hours. Cost me 110 rmb, about £10.50 and that includes the first 12 months line rental and local calls. No other charges except I had to buy the handset, about £7. I know this is a different neck of the woods to you, but the technology is the same and it just shows how much you get ripped off in the UK.

[Stanley]

Which magazine has just raised the same point (LINK) It's the old story, we don't complain and shop around enough. Rule of thumb used to be that UK had the same price in £ as US had in $. Understandable if things had to be shipped but not with things that were downloaded online like programmes and applications.

[Pluggy]

Last week we installed a land-line telephone in our second apartment. Service provider is China Telecom and the job was done within 36 hours. Cost me 110 rmb, about £10.50 and that includes the first 12 months line rental and local calls. No other charges except I had to buy the handset, about £7. I know this is a different neck of the woods to you, but the technology is the same and it just shows how much you get ripped off in the UK.

All we have to do is convince our workers to work for Chinese level wages.....

[Tizer]

Lots of Ubuntu security updates coming down fast and furious the last couple of days...I wonder if Putin has his IT people messing up the Internet?

[Stanley]

You're right Tiz, complete renewal of the OS I reckon and a new Firefox yesterday. This seems to be faster than the last one... very quick response.

[Tizer]

Problems here after the multiple big Ubuntu updates. Yesterday evening I switched on my PC (64-bit Ubuntu), got the usual brief Asus bios screen but then nothing but black screen. Had to switch off power and try again. This time after the bios screen I got the grub menu, chose the top (highlighted) entry and it loaded Ubuntu. I powered down and left it until this morning when I got the exact same behaviour - black screen on first power up, grub menu on the second. I'm in Ubuntu now and it seems OK so far, but I don't want to have to power up twice every time I boot the PC. I wonder if one of the updates has bent something? Mrs Tiz is using 32-bit and her PC boots OK after the updates but the boot screen behaviour is not the same as before. I hope there might be updates today to clear up the problem.

[Pluggy]

What sometimes works if updates gives problems is to go the old school route :

Fire up a terminal

sudo bash
<put your password in>
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

let each command finis before starting the next.
If there are error messages during the process run

apt-get install -f

then

exit
exit

and finally shut the computer down and restart it.

If you normally don't switch the computer off at the mains when you've shut it down, do that occasionally. Sometimes the computer gets its knickers in a twist and needs a deprivation of power to right it.

From Stanley's decription, it sounds like his has distrobution upgraded itself to the latest LTS version which is 14.04. 14.04 has 'About this computer' in the Shut Down menu, or doing

cat /etc/issue

in a terminal will tell you the distribution.

[Tizer]

Thanks Pluggy. The terminal gave me this response: Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS \n \l
The last Linux image I had was on 17th July. Has Stanley clicked upgrade instead of update?
Just before I saw your post I'd run sudo update-grub in the terminal and that seems to have done the trick - I've just shut down completely and restarted and it all went as normal. Fingers crossed!

I've copied your advice for future use, thanks for that.

[Pluggy]

Nothing much wrong with 14.04 but If 12.04 works without issue I'd stick with it. I4.04 usually gives fewer problems with new hardware, but I prefer some of the older versions of software in 12.04.

Allbeing well a nice man from BT openreach will arrive this afternoon and fix my phone line.

[Pluggy]

The nice man from Openreach showed up, decided the problem was up the pole outside, wrong type of pole to climb, couldn't get hold of a cherry picker today, so its deferred until tomorrow morning. The phone has improved slightly from entirely dead to getting a crackle instead of a dial tone.

[David Whipp]

How about me and some mates come round and shake your pole, Pluggy?

[PanBiker]

wrong type of pole to climb, couldn't get hold of a cherry picker today, so its deferred until tomorrow morning.

That's progress for you Stephen. Once upon a time every linesman only needed a safety sling and crampons, oh and a short ladder (although they could manage without if push came to shove). Is your pole a metal jobby by any chance,? Cherry picker indeed!

[Pluggy]

No its wooden, made in 2005, hasn't got a recent safety certificate, elf 'n safety, blah, blah.

[Pluggy]

How about me and some mates come round and shake your pole, Pluggy?

Euphemism ?

[Tizer]

Euphemism ?

More like optimism I'd say!

[David Whipp]

Like it!

[chinatyke]

Recently, say the last month or so, I've noticed peculiar things happening when I go into Hotmail. The in-box page loads as normal. I click onto an unread mail and start reading it and after a few seconds the page refreshes and goes back to the in-box main page. Worse still is that if I have started to write an email all is lost when it refreshes. It's annoying that the first page re-loads and I put this down to slow international connections, but wondered why it needed to reload anyway. Last night I searched the internet (Google is virtually useless here, the Chinese censors have crippled it) and found I wasn't alone with people complaining of the same problem from early 2013. Various fixes like clearing caches or changing browsers were suggested but didn't seem to be permanent solutions. Change to Outlook seems to have got some blame.

I use a Mac with Mavericks OS and Firefox as the browser. I went into Firefox and checked my settings. It was set to update automatically. I forced an update and Firefox updated to v 31.0. Why didn't it do an automatic update? Anyway I've noticed the Hotmail page still refreshes but a lot quicker than it did before and before you have a chance to select a mail. I suspect it is a bug in Hotmail and only apparent on slow connections, or is it something more sinister like your mail is being sent or examined by a 3rd party, NSA, Chinese censors etc?

[Stanley]

Why not use Thunderbird China? Never had a minute's bother with it.
Tele poles.... My Uncle Jim was killed in Oz when he climbed a pole on the side of the railway and it snapped at the base, a bad pole in the first place. Even in those days he had a harness (Before WW1) and they reckon this was what killed him, he couldn't throw himself clear and the pole fractured his skull. So don't laugh at the Openreach man.... Better safe than sorry!

[chinatyke]

Why not use Thunderbird China? Never had a minute's bother with it.

Because I'm too lazy and set in my ways to change things.

You're right, time I looked into it. I'd love to get away from all things MSN.
Downloading it now ..... not sure if I can configure it though.

Thanks for the advice.

2:30 pm update. It works, but about as fast as treacle flowing from Sabden to Pendle summit. Not a success story but I'll give it a day or two.

3:45 pm Open up a folder and retrieve the contents: Thunderbird: 9 secs. Outlook: <1 sec.

2nd attempt on another folder containing a lot of attachments got the message "Connection to server timed out" after about 2 minutes. Outlook again <1 second.

Sorry - hate to support MSN but I'm going back to Outlook. Thanks for trying, Stanley.

Actually, Macs have their own email client called Mail oddly enough! Can't be bothered trying this one!

[Tizer]

Thunderbird works fine for me Chinatyke. I can open folders with 2500 emails in an instant and it all seems easy to use (and I used it for many years while running my own business). Having said that, I always take care with `housekeeping' and I delete attachments once I've saved them to my data files or if they aren't needed. Once a folder gets to about 3000 messages I copy them into an archive folder so that it's easier to use the main folder. If you get a lot of email, set some filters on your email software to direct your incoming messages into several folders rather than just your Inbox. In that way you avoid overloading the Inbox. Don't forget your Sent box - if you've got lots of sent messages with attachments then they'll be clogging up your system too. Probably the commonest cause of email software problems is lack of housekeeping!

[chinatyke]

I always keep my inbox and sent box clear and I'm careful with housekeeping. I think the problem is related to the fact that I am in China and Thunderbox must retrieve file details from Hotmail and then the files from wherever they are stored by Hotmail eg California or Alaska, could be anywhere and in multiple locations I suppose. I assume Outlook already loads this information or is able to retrieve it much quicker. But I'm only guessing. Anyway, Outlook is behaving itself now I've updated Firefox, so I'm happy.
The Chinese censors could also be suspects, they've deliberately crippled Google here.

[Pluggy]

If you're using "Outlook" in Firefox, its glorified (Well, not so glorified actually) webmail so, it will always outrun an email client like Thunderbird, because the mail is already downloaded onto $MSN's servers and you're just looking at a picture of it in a browser. If I used Hotmail aka Outlook seriously I'd probably stick with using a browser. As it is I use Thunderbird.



Nice man preparing to climb the pole with a cherry picker to fix my phone. The phone is back, they replaced the line between the cabinet and the pole. Also an illustration of the fabulous weather we're having.