COMPUTERS, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

[Stanley]

Funny thing SPAM! I know it's dangerous to brag but for whatever reason I am spam free. I don't do anything about it and all I get is special offers from sites I have dealt with. Gone are the heady days of people offering to enlarge redundant parts of my body!

[Tizer]

Stanley, sorry for the late reply but Mrs Tiz was away and I wanted to ask for her opinion on laser printers before replying. Because of when we had a business, Mrs Tiz and I each have a B&W Brother HL-2030 laser printer and she had one of them before that, so we've had three in all. They worked fine with Ubuntu although I think we had to download a printer file years ago when we got the first one - the files are probably part of the Ubuntu software now. She's had good service out of both of her printers (and remember they were being used for business use, lots of invoices, letters etc) and would buy another of the same if needed, assuming the price was sensible. Mine worked OK to begin with but then had a line through the page which was not cured by a new cartridge. It later started to show a background of ink throughout the page although readable. I haven't bothered replacing it because I can print on Mrs Tiz's PC if I need a good copy and it's still usable for copies for archive use.

[Bodger]

Ian, re "spamfighter" it seems to be workin reet champion, thank you, tony

[Bodger]

Ian, re "spamfighter" it seems to be workin reet champion, thank you, tony

[PanBiker]

It has a blacklist as well Bodge so you can manually add if any get through.

[Tripps]

I seem to have accidentally (?) reduced the font size on this site down to 'tiny'. Clicking the 'increase font size button on the portal page seem to have no effect. I've increased the font size in Firefox, but this site stays small. Help......

[Tizer]

Tripps, I didn't know there was such a button on the portal page - I've just tried it and found that it changed only the font size of the window titles etc. It didn't affect the text in the posts at all. So I think you'd need to get Firefox to do it. Is it any different after re-starting Firefox, or after shutting down the PC and re-starting? Are you using Control and the Plus sign key to change the font size in Firefox?

[Tripps]

Thanks for the advice - what took you so long. I think you've cracked it Ctrl+ has done the trick. I didn't know you could do that. Thanks.

[Stanley]

I've just been reading about the genesis of Open Source Programming in Friedman's 'The Earth is Flat'. Fascinating, all news to me. It details Mosaic and Apache and then went on to Mozilla and the advent of Linux and Firefox. All news to me and a fascinating story. The interesting thing to me is that Friedman says that one of the core drivers was anger at the business model of Microsoft, I can identify with that....
Tiz, thanks for the advice. I shall come back to this thread when I have time to think about printers again. Just as a matter of interest, Ringo gave me an old Laserjet printer many years ago and it is still running fine on the IBM upstairs. I found an el cheapo replacement new cartridge online for it about a year ago and fitted it the other day. It's slow, but like the IBM seems to be bullet proof.

[Steven Chorkley]

It has a blacklist as well Bodge so you can manually add if any get through.

Not exactly a solution though..... The emails will still be coming through online. The easiest way to go about it is really to setup filters online in your webmail (So they are filtered directly instead of through the client).

Although of course, (in my opinion) the best way to go about this is to click the unsubscribe button in the footer. Although a slow and tedious operation, over time you will find that this is the best solution as it is the Law that they remove you from their database.

I use (If signing up for something dodgy) an alias for any Junk mail I receive, it is then filtered at the highest level. The best thing about it is the alias only needs to be active whilst I click that link that's sent to you whilst you have to activate the account, so the whole time you could just have it switched off and it doesn't bother you at all until you need it.

After all said and done, if you only use outlook on the one machine it shouldn't really matter to you how you block it. I am talking long term, as I use a custom domain name I plan to have the same email address for a long time so i'm not planning on it being listed in a million databases!

[Steven Chorkley]

The perceived speed of the internet is as much to do with how fast the computer can 'render' the page as with the speed of the internet connection. A new iPad should be faster than an 8 year old laptop.

Thats true.... although what hit me is that any computer within the last 5 years can be quite a capable machine. i5/i7 I don't care..... I can do photoshop with ease, no lag on a core 2 duo machine or play minecraft with logic gates on a single core AMD with No lag whatsoever. (granted there's ATI graphics )

The point is I have upgraded to SSD's (Samsung 840 Pro 250GB, Intel 60GB) and can work with these machines that I would have never taken a second look at before. I don't think people really don't need to upgrade their Ram or the CPU in their machines, I think they purchase machines way to fast for their needs. I/O makes the biggest difference and no one realises this and if they do they don't sell it to anyone. My mum's friends are always asking me what machine they should be buying as theirs is too old or slow, I just switch out the HDD for a small SSD (small cost) upgrade to Windows 7, maybe a RAM boost and have them store their documents on the old HDD.

I am studying AS Physics and I can use Visual Basic with no issue on this AMD machine with word/chrome/excel/spotify with no issue at all. Need any video rendering or conversion I look towards the Core 2 Duo.

/rant over

[Wendyf]

On the old site I bookmarked many photos, alas all gone. On the new site I have painstakingly gone thru and bookmarked many photos again, alas i cant find them. Not happy. Help please.

Cathy, why don't you save the photos you like to your own computer?

[Tizer]

Thanks for the advice - what took you so long. I think you've cracked it Ctrl+ has done the trick. I didn't know you could do that. Thanks.

Haha! "We aim to please". (They should put that phrase on the walls of call centres.)

If you're using Ubuntu you can find more keyboard shortcuts here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KeyboardShortcuts
I find them very useful but these days I keep forgetting them and have had to print them out!

Steven, for dummies like me, what's an SSD when it's at home?

[Pluggy]

Solid State Drive. Combination of flash memory and RAM to replace the old school spinning HDD in a computer. Generally more expensive and lower capacity than an HDD but much faster. The jury is still out on the long term reliability of such devices. Us old conservatives are sticking with HDDs for the time being. Better the devil you know, or maybe I'm an old Luddite.

[Steven Chorkley]

Solid State Drive. Combination of flash memory and RAM to replace the old school spinning HDD in a computer. Generally more expensive and lower capacity than an HDD but much faster. The jury is still out on the long term reliability of such devices. Us old conservatives are sticking with HDDs for the time being. Better the devil you know, or maybe I'm an old Luddite.

Thats what backups are there for aren't they? HDD plugged into your router should suffice, and if you're geeky enough you could buy a NAS or repurpose a Pi (slow, but cheap)

I'm running a HomeServer, and thanks to DreamSpark and my college I am running a legit key of Windows Server 2012 DataCenter with Server 2008 R2 in hyper-V to play with !

[Steven Chorkley]

.... Question for Pluggy,

Is Ubuntu's window system hardware accelerated through the GPU? I think that is why I am getting such slow performance. I had to switch back to windows.

Is there a solution? - Other than installing a crappy desktop environment.

[Pluggy]

Generally, Yes, but it depends on the drivers for your particular graphics subsystem. Some manufacturers aiming to protect their intellectual property, have not released documentation to allow good drivers to be written and have not written linux device drivers themselves, so whats available has been reverse engineering and writing stuff that generally works. The hardware acceleration in Linux drivers is often weak or even non existent. An extreme example is the Raspberry Pi (which doesn't do Ubuntu at all) the CPU and OS is all open source so the world is your oyster, but the GPU is closed and as such very little stuff can use it. I generally take the view that plenty of horsepower in the CPU and memory departments can make up shortfalls in the graphics arena. If you have an Nvidea graphics card, there are drivers written by Nvidea which aren't installed by default due to their closed nature but effect an improvement if installed. There is generally an icon that appears on the top bar informing you if better drivers are available. You usually have to accept the T&C which is why they aren't put on by default. In general Windows drivers are better than Linux.

.... Question for Pluggy,

Is Ubuntu's window system hardware accelerated through the GPU? I think that is why I am getting such slow performance. I had to switch back to windows.

Is there a solution? - Other than installing a crappy desktop environment.

[Pluggy]

Thats what backups are there for aren't they? HDD plugged into your router should suffice, and if you're geeky enough you could buy a NAS or repurpose a Pi (slow, but cheap)

Its more than possible that I'm an old Luddite and my ideas are out of date. Theres a reason I'm now self employed, I don't reckon the IT industry wants guys in their fifties ( ask panbiker ). They want young guys with fresh ideas, that's where you come in....

I reckon you can buy a better NAS cheaper than you can repurpose a Pi. Even a very low end NAS has a far superior CPU than a Pi and by the time you put a PSU, SD card, hub, case etc your'e way above what a low end NAS would cost you.

http://www.businessdirect.bt.com/produc ... -4SRD.html

[Steven Chorkley]

Generally, Yes, but it depends on the drivers for your particular graphics subsystem. Some manufacturers aiming to protect their intellectual property, have not released documentation to allow good drivers to be written and have not written linux device drivers themselves, so whats available has been reverse engineering and writing stuff that generally works. The hardware acceleration in Linux drivers is often weak or even non existent. An extreme example is the Raspberry Pi (which doesn't do Ubuntu at all) the CPU and OS is all open source so the world is your oyster, but the GPU is closed and as such very little stuff can use it. I generally take the view that plenty of horsepower in the CPU and memory departments can make up shortfalls in the graphics arena. If you have an Nvidea graphics card, there are drivers written by Nvidea which aren't installed by default due to their closed nature but effect an improvement if installed. There is generally an icon that appears on the top bar informing you if better drivers are available. You usually have to accept the T&C which is why they aren't put on by default. In general Windows drivers are better than Linux.

.... Question for Pluggy,

Is Ubuntu's window system hardware accelerated through the GPU? I think that is why I am getting such slow performance. I had to switch back to windows.

Is there a solution? - Other than installing a crappy desktop environment.

Right okay... makes sense! Yeah... I would be using ATI, thats really annoying. I get fantastic performance under windows on this single core machine but not under ubuntu and I think thats the reason!

Thanks!

[Steven Chorkley]

Thats what backups are there for aren't they? HDD plugged into your router should suffice, and if you're geeky enough you could buy a NAS or repurpose a Pi (slow, but cheap)

Its more than possible that I'm an old Luddite and my ideas are out of date. Theres a reason I'm now self employed, I don't reckon the IT industry wants guys in their fifties ( ask panbiker ). They want young guys with fresh ideas, that's where you come in....

I reckon you can buy a better NAS cheaper than you can repurpose a Pi. Even a very low end NAS has a far superior CPU than a Pi and by the time you put a PSU, SD card, hub, case etc your'e way above what a low end NAS would cost you.

http://www.businessdirect.bt.com/produc ... -4SRD.html

Yeah, I guess so!

I don't know where I come in exactly, we are learning Java at college and I haven't got my head around Classes yet.... I guess we all have to start somewhere...

Thanks,

[Pluggy]

Heres a little something tying together SSD and Linux :

http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux ... 01669.html

Linus Torvalds (the father of Linux) has just had his SSD fail....

[Steven Chorkley]

Heres a little something tying together SSD and Linux :

http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux ... 01669.html

Linus Torvalds (the father of Linux) has just had his SSD fail....

Yikes..... But SSD's are becoming much more reliable, especially with mlc and slc.

They really aren't that bad, and certainly worth their price for the speed they produce, my laptop boots Windows 7 with a million services running in 15 seconds:

Samsung 840 Pro: http://hosting.chorkley.co.uk/Samsung%20840%20Pro.jpg
Intel SSD: http://hosting.chorkley.co.uk/Intel%20SSD.jpg
Conventional HDD: http://hosting.chorkley.co.uk/Conventional%20HDD.jpg

.... http://lifehacker.com/is-solid-state-dr ... -830470532

[Stanley]

15 seconds sounds slow to me. I switch the box on and brew up, from password to OS up and running is too fast to time, less than 2 seconds? I think I'll stick with the Luddites.... But of course the FMIII is quite fast.

[Steven Chorkley]

15 seconds sounds slow to me. I switch the box on and brew up, from password to OS up and running is too fast to time, less than 2 seconds? I think I'll stick with the Luddites.... But of course the FMIII is quite fast.

Everyone has there preference and I don't want to start a flame war!

I am simply pointing to the preference of most IT guys and showing that SSD's dying sooner than a HDD is now no more than a myth.....

I hope it turns some heads with someone on a slow PC/Mac, as it really does make a huge difference on a Heavy OS. Yes UNIX is heavy.....

[Tizer]

NAS? Come on guys, speak English, we're not all computer techies ya know!