COMPUTERS, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

[Stanley]

Oh dear.... Sorry to hear that Pluggy but it does reinforce my contention that if you have a service and it's running well, leave it alone! I have never been a fan of examining prices and swapping about. You could always sit in my backyard and use my connection with a laptop to talk to them....
I see the Isle of Wight App for contact tracing has been hacked before it even got on line. The woman in charge of the programme is Baroness Harding who was CEO of Talk Talk when they had their major breach in 2015. When asked then if the data was encrypted her reply was "Sorry I just don't know". Just the woman to run it.... (And they start by sending a mass email out without BCC)

[Pluggy]

I decided discretion is the better part of valour (or something like that) and sent an apology, looking back on it I was the impatient bugger who deleted the routers credentials and covid is probably making their lives difficult. And I have had 3 years very reasonable mobile use from them. We'll see how it goes.
1P a megabyte won't break me. But I stay away from anything video......

The government upheld its pledge to help the self employed (which I still pass myself off as as I still do a bit from home) and the brass came through yesterday. Its dropped off with Covid and the Wife's part time job has become very part time. It was 3 months at 80% of the average of my last 3 years income from my tax returns. Not a great deal but it was relatively painless.

[Stanley]

You're keeping the same hours as me Stephen.
I'm sure you're right about the connection. Nice to hear you are getting some help.

[Pluggy]

Being nice helped a lot, the PPP details were waiting for me when I got up. I put them in and the router sprang to life. Pages load like the wind and speedtest reports 37.11 mb/s down and 9.28 up. Happy bunny.

[Tizer]

Well done, you deserve it!

[Stanley]

That triggered me to check mine Pluggy, 38 and 11, virtually identical. (Talktalk)
Glad you are sorted, enjoy.

[Tizer]

About the same speeds here.

[Whyperion]

BT , Fibre to somewhere or other I dont think they ran to mums front door
Download Mbps 43.49
Upload Mbps 9.35

Which is odd, why is facebook (which I only use for some bus, rail and local history groups), so wretchedly slow to load in FF and very jumpy and massively running on the the laptop processor so much that download seems like treacle, OGFB is not the fastest of BB or similar forums i am on but it is pretty quick without a noticable delay other than on the photo heavy pages which are good enough given that the enough expectations has risen over the years.

[chinatyke]

I updated Microsoft Edge today to the latest version. It correctly identifies my location and assumes I am Chinese and therefore loads a home page which displays everything in Chinese characters. So far nothing I've tried lets me stop this happening. Shame, because it does seem to be faster than Firefox. I'm not giving up just yet! At least it displays the weather for my location correctly.
I usually use Edge to display .pdf files which it still does correctly, but I thought I'd give this latest version a whirl.

The answer has got to be in settings somewhere...

[Whyperion]

Edge seems to be returning to M/S thought that everything should be M/S on your device and that M/S know best. (as they did with IE). To me the idea of a personal computer remains I can do all or what stuff as and when on my device, but if I want to choose, or share additionally applications, devices or information with one or more other users locally or wherever then that functionality is desirable.

[chinatyke]

You'd think it would be easy to display a blank page as the home page, it is easy to do it on Firefox.The problem seems to be that Edge displays Bing as the home page which loads Chinese pages relevant to my location even though I've set the language to English. I've given up and gone back to Firefox as my default browser.

[Stanley]

[plaques]

China why don't you learn Chinese, mandarin should cover it, Much easier than trying to understand how to make computers do what you want them to do.

[Stanley]

Unfortunately that is so true!

[Stanley]

Google is censoring my searches. I tried DuckDuckGo yesterday and was pleasantly surprised by it. No censoring on there as far as I can see. No stupid sponsored ads at the head of the search!

[Tripps]

Forgive me if you all are aware of this sort of thing. I've never seen it before. Forget it's a Japanese racecourse, and think what it could do for football,or tennis, or snooker. You can move around a live TV picture, at will with your mouse. They say it can be done with just one camera.



Camera trickery

[Stanley]

Magic David?

[Stanley]

Can someone please give me a brief overview of how to send a short video to Margaret on Whatsapp. Hers are so good..... Is there a simple explanation?

[PanBiker]

Open WhatsApp on your phone. Open the channel to Margaret as if making a normal text contact. Press the small camera icon in the bottom right of the text box, this will give you the option to take a photo or record a video. Hold for video, make sure you flip the phone to the camera facing you, (small camera flip icon at the bottom right). Record your video then press stop, video will be appended to your text.

[plaques]

I don't have a smart phone so what I'm saying has been gleaned from Mrs P.
If you intend to do a video, selfie etc and send it immediately then its as Panbiker says.
If you want to do selfie but send it later then I believe you need an android 10 and the functions in setup switched on.
If its one that someone sent you it should be in your gallery for onward sending.
If its a video that you have seen from another source and you want to pass it on then I don't know how to get it into your gallery then as above.

All depends what you want to do.

[Stanley]

Thanks for that, I shall have a play when I get bored.....

[Tizer]

Panbiker's post sounds the same as Mrs Tiz's phone would do for sending a video on WhatsApp.

I got an email on the weekend from Nominet telling me that my domain name subscription had ended. That gave me a shock because it's hosted by 1&1/IONOS, should be OK to August 2021 and should renew automatically on my credit card. Even if it was annual it shouldn't be due until August. I phoned 1&1 and explained the problem. The response was `Ignore the email, you're subscription is OK'. I pressed them further and then was told they'd had a flood of phone calls about these Nominet messages and the lady told me to look more closely at the message and I'll see that it relates to a slightly different domain. It turns out that when I signed up they were giving new subscribers a free extra domain, so when I put by `bloggs.co.uk' (false name) with them they gave me the bloggs.uk domain for free. Unfortunately they didn't tell the new subscribers and were simply hoping that they'd find it in their account and want to use it to set up another web site and email account with 1&1 (and pay more to them). They forgot about it coming to an end and had lots of people complaining like I did thinking it was about my proper domain. (I didn't even know there were .uk domains as well as .co.uk).

[Pluggy]

II got the same message regarding oneguyfrombarlick.uk also with Ionos, I ignored it.

[Stanley]

It's got to the point where you can ignore any 'official' email. If it's important they will get hold of you somehow!

[Tizer]

At the end of last year, when our Brother printer demanded a new cartridge, I bought a refill from Urefill.co.uk as suggested by Panbiker. First I followed their instructions for doing a reset so we got more out of the old cartridge before refilling - and it's only just faded enough to warrant using the refill! I've used the tool they supply to melt a hole then filled it with their ink. Printed test pages and it's good again. Very easy job as long as you take care with the hot tool and avoid getting black stuff everywhere. Thanks Panbiker!