COMPUTERS, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

[Stanley]

See the edit of my post Kev. Yes, no problem at all once I switched to capitals!
(Next time I might remember!)

[Big Kev]

[Stanley]

A delight to be able to access Youtube etc. from the TV instead of via On Demand on the Humax box. Much faster, a more reliable connection and so easy.

[Stanley]

Just re-logged in after my sleep. First I was refused with 'general error 200'. Then eventually I was let in but the site is painfully slow.

[plaques]

12-15pm Initially the site was slow but then improved inversely proportional to my blood pressure. Too many people reading one guy?

[Stanley]

Seems to be back to normal now.....

[Tizer]

There was a patch this morning when I couldn't access OG pages but other sites were OK.

[PanBiker]

There is no indication of any faults in the various logs in the Admin Control Panel.

[Stanley]

In that case they speak with forked tongue. It was only OG that was affected.

[PanBiker]

Only thing I got yesterday was a failed page load the first time I came on, rectified immediately with a refresh. To be fair the main logs only cover Admin, Moderator and User actions, the Error log itself has always vexed me as it only seems to log system email errors? There is also a Gallery log that has an error in itself and fails to load! Almost certainly because the gallery extension has not kept pace with the board software and is currently not fully compatible and only working on the proverbial wing and a prayer. No comparable module so it is what it is.

[Stanley]

Gallery seems to work fine so best left alone. Funny thing is it occasionally has a brain fart and improves its search function, displaying all the pages on demand but then reverts to normal mode where it only accesses the page numbers already on screen but I have always lived with that.

[Stanley]

140mb of upgrades this morning from Canonical. As usual quick and seamless installation (less than two minutes). Thanks lads!
See THIS BBC news story this morning about Twitter 'inadvertently' releasing user's email addresses and telephone numbers to advertisers. 'Inadvertent'? No mention of how many but from the article it could be the lot. This could be bigger than it looks at the moment.

[Tizer]

Apparently Twitter is not contacting affected customers directly to warn them of the breach even though it is obliged to do so in Europe under the GDPR. Another case of `We're too big for the law'?

[Stanley]

Funny how that story has dropped out of the headlines......

[Tizer]

I notice today that when I do a google search in Firefox the layout of the results page look different. Bigger spacing between entries, fancy tiny thumbnail images against each one. I haven't changed anything so I wonder whether it was the Firefox update yesterday?

[Stanley]

Mine doesn't look any different Tiz.

[Tizer]

Mine doesn't look any different Tiz.

Mrs Tiz's display hasn't changed. Mine now looks as shown below. There are no URLs shown in the results which makes it less secure - I now don't know if I'm clicking on a spoof link. I've sent negative feedback to Google. I'm surprised thy should think it OK to make their display less secure.

[Stanley]

Here's how mine looks Tiz.....

[Tizer]

That's what mine was like until last week, and Mrs Tiz's looks like yours too. I've read that Google like to test out ideas live on unsuspecting users and see what response they get. Perhaps I'm a guinea pig! I've scrutinised all the Google and Firefox settings and haven't found any way of changing it back to what you have. I've just tried the Bing search engine and that's like my old Google and has URLs so I'll give that a try for a while. I've deleted Google from my Firefox search engines for now. I wonder if Pluggy has seen any change?

I remembered the Chromium browser so I launched that and tried it on the same search words. It displays like Google, mostly without full URLs.

[Pluggy]

You could try resetting or refreshing Firefox. On the 3 bars menu button top right, click help, and troubleshooting information, brings up a screen which inclides a button to Refresh firefox.

Are you searching google from the URL box or from the Google page ? Does it make a difference ?

[Stanley]

I always wondered what they were for!

[Tizer]

Thanks for that advice Pluggy. It was displaying the same whichever way I did the search - in my usual separate search box, or in the address bar, or in a Google page. But...I followed your advice and did the Firefox Refresh (I had to drill down through the options to find it) and now it's back to the normal display, with full URLs. It lost my Adblock Plus extension and a number of personal settings so I had to restore them, but it only took a few minutes. Thanks, Pluggy, you've made my day!

Having in the meantime tried the Bing search engine I have to report that I was impressed. Last time I tried it was years ago and now it's much the same as Google, so I'll definitely keep it and make comparisons between the two of them.

[Stanley]

Glad our resident guru solved your problem Tiz. What would we do without him!
Why is it so comfortable to stick with Google? I know I ought to try an alternative....

[chinatyke]

Why is it so comfortable to stick with Google?

Because Google is the best. We're prevented from accessing it by the Great (Fire) Wall of China but can use Bing which is a poor second. Most of the time Bing discovers my location in China and shows the result in Chinese rendering it useless.

[Stanley]

Ah, I'd forgotten that there were drawbacks to living under an all powerful government. Hard luck China.