COMPUTERS, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

[Pluggy]

Prt-sc dumping to the clipboard is Windows land. Ubuntu puts it straight into a png. A far more civilised way of working in my book. It makes a camera sound and blinks the screen while its at it.

[Stanley]

[Tizer]

Thanks for all that, Pluggy. I'd not used the Print Screen key because I thought it just made a pic of the whole screen (perhaps it did in the past) and I always use the screenshot software in its `Select area to grab' mode. Now I see pressing the Print Screen key brings up a cross symbol and you can draw that out into an area of the screen for making the image. It then drops the PNG file in my Home folder (I don't have a folder called Pictures). I agree that small PNGs are often the same size or less than JPGs. I've installed Pinta and will have a play with it. It looks simple enough for me!

After my trouble with the new external hard disk last week I met another problem this morning. It must be the season for problems for me! Booted the PC and found no internet connection. Checked the ports and cables. Checked Mrs Tiz's phone and found wifi from the router OK. She booted her PC and it connected up OK. To cut a longer story short, we're using Powerline connectors and that seemed to be where the problem lay. Dug out the old, very long network cable from our old house (never throw anything away!) and connected my PC directly to the router - successful. It looked like the Powerline had failed until I tried it in a different leccy socket and then I got the internet again. Next time we have an electrician I'll get him to replace the bad socket, it's an old one and I could do with going from a double to a triple too.

[Stanley]

Sometimes mine drops out and unplugging at each and and then reconnecting seems to heal it up Tiz.

[Tizer]

This could be good...if they don't bump into the other rubbish up there!
`OneWeb satellite internet mega-constellation set to fly' LINK

I hope the ISIS ISS computer is getting its updates...
`HP computer stranded in space' LINK

[PanBiker]

I hope they ISIS ISS computer is getting its updates...

ISS even, half an hour for data transfer from the original hardware! See my last post in Signal Propagation - ISS SSTV to see how far we have come and we are just a bunch of amateurs.

[Stanley]

ISIS foxed me as well! My thought was "Good God, they're launching space craft!". ISS reassures me.....
Distance will be a problem, As Scotty used to say on Star Trek; "Ye canna mess with the laws of physics Jim!"
Here on earth we are OK. Having a conversation with Margaret in Oz in between posts. If anyone told me that was going to be possible 40 years ago I'd have told them they were potty!

[Tizer]

Sorry if I worried anyone with my ISIS mistake.

[PanBiker]

Distance Stanley, the ISS is only the same distance as from here to London, but upwards, with nowt in the way.

It's the only man made object in orbit that you can see with the naked eye.

[Tizer]

I thought I'd read that some satellites could be seen with the naked eye - but perhaps it's only possible under ideal conditions of high solar reflection?

[PanBiker]

The smaller and higher altitude satellites just appear as moving stars. The ISS is the largest structure yet to be placed in orbit. With decent binoculars you can see the solar arrays on the station if it's on an overhead pass so closest to the viewing point.

You can track the ISS passes here on Heavens Above

For the ISS you can select all orbits or just the visible ones from your chosen location. Altitude, Azimuth and duration of pass are given.

Reset the viewing point in the box at the top right. You can track lots of other man made celestial objects as well from the side menu.

[Stanley]

Bit harder travelling though.....
I'm getting well into V.18 now and it's working fine. Hard for me to tell because the FM3 has always been fast but I suspect it's a bit faster, especially logging on and off. All the other systems are working well but that error message for the 'system tray' still bugs me. What the hell is a 'system tray'?

[Tizer]

I guess it's to do with your printer. Do you have an HP printer? I see plenty of google links to a `No system tray' warning and they usually relate to HP printers. It doesn't seem to cause any problem other than irritating the user. Best to ask Pluggy about it if you want to be rid of the warning.

[Pluggy]

Go into settings and find the printer. I suspect there will be an option to tell it it only has one system tray/ Linux printer divers are much like windows printer drivers, they are all different and have more options than enough.

[Stanley]

How do I 'go into settings'....?

[Wendyf]

The very charming Irish chappy digging a trench across the end of my track this morning informs me that it's for the Facebook fibre network. He warned me that there would be salesmen heading our way within a few months!!

[Pluggy]

How do I 'go into settings'....?

Click in the top right corner of the screen, where you go to shut down. On the same drop down menu as the power button, theres an icon comprising of a crossed spanner and screwdriver. That's settings.

[Tizer]

Wendy, ask him if he's earning 154,000 euros a year... LINK

Stanley, get used to using the Super key (or Alt + F1) to access stuff - it's very useful on Ubuntu 18.04. It also gives you access to the workspaces on the R.H. side of your desktop. Here's what it says on an Ubuntu web page:
Super key: Opens Activities search
If you have to use just one keyboard shortcut on Ubuntu, this has to be the one.
You want to open an application? Press the super key and search for the application. If the application is not installed, it will even suggest applications from software center.
You want to see the running applications? Press super key and it will show you all the running GUI applications.
You want to use workspaces? Simply press the super key and you can see the workspaces option on the right-hand side.

Here is a list of shortcut keys that's worth bookmarking: LINK

[PanBiker]

The very charming Irish chappy digging a trench across the end of my track this morning informs me that it's for the Facebook fibre network. He warned me that there would be salesmen heading our way within a few months!!

You won't need any of that old hat buried fibre, once they have the broadband satellite swarms up in orbit.

[Stanley]

Settings.... Thanks for the clues, I shall go digging! Thanks Tiz for the advice and the list of shortcut keys. I've printed it out....
Wendy, you reminded me that many years ago in the days when my beard was black (60 years) a firm called United Kingdom had a virtual monopoly of digging trenches and holes in the road and all the men were Irish and tigers for work! This was in the days before JCB back hoes and it was all pick, shovel and crowbar. The then current version of the Navigators who built our canals and railways. I wonder if your Irish man was from the modern equivalent of the same firm.....

[Wendyf]

They are certainly working from 8am to 6pm without stopping (even on Saturday) which is a rare sight with road works!
Sunday's too, the gang are just arriving now.

[Stanley]

Ask them Wendy, I'll bet there is a connection!

[Tizer]

Stanley, I'm finding that one of the most useful key combinations on 18.04 is Super + S. Give it a try with multiple overlapping windows open. It gives you an overview of all the windows and makes it easy to switch between them, as well as bringing the workspace thumbnails into view on the RH side of the screen. If you then move your mouse cursor to those thumbnails they merge further into the screen.

Also click the array of 9 dots at bottom left of the screen to show lots of application icons. There's more than one page and you open page 2 by clicking on the circles on the right. One of the icons is Utilities - this has some useful apps.

[Stanley]

Thanks again Tiz, I'm taking a rest from exploring V. 18 further as at the moment I am being very efficient. I'm handling everything with no difficulty.

[Tizer]

I've been a bit out of the OG loop recently, partly because we've got plumbers, an electrician and a plasterer working here but also because I'm still having a problem with external hard disks. Two weeks ago I reported how I'd returned a Seagate Maxtor 1TB external drive to Scan because it worked once and then failed. They sent a replacement but that failed in exactly the same way and has gone back today. The same problem on both our PCs and yet my old Toshiba external dive still works fine on both. The Seagates did a very fast first back up (30GB in 6 minutes) but every subsequent attempt started fast then soon slowed down until they were going at about 1MB/sec and I had to cancel them after an hour. After cancelling I would click `Safely remove' but they wouldn't let go and were still throwing up a warning when I shut down the PC. I got the same result on both USB 3 and USB 2 ports.

It's usually said that you can use any external hard drive on Linux these days, so I'm surprised by the problem. I haven't encountered any problems transferring data to various USB sticks, SD cards, tablet and smartphone. I've searched the web and found some reports of difficulties but they're mostly dated several or more years ago. In some cases people suggest re-formatting the drive to ext3 partitions instead of the default NTFS but this could make my back ups unreadable on a Windows PC if ever that were needed (think legacy, wills power of attorney etc). Another suggestion is that the manufacturers are now using SMR (shingled magnetic recording) on HDDs and that this is causing a problem with using them on Linux; but others say that Linux doesn't have a problem with SMR. I can't find any straightforward advice on which external drive to use with Ubuntu - most people just say they all work OK!