Mostly lemon based

Category: Computing

Computer problems

  • I think the technical term is ‘whoops’.

    So, I managed to stay up ’til 4:30ish, which is pretty good for swinging my bodyclock round. Distressingly the big-sheets of cardboard behind the curtains had too many holes in (or it was too sunny), so I think I’ll have to put a little more effort into stopping light ingress. But still I managed to sleep, on and off, ’til 12:30, which puts me in a relatively good sleep balance for tonight. Or today, as I’m willing my brain to believe that it is. It’s just a very gloomy day :)

    Fortunately, there’s very little in the way of window-dom in the ED in which I work; and thus I am dependent entirely on other cues to know what time of day it is – and hopefully I can force my body into a sembelance of awakeness for the night; but at the moment I’m wanting to go to sleep and it’s only 1630, which doesn’t bode well.

    Body, let me introduce to my old friend Caffine. Caffine, Body. Here, let’s get together.

    Anyhoo, I did this by a process of watching Carry On Films and Red Dwarf. The Carry On Films aren’t really as good as I remember them being, but they’re funny – at least the old ones are. It’s funny though, I’d never really noticed how weak some of the stories are, or indeed non-existent. I thought there was *some* sort of plot to them all, but I don’t really think that ‘Carry on Nurse’ has a plot at all.

    Red Dwarf season 3, which is where I’m up to, is kind of the pinnacle of the series, I think. 3 and 4 definitely were my favourite seasons, although Holly (female) isn’t really as funny as Holly (male).

    Aaanyhow; so, today I kinda mooched about. I discovered Operator Please (particularly ‘Just a song about ping pong‘ (myspace link for those who like pain)). For some reason I can’t stop listening to Just a Song About Ping Pong (although I’m still also very into Remi Nicole’s Rock ‘n’ Roll and Late of the Pier’s Space and the Woods; Axe Girl is also still floating my boat, musically speaking :) ).

    Then I had a genius idea. I’d been debating updating the Mac to 10.4.10, and there was the download glowing at me like some ethereal mac spirit guide, beckoning me to come into the light. But, having checked it’s not really suitable for my AMD based HackinMac, so I hunted out a 10.4.9 update. Oh, I’m so clever…

    Having checked everything; 10.4.9 should run on my Athlon 64+ (which apparently has SSE3, although it’s not listed in ‘About this Mac’). So there I am installing it, and it runs thorough the updater before ending with ‘there were errors in this installation. Try restarting installer’; so I tried. It wouldn’t restart. Suspecting that the poo had already been flung and was preparing itself for a fan-type impact I attempted to shutdown the Hackinmac. After about 5 minutes of disk churning it sat silent with the blank Mac desktop staring at me. “J’acuse” it said, it’s icy blue glow reflecting on the murderer of the machine.

    I lent down, hitting the power button. After a brief pause it restarted, the screen filling with loading messages… fingers crossed I watched and read…

    …and then it started. Firewire failed to initialise properly…. The network card failed to initialise…. The audio wasn’t working *before*; but it was shedloads of not working now. And then we got into about 5 minutes of failures, before the machine decided it was not going to load OS X and would instead like to be dead.

    Whoops, I believe is the technical term.

    I tried to recover it using my original install disk (which, by some thankful piece of good thinking I put in the OS X box! I mean, who’d’a thunk I’d’ve been that organised. OS install disk in the OS box). But no, so now I’m trying to obtain 10.4.9, which hopefully I can install over the borked install. I’m thinking maybe I want to remove the old install? Hey; mac people. Broken mac with a working emergency partition – do I delete everything that’s not work from the other partition before installing? Or do I just see if it’ll install over it? Will it be quirky and unreliable if I do that?

    Anyhow; it gives me something to do for the rest of the week that isn’t watching videos… :-/

    Anyhow, I best get showered and up :)

  • BT Homehub (again)

    Does anyone have any tips for making the BT Homehub less shit? I’ve had to reset it 4 times today – it crashes and then sits there displaying a few of it’s little dinky lights (broadband, wireless and data) but fails to reconnect correctly. It has crashed though, because the wired machine can’t connect to it’s administration interface, and neither can the wireless machines – although they still show themselves as connected.

    Rebooting it transiently fixes the problem, but since it continues to live upstairs (I’m thinking that once I’ve found a wireless dongle for my Hackintosh then I’ll move it downstairs) I am forced, each time this happens to trail upstairs and unplug it, plug it back in and then wait. Whereupon this morning it would connect work for a good 2 minutes, and then fall over again.

    I think I’ve got a bit over half an hour this time which is positively astonishing.

    I did wonder if it had endured some kind of software update, but it still claims to be running the same revision it was a few days ago, before it got this bad… So, uh, suggestions for fixing it (before I’m forced to ring BT’s “help desk”), well, they’d be useful…

  • Right back where we started

    So I got the new homehub, and plugged it in, and astonishing things happened. The PC downstairs connected – and it got an IP address. All the machines could see each other. It was like magic pixie dust had been sprinkled all over my wireless connections.

    I was, I must admit, astonished. It all seemed to work.

    I left them on. this morning I came down and y’know what? They were all still saying “we’re connected, happy little networked computers”. Popped ’em into Standby, went to work.

    Came home from work, pull them out of standby, as usual the network is defunked. Kill and restart network drivers and lo, connectivity. Switch off hub, plug in hub phone. Configure for broadband telephony. SPLUTCH. Sans network. Fiddle for a bit. Connect…oh no, ‘s gone again. Reboot router. Connectivity! All is well! La la la l. Oh. Gone again.

    Reset router to factory defaults. Still nada. Reboot. Connectivity appears to be back. I want to blame the home hub phone, but I’m not certain enough that it is the cause. I have no idea what is the cause anymore, to be honest. But I wish the cause would make itself clearly known to me, because it’s beginning to drive me nuts.

  • Keeping up appearances

    So, the Viva continues to be a nightmare to start. Well, to be entirely honest we didn’t reach ‘starting’ today. Today we got as far as flattening the battery (which to be fair wasn’t very well charged) and starting to flatten the battery on Rebecca. After a full half hour of starting attempts I took Rebecca to the recycling place instead.

    I’m managing to maintain the pretence that Brick is running by cunningly moving him (by a process of pushing) – so he’s now on that central island at the end of my street. And the battery is back in the house being charged… again. The most frustrating thing is it’s almost certainly something very simple. I suspect that I need to clean a few earth points, change the distributor cap, points, rotorarm and all that. Basically do a service – and I suspect he’ll be sorted. But it’s annoying. I wanted to get the tyre changed, so that when I *do* get ‘im started I can treck straight down to my mum’s and do the service in the garage there. Only, I can’t. But now I’m so unsure of the starting situation that I fear going anywhere except straight down there.

    So, yeah. Homehub, not arrived. BT again promise that it will be here. Each department blames the previous one. I’m really fed up though, of having non-working wireless. I can’t watch stuff on my TV because it all goes through the PC. The PC has just been reinstalled, and needs to connect to the internet to download the graphics card drivers – otherwise I get to endure black and white on the TV output. Which obviously makes watching things less fun – even were I able to watch them.

    The damn thing also randomly loses the Mac now, which is wired to it. It’s incredibly annoying. It’s not getting better after resets either, before the wireless problems’d go away if you rebooted it, but now no.

    In other news, hooking up my CD player has reminded me that my amplifier doesn’t really do ‘quiet’ – on it’s minimum setting it’s ‘a bit loud’ for the evenings… I can’t really afford another one, so I guess I just better get the PC working soon, because that you can adjust the level of the output on it, so it ends up being quiet enough. Mmm. I think that’s the news. Life on Mars tonight, so let’s pray it’s a nice day at work so I get out on time. Yeah. So. Anyway, the house should be okay for Kathryn’s visit, if I get off my arse and sort various things out. I think actually, I’ve worked out how to make the stone on the fireplace sit better. Unfortunately it means I’ll have to remove all the sealant that I did do. But hey. It’ll be a better finished product :-)

    Lordy lordy, this is a boring entry. I’ll stop now :-)

  • Sometimes I think I should just give my first-born to Microsoft

    I hate Microsoft, many people know that, and as part of that I decline to take part in their product activation. I’ll hunt and seek and find ways around activating anything. Same with all my products, actually. I don’t see why I should be hastled.

    And I don’t see why they should get any information about my PC. It’s *my* PC and it’s not like their products are cheap. So. Yeah. Unfortunately the last patch I applied to my XP entertainment box… well… yeah. It confused matters. The machine is now schizophrenic, thinking on the one hand that it’s activated, and on the other that it’s not.
    The upshot of all of this is that it’s dead. I need to reinstall Windows. Bah. And I’ve no-one to blame but myself. What’s that you say? “But Kate you must love reinstalling windows, you do it so often…”. Uh. No.

    So, let’s skip on that and go onto other news. It appears the company I asked to quote for rebuilding my engine were ‘confused’. They wanted to return it to me in bits for me to reassemble. *sighs*. I noticed that they didn’t seem to actually *read* the e-mail I’d sent them – the whole bit about ‘normally I’d do this myself, but I don’t have the time at the moment’ seems to have passed them by. *sighs*. I fear the returned quote with assembly cost. But let’s find out.

    The installing thing is kinda getting to me, but the rest of the universe can go hang, because frankly nothing’s going to erase my general good mood. Not tiredness, not the fact my lemon tree looks exceedingly unwell, not the fact that my builder’s not rung, and not the fact that I can’t now watch what I wanted to watch on telly, because the Ent.PC is dead.

    I shall simply relax, listen to CIUT and consider reading about antibiotics some more.

  • MacOS – Revoltingly nice

    I’m becoming one of those ‘Mac’ people. Those irritating people who ‘love’ Macs. My hackintosh / macinhac is lush to use – it reminds me of the ease of using RISC OS from years ago. It is, I’m sure, not as much of a joy to program – and obviously booting takes a bit longer – but the thing as a whole fits together really nicely.

    I’m obviously biased, I never liked windows, but I never was that impressed with Mac OS – and my experience of Mac OS X on the G3 before was, well, yeah. Lets just say it wasn’t as fast or shiny as this is (to be fair, it was 10.0.1 or somesuch early version).

    Anyway, it’s all pretty much working; the soundcard has some problems – the video card isn’t fast enough (as it’s not using much in the way of acceleration) to play video full screen, but the ntfs disk mounted and the files have been copied. If everything remains dandy and lovely the NTFS disk will be becoming an HFS+ disk (is that right oh mac-ey people?) and the conversion will be complete.  At the moment I’ve imported my mail, my bookmarks, and started work on dumping my docs on here. I need to get Office installed, and FCP, and a few other things. I’m even trying iTunes.

    I know. Easily swayed by Th3 Pr33ty.

    I’m preparing to get a firewall installed – courtesy of e-bay and Lauren, Queen of Networks. Although installing hardware that I can’t work on my network is somewhat antithetical to my normal beliefs, having a firewall that makes sticking anything onto the network and not having to stress completely about it; it’s a good idea and probably worth the sum of money it’ll cost. I’ll also need to sort out a Wireless router – but that shouldn’t be to complex. And some file-sharing ‘twixt windows on the lounge PC (DVD / CD player) and my Macinhack. Now I just need to get my RISC PC on the network and we’ll have a truly hetrogenous network. Oh, and my printer.

    Anyway, enough of that. The job: Well, I’ve finally got my occy health form sent, I hope. I got a letter from the Drs saying “please come visit, we need you to check the form”; so I went over, they couldn’t find any record of the form, of having the request, anything. So I went home, grabbed the letter, and went back. They couldn’t find the form. They rang the sender of the letter who said where it should be, but it wasn’t, the form now being missing.

    They then rang and said they’d found the scanned copy of the form on the computer and couldn’t be certain whether they’d sent it or not. So I went over, the form was fine, and I didn’t push the fact that they’d potentially broken the law by sending it. *sigh*.

    Anyway, they said they’d send it yesterday – so hopefully it should get there today or tomorrow. I’ll ring them tomorrow to check, but we can but hope. If that’s the case, then by the end of the week I should be able to start putting in mortgage pre-qualification stuff, as I’ll know how much I’m paid and so on, and then I can start looking for a house. It is, of course, getting ‘rather tight’ now.

    I’m also continuing to try and clear out crap. The old PC bits have been put on Freecycle and the new cases are much smaller (and prettier. Look, it’s a pseudo mac ;-) ). I’ve got a bunch of stuff to go to the tip, the Videocorder went to a new home (shockingly) – and yeah, all is good on that front. There’s so much packing to do though, I still have far too much crap.

    It’s just now – working out what I want to keep and what can go, well, it’s all a bit much. Right at this moment I’m trying to sort out backing up some CDs and DVDs for Lauren. Friends of mine will realise quite what a trial this is for me and her *g*.

    Anyway, today is a work day – although I’ve come over all tired from eating lunch (hrm, nap time?) so I best start meandering in that direction. It’s weird around here though. Lauren’s moving from Bristol, I’m moving from Bristol, I’ve been here 5 years and kinda thought I’d stay here – then the whole Canada thing happened and this is a kind of dry run for that – staying in the safety of England but still moving away from all my friends. The house is filled with boxes, both hers and mine. In a few days time most of the furniture in the house will be gone. There will be no bookcases, bar my two crappy ones. Half of the house won’t be being used at all. Although I may do more packing and thus fill that. I’m going to have to dig my stereo out of retirement – to save me going insane. And I need to come up with something to stand the TV on!

    It’s all a bit weird. Exciting, but scary too.

    Uh hu.

    So, there y’go.

  • YYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHAW!

    I’m a nurse.

    I am a Nurse.

    I AM A BLOODY NURSE. How completely insane is that. I have passed the final assignment. I got 85% (iirc, provisional). I FUCKING ROCK.

    There ends todays progress announcement.

    (Incidentally, despite a replacement processor, my PC is still dead – I think I might replace *all* of it).

  • The Universe, now extracting urine.

    Did I say to my PC when I built it, “please piss me off endlessly”?

    Did I? I don’t recall saying it. It’s just died (again) with a new and shiny error – a problem with an NTFS driver. This is in my list of things that shouldn’t be happening. I did however manage to find out when my ex-mentor is working, so I can encourage her to send the reference off. I also booked shifts. What’s that you said about a Social Life?

    I also got Kate’s prezzie. I got some shiny shiny oil for the bike, and I may have obtained more crap… I came across an old garage sign that they’d found doing some construction work. Apparently they’re planning to have a display of the stuff they’ve found when they finish. In the unlikely event that they finish before I leave Brizzy, they may ring and say I can have it. It’s an old Mobiloil advert on enamel. Just saw it and thought ‘hey, I fancy that’ so I asked and maybe I’ll get it.

    So, really, it’s quite a positive day apart from the whole computer issue, which is driving me to the brink of insanity.

  • Screaming silently at the wind

    It’s been a tiring few days – what with the Starter Motor on the car failing at the least opportune moment (I’d just finished a shift and was about to head home having parked in a ‘quite dodgy area’ when it decided that it’s raison d’être was to be a giant power consuming magnet instead of a motor. This was just before the police arrived to have a chat with a lovely group of people screaming at each other in the 5th / 6th floor flat – which you could hear quite clearly down inside my car). Still, that’s in Warranty.

    Which is good.

    So is the fact that the clutch *finally* arrived for Cherry, who is *finally* back on the road – and being lovely to ride. I must, however, go buy more two stroke oil as I’m fearing the stuff that I poured out may have bits of shite in it, and therefore is only suitable for premix.

    Unfortunately, the goodness ends there. My mum – who I argued the case with about her continuing to pay me… and said she shouldn’t. Well, it seems that the bank saved her the hastle – because my dad presumably set up the direct debit / transfer to stop in July. So I didn’t get any money in August. So the fact I’m still in credit is… shocking. Of course, the fact I’m only notionally in credit – the money I owe to Lauren for rent, and for council tax, is yet to come out. The money I owe to the credit cards is also yet to come out – astoundingly my bank loan has come out. Oh, and because it took them so long to process my timesheet I’m now not getting paid for work I did on the 17th until… wait for it… the 7th.

    *sighs*

    And my PC is still defunked. I am starting to run out of ideas – James suggested that maybe it needs the Inno graphics card drivers; because it’s an Inno card (rather than the nVidia generic drivers). So I’m trying that now (but I’m downloading them on the laptop because I don’t trust the desktop to stay running that long). Or the processor could be sick. Or… well, that’s it really. Graphics card and processor are all that remain that haven’t been eliminated as the cause of the problem. If it *is* the processor I’m going to cry, because having bought a new motherboard… well… I’d rather have bought a step-up board rather than the same S754 thing, and if it’s the graphics card I’m also going to cry because it’s new-but-off-ebay. So the word guarantee doesn’t apply. But hey. I can’t really afford any of this now anyway. Right at this moment I’m feeling a little bit fed up, really, to say the least.

  • Plot == Lost

    Argh! I’ve replaced now:

    – Motherboard
    – Diskdrives
    – Powersupply
    – Graphics Card
    – Processor fan (old one was noisy, anyhow).

    And y’know what, it’s *still* randomly crashing and rebooting. The problem got *worse* after I changed the graphics card (way back when), I’ve got a brand new unpatched, unmolested version of XP on there – running on only one disk – nothing else is connected. The only thing left is the Firewire card. Sadly, I have to go to work now, but I guess that’s the last thing to pull out. After I get home I may have more of a play. I still want to go *ARGH* though.