Week of 13th November, 2017

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Monday, 13th November

Jane asked me the time this morning, "Is it 9:30?" I think she was worried about being late for something. It turns out the Ansonia clock has stopped, at 09:30. Did I not wind it? Nope, it's not that, but it won't start up again. This is worrying - I already have one clock in the "Fix Me" queue, now it looks like another one has joined the Gustav Becker. And Jane's Mum's clock appears to strike an hour late - it strikes 7 at 8:00. That's a simple matter of removing and refitting the hands.

Jenny sent me a text, "Can you attend to let a workman in, tomorrow?" Yes, but when? She will confirm.

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Tuesday, 14th November

So I chased Jenny this morning - and I'm not needed, the workman is attending after she gets home from work.

Then comes the text, "We have mincemeat in stock!" Which was unexpected. Good - i.e. non-runny - mincemeat is uncommon these days. So she purchased a slab of 12 pots, and I was required to meet her to collect it.

So I did, and while I was there I visited my tame clock repairer, to warn him that the Ansonia clock will need to be looked at. When he collects the Becker on Saturday, he'll have a look at it.

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Wednesday, 15th November

Jane's Mum's clock isn't consistent about striking 1 less than the hands say. This afternoon, I heard it strike 5 at 17:00. But I'll live with that, at least for the foreseeable future - it's a minor problem. Meanwhile its rate is no more than 1 minute a week, gaining, which is the best of all the clocks here. My Mum's clock is nearly as good.

I've been to-and-froing with Martin, G1LIG, about the GD-77 digital radio, and its programming. He uses a TYT MD-380, and the codeplug format is not compatible. But if I can learn the correct frequencies and ID numbers, and where to put them, I can make shift to generate my own codeplug in GD-77 format. Trouble is, it's complicated, and I'm still at the bottom of a steep learning curve. I'll get there, but it's going to take a while. Still, I have most of the numbers now, I just need to select what I need from the large data files, type it in (or import it) and programme the radio. Easier said than done.

PocketLab, in the States, have taken to Kickstarter again, with their new PocketLab Air air quality monitoring device. There is evidently a large demand for such a thing, because the campaign is already fully funded, after 5 days (of 40-odd) They're not proposing to ship before about this time next year, but I'm in. Meanwhile, the Planet Computers Gemini Android palmtop has slipped to some time in January - as usual, crowdfunded projects overrun their predicted ship dates. And the GripCase I ordered for Jenny has also been delayed - this time by a strange blunder by the fabricator. They managed to laser-etch the specified text into a prototype mirror-imaged verically. Of course, it's a Chinese fabricator, and they're obviously not native English speakers, but even so... Delayed to next month, as a result, so possibly not here until after Christmas. Which means I may need to find a new pair of presents for her - birthday (next week) and Christmas.

Firefox updated itself to version 57 today - despite me telling it not to. This caused a flag day, because Firefox 57 removes support for NPAPI extensions, among which is NoScript. Which I need to suppress GoComics' annoying "I'm not going to let you save the strip image" behaviour, which is scripted. But Firefox offered me an alternative, uMatrix. So I installed it.

At first blush, it didn't seem to do much. But it's almost infinitely customisable, and once I'd found the correct option - for Gocomics, select "scripts" from the subdomain "assets" click to turn it red, and "save the temporary change" - it did the trick.

NoScript will, allegedly, be updated to work with WebExtensions, according to the developer, but it could not be done until the release of Firefox 57. In which case, why does uBlock Origin continue to work? Which it does, and just as well as before.

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Thursday, 16th November

So today, Martin sent me another file dump, which included a program called N0GSG Contact Manager. And that proved that one of my problems was caused by a corrupt codeplug file in a previous dump. Furthermore, he sent .csv files containing all the data in his (working) codeplug, and an accompanying e-mail with recommendations as to which items to put in my equivalent, as a first step.

I'll probably just insert everything, but a recommendation for a minimal codeplug is good. I'll not be able to get to this before the weekend, because it needs 2 computers - the .csv formats for N0GSG export and GD-77 import are not the same, and I don't have Excel on latitude, where the radio management software is, to allow me to reorder the fields in the .csv. I can't do it in the study, there's not enough flat surface to set up another machine, so I need the dining room table.

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Friday, 17th November

After Jane and Jenny returned from Rainbows, I was required to get fish and chips in, as usual. Not as usual, Sarah was expected, and did, once I'd collected her from the station. She timed her arrival well, I'd just paid for the paper carrier bag full of food when she texted to say, "I'll be at the station soon." So I carried all back to the car, and drove down to pick her up.

And later took them home.

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Saturday, 18th November

The clock repairer attended this afternoon, and took away the Gustav Becker movement - not the case, which is still hanging on the wall, empty. He also took the Ansonia, to investigate the sundry problems in both clocks that I've mentioned before. We agreed that I'd drop in to the shop on Thursday, to discuss what has happened.

Planet Computers have decided to have a show-and-tell for backers of the Gemini palmtop on IndieGogo. This will be kept in the downstairs cafe at the Royal Court Theatre, in Central London, next Thursday evening, the 23rd, at 18:30. I'm going. It'll be good to see a prototype of what I'm going to get in a month or so - currently January next.

Freelance at former $EMPLOYER tonight - a half night shift.

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Sunday, 19th November

While I was at freelance last night (which went well, btw, no problems) latitude offered me some updates, among which was KB2952664, one of the infamous "Get Windows 10" patch series. It was offered but not selected, and I made the mistake of selecting it.

To cut a long story short, I ended up chasing multiple rabbits down ever-more-convoluted holes, until finally I uninstalled the update. And it went away, which is good. Apparently, it is possible to get multiple installations of this update, because M$ pushes a version update as a new install. There are allegations that KB2952664 can cause instability and/or slowdowns, but I've seen no evidence of this. It is also alleged that the update enables telemetry on Win 7 - if so, I definitely don't want it.

It's seems to be linked to the Windows Customer |Experience Improvement Program, which is apparently enabled by default, and it appears that it may not install if CEIP is disabled. Whether or not that's true, I have no idea, but since I routinely don't send crash dumps (or at least I try not to) it might be worthwhile to disable CEIP. Which you do as follows (claimed to work on all Windows versions) -

Open regedit, and browse to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows. There may be a DWORD key, CEIPEnable, there. If there isn't, create it with <right-click>|new|DWORD. And then set it to 0.

<pause>

Which doesn't seem to work - at least KB2952664 reappeared in Windows Update, so I hid it. Hopefully, that'll be it until next month. And unfortunately, GWX Control Panel (which I still run) doesn't check for this.

Much later: KB2952664 hasn't reappeaared since I typed the last paragraph. Whether this is due to merely hiding it, or disabling CEIP is unknown to me.

Yesterday, I decided to look for a HDD/DVD recorder with a SCART input. There don't seem to be any new ones, but eBay had several used ones, including an example of a slightly more recent version of my broken ones - this is a Panasonic DMR-EX87EB-K, offered by a dealer in South-East London. So I bought it. This will permit restarting archiving of non-BBC TV. I've given up on the Terratec G3 USB video capture box - it cannot record at acceptable quality, not with my machines. It may work with a faster processor - experience suggests at least 2.5GHz (the spec quotes minimum 2GHz - which is NOT enough) and that must be in a single core: the video capture app - Magix 5- appears to be single-threaded. I don't need this for BBC material - the BBC's iPlayer is my source for that, via get-iplayer, running on torrentpi.

 
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