Tag Archives: computers

Patch Tuesday fun on Wednesday

Posted on by

Not that I am ungrateful, mind you. Little Junior HP is now all up to date. But oh my, the process was painful, both for Junior HP whose meagre resources were stretched, and for me as it led to my postponing my birthday trip to the Club, not to mention the pharmacy and library. And of course BWS where a giftie awaits me according to an SMS received on Monday! I suspect it may look like this.

That was last year…. This year I know it is not a scam.

In fact, I am chuffed by all the birthday greetings and comments I received in the past couple of days, many attached to this:

On FB I wrote: This is nice, even if it was auto-generated! And I appreciate all the other messages I have been getting, reminding me in the nicest way that I am now firmly in the one foot in the grave category. But I guess if I were American I could still consider running for President! Seems to be the main qualification these days….

Planned to go to town today

Weather being kind too… But I forgot about PATCH TUESDAY — and not just any Patch Tuesday. Of course here in Oz they come on a Wednesday, we being ahead of the USA in several respects including not least our being a parliamentary democracy and also a constitutional monarchy (Charles !!!), which means, as former PM John Howard, with whom I rarely agree, correctly pointed out on Sky Oz, which I never watch, that because of those things Donald Trump would never have been elected under our system! He simply could not have been.

“If the Americans had a parliamentary system, Trump would not have gotten to the top of the republican party, no chance and therefore would not have been president way back a few years ago.” — John Howard.

But back to Patch Tuesday. I checked several expert sites and this is what I found:

“Microsoft has released the KB5040427 cumulative update for Windows 10 21H2 and Windows 10 22H2 with 13 changes, including Microsoft Copilot now behaving like an app, providing more flexibility on how it is displayed.

“The Windows 10 KB5040427 update is mandatory as it contains Microsoft’s July 2024 Patch Tuesday security updates, which fix 142 vulnerabilities.”

The process began around 8am when Junior HP alerted me that it needed a restart. The thingie that checks for malicious software ran then, but the main game failed. So try again. And with the speed of grass growing the rest of the patches ground their way through the tubes and into Junior HP’s private parts where they slowly and lovingly inserted themselves.

Eventually….

You see the time… Had I gone to town I would have been on the 10.20 bus…

Of course you do know that there is always junk left behind after one of these updates, but Microsoft does have a utility for that.

I do not have a lot of free space, you see. But how much junk was there? Well, look what appeared afterwards — just before I began this post! (It is now 11.20am.)

Now that is a lot of junk cleaned up! Do you clean up after installing those Wndows updates? I suggest you should…. If you want to, you can go even further. I did this a while back.

Remember when the Internet seemed just wonderful?

Posted on by

When people thought it would usher in an era of world peace and understanding?

Stephen Fry explained this brilliantly 6 years ago

In 2024 thoughtful young US vlogger Joel reacts to what he said.

Great listening to Joel from Maryland at any time! Just 20 years old. I have followed his vlogs for a few years now, from when he was still in high school.

Speaking of the good side of the Internet I spoke of the E M Forster tag “only connect” in a 2022 post about some of the Russian and Ukrainian vlogs I had been following:

I discern it also in vloggers like Joel in Maryland USA who reaches out with eyes open and willingness to find the good in people and the world. It is encouraging that there are in the world young people like Joel and Zack and Nik and Niki and Natasha and Roman and Anna from Ukraine and Pavlo from Ukraine and Konstantin (not quite as young) and Daniil and Artyom and Denis in Vladivostok and so on. And only through technology have I found them — and in some cases have they found one another.

I recall conversations with my boss Dick Stratford in the 1990s about the wonders of the “world-wide web” and similar conversations equally hopeful in The Albury with the late Dowager Empress of Hong Kong. I did not enter this magic kingdom until late 1999! And I too was wonderstruck, and by 2000 had even become a blogger! Though I called it a diary, and what I was doing I called “journalling”, using the term I learned in the 70s through Bob Walshe in the English Teachers Writing Group.

And now? Well, there’s social media — and despite the past couple of days I still like Facebook, even if the crass treatment I copped there in those two days, and described in the last two posts, still rankles.

Fact is Facebook has in many ways been a wonderful means of renewing otherwise lost links, being exposed to great conversations, and so much more…

But there is also:

Stephen Fry again

Meanwhile I have reviewed the way I use Facebook

It could be the Dumbbot yesterday was reacting to the number of posts I was sharing, not the content of the one it removed. Still dumb, of course. However, I trimmed yesterday’s output and much that was on my FB feed or would have been later that day ended up on Mastodon, where humans, not AI and algorithms still rule. It is even possible on Mastodon to put your case to actual human beings,in the event of a troubling post being flagged. I have not had to resort to that, but I have seen it done with other users of Mastodon.

Yes, that is always annoying! But do go to YouTube and watch it.

I announced the changes on FB in a pinned post yesterday:

Yes, using that link on the phone version of my Facebook I can go straight to my Mastodon which renders well. There you can scroll down all the posts I have made there.

Obviously you can in a similar way get from the link to my Mastodon that sits in the Intro box on the top left of the laptop view. So it is easy to find the posts which may not be on Facebook any more. That will include quite a few of the vlogs I have normally featured on Facebook, such as Joel or Roman the Russian.

So, please follow me over to Mastodon, but of course much will also be shared on posts here in the blog. I am due for another vlog catch-up soon.

More on laptops I have loved and love

Posted on by

Junior HP

2017

First post on Junior HP

Posted on  by Neil

Well, here we are back in West Wollongong, with a fair bit of setting up still to go. Next to see what I can save from backups on various storage devices.

0320-principal-100249235-large

 

Baby HP: RIP

28th January 2017

And today I paid for JUNIOR HP! Thanks to those WHS friends for their kindness.

192772-l-lo


I don’t take delivery until Wednesday, so I have set myself some homework:

I told the story recently on Facebook

Meet Junior HP and thanks 7.5 years on to Stewart Holt, Nick Southall, Marion Schausberger and all those late 70s/early 80s WHS people who helped bring it into my life!

Junior HP, my Windows 10 laptop, is old and its capacity is small, but by God it is the best I ever had. I took delivery of it on 4th February 2017! It was gifted to me by a small band of wonderful ex-students from Wollongong High — from 40+ years ago! I nurse it carefully through its occasional pains.

Like the time at City Diggers when it had beer spilt on the keyboard. Or the time it fell out of my backpack and crashed onto Mount Keira Road. Or the more recent times when ominous burping and flashing made me fear it was dying at last, but it turned out that all was well except for something a bit loose inside. That is stiill the case, but a discreet bump fixes it. It has now been in that state for over twelve months, but still Junior HP soldiers on.

Despite the most used keys having the lettering quite rubbed away, which does lead me to strike wrong keys rather often…

Then there is the capacity issue. That is 57GB. Lately the free space had been around 2-3GB. Under some conditions it has dropped to a few hundred MB! Then it struggles, so I restart which clears space and allows me to go on.

But the other day Adobe tried to update my Acrobat reader, and failed because of insufficient space. So I searched and found Slim PDF Reader, downloaded it, uninstalled Acrobat thoroughly using Revo Uninstaller, and installed Slim which takes up only 47.9MB.

Result? I now have 8GB free space! Acrobat was a monster! Slim does save by using your browser to display the PDFs, and it works well with Edge. I also have and have long had Bullzip PDF Printer for making PDF versions — and it is very good.

Here is part of the 1992 Foreword by Edward Said of “The Question of Palestine”, which I recommended earlier today, showing how Edge renders it from Slim PDF Reader.

My eBook Library on Calibre takes up 2.47GB by the way. It holds 3,249 books at the moment.

Back in May 2023

Posted on  by Neil

My laptop was showing ominous signs yesterday morning — display flashing like crazy. Junior HP is after all six years old — the longest a computer has lasted for me!

And in July

I see it is around two months since I first mentioned the flashing screen issue on my six-year-old HP laptop. I narrowed the problem down to a “loose screw” somewhere as the actual computer components seem to be working fine. No problem with the main solid state disk drive — it has no hard disk. No problems with any of the software items. And when a fit occurs, a gentle tap or two of the laptop against my knee stops it. Sometimes indeed it will go for ages with no fits at all, as in my first session this morning.

I have resisted buying a new laptop, even if that is what must happen — and yes, thanks to going twelve years without any cigarettes I can afford one!

As you can see Junior HP is soldiering on

But yesterday I backed up in two ways, first to the cloud using Windows tools. and then to my portable hard drive, a My Passport even older than Junior HP. For that I combined straight copying of My Documents in its latest version, and a few other things, plus a system backup using this:

Learn more.

And on Edward Said

One of many posts: Zion Dreaming.

The example of Edward Said

Lately I have been reading The Question of Palestine by Edward Said (1979) with much pleasure as well as with some pain as I contemplate what is unfolding in Palestine/Gaza/Israel today, and the sometimes dire quality of talk about it.

One simple example: “Israelis are Nazis” said in response to some very real abominable deed done as part of the apparent de facto annihilation of Gaza, an area half the size of the Wollongong area where I live. I understand the anger, but it is on so many levels a really stupid thing to say. Strictly speaking no living Israeli is a member of the National Socialist Party in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, and need I say why that whole idea is even more bizarre as anyone Jewish was most unlikely to be such a member, and indeed would by war’s end be lucky to be alive….