2014 — 4 October: Saturday
This morning's mist is a little more solid.1 The tea, however, remains refreshing and addictively necessary. I have another lunchtime expotition today, starting at what I hope will be the correct instantiation of "The Dog and Crook". In other words, not the one we drove past yesterday on the way to "The Wheatsheaf" (home of a delicious chicken curry pie and veg). I'm guessing I'll have a greater chance of greeting my lady companion at the version just the other side of the Brambridge garden centre.
Lunch is my...
... (unnecessary, but very welcome) payment in advance for today's Mission (Un)Impossible as I do my best to ease Iris gently over from the ghastly world of XP into the brightly-lit uplands of Windows 8.1 on her new "All-in-One" HP desktop PC (bought, I confess, at my recommendation). What larks, Pip, what larks.
Meanwhile, Uncle ERNIE has picked me (can you imagine?) to receive one of his virtual £25 notes this month, nicely-timed for my rapidly-approaching birthday. Cool!
As was the link...
... I received about "HiFiPi" in the form of various Volumio Projects. Thanks, Brian.
Inside the Vampire Squid
Today's episode of "This American Life" is a guaranteed blood-pressure elevator:
Another handy hint...
... buried in another long set of El Reg comments on the Windows 10 Tech Preview...
Half a day...
... or so later, I'm delighted to leave Iris with a fully-working All-in-One PC, all her data migrated, and the needful small set of applications either re-installed and running or replaced by (in my opinion) better free equivalents. (Libre Office, for example, rather than a copy of Office dating back more than a decade. Firefox, rather than Internet Explorer, despite the best efforts of the mandated 'Browser Choice' app to push for its Microsoft relative.) The only thing I couldn't quite figure out was how the hell HP had managed both to unhook and hide Windows Defender, replacing it by a McAfee product of some sort (paid for, of course). Naughty.
There were a couple of minor gotchas and wrong turnings — it is, after all, the first time I've had to deal with Windows 8.1 on an actual touch-screen system. I'd also not noticed the recent change in how you set your choice of home page on Firefox... navigate to where you want, then drag the open tab across and drop it on to the 'home' symbol. An unnecessary change in a procedure that's been essentially unchanged for more than a decade. Applying 1GB or so of accumulated patches to a brand-new Win8.1 system was quite eye-opening. That's a lot of re-work going on under the covers.
Still, I've managed to conceal almost all traces of "non-desktop" behaviour without resorting to Classic Shell while also tidying up quite a tangle of superfluous cables and power leads. And Iris can now open Firefox and log straight in to her AOL email web service.
I shall now relax with some Hot Saturday Night jazz on NPR and make a bite to eat, methinks.
Acting on...
... info received, and just before their late night website maintenance kicks off, I've changed my energy supply tariff yet again, 20 days before the previous change was due to kick in, lest I ended up kicking myself. Though the product they emailed me details of (about 72 hours ago) has itself already been supplanted despite their second recommendation of it to me in the smailmail annual summary that was waiting on my doorstep this evening. I've apparently used 30% less electricity and 14% less gas in the last 12 months. (I presume the LED bulbs, and the fact that I rarely use the gas cooker, are both paying off.)