philmophlegm: (dashboard)
 This is a post for my own future reference as much as anything else.

Problem: Printer prints pdf files ridiculously slowly.

Diagnosis: It's a driver problem with the PS driver.

Solution: Switch to the PCL driver.

Simples.
philmophlegm: (orbit)
One of the advantages of working for yourself is that you get to choose your own PC. In fact, not just choose but build.

Another advantage is that this PC doesn't need to be a boring colour like black or white or beige - it can be ORANGE!


Read more (with lots of pics)... )
philmophlegm: (Invasion Earth)
One unfortunate side-effect of my soon-to-be-reduced circumstances is that I'll have to actually buy a mobile phone. This is something I haven't had to do this millennium because my soon-to-be-former employer was nice enough to buy me one (most recently an iPhone 4, before that a pre-3G Blackberry Curve and before that a Motorola Razr V3 (remember them?)).

I make very infrequent calls. How infrequent? Put it this way, when I had to separate out personal calls on my monthly bills, they usually came to less than £1. Still, it's useful to have a mobile phone handy for emergencies like old ladies collapsing and falling off walls as you're driving past*.

I quite like the portable internet browser and ability to play games while sitting waiting for stuff to happen when out and about of my iPhone, so some sort of smartphone would be preferred.

So how do I get a decent smartphone without spending lots on line rental? Tariffs? Network? Handset?

One option would be to pay off my work iPhone. I think I can do this for £100. And then presumably get a SIM-only deal.
A second option would be to dust off the ancient Blackberry and use that, although I don't know how good the battery is, and it's old enough to not have 3G.



* Something that happened in Tavistock a couple of Saturdays ago.
philmophlegm: (Gravel)

Annoyed by Apple fanboys who think their latest MacBook is ace and so much better than a PC? You need one of these.

25 really bad computer gaming setups.

Thirty years of the Commodore 64. (And what do today’s children think of it?)

Steampunk - A Modder's Guide.

Managing email realistically.

Anyone want to buy EA?

Getting online while on holiday. (The article isn’t actually that interesting. However, the flame war in the comments is quite funny. Seemingly there are two kinds of people in the world: those who can’t understand why someone would need or want to be online while they’re on holiday and those who can’t understand people who can’t understand why someone would need or want to be online while they’re on holiday.)

Age distribution of users of various social networks.

philmophlegm: (Yamamayaa (2))
Yesterday morning I came downstairs to find that my main gaming PC had just crashed. Not only that, but on trying to reboot, it failed because the C: drive (a Crucial M4 solid state drive) had become invisible.

This was easily fixed by going into the BIOS and basically showing the PC that yes, it was attached to a 256gb SSD after all. After that the PC was able to boot into Windows.

And then a while later, I returned to the PC to find that the same thing had happened again. So I went back into the BIOS, did the same thing, and got back into Windows. Then I turned the thing off and checked the connections between the SSD and the motherboard and the SSD and the power supply. Back into Windows.

Then another while later and the same thing has happened again. BIOS fiddle again and back into Windows. I'm getting annoyed now. Time for some internet research.

Some mentions of similar issues on forums without much in the way of people with solutions. A moderator on Crucial's own forum said to someone a while back with the same issue that it sounded like he had a faulty drive and should return it. A couple of people vaguely said things along the lines of "Make sure your motherboard drivers and the SSD firmware are up to date", which is the sort of thing that people always say on forums even if they have no reason to think it will fix the specific problem being discussed. It's sort of the next step from "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

Anyway, since I really didn't want to have to return my C: drive I looked at upgrading my SSD's firmware. And buried in the release notes for the firmware file was this gem:
"Release Date: 01/13/2012
Change Log:
Changes made in version 0002 (m4 can be updated to revision 0309 directly from either revision 0001, 0002, or 0009)
Correct a condition where an incorrect response to a SMART counter will cause the m4 drive to become unresponsive after 5184 hours of Power-on time. The drive will recover after a power cycle, however, this failure will repeat once per hour after reaching this point. The condition will allow the end user to successfully update firmware, and poses no risk to user or system data stored on the drive."

5184 hours? So that would be what? 216 days, about 7 months. Now I built this PC last November or thereabouts, and I rarely turn it off.

And that does seem to have solved the problem.
philmophlegm: (gordonfreeman)
Anyone used a modern mechanical keyboard? Any views on which colour Cherry switches are better for gaming / typing? I've used mechanical keyboards back in the day when they were mainstream, and prefer them, if not the clicky ones. I'm aware that not all Cherry switches are clicky, but I don't have any experience of those.
philmophlegm: (Spectrum)
Google has noticed this conjunction:

http://www.google.co.uk/


Anyway, Happy St George’s Day to my English, Georgian, Bulgarian, Aragonian, Catalonian, Romanian, Ethiopian, Greek, Brazilian, Labradorian, Newfoundlander, Genovese, Milanese, Locorotondese, Ferrarese, Beiruter, Maltese, Gozoan, North Ossetian, Portuguese, Serbian and Boy Scout readers plus sufferers of skin disease and syphilis, even though St George’s Day may be a different day in other parts of the world.
philmophlegm: (Default)

I thought I’d do something a little different with this Phligm Phlagm post. Instead of using links grabbed from Twitter or andrewducker, I thought I’d put up links to some of my own favourite LiveJournal posts. And by that I mean ones that I wrote.

Sort of a ‘Phlegmatic Greatest Hits’, or at least a ‘The Best of Philmo Phlegm’ compilation.




Read more... )

Profile

philmophlegm: (Default)
philmophlegm

March 2017

S M T W T F S
   1234
56 7891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031 

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 12th, 2025 06:00 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios