Phlegmatic

 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.

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)... )

Lynne Truss on Christmas round-robin letters

"The truth is that politicians are telling lies - government is simply unaffordable."

A right-wing view of Tolkien's work

I reckon it must have started raining about two days after this statement, and it doesn't seem to have stopped since.

"2013 will decide whether the Scottish wildcat lives or dies."

Fireworks look just as pretty backwards.

The history of the Falkland Islands

You too could own a PC shaped like the TARDIS! (But seriously, how much!?)

Is Obama secretly a Muslim? And did God sign a fish?

How free is your country (economically speaking)?

5 Myths About Health Care Around the World (American article aimed at Americans, but also should be read by the 'hands off our NHS' lobby...)

Why are there so many black and white televisions in Ulster?

"Global warming could mean the end of pasta". See - it's not all bad. Shame it turns out to be your typical environmental scare story bollocks.

Clever web application that shows you where each Premier League team's supporters live (or at least those who tweet about football).

Never, ever type two spaces after a full stop.

So what's this trillion dollar coin thing all about?

New terms and conditions for MPs. This seems remarkably sensible. If they agreed to these, I'd be happy for them to have that big pay rise.

A Timeline of Steampunk

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.

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.

Tom's Hardware's Top 40 Steampunk PC mods

Knowing which eurozone country is or isn't which other eurozone country seems to be quite important.

1,200 years ago the planet was hit by an intense burst of high-energy radiation, and nobody knows what caused it.

25 Things a Professional Woman Should Never Wear

So that visitors to our fair country are prepared for just how often they are going to see Jessica Ennis's abdomen in the next few weeks, we now make sure it's the first thing they see as they come in to land.

Good news for republicans - two celebrities have come out as anti-monarchists. Bad news for republicans: it's Peter Tatchell and David Icke. (Kudos to the BBC producer who replied to Icke’s complaint with “MY MASTERS FROM PLANET ZOG SAY NO”…)

Five Myths About the UK Economy (which it suits everyone to perpetuate)

The Doctor is David Cameron's grandfather-in-law.

ZonalMarking.net looks at Roy Hodgson's appointment.

The thought processes that go into male and female character design in video games.

Bertrand Russell's Ten Commandments for Teachers

After the Doctor Who theme tune on a steel guitar, now hear it played by floppy disk drives (kids, ask your parents to explain to you what a floppy disk drive is)

...as well as the theme tune from Manic Miner (or 'In the Hall of the Mountain King', from Peer Gynt, by Edvard Greig, if you're more classical, less geeky)

Thinking of changing jobs from public to private sector or vice versa? Handy calculator to work out how much you need to earn in the new job to maintain your real income.

France has 2.4 times as many companies with 49 employees as it has companies with 50 employees.

Since macroeconomists can't agree on anything, maybe we should concentrate on microeconomics. (The clever people will see the connection to the previous story).

The Boy Scouts are going to have a Game Design badge. How cool is that?

Controversial small brewer wins industry award - until Diageo threatens industry association with loss of sponsorship unless it wins.

How controversial? 55% abv beer and sold in bottles made out of dead animals as an example.

Income inequality and social equality since the 70s. Did "the left win the cultural debate and the right the economic debate"? (Personally, I think true liberals won both arguments.)

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.

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... )