computers – Moe Lane

Clarity on the computer tomorrow, hopefully.

I spent the day reconstructing the template for the baronial newsletter from a four year old version and the printout of last month’s newsletter, and it was just as much fun as it sounds. Just as well, though. Nobody was open because it was Labor Day, so it’s not like I had anything else to do with the time.

With any luck I can get an idea tomorrow morning about how long I’ll have to try to do my work with a Chromebook. Spoiler alert: I mostly can’t. Other spoiler alert: I’m cranky and crotchety. Sorry about that.

…I’m going to have to reformat my C drive, aren’t I?

Can’t see how THAT could go badly.

So, EA is useless when it comes to telling me how to remove Mass Effect Legendary Edition from my hard drive because its uninstaller keeps failing halfway through.
— Ogiel (Moe Lane) (@Ogiel23) August 12, 2023

Oh, what a day.

Still can’t get the damned 110 GB of MASS EFFECT ANNIVERSARY EDITION off of my boot drive, and getting Steam untangled in the hopes of clearing some space that way absolutely destroyed my afternoon. I also couldn’t figure out how to get my external hard drive to take a new snapshot of said drive so that I could reformat it and not lose any of my stuff. As I told my wife: it left me feeling stupid. Worse, it left me feeling old. I don’t normally feel fifty-three, but I was feeling it today.

I swear to God, this is all just ritual magic.

I just spent thirty minutes trying to fix a screwup of one of the WordPress blocks I always use to edit these posts. Nothing worked, and eventually I gave up, and made a homunculus of the original block, so at least I’d be able to use it in the future. But lo! – No sooner do I do this, but then a button that was not there before appeared, allowing me to edit an existing block, thus returning it to its pre-Fallen state.

I continue to be amazed that we do not make ritual offerings of candy and rum to mainframes. It’s no more absurd than anything else I just did in the last half hour.

Just spent an hour troubleshooting my kid’s new tablet.

We picked up the XPPen Artist12 Pro because both kids are getting deeper and deeper into computer-generated art, and the XPPen looked the best for his needs. It showed up today, and we spent an entertaining hour trying to figure out why it wasn’t getting any signal until I finally realized that the problem was I didn’t have enough going-out HDMI ports. I should be able to free up a port by using a DVI-D 24+1 to VGA conversion cable for the monitor, but that’s going to have to wait until Friday. The important thing is, we know what the issue is, and how to fix it.

…Fatherhood. Fatherhood never changes; only the stuff you have to fiddle with until it works does. I even have the equivalent of a can of old screws to rummage through to find the right one.

#commissionearned

So that was fun.

My local computer guy is fortunately still alive, and in business – the latter at least can be a bit of a craps shoot, these days – and was able to diagnosis the problem. Basically, my non-SSD drive decided to commit suicide. Thankfully, all of my creative work, including my books and ongoing writing projects, is on the SSD, because I was apparently smart several years ago and put them on the drive less likely to embrace the void*. Running around to resolve all of this ate up the day. Continue reading So *that* was fun.

This is the most expensive HDMI adapter I’ve ever bought.

Mostly because it has a new monitor attached to it. I shake my fist at whoever it is that keeps changing the layout of cable connectors! I shake it, I say! I had to go to three places* before I could manage to do a workaround, and while admittedly I now have a 24 inch curved Samsung monitor, that’s not the point! The point is that civilization embraced standardized for a reason! Don’t mess that up, computer industry!

For the hivemind: the Wifi password’s working for SOME of the phones.

[UPDATE]: I swear to God, it’s just sympathetic blipping magic. Everything works now, now that I’ve unplugged the router and powered it up again.

Mine, and the Kindle; but it’s not working for my kids’ phones. Every time I try to log them into the network I get an authentication error. It’s absolutely the right password; I’ve triple checked, and what I tell you three times is true. The router identifies my phone as being connected, and says that their two phones are not connected, if that helps.

Thoughts? The router did lose connection yesterday, so in an hour I’m going to unplug it then plug it back in to see if that restarts anything. …Which is more or less the equivalent of a magical cantrip, but we all realized that we were going down that particular road a long time ago.

Apple stymies right-to-repair bills in CA, Ontario.

I didn’t know too much about this, because after my flirtation with the iPad back in the day I went back to using PCs and whanot. But apparently Apple is playing the lobbyist game in California and Ontario, where bills that would permit third-party repairs of brand name electronics were up. And the reason Apple gave? Hold on, you’ll love it:

According to Motherboard, Apple, along with lobbyists from tech trade organization CompTIA, reportedly told legislators that owners trying to fix their own iPhones could hurt themselves in the process if they damaged the lithium-ion battery.

Well, the computer’s kind of getting backed up.

I got all my music and all of my writings onto the external hard drive, and now I’m trying to get the entire thing backed up as well. I don’t know if that’s going to work, but I just spent an hour trying to get the two computers to recognize each other on a direct LAN network (one would recognize both; the other would only recognize itself). I have enough for a quick and dirty transfer, in other words. That may have to do.