I've discovered that some proportion of the DW comment notification emails have been eaten by my junk email mailbox. Which, aaargh. But now they are in the inbox, and maybe they will actually be seen (I did not, in fact, look at them in any detail. There were, shall we say, a number).
I use Safari tab groups A Lot. At the moment I have ~25 groups, with the goal of never having more than ten tabs in any group, and to systematically go through and clear them out (some are permanent groups: dwircle, fanfic reading, online fiction, to watch; some are time limited: august reading, september reading; some are topic limited: applescripting, catalogue check, worldcon). The systematic isn't quite there yet, but it does mean that when I want to do a [category] task, it is likely that I can find the relevant tabs.
And it has been working swimmingly for me, not least because it doesn't lose tabs, and I can close a window but the links are all there for me to come back to, but they aren't actually bookmarks, because I don't need that temporary stuff bookmarked (I do, for some percentage, copy the link and some notes into my monthly 'diary' documents, which are more links list than diary at this point in time, but have been more comprehensively thinky at some time points). Plus, the same tab groups are available in both the laptop and the ipad, so I can switch between (particularly useful for opening AO3 links from DW communities on the laptop, shunting them into the right tab group, and then just picking up the ipad to have a selection of new stories to read without having to go hunting).
Except today, when one specific tab group has glitched. For many tabs, they would have a name, but when I clicked on them, there was no link. I closed the window, reopened, and now all those that were named are 'start page'. Roughly a hundred of them. But not all of them, and not even in a single cluster. I suspect that I've lost most of the July and August dreamwidth posts I had open to read and/or comment. Amusingly, what was still there, scattered between lost pages, were many James Nicol's reviews, AO3 pages, and links I know I've followed from a DW post.
I'm taking this as a message from the Fates to take a deep breath, and move into the future. But before I do that, I'm going to read some book reviews.
tl;dr: the hard part of the presentation isn't the writing, it is getting the software that makes the slides to Do The Thing.
( the long version )
Artisanat: Somewhere, there is a developer who is responsible for that
Me: Somewhere, there is a developer going 'I f*ing told you it wasn't ready to ship'
Also, Youngest had not encountered BSOD as a term. Which I then explained as "Blue Screen of Death. Like the Rainbow Beachball of Doooom, but windows"
Eldest acquired a new laptop Monday, we have now narrowed down the issues with the microphone to the device believing that the headphones are a headset and turning off the microphone. For reasons we have not yet ascertained, although my conclusion is f&^%ing windows.
But, what that, and another story, have reminded me of is what I think of as The Printer Story. Which, to be fair, I was a computer support officer in a universities for several years, and one of my remits was printers, so in theory I have many printer stories. Such as the fact that the second floor printer, which was the one the honours students had access to, would fail on the Monday before the theses were due, every year, without fail.
But none of those have quite the batshittery of THE printer story.
We need to go back to when I was sharing a house with nullsmurf*, in a place in Wembley. The house (a California bungalow style) fronted on to a side street, but had a half broken fence on the side of the property on Grantham street, and bugger all fence to the lane that ran behind the property.
We got home from who remembers where to discover we had been burgled. Absolutely everything from the computer table was missing (including the folder with all of my school reports, certificates, written references; and the CD but not the case for Alan Parson's Project album Gaudi), as were several small cushions, and our green waste bin -- a 240L wheelie bin. Said bin had recently been filled with lawn clippings.
A day or two later the bin was discovered at the bottom of the lane, with a couple of cushions and the printer still in the bottom. The hypothesis the police came up with was that the culprit had parked their car at the bottom of the lane, and then unloaded the bin, and either been spooked before finishing, or it was too hard to get the printer out. We cleaned up the printer, and carried on using it.
From then on, the printer would intermittently spit out a piece of grass with a printed page.
Fast forward, and we have moved house (twice), and gained and lost multiple housemates. For some reason we were continuing to rent California bungalows, but that might have to do with what was available for mixed student/new grads housing. The new house we were in had a gloomy and dark room in the middle of the house, which was presumed to be the dining room (I'm guessing that the room we did use as the dining room, which was across the back of the house and was very light and airy was an extension). This got designated as the computer room. The printer was set up.
So, we get to the day of the story. The printer, in addition to occasionally still printing grass (we are, at this point, somewhere between 2 and 3 years post theft) Does Not Work Well for me, but does work just fine if nullsmurf is in the room, and typically printed just fine if I called them in after it baulked for me.
On the day in question, Eldest (aged, hmm, 18 mo?) and I were the only ones in the house. I needed to print one page. Printer had turned on, claimed to get the print job, and was thus 'printing'. Except it really really wasn't. I did all the troubleshooting things I could remember watching, nothing. I tried them all again. I did rather need that printout, although at this point in time I remember the frustration and nothing about the why. I'm assuming that there was some time pressure, in that either Eldest was awake and thus couldn't be safely ignored for too long, or they were asleep with no reliable guess as to how long that was going to last. So, stressed is probably my baseline state at the time.
At some point, I gave up and called nullsmurf at work (this would be 1999, which is the year after they and I had acquired our first mobile phones, so while I could have called their mobile, I probably called their office and hoped). I asked a question about troubleshooting, I tried some more things (some repeated, but as anyone who has worked tech support, you kinda need to get the person on the other end of the phone to really do those things because sometimes they just didn't work the first time).
And then in despair I said - how about you talk to the printer. I'll just hold the phone over it, and you say something. So I did, and they did.
Which sodding well worked.
One page of printing (plus bonus piece of grass, very dried). And the most ridiculous 'maaaan, printers' story in my repertoire.
* they have other online names, but I'm blanking on all of them. The smurf part of the name came from the fact that the year we started uni, there were ~20 new students joined UniSFA, and most of us were either math or engineering students, which meant we had 4-5 8am lectures, which meant that we would roll up to the club room en masse about 9am, and raid the drinks fridge (cheapest Coke / Lemonade / possibly Fanta on campus). The null part was because the university computer system manage to forget their existence *more than once*.
For reasons that have to do with my existing laptop having a couple of keys that don't stay on the keyboard, and some issues with keeping the thing from going flat even while charging, I have invested in a new laptop. Not a thing I wanted to have on the list this year, but needs must and the last one was about 7 years old, and struggling (I couldn't watch video on it; tumblr mostly loads lovely gradients rather than images; typing became an exercise in meditation as I attempted to type at the speed that the buffer was accepting text).
Rather than port everything across, I'm taking this as the opportunity to actually go through and rearrange the files, because my folder structure is giving me the irrits, and has been too large a task to address in a way that worked. The old computer has a file called 'z_on the new computer' and as I copy a folder across, it gets moved in there. I'm still using email on the old one, and most of my logins haven't yet been transferred across (am attempting to persuade myself that tumblr should be a 'not on the lap top' thing, but if I try and use it on my phone, I'm concerned about the potential for addictive behaviour other than when I should be going to be).
One of the ways that I'm dealing with the transfer is to keep a tick list of all the things that i think of that need doing. I'm using the built in notes add, which as the option to have a list that self sorts as things get ticked off.
I went to do something with that, and realised that it was only showing the 'iCloud' option. As a general rule, I don't leave local task lists in the cloud, because I don't need them mirrored across multiple devices. So I went to move the list to the 'on my mac' list. Which wasn't there.
After several attempts to work it out, and completely failing to find anything relevant in a web search, I turned the icloud option off, created a local (temporary) file, and then turned icloud back on. And lo, I now have the two locations showing, and i can pick which one is going to be the default. Win!
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