kate_nepveu | Entries tagged with computers

Tonight my desktop suddenly displayed a screen consisting of nothing but vertical stripes and then shut itself down, making sad beeping noises until I held down the power button.

It restarted successfully and is running its backup programs a little early, but (1) that was way more exciting than I needed tonight and (2) I'm guessing that this is the HDD error that came up about two months ago and that I decided to ignore until I couldn't any more.

Honestly I'm half-tempted to just bring the netbook—which lives in the Pip's room for me to use at naptime, bedtime, and in the middle of the night—downstairs, hook it up to my monitor and external hard drive, and just prop the tablet up in his room. But I should really at least open the case and see if any fans are obviously broken or dust bunnies are breeding or whatever, before deciding whether to replace the HDD. Again. Whee.

and I don't like it.

My disk imaging program says that it can't read a particular sector. On the other hand, this time chkdsk didn't throw any errors, so perhaps the backup program is just flawed somehow. But somehow I doubt it, and I really do not have time to be replacing my hard drive again just now, or really ever.

(The last full backup I have is from two weeks ago, so at least it's better than last time, when I had no full backups. Still.)

I have recently started using two tools that probably everyone but me knows about, but just in case!

Simplenote. Straightforward text files that you can access and update in your web browser or through various clients, that sync automatically. For instance, I have a pinned "to do" note that I keep open throughout the day and jot down anything that comes to mind (shopping list, stuff to do at home, etc.); "hobbit reviews I am not reading yet"; the most recent book added to the NYPL's ebooks site, so I know if anything new has been added; boilerplate HTML for the Tor.com Hobbit posts; and so forth. There are lots of clients; I'm using ResophNotes with no complaint at home.

Yes, it's true that this means I'm using three different web-based services to organize my life: Simplenote; Remember the Milk for recurring or future-dated tasks; and Google Calendar for appointments. [*] This seems inelegant, and yet they all do what I need them to do—which includes setting recurring tasks, sharing appointments with Chad, and being available in a browser (as I neither have nor want a smartphone), so hey.

[*] I have the last two open all the time in GMail, using the RtM for GMail gadget, the Google Calendar GMail Labs gadget, and a CSS trick to give them more room (in Opera I can do this with a user stylesheet and no add-on).

Evernote. This is kind of the philosophical opposite from Simplenote, and is designed to store and tag basically everything. I use it for a very specific purpose, which is to keep fanfic: my prior find-it-later system was too much work and never got done, but now I use Evernote's bookmarklet on a fic's web page (the HTML download page on AO3 is good for this, but you can also highlight just the text on an LJ/DW journal entry), and then it's saved to my various computers and can be tagged and full-text searched within Evernote. I can also occasionally export from it to put on my ereader, though if I get a tablet (as I'm contemplating), I can use their Premium feature for offline data availability.

What are your go-to online services to make your daily life less chaotic?

A while after we switched to cable internet [*] our home network started doing this highly annoying thing--which it is doing right now, in fact--where it would cycle off and then cycle immediately back on, every minute or so. Sometimes rebooting everything helps and sometimes not. It seems to happen mostly at night (possibly there is a temperature correlation, as we haven't turned heat on yet?).Unlike when our DSL would go on the fritz, our internal network also vanishes when it loses the internet (that is, I can't see my desktop from my netbook), so I suspect this means the problem is the router not the cable modem?

[*] I thought I was getting an all-in-one modem plus wireless router from the cable company. The instructions were zero and so I'm not sure if that's what I actually got, and anyway I realized that we still needed the existing router because of the multiple Ethernet connections we use, so I just plugged the modem-possibly-router into the existing router and it worked fine. I'd think any interference from incompatible devices or whatnot would have shown up sooner and not be so intermittent.

New hard drive it is. While my poor sick toddler naps, I shall find the various recovery/install discs that came with the desktop, let the current drive imaging run and if it completes successfully create a rescue disk, if not do as much pulling-of-data as I can, and then go get a new hard drive installed. And it appears that Macrium will let me restore to a drive of a different size, so I will take this opportunity to upgrade the size too.

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incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

Entries tagged with computers

computers, ugh.

this seems familiar

*note

bad router?

thank you internets

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July 2025

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