Brrrrrrrr and Wow !!!

Thursday 2nd December, the 4th day in a row that we are virtually snowed in.This morning the temperature is a balmy - 1.8 ° C and for now at least it has stopped snowing. Yesterday we made an effort to reach the Co-op and stock up on milk and other essentials. It was snowing hard and although the Co-op is only 300 yds from our home, we were both exhausted and very cold by the time we made it back home. After that experience I can empathise with the Police who are telling us all that if we really don't need to go out then stay at home.

On Tuesday, much to my surprise, the engineer from BT arrived to connect me to fibre broadband. He was wet through and frozen solid after working in the box at the end of the road for 30 mins before coming to our house. We wrapped him round a hot mug of coffee and our dogs did their best to cuddle him back to life again. Once he could feel his fingers he tested the line and found that we had indeed achieved the 40 Mbps we had been promised. There was a certain amount of re-running of wires needed to get fiber where I wanted it but it took less than an hour for me to be able to sit down and back up some websites in seconds that before took anything up to half an hour to download on ADSL. Uploads are now a breeze and files loaded into my FTP program just vanish even big ones are transferred in seconds. I have a feeling that my Internet life is going to be a lot richer from now on.

The attacks I wrote about last week are still going on but for the moment at least we seem to be able to catch them. Up to now we have dealt with the attacks by blocking the IP addresses of attackers. However this has lead to a .htaccess file of over 10,000 lines of code which is unmanageable. So we are thinking about a proactive way to cut down on the number of attacks by only allowing people from countries that we want to trade with access to the sites. You would think this would be relatively easy because as this is a UK company and all its products are in the English language then all you have to do is list the English speaking countries and job done. Not so. A lot of the UK's former colonies still follow UK teaching practices and use English language text books so orders can and do arrive from very unexpected places. At least the effort it will need to analyze the order books and see just where orders have been received from will only generate one line of code per country instead of the hundreds of lines needed to block all the individual networks as before (The UK would need 4,254 lines of code to block it properly, I shudder to think what the USA would need).

Given the weather outside I am so glad that I am offically retired. After our expedition to the Co-op I think that if I had to struggle through this weather to work everyday I would be permanently exhausted and my heart goes out to the folks I see on TV trying to carry on in very difficult circumstances. But that's the English - we moan like mad about almost everything but when the chips are down we get stuck in and the job gets done.

The cost of being hacked

Before I retired to care full time for my wife, I wrote two online bookstores. A few weeks ago the owner of those stores contacted me to ask if I could help him get them back up and running again. On investigation I found that both sites had been hacked, the access codes changed and the databases corrupted. The way these sites are run there is no need to store things like credit card/bank details so apart from basic security, not a lot of attention had been paid to security in depth.

Thanks to good backup routines both sites were back up and running in hours and that was that we though - wrong !!!!

One of the two sites was re-hacked in minutes despite the access codes being changed, the other followed a couple of days later. Time for some serious thought about security. Both sites are run on a commercially available online shop package so there is a wealth of experience on the user forums. It quickly became apparent that this was not an unusual occurrence and there were plenty of examples of what can happen, what to do about it and how to increase security. After a good deal of reading this is what we decided to do;

1. Change all the passwords to the back end of the site making them as strong as we could by using all the available characters (ASCII 0 to 254) and increasing the length of the password making it much harder for brute force hacking programs to discover the username/password.
2. Changing the name of the admin folder and adding extra security to that folder.
3. Making the .htaccess file as inaccessible as possible.
4. Changing the robots file to exclude all the folders we didn't want indexing.
5. Build some custom error pages that report every time a hacking attack is stopped.

So far this has thrown up some surprising information. Hacking probes are there all the time but most of them realise a site is protected and, after a very few attempts, stop trying to get in. A lot of the attacks come from IP addresses owned by large companies but it isn't clear at this stage if the companies are mounting the attack, a disgruntled employee is using the company equipment or the company had been invaded itself by a bot net and was unaware that their computers were being used in this way.

There seems to be three distinct types of probe;

1. A robot that wants to index the whole of the site - these can mostly be stopped or diverted using .htaccess
2. A probe looking for databases and/or customer lists
3. An attack that has recognised which shop is being used and is trying to access the specific files that will reveal the order list, the customer list, payment methods etc. This is by far the most dangerous of the three and the one we need to make most effort to block.

I'm sure some of my readers will by now recognise which company I am talking about and I want to reassure them that to the best of our knowledge none of their financial details can possibly have been lifted by the attackers because the company doesn't trade using credit or debit cards. Likewise although we know the database containing customer list and product descriptions has been destroyed more than once, there is no evidence available at this time that any names and addresses etc have been stolen. However you may find that as we have had to use backups to rebuild the database your account no longer exists. If that is so, please login and make a new one and accept our apologies for the inconvenience.

This sort of action costs business large and small a lot of money in lost time, lost orders and other fees to get sites working again. I know what the criminal hacker is after - they want personal data and bank details. But the hobbyist hacker has me baffled. What possible motive can he/she have for trying to wreck some one's lively hood?

Time to Change

Today the BBC released a story about a debate in the House of Commons concerned with just what Google collected as it drove past our homes. you can read all about it here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11650692.

Now I have heard all sorts of tales about what Google has or hasn't done but I have come to the conclusion that it better to be safe than sorry. I am recommending to all my family and friends that they change the WiFi login details on their routers. Change the login passwords on their personal accounts on their computers and last by by no means least change the passwords on all their email accounts.

I know this means a lot of careful work needs to be done but as some of the people I know have business and financial details on their computers and they rely on them for their livelihood. I feel it is better to put in an hour now than trying to rescue all their financial details and contacts after someone has has found a way in.

Given all this, it is good general practice to change your passwords monthly and to scan your computer weekly for malware and viruses. Give the number there is about now you can't be too careful.

Two steps forward and one back

It's been quite a few weeks since I fetched my wife home from Hospital. We did manage a few days away when the weather was kind, the food was good and we managed to relax and unwind. The fun began when we got home and found that some of the drugs being given to Jackie were not suitable to be given together so we had a week or two of chopping and changing when we were not sure from one week to the next exactly what she should have been taking. Thankfully with the aid of her CPN and our GP we think we have got the drugs about right as most of the major side effects have disappeared and Jackie is making slow but steady progress to being well again.


I also had a setback. I had a fall that dislocated two finger on my right hand. One of them went back into place perfectly but the other has lost a chip of bone where the tendon has pulled away from the joint and a third tendon is ruptured. Thankfully it doesn't need surgery but I have been warned it could take some months to heal properly. In the mean time it is slowing and restricting the amount of time I can spend at my keyboard.


Speaking of keyboards, there have been a rash recently of alerts coming from the security firms who monitor the number of viruses and malware currently making the rounds of the system. They run from the mischievous ones that just send stupid messages to your screen through ones that can delete files on your HDD and cost a lot of time and effort to get rid of. However the worst of all are those that enroll your computer to a bot net and start to send your private details to the criminal gangs that run the bot nets.


The way to keep your computers free of infections like these are as follows :-

1. Make sure you have the latest version of a good anti virus program (I use Avast Free) and ensure that it updates at least daily.


2. Likewise download and install at least two malware programs and run a full scan weekly, the favourites for this are Adaware and Spybot both of which are free for home use.


3. A favourite way of getting malware (Worms) onto your computer is via a round robin purporting to be a warning about a new virus. One came to my notice this week. It was titled 'There is a Muslim in the white house'. It tried to tell you that if you received an email like this it would contain a virus that would put a flaming torch on your screen while it destroyed your HDD. I can find no trace of this virus in the database of any of the major Antivirus companies but there is plenty of evidence of round robins like this being used to sneak worms onto your computer. If you receive an email that is addressed to a lot of people and it asks you to pass it on to all your friends. Break the chain. Delete it from your computer preferably unread and don't send it on. You should also do a full scan of your computer to make sure you haven't been infected.


4. I use an email program that catches about 99% of the spam and infected email that arrives in my mailbox. It is called MailWasher and you can download it for free from here http://www.mailwasher.net/ It is free for personal use but if, like me, you have multiple mail boxes and accounts, then the pro version is worth every penny.

Just as a last aside, I was asked to look at a computer that was behaving 'oddly'. I had been asked to configure this computer when it was new and had loaded all the necessary antivirus and malware software. All the new owner has to do was register the software to activate it for a year. They didn't and the machine had been running on the web unprotected for about three months. The computer was slow because it was too bus running malware to be bothered to do what the owner wanted and it had enough viruses to keep a bacteriologist happy for months. It several days of hard work to get rid of them all and clean up the system and the owner's plea that it didn't seem important fell on deaf ears.

I have bought myself a Sony e-book reader. They are not all they are cracked up to be but they can contain a lot of books both e-books and audio books or music. For people like me who find it difficult to sleep they are a boon because with the addition of a small LED light, you can read in the dark or by plugging in a set of head phones (ear buds will do) you can listen to soothing music and read at the same time. I can also imagine that for long haul flights they could be an essential accessory as they have a long battery life (7,000+ page turnings) but I haven't yet had chance to find out how many songs/audio books they can play before the battery runs out. As they are recharged by the 5 volt USB system and only need a 4 hr charge from fully exhausted then there are many ways a traveller can find to refresh the charge in his reader's battery.

I have been offered some holly logs and that has spurred me on to clear all the rubbish out of my workshop. I am hoping I can disinter the two lathes that are in there and try to re-learn how to turn wood. There is nothing that cheers me more than something I have made giving pleasure to someone else so watch this space to see how I get on.

Home Again

Yesterday I brought my wife home from the hospital ending what seems to have been the longest loneliest period of my life. My next task is to take us both away for a few days for a bit of pampering in a hotel by the sea. This time I have two new toys to play with. The first is a CamCorder which I haven't had before - I used to use my SLR to record videos. The second is a 3G dongle that should allow me to keep in touch with the world from my hotel room without incurring sky high charges for using the hotel's WiFi connection.

While she was in hospital, my wife used the dongle and her notebook to keep in touch with me in real time using Yahoo Messenger. It made the world of difference to how she felt and to how she was able to keep in touch with the world outside. When you are in hospital for any length of time, you crave for contact with the outside world. These dongles make it possible AND cost less than a mobile phone to run. From the other patients point of view there are no annoying ring tones or someone talking. Typing on a laptop is almost silent so it annoys no one.

I only use a fraction of what one of these dongles can do as they can easily allow you to browse the web, download and watch streamed programs, use iPlayer or spend a fortune on eBay. When I am away from home I can collect my email, check my bank accounts and talk on yahoo with anyone I need to (a friend looks after our animals while we are away and calls to reasure us that all is well).

The learning curve for the CamCorder is going to be a steep one as mine is not sophisticated with anti shake and all sorts of other twiddly bits. I'll let you know how I get on when we come home.

Another scam

This week I was sent a copy of a warning issued to all their customers by AOL. It is about a new way to try to trick you into revealing your credit/debit card details. It works like this;

1. You receive an email that asks you to ring a number because there is a problem with your PayPal account. If you do, a recorded voice asks for your credit/debit card details
2. You may receive a phone call where the caller already knows your credit/debit card details but wants you to give them the security number on the back of the card

What you should do is this;

• Delete any email that asks for financial details. No reputable company would work like this and certainly not a bank, credit card company or PayPal.
• If you receive a phone call asking for any of your card details hang up immediately then ring the telephone number on the back of the card. If the first call was genuine then your card company will be able to tell you what the problem is. However it is much more likely that they will be able to confirm that you have received a vishing call and will tell you what to do next.

If any of you want to read the original warning you will find it at AOL Warning

This warning does make you wonder where these crooks are getting your card numbers from. My wife and I were so concerned about this that we decided to set up an account that is only used for shopping on the web and eBay. With the help of our Bank, we opened an account that does not have a cheque book, has no overdraft facilities at all, can not accept any direct payments such as Standing orders, Direct Debits etc and has only a Debit Card as the way to access any funds. We keep the balance of the account below £10 and only move money into the account when we have made an online purchase. So far it has worked just fine but if anyone does get hold of the card details the most they will get is £5 and it will flag up on the Bank's computer that this is an unauthorised transaction and we will know that account has been hacked.

Our Bank were so impressed by how it has worked (we have been running it for a year now) they have started to offer it to all their online customers for use as an online shopping account.

A shocking tale

One of the nurses looking after my wife in hospital was notorious for crashing electronic equipment as soon as she touched it. Her colleagues thought it was a hoot but not her boss and he banned her from even going near his computer. I thought the tale was a bit far fetched till I watched her take a blood pressure reading. As soon as she put her hand on the machine it crashed.

My mind went back a number of years to an incident when I was a newly qualified computer technician just starting off in business. A firm I looked after had a typist/secretary who couldn't use a computer. Before they dispensed with her services they asked me to have a look at what she was doing to see if there was a simple solution to the problem because apart from this, she was a very good worker. I detached a computer from their network and set her off typing a letter. In less than 10 seconds the monitor went funny with the picture distorted and the computer froze. The lady dissolved in tears and fled to the toilet. I switched the computer off and rebooted it and all worked properly again so the problem was either static electricity or a stray magnetic field. I eliminated magnets as I could find no trace of a gauss field but where was the static coming from?

When the lady returned red eyed from the loo I was about to give up and confess myself beaten when I heard a sharp crack as she sat down.
"It's always doing that" she said as she shook her hand where a spark had jumped from her to the metal of the chair.
The penny dropped. The young lady was wearing a silky looking blouse and a pencil skirt. I asked her if she had a slip on and with great trepidation asked her what her undies were made of. She told me that both her slip and undies were silky man made material like her blouse.

Now those among you that have done physics at school will remember the demonstration of rubbing a glass rod with a silk handkerchief and then picking up scraps of paper using static electricity. What was happening was the young lady's undies were rubbing against her slip and blouse and having the same effect. Her plastic soled shoes were insulating her till she sat down in the metal chair and the electrical potential was high enough to generate a spark to jump the gap.

I asked the young lady to wear cotton clothing and undies the following day and we repeated the test. No sparks and the computer behaved itself. A neat and cost free solution.

Now back to our nurse. Her uniform is mostly made of polycotton and there is no way to change that so I had to do a bit of oblique thinking. Every computer technician will be used to using a wrist strap to earth themselves while handling electronic components so maybe this was the answer. I took a wrist strap with me on my next visit to the hospital and showed the nurse how to use it. Two days later when I took my wife for her regular treatment session the nurse wasn't on duty but all her colleagues were full of the story about how she could use a computer and the other electronics in the unit without something horrible happening.

The moral of this tale is that if ever you have to open the case of your computer, before you touch anything inside, put your hand on a radiator or metal sink for a few seconds and make sure you have drained away all the static electricity we all carry as part of our daily lives. Not everyone carries as much as the nurse or the fashion conscious secretary in the story but you may be carrying enough to seriously damage some of the parts inside your computer and you could land yourself with a big bill to put things right.

Update

I am extremely pleased to be able to report that my Wife is steadily getting better. She is coming home for the weekend and we are all thrilled to bits that she has made enough progress to make this possible.

A few weeks ago I told you I was trialing a new router the Billion Wireless N 3G ADSL router. It has enabled my network to run at a much higher speed which made streaming videos around the house a very simple operation. I am not as impressed with the Wireless coverage as it doesn't seem to have the power to get a good signal from my study on the ground floor to our bedroom upstairs. My previous router a Netgear DG834N used to be able to do this returning a signal strength of 65% or more. The Billion has never managed more than 40% so it is significantly inferior in WiFi performance. However it could be said that is offset by the gigabit speed of the cabled part of the network and the ability to switch from ADSL to 3G if the ADSL signal is interrupted. It depends how much you value your Internet connection and how critical it is that you are connected at high speed. If you are running a web server from a machine at your office or handle a significant number of web base transactions every day, then I could easily see how you could justify the expense of buying a router like this one. But I can't see how you could justify the cost if all you do is Browse the web, send and receive emails and take part in online chats and messaging.

Conclusion

This router is a good solution for a small business or home office that needs fast, always on access to the Internet and can justify the £150 + cost. It is not as good value for a house full of teenagers with laptops as its WiFi side isn't powerful enough compared to Netgear's N WiFi routers.

A Tiny Contrast

Ten years ago I used to dread the onset of holidays because they had to be preceded by the dreaded clothes shopping trips. In those days both Jackie and myself tipped the scales at well over 20 stones and finding nice clothes that fit was a nightmare. After visiting the fourth or fifth shop where nothing was big enough, in the right colours or stylish we would often adjourn to a cafe and stuff ourselves with cream cakes or other comfort food.

Compare this to our visit to the Nike shop last week. Jackie headed for the Ladies section but on her way she spotted a lovely blue tracksuit. She picked one up and went to try it on and called me from the fitting room to see what I thought. Too big - I was sent back to the rail to find a smaller one. It was then I noticed that the suit was in the children's section and the size that was too big was 13 to 15 yrs. I found one that was 12 to 13 yrs and that proved to be a perfect fit.

I couldn't help thinking about a picture we have of Jackie feeding some ducks when she was at her biggest. The bright orange T shirt she was wearing was 5xl and I couldn't help thinking about our shopping trips now where we have problems finding things that are small enough in the styles she likes.

Jackie is still in hospital but there are signs that she is begining to improve and get better. There is still a long way to go before she is well enough to come home for good but she has reached the stage where she comes home during the day at weekends which is proving to be a very special time for us as we get to spend some quality time together and Jackie is re-connecting with our home and is able to keep it clean and tidy to help me.

Update

Today is the day I hoped would never come. Today my wife is starting a course of treatment that should allow her to leave hospital and live a normal life again. Fifteen years ago she had similar treatment and that left her disabled and unable to work. We both know this is the only treatment that can make her well again in anything like a reasonable time but we are both very apprehensive about the outcome.

Please keep us in your thoughts today.

My wife is ill in hospital so there will be no posts on here till I get her home. If anyone has an IT problem please use the contacts page of my web site to call me.

http://www.omega-cottage.co.uk/contacts.co.uk

A new way to logon

Have you ever lost your ADSL Broadband connection just when you need to log on and and get a vital bit of information from the web? It seems to happen all too often these days and up to now the only way I had found to get round it was to stick my 3G mobile broadband dongle in my laptop or main computer and log in that way until ADSL came back up. This week I found a better way.

The picture above is the Billion 7420nx 3G/ADSL Gigabit Wireless router. What it does is monitor the strength of your ADSL connection and if it goes down, after a short pause of 2 minutes, it swaps over to the 3G dongle that fits in a USB port on the back of the router. This will allow most home workers just enough time to visit the loo and make a fresh coffee before starting work again.

The Billion 7420nx has yet more tricks up its sleeve. It has 802.11n wireless networking. 802.11n networks support approximately 300 Mbps of rated (theoretical) bandwidth under the best conditions. This is fast enough and has enough bandwidth to cope with almost anything a house full of teenagers could demand of it as well as cope with all the load a home worker could ask for. Last but by no means least, the bottle neck in a wired network has always been the router’s 100 Mbps speed while office networks handling large amounts of data want to run at Gigabit speed (1000 Mbps). This router does away with having to have a Gigabit switch down stream to allow the computers on the network to communicate at 1000 Mbps because its four Ethernet ports are all Gigabit ones. I noticed the increase in speed across my network as soon as I connected the router and I now find that videos stream just fine from my server to the multimedia computer in the lounge so I no longer have to copy the file over before watching a film.

I must admit this is not the easiest router I have setup because unlike the Netgear ones I have used previously, this one assumes you have some knowledge of what you are doing so it isn't for a beginner. Having said that, there is a very good User Guide in PDF form on the driver CD and also a quick setup printed guide that will ensure you get all the cables in the right holes. After that once you have established a connection between the router and your computer, there is a setup utility on the CD which claims to do the rest of the setup for you. I didn't try it as my network settings are none standard and I didn't want to lose a good few of my peripherals so I used the Gui interface through my browser.

When I have had it running for a week or two I will let you know if there are any snags to running this router.

Internet Explorer Ballot

On March 1st Microsoft will release a new update that will allow you to choose which browser you want to use. Of course you can already do this but most computer users are either quite happy with Internet Explorer or haven’t a clue what an alternative browser is.

Via Windows Update, Windows users will be presented with the Microsoft Browser Ballot from 1 March, which will force users to choose between the five most popular browsers presented in random order.

Once the browser ballot is downloaded and installed, the browser choice system will automatically unpin Internet Explorer from the taskbar, so if that's where you'd like it to be, you'll have to go back and add it again. IE won't be uninstalled but you will have to positively choose it instead of it being the default browser as now. Windows will then pop up a first screen explaining what is going on.

The next screen of the ballot will display in random order a selection of 12 browsers, including Google's Chrome, Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari, as well as the Opera browser and Microsoft's own IE8.

Under each browser icon, there is the option to install it or find out more - or defer the decision to later. Once you have done this, you can carry on working as normal.

My personal opinion is that this is the most stupid ‘fix’ that has come out of Brussels in a long time. It is fine for geeks and wire heads who hate anything with Microsoft written on it but for the ordinary computer user it is a solid nightmare. Most of the folk I looked after before I retired just want a computer that works and couldn’t care less about the internal politics of the EEC or its pissing contest with Microsoft. I personally don’t want some nameless chair warmer from Brussels trying to influence my choices about how I use my computers or which software I have installed. I can see no valid reason for them to interfere in what I do or the choices I make so what can we do about it?

First, don’t download the fix or install it if your computer is set to download updates automatically. If by some accident you do install the fix then uninstall it. That should keep your computer in the same condition it is now.

I am going to write to my MEP and complain about them messing with the computers I have bought with my own hard earned money. I feel they weren’t sent to Brussels to waste time and money persecuting Microsoft.

If by March 2nd you can’t find Internet Explorer and your home page has vanished don’t panic. Just Go to Start > All Programs and open Internet Explorer. Go to Tools on the Menu Bar and click on the Programs Tab. At the top click on the Make Default button and Internet Explorer is back to being your default browser. Then go again to Start > All Programs and find Internet Explorer. This time right click on it and one of the options is Pin to Start Menu. That will put IE at the top of the Start Menu. Last but not least go to Start and drag the New IE Icon down onto the Taskbar where it will make a new icon to replace the one that had vanished.

Shed part 2 and a surprise

Thanks to a few days of sunshine and a balmy temperature of 5°C the shed is erected and sealed against damp. The next task is to restore the electric supply and the alarm then last but not least paint the concrete floor to seal it. Everyone who sees it has commented on just how sturdy it is, That it will need no maintenance and that it looks a lot better than even a brand new wooden hut. How long it will stay like that only time will tell.

Regular readers of this blog will remember that my Nephew was being tested for haemochromatosis. This has now been confirmed and he is being bled weekly to get his blood iron levels down to a normal value. The hospital looking after him sent a message to all his family telling us to get tested too. In my case this meant contacting my children and warning them about this condition and that I was being tested for it (I had my blood test earlier this week). Since the death of my son Thomas, I haven’t got on very well with my children so it was a bit daunting to have to try to get in touch. Eventually I found most of them on Facebook and sent them a message. To my surprise and delight I found myself chatting with my Grandson and one one of my Granddaughters. As my Granddaughter said “It’s a bit difficult to know what to talk about when you don’t know someone”. I have no idea what teenagers talk about or find interesting and they seem to be having a similar problem talking to me. I hope in time we will learn what we can talk about and start to share a bit of ourselves with each other.

I told my Sister about getting in touch with with my grandchildren and as she is on Facebook too she asked them to become her friends. Where that will lead to I have no idea but I do know that if this family gets much bigger we are going to need a full time secretary.

As many of you know, I have not been a great user of social networking sites. Many older people find them difficult to use and the language adopted by users sometimes unintelligible. This made it a bit pointless for me as most of my customers were elderly or small business people who didn’t have the time for networking outside their business. So all this chatting and messaging is a new experience and I am not at all sure how I will get on with it long term.

Another Internet Explorer Flaw

Another flaw has hit Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and this time it doesn't just affect IE6.

Read about it here

Basically if you are still running Windows XP and IE 6 then your machine is open to attack. As I have said before and will keep on saying it is time to upgrade away from Windows XP as it will be obsolete sometime this year and no longer supported by Microsoft. As soon as that happens it will also be unsupported by lots of other companies like Norton, McAfee and other anti virus application producers. Then you will find that things like Office updates won’t install and newer software won’t either.

If you have an old computer (over 3 yrs) then you might find it has too low a spec to run Windows 7 and of course it won’t run Vista either. Basically you have two choices;

1. Buy an up to date computer. Not as expensive as you might think. CCL in Bradford will sell you a new tin box complete with Windows 7 Home premium for £237 inc vat.
   
   It is ideal for...


• Office Applications
• Web Browsing
• Email
• Music Playback
• Video Playback
• Viewing Photos
• It will NOT play games
  
2. If your pocket won’t stretch to that then you can download Linux for free and install it on your present machine.
   

Option two means you will have to learn to use a new operating system and then hunt for and download new applications because Microsoft programs like Office won’t work on Linux but I am told by Linux enthusiasts that it doesn’t cost them a penny.

Well there you have it. If like me you live on the Internet and prefer Windows then you need to be
running at least a version of Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 8 which you can download for free from Microsoft and preferably a version of Windows higher than XP.

Haemochromatosis and The Shed

It always amazes me just how a simple thing can spark off a reaction that on the face of it is out of all proportion. Let me explain.

One of my sister’s boys, went for a routine blood test for a minor operation. The test showed that his blood iron level was way above normal. His local hospital in the small town where he lives hasn’t got the facilities to deal with this so he was sent to the large district hospital, in the nearby city. There he was screened for a condition called haemochromatosis
(read about it here http://www.haemochromatosis.org.uk/home.html).

Haemochromatosis is a genetic condition which is passed on by one or two faulty genes. The problem is that it isn't just a matter of too much iron in the blood. Having the iron at these dangerous levels can lead to arthritis, diabetes, liver problems included cirrhosis and cancer, impotence and adrenal problems. So you see, this is not something that can be safely ignored.

The genes can be passed on down either the male or female line and depending how many of the genes you have (you can be carrying one or two), your children may inherit these genes from you. This means that they too can develop this condition especially if your partner also has one or more of these genes (apparently one in 200 of the population have at least one of these genes). This makes it imperative that all members of the family of a patient with this condition should be screened. This is where we, as a family, are at the moment.

Looking just at my siblings, children and grandchildren, it adds up to my three siblings and myself, 7 nieces and nephews, my four children and their partners and nine grandchildren
(26 people all told), all of whom need to be screened if my sister’s boy tests as positive for the condition. As you can imagine, we are all somewhat nervous at the moment.

I didn't realise just how seriously this condition is taken by the medical establishment. It was only when I mentioned my nephew to my consultant’s secretary and got an immediate response from my consultant that I realised that this condition was not something that could be taken lightly. At the moment, we are all hoping that this is a false alarm or that it can be proved that my sister's boy contracted this from a blood transfusion, which is the only other way of getting this condition. I know it wouldn't be nice for him, if it did come from a blood transfusion, but it would mean that the rest of us are in the clear.

A few days ago, while the snow was on the ground, my better half came in from the shed where our freezer lives and told me it was leaking like a sieve. This shed is getting on for twenty years old so it has served us very well indeed. I am no longer capable of crawling about on a shed roof adding a new covering of roofing felt and I don’t want Jackie up there with her eyesight problems so it looked as if the time has come to get a new shed. In olden days it would mean getting out the phone book and ringing round for quotes. In these days of the internet, all that is needed is to open your internet browser go to something like Google and type in sheds from the UK. That got me 2.7 million hits and I was thoroughly confused by the sheer choice of sizes and styles available. I went to B&Q for a few bits for another small project and spotted a plastic shed on display. Now I had never thought about a plastic shed even though I had heard of them. One thing struck me right away was that the shed was a lot sturdier than I had imagined. Then another penny dropped – it didn’t need treating every year either. In fact it didn’t need any painting or maintenance at all other than hosing down to get the grime off it occasionally. Now this made it very attractive to me because as we are getting older Jackie and I are finding it difficult to maintain outdoor things properly.

When I got home I repeated the search on Google this time for plastic sheds UK. That cut the hits to 101K hits – much better. As I read the adverts it quickly became obvious that there are only a few manufacturers that make and sell plastic sheds in the UK so weeding them out to eliminate the very expensive workshop type sheds that we didn’t need brought the choice down to one of three models. We chose a Duramax Duramate 8'x8' Plastic Garden Storage Shed which would fit where the present shed stands. The web site offering the shed said delivery was around 4 weeks which would give us plenty of time to empty the old shed, pull it down and get rid of it so I ordered it. Two days later the phone rang and a young lady asked if we could take delivery of the new shed on Monday, four days away !!!! Panic Stations.

I needn't have worried, within two days the freezer was moved to the workshop on a temporary basis, the garden tools were stuffed in the junk shed and the old shed was empty. We stripped out the electrics and our Alarm Technician (http://www.anchorsecurityalarms.co.uk/) came and dismantled that part of our alarm system.

On the morning we had set aside to start dismantling the shed the phone went and a friend asked if I was up for a bit of barter. She knew that we were going to have a go at dismantling the shed that morning and we would struggle with it. Her computer was feeling poorly and her idea was that her husband Alan, a retired builder, would come and help to dismantle the shed and I would have a look at her computer. Within half an hour Alan had arrived and the shed was beginning to disappear. By lunch time the shed was in bits and piled up ready for burning and Jackie was digging out our pressure washer to clean the concrete pad that the shed had sat on. Thanks Alan you did a great job in a fraction of the time we would have taken.

The state of play at the moment is that the pad is marked out ready to drill the holes for the hold down bolts and the shed base is partially assembled ready to bolt down. However, mother nature has stepped in with a temperature of minus 2° so it is cold stopped play until the temperature rises somewhat.

Why have I told you all this?
Simply to illustrate how easy it is to research and then shop on line for almost anything these days. Gone are the days when you had to spend hours on the phone at enormous cost trying to locate that elusive part. Now Google or eBay can find it in very few minutes and for very little more can have whatever you need delivered to your door.

It got me at last + The Dragon

I was in bed with flu like symptoms all over Christmas and by the new year I couldn’t breath so it was time to call the Dr in. He arrived saying he wondered how long it would be before I called him in so I guess our area is well infected with whatever infection it is. The end result is that I am full to the brim with antibiotic and steroid so bang goes my after Christmas diet as I am now eating anything not screwed down which is the usual result of taking steroids. My blood sugars are running in the high teens too despite the increase in meds before Christmas so all in all it is a step backwards.

Being stuck in the house over the holiday has allowed me to start to play with voice recognition software. I first tried the voice recognition software built-in to Windows 7. I was able to set up my hardware microphone and headset without any problems. The tutorial was easy to understand and I thought that the training of the software to recognise my voice went just fine that is until I try to enter text into MS Word. All I got was gobbledegook. I went 8 and tried the training and again with roughly the same result. From there I went along to the forums to see what results other people had got. It seemed to be a mixed bag. There were a higher percentage of female users who reported good results. My voice is soft and deep and has a Yorkshire accent. I suspect that the Microsoft software couldn't cope with this. So having an old copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking in my software library and I decided to load it and give it a try.

It was easy to load, not too difficult to configure but training it to recognise my voice was a very different matter. You are offered a selection of scripts to read, I chose John F Kennedy's inaugural address. I think if I had read it before, and I might not have chosen it because it contains many policiballic words. It took about 20 minutes to read all the address but once I had and had identified the language I wish to use (English UK) I've found that it now makes very few dictation mistakes. The help files tell me that the more I use it the more accurate it will become will become. I have used it to write this blog and with one or two words that were not recognised by the editor so please excuse the few spelling mistakes, I think that a first attempt it isn't bad.

The test will come when I try to use it to write a chapter for the book I am writing for my college course. Watch this space to see how I get on.