Never A Dull Moment

[timill]

especially not when three of the cats have established themselves on our bed for the night, and then another two turn up looking for space.

Yesterday Marcia wasn't sounding at all well, so I took off at lunchtime, figuring that if we were going over to the nearest emergency room (at Huntingdon), then it was better to get started in the afternoon rather than mid-evening.

As it was, she was feeling better and has got an appointment for Friday afternoon to discuss the results of last Wednesday's MRI. Not that the notes have been typed up yet, of course... Grump grump.

So we finished off backing up Marcia's old machine. Though the CD-writer we put in a while back was playing up, there turned out to be little enough that we could do it via floppy.

So I took the CDRW drive down to my library to install into my machine, which had rather more un-backed-up data on it than I liked and was misbehaving as well. Install. Boot. Sorry, two masters on one IDE chain. Shut down. Extract, move jumper, reinstall. Boot. Motherboard fries itself. Oh well, I was thinking of getting a new machine anyway. So the base unit is down at Ely Computer Suppplies for the disk to be copied into the new base unit, which should be ready later today. Assuming that the drive is readable, of course... fret fret.

Oh well. At least taking a half day to pick it up means I should have time to watch last night's Red Sox-Athletics game, which was on NASN overnight.

Comments

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Oh, Hinchinbrooke? I ended up there the second time I dislocated my kneecap ... the wretched doctor put me in plaster for weeks. Never again! Still, I'm sure it's a good place...

Hope Friday's appointment is helpful!

You have five cats? Awww....

[timill]

You have five cats?

No - neither Smokey nor Patchy were trying to fit on the bed that night. Just Jamin, Jasper, Princess, Duchess and Tabitha...

And Samson has his own crate to sleep in. Which is locked, since he took to chasing the kittens at 2am when they were younger.

For more details see the Menagerie. Which needs newer kitten photos - those are from last September.

You should have asked ...

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

... the trouble with older machines is that they rarely have USB connections (and certainly rarer to find USB2.0) but I have both a USB CD-RW drive and a USB hard disk which are useful for backing up and transferring data ... and a parallel port ZIP drive for transferring 100Mb at a time from older machines (newer machines and I use a USB keychain device that takes my 256Mb xD cards from the camera, so I can copy 256Mb at a time!)

If you need an older spare machine, let me know as I have several boxes kicking around and I'm trying to decide what to put together, what to upgrade and what to do with the rest. I don't think I have anything as old as a 486, but I think I have Pentiums from p60s upwards!

and more importantly

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

... tell M that I'm thinking good thoughts for her and sending messages to the Big Guy in the Sky pointing out that she's needed down here and in good health so he'd better do something about it!

Re: You should have asked ...

[timill]

What we mostly need it to get networked and add a file server. This might even happen sometime, since Marcia's old P166 is now a spare machine. But this all involves running cable or tackling wireless networks, neither of which I've really felt like doing.

As to machines, what we're out of is portables (though I might have a go at Marcia's old Compaq sometime) and/or PDAs. The world supply of Psion 3s seems to have dried up...

So if you feel up to tackling networking some weekend, by all means come up.

Well, come anyway, but YKWIM.

Networking etc.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

That's what I'm planning on starting on this evening. I have FIVE bits of networking hardware sitting around the house
(one four port hub, one eight port hub and one 12 port hub, all at 10Mbs, and one four port cable router and one four port wireless router both of which should work at 100Mbps, though obviously the cable feed is only going to be 1.5Mbps ...

... and the wireless part is *only* 802.11b (so 11Mbps) but that will be fine) ...

... the laptop situation here is ZERO with working batteries ... but a p150, a p233 and a p500 with various amounts of memory and disk (and varying OSs) ... the idea is to get the p500 up and useable with the wireless card so that I can surf the web, LJ and check my CiX email from downstairs (using www.mail2web.com!) ... use another machine to do the MailWashing and p2p downloading/uploading ... have my main machine for doing graphics and music on, and have a spare port for alexmc to do whatever he needs to.

Tonight though will be just putting in the cable router and seeing if I can get my machine online and provide somewhere for Alex to plug into. Then I might see if the P233 laptop (which has a network card in it with a pop out "standard" network cable connector) can see the internet ...

... if you like, I'll keep an eye out for Psion 3s at the boot sales (I got a Psion 5 with leather case for 25 quid last weekend, another stall had a 5 with no case for 50 quid, so I think I did well!)

Psions

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Recent auctions on ebay.co.uk have Psions going for the following prices

3mx 58 pounds
3a 26 pounds
3c 31 pounds
3 17 pounds
3c 21 pounds
3 9.99
3a 37 pounds
3a 15.51
3c 41 pounds

and there are currently several 3, a 3a and a 3mx finishing in the next four days