And (at last) a Happy New Year to you.

First, I wish you a Happy New Year. I would have done this about 100 hours earlier but my laptop was not cooperating.

I forget now exactly how the trouble started but by Christmas the laptop was becoming intolerably slow and unpredictable. For months I have been toying with the idea of a new computer in early 2012 but I simply don’t think that they are worth the hassle and the money. Why should I pay for a computer that, unavoidably, comes complete with a load of software that I don’t want? Take that software out, reduce the price accordingly and sell me a machine with a decent operating system and I will be happy. On second thoughts I won’t be entirely happy because, after just four years, I shouldn’t feel the need for a new machine at all.

As an alternative to a new laptop I have also been considering the feasability and likely effectiveness of clearing out the contents of the present one and starting again from scratch. By New Year I was sufficiently exasperated to give this a try and so, having copied my own files to a separate hard drive, I loaded the “Product Recovery Disc” (which came with the computer) and followed the on-screen instructions. It took most of an evening and I couldn’t begin to describe what was happening but I was left with a computer plus operating system and very little else. My spare time over the following day or two was spent reinstalling my favourite software packages. The result of all this is a noticeably quicker computer with around 24GB extra free space on the hard drive and all but one of  the original problems eliminated.

However, this so-called “Product Recovery Disc”  has not entirely lived up to its grand title. There are two new problems, and a couple of mysterious pop-up messages that I have never seen before. The problem that has not gone away is that it it necessary only to hover over a link briefly to activate it, whereas activation should require a definite button click. I can find nothing in the Control Panel to change this. The new problems are that the touchpad lights up unexpectedly – I don’t remember the last time it did this and had forgotten that it was able to do so – and I seem to have lost all references to Bluetooth from the laptop (and that was definitely in the Control Panel prior to the “Recovery”). Apart from the loss of Bluetooth (which I was about to start using to connect the laptop to another gadget – about which I will tell you another time) everything seems to be working.

The mystery messages? One refers to a failure to make a Windows connection – which I cannot describe further as I don’t understand it. The second message (which has appeared a couple of times at the bottom right of the Desktop tells me that this is not a genuine version of Windows! How come? The original was bought pre-installed in the new laptop. Clearly, the new messages must have something to do with the “Product Recovery Disc”. I am beginning to detect the odour of a rodent!

Blogroll revision

I have intended to review the blogroll here for some time and have now made three worthwhile additions to the Art and Music category. Bill Mather and Daniel Gerhartz are two of my favourite painters of portraits and the husband and wife team, Melanie and Nick Beale, are truly amazing painters of dogs, cats and horses. Enjoy.

Some elementary questions?

I seem to have survived using computers for almost 30 years with  relatively little of the essential knowledge of the wretched devices or of the software that supposedly makes them useful. There are many (probably elementary) aspects of computers and computing that I should understand by now but don’t. For example; my laptop’s 150 GB hard drive appears to be divided into two, “Vista (C:)”, in which there are 23.1 GB of free space out of a total of 74.5 GB, and “Data (E:)” with 67.9 GB free space out of 73 GB total. My questions are, can some of that free space from drive “E” be transferred to drive “C”? What effect would this have on the computer’s performance and, if desirable, how to do it?

All comments packed with advice (or sympathy) will be gratefully received!

Cardiff Bloggers, part 2.

In reply to the comment from Philip Baillie following my earlier post about Cardiff Bloggers, it would not be appropriate for me to pronounce on the “best” of the Cardiff-based blogs that I have discovered so far – whatever “best” might mean.  I have linked to those that seemed the most interesting, to me anyway, when I discovered them back in September and I have found more since then.

I remain interested in finding blogs, produced (mainly) by private individuals based in and around Cardiff, rather than by commercial concerns, and preferably avoiding football, rugby and pop music obsessives! The idea is to help create an ever-widening network of local bloggers of all ages with a great variety of interests.

My earlier “Cardiff Bloggers” post was easily found via Google, or via the WordPress.com search engine, yet no other Cardiff-based blogger has contacted me so far.  Therefore it seems unlikely that any other individual or group shares my interest in assembling a local network.

In this Capital City of Wales there must be more than a couple of dozen non-commercial bloggers in a population which is well in excess of 300,000.

New links

From time to time I delete a few links from this blog and insert new ones. Neither additions nor deletions are necessarily permanent. The idea is to limit the total number of links while still guiding my visitors to “new” blogs and websites that have caught my attention for one reason or another, if only temporarily.
I have been shuffling the links again recently and have added the following:

Karin Wells Studio - interesting content and not all of it art and painting.
Carolee S. Clark - a painter with an attractive style.
Twitter – needs no introduction.
Nick Robinson’s Newslog - a good source of commentary on UK politics.
The Cycling Lawyer - for expert commentary on the legal issues relevant to cyclists.
Cycle Social - a site with a difference for cyclists of all kinds, sporting, road, commuting, leisure, slow, whatever. The site is relatively new but growing steadily and looking forward to a relaunch early in the New Year. It has enormous potential for cyclists and local clubs who have the inagination and initiative to use it.  I signed up (free) and put myself on the “Members Map” and look forward to meeting (and cycling with) other local members.

Keyboard troubles

Reading the Town Mouse blog today reminded me of my own, usually impatient, efforts to clean my laptop  keyboard. Once, approaching the task with enthusiasm and a brand new yellow duster, I managed to remove half-a-dozen keys at a stroke. I never discovered a way to refit them but fitting a replacement keyboard was easy.

My present problem is much more irritating because this laptop is less than two years old and the problem started several months ago (but outside the guarantee period, naturally). Quite why T I O L and N should have been the first to wear away I don’t know but wouldn’t you think they could make a keyboard that didn’t do this?  I never saw this problem after many years of use on any of the typewriters that I owned, and they all got far more pounding than any computer keyboard.

Spam, page views, Twitter, etc.

I have received a little flurry of comments today which were classified by akismet as spam and none of which was in any way relevant to the subject of the post to it was directed. So I have deleted all of them. Two of them, however, contained intelligible messages and so, just in case they weren’t actually spam, I propose to reply here.
To the person who complimented me on the choice of title for this blog, thank you. To the person who wanted to know how to connect to this blog using RSS – which seemed to be the same author as the previous comment but coming from a different domain – I am sorry but I cannot help as I have no idea. I don’t understand RSS or how to use it.
By the way, despite my misgivings of a few weeks ago I have not abandoned entirely my use of Alphainventions and Condron for promoting this blog. There is no doubt that they encourage page views, if nothing else, and if that produces a few more visitors who stop to comment, so much the better.
I have since found another way to promote the blog – Twitter. You must have heard of it by now. It is the “microblogging” service which allows posts (or in Twitterspeak, “updates” or  “tweets”) of up to 140 characters. If that seems a bit limiting, actually it is quite a fun challenge and you soon get used to it. The idea is to find other “twits”, “tweeters” oe “tweeple” (think about it!) with similar interests and to “follow” them. Others in turn will choose to “follow” you. Thus you become part of a network of people who hold conversations by exchanging tweets. The people and organisations that I am following have included various links in their tweets that, quite frequently, have directed me to interesting newspaper and magazine articles and to broadcasts and video clips that I would have missed. It has been very worthwhile although it takes a little time to get used to it at first and I have a lot to learn yet.. You can send tweets to everyone on Twitter or direct them towards specific fellow tweeters, or send direct to other tweeters but privately.  The service is free on your PC or laptop but you can also use it on your mobile phone. I don’t know about this aspect but suspect that it could become expensive, depending on what sort of contract you have with your provider,  as tweets are treated, in effect, as text messages.
How do I promote the blog on Twitter? Simply by writing a tweet or two, including the domain name of this blog, each time I write a new post, especially if the post is on a topic that is a current news item such as The Gurkha Justice Campaign or the petition in support of the whistleblowing nurse.
I hasten to add that Twitter is not a substiture for a WordPress  blog. Twitter is a totally different animal. Come to that, nothing else is a substitute for a WordPress blog either, judging by the comments that follow each time WordPress introduce a new feature.

Twitter, the busker and the “lost generation”

 I have been signed up to Twitter for almost two months and it has been both entertaining and informative. This evening I spent some time sorting out a small pile of sheet music and it reminded me to look on Twitter for others with similar musical interests. This led me to various online stories and I couldn’t resist including links to two of them here. The first is about musical education in UK schools and it reminded me how lucky I had been. The second is about that brilliant violinist, Joshua Bell and I won’t say any more in case I spoil the story.

Condron.us

My recent posts about blog stats, Alphainventions etc. have touched on two distinct issues. The key question was about the precise nature of the 17,000 extra “hits” on my blog last weekend allegedly caused by Alphainventions. I am no wiser about this but remain convinced that only a minority of them were genuine unique visitors to my blog. Quite a few more might have been attributed to separate page views and still more to the so-called hits caused by pictures and links within posts, not forgetting the same people returning for one or more subsequent visits on the same day.
The second issue was the whole question of “hits” and how they are measured. There seem to be numerous ways of viewing the contents of a blog without actually visiting it and there are, apparently, various features of the contents of a blog that can generate more so-called “hits”, depending on who is counting. The only hit that really helps me to assess the growing interest in the blog is the “unique visitor”. I regard a unique visitor as one person visiting any part of my blog irrespective of how many posts they read, how many pictures and/or links are in those posts, and how many times they return on the same day. Having looked at WordPress stats and Site Meter stats for just three days it is clear that they are counting different things where I would expect them to be comparable. And as I have no idea what they are counting or why there are discrepancies, I am not able to interpret them in ways that would benefit the blog so there seems little point in paying attention to them.
It is disappointing that site visitor statistics seem somewhat less useful than I had hoped but it is not a big disaster. In fact I agree with a point made by Philip Gibb recently, when he said that the important thing about blogging is communication rather than statistics.
Even so, I am curious about another site, Condron,  that looks a bit like Alphainventions so I think  must investigate!

Twitter

If you have been wondering what  Twitter is all about, this article might help. I joined Twitter a couple of weeks ago (username is Justwilliams) and have been well entertained and far better informed ever since. The secret seems to be to ignore what “everyone” is tweeting, most of the time anyway. It’s impossible to keep up with it all anyway. Instead, pick the people you want to “follow” with care so that they are relevant to the things that interest you. There is a “people search” thingy at the top of the screen and a general search at the bottom. Beyond that I will say no more as it is quite easy (and completely free) to use. Comments from other users are welcome.