Tag: PC
-
Live and let Live keep charging you
Several years ago, I bought my son an Xbox 360 for his birthday. Along with this, I got him a subscription to Xbox Live Gold. Because he was a minor at the time, getting him an account set up on Xbox was a complete pain in the ass, involving me providing a credit card to prove I was over 18 and could ‘vouch for’ him, then a bunch of iterations of logging in and out and providing various approvals/confirmations, and so on, which took the best part of an hour to do (all the while, the boy pacing around anxiously… Read more
-
They should rename it the Hindrance-Desk
As Training Lead, one of my responsibilities is to provide User Procedures for the system we’re implementing. Because users have a nasty habit of taking my official global User Procedures and changing them to match what they want to do, I publish them in Adobe PDF format. And because I generate all of the User Procedures out of OnDemand, I just get OnDemand to publish directly to PDF, which it will happily do if you have the full version of Adobe Suite installed. In order to meet licensing requirements, here at my current client if you need a piece of… Read more
-
Who’s gonna ‘drive your home?
Just before Christmas my eldest managed to frag the hard drive on his laptop. I’m not sure how he managed it (probably deliberately, to get out of doing his homework), but when you tried booting it up you’d just get an “Operating System not found” message. Freya has an identical laptop (to avoid sibling rivalry) so I swapped her drive into Finn’s laptop and confirmed that everything else was fine – just a blank hard drive. It could have been that he’d just deleted everything, but that’s pretty hard to do by accident, so I’m guessing he dropped the laptop and crashed… Read more
-
Technology: The Great Disabler
We’re pretty tight on security in this company. Not quite Pentagon tight, but tight to the point where some buildings have X-ray machines and walk-thru metal detectors (although thankfully they don’t make you take your shoes off…). Even so, every so often some bright spark in upper management decides to tighten things up a notch, seemingly just for their own perverse pleasure. For quite some years now we have had electronic badge-access to most of our buildings (at least in the United States). So now you can’t get into the car-park, let alone the actual building, without your badge. Hell,… Read more
-
Geek Tragedies
A couple of weeks ago, my PC died (again). This is a major catastrophe in our house, what with the kids and Webkins, and the wife and on-line shopping. In theory we can access the Internet via the PlayStation 3, but actually doing so is an exercise in exasperation – the browser window is either too big or too small (you can’t get it to simply re-scale for the TV size the way HTML should), and entering even the shortest URL via the controller is truly painful (and the PS3 refuses to recognize my (non-Sony) bluetooth keyboard). A life without… Read more