Blown away

The day after Monday night and Tuesday's storms so for most here school was still on although some struggled to walk and transport for those who attend "Disabled Schools" wasn't running as everybody including staff do travel large distances and trees and the like were down here.

I can remember experiences like that rather well although in hindsight one plus we had was there was no "E-learning" so unlike some today you wouldn't be expected to work from home on your Chromebook or Smartphone instead.

You had the day off instead to play with your toy soldiers or read comics instead which was far more fun and to be fair in some homes you might struggle to concentrate left on your own with all the domestic stuff going on around you.

Winter always brings back boyhood school memories for me and whatever the birthdate may say, you're back in that time and I love that.

Time to act?

While my head is a bit messed up with some triggering incident caused by stuff on one site we won't go deeply into, discussion is continuing on the topic of under sixteens and social media following a ban on it in Australia and talk of similar schemes elsewhere.

Part of the problem was the internet and especially the social media part were never really designed for young users who in the past might of had to got permission to publish a school magazine and the content would of been moderated prior to it being published could now put anything up with the companies only responding to reports if anyone raised concerns.

And that's too late if slurs, insults, dubious pictures and the like are being posted and traded around as then schools are having to deal with the fall out in school time beyond the issues around just how long younsgters are staring at relatively small screens.

Reports are coming from health professionals about the major rise in eyesight issues and premature, often highly inappropriate sexual behaviour by youngsters copying pr0n they've seen or challenges that are often highly dangerous, even life threatening.

Something has to change here as even as legal adults we can have issues around addiction as the algorithms just keep on finding more and more material to scroll though.

We are now talking serious around a social media ban - not a absolute ban on internet access although a good case can be made for the youngest only doing so under supervision and it is about time.

 

Sorted (for now)

Fortunately the strong winds, very limited snow of the weekend but much ice has recided although it did leave a certain amount delayed post was things were much worse to the south of us so some things were rather put on hold.

One thing in that was the whole project of dealing with last weeks computer issue as while leave in an age of many devices connected to our televisions, such as streaming kit, games consoles, maybe a computer for things like Microsoft Teams, your Blu-Ray player and so on the sockets on a good number of tv's are insufficient to leave things plugged in and bending round the back plugging and unplugging leads is both a faff and for some of us backaching.

Thus before I could do anything, I needed to look at ways of extending the number of HDMI sockets and looking around it seemed unlike the 90's world of Scarts we used for our VCR's and DVD players automatic swicthing just doesn't work very well at all.

In the end I opted for simple manual swicthing unit with the right number of inputs that uses relays powered from a device to do the witching which tend to be more reliable than cheap contact switches and a half meter lead to go to the tv to keep it neat.

Having plugged the HD satellite box and DVD Player back in, attention was then taken to the lead to the laptop because you don't want a lead that might act more like a fence between you, the tv (acting as a monitor) and it plus often you'll have things plugged into the computer such as cameras for photo editing or a cd/dvd drive for copying discs for things such as portable digital audio players or playing via an external digital to analogue converter to your stereo.

The act of copying such discs is very difficult on a Chromebook as it doesn't natively allow for run ning programs and the one Andriod app that can is a faff and half to use so that's a major use of this Windows laptop.

I went for three meter lead to allow for a more careful and potentially accident free installation and using the supplied cable ties you can just gently roll it up when not in use so it doesn't clutter the place up.

Never discount the potential for tripping over wires!

It is now all working able to plugged in and used in minutes for those things the Chromebook isn't so good even if that's so much better for just opening up, logging in  and getting on with stuff.

Cold black screen of death

Brr it was minus 7 degrees when I started this blog so I haven't been far in my grey short trousers, shirt and jersey  as with heavy snow it is rather difficult for me to get about when you're wobbly of foot.

Something rather unfortunate happened on the cool but nowhere near bitterly cold saturday night that has had some consequencies to some of my interests and very much with blogging which has also been impacted on by the weather.

That Windows 11 machine had a screen failure that replaced its good 1336 x768 colour screen for faint horizontal lines at the top and no image  which when you remember that even powering down usually requires you to use the mouse and screen is not remotely good.

I did the torchlight test and there's no faint image it's likely the LCD itself has failed but finding a spare HDMI cable and hooking that up to the tv shows  a steady correctly proportioned clear image and full interface.

While at some point a new machine would make more sense although you'd have to reinstall or replace programs  as I mainly use it for photo processing, ripping cds to lossless files for digital audio player and for ease with the downloader at Presto, a Music store that sells downloads as that pulls the files into a folder that ended up in the Music masterfolder of the computer.

While you can download via the browser on the Chromebook Plus, that gives you individual files that you have to round up to a master file you create and name it which is a bit more faff.

So I should be getting weather permitting a switch so I can leave cable plugged into it so I can continue to use it while not be pulling out the blu tay machines plug a lot of the time with the mauling that causes.