We are all accustomed to regular privacy scares online.
We know our web browsers track our history, social media apps build advertising profiles based on our clicks, and smart speakers listen out for wake words.
But last week, I stumbled across a post on Instagram that claimed that smart TVs are quietly taking screenshots of our displays every few seconds — even when the television is simply being used as a computer monitor.
Continue reading Is your smart TV spying on you?
Early on Sunday morning I switch on my PC and nothing happened. Nothing. Not a sound. Not a spark. Nothing. All a bit worrying really given that I wanted to get some prayers off my hard drive for use in the 08:00 service that morning.
I tried not to panic and think about it logically. What could the problem be? Okay, the power comes into the power supply unit which then feeds the motherboard and the various components (DVD, hard drives, graphics card, soundcard, USB devices, etc.) But the PSU is in standby mode until it’s supplied with a load which only happens when I push the on/off switch. There are my first two candidates: PSU and switch. And it it’s not them then I guess it could be the motherboard?
I took a look at the switch. It looked and sounded fairly solid. I then hunted down another power cable and swapped that out. Maybe the fuse had gone, I reasoned. And remarkably, my PC started (after two or three failed attempts). That immediately ruled out a dodgy motherboard.
It was looking more and more likely that the PSU was the source of the problem.
So I searched online for the make and model of my then-current PSU: EZCOOL ATX-600JSP and was astonished to read a review on Amazon UK which described something very close to the problems that I had been experiencing for the last couple of years.
For the last couple of years I’ve had a intermittent issues whereby I’d switch on the PC and it would start only to switch itself off a few seconds into the boot sequence. I’d put it down to my not pressing the button hard enough, or even thinking that perhaps there was a problem with the button itself.
Here is what Bukkithead said on Amazon:
For the love of all things holy, don’t buy this power supply. Hamsters on running wheels are a more reliable source of power than this.
Fortunately, I didn’t buy this. I borrowed it from a friend as my old PSU was only 450W and couldn’t handle my new NVIDIA 8800 GTX graphics card.
For about a month, everything was fine. Admittedly sometimes the computer wouldn’t turn on, but it did after pressing the button again and I attributed that to the case rather than the PSU.
However, after this time of false happiness, I was using my computer one day and the power just died. I was surprised but assumed it was a power surge or something similar. Then after a while it would cut out as the computer was turning on or within the first few minutes of running. It was fairly annoying having to have two or three attempts to turn my computer on, and this happened more often than not.
After getting used to this for another couple of weeks, the thing really started to die, a few days ago it turned itself off twenty times, accompanied by a worrying fizzing sound. I tried switching power cables but this made no difference whatsoever. Now it’s more useful as a doorstop and I look forward to destroying the damn thing.
In the last few days I have bought and installed a new Corsair HX series PSU, which never turns off, drastically improved the performance of my computer and is actually silent, unlike this one which claims to be but is far from it. An added bonus is that the inside of my computer no longer looks like a jungle thanks to the modular cabling. The Corsair is highly recommended and is well worth the money, albeit a fairly large sum.
Cheap things are cheap for a reason. Please save yourself the trouble.
I ordered a new PSU, the Corsair GS800 80 Plus Bronze Certified Power Supply 2013 Edition which arrived this afternoon.
Reuben helped me to fit it; what a sweetie! You can see from the photo above that he brought his own toolkit to my desk to help.
The operation was pretty straightforward:
It did! My PC is now disconcertingly quiet. It starts up with a whirring flurry of noise before almost immediately dropping down to an almost inaudible whisper. So quiet was it the first couple of times that I thought my PC had switched itself off. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the screen flicker into life and I watched the power-on startup test (POST) begin.
Having recently upgraded my RAM too—doubling it from 4GB to 8GB—which involved some first class customer service from Crucial, my PC is slowly getting a new lease of life. Not had for a machine that I bought about five or six years ago:
Next up, I want to upgrade the graphics card from an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT (still a remarkably capable graphics card) to something more powerful. I’ll be sure to report back.
I’ve just spent, on and off, about 2 hours trying to work out why the media keys on my Microsoft Digital Media Pro keyboard weren’t working properly with Winamp 5.541 Pro. I’ve finally managed to solve the problem by rolling back to older keyboard drivers.
It appears that the Intellitype 6.3 drivers aren’t compatible with Winamp 5.541 Pro.
When I reinstalled Windows XP Professional a couple of weeks ago I did as I was supposed to: I installed the latest keyboard drivers (Intellitype Pro 6.3). But when it came to setting up Winamp I discovered that it didn’t work as expected.
Winamp has a Global Hotkeys setting within its preferences. As the explanatory text says:
Global Hotkeys are keyboard shortcuts that you can use from within any running application.
And here you can “enable default multimedia key support”. My keyboard (the Microsoft Digital Media Pro) has multimedia keys, so what could be more simple?
I ticked the option, both options in fact, and closed the preferences dialog box.
Pressing the Play/Pause button once started the MP3 track. Pressing it again paused it. Success!
But then I minimized Winamp, pressed Play/Pause again and Windows Media Player started. Eh?!
I tried a variety of solutions on the Winamp forums. Tick one, close, stop itype.exe, restart Winamp, reselect the option, close Winamp, start itype.exe … all that jazz. Nothing worked properly.
How frustrating!
I know that it worked with the last Windows installation, and I knew that I’d used the Intellitype 6.1 drivers, so I uninstalled Intellitype 6.3, rebooted my PC and reinstalled version 6.1.
And do you know what? It worked.
What I’ve had to do in the Intellitype options is disable the Play/Pause button (because enabled it was still opening Windows Media Player) but it didn’t have any effect on Winamp’s ability to recognise or use the key.
Now when I press Play/Pause, no matter whether Winamp is minimized or maximized it toggles play and pause.
Intellitype 6.3 appears to offer a few new features not present in 6.1, such as the ability to save keyboard profiles, but to be honest I don’t need such a facility. So long as my keyboard shortcuts work and my multimedia keys control Winamp I’m a happy user.
Today I made my internet debut on Seesmic: the video conversation website.
I remember someone leaving a comment ages ago when they heard my voice on an MP3 file saying that it kind of freaked them out to hear me because up until then I’d just been an anonymous stranger behind the written word. Well, now you get pictures too! I hope it’s not too upsetting for you.
I was quite unsure about whether I’d enjoy it or not. What would I have to say? Would I want to join in any conversations? But to be honest it was great. It was easy and people were really friendly.
The embedded video above was my Seesmic debut. I introduced myself and a bit like wandering into a room of strangers before long someone said hi and we got chatting. Except that both of us were sitting at home looking into a webcam.
The Seesmic software is tremendously easy to use. Once you’ve logged in all you have to do the first time is make sure that the camera, microphone and speaker settings are assigned to the devices you want them to be set to and then you simply click on record and get chatting. It couldn’t be simpler.
Recording directly to the website makes it so much easier to use than say YouTube where you need to record to a particular video format, upload that file to the website, which then takes time to convert to Flash format, and eventually view a couple of hours later. Seesmic is almost instant; it’s great.
The only issue is that after watching Seesmic videos it seems to mess up my audio playback settings and my MP3s then sound like they’re being played by a chipmunk band!
Nothing that a quick mode change on my soundcard doesn’t fix, but I’d like to prevent that if possible. It’ll be to do with a change in bitrate or something, but it sure is annoying.
It’s like video blogging, I think — you can start new threads or leave comments. But unlike a blog where you type you just chat. It’s far more personal, you can really show your personality, your gestures are obvious and, of course, you can wear odd hats too!
On Wednesday evening I sat down at my PC and tried to scan a document on my Epson Perfection 1670 Photo scanner.
I placed the document on the scanner’s glass, closed the lid and fired up the scanning software (Epson Scan).
Scanning …
Nothing.
I tried again. Again nothing. Every time I tried the scanner appeared to work okay but presented me with the same thing: an A4 sized blank document.
Switching it off and switching it back on again (that favourite of technical support) didn’t fix it. Reinstalling the software didn’t fix it.
Searching Google confirmed what I feared: a hardware error.
I suspect that since you can’t switch off the scanner, short of pulling out the power cable, it eventually burned itself out. Maybe it got zapped during a recent power cut and surge.
I don’t know. All I knew is that my scanner no longer worked.
My new scanner arrived on Friday morning, the Epson Perfection V200 Photo.
This one works, it scans faster, but even better: it has an on/off button. It’s important to switch off your peripherals when you’re not using them.