dormouse1953

When I got out of hospital a year ago I discovered that my notebook PC was giving problems. Within days it failed completely. So I ordered a new one on Amazon. (A Jumper Ezpad Pro8. No, I've never heard of that make either.)

Now, for the first few months after getting home, I was so tired I was going to bed early most nights. So it's possible that I'd not been downstairs at midnight before seeing in the new year. And as the chimes of Big Ben started on the TV my computer started beeping. Slowly at first, but speeding up and stopping after two minutes. I did wonder if it was some sort of happy new year message.

Feeling a lot better these days, there were other occasions when I was still downstairs at midnight, and there was more beeping, on one one occasion drowning out the music I was listening to. What's more, I'd shut the computer down.

I asked on Cix if anyone could suggest what was going on. One suggestion was that I had a nearby smoke detector and that was giving a low-battery alarm. Well, there is an old smoke detector in a drawer in the kitchen, but it's been sitting there unused since I moved in in 1995, and the sound was louder in living room and the door to the kitchen was closed.

Finally last night, I took the computer up to my bedroom before going to bed. The computer did not beep. I hurried downstairs and could still here the beeping in the living room. It is difficult to get the origin of high-pitched sounds, something to do with the way our ears work. But then I noticed the weather station base unit on the mantelpiece. It has alarms built into it and it appeared there was an alarm set for midnight which was switched on. Possibly when resetting the recorded temperatures I'd switched it on. I've switched it off. Let's see what happens next time up at midnight.

Today's Guardian has an obituary of Geoff Tootill, one of the creators of the "Baby" computer in Manchester in 1948. It claims that the computer took 52 minutes to calculate the highest factor of 2^18. I know computers were slow in those days, but...

Curiously, I remember seeing a similar error on the 50th anniversary of this computer. We used to have a computing department house magazine at work and someone wrote about this computer and said it took some length of time to determine if 2^32-1 was prime. Well, I think it was divisible by 3.

UPDATE

The Guardian contacted me last night to ask if I had a reference as to why I thought 2^18 was wrong. They pointed me to several sites referencing this number:

http://curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk/computer50/www.computer50.org/mark1/new.baby.html

So, did they use 2^18 as a test, because it was trivial to find the correct answer - 131072 - and write a brute force program just dividing by larger and larger numbers to see what the largest factor was?

It occurs to me that the first computer I ever programmed had 18 bit words and couldn't handle integers of 2^18 and larger.

I was supposed to be going to a concert at the Barbican tonight but I received an e-mail this morning telling me the conductor has been hospitalised with pneumonia and they couldn't find a replacement at such short notice so the concert has been cancelled.

Leastwise, that's what the e-mail said when I read it in Thunderbird.  But I also download all my e-mails for long term storage using an antiquated text-only program, Ameol, supplied by Cix, my e-mail provider.  The message was in two parts, one in html and the other in plain text.  Ameol displays the text part, which is a notification that a concert has been cancelled that was due to take place on January 5th 2015.

So, I get home from Novacon yesterday afternoon and go to switch on my netbook computer and i can't find the power connector for it.  I looked in both of my bags.  I know I had it in my hotel room that morning so I guess I must have left it there when I finished packing.  The netbook was the last thing I put in my bag.

I phoned the the hotel who told me that they'd ask house-keeping to get back to me.  There was no phone call as of ten o-clock this morning so I phoned them back and was put through to house-keeping immediately.  They said they had it and would ask front desk to post it back to me (as it is unlikely I'll be in Nottingham again before next Novacon).  So I then had to wait for the front desk to phone me back.  They did after about an hour or so, and said they'd post it, charging the cost to the credit card I'd used to pay the bill.

However, in the interim I'd ordered a replacement from Amazon, thinking that having a spare would be useful just in case I do something like this again.  Meanwhile, last I checked the charge on the netbook was down to 50% and I presume that as Windows computers don't power down completely when you shut them down, there is a constant power drain even on a swtiched off computer.  It will be a race as to which will happen first, the original connector arrives, the new connector arrives, or the battery goes completely flat.  My guess is that all three will happen about simultaneously.

I have a Canon printer in the room with my desktop computer.  It is connected via the house wi-fi.  I was sitting at the computer just now and suddenly the printer burst into life.  Which was surprising as I wasn't printing anything.

I did wonder if a neighbour had somehow accidentally connected to my printer - unlikely, I know - but what came out was obviously something I'd printed.

Some months ago I came across a website that publshes a daily killer sudoku and I print each one out because I find it easier to do on paper than online.  Sometimes I remember to print it out from my laptop when I first go through my e-mail after breakfast, sometimes I forget and print it later from my desktop.  The printout just now was Monday's puzzle.  Now, I think I tried to print that out from my laptop on Monday morning and got the message that the printer was offline, so I printed it out again when I got to the desktop later that morning.

But quite why it has taken four days - and I have printed many other items in that time - for that printout to come through, I have no idea.

I've had this computer almost exactly a year.  Twice in the last week, I've gone to open the CD drive and pressed the power button instead, leading to a shutdown.  Don't think I'd done it at all in the past year.

My portable netbook computer gave up the ghost the Tuesday before Loncon, leaving me without e-mail and the net for all of Loncon and Shamrokon.  Replaced it Thursday with an ASUS netbook/tablet combination - the keyboard unclips turning it into a tablet.

Even when the keyboard is connected, as the page up and down keys are shifts to the arrow keys, to scroll up and down it is easier to run my finger over the screen.  I've only had it two days and already there is enough grease on the screen to fry an egg in.  How do people get round this?  Do they have to clean the screen every few hours?

Just received a spam from someone trying to get me to send my personal details for inclusion in the "20122 Edition of Who's Who Among Executives and Professionals".

Seems to be the day for getting bills.  First off, the electricity.  But they'd estimated the readings and allow you to submit your own readings through the EDF website.  For each meter, you have to give both the value and the date you made the reading.  The date field shows "DD/MM/YY".  No defaulting to today's date.  What's more, just putting in "17/10" won't fill in the year field, and putting in "17/10/11" tells you that the date format is in fact "dd/mm/yyyy".  After all that, it saved me fifteen quid.

Then a renewal notice for the insurance on the tumble dryer.  There are two options for paying this, direct debit or credit card.  Each option has the amount you'll pay with a button underneath.  Pressing the button for credit card got me a message telling me to select which option I wanted to use.  At which point I noticed radio buttons next to each option.  You have to select the radio button for credit cards before pressing the button to pay by credit cards.

OK, I guess this video is old news by now, but still rather impressive.