15 Months

Posted on by Greg Dance - PC-Techniques Stroud

Life Beyond so called ‘Normality’

After 15 months of seeing the world around me become ever less stable I’ve broken my silence here to take a little time out to mind dump it here. Nothing super substantial has happened to our world over the past 15 months, that humans hadn’t already done during the short period of Earth history that we have been here.

Though from seeing the ways that IT has been weaponised during the period, it might!

Generally speaking, the most profound experiences I had during that time were personal ones. Some friends died, all from cancers. I was immobilised along with my car for several months following a breakdown of the car spilling over onto a leg injury. Something from that sequence made me reassess my work life and so for multiple reasons I’ve now removed the Stroud Cloud backup & NAS at Base services from my business portfolio.

It’s Not Only Me

From conversations with friends & others I see that ‘business as usual’ is pretty much over for most of us. Sure, we can talk & act as if covid-19, Ukraine & Palestine and climate / weather disruptions are mere ripples at the surface of a deep & stagnant pond, but I think that no one outside of the offshore owned corporate mass media thinks that any more. Even the self proclaimed freedom screaming rocket man has lost much of his listener base as Xitter follows his last rocket trajectory in free fall.

I’ve got to ask the declining number of world notable voices who still cling to it, why? Social media is mostly a means of voices being seen & heard on a global scale. It has been useful in some campaigns and breaking through communication barriers, but now is also weaponised by Meta & other chattels of elite wealth as sources of censored news & opinion, while innocents & truth bringers are deliberately targeted for daring to be noble, selfless & honest.

IT isn’t the problem per se, but its utilisation by power trying to maintain its prominence & control is becoming toxic to all forms of personal integrity by its main agents. And as large technological behemoths battle it out in the market place for our private data, offshore state level infiltrators creep into systems to rifle information & sabotage security of those large scale online platforms & cloud providers. Its getting very ugly!

Has artificial intelligence not also come into the field it would be bad enough, but here we go…. a human made autonomous ‘intelligence’ that can be in your home/work life as surely as it will be flying & driving autonomous killing toys for military’s makes its appearance.

Oh, and btw covid was only the first aerosol transmitted coronavirus to arrive, it won’t be the last because the field into which it arrived & fast spread is still the same as it was in 2019, open for everything as usual!

Fixer Blues!

Me being a fixer type ain’t easy in this world right now because fixer types are sharp at spotting faults in systems or devices and proposing / enacting solutions to them…. fixed! But how can fixers be useful in any way at the sheer scale of now global breakage of systems that are beginning to break down all at once? (food & water supplies, healthcare, political & financial integrity, truthful information etc)

Acting locally so that we can be more effective to try containing the breakages coming to major supply chains offers the only access we have to making a real difference. Global scale systems control is beyond reach & beyond comprehension. This is why I determined from the beginning to keep my little biz local only! But making money isn’t a guarantee that food will be in the larder if no food can be bought!

What to do eh!

Move? Hide? Hoard?

The first pandemic (coronavirus) showed us how panic makes fools of people who suddenly feel naked! Hoarding toilet rolls, my arse! So learning from that trait we could try to follow the community centred deep adaptation works of Prof. Jem Bendell (Deep Adaptation/Breaking Together) & Prof. Rupert Read (Climate Majority Project). Their openness to talking REAL about the real world climate / collapse state is very refreshing by comparison to mainstream media distractions & personalities waffle . (Content warning: not fans of romantic fiction or daytime TV decade old, lifestyle mono cultured smiley shows)

It seems & I think it really is, that most of our modern western cultures are stuck in a mass delusion about, well everything really. Westerners are so drug dependent on TV & toxic media daily shots, it is easy to conclude that a full scale civilisational ‘reset’ will be arriving soon and will be very life disturbing. My title to this paragraph (Move? Hide? Hoard?) is likely to flash in fast forward through many minds all at once unless people have instead taken the time now to Stop, Listen, Act!

So my sign off for this post (no idea if/when the next post comes) I hope will leave you readers with something more useful than a No10 ministerial ‘promise’ (aka pledge).

What if our Planet were likened to a Computers Hard Drive?

Posted on by Greg Dance - PC-Techniques Stroud

My being a computer repairs engineer for many years has taught me some clear lessons about my approach to technical issues.

If a computer begins malfunctioning erratically or operates extremely slowly & is more than 5 or so years old, I have begin with checking the state of its hard drive especially if it is an older type spinning platen type.

The platens of those drives are where all Operating system files, software & often the users data is stored. It is vital that this is reliably stored on sectors that work well enough to allow reading & writing from them at speeds that don’t slow down the computer because of misreads or writes.
Therefore the physical platens media has to be in good condition as well as the reading & writing heads & servo motors that actuate the heads across the disk platen.

Being a physical device it is constructed to very high precision accuracy, no approximations can be tolerated or it is slow or malfunctions. All parts must be constructed from high quality materials.


What has this to do with our Earth?

Like a computer our shared planet Earth is also a vastly complex system, but has the clear distinction of also being a life supporting & evolutionary system.

It has features that nearby planets don’t have such as lots of surface water, an atmosphere that carbon based life forms including human need to breathe, fertile soils that support complex life forms. All of these features interact through a combination of lunar gravity, solar energy & planet rotation, seasons because of it orbiting a sun with a tilted axis of rotation. From those, although the planets climate can vary through ice ages to much higher temperatures that affect life forms, it always stays withing certain physical limits.
The evolution, succession & die back of species goes on within those Earth limits generally, though in a few cases the success of a specie might itself affect the planets climate directly.

Some might see all of that natural automation as vastly superior to a simple computer or network of computers that has no means within it of evolution. It simply runs programmes, though now a so called superior form of ‘digital intelligence’ (A.I.) is being shouted about that is possibly capable of self evolution of ‘intelligent thought’ in some form, but it remains to be seen what that might become.
For example, can an A.I. that has never been gestated inside its creators body, then born into a completely different environment, gone through 18 years of growth during which it is shown how to do things, educated, becomes faster & taller, goes through massive hormone emergence changes & powerful influences & does all of that within social constraints & beliefs, ever be able to perceive the world as humans have & do?

I won’t further the discussion into whether or not the collective human view of our Earth & us on it is a healthy one, but suffice to say that our weather patterns now tell us our views of our Earth lack clear vision!

Back to the physicals.

If I am working on a computer that is malfunctioning and see that it has delayed or unreliable responses I can run programmes that will search for & fix software read/write errors on the hard drive. Sometimes these happen from power blips during the computers use or some other temporary anomaly and so these faults can be found & corrected. Sometimes only small areas of the disk are in some way not up to standard & so the fix software can move the software or data from them to another area that is still good. This can get a computer back up to speed, though if some disc sectors are flagged as faulty it could be an early warning that more disk media or heads performance is degrading.
Should that reoccur than the only course of action is to look to replace the entire hard drive device because only a manufacturer of them has the replacement parts and clean room facilities that would be required.


Planet Earth is like a huge global storage medium. Its complex life forms exist because they all rely upon the existence & interactions of less complex life forms.
All of our food comes from what we regard as lower life forms. Whether land animal, land plant, marine fish or mammal, we cannot feed ourselves without lesser life forms that themselves need to live within balanced ecological systems.
Humans now interfere with natural balanced ecologies all of the time and at massive scale, this is particularly so during the past 30 years. We are always trying to maximise getting more out from the Earth while giving less to achieve it. This super efficient pursuit includes forcing the pace of nature and that acts in defiance of any calls to accept that our planets natural cycles are fairly fixed, and that it is from those that humans have evolved. It is our origin & that grew from the origin of species we rely on to exist.

So if we consider the complex Earth life forms as like software that live upon a physical storage media (our Earth) and acknowledge that this being undamaged is critical to the continued existence of all life forms, (particularly so the more complex ones), then we see we are in a show stopper of a problem. And despite the absurd dreams of 3 super rich rocket men, we haven’t a suitable planet we all can just move to. maybe they can with their close circles but it won’t end well with only a mono-mindset & no underlings to talk to.

Despite beliefs there seems to be no Earth manufacturer we can contact to get a quote to fix the physical Earth media from human neglect. And human life is not viable if separated from lesser life forms just because we wrongly choose to ‘go it alone’ via technologies instead, that notion is foolish & uneducated.

And before any thoughts of using planet scale technical fixes come to the fore front, just consider this.
If I run the ‘fix’ software on a computers hard drive then the performance can be improved, but for how long? Always there will be a degradation in the physical drive to some extent. Once the physical media is degrading it is only a matter of time until it fails again and those failures will increase in frequency over time.
I’m seeing A.I. & other ‘saviour technologies’ that the press/TV pack love to glorify as no more than software fix programmes that can only buy a little time more on a dying planet media.


Fixing our Earth ourselves by comparison is far easier to deal with despite its size, because that has its own fully automatic fixing routines. All we have to do is decide to live our lives much less harmfully staying withing its own natural boundaries & it will do all of the rest for us.

I have said for many years that humans are the masters of production, but only the students of consequences, see the story of the Sorcerers Apprentice).

Accepting that is so would be the first small step in becoming responsible citizens of our planet who decided to sacrifice their silly toys & hedonist/ego-madness ways in favour of sustaining all life on Earth, including their own.

<<WARNING The Earth System is Becoming UNSTABLE >>

Please Re-boot Civilisation, then log in using the ‘Sustainable Only’ account option.

Thank you.

Steadying our Worldwide Wobble

Posted on by Greg Dance - PC-Techniques Stroud

Normally, October is a month of revolutions, dead leaves, tedious grandstanding at party conferences & silly premature Christmas adverts.

  • Red = Glass Half Empty
  • Green = Glass Half Full
  • Orange = Optional Moves

But October ’22’ had some extra features making it easily a Category 5 October because Hurricane Ian had just smashed Florida to match wood, so I thought mentioning this is appropriate.

Hurricanes & despicable national leaders – what a mixture!

And which of them will prove the most destructive by Christmas? Putin & his nuclear carnage threats tops my list above hurricanes only because hurricanes have a defined season and region of the planet to be dangerous within, & Putin seems to have a self awarded licence to the end of his goblin life to be a global scale menace.

Added to that we have a peppering of neo-fascists bubbling up like rust through paint on a 1930’s gangsters getaway car. All across Europe. From Sweden to Italy, Hungary, Brasil, Belarus, Poland, Turkiy Iran and lest I forget, the UK also, a swarm of populist wannabe Hitlers have smiled & smarmed their way into voters bellies like super promoted junk food.

And China isn’t sure whether to bankrupt our consumer addicted world with hypnotised addictions to its consumer stuff made by reprogrammed Muslims in sweat shops, or up its international thug credentials with a Putin aping invasion of Taiwan. Oh and there’s also rocket wimp in N. Korea playing “me too” in the race to Armageddon. In all that bravado sewage stew there is a strong stink of reckless insanity.

Changing the theme now but not enough to become soporific, are the deeply felt concerns of us every day folk who fear the future scale of our utility bills that ballooned when leading nutters changed from international dialogue to international tank & missile chess.

But what can we do for ourselves? Quite a lot really but only at home unless your voting habit helped make them elected! The first step is to seriously review how our homes are lit & heated, how we keep clean, how we cook food and keep food fresh from going off. Doing those will immensely help our morale with a boost as figures of energy & water consumption drop, even if prices don’t! Even homes not on metered water need to cut consumption because some terribly detached policy makers have ensured over that water shortages will be in our near futures so its every bodies interest to not waste water.

Step 1 has to be against the many greedy household devices that bleed our electricity most heavily when in use. The electric shower (worse if a power electric shower), tumble driers, air conditioners, electric car charging, electric blankets, room heaters and immersion heaters. That old fridge/freezer is also a big user of power, especially if its caked with ice &/or stocked badly.

Next Steps have to be those always on, low level standby appliances that we don’t even notice are on. Fridges & freezers, WiFi extenders & routers, I.O.T (Internet of Things) devices and any other devices that graze all day on stand-by 24×7. Many small current devices will collectively gobble a lot of power over time when constantly left on standby so ask yourself if it REALLY has to be on! Some devices do, but many don’t.

And those light bulbs have to be LED these days (Warm not that horrible stark white light)

Timers – Our gas boiler is now plugged into a timer so that it isn’t leeching power all the day only waiting the hours between heating cycles to serve us occasional hot water (which it does very inefficiently). So we now only heat washing up water in the kettle and wash in the basin in cold water for as long as our tolerance lasts!. We plugged our many chargers into a common power strip so that its timer only switches them all on for 4 hours each night (economy 7) but the principle is the same for non economy 7 to keep them off.

Our WiFi extenders & router are also on timers so are off while we are asleep.

Bigger investments like multi cookers (pressure & slow cooking devices that in some cases also make yogurt & bake cakes), microwaves & new efficient fridge/freezers come harder to afford but they definitely will you pay back well over their entire life time.

But if you persist with old inefficient ones, or stick only to ovens, pots & pans an investment not made now will be very costly over time.

So a Christmas where people maybe jointly buy new appliances as presents or heavier socks & jumpers and a woolly legs blanket for TV evenings has to be good for everyone, and snuggling up close to your favoured warm blooded living being of any species will also add that creature comfort sense of internal warmth that most of us really like.

Have a nice winter!

Greg

2022 – for Better & Worse?

Posted on by Greg Dance - PC-Techniques Stroud

I’m not entirely a doomsayer you know!

To build a backdrop, I am now in my early sixties which I used to think of as ‘getting on a bit’ when I were a wipper-snapper that had more hair and that of the original colour! Though yesterday I saw a post where some self styled commentator put up a meme that shifted age designations that we all grew up (and older) with, up the age column several decades! So on that score I’m ‘young’ again except that my body has grumblings that denounce such proud nonsense.

I am aware that my non negotiable status of age also makes me prone to the much decried state of being a ‘grumpy (now young) man, which is perplexing!

Grumpiness isn’t bad really, it can be useful as long as the grumpy commentator isn’t mired in a thick sticky brown mix of revenging some historic political, racial, scientific or other much disputed past which he/she can never resolve anyway by acting nasty in the present time!

Good grumpiness is a good thing I say, it offers a future that is better than the drift into systemic failures that we all have been made to be a part of, since neo- <add your own hates here> strong arm clans decided we must hear & follow their ideas, no matter what! That covers almost entirely the UK press (gangs) media & the self image un-assured BBC, who don’t really know where to appear to sit on high octane globally threatening stories of our time.

So +’ve Grumps are OK if they only use the past as a ‘don’t go there and think/do that again’ reference marker! Sort of a “I wouldn’t have come to here by that route if I were you” annoying self appointed advisor.

+’ve Grumps are unsmiling heroes who can appear as dour & serious which can be a serious disadvantage in our current age of silly selfie cheesy smile imagery & sound bites that deceive the unwary, as much as they try to suppress the presence of reality behind a huge marsh mallow. So a +’ve grumpy might for example comment strongly against corrupt & inept governments that howl through their media for a return of ‘basic values’ that were glued retrospectively onto their favoured accounts of glory days of control through empire & deference to them by all but their school chums!

So here we all are, 2022 seems to be the point where covid-19/20/21/22 might now be running out of pathogenicity in favour of a new past time of it having a transmission & engine speed like a Ferrari! Maybe, maybe not I think it too early to call that one as ‘done’ Boris!

Assuming covid will become a gazelle instead of a rhino virus what does the future of I.T. look like? In a word it is not trans-ing to a less virulent species like covid is. I won’t cover that right here & now, but I will mention the human element in things going wrong.

For example, a simple purchase of an Anti-Virus package ought not to become a problem because that is opposite to the intended purpose of the software in the first place, right? But ….. not always.

This takes you to a article where the sleight of hand with automatic renewal subscriptions by AV businesses is exposed as bad practice. That is my +’ve grump of this post, more to follow another grumpy day!

TTFN

Greg

Sharp End Forward!

Posted on by Greg Dance - PC-Techniques Stroud

But Carefully!

Dear Customers & Friends


I thought I would update you all on how I'm going to offer my Repair & Tuition services from now because of the changing situation with coronavirus in terms of its ever changing presence in communities.

Clearly there has been no upgrade to the government's attitudes on public protection & health since I wrote last in February, otherwise we wouldn't be facing a summer surge in infections from yet another new variant!

Generally speaking, and as things appear to be today I am becoming more optimistic that the chances of a major UK cases explosion is slowly receding, particularly so in the local Stroud area, from careful behaviour by most people and vaccines reaching many people now x2 doses. I have now received my second vaccine jab, over 3 weeks ago.


But on the other side I am aware that the Delta variant is a fast spreading threat that must be of great concern, in particular to unvaccinated children & youth plus any older people who for a reason haven't been vaccinated.


Opening Up.

So I will now carefully 'open up' as the saying goes by offering my services as they are now, and also will add to this my visiting service where this is not practicable (but under carefully set  conditions).

I have updated my website with new details which you can read here


I look forward to helping you,


Kind regards


Greg

Opening Up Carefully

Posted on by Greg Dance - PC-Techniques Stroud

To write this blog post I need to take one big step back first, for the sake of perspective.

Our pre-pandemic world functioned in ways that essentially had no serious interest in engaging meaningfully in any discussion of approaching hazards. Consequently it lacked planning responses to an approaching threat horizon from ecological & as we now know to our cost, Zoonotic microbes.

To gain a sense of where my personal current place is I begin with what I see with reasonably good reliability about the covid-19 pandemic state at this time.

Simply, because the pandemic was completely avoidable, as is demonstrated by 9 or so nations who now operate their lives & economies as if it never existed, why did so few nations chose to prevent a lethally capable & highly transmissible Novel Virus?

And how did the other 187 nations on Earth ignore the obvious and lose so much, & so many people is the stuff of a thick volume written by tutting historians & not my blog, however because peoples normal behaviour may now take one of two forks in the road ahead I will write on because I believe that business will need a new novel normal.

Being a visiting computer services provider business in a pandemic has had its downside as you might imagine, but I have continued with adapted service provision methods which have, in the main, worked well under successive lock-downs!

Now that our lusterless government seems committed to opening up what it describes as ‘carefully’ and with ‘data’ as its new guiding mantra, I will also adopt a cautious opening up approach of my own. However because I am by definitely influenced by solid data & sound assessments from truly independent scientists & real medical experts, I may not necessarily move in step with a government machine that has other interests that appear to be heard by them more readily than those speaking for ‘the public good’. The pace of vaccines roll out that our NHS has achieved (despite the government) has proved it really ought to be running the UK instead of them!

As I see it today the trends of new infections, hospitalisations & deaths are reducing very well, but this is due almost entirely to the #3 lock-down & the good will of the majority of people who’s normal lives are accepted by them as being ‘on hold’.

The issue may come when on March 8th the schools reopen because as we already have seen, the incidences of primary school & nursery virus transmission are already rising in lock-down #3 and so this rise is happening during a limited pupil attendance level. This is concerning because no real resources have been committed by any authorities to make schools safer, so that full attendance at schools could cause infection rates to rise exponentially again as they did in December/January. Opening up schools presents a problem of wider & possibly faster transmission of the virus so in my decisions to visit sites for work, or not, I will have to take the presence of children & teenagers (who may be offered vaccinations later in the year), with a high degree of caution.

This lack of protection to prevent harm is as reckless as it should be unbelievable, and the trumpeted efficient roll out of vaccines (to those accepting them, but not yet to children) won’t as I understand it, change the nature of the threat. This is because the vaccines impressive pace of rollout is delayed by a 3 week efficacy lag, making the likelihood of another infections spike this Spring more possible.

Also the mutations we are seeing appear every week now are more dangerous due to higher infectiousness, and possibly higher virulence that may more seriously affect the young than did the original strain of covid-19. So a tolerated presence of the virus in our communities only adds further to the chances of more unknown strains to emerge, possibly some that bypass the protection of the vaccines and ……………!

Much of what I know has been very generously provided to the public by Independent SAGE who are world class experts and provide their time & efforts completely free.

Their current update on the so called road map from lock-down is here

My Approach to Site Visits

Basically I am cautiously opening up as of 8th March but will need to ensure that a customers site is as safe for me and for them first. ie sufficiently ventilated and not crowded.

What will I do?

I intend to gradually and under closely watched conditions, open up to my visiting repairing & installing of systems, but this has to be done with careful safeguards in place for both customers and for myself.

Where a work space at a customers site is small, crowded &/or lacks open ventilation I will have to avoid working within it unless I am assured that (post vaccination + a 3 week period) any persons I come into contact with are also protected by vaccines.

I am sorry if this causes upset feelings to those not choosing to have, or are ineligible to have vaccines, but I feel that I must protect as best as I can myself, my partner and other customers to the best standards.

I will wear a N99 face mask even if those above conditions are met as a precaution.

I update the knowledge that I have on a weekly & daily basis,  so my approach will change accordingly, so please do feel that you can discuss your needs of my work before it commences.

Please keep safe & well & remember that a vaccine is no protection to you unless 3 weeks have passed after the jab!

Greg

STOP Sign Year

Posted on by Greg Dance - PC-Techniques Stroud

This post is a second version because for some strange reason my original version suddenly lost some of its paragraphs! I’m watching you WordPress!

Greetings to you all!  (I won’t bother with the usual Happy New Year stuff simply because it couldn’t have been, and isn’t likely to be).

That nasty virus isn’t content with invading our lives, causing mayhem and then refusing to leave which gives it much in common with a soon to be ejected white supremacist thug! The difference is that the virus is only doing its job, whereas the other only plays at it through golf and spitting nocturnal tweets at opponents.

But more is in the real news and its looking a bit better for privacy & democracy!

In The News – WhatsApp & Facebook.

But first I will backtrack. You may have seen that I wrote in our ‘Covid Spring’ that Google expatriated all of your UK data on its platforms in Ireland  (our then GDPR protected zone, inside the EU) to the Wild West (USA). So I deleted my Google account before this and implored others to do the same.

Before that event, WhatsApp failed to find a massive security hole that others discovered in its phone App. That backdoor was wide open to state level spyware that opened up smartphones data with no user intervention! So I also got rid of that App after closing my account!

Here it comes! Zuckerberg’s Facebook, who we all know to make zillions from flogging your privacy details to its ‘affiliates’ have announced two more encircling moves.

Move#1 is that your phone data that WhatsApp accesses on your smartphone including contacts, and transactions you do through the App (plus who knows what else) will become accessible to Facebook and its ‘affiliates’ from February 8th 2021! The ‘choice’ they give you is ‘do it our way or stop using the app’.

Move#2 Another announcement made under news coverage of #pandemic outta control is that your private data they hold on Facebook which. lets face it is huge, will be shifted to the wild west during this year.

Yes, I know, following a rush to other apps by the tens of millions, WhatsApp have tried giving ‘assurances’ on privacy protection, and those might be as they claim for now. But when we remember through past experience the tendencies of corporations and politicians who carefully manage the release of disturbing changes that often appear silently during public holidays, or under cover of disasters, do we ‘really’ trust them? We remember Zuckerberg’s refusal to explain his part in the Cambridge Analytical data scandal to Parliament! Both he and other owners of huge platforms behave like Bond film villains now and there is no real James Bond to stop them (sorry if I just busted a myth).

Assuming you feel as I do about being treated like a piece of farm livestock, then here are some ideas I have, they are not advice, but are based on experience.

WhatsApp (WA) – Best to message all of your friends through it to tell them you’ve had enough and then open an account on another platform, I use Signal because it has a long good reputation. Edward Snowden also says its better than Telegram security wise.

 

 

 


Suggested Method –

Open a new account on your chosen replacement platform, install its app onto your devices, TIP – Signal lets you video & audio call from a laptop/PC/Mac, unlike WA.
Send messages of joy to your friends from Signal (or other) and invite them to also escape!
If you want to retain any messages on WA then copy/backup them! Then use WA’s app to delete your messages and account, then uninstall the horrible thing from all of your devices.

Facebook (FB) doesn’t yet present you with such a rush to action as its data move deadline isn’t yet announced, though it will be this year. If you are also minded to get away from the risks it poses with your privacy (and possibly your sanity by its content controlling algorithms), then next I would take a look at other social media offerings. Again I won’t endorse any here, its up to you! But I can point you to some I’ve looked at.

WT.Social is fairly new and is still developing, so its in its growing phase. That said its fairly easy to use and lets you post like FB does and without the word number constraint of twitter posting. And you can join groups that it calls ‘SubWiki’s’. Also you can befriend and have followers just as you have before. These are its proud claims;

WT.Social

You can view WT’s Privacy Policy here

 

Mastodon has been around, I think, for a few years and has a following that is less easy to gauge because you have to sign up to which ever of its many ‘servers’ you feel attracted to, according to your tastes. So maybe not as easy to get to know but if you are particularly into a niche social media experience, then it may be worth a look. It also offers a mobile device App. I didn’t take to it myself so cannot guide further.

Maybe 2020 may be seen one day as the ‘demo version’ and 2021 will be the full release version that has yet to prove itself, who can predict?

 

Keep well and Safe!

 

Greg

Quick Bytes News – July Covid-19 Update

Posted on by Greg Dance - PC-Techniques Stroud

Despite the extended lock down, the months have rolled by and a worrying spring has become a very confusing summer. Our behaviour has been advised and advised again in a constant stream of conflicting updates from No10 and others with seemingly no improvement in its quality or reliability.

Consequently I only act upon advice from genuine experts such as Independent SAGE and The Academy of Medical Sciences who offer regular online updates of real data analysis of the pandemic and offer opinions that I value.

This has been the basis of my web page on covid-19 that I updated this morning, and this describes my working practices while the pandemic persists. Sadly due to some rising infection rates in the UK it seems unlikely that we will be free from this virus until next year at the earliest. I will keep this all under constant review. Keep safe!

And next is Microsoft!

Oh boy, have they had a summer! Not content with coping with a pandemic the big M have been creating a mess of their own with ‘updates’ that have in some cases slowed machines to a crawl, in others rendered them paper weights or door stops!

The devils details are that Big ‘M’ chose to not allow a buggy update to their Edge browser to be uninstalled, and for users to not be allowed to stop it booting open the door and installing itself ! As one website put it…

Having fixed it, and to prevent it reoccurring Big ‘M’ have had to produce a tool to stop it from kicking its way back in! Do contact me if you need assistance with getting this intruder fixed!

June 2020 Update

Big ‘M’s next big mess is their June 2020 Update which also may, or may not affect your Windows 10 depending on its configuration, or perhaps its mood, who knows?

Some users have seen it cause a lot of forced restarts that are preceded by this annoyingly pretty blue box.

Big’M’ say that a fix for this “should be available in July”, but the good news is that for some users this update can be prevented because of the version of Windows 10 they have. If your version allows you to ignore the update by not manually installing it I expect you can guess my advice!

Unlike the horrible Edge update, this trouble maker can be uninstalled, its name is either KB4560960 or KB4557957, your Windows will howl that you are downgrading its defences, but hey, a working machine has to be better and anyway Big ‘M’ will fix its subsequent update … one day!

Linux – Ah, that’s Better!

I have installed Linux Mint onto a many PC’s now and in all cases it not only Works Reliably but it also has updates that in mine and others experiences, don’t break it!

The Minty folk have just produced the new ‘Ulyana’ (version 20) release which I haven’t tried out yet, but as always with Linux the new version is better and more capable that its predecessor, so I am encouraged!

You might be too, why not contact me and give it a try?

I can set it up either in ‘Dual Boot’ method so you can combine your boot up options with Windows as the other choice, or I could give it its own hard drive installation (perhaps on a new super fast SSD drive which I can install?) .

Lets talk – 07579001747 or pct@phonecoop.coop

My Website is Here.