There's a stack of things happening here, though almost all of them are boring-type background things. There are some minor issues with the website, including some updates and some other small nuisances that I'd like to fix, but still haven't. In some cases, I'm not good enough at programming or understanding how the website innards work, and I just can't find where to tweak stuff so it works as intended. Most of these things are also not crucial, so I tend to have a go at them when they catch my eye, which they do once in a while, and after an hour or two of fuddling around, I put them to rest again. Sometimes I change a small thing only to find out (days or weeks later, if things go badly) that my things-look-better-now tweak actually was a things-look-better-here-now-but-shittier-everywhere-else thing. Sigh.

The most current problem was a deluge of spam coming via my contact form. It seems to have been solved now, at least mostly - I'll see if what I did was enough in the next few days. There's a plugin installed now that should keep bots from posting while doing nothing (and adding no extra steps) for regular, living and breathing human beings. If that will not stop the spamming, I'll have to add one of those wonderful "please answer this simple maths question" thingies - something I did want very much to avoid. But if the alternative is to get about 200 spam emails each day, plus the same amount in "Undelivered Mail Returned To  Sender" messages, that decision does get a lot easier.

There's also some more maintenance and ordering of things going on with the computer. Most of the transferred programmes seem to work fine on the newly setup machine, but there's a new backup procedure to be implemented, and it's a good opportunity to do some additional housekeeping, so that's also going on, and - as usual - it takes a long time and is a little annoying.

In other, more happy news: There's been some progress on the Ink cardigan, as can be proved by this very bad, very blurry photo:



I've progressed past the raglan increases and into the main body. Next step will be knitting the sleeves. I've found out with my first knit-it-all-in-one-piece piece that I absolutely hate knitting the sleeves as the last bit. There's just too much finished object to turn around with each round of the sleeve to make it comfortable... which means I'll do the sleeve-knitting right now, at the earliest possible part. That way I can also see if things fit, or if I have to go back a bit and adjust stuff.

 

After some searching, I did find a helpful article on how to fix the issue - a hack disabling all the system hardware parts that might cause driver issues (which were the reason for the hang-up). I tried this-but to no avail. So I tried again, disabling more and more things, and at one point it did work.

I had to get some other things done at that point, though. So I tried to access the Windows Easy Transfer file I had created, in the hope of leaving my data over smoothly - only to find out that the external disk drive that I had saved it on did not work anymore. So not on the list of things I had needed!

So what to do? That was easy: find, buy and install a recovery programme, scan the drive to find that all files can be found, then go into town the next day to get a new external drive, and wait for the file recovery programme to finish so it can copy the found things to the new disk.

Which was a good plan, but after almost 36 hours of scanning for files to recover, the new installation of Windows graciously treated me to an automatic update with a system restart, resulting in all scan data being lost. Meanwhile, though, I had a) dis­covered that there is indeed a programme designed to migrate things, including working programmes, from one computer to another - and remembered that we actually had used that before, with good success. The only little problem about this was to find the license Code again-and then, it turned out, we had to ask for a reset of the code from support (which went very quickly and smoothly); and b) I really needed to get some work done for which I needed the programmes on the old version. Which meant I saved the system as it was then, did a rollback to my old Windows, and got some work done there. In addition, I discovered that the "broken" external disk was still working fine on the old system. Weird - but not unwelcome; I could do a checkdisk now, fix the issue that had caused the trouble, and save the long scanning time and recovery process.

Then I did a system backup again, prepared the migration file, and started to do the installation thing of Windows again. Whatever I had done the one time it did work, though, I was not able to reproduce it. After the second try, I gave up, went back to the system backup I had done just in case (good thing I had!), and went on from there, first updating, then cleaning up the new system and then migrating. Which took insane amounts of time.

So basically, there was an enormous amount of waiting interspersed with deep sighs, tries to get things working, more sighs, and even more waiting. There were numerous rollbacks and system restores. There were plenty of backups at different stages (and what a good thing, too!), and about three days of work-time lost to these shenanigans.

Now things seem to be more or less back in working order. I'm quite sure I will find some more glitches and problems in the next few days or weeks, but for now, I'm able to start the most important programmes, my mail is running, my browser data (except for the auto-fill in of some passwords, which were not migrated) is all there, and it mostly feels like my old familiar home system again. Whew.

I am dreading, though, the day when I will need to migrate to a newer version of Windows, as support for Win7 is ending this year...

Happy New Year everyone!

I'm only sort of back today - the plan was to fix my computer issues between the years, and that has, unfortunately, not worked very well. In fact, it has worked so much not well that I am still struggling with stuff. You'll get a longer and more elaborate whine about this tomorrow, when I will hopefully be up and running again, able to access all the things I need to access... which, at the moment, is not the case at all, unfortunately.

(All the data is still there. It's just an issue of accessing it. Which is partly not possible due to technical reasons, and partly due to my being over-optimistic on how quickly things would go, therefore deleting some things from the places where they would have been accessible to make space so things would go more quickly and smoothly. Hello irony.)

Somehow, computer maintenance and desk clearing are ginormous time sinks! But at least there is visible progress in the stacks of papers and stacks of files - though I still have some software issues.

There's been some tweaking of things in the shop background, where there have been occasional malfunctions in the past. I hope I have made things better and not worse - if they do turn out to have gotten worse, I might have to do a fresh install and see if I can have everything run smoothly again. Though I very much dread this...

A similar thing is looming over me for my computer as well. For a good while now, the system (Windows, of course, like almost everyone uses) has managed to self-digest some crucial bit deep in its innards, so there's trouble with the updates and there's also trouble with the machine telling me it does not have an authentic copy of Windows. Yeah. Thank you very much, you do. Having had Microsoft Support take a good and proper look at it did, unfortunately, not help at all - the only solution they were able to offer me, in the end, was a custom install, which means I'll have to re-install all my programmes afterwards. Sigh. At some point in the near-ish future, I will probably do this.

And hope that everything will go nice and smooth again afterwards!

Sorry for the blog silence yesterday - I spent most of the day off and on in a chat with Microsoft support, trying to solve a mildly annoying computer problem that I've now had for a while. It's several different smaller things (update is not working, and I get an erroneous "you need to activate your windows" popup thingie, and the troubleshooter cannot start because it feels so troubled). None of them really keep me from working, but taken all together, it just adds together until it did not feel so comfortable anymore.

So I finally called the support hotline, and things happened with the first of the issues which I then thought resolved, but it turns out it isn't - and now, after a good while of trying all kinds of different things, it does seem as if the trouble is somewhere deeper, and as if I'd need to do a more or less clean new install of the system, and that is something that I frankly don't want to bother with right now.

Which means I'll be clicking away popups periodically, and maybe try one or two other things that might or might not help with my update issue. Sigh. First things first, though - there is a stack of stuff that should have been done and dealt with yesterday, among them  some Forum organisation (and I'm getting all excited about that, there will be so many interesting things!), so I'm sitting here, fortified with a cup of coffee, helped by a purring cat curled up between my forearms and the laptop, and ready to go...

Back in 2016, I decided to finally give in and get myself a smartphone. One of the reasons for this decision was that I wanted to offer customers on fairs the possibility to pay via card - and to do this with relatively small financial and logistical overhead, you need a smartphone.

So I did some looking, and some research, and I tried to find a phone with replaceable battery (as this can be one of the first things to give out, and being able to replace the battery means you can use the phone so much longer), relatively small so it would fit well in pockets, with decent battery life and not too highly priced. I finally ended up with a Samsung S5 mini - and I was quite happy with it.

Until... well. Until at some point, it did not get proper reception anymore. Even in places where it should have gotten very good reception - nothing. Some head-scratching and some internet research later, I had found that the phone has two antennae built inside, one for the "slow" stuff and one for the "fast" stuff (3G), and the fast antenna had died a quiet death. This was annoying, but no big deal - I changed the settings to never use the fast connection, and there it was, functioning nicely again. Yes, the internet was slower now - but I never stream things anyways, and all the bits that I needed to download occasionally are quite small. (The Most Patient Husband found me a prepaid phone tariff that was very, very small and thus very, very affordable, and just the right fit for what I would need. It has 150 MB of free data each month, which is plenty for checking mails, writing a few messages, and even sending a few pictures when away from home; for everything larger, I use wifi connections. So I'm very much used to not sending or downloading huge things over mobile data - and whether getting the mail takes 3 or 6 seconds, well, that's no big deal.) It, however, meant more use out of the phone, and not needing a new one. Good for the environment.

My newfound serenity with the slow mobile data did not last very long, though, because apparently something else was giving up, and the phone became unreliable. It would refuse to connect, refuse to get messages or send them, and since that was one of the main uses for the phone when I'm doing stuff such as organising the Forum, I was getting antsy. I had expected the phone to last much longer than just a bit more than two years, which was making me quite unhappy - even though the thing itself still seemed like the perfect fit for my needs. My desire to spend another 180 or so Euros for a new phone of this make, for maybe another 2 years was, however, ... very small. So I got myself a refurbished replacement phone... the same model, used and with slight traces of said use, with a new battery, for about a third of the new price. Also I had hoped to just very easily transfer my old phone's contents to the new one. Same thing, should be easy, right?

The new phone arrived, and I found out that it was a branded one, with T-Mobile special software (sorry, apps...) on it. Well, no big deal. I managed to transfer my stuff (not as easy as I had hoped), and everything worked well for a bit. Then an Android update arrived, and afterwards, the phone would crash, or lag for ages until it reacted. Which is annoying for a phone that you want to use, but really and seriously not good for a phone used for, say, payment by card on a busy fair... One of the worst lags was about 14 minutes until I managed to access the home screen. So I was not happy anymore - but also did not want to buy yet another phone.

I finally decided that I could try to root the phone, in hopes to make things better - and reading the help pages and descriptions in an android forum, I found that there's a way to overwrite the phone OS with a newer or different version (an un-branded one, for instance), which would not lose any data, not change the OS, and not void the warranty (not that I have one, but good to know). It's called "flashing", there's a tool that Samsung offers called Odin (hah!), you download the proper firmware, follow the instructions and hope that it works.

That's what I did... and it looks like that was successful. So in case you have similar troubles because your phone had some hiccup when the last firmware update arrived... you might want to trust in Odin making everything better, too.

 

Here's your gratuitous service announcement, since it is spring - no, really, for no other reason than that I've recently stumbled across these issues again, and found it smart to check - and change - some of my passwords… which, admittedly, I am doing way too rarely.

So… amidst all the spring cleaning, and the gardening, and spending time outside where it's finally nice and sunny again, maybe you can make time for some spring security stuff regarding your computer?

Thing One: Make a backup. I've written about that before, but it never hurts to repeat this from time to time. Hard disk drives are, yes, prone to die at some point, and preferrably at the worst possible point for you. So get yourself an external disk, or - if you are data paranoid - a simple RAID 1, and backup your data. There is plenty of free software around; I use SyncBack (not because it's the best ever, but because I got it at some point, it's all set up, and I have not seen a need to change it yet).
While you're at it, make sure that you will be reminded to actually use your backup software and equipment. Put a reminder into your calendar, set a recurring to-do on your to-do-list, or do whatever else works for you to do periodical backups of your important data.

Thing Two: Make sure your software is up to date. (Most software updates itself readily on its own if you allow it to do so; there's usually a "check for updates" menu item somewhere in the Help or Options menu.) Outdated software can pose a security issue - and sometimes the new version comes with nifty new features that make life a lot easier. (Sometimes they come with annoying new features, admittedly... but well. Life.)

Thing Three: Change some passwords. There is a rather good chance that at some point in time, you too were affected by a data security breach - that is someone stealing personal information from some portal or website that you have an account at. These stolen data then turn up in form of lists somewhere on the Internet, for other shady individuals to use for dark deeds. Such as sending you spam emails, or using your address to send spam from.

Fortunately there are sites that let you check if your email was leaked, and if other personal data got out as well. The Hasso-Plattner-Institute offers a free Identity Leak Checker, where you can check if your personal data was leaked.

A second site worth checking out is "have i been pwned". This not only lets you check for your email address - it also has a search function where you can input a password and see if that has been leaked and is on a list available in the Internet.
If you get hits, you should change the password on the sites that you use that specific email address for. Which is annoying and might be a lot of work, but might save you a good amount of heartache and hassle in the long run. And spam. It might save you from getting as much (or, worse, having it posted from your account).

If you set any new passwords, there's a few good guideline things to remember. Most important of them all: Don't use the same password for several sites, especially not important ones with sensitive data, such as your bank data. Managing that ever-increasing number of passwords is a hassle, which is why password managers such as KeePass are a very good thing - you only need to remember one master password to access the database, where you store all your other passwords. These managers can also remind you to change your passwords regularly, which is a feature that I have now (finally) enabled... because I'm just as lazy, or as prone to forget about the age of a password, as the next person is.

For the master password, or any other important password that you need to type in on your own, you should choose a strong one that you can remember easily. There's a brilliant XKCD comic about strong passwords that fit the bill - which is the type of password I use for the ones that I actually want to remember. For those used only rarely, and only from my home machine, I tend to let the password generator in my manager do the work; it spits out a long random string of numbers and characters which is pretty secure.

So. Ready for some cyber housekeeping?