So, Sunday, I get everything ready for work, change a laptop over, so I am using my Dell Latitude 7300 (which is identical to my work laptop – they are both the same, just one is upgraded and one is untouched), I also have my Toughbook on me.
Next morning, make my lunch, stuff my bag (I need a bigger one), drive to Havant (haven’t a clue why), got onto the station, got my morning tea as I’m feeling tea’ed off, talk to someone I travel up with on a daily basis (nearly) then rummage through my bag
Spot the missing cable and power supply!
I only forgot the Toughbook charger and the cloverleaf power cable. It wasn’t a complete fail though as I have the Dell power supply. Oh and I didn’t charge the computers the day before. 61% and draining fast!
So, how do I survive? Easy! Use power saving mode, knock off Bluetooth and 4G, knock down the brightness until you can just about see without overdoing it. Extreme measures would be to go to Control Panel > Power Options > Change plan Settings > Change Advanced Plan Settings > Change Settings that are currently unavailable > Processor Power Management … On Battery Then set it to something like 50%. The computer may well be slow at this point, but it will clock down the CPU to give you some precious minutes back.
From here, you can go a step further. Either A) A) download your file you want to work on and disconnect from the Wifii/Netowrk or B) if you have a computer that is set up as a remote desktop and has remote access setup, you could do what I did, although using the on train wifi is super slow! I’ve unloaded all processing tasks from the laptop and then use the remote desktop instead.
EDIT: Managed to charge the Dell! A USB-C to USB-A with the computer off did actually charged it, plus a colleague needed the same cable and asked for a USB-C to USB-C cable in exchange. It worked.
Apart from the introductions, I thought I’ll open this blog with something a little more interesting, I tend to mess with old computers and this is one of them. Its quite wordy and long, however, you might want to have a laugh at my expense. I also have no photos of said machine yet (I didn’t think about that bit), but I’ll put one up later.
I’m a big user of Facebook, I have to confess and I tend to look at Facebook a bit too much for my liking (note to self, find a different hobby) – but unexpected things do come up from time to time, especially freebies. Well, actually, this wasn’t free to me, the “seller” offered it out for free, I gave them some money for it because I am nice like that. I thought “some money would do” and miscounted.
Anyway, it came up in a local group, saw it, asked my dad if I should get it, he was like “why not?”, contacted a seller within one minute of it going up, arranged a time to pick it up when the rain eased off as it was chucking it down and I only had to walk 300 yards and collect the machine, box and all.
For a freebie, it was complete, everything to get you started with a Mac, said the inevitable thank you’s and told them “the first thing I’m going to do is hack the (removed) out of it!”, I sort of have and use it as my main PC. I got loads of dust issues which is why and I’m trying to avoid using anything with a fan or anything that overheats too much with a fan. It also went a little like this:
It spent the first week in my bedroom rather than office, so I plugged it in, switched it on (yay, boots!) and proceeded to try and wipe the hard drive..
… someone got there before me (good!). But this was the start of my fun! “Oh well, get an ethernet cable, plug it in and see if it will download an operating system”.
NOPE! 403 Forbidden!
Ok, ok, maybe we try something else, the WIFI?
NOPE! 403 Forbidden!
What about my phone?
NOPE! 403 Forbidden!
Ok, what about the GL iNET modem?
NOPE! 403 Forbidden!
Ok, ok, got to think here, the problem is either my credentials are wrong as Apple want me to sign in with my username and password to my Apple account or the modem is blocking traffic, which I am getting with my windows PCs, as I cant set them up.
So, a few terminal commands to find out what CPU it is, ok, it’s a Core2Duo E8315 (OLD – 2008) which means last supported is OSX 10.10 Yosemite which came out around 2014 or was it 2016?
So downloaded a disk image from a third party site as I couldn’t find a first party site (Apple) that had the image available.
Now it won’t boot from that drive. Dragged out an old mac (I have several!) and didn’t want to boot from that either.
Right, trawl the internet for a DMG file, that was VERY difficult to do, found a site that would do it, can download it on one device but not the other – great.
Lets bring out the MacBook Pro 15” 2013 – oh the USB ports stopped working now. Lets do a PRAM reset then an EMC reset, right they are working… oh they stopped again.
Time to find the MBP 2013 13”..
Success we got somewhere, lets plug the mac in, right we have 10.10 installing from the USB drive at last.
Here it is in its new place!
By this time, it took about a week on and off between work and a lot of head scratching!
Installed OSX 10.10 and got some programs on it, went and searched for “opencore” and RDP… wait, half the keyboard is dead. Ok, right its only in Microsoft RDP, oh we only have 2GB ram so the machine was SUPER SLOW, with web browsers, get some more ram, can only address 6GB so got 4GB DDR2.
Got opencore to install macOS 11 which went smoothly if slow, by now I am in week 2. Ram arrived in week 3 “You can upgrade to Sommia”, great, I’ll take that, left it overnight and it cooked itself the next day. Opencore to the rescue again and now working ok, if very slow, next fun part is to put my mac programs on – that will be fun and oh, I need Virtualbox as well.
Next step? Find a small(ish) SATA SSD and use that as the boot drive. Oh and the keyboard has gone completely dead on one side. I’ve got some Mac specific keyboards I can use, including a not-so-magic mouse, which I can use to replace the oh-not-so-mighty mouse.
Edit much later:
God, its soo slow! And the USB keyboard is well and truly knackered. ZXCV keys don’t work at all, I pulled out 3 keyboards from the “awaiting use pile” and all 3 ended up on the “dead keyboard pile”`, it also crashes a lot. So, cheap SSD and a good clean is required. I dread to think how much “dust and goch balls” are in that thing. I suppose I should give it to “the greatest technician that ever lived” to fix, but he is the other side of a big pond and its no fun for me.
The purpose of this blog is to be really simple, I.e. the site uses one method to display content (using NetObject Fusion – there is a custom template I plan to impliment at https://www.wessexelectricnut.co.uk/test/test.html to see what you think) and have it as an iframe on that part of the site as a different heading.
Or maybe this will give you an idea?
Small problem, I had to deal with the default profile for some time, as it has a lot of default stuff added to it (twenty-twenty four, I was not happy!). Trying to convert over to other profiles – i.e. simplistic ones to give a more consistent feel became a bit difficult as my site needed yet another update. Oh well, I’ve done it now, only took 2 weeks! Depends how busy I get.
You might see some more entries soon, I wanted to talk about my experiences of “Blackpool, UK”, listed as one of the most deprived areas of the UK and how I would fix it – its bad. #not_recommended (unless you like trams.) and projects I’m working on, several I have started or restarted and most were missing one model to make them look the part. Plus the site may change IDC with the template I designed.
Welcome to my blog, its a new blog and it started from one problem with my life.
I’m on the ASD (autistic spectrum disorder) and more recently, I have had a lot of issues with my personal life (thankfully, not my work life). I won’t go into the past but I have produced blogs before on this site and on previous sites (pre 2008 can be found here: (link to find – from Live Journal), most of this is between my teens and early 20s when I wanted to show the world the work I produced and back then, the frustrations I have with society as a whole and the unique way I see the world. I also wanted to talk about my frustrations about finding jobs which I eventually solved but that wasn’t the end of the story. (I gained my first job in 2010, started working in my dream industry in 2013 which is the UK railways, progressed and as I write this, I have progressed in the same company, now planning trains.)
My mum suggested more recently as my mental health keeps collapsing, that should write about it and my trigger points, I also want to show the world what I have been working on despite being quiet on a community I contribute to – Trainz – these days. There is a reason, time management or lack thereof.
I appreciate feedback, I may discuss topics like as I write this (21st July 2024) how the industry is changing as a result of politics pressure, within reasons as I have to adhere to my workplace’s social media policy. Some entries, I already have a draft and they are pretty heavy reading.
IF you like it, please say and drop me a message, if you don’t, please do the same. I’m planning to allow my intermediate family (sisters, parents, I don’t have anyone else) to also add to the blog when required.
And it was for an old laptop! In fact, it is for an old Panasonic Laptop, more specifically, a Panasonic Toughbook CF-18 (I love Toughbooks! But their optional extras can be a pain!). Mine is fitted with an additional item called a GPRS modem, or General Packet Radio Service or 2G (Or EDGE which is 2.5G if you like, but my Toughbook called it 2.75G!) I have 2 newer toughbooks and 2 newer laptops (a HP Elitebook 2730P and an Elitebook 2760P which is a US import) which have 3G modems installed in them (which is faster than EDGE and GPRS – you may of heard 4G and even 5G, these are just faster data standards). GPRS for my use as long as its not Youtube I found to be quite quick, if I could get it to work to begin with. Now these laptops have a Siemens MC75 USB modem in them, the drivers of which are dead easy to find.
The software not so, for a start, you have 3 options:
Create whats called a Dial-Up Networking profile (DUN) which is hard as I found out with Vodafone as the customer service agent couldn’t work out what I was trying to achieve, well the laptop is 12 years old at the time of writing.
Find the BVRP software, hard to find, trust me, the original software I used was Norwegian of which I know someone who would understand and know it, but they’ve decided to ditch me (in 2006) for better things which is the story of my life – I’ve changed since then a lot. I eventually found the software on this site: http://www.helpjet.net/Fs-75078872-19927365-95508474-extract.html
A couple of observations, it works VERY well. But, it can be temperamental, for a start, you have to use the driver that came with the program or it won’t work, secondly, you may need to (as I use it in Windows 7 for which it was not designed for!) run it as an Administrator on Windows Vista or Windows 7. Other than that, it works. Just make sure your phone operator supports it, I know I had trouble with Three or otherwise known as H3G.
Interesting scenario to think about, you are station staff in a mess room near the end of your shift. You hear shouting from one platform so you investigate. You see that all your colleagues are already talking to the person, but at the same time, a passenger distracts you telling you that there is a knife on another platform under a bench which you categorise as a sharp object, but you remember how you are trained in dealing with sharp objects (not to touch it with anything other than litter pickers) and the law. You had 2 options:
Option 1:
Investigate the sharp, take the equipment over (litter picker and sharp box) and another member of staff in case it gets ugly, make an assessment on the sharp and decide because its under 3in and nothing is suspicious about it, no one talks to you about it on the platform, so you put it in the box (which it fits in) and think no more.
Option 2:
Don’t take the equipment, borrows someone else’s radio (which is probably clogged with radio traffic because of another incident and you are told off too many times for ‘overusing the radio’), call for the supervisor to meet you on the platform its on while using 2 members of staff to some how seal off this area and await for them to arrive and make an assessment.
Option 3:
It ain’t your problem, so direct the customer complaint to the member of staff that has a radio and a way of communicating.
I ask this, because its happened to me recently. Now what is interesting is that option 1 is what 2 people I specifically asked would of done, but I got told off because I didn’t do option 2, this is where I am ultimately confused. You got 2 emergency incidents at the same time, with 2 different outcomes (option 2 has a greater risk of being stabbed in my humble opinion, depending how long it takes for staff to deal with the other incident.), so 6 of one, half a dozen of the other? On the other hand, I’m thinking in future, option 3 because quite simply, what else would they want you to do? You got told off for it, you can use that as your defence and if anything goes wrong and there is an investigation, you can say “This is my report from the previous incident, I got told off for it and it upset me quite a bit, so I felt that taking my own initiative to deal with an item like this wasn’t required so I gave it to someone else to deal with for that reason and more importantly, to protect myself from these sorts of backlashes.” By that time, the supervisors are always moaning they got too much work to do anyway.
Its that time of year again, where one of my cars goes for the dreaded MOT. Naturally, it fails (well bound to), but I’ve checked the status online and this is a very interesting thing about the car. For the record, its a Renault Espace MK3, at last look, around one of 374 left on the road.. well, the variant I have anyway (Renault Espace Mk3 Privilege 2.2 DCi – and yes its a diesel.), I have another which is different (Renault Espace Mk3 Privilege V6 Auto – Petrol) but this blog post talks about some of the oddities which isn’t down to the garage, MOT or manufacturer, but how complex cars in general are getting.
In November, the V6 Espace went for its MOT, I think it failed on a few items, but they were fixed. One it should of failed on, but didn’t is the SRS light. Now this IS why I wrote the blog post. These Espaces have early electronic dashboards and very interesting ones especially for its age. It sits in the centre of the car so your kids (if I had any) and your wife (if I had even a girlfriend, its just me) can see what the car is doing or when I had a girlfriend, fiddle with the radio and she loved hogging the radio while they can see that you are taking the speed limit with a pinch of salt. 70mph? Plus the new VAT rate! Thats beside the point. I do as much as possible try to keep to the limits mainly because I don’t want to loose my licence of have a smack, I’m trying to look after my old girls.
The DCi Espace funny enough, passed as well on that part, but going through the history, I noticed this: “Supplementary Restraint System warning lamp does not illuminate”
Now, to remember all car warning lamp combos is a bit hard, especially on the fly when you test hundreds of cars every week. The correct operation is:
If the lamp illuminates followed by the word “Service”, fail.
If the lamp isn’t lit and the dashboard then shows “OK” after the glow plug light, pass.
But, the MOT manual throws a good one:
From this link: http://www.ukmot.com/manual/5.4/Supplementary-Restraint-Systems-(SRS)
“Method of inspection:
….
2. Turn on the ignition and check the presence and operation of any Supplementary Restraint System SRS malfunction indictor lamps MIL.”
So, work that one out. The MIL works and it also doesn’t. I know one garage who is familiar with these vehicles and follows the rule correctly (it doesn’t help that the guy is an ex Renault Master Technician.) and it proves you can have a car nearly unique but doesn’t follow the rules. In that case, you are in the position I mentioned, “Do I pass or fail it? The manual says this, but it does that.” The problem is that cars are now really complex and that means so does testing them.
TECHIE WARNING: This article uses a lot of jargon, so if you aren’t sure, ask questions or if you aren’t interested, read on.
And it comes with a little pitfall if you don’t know computers that well. Mine was a slight issue which the operating system I was using, which is called Ubuntu Mate. I went from an AMD computer to a Raspberry Pi as I thought my AMD system which is by the way, an AMD A4-5000 based system, with 2 2.5″ hard drives, an ATI Radeon 240 graphics card and 16GB of ram, shoved in a case that hooks on to the back of a monitor.
I changed because I didn’t want the distractions when having important stuff to do, like using eBay to sell stuff or my applications I’m suppose to be doing. The Raspberry Pi, or more correctly, Raspberry Pi 2 as a fully fledged desktop computer made sense. Add a Sony monitor, DVI to HDMI cable, USB keyboard and mouse, USB wifi device and a 16GB Transflash card with Ubuntu Mate and you have a perfectly working computer that actually isn’t half bad. Except one problem, too many programs slow the computer down. It took me a while to find out and the problem is actually a simple fix. Now, I strongly recommend if you are going to use the Pi as a general purpose computer, follow this. For me, I went to Applications > System Tools > MATE System Monitor then watched the RAM usage. The Pi has 16x less RAM than my AMD system. (32x than another system I own). So, its a little wonder when I used my Pi for a few tasks, it ran out of RAM. Its a surprisingly simple fix – create a swap partition.
A Swap what?
Whats swap? Simple, its like RAM or memory. I assume you know the difference between Memory (Temporary) and storage (permanent). Memory isn’t where your files live. Thats a hard drives job. The Hard drive, in the case of my Pi, lives on a small Transflash card which when I remove any power to it, my files stay there no matter what happens.
Memory or RAM is different, its temporary use, this blog was made in RAM which if I was to unplug my Pi, everything will be lost and I have to start again which is very annoying. But RAM is very fast temporary access, which is often very limited because it is expensive. Storage is much slower but you can buy more of it. So what do you do when you run out of RAM? The computer just simply stops without a swap partition. Lets say you have 512mb of RAM (temporary space). Your operating system will probably take around 100mb of that and an email client about 60mb, web browsing will consume 250mb and add a game which takes up another 130mb and then the computer goes “well, what do I do with the rest of the 28mb I need? I have no space!” and then crawls or locks up completely.
A swap file or partition more like in this case, the Operating System goes “Oh, I got some space to use. Its slow, so I’ll put the oldest/least used files in there”. And then the computer doesn’t crash. The computer basically thinks it has more RAM than it actually does. It sounds great but there are at least 2 problems:
For flash based drives, you’ll eventually wear out the drive far quicker with a swap file than normal read and writes. Its not a problem as it used to be as the drives themselves are often rated at 1m write cycles and unlimited read cycles. Besides at £10 per 16GB transflash drive, why worry?
Its slower to access despite my Pi has a Class 10 card.
But we still need it more. Or don’t use the humble £35 Pi as a desktop. (Which by the way, is a silent desktop!)
To do this, open your favorite terminal, on Ubuntu Mate, it can be found under
Applications > System Tools > MATE Terminal.
You’ll see a text screen, get your password ready for this and you won’t see what you typed, you will need it. Type first “Sudo apt-get update”. Once that finishes, type “Sudo apt-get install gparted”. You are installing a partition editor, what does it do? Allocates disk space across a disk for different uses.
Then type “Sudo gparted”, you should see a partition editor. You should see a button saying “New”, click this, then under the partition type which is probably “ext4” by default, select “swap”. Set the size to either 1024 or 2048 (up to you), create it, then right click on the new swap partition as its called (the red outlined bit) and select “swapon”. Close, restart and it should be fixed. You can also resize your existing stuff to take up a bit more space if your drive is rather large.
Now check with the “System Monitor” to see if it gives you the size of the swap partition and notice a huge improvement in speed.
That should be all you need. No I don’t have any screenshots sadly. 🙁
One of my facebook buddies posted his typical Southern commute which is pretty much like mine. First your train gets delayed for no reason, then cancelled, then the next service does a platform dance, so you don’t know where its going with the Customer Information System (known as DARWIN for some reason). One really interesting one that might interest anyone is when I was at Guildford on the 9th June 2016, heavy rain and thunderstorms were forecast and while going through one train, I heard this:
“We are sorry to announce that the 18:13 Southern service from London Victoria has been delayed due to the condition of the platform surface. We are very sorry for the delay to your journey.”
And the return working was:
“We are sorry to announce that the 18:22 Southern service to London Victoria has been delayed due to flooding. We are very sorry for the delay to your journey.”
Its that time of year and now I’m upgrading my phone (again) to a newer model which makes me wonder what can I do with it? The purpose of this blog is to think of the unusual and more obvious ways to dispose of your old phone. iPhones are slightly different due to their limitations, but no doubt you might find this blog useful. I use Android phones so lets look at them.
The obvious!
Flog it! – So you got your shiny new phone for way over the odds you should of paid for it, your old one is quivering and upset. So you decide now is the time to part company. Besides, that eBay buyer may pay over the odds for it or may decided to offer a cut price. Ether way, you are looking at recouperating your costs. A big tip, do your research first on your make and model of phone as putting in a random price may mean you will be stick with it for a while.
Keeping it as a spare – It sits in a drawer gathering dust for a few years and brought out when you need it, its great when that brand new LG G5 you had (like I have now) gets nicked on the railway station when you aren’t looking.
Give it away – Someone is going to like it one way or another, perhaps a friend or a relative, but maybe they have phones and don’t like it either.
Recycle it – the screens cracked, its been dropped 14 million times (because you didn’t think about putting it in a case – let alone a drop proof one.) and you listed it, no one wants it, but Mazuma (other recycling sites are available!) offered a decent price, so your phone is better off as scrap due to its value, end of the matter.
But, did you know that an iPhone or even android phone can have a lot of uses? What about other projects? You’d be surprised about their power. With a bit of software tweaking, phones can do a lot more than you think. Better still, you don’t need a sim card to operate a phone, most of which you can do already but with the addition of having a phone with a spare battery, you won’t have to worry about running out of battery power.
GPS companion – Your new phone you prefer to keep its battery fresh as you don’t have a charger yet, not an issue, your old phone makes a great GPS device and with software updates, you can use it to navigate everywhere, plus your new phone doesn’t drain its battery as quickly. It’s particularly problematic when you have a newer phone with a USB type C connector. Free maps are available if you didn’t know already and can help you go everywhere.
Remote Desktop Client – On some phones, you can buy a USB keyboard for the job and this turns it into a rather good Remote Desktop Connection client which means you can use the phone to connect to a computer somewhere else, you will need to do a few tweaks however to get it to work, but the joys are endless and certaintly allows you to leave the laptop at home. I did this with an old HTC touch Diamond pro 2.
FTP Server – So you have a lot of files and you want a device that you can store your data on and not have to worry about it. Phones are good at this because they have a battery, so when the power goes out, the downtime is minimised. Soon as the power is restored, you should have your FTP server on in minutes.
Web server – see above but someone once did this on a Compaq iPAQ and the results were interesting, but again, always on and back up UPS.
DVR camera or any sort of camera – Most android phones have cameras, so why not use it as a way of recording evidence in a court of law? You’ve had a smash, you have a DVR camera in your car to tell you who the culprits were. Most also have 2 cameras which also does both front and back which should help the courts and insurance companies give a bigger picture of the accident.
Fully fledged desktop computer – Again, the phones have the capability and with the right sim card, you can even use it as a networked computer to browse the internet if you haven’t got one already. A few cables (MHL cable for example), the right monitor (with HDMI ports) and a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, you actually have a fully fledged desktop. When Superbook comes out, which is a laptop shell for a phone (others are available), you even can use the same old phone as a permanent laptop.
Music player – One I never thought of, but its possible to use a phone as an iPod like device and one person I met did indeed use her old phone as a music player, the battery life should be pretty good because you won’t have a sim or wifi to worry about.
MID or Mobile Internet Device – Great for walking around surfing the web on wifi if you are very cautious about not wanting to use your data, you won’t need much as the software is already on the phone.
Spare parts – Very useful if you have a job lot of phones with different faults, if you know how to take a phone apart and put it back together, you can use your old phone to put together several new ones.
So, upgrading your phone? Here is 9 unusual ways to use a phone for a different purpose. Notice that I’ve not put tutorials in, because tutorials A) would take a lot of time and B) would take up a lot of space. The idea is to give you an idea of flexibility. There are many more ways you can use a phone and a lot I’ve mentioned you can already do on your own phone with or without a sim card, but the idea is to use the old phone instead of the new phone. There are many many more ways as well, like a dedicated 3G modem for your laptop, a phone for dodgy people, etc. If you think out the box, you can think of different ideas.
