daveydave

Ok, so this is planned to be the first in a (probably short) series of posts covering why my fancy laptop is now running Linux. To give you a bit of background, I currently have 2 computers in current use at home: a 10 year old Dell that, with a few choice hardware upgrades over the years, is still going strong. This is running Windows 10 1903 and is currently suggesting I update to 1909. I am hesitant to do this because... My other PC is a fairly fancy, super-slim Acer laptop that I bought about 5 years ago. This had Windows 8 point something installed on arrival, but thankfully the free Windows 10 upgrade arrived soon after the laptop did. All was well. Until May last year when Windows 10 1903 dropped, promptly disabled the audio and broke Windows Update. Having a but of a tech background, I managed to get the audio up and running again, but Update was bust, so no security updates, etc. Far from ideal. When the 1909 update arrived in November I went through the whole manual upd

Ok, so here are some thoughts on the Michel Thomas method of language learning after a month following the German course. I have to say I do like the method. One of the areas of language learning I always find challenging is making sentences from scratch. Not so much the words, but the order because of course German sentence structure is different to English. In other courses that I've tried, you get some example sentences and usually some grammar rules for the construction of those sentences, but it isn't natural and it doesn't sit well in my head. Michel Thomas does a great job of breaking sentences down and reconstructing them in the target language - in this case German - so that the word order starts to feel natural. I really like this aspect of the course. One thing you don't learn a lot of (so far anyway - I am only a couple of CDs into the Total German course) are nouns. The sentences you build make major use of "it". This obviously avoids learning

Snappy title, eh? I have one of these snazzy bits of kit plugged in to my PC for recording stuff in Presonus Studio One. It started to misbehave when I upgraded to Windows 10. There seems to be quite a few people around having some issues with the FireWire cards or the Saffire Mix Control software so when my setup started to act up, I hit the forums. The issue I was seeing was that Saffire Mix Control wouldn't open. The first thing I did was replace my FireWire card for one with a Texas Instruments chipset (TI TSB43AB22A) which seemed to fix things initially. But didn't. So it is possible that the original FireWire card (with VIA Fire VT6315 chipset) would be fine. I just can't be bothered to swap it back into the computer. The solution for me was to get Saffire Mix Control running in compatibility mode. I used the compatibility troubleshooter and the Windows 7 setting seems to work fine, Another issue that has shown itself is that I stopped getting sound out of the

In a brief follow-up to an earlier post ( Time to replace the mobile ), I though it may be useful to outline how I use my mobile phone. Everyone uses their mobile differently because modern smartphones can do so many different things, so what I need from my mobile is likely to be different to what you need. This is how mine gets used: I drive to and from work, so that is around an hour of screen on/GPS time per day while I run Waze . Sadly, my current phone just will not charge when plugged into a 12v car charger, and I've tried a few. It is about 20 to 30 minutes walk from the car to the office, depending on the route, during which I am tracking progress using Endomondo and listening to music over Bluetooth. So that is another 40 to 60 minutes of GPS a day as well as sending music to my Bluetooth headset. During the day I may have a phone call or two, but that's not too common. Yes, using the phone as a phone is nowhere near the top of the usage list. Other than that

Ok, some time ago I mentioned that I was absolutely going to learn German. I mentioned how past language learning efforts had failed and how I proposed to succeed this time around. So how am I doing? Well, the title of this post probably gives you a rough idea. I'm at the very annoyed with myself  stage and have come to the conclusion that I can either get on with it, or stop pretending. I'm going former. One of the main problems I'm having is setting aside time. Solution: the car journey to work gives me at least 45 minutes a day to work with. But: some language courses aren't ideal for use in this situation because you really need to refer to the book. And so I introduce Michel Thomas. I say introduce, his courses have been around for decades but I've never used them before because they are 100% audio and I always want to be able to read a write too. However, they are 100% audio, so they should suit car-based study. I bought the Start German taster to try ou

I use my mobile phone a lot and, even though I don't look at it quite so often now that I have a smartwatch, it still gets hammered every single day. For almost 3 years now, my digital companion has been an HTC One M8. A very able beast she is too, so much so that I felt no need to spend an extra £12 a month to upgrade to the HTC 10 last year. HTC. Ah yes, I have used many of your phones over the past few years. Between work and personal mobiles I have had the Hero, Desire, Desire S, One X and One M8. Great phones all. I like HTC; I like HTC Sense. Or at least I did. A system update a while back introduced more crapware that I didn't want and couldn't uninstall. Things that I had to go and disable because they wouldn't stop firing unwanted notifications at me: News Republic, Peel Remote, take a bow. However, once disabled, things got more or less back to normal. Apart from the odd time when she doesn't charge up overnight. And the increasing number of occasions wh