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Hosted by Dave Morriss on 2018-07-16 is flagged as Explicit and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
Tags: grammar,spelling,punctuation,word misuse,English,apostrophe.
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'then' and 'than'In the last episode I mentioned the confusion between then and than. I referred to the etymology of the two words, but I didn't go into detail.
Reading the Online Etymology Dictionary, one interesting point in the page about than is that it was:
Developed from the adverb then, and not distinguished from it by spelling until c. 1700.
So, it would seem that the two words are related and historically were the same! However, I'd guess that it is unlikely that people using them interchangeably now are making reference to usage in the 1700's.
Let us now examine the apostrophe, which is a punctuation mark. It is used for:
Indicating that letters have been omitted, such as in a contracted form of words. For example when the phrase they are is contracted to they're.
Turning a word into a possessive form such as in the cat's paw
When the plural of a single letter (or digit) is required such as in dot your i's and cross your t's.
There are other uses but you can look at the Wikipedia article for them if you want to dig deeper. I may well revisit this topic in a later show in this series.
I have provided detailed notes as usual, and these can be viewed here.
Greetings HPR listeners this is Tony Hughes again coming from Blackpool in the UK. Well, as you heard on my last episode I recently visited the computer auction I frequent here in the UK. If you want to drool over the catalogue at any time their website is here:
So at the sale in June they had some really good 3-4 year old laptops for sale so I decided to take a trip and see if I could liberate a few bargains, and one of the items I came away with was 3 Toshiba Z30a Ultra Books of the i5 4th generation. The basic specs are:
There will be a link in the show notes to the full specifications
http://www.toshiba.co.uk/discontinued-products/portege-z30-a-1fd/
I had also picked up some 240Gig SSD's and had planned to upgrade the storage but this is not possible with a 2.5 inch drive as it doesn't have a bay for this format. However it does support up to 128Gig High capacity SD cards so this could be an option if you don't want to go to the expense of upgrading the mSATA drive, however as luck would have it one of my other purchases had a 256Gig mSATA drive in a 2.5 inch caddy so that was quickly swapped out and both laptops got an upgrade. More of that in another show.
So after doing the hardware upgrade I proceeded to install Ubuntu 18.04 MATE onto the PC. The install worked flawlessly and after completion and configuring the machine to my liking everything seems to be working just fine. The battery condition for a 4 year old laptop is excellent at over 90%, however a replacement can be had on Ebay for around £30 if needed and I always factor this into any second hand laptops I buy.
Since I got it running I've installed Windows 7 in a Virtual Machine, in this case Virtual Box as I have a preconfigured Virtual Box HDD image that makes it less of a hassle to install as I don’t have to spend days waiting for all the updates to come through. When this is running in the background it doesn't over tax the host machine, and for Linux users it does mean you have access to that occasional bit of light weight MS software that you may need without the need to lug around 2 PC's.
So did I bag a bargain, well 4 years ago on release these laptops went for £1100+ in the UK and even today they fetch £160 in good order on the likes of Ebay for a model with the specification as I originally purchased it. I would never have been in the market to spend £1000+ on a laptop now or then so the only way I can enjoy these types of machines is after they have been pre loved by someone else. Lets just say £160 is quite a bit more than I paid but with the upgrade to 256Gig mSATA drive I have a better machine for a little less than that, I personally think I bagged a bargain which will do me good service in the coming months/years.
This is my first show and I am happy to be here!
nmtui's documentation can be found here.
You can reach me on the freenode irc network at blu3r4d0n.
In this episode tuturto paints rambles about De Bellis Antiquitatis while painting more toy soldiers, so expect long pauses and missing thoughts as he tries to do two things at the same time.
De Bellis Antiquitatis (or DBA for short): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bellis_Antiquitatis
While the original site seems to be gone, WADBAG unofficial guide to DBA can be found at: http://www.wargames-romania.ro/wordpress/wargames/de-bellis-antiquitatis-dba/the-unofficial-guide-to-dba/
Hosted by sigflup on 2018-07-10 is flagged as Clean and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
Tags: os, ruby, webdev.
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Come join us and listen to Allison talk about her tech!!! This talk includes subjects like websites, ruby, os design and other such things.
Allison's email address: allison@isams.net
Hosted by NYbill on 2018-07-09 is flagged as Clean and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
Tags: DIY, Kit, Electronics, Troubleshooting.
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Series: Hobby Electronics | Comments (0)
NYbill troubleshoots a DIY kit of Ken Fallon's.
The new toy:
AmScope SE400-Z
(The microscope has a nice working height underneath it so you can get your hands and tools in there.)
The offending chip:
http://www.mccsemi.com/up_pdf/SRV05-4L(SOT23-6L).pdf
Pics for the episode:
http://media.gunmonkeynet.net/u/nybill/collection/international-troubleshooting/
Greetings Hacker Public Radio listeners, Tony Hughes again coming all the way from Blackpool in the North West of the UK. Originally this show was going to be about some new kit that I have recently bought at my favourite computer auction. However as luck or actually bad luck should have it I fried the power supply on my Desktop machine yesterday as I was setting it up again after moving back to my office.
The PC is a HP Compaq Elite 8300 micro Desk top tower with a i7 3rd generation 3770 3.4Ghz CPU and since upgrades now has 16Gig Ram and a Primary 256Gig SSD. This is my daily driver and I've been running it for a couple of years since I bought it at the said auction. It is the best PC I've ever owned; the full specifications are here:
As I said I was re setting up my full rig after moving it back to the office upstairs after a temporary move while we had a house guest. As I was plugging in the power cable there was a flash and crack, and a few expletives were uttered, sure enough when I switched of the power at the plug and reconnected the power cable and then tried to power on the PC, it was dead. I was hoping that it was the power supply that had blown and as I had a spare I was not too concerned. However on investigation HP have done the dirty with the design of the motherboard and power supply and neither are standard ATX configuration, yes propriety hardware for this baby.
I was lucky as a few months ago I had picked up a i3 HP using the same case, so I pulled out the power supply from this and fitted it into the i7 PC and luckily that did turn out to be the issue, and the PC sprang into life when I hit the power button. I’m now left with a PC that works, but another one that unless I can find a power supply to match is next to useless except for spares.
Lessons learned, never connect the power cable when the socket is live, if your plug socket doesn't have a switch connect the kettle end to the PC first to reduce the risk of a short like mine. Also never assume that 2nd hand PC’s are standard case/motherboard format as you may have a problem sourcing spares if anything goes wrong as in my case. It’s not the first PC disaster I've had over the years and I can as in this case usually get round them, although not when I bricked the BIOS on a Lenovo x200 one time trying to clear a BIOS password, again I was left with a box of spares which actually came in very handy.
Well that's the end of my tale of woe. I’ll do another episode on the recent trip to the auction and my new laptops shortly. This is Tony Hughes for Hacker Public Radio signing off for now.
Hosted by Jon Kulp on 2018-07-05 is flagged as Clean and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
Tags: personal finance, money, saving, retirement.
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tuturto rambles about miniature painting while painting some ancient British units (horses for chariots to be specific) for De Bellis Antiquitatis.
De Bellis Antiquitatis is a quick to learn, quick to play war game for ancient period (and a bit more) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bellis_Antiquitatis
Army Painter is paint, brush and basing manufacturer - https://www.thearmypainter.com/
Osprey Publishing specializes in publishing books on modeling and history - https://ospreypublishing.com/
While cleaning out the gutters, Knightwise talks about cleaning out the digital gutters of his information consumption and looking for geeky ways to get his information fix.
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