Cookies!

One Egg
Half a cup of Nutella
Five tablespoons of flour.

Mix well
Distribute around a pan of twelve mini-muffins

Bake at 350F for 10 minutes.


Take out and they look like this





They taste seriously good - like muffins made from very very good brownie-mix. Not heavy like brownies, though.

TTFN

Maryland Sheep and Wool 2012

And welcome to the fair!

For the very fourth time - and it's Cinco de Mayo today ..... and a super-full moon. There'll be crazyness tonight - that's for sure!

The first thing seen in through the gate today was a yarn- bombed sign - it says "Sock Yarn for Sock Lovers"!

Anyhow, I'm posting just some pictures here. I'll probably not send them all up to PhotoBucket like the last few years 'cos I'm using a new (=better) camera now, and I don't think they'd appreciate a gigabytes-worth of space grabbed all-at-once! 



These two (left and below) are of the booth from the Tsock Tsarina.

 If you've never seen her extras on socks, you need to! I saw some leaves on a sock and, for a moment at a distance, thought them real!

 We kept wandering around the area uphill from the entrance for a while, looking in where people were just finishing setup.

 Below you see the shop from a guy where we bought new chopsticks.

 Next, of course, was my personal favourite - Tess !  I just love the colours and the way they drift into one another.

 

 

Courtesy of the young lady below - and her scissors - I'll be getting some brick-red socks in a few months (assuming I keep on the right side of the AG!)

 

So, that's all the pictures for this post. More next time.

TTFN

I Won Again !!

Two years ago I joined a kind of a book club, called 101 Free Tech Books.

About eighteen months ago I won a book on being a SQL Server DBA from 101 Free Tech Books.

Well, guess what? It happened again! This time I chose a Powershell book, 'cos I'm starting to need that more and more.

WIN FREE Tech Books! Why pay for Tech Books when you can get them for FREE! 101FTB.com raffles 101 Tech Books each month. Join Now http://101ftb.com/K90W40T770

Yes - it's an advert. It's the advert for 101 Free Tech Books. Click on it and go and join! It's free, and you get books! What's more, it's totally free!!!

 One last note for this post:

We're in MD for the MD Sheep & Wool again, 

so stand by for more photos on Photobucket tomorrow!

so photos will get reduced in size and put up here - 

I went over a gig of images in 2 hours !!

TTFN

A New Addition!

 A few weeks ago the AG went out to feed the local squirrel-neighbours, and heard a stream of plaintive meows. Going to investigate, she found a tabby-and-white cat lurking loudly in the undergrowth.

Being a total softie, she picked her up and brought her in.

Later on, as I leave from work, I get a call ...

 ... to buy cat-food on the way home!

(say what??? - we don't have a cat! 

Do we?)

Well, suddenly we do. So we get to have new friends - the vets and staff at the Banfield surgery in Cherry Hill, all the staff at Country Kennel in Lindenwold, the people at PetSmart, and, of course, the development office, where we pay extra rent for her!

When we got her she weighed about four pounds and could fairly be called a Flat Cat, she was so thin. We're doing our best to "feed the 'ell out of her", so she ends up being a Fat Cat instead!

As you can see, she's tall and long - three feet long including tail!

She's also a very well-behaved cat, about a year old, and knows all about using a litter tray and a scratching post.

There'll be more pictures of her over the coming posts

TTFN

And Lightning Doesn't Strike Twice?

So you believed the tale that lightning never strikes twice? You never thought that maybe - just maybe - nobody ever reported a second strike 'cos they were already dead from the first one?

No more than four days after the last tale of Windows woe I get called by the dad of one of my son's friends. "My son's computer died" he said, "Do you think you could look at it?". I suppose a certain amount of desperation was creeping into his tone of voice (small hints like the "How much do you charge?" phrase), so I went over that night to see. The problem was that his netbook would not boot properly into Windows, giving this message:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt
"WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/CONFIG/SYSTEM". 

 This is not a happy message to see. The files in the config directory are your registry, so this means that the system hive (part) of your registry - probably the most important part - is gone. Without it Windows has no idea what parts of Windows are where, so nothing starts!

There are programs that claim to help you to recover from this problem, but not only did I not have them but I was also constrained by time. So we got his external USB Optical drive, connected it, put in a Linux live image DVD, and tried to boot. Same message!

Drat!! F2 to get to the BIOS and change the boot device sequence (it was an Acer One, so under "Boot" in the BIOS menus). Try again. Same message. Huh??? Check the BIOS - should start from hard drive last, so why isn't it? Turn machine totally off, disconnect optical drive (that uses one USB socket) and try another (that uses a double-headed cable).

Success!! Select PartedMagic. Look at the hard drive ... there are two? Oh! 155 GB and 5 GB means that there's a normal one and a recovery one. Excellent!!

Spent the next hour taking all the irreplaceable personal files off the hard drive and onto a USB drive. Once that's done we used the disk checker in PartedMagic to review the SMART data from the hard drive. It all looked good, so replacement was ok to do.

Reboot yet again - without the optical drive - and hit F6. This got us the menu for replacing the content of the hard drive from the recovery partition. 30 minutes later we had a "brand new" PC!!

Yes, we could have done the system recovery without Linux, but not without losing all the data from the machine. Oh, and no, I didn't charge!

 TTFN

What Do You Do When Windows Doesn't ......?

You don't really think much about it when your laptop dies because of a low battery. You just put it away and plug it in to feed when you get to an outlet. Once attached to the electrical umbilical you just restart it and continue with your work, games, chatting, or whatever.

So this friend of mine - a student, as it happens - rings up a few days ago at about 5 pm to say that the above was just exactly what had happened ... up until it was time for Windows to re-launch. The all she was getting was a prompt to reboot again.

Well, it could have been a root-kit virus, or an OS failure, or a hard drive failure - from 500 miles away I couldn't tell, but what we did know was that she needed to get her data off the hard drive and also to get a system up so she could finish a paper.

Enter the "Live Distro"!!  You'll have seen magazines on sale with CDs packaged in them. There are at least four (Linux Format, Linux Pro Magazine, Ubuntu User, and Linux User and Developer) that normally carry a CD or DVD in their packaging containing a bootable version of the operating system. The idea is to let people try out the system to see if they like it without installing a whole new OS just to find they hate it!

However, because pretty much all Linux versions now have drivers to read Microsoft's NTFS file system, they make excellent rescue systems!

So she went and got a magazine, opened the case and popped the DVD in to the drive in her laptop and rebooted the machine. When it started it asked her if she wanted to boot from removable disc, and she said Yes. Three or four simple questions (keyboard, time, date, timezone, etc). After that she was in to a functioning modern operating system.

After getting all valuable information off, she found that Libre Office let her open her Windows 2010 Word and PowerPoint documents and finish everything up. Her VB.Net coursework is (luckily) complete, otherwise it would have been an install of Mono and Eclipse!

And Windows? Dell are sending her a recovery disk set and, if that doesn't work, it'll be returned for hardware recovery. Of course, there's always the alternative of popping in a new hard drive and running Linux natively, with maybe a VM with Windows ....

So, to all those of you who panic when Windows fails: help is at hand - just as far away as your nearest Barnes & Noble store! The magazines (they're all British, by the way) cost about $16, so as a way of getting at your data despite a death of Windows it is probably the cheapest method going!

TTFN

Even Apple isn't Perfect

Nobody's perfect - not even Apple. Although it tries very hard, I'll admit, and is incredibly successful about it. Right now Apple is worth more than the combined GDP of the economies of Greece, Italy, and Spain! On the downside, it took them three months to publicly realise and try to fix a loophole in the security of their OS (through the Java JVM software, supplied by Oracle) that Oracle fixed for windows 3 months ago. Oracle can't fix it for Mac machines because Apple won't let them!

Anyhow, here's a case of imperfection you may find curious.

We all use USB connections of one sort or another for our computers and our phones. We're all familiar with the standard USB "A" connector - the steel rectangle part-filled with a block of plastic to make sure it goes in the right way around.

I recently bought an Apply wired keyboard. I don't possess an Apple machine, but do like their keyboards, and, as they work fine with Linux (and Windows) systems, I invested in a couple. Each keyboard comes with a USB cable for attaching to the computer and, thanks to Apple's fore-sightedness, an extension cable.

Now look at these photos.

 On the left is a picture of the socket on the end of the extension cable. Look closely, and notice the little "v" on the inside of the metal casing, opposite the plastic block insert.

 Now look here at the USB plug on the end of the USB cable attached to the keyboard. Notice the little trough between the two plastic lugs holding the plastic insert block in place? It perfectly matches the "v" on the socket of the extension cable.

 

At the other end of the extension cable the USB plug is a perfectly normal one!







This means that the keyboard and extension cable are keyed: you can only plug a keyboard into that extension cable - nothing else.

Well, actually, you can, but you need a pair of small pliers to get them apart again!!  Be warned !

TTFN

Update !

Apple has released a tool to remove the FlashBack virus.

If you think you might have this infection on your PC,

or want to make sure you don't,

please look here.