Posts on Home-based Topics

Over the last week I’ve been looking at a lot of paper, statements for accounts etc and found it really difficult to manage with a laptop, so I’ve ended up being forced to use my desktop. So I’m now use to having dual screens and lots of things open at once, again.

Which normally I’d only be doing for an hour or so in the morning, which wasn’t so bad.

Anyways, this morning I’ve been doing some client work and found the amount of stuff I can fit on the screen of a 14″ screen laptop unbarable. So I thought I’d have a go at making things smaller to see if I could improve my situation.

I’ve turned my DPI down to 84% and found a default zoom level add-on for firefox, which has allowed me to set all pages to 80% zoom.

Also, I use a add-on which splits pages, so I could loads of pages on the screen.

This all seems to be working quite well, this is until I get eye strain later in the day.

Hopefully these measures and increased productivity will lead to the cash to buy a bigger screen laptop

cobalt09 Home Business

I’ve been to my mothers today with our son, my plan like the previous two occasions to do some work on my laptop while having my mam look after my son.

The first time I tried, I brought a usb wifi dongle and a wap. I got the wap and my laptop setup fine. The put the dongle in my mams machine, however it didn’t work with windows 98. I didn’t have any other kit with me so I was stuck that day and got nothing done. Just to explain my mam and my son like to look at train pictures on google images, which keeps them both quiet and out of my hair

My next attempt I brought my wap and had planned to bring an CAT5 / RJ45 network splitter cable, which I bought online and seemed like a great idea. However I forgot it and again had no more tech with me.

Today, I tried to plan for all eventuallities. I brought the splitter cable and an old hub. However, the splitter didn’t work as I’d hoped. I had 2 and they both did the same thing, I must have mis-understood when i bought them, one machine would work fine but not the other.

So I thought, I’ll just use the hub. However, I was short one network cable. Which by chance I was able to borrow from my mams next door neighbour. Great I thought. However, when I got all setup the hub only seemed to have one port which worked.

So again unlucky. I almost think that I’m not meant to do any work at my mams.

Not sure what I’ll try next time, I’ve got an adsl 4 port router I think I might try.

Its just getting silly though

cobalt09 Home Projects

This is probably an obvious one, but I only just realised how powerful this was they other day.

We often find ourselves in a mess and a lot of the time it comes down the fact that we don’t have space to put things. So we tidy things and put them away, but we never have room to put more things. So what do you do. The most obvious answer is to get more storage or find more space.

Right?

No!

We’ve been doing this for sometime, we even boarded out the rest of our loft and got a bigger hatch and proper ladders. We got a shed the other year too. All of which are quite full.

The answer is to change your life style, don’t hoard stuff.

Last weekend I was going through my shelves shreadding and putting paper in our recyle bin, it took me hours and I have nothing to show for it, I’ve got lots of piles of scrap paper though.

However, it was a start and I now feel a bit better that I did it. I feel now that I need to think carefully about anything I keep.

How useful will that be to me in the future, probably not at all!

cobalt09 Life Skills

We seem to have managed most things with our sons development so far, I think.

On weekdays we make use of a nightlight / clock, which lights up at 6:30am, which means he can come into our room.

However on weekends, he still comes through at 6:30, I guess we could change his clock, but we always forget.

How did you guys solve this problem?

cobalt09 Parenting

Great, thought i’d log in to that other blog today on my new mobile and do my first post with it.

But it looks like theres some sort of feature / bug, in the earlier version of wordpress. So i’m going to have to upgrade it.

Anyways this is my first mobile post

EDIT:Got this far and it didn’t submit

cobalt09 Audio / Video / Gaming

I just want to recommend a program to you guys.

Final Burner Free version, I’ve just spent 20 minutes trying to re-find it. I installed it a few months ago, then wnet back to a disk image and lost it.

Its a great program for burning video to dvd discs.

by JM

cobalt09 Audio / Video / Gaming

I spend a lot of time in a room where there are two tvs going and my son noisely playing with his toys. Normally I wouldn’t be too bothered. However, recently I’ve been getting a lot of headaches, which are commonly at the same time of the day.

I also spend a lot of time with my laptop, not being able to get much done and getting really frustrated.

I don’t seem to be able to work at my desktop pc at all these days again, due to noise and not being able to concentrate.

Its kind of a vicious circle, get less done, get frustrated and then get a headache.

I tried using some normal headphones, but this didn’t drown out the noise.

So I discovered you could get noise cancelling headphones, mine have a battery in them and an on/off switch. It causes a hissing sound. Apparently there supposed to be a microphone near the ear which interacts and produces the hissing noise.

When I’m listening to music, it just seems louder, but the hiss, seems to block out some background noise. Not all noise, so I can hear if my son trips over or something, but enough to allow me to concentrate.

Over the weekend, I was sat doing some coding, in a couple of short sessions, where normally I’d have to spend ages trying to concentrate then struggle to do a few lines of code.

Anyways, my life has been transformed

cobalt09 Audio / Video / Gaming

During the recent financial turmoil the numbers being thrown around by the UK and US governments are making large numbers seem like pocket money. Every week it seems like some bank or insurance company is being bailed out to the tune of a few billion pounds or dollars. The thing is, I’m slightly confused about how big a billion really is. My confusion is that historically I think the US and UK definition of a billion were different:

US Billion = 1,000,000,000, i.e. one thousand million

UK Billion = 1,000,000,000,000, i.e. one million, million

I’ve been assuming that when some UK bank get 30 billion pounds, they’re getting 30 thousand million pounds but lately BBC News have started showing actual figures in their headlines and occasionally I see figures like:

£1,200,000,000,000

Surely this can’t be the money given to a bank? It’s more than the UK GDP isn’t it?

With all these large numbers, it’s hard to put into context how much money is actually involved. Another recent trend I’ve noticed on news programs is to show two stories back to back with the first involving a credit crunch fantasy bailout figure and the second a real world financial figure. For example, yesterday there was a story about Quantitiave Easing (a technical term much more aptly described on Question Time by Shirley Williams as Financial Laxative) involving a figure of £150 billion. The next story told how £140,000 had been allocated to fix potholes in all the roads in the county of Shropshire. To contrast these figures:

£150 billion = enough to fix all the potholes in Shropshire for the next 1,000,000 years

or

£150 billion = enough to fix all the potholes in the UK for over 10,000 years

Where is all this money is coming from? And who does it get paid back to?

admin Credit Crunch

Since I last spoke to you I was considering buying an expensive used WaveBird wireless controller for my wii and I was about to borrow a wired controller.

I tried the wired controller and found the cable very short. I discovered that I could use a couple of extension cables, which would give me the length I required. However, I was worried about pulling my wii off my shelf.

So I bought a wavebird. Which was much better, but very expensive.

I then discovered that mine didn’t vibrate, which wasn’t a fault. The reason it wasn’t designed to vibrate, was due to power it zapped from batteries. Which I found both odd, as the third party one did and frustrating. It just wasn’t the same.

I then had a bit more of a go of the wired controller I had borrowed and decided that I’d sell my wavebird and with the money, buy 2 wired controllers and 4 extensions, 2 each.

My wavebird is on ebay and my new kit has arrived today.

Going to give them a try tonight

by JM

cobalt09 Audio / Video / Gaming

Our son isn’t sleeping through the night at the moment. Probably hasn’t for a couple of weeks, I loose track.

So I’ve been really tired during the day.

I don’t drink ANY coffe as a rule, haven’t done since I was a teenager. However I felt so tired that I needed something to wake me up. My wife drinks coffee so I help myself to a spoon full of instant, think it worked.

Later on our son began to become a bit of a handful and was obviously tired. But I began feeling really stressed / edgy, I guess anxious. And I couldn’t figure out why. I put it down to lack of sleep and him being stressful.

I mentioned to my wife about the cup of coffe I had, she said it was quite strong coffee and I was probably suffering from the affects of caffeine.

Just thought this was interesting.

by JM

cobalt09 Health