Hi, and welcome to BMH Online, my little corner on/at/in Neocities [joined 16 June 2020]. I typically list on this page things in my life to share right now. Then each day or so I add something new to the top of the list, and then eventually file the old stuff away. There are also various sections to explore. Here goes...

  • [19 July 2021] Another night in my tent in the garden. The previous night I saw the baby hedgehogs for the first time; I'd come to realise there was a nest of them under the bushes. I saw the pair of them again last night doing their rounds. I left my wildlife camera out but it wasn't quite in the right position so will have to try again.

  • [13 July 2021] I went for a walk in some woods today...

Then once home I had a recent ebay purchase to tinker with...

It's a mini HP Pavilion system with Windows XP MCE on it... (not quite that tidy looking) actually, it was a nice surprise to find it still had its original install and the previous owner hadn't created a set of recovery discs, so I'm presently creating those (after having to remove the admin password). I'm not sure what I want to do with it; it also has Microsoft Office 2007 on it, complete with Publisher and Office Groove...

Maybe a new Project page is in order... the computer needs a clean out as it's pretty dusty inside.

[08 July 2021] Backup... backup... BACKUP!

That's what I tell many of my clients... "If you don't want to lose it, keep a backup." I had maintained a fairly good backup routine, until recently when my monthly backup day came around and I didn't do it, and it came around again and I still didn't do it. I knew I was playing with fire, particularly because there was some work on there that wasn't backed up at all and would take me days to piece back together.

I had a wakeup call this morning when I went to open a shortcut pointing to a file on my storage drive and I was presented with the message "Cannot find file..." I thought it was odd at first, but I had disconnected and reconnected the drive a couple of days ago so perhaps the drive letter had changed or something like that.

I navigated to the drive; it was there and Windows was showing the usual amount of used space... I opened it... and... nothing was there. Blank except for a message saying there were no files to display.


All my files are here!

The short version of the rest of the story is, it turned out the drive has at least one bad sector (I didn't do a full scan), and Chkdsk found an issue with files/the drive and was able to "recover" the lost files (as I guessed from the start, they weren't actually lost... luckily)... I'm now copying everything to another drive.

I had it lucky. There are files I hadn't backed up in so long it would take me a week of work and stress to piece back together, and some that would just be gone.

Backup... backup... BACKUP!

I actually have little sympathy when I'm dealing with clients that have not kept a backup and then lose files. Sometimes I can help them, but if a drive has failed then that's beyond my area of expertise and I just tell them they would need to use a data recovery specialist. I once had a memory stick fail and I lost a week's work; I know that sinking feeling.

[04 July 2021] Firefox annoyed me with their 'latest' update. I'd had updates disabled and it had been pestering me for some weeks. Then my brother said "watch this on Amazon Prime..." and I couldn't because Amazon said my browser was out of date. So I updated/upgraded and the style of the tabs changed... they sort of blended together and lacked the 'audio playing' icon. This was the most annoying part of it because I often have something playing in a tab while I browse another and then I typically scroll back (I hoard tabs) to the audio/video which is easy to find because of that icon... I looked for a hack to return the tabs to the 'old style' and while the fix was kind of supposed to do that, it didn't, but it did enough to get the audio icon back. Yay.

[01 July 2021] Happy July everyone! I wasn't sure if June was 30 days or 31 and I still had a day left. I had a night in the tent last night as the night before was too warm inside and I didn't like being in. Here is me reading:

I've just started a book about Egregore[s] [I think the plural should be Egregore, like sheep and sheep, but the author calls them Egregores. It's topic I came across some months back and this book has been on my digital reading pile for as long.

As well as the grass in my garden needing a cut I have a number of things I want to do/keep/get on top of this month... computers to assemble, a walk, running, yoga, organise my house/tidy... and add stuff to this website... I saw yesterday that I have now been on Neocities for over a year... did everyone have a party without me?!

  • [22 June 2021] I've still been buying computer stuff off ebay to tinker with. I bought a pair of AMD Radeon HDs off someone for a reasonable price, complete with Crossfire bridge.

At the time I had no use for them as a pair and intended to use them individually, but then a motherboard cropped up that caught my eye... it had water-coolable RAM. I had no use for such RAM but considered I could sell that.

It turned out the motherboard was "Crossfire-ready", so I've been considering having a play with some games that might take advantage of Crossfire. I know Crossfire is old-hat and was always hit-and-miss with games, and I'm not really into gaming, but I'm intrigued. I've found a list of games and their Crossfire-compatibleness, and I've also been looking at cheap games to try, even if they aren't really going to benefit from Crossfire... old games are a minefield once you get into the era of DRM and online activation. Some still work, others wont if they have previously been activated and linked to an account (yet people still list such games for sale), and some have patches available to bypass activation, but that's a gamble too. I even found GTA IV that was downloadable, but the servers were slow (it claimed it was going to take 48 hours to download and I didn't know if it would actually work in the end, so I avoided that).

Very few genres of games interest me at all; I've tried racing games and old ones have such poor graphics that I'm not inspired. Maybe a simulation game like Sim City 3000 would be fun for a while, or I could spend a day being a trucker, or a train driver!? Maybe Tron 2.0?

  • [01 June 2021] Happy June everyone! I realise I've not been making many updates to my website here of late. I've found that I've been trying to keep myself busy with various projects but more for the sake of their own enjoyment, rather than for sharing, if that makes sense. I kind of want to change that for this month (my daily journaling has also take an backseat), but at the same time I'm reluctant to compromise my time away with whatever else I'm doing.

  • I'm still enjoying camping outside most nights since the weather feels too warm to be in my bed.

  • I go out on my bike most days, although I've started to notice my hayfever doing its annual thing.

  • I read for an hour most days and have just finished a book on the history of quantum mechanics.

  • I've been buying a bunch of things off ebay to tinker with and build, including tablets and PCs.

- BMH Online -