The name Johann Hari rings some sort of bell, and it has a certain crack of doom in it?
Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen.
You, dr rdrz, know me by now, and that I am a hedjog who looks askance at a lovely rosy vision of the somehow unified consciousness of the past (was that TS Eliot?), that Past when Things Were Better and we lived ( Read more... )

Yesterday Firefox decided to do that thing where it crashed and lost all my tabs. And they did not appear in History, no I don't know what was going on there.
So I have managed to reconstruct my usual regularly visited tabs, most of them, I think, but there were Not A Few things that I was saving up for future reference, posts, etc, all gone, alas ( Read more... )

Never mentioned, in my agitato post on Monday, that the day had begun with turning on my phone to discover a text telling me I had a voicemail as of first thing from my sister -
- this in fact turned out to be a blip by her phone and there was no family crisis.
Phew.
***
The solution I thought I had attained to logging in to old workplace email ( Read more... )

Annoyingly, it doesn't seem to be online, but the other side of this, was the Boomers asking the Zoomers question, in the course of which, one naive young thing declared that they were 'The first internet generation', they having been born in 2000, and what even were people doing in 1998?
What I was doing in 1998, having already been online via ( Read more... )

This morning I was having what I thought was connectivity problems with my desktop.
And eventually I thought, as my phone and tablet did not seem to be having problems, maybe if I turned off and turned on again?
And when it restarted it was 'unable to load User profile'.
After a few go rounds with this, it started configuring Windows.
And now I ( Read more... )

Have been wrestling with various tech issues which seem to me to have (by and large) been introducing entirely unnecessary levels of complication into their processes.
We have two Nest smoke/CO alarms, which are supposed to operate in sequence, i.e. if the downstairs one goes off, the upstairs one will be alerted, and vikyverky, but this is ( Read more... )

Re the password shenanigans, it turned out that if you reset your password, the system will not let you change it - even if it suddenly decides it doesn't like your shiny new password - for five days. At no point in the attempt to change the password does it say, come back in 5 days time. However, after toing and froing and actually speaking on the ( Read more... )

Yesterday I was supposed to be having an - already deferred once due to connection issues - video chat with a friend/colleague on academic matters (not entirely my preferred method of interaction), and I got this all set up, and was ready and waiting, and they never turned up. It transpired that they had been having a crisis due to their current ( Read more... )

A couple of weeks or so ago I had a reprise of that thing that happened last July with Malwarebytes that instead of scanning it was stuck in endless updating and could not be cancelled or paused. And I don't think it was the case last time, that it caused just about everything to run incredibly sloooooowly, which was really annoying and ( Read more... )

Yet another of those weird book lists compiled upon principles that are impossible to decode - including mostly fiction, a few instances of fairly popular non-fictional writing, a proportion of classics, a certain amount of what I think of as 'book club faves', relatively recent bestsellers, popular YA works, and a sprinkling of genre classics ( ( Read more... )