RIP PCW

It's sad about Michael Jackson. It's sad about Farrah Fawcet. It's also very sad about Personal Computer World.

Anyone outside of the UK may not realise what news this is.

PCW was the computer mag in the UK, and for decades. It began back in 1978. I have the most recent issue, which I bought only a week ago. In the back it confidently advertises the content of the next issue - an issue that will never see the light of day. The plug was pulled that suddenly.

It was a mag that combined articles that any computer user could understand (comparing printers, for example) and much more esoteric stuff about how to fix arcane problems in databases. At lot of it I couldn't understand, but I still enjoyed buying it and reading at least the easy bits. It was also very well written by people like Guy Kewney and Gordon Laing. (Micromart eat your heart out).

I had noticed that it had been on a diet since the nineties. In those days it was so thick and heavy that you needed a shopping trolley to get it home from the newsagents. So, I suppose, just as video killed the radio star, it was the internet wot did it.

Computer Shopper, PC Pro and PC Advisor watch out! I'll keep on buying you.

I hope it helps.

Drop Dropbox

Since my last post, I have heard more from Dropbox. They say they only root around in the titles of your files, not the contents. Hm. Even the titles might include sensitive material. And if they can see the titles, who knows for sure they don't go further?

The Dropbox helper this time gave me some detailed (and fiddly) instructions for fixing the fact that I can't actually get or view updated files in my Dropbox on my home computer (this one). I tried to follow the instructions. I really did. But they didn't work.

Once it gets down to having to type complex gobbledygook into a command line, I'm off.

Come back USB stick. Come back Gmail.

Goodbye Dropbox.

Dropbox: it gets worse

In my last post I mentioned various less-than-ideal features of Dropbox.

Well, they did respond to a gripe I wrote in a comments box on their site. I did not leave a name or email address. I wasn't actually looking for a reply.

However, I soon got one. How did they know who I was?

What's more, the reply showed that the helper person at Dropbox had rooted through the files in my dropbox.

Hello? They are meant to be secret, secure and sealed!

Not from Dropbox employees, it seems.

Churning hard disk, glacial startup

This was the problem: the computer took ages to start, the hard disk churned endlessly and everything slowed to a snail's pace. Seems to have been caused largely by Dropbox. Such a great idea: a virtual folder in the 'cloud' into which you can drop files and access them anywhere.

That's the theory. Only it takes over.

If it finds it can't update itself for some obscure reason, it too just churns on and on forever. It doesn't even give up and tell you it's failed.

And it doesn't quite behave like it should. Despite the name, you can't just drop files onto its icon. You have to open its window first. And unlike other disks and 'volumes', it doesn't create a copy of the files you drag into it, it moves them, so that they are no longer present at their original location.

These are bad features.

Maybe the great idea is not so great after all.

Ubuntu-UK rules OK

Ubuntu-UK rocks. I take back everything I said about the Ubuntu community not helping. These people do!

I've been having trouble with an endlessly churning hard disk, plus very slow start up times. They are really on the job.

More on the actual problems next time.

Adobe Air - the killer app

Adobe Air nearly did for my computer. DON'T TOUCH IT. I installed it because I wanted to use Twhirl (a Twitter client). First it slowed the machine down, so that Textmaker suddenly took ages to launch (instead of about 3 seconds normally), the hard disk churned endlessly and Add/remove now claimed that there were no programs on my computer.

A kind person on Ubuntu-UK, Matthew Daubney, provided this:

sudo apt-get --reinstall install gnome-app-install

It worked. Whew!

Twits and Faces

I feel like some kind of dinosaur, because it's taken me till now to try to get to grips with Facebook and Twitter. I went for the double whammy and grappled with them both at once. I think I'm vaguely starting to realise what they're good for. But I also have a dim feeling that they are a decadent and self-indulgent waste of time. It's all about me, me, me (and a bit of you, so that you can get more about me, me, me), isn't it?

I heard on the Gadget Inspectors (see the telegraphonline website) that Twhirl is a good Twitter client. This got me a bit bogged down in installing Adobe Air (a fiddle-faddle involving the dreaded Terminal. I so wish that didn't keep rearing its ugly head. And why does copy and paste not just work with Ctrl C and Ctrl V as it does in every other program on the planet?)

Otherwise Adobe Air takes you back to the Wonderful World of Windows because its installation goes through the typical Windows-like stages. And no sooner had I installed it than it popped up asking to be updated!

Then to the Twhirl website, which proudly states it is for Windows and Mac. Luckily there is an Adobe Air logo. Sure enough, this makes it Ubuntu-friendly. Well, not exactly, because it seems to tell you that it is going to insist on installing Adobe Air (again!) before installing Twhirl. Are you still with me? It's wearisome, I know. However, you can choose Manual Install and you are at last in business.

After all that, Twhirl takes ages to start - the only program on my Ubuntu system that does that.

Textmaker: the nightmare continues

Whew! I have finally got a working Textmaker (and chums) on my system. It took a bit of doing. See earlier posts for my first frustrations. This week Softmaker finally sent me the licence number I needed and links to click for a new download. So I downloaded. That was the only easy part.

Does Textmaker work on the 'unlock code' principle? No, that would be too simple.
Does Textmaker work on the 'overwrite and amend' principle? Nope. That might be user-friendly.

Textmaker expects you first to have uninstalled the trial version that you had. BUT IT DOES NOT TELL YOU THIS.

That's where my woes began. All I ever got was the trial version, continually counting down the time until it ran out and inviting me to acquire the full version. Huh!

The one good thing about Textmaker is that they are quite quick at answering emails. They tried to help. They don't rush to apologise, however, and can slightly give the feeling that you are being dense by not understanding some of the usual Linux command line goobledygook that they throw at you.

They sent me a command to put in Terminal to uninstall the trial version. Hurray. It worked. I was then able to install the new version.

This was sort of OK except that Textmaker and its two chum programs failed to put themselves into the Applications menu and so were difficult to start. (I didn't know about Alt-F2 as a way to start programs at that point.) Textmaker's help failed at this point, and I had to search around in Google and Ubuntu forums until, somehow, I solved the problem myself. I don't know quite how I did it and I'm not sure I could do it again.

Anyway, it all works now.