Category Archives: computers

hacked!

13 Wednesday Mar 2019

Posted by in computers

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What a day! Woke up to discover that ALL my websites had been blocked by my server HostGator – I was told they had been using too much CPU over an extended period of time. Say what?? I’d been having some problems with one site, which was linking to a page in Japanese when some people tried to access it, but I thought that had been sorted out.

Anyhow, with the help of my friend David, we worked out that the sites had been hacked, and David was able to get into the CPanel and remove the unwanted files, re-verified all my sites with Google (the hackers had changed the ownership to THEM!) and changed the passwords. I would have been totally lost without him. Phew! So now I have to get the site brought up to date in terms of plug-ins and php, then look at getting additional security –  wish me luck!

facetime eavesdropping bug

29 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by in computers, devices, iphone

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Well, this is alarming. You have probably already heard about this, but in case you haven’t… TURN OFF FACETIME ON ALL YOUR DEVICES NOW.

It turns out that anyone can call you on your iPhone and, before you answer, simply swipe up from the bottom of the screen and add your number to a Facetime group. From then on, your iPhone will start transmitting audio to this person, even if you didn’t answer the call. And even worse! If you press the power button on your iPhone you will start transmitting video as well.

I have now disabled Facetime, which I never use anyhow, on my iPhone and iPad. This also affects Mac computers.

adiós sterling, sayonara loki!

01 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by in casa azahar, cats, computers, friends

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Ever since I upgraded to the Boquerón I have been planning on wiping the drive on Sterling so that my friend Tomoko could buy it. To be honest, I kept putting it off because I’d never done this before and it seemed more than somewhat daunting. But when Tomoko said she would be in Sevilla for a couple of days and wanted to take Sterling home I was forced into action. And well, it wasn’t that bad after all, but it did take a very long time (approx 10 hours). The first attempt failed after a couple of hours and I had to start over again. But second time lucky and when I got back from my tour in the evening there was a squeaky clean laptop ready for its new home.

So Tomoko came over yesterday and we set up the newly-named Loki to make sure everything was working okay. After that we went shopping for a case and then Loki the Laptop was gone. Though of course Tomoko didn’t leave without giving Loki the Cat a thorough belly rub.

If anyone is interested, these were the instructions I followed…
How To Reset Your Windows 10 PC

ssd & hdd

21 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by in casa azahar, computers, gadgets, home

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So after my accidental upgrade a couple of weeks ago, after Sterling had been acting up and I bought El Boquerón on sale as “insurance” (but then ended up keeping him), I was feeling quite chuffed. Because I had been assured that with Boquerón (aka HP ENVY-17-bw0001ns) I was getting the “latest generation” jazz, including not only 1 Tetra of HD memory, but also 128 GB of SSD memory, GUARANTEED to make my system run faster. So like wow, okay, sign me up (even though I had only a small idea of what SSD was).

And when I first got Boquerón up and running, this proved to be the case. Everything was zippity-do-dahing along like crazy, which was great. Though it was a bit faffy setting up and uploading my gazillion photos to the D-drive (HDD) to keep the C-drive (SSD) unencumbered. And I thought I had been doing things right… until I was told yesterday that my SSD had next to no space left and I had to do SOMETHING about it.

And I have tried. But it would help if I knew what I was supposed to be doing. I have all my downloaded programmes and (of course) my gazillion photos stored on the HDD. And even after eliminating superfluous files and programmes from my C-drive, I still only have about 5 GB of free space on my SSD. WTF? HELP?

anchoa revived!

10 Monday Sep 2018

Posted by in computers, work

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In other home computer news… about two years after buying La Anchoa as a travel notebook option back in 2014 (instead of lugging my big 17″ guy around on trips) I began having problems with her screen. It starting flickering on one trip to Málaga, and in the end it got so bad I had to give up and just use my iphone. Then one day it went flickery-flickery-flickery and totally died. Damn. At the time I thought that it probably wouldn’t be worth taking her in to be fixed, but I also didn’t want to fork out for another small travel option. So oh well. It was adiós Anchoa and back to either taking massive laptop with me or working from the iPhone (NOT ideal) on trips.

Then the other day, while reading the specs on El Boquerón (shit, I’ve already named him!) I noticed that he has a touch screen, something I hadn’t noticed at the store. And then I thought… hey, Anchoa has a touch screen too. Hmmm, I wonder…

So after not having used her since 2016 I took my little Anchoa out of hibernation, revved her up, saw the old flickery-flickery thing start up… and then I TOUCHED THE SCREEN. And hey – problem solved! I mean, fucking DUH or what? Why hadn’t I thought of that before??

And the best thing? Picasa works just fine on her! I can upload my photos and they all show up, ready to be edited and sorted. Yay! There was a tense moment when suddenly Windows starting doing updates (well, it had been two years…) and I thought I might lose Picasa like I did on Sterling. But so far so good! Of course, editing photos is primarily why I want to have a nice big 17.3″ screen at home, so now having to do it on a tiny 11.6″ screen kind of defeats that purpose. But at least I can do it. So for now my little Anchoa is set up next to my desk, propped up on a stack of books, acting as my photo editing assistant.

Now I just have to decide if I’m keeping El Boquerón…