Jules Jones's Blog, page 27
August 18, 2014
down and safe
Back from Worldcom, had a great time with several thousand of my closest friends. Woth any luck will; even write something about it while I can still remember.
Not going to forget meeting Brian Aldiss, though. :-)
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Not going to forget meeting Brian Aldiss, though. :-)
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August 15, 2014
worldcon Friday movements
I see to have volunteered for the access desk - ground floor near registration, and will probably be there much of the morning. Other than that, no definite plans but some panels I was interested in. Checking gmail and twitter every so often, which will pick up LJ/DW comments as well.
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August 13, 2014
worldcon
Arrive around lunch today, leave late afternoon on Monday. No panels. Mobile number unchanged. Twitter is bookfetishist. Currently panicking about what have I forgotten to pack.
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August 6, 2014
Discworld con
Not packing for Discworld, because it's a short bus ride from home and therefore I will be sleeping in my own bed this weekend. :-)
Not on any panels and no particular plans, other than show up after work tomorrow night, and on Saturday and Sunday some time after breakfast. Monday I'll be back at work, although I might drop in to the Dead Dog party. Let me know if you want me to bring anything along.
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Not on any panels and no particular plans, other than show up after work tomorrow night, and on Saturday and Sunday some time after breakfast. Monday I'll be back at work, although I might drop in to the Dead Dog party. Let me know if you want me to bring anything along.
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August 2, 2014
Windows 8.1, part 9 - Dragon Naturally Speaking, and Skype
I'd originally intended to install Dragon 10 and wait for one of the frequent cheap upgrade offers for registered customers. I'd never upgraded because the XP box could barely cope with 10, and besides, we're still on 10 at work, but I was quite willing to pay to upgrade to 12 once I had kit that could run it.
Gues what dropped into my inbox two days after I bought the shiny? The pre-release announcement and early bird offer for Dragon 13. :-) I dithered for a few days, because initially it was only the upgrade from an existing 11 or higher, but then found a link to the full version at the offer price. £80 probably sounds extravagent if you don't need it, but for me, it's worth paying to get a current version. That got installed last night. Late last night, so I haven't done anything but run through the basic demo yet. $FANNISH_COLLEAGUE (who is also in "install all the shinies!" mood) has been somewhat cynical about release day bugs and intends to wait before buying hers, but I have a legal copy of 10 to fall back to if necessary.
I've just installed Skype, but I've also set it up with a brand new account rather than desperately try to remember the login details for the old one.
I had to reboot at some point last night, and was provided with evidence that the SmartSuite install had worked, in the form of the SmartCentre toolbar popping up. It has been told to go away again, as there isn't the screen estate on the laptop's own screen.
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Gues what dropped into my inbox two days after I bought the shiny? The pre-release announcement and early bird offer for Dragon 13. :-) I dithered for a few days, because initially it was only the upgrade from an existing 11 or higher, but then found a link to the full version at the offer price. £80 probably sounds extravagent if you don't need it, but for me, it's worth paying to get a current version. That got installed last night. Late last night, so I haven't done anything but run through the basic demo yet. $FANNISH_COLLEAGUE (who is also in "install all the shinies!" mood) has been somewhat cynical about release day bugs and intends to wait before buying hers, but I have a legal copy of 10 to fall back to if necessary.
I've just installed Skype, but I've also set it up with a brand new account rather than desperately try to remember the login details for the old one.
I had to reboot at some point last night, and was provided with evidence that the SmartSuite install had worked, in the form of the SmartCentre toolbar popping up. It has been told to go away again, as there isn't the screen estate on the laptop's own screen.
Mirror of http://julesjones.dreamwidth.org/278037.html, where it has received
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August 1, 2014
Windows 8.1, part 8 - Lotus SmartSuite
I've been using Lotus Smartsuite since version 3.1. I recognise that sooner or later I will have to abandon it, but I want access to it for a while in case there are any files I've forgotten to convert to rtf etc. A quick Google found the following thread:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-performance/windows-8-load-lotus-smartsuite-981/9d658644-6708-4217-a300-a7100372fd96?auth=1
I stuck the CD in the drive, and after a bit of faffing about found that while trying to run the msi file didn't get anywhere, right click on "setup.exe" and "run as administrator", with a side-order of "troubleshoot incompatibility", did the trick. Haven't actually tried doing anything other than opening Word Pro to check that it would indeed open, but I appear to have access to the software on the Win8.1 box.
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http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-performance/windows-8-load-lotus-smartsuite-981/9d658644-6708-4217-a300-a7100372fd96?auth=1
I stuck the CD in the drive, and after a bit of faffing about found that while trying to run the msi file didn't get anywhere, right click on "setup.exe" and "run as administrator", with a side-order of "troubleshoot incompatibility", did the trick. Haven't actually tried doing anything other than opening Word Pro to check that it would indeed open, but I appear to have access to the software on the Win8.1 box.
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July 29, 2014
Windows 8.1, part 7 - more Turnpike
I finished up Sunday evening by using Wm's instructions on folders in Thunderbird, i.e.
which resulted in a view of Turnpike's folders within Thunderbird. Telling TB to go fetch via imap resulted in activity. Lots of activity. I left it going overnight, and on Monday morning checked the Turnpike log to find that imap activity finally finished at about 3 in the morning. I came home last night with a migraine, so nothing has happened since then, not even checking to see if the emails are really in Thunderbird.
Next job re the email will be to port the TB mailspool on the XP box over to the TB running on the Win8 box, but that can wait until I have an attention span longer than the average goldfish's.
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By default TB will only look at TP's Inbox, it is actually expecting a
folder with that specific name. You need to specifically subscribe to
other folders. Here my TB has an account "Wm@localhost" that talks to
TP, if I click on that account (in TB) I can click on "Manage folder
subscriptions" and gain access to any of my TP folders.
which resulted in a view of Turnpike's folders within Thunderbird. Telling TB to go fetch via imap resulted in activity. Lots of activity. I left it going overnight, and on Monday morning checked the Turnpike log to find that imap activity finally finished at about 3 in the morning. I came home last night with a migraine, so nothing has happened since then, not even checking to see if the emails are really in Thunderbird.
Next job re the email will be to port the TB mailspool on the XP box over to the TB running on the Win8 box, but that can wait until I have an attention span longer than the average goldfish's.
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July 27, 2014
Two from the BVC summer sale - Northern Lights duology
If you like dark urban fantasy, buy this pair of books from the Book View Cafe sale -- Dead of Light, and its sequel Light Errant, by Chaz Brenchley. 50% coupon applied automatically at the checkout until the end of today. My reviews from LibraryThing:
Dead of Light
Benedict Macallan doesn't share his family's talent -- nor their taste for power and violence. He turned his back on them; walked out of the family, if not out of the town that they control. But when a cousin is murdered in a manner that promises danger to the whole family, he's pulled back in against his will. Only for the funeral, only for long enough to say goodbye to a cousin he loved in spite of everything -- but then the body count starts to mount, and whatever Ben may feel about his family, they're his *family*.
The publisher calls it a horror novel, but it's more of a story about a Mafia-like family, seen through the eyes of a dropout member who understands how they look from both the inside and the outside. The horror element comes in the weapon used by the family to maintain control of their territory, one that's only hinted at initially, and gradually revealed during the first half of the book. Power corrupts, and the Macallan clan has held power for a very long time. Now someone is reflecting that power and threat back at them, killing Macallans as casually as they've killed others. Ben's left trying to protect a family he despises and that mostly despises him; and the outside friends who are afraid of him now they've been reminded exactly who he is; and himself. But Ben has no power of his own...
Brenchley deftly interweaves a coming of age story with a murder mystery, gradually building a picture of a strange but only too human family, and Ben's love-hate relationship with them. There's some fine world-building and character development to back up the rising tension as Ben tries to solve the lethal riddle. And the use of language is superb, making the book a joy to read for the pure pleasure of the prose. It's not exactly your traditional whodunnit, but the magic elements are never used to cheat the reader, and the clues are there for those who want to play the game. Dead of Light is both lyrical and a gripping, fast-paced read.
http://bookviewcafe.com/bookstore/book/dead-of-light/
Light Errant
Ben Macallan fled abroad at the end of the first book, away from his gangster family and away from any temptation to use his supernatural abilities. But even so he finds himself in a situation where he has to intervene or watch a friend suffer. His promise to himself broken, he gets on his motorbike and heads for home.
But home isn't what it was. The city has finally found a way to defy the Macallans and their uncanny powers of life and death. Only the Macallan men have power, and their women are now hostages. Ben is sick of death and destruction, but a rescue, never mind a peace deal, may be beyond even his extraordinary talent.
It can be read as a standalone if need be, but I think is much better read in sequence with Dead of Light. That way you get a full appreciation of the growth in Ben, as he not only learns to deal with his own newly discovered talent, but convinces key members of his generation of the family to find another way to use theirs. It doesn't have quite the same impact as the first novel, because you don't have the suspense of wondering just how the Macallan clan control the city, but it's still an intense ride with a book that's well out of the usual run of urban fantasy.
Light Errant is out of print in its original paper editions from NEL, but has been re-released in ebook format by Book View Cafe, along with Dead of Light. You can find samples of both books at the BVC website. And maybe if enough of us buy them, Chaz will write a third...
http://bookviewcafe.com/bookstore/book/light-errant/
Mirror of http://julesjones.dreamwidth.org/277300.html, where it has received
comments.
Dead of Light
Benedict Macallan doesn't share his family's talent -- nor their taste for power and violence. He turned his back on them; walked out of the family, if not out of the town that they control. But when a cousin is murdered in a manner that promises danger to the whole family, he's pulled back in against his will. Only for the funeral, only for long enough to say goodbye to a cousin he loved in spite of everything -- but then the body count starts to mount, and whatever Ben may feel about his family, they're his *family*.
The publisher calls it a horror novel, but it's more of a story about a Mafia-like family, seen through the eyes of a dropout member who understands how they look from both the inside and the outside. The horror element comes in the weapon used by the family to maintain control of their territory, one that's only hinted at initially, and gradually revealed during the first half of the book. Power corrupts, and the Macallan clan has held power for a very long time. Now someone is reflecting that power and threat back at them, killing Macallans as casually as they've killed others. Ben's left trying to protect a family he despises and that mostly despises him; and the outside friends who are afraid of him now they've been reminded exactly who he is; and himself. But Ben has no power of his own...
Brenchley deftly interweaves a coming of age story with a murder mystery, gradually building a picture of a strange but only too human family, and Ben's love-hate relationship with them. There's some fine world-building and character development to back up the rising tension as Ben tries to solve the lethal riddle. And the use of language is superb, making the book a joy to read for the pure pleasure of the prose. It's not exactly your traditional whodunnit, but the magic elements are never used to cheat the reader, and the clues are there for those who want to play the game. Dead of Light is both lyrical and a gripping, fast-paced read.
http://bookviewcafe.com/bookstore/book/dead-of-light/
Light Errant
Ben Macallan fled abroad at the end of the first book, away from his gangster family and away from any temptation to use his supernatural abilities. But even so he finds himself in a situation where he has to intervene or watch a friend suffer. His promise to himself broken, he gets on his motorbike and heads for home.
But home isn't what it was. The city has finally found a way to defy the Macallans and their uncanny powers of life and death. Only the Macallan men have power, and their women are now hostages. Ben is sick of death and destruction, but a rescue, never mind a peace deal, may be beyond even his extraordinary talent.
It can be read as a standalone if need be, but I think is much better read in sequence with Dead of Light. That way you get a full appreciation of the growth in Ben, as he not only learns to deal with his own newly discovered talent, but convinces key members of his generation of the family to find another way to use theirs. It doesn't have quite the same impact as the first novel, because you don't have the suspense of wondering just how the Macallan clan control the city, but it's still an intense ride with a book that's well out of the usual run of urban fantasy.
Light Errant is out of print in its original paper editions from NEL, but has been re-released in ebook format by Book View Cafe, along with Dead of Light. You can find samples of both books at the BVC website. And maybe if enough of us buy them, Chaz will write a third...
http://bookviewcafe.com/bookstore/book/light-errant/
Mirror of http://julesjones.dreamwidth.org/277300.html, where it has received
comments.
Book View Cafe summer sale
And because I have spent the last week wrestling with laptops old and new, I failed to point out that the Book View Cafe summer sale is on until the end of 28/7/14. Half price on one hundred books, many of which I can personally recommend, or intend to buy now based on reading other books by those authors. I had meant to itemise these, but it will have to wait until tomorrow. :-(
http://bookviewcafe.com/bookstore/category/bvc-sale/
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http://bookviewcafe.com/bookstore/category/bvc-sale/
Mirror of http://julesjones.dreamwidth.org/277047.html, where it has received
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Windows 8.1 part 6 - Turnpike
My primary email client is Turnpike, and has been since I bought my first internet connection 17 years ago. Unfortunately Demon stopped developing it a long time ago, and amongst other things it now effectively requires stunnel as an add-on to allow it to send mail in this cold, hard world of secure login. It is still a superb email client for collecting and reading mail off-line, but with the advent of the Win 8.1 box it's time to give in and use a current email client. Threads in demon.internet.support.turnpike suggest that it *is* possible to install Turnpike on at least the 32-bit version, but as it would involve a lot of fiddling, plus use of stunnel, I'm moving to Thunderbird. That means moving my mailspool, oh joy. I want to go with imap, although exporting in Berkeley mailbox format and importing into Thunderbird is also an option.
I've spent the last two days reading threads in d.i.s.t, discovering that I was still on v3.something of Thunderbird on the XP box and upgrading, and fighting with settings. I've finally got Thunderbird to talk to Turnpike's imap server, even if it is only looking in the inbox and not the other folders at the moment.
Turnpike:
make sure the user has a non-blank password, or the account won't be able to login to the imap server from elsewhere (security feature in Turnpike).
Configure
Options
Login tab
tick "login using password", and under "permissions", scroll to the bottom and tick "access mail using pop3/imap server" to enable imap access for this user account -- which is the bit I overlooked first time round, resulting in much head-desking.
You can check the exact user name on the "user" tab - you'll need it for setting up the Thunderbird account
Turnpike Connect:
Configure
Email transfer...
Tickbox down the bottom of the screen under Mail Servers "enable imap"
Need to have Connect running in deliver mode (i.e. make a connection to the internet) or the imap server will refuse connections.
Thunderbird:
Set up an account on the XP box using the settings Wm helpfully posted here:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/demon.ip.support.turnpike/So7sW_G5rC0/EXc46oJLDXUJ
i.e.
And set appropriate synchronisation options -- in my case I want a copy at each end.
Once I've got all the email copied into Thunderbird, the TB copy of the mailspool gets copied over to the Win8 box as part of the general "copy all files".
Useful links:
Wm's collection of useful Thunderbird add-ons
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/collections/Wm/turnpike/
Wm's post in dist with settings:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/demon.ip.support.turnpike/So7sW_G5rC0/EXc46oJLDXUJ
dist on folders:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/demon.ip.support.turnpike/SrmtShEE0E8/F4OqVAjSivcJ
dist on permissions when installing on Win8
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/demon.ip.support.turnpike/WgMSrD59iQM
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/demon.ip.support.turnpike/SrmtShEE0E8/F4OqVAjSivcJ
Mirror of http://julesjones.dreamwidth.org/276751.html, where it has received
comments.
I've spent the last two days reading threads in d.i.s.t, discovering that I was still on v3.something of Thunderbird on the XP box and upgrading, and fighting with settings. I've finally got Thunderbird to talk to Turnpike's imap server, even if it is only looking in the inbox and not the other folders at the moment.
Turnpike:
make sure the user has a non-blank password, or the account won't be able to login to the imap server from elsewhere (security feature in Turnpike).
Configure
Options
Login tab
tick "login using password", and under "permissions", scroll to the bottom and tick "access mail using pop3/imap server" to enable imap access for this user account -- which is the bit I overlooked first time round, resulting in much head-desking.
You can check the exact user name on the "user" tab - you'll need it for setting up the Thunderbird account
Turnpike Connect:
Configure
Email transfer...
Tickbox down the bottom of the screen under Mail Servers "enable imap"
Need to have Connect running in deliver mode (i.e. make a connection to the internet) or the imap server will refuse connections.
Thunderbird:
Set up an account on the XP box using the settings Wm helpfully posted here:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/demon.ip.support.turnpike/So7sW_G5rC0/EXc46oJLDXUJ
i.e.
In TB the Server Settings for the account to access TP via IMAP (a
*separate* a/c to any real e-mail address, I used Wm@localhost) should
be something like
===
server name: localhost
port: 143
username: [whatever username you use to log in to TP]
connection security: none
authentication method: passwd, trans insec
And set appropriate synchronisation options -- in my case I want a copy at each end.
Once I've got all the email copied into Thunderbird, the TB copy of the mailspool gets copied over to the Win8 box as part of the general "copy all files".
Useful links:
Wm's collection of useful Thunderbird add-ons
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/collections/Wm/turnpike/
Wm's post in dist with settings:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/demon.ip.support.turnpike/So7sW_G5rC0/EXc46oJLDXUJ
dist on folders:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/demon.ip.support.turnpike/SrmtShEE0E8/F4OqVAjSivcJ
dist on permissions when installing on Win8
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/demon.ip.support.turnpike/WgMSrD59iQM
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/demon.ip.support.turnpike/SrmtShEE0E8/F4OqVAjSivcJ
Mirror of http://julesjones.dreamwidth.org/276751.html, where it has received
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