Posts

Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order - a review by an over 50s gamer

  Some Context I like video games, unfortunately I started way back when on Spectrums, and now my faculties are not what the once were, not that I was ever a gaming Ninja. Now mostly I play games on easy or story mode because I cannot be arsed to try that hard, I want to be entertained, I want to enjoy a game as a game, I don’t want real life where I die after one shot, I get that 24/7 at work and with the wife. I hate online gaming as everyone else is 99% better than me. Oh and I hate Boss battles, they are the most boring moments in a game, if there was an option to bypass them I would, they add nothing to the story just serve to annoy and frustrate. I bought the game in sale on Epic (£22), with their added £10 discount voucher for £12, Steam had it for £54 at the time. Pick your battles and whatever works for you, but never pay full price (£42 is 4 decent and 6 good bottles of wine) The meaty bit Spoiler alert: this review will mention some aspects of events in game, it
Post a Comment
Read more

Windows Phone to iPhone - a painful transition

Windows Phone died a death due to a whole heap of incompetence from Microsoft.  My phone was an old Nokia 925, about 4 1/2 years old and bought and paid by my company. There were always low requirements for company phones, if it rung and you answered it, all was good. Then Hangouts reared its head (Google want to destroy MS, so WP support) but third-party support gave a stay of execution. The final nail was a requirement for out of hours support software that had no app for Windows Phone. I had to be “downgraded” to an iPhone 6s (yes, it is a low spec 2 version old iPhone, better hardware than my 925 but not really up there as a current version, how my company loves their staff, buy expensive crap rather than cheap crap). Stuff that just worked on my old phone, now needs 'me' to be re-engineered to work the Apple way.  This is only slightly less bad than the Google eat all your life and sell it back to you way, but it is like stepping back in to the 1990s Microsoft way
Post a Comment
Read more

Trying to update a Lenovo Yoga Tablet

Android, oh my god really? I tried, really, I tried very hard, but a combination of Android craziness and Lenovo ineptitude just made it so hard I couldn’t be bothered. In fact, the combination of the two made Microsoft look positively stunning in their slickness of updating and a paragon of patching. In the windows world Microsoft delivers updates to all manner of hardware mixes without a pause for breath. You may not want them, but you get them anyway and since Windows 10 you get OS updates on the fly for free as long as your chipsets are supported, but it is quite a long term support, 7 or 8 years at the shortest, normal 10 or more. With Android, you are lucky if you get 2 years for OS updates if you are lucky and security patches, I really don’t as I have yet to work out how to find out. So what produced this anti-android rant? Trying to update my Wife’s Yoga Tablet (less than 1 year old) from 5.1 to 6. Yes, I know the latest Android version is 8.0 but due to the unique
Post a Comment
Read more

How long do you keep your backups

Backup retention periods seem to be driven by urban myths and how systems worked in the 1970s. Not wholly surprising since most back up software still seems to be stuck in that period and most sales pitches are urban myths. So how long do you keep backups for (this is the easy starter question) 10 years, 7 years or even forever? Do you keep you daily backups for that long or only your monthly or yearly ones? Why (don’t you just hate it when someone says why) have you chosen that time period? Was it because someone in the business said there was a law that said they had to keep some data for that time? What happens to stuff that was created and then deleted between your backups tapes? Have they ever shown you the law that states that? My first question is where is the data kept? Most HR/finance/legal systems likely to have a data retention requirement store data in a database these days and the data covers the last seven years or whatever is the legal requirement or for w
Post a Comment
Read more

Windows 10 Fall Creators Edition Annoyance

What is annoying me right now is not an admin thing except in the loosest sense. I have been on the Windows 10 fast ring forever and have had a few issues but nothing major over the years, but as we rush headlong in to the Fall Creators update one aspect has really annoyed me. My PC is used by myself and my wife, her mostly in the mornings and daytime, me in the evening. After we have finished the PC gets shut down, yes, its weird behaviour in this modern always connected world but it’s what we do. Sometime before build 16273 a rather annoying configuration seems to have been imposed. When you boot a PC the last logged on user is signed in as a disconnected user. Why? It may make login (sorry sign in) quicker but in reality, if I have just started the PC I am waiting to log in and with SSDs it makes no difference at all. Why worry you may ask? For me it affects two things. First, and most visibly, when I shut down the computer an annoying message pops up and tells some
Post a Comment
Read more

Windows 10 Phone/Mobile thingy

I know a lot of people dont think Windows 10 phone is worth a punt because it doesn't have enough apps or err........ is there any other reason other than it isn't IOS? How many apps do you actually use? If we ignore all the apps that do the same thing how many would each platform actually have? Anyway I use a windows phone because it is relative simple at doing stuff and it generally works for me. I still haven't worked out how to remove all the Tesco apps that came pre-installed on my wife's Hudl tablet, Android just doesn't seem to work in any kind of logical way for me, I am sure if I spent some time (a year or so) with just Android I may grow to ......... work with it. As for Apple, I am really not keen on their closed shop Apple only business mentality. I am currently running 10586.71 on my trusty Nokia 925. Having gone through all the fast ring builds i have to say it is mostly very stable and slick. There are a few minor issues. Outlo
Post a Comment
Read more