How is everybody doing?

2020 was an awful year, I'm one of the folks that are clinically extremely vulnerable, so when lockdown started here in the UK in march of last year, myself and daughter (who is also CEV) were stuck indoors, I know a lot of people have struggled, but with my health issues I hardly left the house anyway.

In august I got that dreaded early morning phonecall from my mum, my dad was waken to hospital and was not at all well, we headed up to Cambridge and was able to be with him as he passed away in intensive care. A few days after his funeral, my sister in law then passed away from her cancer battle. 2020 not being one to relent, another couple of weeks later and my aunt passed away from cancer too.

In September we were really reluctant about daughter going to school (she's a teacher)l, we felt it wasn't safe and 3 weeks later after a member of staff tested positive, our daughter then went and got tested and she was positive, my wife and myself then got tested and we also got positive results.

I'm still struggling from the effects of it and 2 weeks ago I ended up in the last place I wasned, in hospital. I was in for an unusually short stay for myself of 4 days, because of my health problems I always get my own room, so it's not as bad as it could be.

We've all had our first vaccination jabs and are waiting for our follow up.

When lockdown started, I began work on a software project for myself, and over the past 10 months I've been working on it during my insomnia, there was a period in the summer where I didn't feel like working on it when my father passed away.

I've been back chipping away at it, it's kept me busy at night and takes my focus off of pain.

I even created a small website for the application, I finally found a Wordpress theme/builder that allowed me to put together something that didn't look like a geocities site from the 90's!

https://www.pingnoo.com

it's open-source as well and all the code is at https://github.com/nedrysoft/pingnoo

How has everybody else kept themselves occupied during this pandemic?

Cool looking website!

For most of the past year, the new fiancée and I have been enjoying each other's close company and hardly venturing away from the property. When CV19 hit, I immediately retired, and convinced her to do the same.

We ran the gardens here together for the first time in 2020 (my wife The Gardener died in 2019), and we're still eating garden produce in most meals.

Right now, I am keeping more than busy enough with building new cabinets and counters for the "plant factory" (seedling room), and have wired up controllers and thermostats for the new LED grow lights and heating mats that go with it all.

I also got a telescope (8" SCT) and have been having fun making electronic accessories for its go-to mount, most recently an ethernet interface for remote control that has interest from the astrophotography/EAA crowd. Nothing too complex, just useful stuff.

Looking forward to 2022. In a big way.

Cheers!

Oh man Mark, I’m so sorry to hear that. Life is hard work:

Enjoy your retirement, my health has been deteriorating for a while, I have a number of chronic health problems, the one that is causing be problems is an incredibly rare liver disease, Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis. It’s quite funny because when you tell people you have liver disease they always jump to the wrong conclusion! PSC is causing my bile ducts to scar;, which stops bile flowing and causes cirrhosis. I’ve already had one transplant assessment, i have a long standing issue with gallstones and take a lot of morphine for the pain, I can’t have the gallbladder removed because i would bleed out.

Over the past year or two it’s become a massive problem, my fatigue is awful, I’m in constant pain and feel sick or are sick, eating food is like Russian roulette.

We’ve taken on a couple of developers to take on what I was doing because I struggle with either having no sleep (it’s 5am here!) or just feeling run down, I’m trying to transition to managing the other developers rather than developing myself, or at least to free me up to do more R&D work.

To say I was glad to see the end of 2020 which was awful is an understatement; but ending up in hospital a few weeks back (free ambulance ride!) and having to stay in while I was pumped full of fluids, antibiotics and steroids was something I could have done without.

I think 2021 is pretty much going to be a write off, so yeah, here’s to 2022!

Always nice to hear from you Mark!

So sorry to hear about the awful year you've had! It's been such a dung heap of a year that I feel like I've only heard bad stories and very few happy ones have stood out in my mind. Such an oppressive year. Ugh. My year has been crap too. Our oldest just started Kindergarten, and distance learning for these brand new students AND brand new computer users might be the worst situation of any age. It completely blows. And as the household's resident "self-employment is impossible when half your job involves going into homes and businesses and using people's computers," I'm tasked with being school monitor. This gives me the lovely opportunity to be the person my kid resents for having to pay attention in class. Oh joy.

On top of that we've had all sorts of family drama that I won't go into. But it's awful and has left us more cut off than ever.

...

ANYWAY!! I really like your website a lot. And I've downloaded your software so I can play with it.

One initial observation: I launched the software, put in an IP address, then hit enter and the program had a hard crash. It works when I click Start though. I'm on Windows 10.

It's been trying to say the least, I hope that by the end of the year we will have some normality back, but who knows. I've had my first covid jab, so I'm doing everything I can to try to stave it off.

Thanks for the comments, I appreciate it. You know what, I don't think I've tried just hitting enter! lol. Users eh?

I'll have a look and fix it, I'm going to push some new binaries soon, I've done a lot of work behind the scenes in the configuration pages which now actually do something, I've got a few more things I want to fix up before the next lot of binaries, I've also added rpm and deb package creation to my deployment script which means natively installed app where I can use setcap to give raw socket permissions to the app on Linux, the AppImage has to run as root. (although the latest code introduces a ping engine that uses the ping binary on Linux as another option to running as root).

If you feel like giving any more feedback (good, bad, ugly!) I would appreciate it, I'm developing somewhat in a vacuum, I developed the tool for myself and figured others might find it useful which is why I released it.

I have fixed the issue (it's fixed in the code, I haven't created new binaries yet, I spent most of today getting my TeamCity configuration back up and running), it was a recursion resulting in a stack overflow due to the syntax highlighting.

I also took the time to fix it so that you can't put new liens in the field, it's a Qt application and to be able to do the syntax highlighting I had to resort to using a TextEdit which is a rich multi line text editor, I just hack it around to make it work as a line edit.

I wondered why there was a sudden spike in downloads a week or so back, I ended up trawling google, turns out my little app made it into the "Hot Picks" section of the Linux Format magazine!

Jumping into a somewhat dormant thread:

We did the lockdown thing much like everybody else. Luckily, my kid was able to do school from home without much issue, and my wife and I were able to do everything remotely. Conveniently (?), I was already planning to be on sabbatical and working from home for 2020, so I got January and February at home alone before the world came crashing down.

What kept me sane, through all the lockdown, was biking. In 2020, I roughly doubled my road biking mileage relative to 2019. Initially, it was just me and one friend who I trusted, but once it became clear that COVID wasn't especially infectious, while biking, my regular biking crew started riding together again. (With Delta now, that would seem less safe, but then everybody in the crew is vaccinated. One of them, an OB/GYN, recently caught it from a client. Eek.)

Thankfully, nobody in our immediate families got COVID, and everybody is now vaccinated. We even managed to see some family and do a short vacation, but that's all crashing down again. No more eating in restaurants, etc.

I will mention that I was asked to testify in a Texas Senate hearing, concerning voting machines, but that same hearing also had several higher-profile bills concerning things like transgender rights. I signed up to testify early in the day and didn't actually get called until something like 9pm. At the time, I was only just a week past my first Pfizer shot, so I was exceptionally cautious. Others attending the hearing? Well, there was somebody who got up to testify and instead led the audience in singing the national anthem. During a pandemic. A respiratory pandemic. The only reason I didn't just get up and bolt was that everybody in the room had to pass a "rapid" COVID test (nasal swab) to get an wristband for entry to the hearing room.

My God, Texas.

I believe the UK's worse in deaths per capita than the US! Just come back to work after catching covid (already double jabbed with Astra Zeneca), only 1 really bad day bu8t felt fluey for a couple of weeks and my taste/smell is just coming back now.

Congratulations.🙁 You beat us by nearly 4%. Below is a screenshot taken from a spreadsheet I wrote, using data from the World Health Organization. It is currently sorted on column AD, Deaths per 100,000. As you can see, there are 11 countries "ahead" of the UK on the list:
Peru
Hungary
Czechia
Bulgaria
Brazil
Colombia
Argentina
Belgium
Italy
Paraguay
Poland

Note that U.S.A. currently is the leader in:
New Cases 7/21 -- 7-27 (Column Q)
New Cases 7/28 -- 8/03 (Column R)
Confirmed Cases Cumulative (Column T)
Percentage of Confirmed Cases vs. World (Column U)
Confirmed Deaths Cumulative (Column AB)
Percentage of Confirmed Deaths vs. World (Column AC)

The GIGO rule (Garbage In Garbage Out) certainly applies here. I think the WHO is trustworthy, others have different opinions. In any case, what really skews everybody's numbers is the uncertainty of how many Covid-19 cases are actually reported. This will vary enormously country to country. I have seen estimates that in my country (Mexico) only about 15% of actual cases are reported. Much of the Mexican population lives outside the reach of organized health care. The numbers in cell AA16 and AE16 are pretty scary as they stand, factor in that they might show only a sixth of the actual cases and you may understand why, even though fully vaccinated, I never leave the house without my really good mask (five-layer replaceable filters), I never go to restaurants or any social gatherings, I never allow anyone inside the property (gardener, maid, work crew, guests) unless they (and myself, of course) are masked. Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me!

If anyone is interested in my spreadsheet (137,215 rows now) PM me and I'll send you a copy. It is highly configurable, can be sorted on any column by a single keystroke, you can adjust the date ranges in columns Q,R,S, and Y,Z,AA by changing the number in A7, and if you turn off protection and unhide columns B through N you will have access to the raw data which produces the information in O through AE. I'll also explain how to update the data, a process that takes less than a minute start to finish.

A word of warning: As the spreadsheet has grown, it has become less stable. Perhaps it is a problem with just my computer, but it occasionally locks up hard when performing operations that access all the raw data, like sorting or changing date offsets. This morning it locked up when I tried to copy formatting from a cell that accessed data only in column A into a standalone display-only not formula-derived cell. I think the lockup may only be that it is killing my USB (both keyboard and mouse are USB) but the only way out of it is a hard reset. No keyboard/mouse leaves no other options that I know of.

Anyway, I have a lot of work in this spreadsheet I hope that at least a few of you will like it.

tanstaafl.

Remote control access from another computer on your local network

I have a computer here that sometimes ignores keyboard and mouse upon first reboot after an OS software update. My work-around is to access the unresponsive computer from another laptop in the same room. I use basic remote access software, which you can pre-install on both computers, ready for future use.

I use the remote access to complete the normal login and start-up process, then instruct the troubled computer to fully shut down. Subsequent restart allows mouse and keyboard to again function, and it continues to so so for many weeks. Until another software update retriggers the problem again.

In your case, if remote access works, you can complete the document save (if that is what you want to do) and then tell Windows it restart,

A quick experiment with plugging in a second keyboard and mouse might allow you access. Back in the day I would use an old PS/2 style keyboard and mouse to get around a hung USB driver. Those connectors are long gone form modern PC motherboards.