Wednesday 21 July 2010

That's about the size of it


This is the sort of thing that will be trundling along our narrow rural roads for the next couple of months as the harvest gets underway. They weren't built for this kind of traffic, and it makes travelling round here quite dangerous. The machine in front of this one, for which I couldn't get my camera running in time, was massive and tall. The study darkened as it went by.

And I've been immersed in my study for most of the day. The computer desk had finally reached the end of its usefulness as the sliding tray for the keyboard kept falling out onto my knees. The runners had given up and the ball-bearings had fallen out, so it was time for a change. The nearby village school was throwing out a small computer station and so I asked if I could have it. Made of sturdy metal it is ideal but it called for a re-arrangement of the whole corner. That is now done and it looks a lot less cluttered. And for the first time I can access my scanner properly and lift the lid all the way up, which is something I've never been able to do.

I have also changed my web browser. Internet Explorer 8 was getting slower and slower, pages taking 15 seconds or more to load, and crashing if too many tabs were opened. Searching the web I found numerous posts stating similar problems, and a couple of possible solutions. However, when I tried them they had no effect. So I downloaded the Opera browser, and it's superb. Fast - with more facilities, and easy to use. If anyone out there is thinking of changing I can recommend it.

7 comments:

  1. How does Opera deal with RSS feeds? They're the big drawback of Firefox and the one thing that still keeps me with IE.

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  2. Can't answer that question as a) I don't use them because b) I haven't a clue what they are!
    All I know is that I have yet to find something not working, and as an added bonus I now get spell-checking on these comment boxes - something I never had before.

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  3. I didn't like Firefox. It seemed slow, had an awkward layout, and more importantly, I couldn't close it down completely. It would close down its window but remained running in the background, and not even Task Manager would shut it down. I had to reboot the computer in order to close it.

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  4. I'll try it out, thanks!
    RSS feeds are what you can subscribe to to get a collation of new blog posts or new blog comments in one browers window.
    I subscribe to Thinking Anglicans comments, for example, and when I open the feed in Explorer I get a whole list with all the latest comments. The headings are live links that then take you directly to the thread they were made under.

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  5. I'm already frustrated.... can I import my IE favourites? There seems to be no decent Help function.
    I think I give up.

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  6. Importing Internet Explorer favourites option is under the File menu drop-down. My subscribed feeds come through ok.

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  7. Thanks, that's a much more helpful explanation that I could find on the Opera website. I'll try again!

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