classic

More strange stuff . . .

/ Tony / 6 Comments

I am currently Home Alone. Mrs H has gone away for a few days, with her sister and father, to a cottage in North Yorkshire. I don’t like that kind of holiday, in fact, these days I don’t really like holidays. So here I am, the ‘saddo’ supposedly ‘enjoying my space’ (whatever that means.)

My sleep pattern does not exist. Some nights I can sleep for seven hours uninterrupted, but other nights it’s three hours then four or five hours of dozing sleep. The kind of sleep where you don’t realise you have slept, but time has moved on.

Well, last night was one of those nights! I staggered off to bed at around 11:45 (wife away, don’t forget) and was soon asleep. I assume I was soon asleep as I don’t remember being awake for long.

At around 3:30am I awoke. Unusually, I still felt sleepy, so after a quick visit to the bathroom, I snuggled down to sleep. After a few moments but could have been longer, I suddenly realised that the room was getting lighter. Sitting up, I quickly noticed that the Amazon Echo Dot that we have in the bedroom had somehow activated and the room was filled with a blue light. It lasted no more than ten seconds, but it was quite disturbing. I spent the next 30 minutes or so, trying to think if I had mentioned the ‘Alexa’ word in my sleep. Very disturbing!

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You may recall, I had a cause to contact WP support over an issue I had. I’m told that the issue has been passed on to the developers. I have now discovered another issue.

I decided that I would like to change the theme I use for my blog. I’ve had this one (Independent Publisher 2) for a couple of years now, and I thought I needed to have a refresh. Endless scrolling followed, but there was a problem! I seemed to be unable to preview a large number of the themes available.

I thought at first the issue was with the ‘free themes’ (I’m not paying any more for this.) But no! The issue affected most of the paid themes too! So I contacted Support! I pay for it so they might as well earn it.

I got a reply the next day (which was good service, I thought). It seems that my current theme is a “Classic” theme. Most of the themes are what they like to call “Block” themes. Support explained, clumsily I thought, that the ‘preview’ only worked properly for ‘Classic’ themes if I was previewing a ‘Classic’ theme. I needed to be using a ‘Block’ theme to preview ‘Block’ themes.

This has also gone to the developers, but as the ‘Happiness Engineer’ explained, they didn’t think there was any chance of it being changed or fixed.

Giving it another go …

/ Tony / 4 Comments

I have this feeling that the Classic Editor my soon be on it’s way out.

Given that thought, I’m determined to have another crack at mastering this Block Editor. The issue I have is the formatting of images. I prefer to have my images either left or right aligned with the text wrapping justified at the side of the image. The only way that I have found to do this, is to insert the image before I start to write the accompanying text. This not the way I am used to. Often as I’m writing, I get the inspiration to add an image. I suppose, if I wish to use the Block Editor, I will have to think about images first.

Now, when you look at this post with it’s aligned random images, you can see another issue. The top of the images do not appear to align with the top of the text, which looks rather odd as you can see in the first image. .

Another issue is that there does not seem to be a way to remove the caption area from below the image. For most of my posts, the image is there to add a touch of personality to the post. I rarely need to add an attribution or a description of the image.

However, I’m beginning (slightly) to get to like parts of this editor. The posts do look reasonable on a tablet and a phone. I’m now wondering if there is any way to change the default font. I can see that there are a variety of font sizes available but not sure about font type. Need to do further digging.

Still in the cave …

/ Tony / 1 Comment

When you look at all the improvements and achievements over the years, you would be forgiven for thinking that we have progressed as a civilisation. But have we? I was watching Good Morning Britain on Tuesday, well more to the point Mrs was watching, I was enduring. One of the presenters (the loud male one – if you’ve watched, you’ll know who I mean) was interviewing another presenter who is currently appearing on the TV show ‘Strictly Come Dancing’. He was commenting on her dancing when he came out with the phrase “You’re hot baby!” I sat and cringed, I mean this just shows how close to the cave some people still are.

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So, it’s back! Only it’s not in the jungle this time, it has been transported to a castle in Wales. That’s going to a lot for the tourist industry in this pandemic. The only good thing about “I’m A Celebrity That Everybody Has Forgotten/Didn’t Know/Didn’t Care About, Get me Out Of Here” is that it gives me the opportunity to watch some old classic movies. On Tuesday night, Mrs Me was watching that rubbish, whilst I watched “Brief Encounter” on my laptop. Who was the winner ?? Tonight, I have on my menu either “The African Queen” or maybe “Rebecca” with a possibility of the “The 39 Steps“. Decisions, decisions!

Bit of rant and a bit of a moan.

/ Tony / Leave a comment

So it’s Fathers Day!  What does that mean. Well is supposed to compliment Mothers Day, but basically, it’s just another Americanism that seems to have embedded itself into British culture. It you want a history about it see this link. I don’t like these ‘special’ days, that just seem  to be a money spinning scam for card retails both online and offline (funny how we now call shops, “offline” and not shops.) It annoys me how advertisers try to make you feel guilty for not celebrating this and similar days. Well my father died some time back, and as good as they claim to be, I bet even Moonpig.com can’t deliver one of their personalised cards to where he has gone to.

Now for the moan. I have a portable hard drive, that until yesterday, was where I was  keeping my Classic films. I say, until yesterday, because at around 22:45 last night, I decided to move them to my main laptop hard drive. Not such a difficult job and I have an applicaman-pulling-his-hair-out-300x138tion that does just that. Only problem was, that instead of moving them, it deleted them. I spent a good hour or so, searching my hard drive for sign of the files, but alas they were gone. However, I have in my software armoury, a program that will recover files that have been deleted, if it is done quite quickly afterwards. The software is called  Recuva and is part a group of very useful free tools available from a software company called Piriform. All are free for home use, and no serious computer user should be without them. Forgive me if I am sounding like a complete Geek, but sometimes specialised tools are needed and it is useful to have them on board from the start.

Tiring day

/ Tony / Leave a comment

   It seemed to be a real tiring day today. Took the eldest to Uni for 09:00am this morning, which meant I was not in work until 30 minutes later. Of course that meant 90 minutes less time in the day, so work was quite steady.

   Have you heard the new Sony advert ? the one with the girls singing Sweet Child of Mine ? Well it turns out to be a Swedish band called Taken by Trees. I think it is a brilliant version of a classic song.