ipaq wrangling

Am sitting here in a hotel room in Jersey, sorting out ipaqs for tomorrow's demo at Branchage International Film Festival. I thought I would double check them all again becuase I had to take the batteries out to travel here - I hate the idea of the little buggers switching themselves on when they rub against each other in my hand luggage. I had the usual double check from security staff at the airport when twenty handheld devices popped up on the x-ray machine. Then I sat in the airport cafe removing all the batteries just to be on the safe side. It was a bit of a late night last night getting ready to come here - so much on top of the usual chaos! Carpet fitters laying carpet and taking off bathroom doors - which is a problem when you have paying guests, elderly mother in law passing out when shopping and being in hospital for heart tests, children being generally uncooperative with stessed parents etc etc But enough whinging.
I got here, had cream tea (well, coffee and walnut cake, and watched my daughter and her partner eat creamcakes, then headded to the hotel to get sorted. I put the batteries in the ipaqs, checked the settings (you have to make sure the devices don't go into powersave mode and dim their own screens or switch off). It was all going swimmingly 'til FOUR out of the 20 started complaining that they couldn't locate the file they wanted. Presumable the last user had set them to automatically load the mscape software and go to one particular experience, which I had deleted last night because I didn't need a music tour of Leeds city centre for this demo.
I tried clicking ok - no effect - then pushing buttons (hard buttons presumably disable) whinged out loud a little, and then texted Tom Melamed as he is usually quite helpful even out of hours when he senses desperation. Then I thought of factory reset trick - where you hold down the two outer buttons and stick the pen in the reset hole. Hurrah! It worked, but I had to then reload the mscape player as the reset to factory settings wipes out added bits and pieces (technical term). I'm glad I thought to check that, as I vaguely remembered being caught out before with that one. I was in full flow when text came from Tom, telling me to check the ipaq file store for a folder probably called 2577 and to delete or rename it and see if that works. I am writing that down for next time.

wordpress blogs

I have been using wordpress for a couple of different blogs, and have been finding it relatively easy to use. One irritation though was that wordpress automatically added a link that generated "possibly related links" This seems to mean that it trawls your posts for keywords, even if you don't tag them, and puts links to random blogs underneath your post. I had switched it off on the pervasive media blog a while ago, only with help from Sam Kinsley, but needless to say I had forgotten how to do this. I spent some time this evening clicking around and finally spotted Appearance > Extras > Hide related links.
Phew. No more uncontrollable links popping up on Today I threw out.

popcorn video

Just realised I forgot to promote the fab fashion popcorn video courtesy of Crispy Duck Productions. Great piece that explains what we were doing at the Fashion Popcorn launch at London College of Fashion. Currently beginning to cook up Fashion Popcorn 2. Will keep everyone posted

Fashion Popcorn Launch from Fashion Popcorn on Vimeo.

smug smug smug

Am feeling pleased with myself this evening for having finally solved a problem which had meant my home wireless network was not letting me access my featherhouse website and email server. I could get on to other websites, except for ones that were hosted by the same provider. The email server was an especial problem as a lot of my email comes vis the featherhouse address, and I send all my email using featherhouse as I can't use the uwe mail server to send mail.

Most irritating, as it took me a while to work out what was happening.

At first I thought that the service provider was down or flaky, as I managed to log on and send emails intermittently. Then I thought the server was just down in the evenings because I could access it all at work. I tried three different laptops, pc and mac. In desperation I tried plugging the laptop directly into the blueyonder box, ignoring the wireless router, and lo and behold I could access featherhouse.

This meant that the service provider couldn't have blocked me.

I talked it through with a very helpful friend and colleague, Richard Hull, who suggested I look at the wireless router and try putting it back to the factory settings. He told me that the IP address is dynamically assigned, so if I was blocked then all blueyonder IP addresses would be blocked, and he even tested it out for me that evening by accessing the same non-working sites from his blueyonder address when he got home.

So this evening I sat upstairs, connected my laptop to the wireless router, and started playing around with the settings for the router. I googled "connecting to wireless router to change login" to find the address to type in to access the settings page for the router : 192.168.2.1

And then I played around, reset the router to the default factory settings, then had to rename it, decide what security ( I went for WPA but need to check what is best and what works for mac and pc) put in a password, reboot a couple of times, and YAY! I can now lounge on the sofa downstairs, access my website, and send and receive emails.

I do like it when something works.

back at the end of july

Love this video, of the grandbabies meeting the guinea-pigs