Artichokes

Are we growing globe artichokes as well as Jerusalem artichokes? This appeared in the back garden:

And here is a picture of a poppy that decided to grow in one of the raised garden beds:

And in the financial news, we have not been paid as it's not payday, and the markets are down. Back to where they were six weeks ago.

Scanner

Well, I've got the USB stick on the scanner back - sort of.

It seems there's a network discovery issue with Windows 10, which I'm a bit surprised about as that's something I'd think businesses would use a fair bit. After poking around for a while it seems that although I can see the printer and can access it, it's not being found automatically by Windows 10. The same goes for the WD MyCloud backup box. I can map drive letters to them, create shortcuts to them, all that stuff. Windows 10 won't automatically discover them though. The only thing it will automatically discover is your laptop - when it's turned on.

To get around this lack of automatic discovery I used Explorer and "Add a network location" to add the USB drive to my list of network locations and mapped drives.

Not a complete fix, but at least I can now access the USB stick on the scanner.

What's even better is that the networkj location persists across a re-boot.

Corel

I decided to have a play with something in Corel Photopaint today and under Windows 10 the menu bar in Corel is white on white. Not very useful! After scrabbling around on the web I found that there's a Corel update (update 4 for X6) that is supposed to fix it. I gave it a try and it did.

I also discovered there's a Corel hotfix for update 4 so I downloaded it, and it doesn't seem to make things worse.

Easterly hurricane

The easterly hurricanes have started for the season - and not always on hot days.

And 2kg of red peppers doesn't make much red pepper paste - about enough for two soups.

All systems - cook!

Red soup - the vegetarian kind!

Red pepper paste!

I spent the morning at the local archery as last week's rain seems to have ended. I made the red soup before going and now that I'm back I'm making the red pepper paste.

Christmas already!

I have bought the first fruit mince pies of the season.

WIndows 10

Today's exercise in technology was the installation of Windows 10 on my laptop - just as well I upgraded our download limit as to get it sorted out I had to download a heap of stuff, and not just Windows 10.

It all seems to be working OK, though I haven't tested everything yet. There are some minor problems that I haven't looked into fixing so far:

• I've lost access to the USB drive in the scanner. In fact I can't see the printer in my network drives at all. I can still print stuff, just can't get stuff from the scanner.
• Partially fixed - see the Scanner entry on 18/11/15.
• There's some strange interaction between USB drives and my wireless mouse. The mouse doesn't work when I insert a USB drive, but it starts working again as soon as I remove the USB drive.
• 14/11/15 - fixed, well not really. Nothing to do with Windows 10. It seems there is a known problem with the Logitec cordless mouse and USB 3.0 devices interfering with each other. This was the first time I noticed it as I normally don't use the mouse and most of my USB drives are USB 2.0. This was the first time I'd plugged a USB 3.0 drive into the USB port next to the mouse receiver while using the mouse. The mouse works if I plug a USB 2.0 drive in next to the receiver and if I plug a USB 3.0 drive into a port on the opposite side of the system to the receiver.
• There are occasional things left on the screen when I start doing things much too quickly. I think this is because I'm not using the right video driver. I had a lot of trouble sorting out which drivers and versions I should be using.

Apart from that it's all OK. I'm not sure I like the look of Windows 10. It all feels a bit like it's still a work in progress.

Modem

I had another go at getting the new modem to work and was mostly successful. This time I got stable DSL sync, but with no improvement in line speed. I also got most of the devices connected. Something curious was that they all connected as 802.11n rather than 802.11ac. It's not important, though, as we can't drive 802.11n at it's full rate anyway.

The one thing that didn't work was the printer. I couldn't get it on-line while using the new modem. I suspect there's some incompatibility between the security schemes being used by the printer and the modem. I've gone back to the old modem and will leave this for another day.

The numbers are down

We have been paid and the numbers have been recorded  They are down to where they were a mohtn ago.

It looks like it will another wet day today, so I'll be staying inside and doing the archery newsletter.

Update day

Your computer updated properly. The treasurer's computer updated properly. Mine didn't. A video driver scrambled itself and it took me most of the day to get it back to where it should be. Along the way something else got mangled too, but it's not important and can wait until later.

Fortunately I wasn't planning on doing much useful today as it has been raining gently most of the day.

Job of the day

All stitched together and pegged down. The peach tree took a bit of a pruning in the process but it still needs more.

28 degrees

I have scheduled payment of your 28 Degrees card as per the latest invoice. According to them you haven't used it since you left the USA.

Apart from that there's nothing to report. All very boring.

Wet, wet, wet!

We had 40mm of rain in about an hour last night. As a result there was minor internal flooding in my bedroom, but nothing like there has been in the past.

I have forwarded a message to your dpr2903 account about changes to your G Adventures tour itinerary. I don't think the changes are significant, but you can make up your own mind.

After I spoke to you I received a phone call from Internode, and it seems that the Telstra people fixed a wiring problem at the exchange rather than coming here as I thought they would. As a result there has been some minor improvement in our DSL synch speed, but not much observable difference in our download speed. I think an improvement by a factor of four is all we'll see.

The numbers

We have not been paid as it's not payday and the numbers have been recorded. They are down slightly on last week, but still higher than the week before.

I may be out of communication for a while today while Telstra does some tests on the phone line.

Thanks for the post on ikat. It's made me realise why some fabrics tun out looking the way they do.