Computing ⁽³⁷⁾

Those lumps you see on PC monitor cables and other PC and related cables... yes we know what they are and what they do but here's proof. I got a DisplayPort to HDMI cable for a new monitor. It works fine via VGA but why not? Anyway, aside from why on earth the PC has a DisplayPort and not an HDMI, the cable duly arrived. It's a nice cable in that it has a braided cover, feels well made and the connectors fit well and do not drop out. But no ferrites. All worked fine with both monitors - one DVI and one HDMI connected - came on fine. But when I key up the FT450D (set to 30W) the HDMI-connected screen goes blank. Completely blank. Black. It comes right back when I de-key. Ugh, no ferrites. I fitted a decent clip-on to each end with a whole turn of lead in each - no problems since. See? They do work!

I finally upgraded to 18.04, an advantage of which is I am finally rid of the Unity desktop and back to Gnome. I never 'got' Unity and had added there Gnome add-ons which made it Gnome-like but quirky. For some reason, the system would always launch a service process via upstart that sat there doing nothing every time I unlocked the screen... resulting in the process table filing up before I realised. The upgrade caught me out however. For some reason it did not bring across php-mysql or the Stomp library but both were easy to put back in. I use Stomp to pull in Network Rail Open Data, something I've been fiddling with recently but more of that some time later on. It also seems to default to a later CIFS protocol than my poor old backup NAS devices use meaning they would not mount, so I had to add vers=1.0 to the lines in /etc/fstab to solve that one. Finally, until I find more, Apache would not see PHP even though PHP had been upgraded so it needed a2enmod php7.2 and a bounce of Apache. That one is particularly annoying as without it Apache merrily shows The World…