Let's start with what I suspect are incredibly stupid IT questions:

[alexsarll]

1. How do I make my keyboard actually do what the keys say it does? I can just about remember that " and @ are transposed, but the pound sign is nowhere to be found, and that really grates. I'd expected the answer to lie in control panel > keyboard; I seem to be mistaken. Cheers burkesworks!
2. Why does my mousepad thing take 'hover over for a bit' to be equivalent to 'click'? This could have truly awful consequences with buttons like 'send'.
3. I wish to extract some information from a late nineties PC. Can this be done by plugging some form of wire into that and this? If so, what sort and where?
4. Why, since installing my own broadband, is my system tray full of various utterly useless icons, with the rather essential battery life one nowhere to be seen? Cheers, all!

Anyone who enjoys seeing hypocritical tossers from bad indie bands making fools of themselves should be sure to read the Bloc Party interview in this week's NME. "Selling more records is the only thing that's important to him, not provoking debate" says Kele from Bloc Party of "treacherous" Jack White - before refusing to answer questions about his own sexuality. Yeah, way to speak out for the kids, Kele! Later he heads for the Old Blue Last, talking about how shallow it is and how the people there think they're the centre of the universe. This being the pub he has just immortalised in a song on his new album, and in which everyone seems to know him.
He's very scathing about the failure of British society to accept anyone different, is Kele. But for me the fact that in Britain 2007 a gay black man can front an indie band, and they can still be as unutterably boring as Bloc Party, is in its own strange way a sign of the triumph of tolerance.

Study supports reintroduction of wolves to the Scottish Highlands. Right, so the science is in favour, and it would definitely work from a poetic and Romantic point of view, so any objections from this point must lie outside either of those realms - ie, in ignorance and muddleheadedness. So when do we get the wolves?
(NB clearly I want them more widespread than just the Highlands. Hampstead Heath, for starters)
In other news, Beautiful South split, blaming "musical similarities", and Venzuela just became a dictatorship.

Comments

[billywhizz.livejournal.com]

Where the keys map to is an International settings thing, that should be an option on the control panel - make sure it's set to British English.

Has him off of Bloc Party actually come out or is it just one of those things everyone knows?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Apparently he's talked about it in other interviews; I had no idea 'til last week.

The only keyboard option I can find is in Printers And Other Hardware; that just asks how it's connected, not what language I want it in.

[billywhizz.livejournal.com]

Hmn. Only, I was told a story not so long ago about a singer in an indie band who felt unable to come out publicly because his record label said it would be massively detrimental - the inference was that it was him off Bloc Party. Shocking, anyway.

Oh, 2) If not under Control Panel > Mouse or somesuch, then there should be a trackpad-looking icon in the system tray; on there somewhere, anyway, there will be options to enable / disable using "taps" on the pad as left/right mouseclicks.

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

Okay then, assuming you're using Windows XP;

Control Panel > Date, Time, Language & Regional Options > Regional & Language Options > Languages

then hit "Details" under "Text Services & Input languages",
change your default language to "English(United Kingdom)"
and set "Installed Services" to "English(United Kingdom)" and remove any option that says "English(United States)".

Follow those instructions and your keyboard's language will be as English as Gussie Fink-Nottle. Pip pip!

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I am now £s in, or something to that effect.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

1. Try control panel > Regional, or > Languages, or something along those lines.
2. Don't know, that's worrying.
3. Late nineties is borderline, it might work with a USB cable to each, or at the worst a USB stick out of one and into the other, or you might actually have to network them, which is less fun.
4. Start > Run > MSCONFIG will get you a list of what runs at startup, so try fiddling with that then reboot.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Well, I think it has a USB cable...shall investigate later.

2) has been more annoying than worrying thus far, but I definitely want rid of it.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_moggy_/]

I thought he couldn't come out because his parents are born again Christians and they'd disown him?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Well then it's doubly his duty to speak out, because just think of all the poor kids in that situation!

Or maybe he's just saying that and they actually want to disown him because they heard his band, and quite right too.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_moggy_/]

Yeah but it's up to the person whether they want to come out or not - unless of course they are being hypocritical and espouse 'family values' etc. like that cunt Ruth Kelly who I defy anyone to say isn't a lesbian.

[auxyeuxdargent.livejournal.com]

Wolves! Wolves! Wolves! Wolves!

I might have to move to Scotland. Let's start a Wolves on Hampstead Heath lobby. x

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I think we need to take this slowly; I'm sure once the Scottish packs are established, one of the young males would be interested in some new territory and a run all his own.

[azureskies.livejournal.com]

hypocritical tossers from bad indie bands making fools of themselves

Beth Ditto's doing a lot of that lately, I notice.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

How is she hypocritical? If anything, her main problem is the utter consistency of her interviews.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Dude, rainforests! Not that I want to visit them really, too many bugs, but they look great on Planet Earth. And stop us all dying, which is kinda handy.

Mahmoud is undoubtedly worse, but Hugo is far more seductive for the well-meaning lefties, and thus more insidious.

And I've been wondering whether global warming might bring snakes to Ireland. Obviously I approve, anything undoing a saint's work is likely something I endorse.

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

Seeing the comments about "wolves" and "Munro baggers" juxtaposed made me think of wolfbagging, which as far as I know isn't entirely uncommon behaviour among some of the denizens of Hampstead Heath.

[sbp.livejournal.com]

I was at the Old Blue Last last night as it happens. Fizzy lager at £3 a pint and no proper ale to be seen anywhere. Bit of a dump really.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Clearly the real ale's not a dealbreaker for me, but I bet the only cider is the bottles, and outside summer they make me depressed.

[stephens.livejournal.com]

If you can be bothered to drag your shiny toy the enormous distance to our flat then I would be delighted to configure it to your hearts content. And the laptop etc etc.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Arf!

Thank you, but I now seem to be OK now on everything bar the transfer, and lugging the old PC even that short distance would seem rather less practical; I'll see how efforts in that respect go over the weekend.

[spyinthehaus.livejournal.com]

If your late-90s PC is running Windows 98, then it will work with USB ports, which is a godsend - either get a direct transfer cable, if you can put them next to each other (about £15), or a portable USB hard drive - your old PCs hard drive is unlikely to be bigger than about 40GB, probably less, and a portable HD that size would cost about £35, maybe, on ebay and is a lot quicker than doing it on floppies. Windows 98 also allows for networking, which could work.

If it's Windows 95, that might be trickier. If it's Windows 95 but has non-functional USB ports, it might be worth thinking about a lightweight Linux installation.

Oh, and you can edit your system tray. I thin Codestuff's Starter (free download) can do it, but right-clicking on most of them will reveal an "open on startup" tickbox. You probably have a simialr tickbox in the power settings of your Control Panel - I haven't used a PC laptop for years, though, so that may have changed.

Failing all that, you could pop out the hard drive, put it in a caddy and connect _that_ to your current PC. By the late 90s most parts were pretty standardised, so your hard drive probably has an IDE connection. Depending on how recent your new PC is, it might even fit into a drive bay, although personally I wouldn't try it.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Thank you for all that. From your description transfer sounds like a weekend rather than an evening effort, but I guess I should have expected as much...

System tray now seems to have been sorted by the simple expedient of telling it to hide icons I haven't clicked lately - where 'lately' = 'never'.

[pippaalice.livejournal.com]

I can poss help with the transfering of DATA!

Also WOLVES!

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Thank you! They should have a plan to reintroduce wolves to WALLS also.