The printing problem is nearly resolved – we were presented with an A3 version of the Thursday edition last night. It still has a couple of problems, as in the image sizes have been reduced, so that there’s a huge margin round the outside of the text, and one side was upside down, but we’re getting there.
Essentially, the guys up at Admin village would really like me to be using MS Publisher, because that’s all they know, and providing the documents in such rare formats as PDF or a Postscript file is giving them trouble. Hey ho, it’s their problem, not ours.
I had a conversation with Bungle last night about the disappearing data allowance. As a systems development engineer with Vodafone, he’s a fount of wisdom on the subject, and immediately agreed that we must have been hacked by someone freeloading on our connection.
Since it shows on the WiFi list as “3Wireless-modem-xxxx” where the x’s stand for digits, whoever it was probably didn’t know it was a fellow boater – perhaps. In any event, they must have used password cracking software to get in, and if you are reading this, you’re going to cost me £15, since when the last of my 3 allowance is gone, I shall have to buy a month’s supply on my O2 PAYG dongle.
I don’t know what anyone else thinks, but in my book, this is theft, just as if someone had reached into my boat and helped themselves to a can of diesel. What really hurts is that the limited range of the MiFi dongle, used inside a boat, means that the culprit must be a fellow BOD boater.
Ever generous, Bungle has offered to come over later on and help me reprogram the 3 dongle to use a more obvious name for the connection, like Bruce’s Hotspot, and a more secure password.
On a more cheerful note, here are some photos of progress building the site.
Inside Hall A
The crane at the Historic Wharf
Touch of Pink Floyd; painting another brick in the wall
The BOD boats moorings
2 comments:
Two thoughts on the disappearing data:
It could be Software Update. I remember when I first got a 3 dongle noticing the connection running very slowly. Turned out the Mac had taken it on itself to download the latest OS update and a host of other stuff. It's worth checking this is turned off.
There are a few other unexpected network accesses that can take place, too. In particular, I learned the other week that Safari's default setting is "Automatically update articles in bookmarks bar", so if you have lots of bookmarks in there, it'll download every bookmarked page whenever you first open Safari. I tend to organise my favourite pages in here, and had been wondering why the hard disc went crazy every time I opened Safari...!
Thanks for these thoughts, Richard. I've got Software Update set to manual on this machine, but had forgotten Sheila's new MacBook. On checking the Installed Software pane, however, there were no surprises.
Didn't know about Safari, but the version we've got doesn't seem to do it.
As a matter of routine, I keep all those autocheck type things turned off, as a result of using mobile connections almost exclusively for six years now.
That's why I was so stunned by this serious loss (I mean, even today 650 Meg is a lot of data to disappear in 48 hours, given that we don't do any of the high usage stuff on the net.)
Cheers
Bruce
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