Advanced Boot Options on a Toshiba Satellite

I've just found out, after a few hours of messing about with a broken Vista boot, that you need to hold F8 at switch-on to get advanced boot options. That might save you some time. Now to see if any of the options actually help me out.

It looks like an automatic update has done something bad to Vista. It boots through to a black screen and a pointer, but doesn't get any further.

Cheap and cheerful 20/20 vision

Well, I'm not sure about the 20/20 part, but by drilling two very small holes in a pair of sunglasses I've managed to double the range at which I can read a number plate. The main problem was aligning the holes correctly for a given distance, but as long as you get 'em pretty close you can bend the glasses around a bit to improve that. Of course, a monocular version might work as well or better.

I'd always wondered why some things came into better focus when I was looking at them just over the top of something - usually looking at a further away object e.g. desk over the top of a very close object e.g. fingers. Assumption would have to be that it's the same thing that happens in a pin-hole camera (nothing is out of focus because all the light passes through a single point) and you're restricting some of the light that would otherwise come in at the wrong angle for your eye's lens and make things blurry.

I'd also just read a NewScientist article that talked about the role of peripheral vision (and possibly lack of bright light) in helping, or not hindering myopia.

So I'm going to try wearing them for 10 minutes a day and see if my vision gets any better - it's been pretty stable for ages now and I've had -2.50 diopter contacts for about 5 years.

Forex

I started playing with one of the foreign exchange / commodities trading programs the other day. I started well, then lost some cash, and now am being a bit more careful and gradually making some back. I'm using the system from www.avafx.com which seems good but I haven't compared it with anything else.

The most important lesson learned so far is that I was initially motivated by greed and fear. When you see gold shooting up, the instinctive reaction is "I want some of that!". In my experience, the greed + fear of letting an opportunity go by outweighed the fear of losing money on the trade. This is of course a fantastic way to get sucked into placing bigger and bigger bets trying to make back any losses, so watch out.

Don't believe people who tell you what to buy, or say that gold will continue it's rise forever. One of the reasons that gold went so high is that the US dollar was weak. Gold is priced at USD/ounce, so weak dollar means expensive gold. Now the dollar is firming up a bit, I wouldn't expect to see such high gold prices for a while. But then I'm not an expert.

NewScientist had a piece a while ago about monkeys who were given presents. They either got 1 coin with a 0.5 probability of getting another coin, or were given 2 coins with a .5 probability that one would be taken away. So the result is identical, statistically speaking. But the monkeys preferred the first option.

Happy Christmas

Happy Christmas everyone. Just remember that it wasn't invented so rich westerners can stuff their faces, drink too much and acquire more possessions.

Nadolig Llawen i bawb!

good old Blue Screen Of Death

A laptop that always boots to a BSOD. Error message as follows:

Stop c000021a {Fatal System Error} - The session manager initialization system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc0000034 (0x00000000, 0x0000000) The system has been shut down.

I found an answer that fixed it on the interweb:

Dick White explains

I don't have an XP install disc any more but I do have a Windows 2000 install disc, which was happy to let me use the recovery console. Followed the instructions, rebooted and it worked! Nice one Mr. White.

Virus Cleaning

Another annoying program pretending to be a virus scanner that just refuses to die. Last one was Antivirus 2009 or something, this one was called Security Tool. In the end I took the affected computer's drive out, put it in mine, cleaned it and then returned it - there may be an easier way and I'd like to know what it is.

Use Malware Bytes Anti-Malware. Spyware Doctor is good to use to check for additional problems but won't clean unless you pay them. Prevx and Spybot failed to do anything very useful.

Stagepas300 part two

Well, it stood up to being used for vocals and drum machine last night, and we thought it sounded better than before. Something similar had happened to the unit while it was under warranty, we wonder if was the same component that failed.



The picture shows where the dead TOP249YN was.