I was really doubting the reality of what I was wittering to Ofcom about.  'He's just obsessive' I could hear you saying. With an undercurrent of 'Why doesn't the sad twat get a life and stop bothering us with all this crap?' (mostly from the back row - you know who you are). But these monitoring gubbins are beginning to pay off. I'm not imagining things.

I set up a monitoring sensor to time the download of a 100KB picture from a Google site once every 60 seconds. This isn't a perfect measure, but there are no sensors to do the same with a file on the NAS (and no, file:// doesn't work with the sensor, before the techheads start making suggestions). Setting up a webserver on another machine just brings another bit of kit into the equation).  Google's infrastructure should be pretty performant, the DSL connection is very stable - as indicators go it will do.

I also set up some sensors to ping the devices around the network - essentially a measure of whether this wirelessly connected laptop can even start a conversation with them and how long it takes them to say hello back.  If the timing of the web download goes awry - well that could be Google or the ADSL.  But not if the laptop suddenly can't have a sensible wireless chat with the router at the same time - that almost certainly has to be a sudden problem with the wireless transmission.

If Les had been here for most of tonight he'd probably not have seen anything - perhaps a couple of small blips, but it's been pretty good.  But I'd really liked him to have been here in the run up to midnight...

This is the download of the image from the Google site, over a 2 hour period:

And this is ping to the router over the same period:

At the same time as the download time goes through the roof, communication to the router pretty much gets lost (that's what the red dots are in the lower trace.  Pings to the other bits of kit on the LAN are pretty much the same. The only thing common to both of these are the router and the wireless connection. Yes, it could be the router - but I can't see what would cause a good router to go into a tizzy like this for 10 minutes.  More to the point, I've been seeing behaviour like this for 10 months, during which period I've had three different routers in the attic in my desperation to eliminate possible causes.

So I don't think I am going insane after all. Which is a relief. People with proper qualifications, Cisco and everything, please feel free to point out flaws in my thinking: It all helps and I am a total amateur in this stuff, floundering around in the wrong end of the IT pool...

I liked Windows 7 the moment it was released - nice to use, nice to look at but, above all else, rock-solid stable. I liked it so much I bought a family pack to install it on everything in the house. I've carried on liking it ever since. Right up until Sunday morning.

Because, on Sunday morning, all the icons for Office disappeared, along with Adobe stuff, Evernote and a couple of other apps, document icons too.  I've seen this happen in earlier versions of Windows, so I wasn't too bothered - just need to find the location of the icon cache, delete it and let the OS rebuild it. Which I did. And it didn't.

I turned to Google and MS Answers and lost an hour understanding the HUGE number of possible causes and resolutions. None of which worked. Gave up on it and resigned myself to reinstalling the affected apps, starting with Evernote and Adobe, both of which recovered their icons. Then I turned to Office, once I'd dug the installations disks out from some dusty corner of the attic - and that's when the fun really started.  Installing over the top of the existing installation failed halfway, with a meaningless error. Uninstalling - I wish I'd never decided to do it - failed halfway with another meaningless error, but got far enough to have removed the apps. Installing over the top of the now useless installation failed with... you get the gist. Lost another hour filtering error messages out of the Windows Event Viewer, Googling them, throwing them at Technet, all to no avail.

No other route open to me: I'm now in the land of 'format c:' and reinstall the OS. I keep all the data on a separate partition - but have to reinstall all the BLOODY apps, find all the latest BLOODY drivers, re-instate all the BLOODY user accounts, add back in all the BLOODY BITS OF CONFIG, set up all the BLOODY backup jobs again.  Etc. Etc. I started at 11pm on Sunday evening and went to bed at gone 2am, with  a clean Windows install, the latest 110 Windows patches applied, MS Defender watching for infiltration and some remote access software in place (the excellent TeamViewer). Left it plugged into the network and went to bed.

And on Monday I dipped in when I had a moment at work and kicked off the occasional installation, jobs to rescan all the pictures, find all the music etc. I'm still tweaking bits now, two days later.

Which brings me to the one useful bit of advice out of all this. I don't know how many times over the years I've had to do this with an OS, but more than I care to think of. I've always been anal about backing up data, but backing up data is not the same as backing up the core OS, the apps, all the little tweaks you make over the years... And for years, it's been quite possible to do that, you just have to invest a bit of time in creating an image of the OS partition. Every time I've been through this I resolve to do exactly that - and I never get round to it.

Not this time.  This time I am now the owner of a shiny image of the rebuilt system, clean as a whistle, which I can re-instate at the click of a clicky-thing - and, moreover, not just to the same hardware, but to a completely different chunk of tin, should I need to.

So what did I use to achieve this? I had planned to use whatever Acronis currently call their imaging/backup solution - in fact, I did download a trial and create the first image.  But's it's not cheap - $45 for one machine - so I Googled around whilst it was doing its stuff and came across a freeware alternative which seems at least as competent. Web reviews seemed to back up my first impressions too. A bit more research turned up the same organisation's free partitioning tool, which I used to recover the space I'd freed up by blowing away all the Dell recovery crap in the 'hidden partition' which was of no help in the first place, not least because I didn't try it because if I'm going to rebuild the machine I'm going to rebuild it properly, not riddled with Dell's spammy crapware.

These are nice tools. Intuitive interfaces, which allow you to focus on the key tasks, but loads of configuration and tweaking if that's what you need (which I don't, not for the critical tasks at hand anyway). They're at least the match of anything Acronis will sell you and impressively quick in operation. If you've got the space to store the images, you can back up whole machines, data n'all - the lazy man's approach - and know that you can have the whole lot up and running - even on another bit of kit - with a trivially simple set of steps. 

If you've ploughed your way through all this and wondered where the payback is - well, that's it. 

For no money at all you can go and research the wares at easeus.com, download them, spend half an hour understanding them and then use them. I guarantee someone will be saved tears - of frustration, if not loss - as a result.

So - if you read the diatribe about my wireless network last week, you're probably desperate to know how it went. Or possibly not. Either way, I'm going to tell you about it, so if you're squeamish about technical matters, look away now.

This is a Spectrum Analyser. This is what serious Ofcom interference jockeys whip out from their jacket pocket at the first sniff of dubious transmission - which is what the very nice Les did when he turned up at my house. ('Jacket pocket' is somewhat metaphorical, it's about the size of a cereal packet, albeit dwarfed by some of the aerials that Les carted in a bit later).  Les sniggered a bit at my suggestion that one of these will set you back about £500; I now understand that a very, very cheap one of these will set you back about £500 and a proper one starts at about 10 times as much.

So I spent a very pleasant hour and a half with Les, chewing the fat about the issue whilst he waved expensive bits of kit about.  And he detected absolutely nothing that might be causing the problem, which didn't appear to be an issue all the time he was here, frustratingly - the network connection had dropped three times in the morning before he came. He did comment that it was odd the way the signal appeared to weaken at the back of the house so dramatically - but, whatever the cause of that, it's not something transmitting locally.

All very frustrating.  Les has gone off to write up his initial findings and I undertook to see if I could get some better measures of when the problem occurs, although I'm not conscious of particular times being worse than any other. To that end, I spent a bit of time on Sunday* setting up some network monitoring doobrey and am playing around with some measures of reachability for the devices on the network alongside timing scheduled downloads across the network. The latter is surprisingly tricky to get a handle on: A few years ago I'd probably have written some code to collect data based on transfer of a file from the NAS in the attic but that's not really an option any more, seeing as how I've forgotten to write anything more useful than the occasional batch script and I'm not resurrecting my skills just for that. Found a cut-down edition of PRTG that might give me some clues for free, so I'll see what that tells me in the next couple of weeks. And if it doesn't tell me anything that looks useful, I may just give up and wire the house up more robustly. You lot will have to watch this space for a bit longer.

* I had to do it all again on Monday, on account of the hitherto reliable Windows 7 OS going into meltdown on the kitchen laptop. Which absorbed most of my Sunday and is going to be the subject of a later post entirely to vent my annoyance and help me calm down.  I don't care if you're interested.

But had cause to deploy it in anger today.  I hope they use it in the 2100s to educate children about life in Britain at the turn of the century. 

Only yesterday, Abby was a little blonde bundle of energy-excess and giggle-surfeit. If I took her to the shops, she'd coo over fluffy things, shriek at pink things and fall prostrate at the paws of dogs in the street, the smaller the better.

I took her to the shops on Saturday.  She ignored the felt-tips, turned her nose up at the pony books and threw disdainful looks at gonks on keyrings. We came home with a poster of some C-list trollop, to go next to the recently acquired poster of an (un)popular beat combo, the (un)Wanted. 

In the words of a real musician: The Times, They Are a-Changin'

Some of you may recall me moaning - a lot - about my suddenly non-functioning wireless network, back in April last year:
 
"Wireless connection dead almost everywhere. Neighbours the same. And no-one owning up to the kit that's killing it. EXTREMELY grumpy. May weep."

 I was demoing the issue to my brother-in-law yesterday - it's pretty clearly captured below:

This is ethernet connected to the router - and is at the lower end of what I typically get on the Sky ADSL, since I can almost spit out of the attic window and hit the exchange up the road. The router's in the attic, because - up until last April - this gave me 100% throughput everywhere in the house (and garden, for that matter). 802.11b, then g, then n, over the last 10 years odd.

This is by the front door - some degradation but I'd be very happy if I could always achieve this.  It can be a lot worse here, but rarely drops to the levels I routinely see - at best - at the back of the house...

In the conservatory at the back.  Where all the 'routine' internet use happens - children's homework, Spotify connected to the amp in the kitchen, general bits of work and leisure stuff. There isn't anywhere else on the ground floor that you can sit at a table and use a laptop comfortably. And this is as good as it gets. When the interference ramps up, the connection drops completely.

Which is all incredibly frustrating: I have several devices in the house which can ONLY connect via WiFi. I spent a lot of time last April working through all the possible causes but to no avail.  I even did a maildrop to my twenty nearest neighbours, which established I wasn't alone - but threw no light on the cause:

The rather obvious bank of phone-masts on the top of the nearby fire-station practice-tower - no longer used for practice, solely revenue - I'd mentally eliminated pretty early on: Mobile transmission is at 900 or 1800MHz, 3G at 2.1GHz. Neither, to my mind, should interfere with 2.4GHz WiFi. And they'd been no problem for the last 8 years in any case. There was no question that this was something other than another 802.11 network - the excellent inSSIDer will quickly show you what's operating around you and, in any case, the whole point of the protocol is to allow WiFi devices to co-exist and play nicely - sharing the same channels, you might see some reduced throughput, but not complete failure of the connection. More precise analysis needs at least a (£500-odd) spectrum analyser - and I don't know anyone who has access to one, let alone the expertise to use it. The only thing I've been able to do which has helped at all is hang a 5GHz AP off the router, which at least gives me a reasonable connection at the front of the house and enables the Apple TVs to do Airplay - prior to that, they refused completely, regardless of where they were sited. But it's no panacea - 5GHz doesn't have the range of 2.4GHz - so can't reach the conservatory - and several of the devices in the house can only operate with the latter.

And then I started thinking about the line-of-sight between the most interfered-with places in the house and the phone masts. And how there was fairly strong correlation between the likely number of walls in the way and stability of the signal. It had always bugged me that, bizarrely, the signal could drop to nothing just feet away from the router in the attic - until it occurred to me that the only obstruction between the masts and the device in that area are some rooftiles and a sheet of plasterboard... A bit of Googling turned up some articles penned since last year which leave me thinking my simplistic views about the frequencies involved may have led to me to look in the wrong places.

(If it turns out to be the phone-masts it would, of course, me more than a little ironic: There are four Apple devices here which get most of their usage in the worst-affected areas. They're sold by the mobile-phone companies on the basis that you can limit your 3G usage by connecting to Wi-Fi... but if the signal disappears, they'll use 3G. So the same companies that may well be responsible for knackering my wireless network also increase their revenues, as a result of doing so - at my expense.)

Back in April, I'd raised the issue on several web forums and usenet - and a number of people had opined that there was little else I could do: The regulatory bodies would have no interest in interference with unlicensed spectrum, so I was stuck with it. But, having thought through the issue again for the first time in months, I thought I'd give Ofcom a call and see what advice they could offer. Eventually talked to someone in 'spectrum' who asked me to lay out the issue in an email, although she didn't sound particularly interested. But, in for a penny... so I mailed them a copy of the letter I'd dropped in my neighbours' letterboxes with the following:

" I have a problem that has persisted since last April, with interference with my wireless broadband - the attached document is a letter I distributed to a number of my neighbours' houses at the time and will give you a detailed overview of the position as it was then. Since I conducted this 'survey' I have added a 5GHz Access Point to my house, but this seems to be impacted almost as badly.  The interference seemed to become less frequent over December/January, but I have twice completely lost the connection to the laptop I am typing on today. So beginning to feel 'end of my tether' abut the whole affair again...I'd be grateful for any advice you can offer on where to go next - my efforts to locate someone with spectrum analysis equipment (and the expertise to use it) have so far drawn a blank... "

And on Thursday I got a phone call from a very nice chap, who advised 'We've decided to take on your case', then laughed heartily at the extended, manic outburst of gratitude that ensued.

So - this Friday, Ofcom engineer Les is turning up at my house with his spectrum analyser, some directional antennae and a stack of clever software.  I'm trying not to be too optimistic about it: Sod's law says he'll turn up just as the interference drops. If he does detect it and it is the phone masts... well, I'm not sure whether that's actually going to help resolve it. But at least I might find out what the problem is.

Watch this space.

I bought one of these the other day. Abby needs a desk and I'm very happy to furnish her with one. I only wish that we didn't live a 10-minute drive away from IKEA, Purley Way, because it's impossible to identify any household need that IKEA won't be able to meet.  Which means that we have to go to IKEA a lot more often than I want to, my optimum frequency of visit per annum being around the NO I DO NOT WANT TO GO TO IKEA, I NEVER WANT TO GO TO IKEA, I'D RATHER SELF-CIRCUMCISE THAN GO TO IKEA EVER AGAIN mark. 

This is page 3 of the instruction manual. Apart from the rather greater number of bits of faux-wood than I expected, this simple piece of child's furniture requires 114 screws, widgets, doodabs, slightly longer screws, slightly thinner doodabs and some curly things that defy description. It's enough to bring tears to a grown man's eyes.

Still, once you've got to this point, slightly smug at the rigour with which you've approached the preparation stage, you know the actual task of construction is going to be a breeze.

This is page 37 of the instructions. PAGE THIRTY-SEVEN. PAGE THIRTY SEVEN.

No doubt in my mind. Someone, somewhere should be shot.

This house has a number of tablet devices in it. It's got more LCD screens than I care to count. I can't remember the last book I bought but, whatever it was, it would have been a rare publication that I couldn't get in an electronic format. And the attic has about 500 books in it, there are books under beds, books in boxes... something has to give.

I hate the fact that I can't lend ebooks to my friends.  I snort when I see electronic books priced higher than a pristine paper copy. I like the fact that people will understand something of me from the books on my shelves and can pick something interesting out, inspiring the sharing of some interest or passion. But this is going to change and I've run out of shelf space.

So I'm starting at the easy end. Old techy books have no value whatsoever. The Good Pub Guide 1995 is probably not going to recommend the best real ale experience in 2012. Drucker's views on management practice are from a world I can't even remember. I'm already pretty nifty with Excel 2007 and I haven't touched Vi for a decade. This pile is now in the green bin - and I reckon I can free up another 20 feet of shelf without getting too stressed about it.

Then I'll get to fiction. And books about cricket, their pages spilling the fug of leather and beer, linseed and tweed. Books I recall as much for the sunny day in the park when I propped them up against a folded blanket as I do for the words they contained. Books with a 14-year old's scrawls of panicked revision in the margin.  Books that people returned to me many times over, with a grin or a sadness or a hysterical recollection or a recital. Spines that hold cracks I remember cursing over.

I may have to pause at that point. I'm not sure I'm ready.

I moved the blog onto this domain over a month ago - and I haven't published a single Sunday dinner picture yet.

Al's Bridge Road Classic.  Perfect Roast Chicken and four veg (I didn't have peas). And, essentially, 'incongruous' Yorkshire Puddings. Never tire of it.

Finally got round to it: Firefox has been retired in this house and the machines are now Chrome-shiny. Quite a job, given the several machines which have logins for everyone residing chez-FG. I've been using Firefox with Xmarks (since back when it was Foxmarks) for yonks, but XMarks is looking like a bit of a security-risk for password sync, Chrome does native bookmark sync and Firefox with multiple add-ons takes about an hour to spring into life. Which is a highly unsatisfactory and retrograde state of affairs for a web-browser but, of course, there's no such thing as 'just a web browser' any more.  And I haven't looked at the Chrome eco-system for a while: My biggest fear - that the extensions couldn't match what I use in Firefox - have turned out to be (almost) unfounded.

So, what have I learnt?

• The standard Chrome install works only for the user who installs it - which is a right pain to discover half-way through the process.  There is a multi-user install, but it's not exactly obvious.
  
• Google won't let you create accounts for children - so if you want Chrome to sync bookmarks across machines, you'll have to lie about their birthdate.
  
• Chrome doesn't do keywords - you have to fudge them through Search Engines

But, on the positive side... Chrome will carry everything you want across from Firefox seamlessly, which enables you to populate the Last Pass extension with saved passwords without hitch.  And the syncing of extensions almost entirely works between installations (ie one or two refuse to, but the rest were fine).  The only extension I really miss is a decent download manager - Down Them All is notably absent from the Chrome Web Store.

After some ferreting around, I think the essential extensions - for me anyway - are:

• Last Pass
  
• AdBlock
  
• IETab (for compatibility with work stuff, mostly)
  
• Shareaholic
  
• Feedly
  
• Evernote Clipper
  
• Amazon Wishlist

A bunch of others - as in the picture - are really no more than shortcuts presented in pretty fashion.  Since I keep stuff like that to hand on the bookmark bar / by keyword, I'm not sure there's a lot of point to it. Looks nice though. No doubt I'll find others with more ferreting, but that seems enough to get me up and running for the moment.

The whole process has still taken me about three hours - but it was less painful than I expected.  And I have no idea what Chrome may keep running in the background, but it's lightning quick compared with Firefox - which will save me back the lost three hours over the next decade or so...