Vivaldi Seems Faster Than Brave

Maybe slower than Chrome, but Brave slows my PC to a crawl as the number of tabs increases beyond about six.

One More Request For Sed Help

I believe that I have figured out how to do what I need to this spreadsheet for export inside Excel except for the date transformations. 

sed -E "s!^[[:digit:]]\{4\}!0,0,&!" massmurder.csv|sed -E "s!\([[:digit:]]\)/\([[:digit:]]\(4\)\)!\1/0/\2!"

The first command does convert YYYY to 0/0/YYYY.  The second command should convert M/YYYY to M/0/YYYY.  But the second command produces:

sed: -e expression #1, char 47: invalid reference \2 on 's' command's RHS

What am I doing wrong?

One of You Recommended a Virus Cleaner That Was Free

But slow.  So use it once and delete it.  Which was that?

gcc for Windows 7

I have been looking for bcc and related tools for Windows 7. Three is something called minGw, but it is anything but min.  Downloading all the components takes at least an hour, and the installer is utterly incomprehensible.  I had hoped that cygwin would include gcc and gdb but no such luck. I can do what I want in the virtual Linux on my Windows PC, but it naturally runs a bit slower than native apps.  Something which is a downloadable executable would be nice.  (I am not really interested in compiling gcc, gdb, and related tools.)  This seems better.  It now looks like I should have been looking for cc, not gcc in cygwin.  Whatever cc is in cygwin, it is not an executable.  There is a gcc there, but no obvious debugger.  There is a reason Linus remains popular.

That Dying Seagate Drive

I mentioned some weeks back?  It seems to have finally died.  It no longer appears on the drive list.

Replaced the Foscam Router

It seems to have become unreliable, occasionally dropping to data rates that the Roku did not like.  I bought a Dlink that supported A and C protocols and gigabit wired connections.  While both our new cell phones support the new speeds (472 MB) the Roku does not, nor does the 2000s laptop I use for the CNC mill, but I no longer need a wireless repeater at the far end of the house for it. Of course, my ISP data rate is only 18 Mbps, so this only matters for backups and file transfers over our internal LAN.

There are however AC USB adapters.  And cheap.

Curiously, the Seagate Has Stopped Clicking Since I Ran Seagate Tests On It

Did the tests heal it?  I have a Toshiba on order and I will not trust this Seagate.  Three backup drives, one of which I really do not trust?

Next Hard Disk Question

I have a WD 1TB drive in an external enclosure connected by USB which has served as my wife's backup drive for a couple of years.  Suddenly, it is invisible.   I plugged it into my ThinkPad and it works fine. So I mapped it as a network drive on my wife's ThinkPad and it works fine for backup.  Any ideas on why?  I have a practical backup solution for her, but it seems strange.

Seagate or Western Digital

I bought a Seagate 4TB external drive in 2013 and it starting to make repeated clicking noises, which I have read means a sticking read/write head and I need to replace it.  I am sure it is out of warranty; five years is pretty decent for a drive that gets nightly backup activity.  Any reason for a particular drive brand?  I have a Western Digital network drive as well; I am just a bit paranoid of losing 20 years of research and writing.

I found an organization that keeps track of hard disk failures in its systems.  Most of the Seagates are below average in reliability; ditto for the Western Digital drives; the Toshiba and HGST drives are generally better than average.  Some involve large samples.

Curiously, the clicking stopped after running Seagate Tools for Windows.  I am suspecting that this the calm before the click storm.

Notification Nuisance

I complained about this a while back.  The asterisk in the upper left of the box allowed me to disable them on a website by website basis; these are apparently turned on by the popup on various websites  that ask if you want to allow notifications.  The Thunderbird mail notification is controlled by Tools->Options-> General  "When new messages arrive:"

The Case I Used for My 11.6" Laptop Was Bigger Than I Wanted

It was originally for a 14" or 15" laptop.  It was not very heavy, but my wife complained that its exterior dimensions made it clumsy on airliners.  She was right.  I bought this instead.  Several inches smaller in width and depth still with a crossbody strap.  The power supply brick, a spare battery, and the wireless mouse all fit in center and side pockets.  Takes up less space under the seat or in the storage bin. 

Nice touch: on the back of the case is an elastic strap that exactly and tautly slides over the pullout handle on the rolling suitcases.  One less item to carry over the shoulder on your way to the ticket counter and from baggage claim.

Why I Try Not to Discard Stuff

My wife's PC has been using an old USB 1.1 hub and has recently started complaining that USB 2.0 would be faster.  Each time it does so, it disconnects the hub, then reconnects it.  For several seconds, keyboard and mouse are dead.  I dug through the PC bone pile and found a USB 2.0 hub missing only the power cord which at $8.36 seems expensive, but it was here in two days and her problem is solved.

This Might Be Useful For Organizing Your Pictures

I mentioned recently that I need to organize my astrophotos, which are generally organized by date taken, scattered amidst thousands of other pictures.  I really wanted a single folder of astrophotos without breaking their date context.  Windows 7 and likely later has the equivalent of Unix symbolic links!  Right click on a picture and Create Shortcut.  This creates a shortcut to the picture in current folder, which you can then drag to another folder so all your astrophotos (or your quilting pictures or your silly cat pictures) appear in one place.  Of course these are links to the original, not copies, so they take up very little space and if you click on a link and edit it, it changes the original photo, which can be good or bad, depending on your goal.

If you select multiple pictures, you can Create Shortcut on all at once.  They will be scattered in filename order, which makes it harder to drag just the shorts, but sort by size and you can drag just the links (typically 11K in size),

Note: symbolic links to directories are not advised.  I symbolically linked a directory, then deleted the link in my astrophotos directory and it deleted both link and original directory.

Found a few lost gems:

Do You Use CCleaner?

A very nice and useful cleanup tool.  But 9/18/17 CBS Philadelphia:

CCleaner, the computer-optimizing tool made by software company Piriform, was successfully infected by malware, according to security firm Cisco Talos. The malware reportedly tried to connect to unregistered websites in order to remotely download even more harmful programs to users’ computers.

Security experts say the Trojan horse-style attack hackers launched affected over 2 million CCleaner customers who downloaded the product in August....

Piriform’s parent company, Avast, released a statement after the breach was announced saying the infected software had been dealt with.

“Piriform believes that these users are safe now as its investigation indicates it was able to disarm the threat before it was able to do any harm,” an Avast spokesperson said. 

If you downloaded it in August, get a fresh download.

Malware

My PC had slowed to a crawl.  When I rebooted, it would not.  I had to have Windows do its recovery thing.  Then I ran MalwareBytes and found 43 of the little beasts.  Now it runs again.  Malware is the little annoying brother of computer virii.  Almost tempted to pay for the always on variant of MalwareBytes.

The WD NAS 4TB

Used the three step QuickStart card.  Only a few mild surprises, and it backing up my Lenovo and my wife's Lenovo, hourly.  Definitely slower than a USB drive backup, but acceptable.  Now two full backups, on completely separate devices.  I will sleep better.

Where is the "My Documents" Folder Actually Stored in Windows 7?

It is not under C:\Users\clayton\Documents.  There is a C:\Users\clayton\My Documents folder, but it is empty.  Nor do subfolders of it appear when I search C: from Windows Explorer.

According to Windows Explorer, Libraries->Documents->My Documents
Documents has a folder teaching which it claims is in C:\users\Clayton\Documents.  This folder contains many others.  In the command shell, C:\users\Clayton\Documents\teaching contains only one folder.

If I open C:\users\clayton in Windows Explorer, it shows My Documents folder, but in the command shell, it is not there.  I know that My Documents actually points to C:\Users\clayton\Documents, but why cannot I see the folders there in the command shell?

Curiously, folders that appear in C:\Users\clayton\Documents through the command shell have a clearly visible folder icon, while the missing ones have a faded folder icon.

My Music, My Pictures, and My Videos are all where you would expect them.

If you came here looking for a solution: the folders and files in Windows Explorer that have dimmed out icons are hidden.  They are therefore invisible in the shell.  Use properties to change the hidden attribute.

Backup Storage

I mentioned a while back that my 1TB external USB hard drive had failed.  I am now backing up to my 4TB external hard drive.  I had some weird hiccup with last night's Windows 7 security upgrade and suddenly became terrified of losing everything.  I currently have my wife's PC backing up to a spare 1TB external drive.

While searching for another 4 TB drive, I noticed for just a bit more money, WD 4TB My Cloud Personal Network Attached Storage - NAS, so Ethernet instead of USB.  This lets me backup both PCs through the network.  and access my files remotely as well.  I assume that Gigabit Ethernet will beat USB 3.0 on speed.  Anyone think of a reason not to go this way?

Office 2016: Any Strong Reason to Upgrade?

Since I am again faculty, I get an upgrade to Office 2016 for $10.  Are there any strong arguments in favor or against doing so?

64-bit versions of SED and AWK?

The 32-bit versions at SourceForge, when executed from the command line in Windows 7 say, "is not compatible with the version of Windows you are running."  Huh?