Desperate Remedies - a return to Victorian literature

A couple of weeks ago I resolved to return to the novels of Thomas Hardy.  As a Eng. Lit. ‘O’-Level student in the 70’s we’d covered a couple of his novels, and some poems; and I read most of them two or three decades ago.  A friend of mine (thanks Timbo!) posted The Darkling Thrush (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darkling_Thrush) on Facebook for the second time in a few years, and it seemed like time to move away from the diet of modern spy/crime/historical/fantasy fiction I’ve been reading for the past few years (e.g. CJ Sansom, Mick Herron, Robin Hobb, Ian Rankin, Stephen Donaldson, Peter James) and return to something from a different era.

I went for a kindle collection of all novels in publication date order.   So have started with Desperate Remedies from 1872 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desperate_Remedies), although his second novel, the first was never published, so this is the correct starting point.

Hardy is noted for his lengthy, complex, punctuated sentence structure – and quite frankly it took a few chapters to get back into that style.  But after a few late night reading sessions (a hot bath for my spine is always a good place!!) I’m there and really enjoying it again.   The sentences just fall into place and the added bonus of reading on a kindle is the ability to highlight a word and get the dictionary definition (useful for writing that is nearly 200 years old).

The one thing I didn’t expect?  After all the excitement today of the New Horizons fly by of Ultima Thule (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46729898) I didn’t expect to read those words in the novel.  I’ll let you read the novel to find out where and why.

If you see something like this. ITS A SCAM

I got an alert from Kaspersky that stopped me going to a site when I clicked on a music link.  Curious I decided to find out what was there.

 

It was this website, and is definitely not a Microsoft webpage, and definitely not a genuine issue.  If you get something like this then:

1. Don’t do anything on that page, just close it and don’t answer any questions or enter any data until the page is gone
2. Update or install AV software.  Any decent AV tool should have stopped you getting there
3. Don’t panic!

 

Microsoft Forefront TMG and Windows 10 1803

With the 1803 update I got a problem.

 

I’ve used Forefront TMG2010 and it’s predecessors for over a decade.  It generally sits there doing it’s job and provides me with the means to control access in and out of the network.

The client has sat on the taskbar since XP days, without a problem.  Until the 1803 upgrade.

 

Microsoft don’t support TMG any more, so no joy looking on the forums for support, but I did find this: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/936773/yellow-exclamation-mark-appears-next-to-the-firewall-client-icon-on-a.  Although I didn’t change the client (mine was v7.xxxx and 4 years younger), but the registry change had cleared the yellow marker on the TMG Taskbar icon.

 

I hadn’t found any actual problem with TMG (yet) that this might have caused, but at least an error has been cleared.

 

OneDrive broken after update, yet again...

I was busy collecting money for Help For Heroes on Friday, but left the main desktop computer running.  It seems that about 11:14am OneDrive was updated.  I had previously been running 18.091.0506.007, but Microsoft delivered (on a rollout from Office 365) 18.111.0603.0004.

 

The net result was that OneDrive stopped working, and wouldn't restart or re-install; or even uninstall.  If I could get a "not logged in" grey OneDrive icon, the right click menu was just a white space.  Not good when I was trying to do some quick work on Sunday night.  A support call on Sunday evening to O365 tried all that I had tried, plus a few other things but left it broken.  I ended the call past midnight, and was expecting a follow up from Microsoft on Monday, yesterday.  Nope, nothing happened.

 

Today I updated the call, asked for a call back, and got it quite quickly – but it was mostly more data collection and testing things.  During which I was pointed to https://support.office.com/en-us/article/new-onedrive-sync-client-release-notes-845dcf18-f921-435e-bf28-4e24b95e5fc0 which at least confirmed the build numbers involved.  A quick Bing search and I found this: https://www.tenforums.com/software-apps/112766-onedrive-semi-missing-again.html

 

Checking my OneDrive folder, there was indeed no OneDrive.EXE file present, so I copied it from the 18.111 subfolder and tried again.  Nothing.

I then ran the OneDriveSetup.EXE from within the 18.111 folder and it seemed to work.

Logging into OneDrive and it started the "new user" setup.  TAKING CARE TO SELECT THE SAME FOLDER AS BEFORE (to avoid re-downloading everything 😊) OneDrive for Business then decided there we more changes to the folder structure than there were files.  But I let it proceed – it seems it was cross checking cloud and local copies and each file on either side created a "check".

 

I had to open settings and add an account to get OneDrive consumer back up and running, and it went through the same painful checking process.  Currently both are still checking, but hopefully within an hour or two all shall be well.