Found a neat way of boosting your wireless signal indoors with some tinfoil, a template, pritstick glue and a craftknife – the Windsurfer aerial
Gmail canned responses
I’ve found a useful gmail feature when trying to work out how to reply quickly to a ‘first come first served’ email about a wine tasting event that is likely to be very popular.
You can enable the ‘canned response feature in gmail, setup a response ‘yes i’d like to attend the wine tasting next tuesday’ and create a filter so when the wine merchant emailed me my reply went back automagically and immediately. It lets you setup an automatic response when an email is received from a specific sender.
Of course if the wine merchant had sent his email from a different email address from his usual one I would be stuffed 🙂
Autopulse
Our Department is trialling one of these at the moment for use in cardiac arrests. It is a bit of a faff to get in position and get going but excellent when it does. I suspect it is only a matter of time before this type of device works its way into the pre-hospital phase with our local ambulance service.
GMEP – Global Medical Education Project
Another very useful medical education site that is extremely simple to join and add content to. I will be using work here towards my CPD targets 🙂
Windows 8 upgrade
Microsoft never make it simple. I purchased a windows 8 upgrade for 25 quid to upgrade my existing windows 7 install. However my SSD with win7 on it died so I installed windows 8 onto a new SSD. But then windows wouldn’t activate as it was a ‘clean install’ rather than an ‘upgrade install’. Seems like this is a common problem but easily sorted
- Open regedit by pressing Windows-q, entering regedit and selecting the result from the list of hits.
- Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/
- Change MediaBootInstall from 1 to 0
- Go back to the start screen and enter cmd there.
- Right-click Command Prompt and select to run it as administrator.
- Type slmgr /rearm on the command line and hit enter.
- Reboot Windows now.
- Run the activation utility afterwards, enter your product key to activate Windows.
WHS 2011 slowdown
Tried watching some tv episodes streamed from my WHS box and found them stuttering really badly – first time ever doing this. Logged into WHS and found one drive completely full with half a terabyte of ‘client pc backups’. Did some googling and found out how to remove safely the unwanted ones and freed up the necessary space
here is the excellent howto
No more stuttering 🙂
Cycling DIY
Cycled up to work today, nearly killed me, much more than usual. Turns out the rear brake is binding. I tried to adjust the caliper mountings and managed to depressure the caliper instead = rebleed of the avid brake which is a pain (although 50ml luerlock syringes are useful for this 🙂 ) I have also lost half a powerlink when taking the chain apart to soak it in degreaser. If you see it let me know…..
Life in the fast lane
Good Emergency Medicine site based ‘down under’
One recent article managed to trigger a GMC educational visit to our Department/Trainees 🙁
Useful learning point is how your Hospital needs to adapt to managing staff using social media
Christmas Day wine
I’m trying to choose my wine for Christmas Day. So far I have almost decided on a red from Langmiel winery in Oz and a safe sauv blanc from Marlborough in NZ – Fairhall Cliffs
Windows 7 Homegroup vanishing #2
Well, that fix didn’t last long. I’m utterly perplexed by this. I’ve reset windows firewall rules on the remote pc which worked. For a while. The workgroup vanished again from my main rig. 🙁 . I’ve looked more closely at my main rig and have uninstalled Comodo firewall and gone back to using Windows firewall again. This seems to have cured things. For the moment anyway.