LG G3 - No fun here

Edit 04/04/2016

I should have updated this post sooner. Usually I’d just include an addendum at the bottom, but I’ve re-worded a few bits in the content as my original review was maybe a tad harsh, and I’ll explain why below. It’s just a shame it took so long for the Marshmallow update to be available, as I’d already had enough with the handset and wanted back to an Apple where things are just simple!

A Decent 10" Android Tablet... Does one exist?

My son bought an Android tablet around 18 months ago with a combination of Christmas and Birthday money. It became an extension of his body with him taking it everywhere to play games and watch YouTube videos about Minecraft and Garry’s Mod.

He recently leapt into bed one night (forgetting the tablet was on his bed) and broke the screen with his knee. It was a complete accident, but he was absolutely devastated by what had happened. I explained that if we couldn’t get a screen, I’d pay for half of any replacement as he had looked after it so well up until the accident.

TP-Link Archer C2 - First Impressions

As mentioned in my last post, I was in the hunt for a new router to replace the aging Buffalo WHR-HP-G54. I’d found that it wasn’t capable of handling fibre broadband speeds (hardly surprising… given that it’s running a 200MHz single core CPU with barely a few megs free of the 16Mb RAM).

I ended up dropping by PC World and picking up the TP-Link Archer C2 for £49.99 (a few quid more expensive than it was at Scan, but PC World was closer, so I was saving petrol money and around 30 minutes of my time for the round-trip).

Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 Fun (or not...)

Out of contract with my previous supplier, I was free to find a new supplier. Luckily, one of the benefits of my job is that I get free fibre broadband, so it was a simple decision :)

Anyway, back to the point of my post.

I last used the Buffalo a few years back when on Virgin Media’s “National” service (no longer available - a good thing as it was trash) when their supplied Netgear had weak wi-fi. Since then, there’s been well documented problems with OpenSSL and the Heartbleed vulnerability and I was sure that the Tomato firmware running on the Buffalo would be affected. It turned out that as I was using an official release, I was OK but I still fancied trying DD-WRT as it was the original reason for me buying the Buffalo in the first place.

No dial tone, but broadband still works?

It seems whenever I need to make a phone call on the landline, it’s broken. Yesterday I picked up the landline handset and it was dead. No dial tone. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

I tried the usual steps at first (unplug it, plug it back in) but no joy. Onto the broadband I went. Works fine. Weird. I’ve had this before and leaving stuff unplugged overnight seemed to fix it, but on this occasion it didn’t help. So today, Di picked up a cheap landline handset from the Asda and she tried it while I was at work, but still no joy. Which only means one thing… calling the provider :(

New site using Hugo

I’ve been looking for a while at various blogging engines for my website and came across Hugo which is a static page generator.

The bonus of this is that I don’t have a demand on any SQL databases, nor do I have to remember a password every time I want to update the site. Unfortunately, this does mean I’m tied to a computer for updating the page all the time. I’ll see if I can find a way around that though if I get chance :)

Griddle - A Grid/Table Component for React

We had a requirement at work to display some tabular data that is retrieved from a web service as a JSON object. As we have recently started using React, it made sense to find a decent component that suited what we needed and after a bit of browsing, we found Griddle.

Unfortunately, their documentation; while it wasn’t bad, it’s not the best I’ve seen so I thought I’d throw something together to show how to get it working quickly and using a publicly available API, so anyone should be able to follow.

Getting Started with React.js

I’ve recently reviewed some of my blog content and found that some of it is advising of a way to do things in a way that I would no longer suggest. This article in particular focused around using Browserify and also installing npm packages globally; neither of which I’ve used/done for a long time.

I did write a “revisited” post a few years after this one, which is much more relevant and you can view that here: React JS Revisited.

heavy cpu usage svchost windows10

Google brings up a complete bag of results when you search for “svchost high cpu” as it’s been a well documented issue with the Windows Update service across the last couple of Windows versions (way back to XP as it happens!) so it was little surprise to find that the instance of svchost.exe that was eating CPU cycles was the one that was hosting the Windows Update service.

Dipping into the Settings screens of Windows 10, I got to the Windows Update section, only for it to show that it was on “Downloading Updates 0%” and remained at this point for a couple of hours without moving. I couldn’t remember the process for fixing this issue in Windows 8 (as I have had it on another PC in the past), hence the need for Google.

"Something went wrong" - Creating users on Windows 10

On a fresh install of Windows 10, I found I was unable to add a second user to the system (via All Settings) and constantly got the “Something went wrong” screen. I tried a few reboots but to no avail. A quick google found that a lot of people with laptops were having this problem, and removing the battery and running on AC power only appeared to resolve their problem, but I’m on a desktop… i.e. no battery.