Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Computers

I am sunk in gloom.

I have just spent three quarters of an hour formatting something for my husband with a series of hanging indents. Successfully, but with difficulty. It seemed to me as if identical actions on successive paragraphs, produced variable results, quod absurdum est.  Little time or mental strength is left to think about knitting.

 I want at least to comment on recent comments – but my desktop computer is exhibiting a fault it has developed recently, of not – when Google Chrome is loaded -- showing the bar at the bottom of the screen which allows one to skip about. So I have to unload Google Chrome to get to this document (I compose in Word). That slows things down still further, on a slow computer.  And the iPad won't show me the blog and its comments, as it keeps saying it is not connected to the internet, which is a lie.

I had forgotten all about Auto-Save, FiberQat and Southern Gal. I am grateful as ever for your help. My husband is using Open Office rather than Word – supposed to be a bit simpler – but there must still be an Auto-Save feature which I will investigate today. I have tried and tried to teach him about Ctrl-S (F10 in his old, DOS system). He says it interrupts his train of thought. I wondered, as you did, if there was some combination of keys he was hitting which spirited his document away. But what? And why no warning?

Other comments

I like that picture of me and Matt, too, Mary G. He is the one who mentioned, in an off-hand sort of way, at the post-Games party in 2010 when we were all sitting about exhausted and happy, eating left-overs from the weekend catering, that he wouldn’t mind a pair of socks.

I sounded out opinion here as to whether the Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater extended to knitting socks for a granddaughter’s boyfriend, and the consensus was that it was probably safe to go ahead. So I did.

Skeindalous, I was very interested to hear that you share my difficulty – this is with reference to Kate Davies’ “Rams and Yowes” pattern, but it has a general application – in hemming live stitches to corresponding purl bumps. What if one marked, say, every 5th purl bump with a safety pin or something, before the operation started?

I am resolved to knit it, if only for the pleasure of asking for those colours with their wonderful Shetland names, when we are in Lerwick next month. So, eventually, I should engage with the problem and you will hear more.

I have forgotten, now, which of you told me how to buy acetate to stiffen the (silly) Christmas present knitting I have in mind, and because of the problems mentioned above, it would take too long to find that comment. But I am grateful.

Knitting

I have finished the first sleeve for Relax2, and decided that I needed to wind the next skein for the second, and am having tangle-trouble. Life is frot with problems.


But Archie will be here tonight, and be taken to school for the new term tomorrow. That’s a cheering thought.

12 comments:

  1. Google Chrome really irritates me for the same reason. I often have to skip between sites while I am working (usually a foreign language dictionary and a document). My nephews are not sympathetic. They say I must learn to live with it. Why?

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  2. Here is how to enable auto save in Open Office Writer (found this in the help section):

    To save recovery information automatically every n minutes
    1. Choose Tools - Options - Load/Save - General.
    2. Mark Save AutoRecovery information every and select the time interval.

    Hope this helps!

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  3. I sympathize: I have been trying to do a small academic piece of work peer reviewing an article for a journal. The first time our router crashed. The second time the journal website (through which I must submit my review) timed me out and I lost my comments. The third time I composed my notes in word, so I could paste them into the website, and then word crashed and I lost it all again. I fear I will never manage to complete this task....

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  4. Here's my solution for hemming live sts to purl bumps. I don't do it. I bind off, then hem. It may be a little less "seamless" in appearance, but I fund it turns out better for me. I never get an even tension when I sew down live sts that way. Maybe I should try it again sometime.

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  5. I'm not sure if we're talking about the same thing exactly, but if I know I'm going to hem, I cast on, slide a second needle through the stitches, then knit the hem/facing. When I reach the hemming point, I turn up the extra needle, carefully match the cast-on stitch to the live stitch, and knit two together. From there on, it's easy to k2tog around (or across), and create a "seamless" hem.

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  6. In regards to your toolbar, right-click it and go to Properties. There should be an option for "Keep the Taskbar on top of other Windows" selected. That should keep it on top of Chrome.

    CatDownUnder, if you do when you're in Chrome, you should be able to toggle between the sites instead of having to click with the mouse.

    Hems with live stitches: I'm in the castoff and hem group. If you hem it fairly loosely it can look very nice.

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  7. I like Mozilla Firefox better than Google Chrome

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  8. CatDownUnder, there should be Ctrl-Tab in there. Darn Blogger! I also thought of opening two Chrome windows but making sure the headers never touch the top of the screen to make it automatically fill the page. Then set them up side-by-side.

    Hope this helps!

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  9. Elaine in NYC5:04 PM

    In MS Word, you could create and apply a style which you could name "Hanging Indent." Perhaps Open Office has a similar feature?

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  10. I knit socks for my daughter's boyfriend, kind of with the thought at the time that maybe he would go away, but obviously the curse does not extend to socks. They have been married eight years and given me two adorable grandsons. :)

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  11. In Word you format a paragraph to your liking, then select the paragraph and click on the paintbrush symbol in the menu. The cursor will change shape and you then drag it along all the other paragraphs you want to have similarly formatted. Done. This is a feature I use constantly in my work, and I'm always surprised how few people know of it.

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  12. =Tamar11:30 PM

    "I wondered, as you did, if there was some combination of keys he was hitting which spirited his document away. But what? And why no warning?"

    I have no idea about Word, but there was something like that in WordPerfect years ago and Word and its ilk "borrowed" a lot from WP when that company bought them out. In WP, if you hit "esc" and then accidentally dragged a finger along a few numbers, say 123, the next key you touched would be repeated that number of times. This led to an amazing number of retypes until we figured it out. For example, if you accidentally hit Esc, then a number, then Delete, hoping to remove something, it would delete that many times. There were times when we used a command to "Delete to end of line" and if we had made the mistake first, it would delete that many whole lines. If we were at the top of the document it could be disastrous, especially i there was an autosave immediately afterward.

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