My name is Carl Farrington and I live in south Manchester Kelsall, England.
I work for myself as a general IT support person / technician, a.k.a dogsbody and helpline 🙂
I am of course interested in most IT stuff, but also electronics, microcontrollers, trying to repair things, R/C models (helicopters), listening to all sorts of mostly older pop/rock music and a little reggae, and trying to learn to play as many musical instruments as possible (but not being particularly good at any!)
I’m interested in programming, but I am a bit late to the game having turned 40 😮 this year in 2021.
I love Python & Django, and have done some work with VueJS 2 and Quasar UI Framework.
I’ve become quite a fan of the Computerphile Youtube channel and the professors in the CS dept. at Nottingham University. I have quite a collection of books on algorithms and am slowly trying to take it all in. I think the much broader ‘CODE’ book by Microsoft Press has been most enlightening and educational.
Although my life is obviously spent mostly installing and supporting Windows systems, I do also work with Linux and am a keen fan of open source, and of the UNIX way in general. I don’t however have any Apple stuff and don’t intend to, although I may pick up one of the next (future, second generation) Apple Silicon based Minis if the price is OK just for a look and because I do, annoyingly, end up having to try to help people who have bought Macs from time to time.
You won’t find me on Facebook, and I tend not to use Twitter. After many years I decided ditching Facebook was the smart thing to do. It wasn’t healthy getting so frustrated at, and drawn into arguments with people sharing selfish hate, anti-immigration type stuff – the usual thinly veiled racism, and generally sharing things without fact-checking. I got fed up of doing fact-checking for others and trying to enlighten them. After the Brexit vote, and the Cambridge Analytica mind-control revelations, I downloaded my data and deleted my account. Strangely enough though, my contact details are still part of their latest 530-million-person data breach – the one that they’re saying isn’t really a data breach because they permitted scraping of contact details up until 2019 or something.
The purpose of this blog is for me to write about things that occur in my technical work/play life. Often it’s just for my own recollection at a later date, in case I encounter the same problem again and can’t remember how I fixed it.
You’ll find notes on computer problems and fixes that I have encountered and decided to share with the world, as well as occasional opinions and rants.
I used to allow comments on here, and it was nice to get positive feedback when something helped others, but I’m afraid the spammers have ruined that, so I disabled commenting years ago.