Lightning Strike on Ethernet Cable

I look after a pal's PC kit he uses for his art publishing company. His company is run on the ground floor at the rear of next door's house and his home kit is in the attic of the other house.

His printing kit consists of two very large and expensive high quality printers that are connected to two PCs via a LAN switch, 8 ports of which 4 are used. One PC runs Windows 7 connected to this switch via on board Ethernet and there is a PCI Ethernet LAN card so that we can occasionally connect to web for maintenance. His other PC runs XP and is also connected to the LAN switch so it can also access printers and Windows 7 machine. This XP machine also has a LAN PCI card connected to a long ethernet cable that runs through both houses and all the way through the roof to his router in the attic which is connected to Virgin Cable ISP. This router has 4 ethernet ports, one connected to his home XP machine, others to various laptops and other PCs as required.

In Aug 2011 I received a call to say the Windows 7  and XP machine could not talk to each other, the Windows 7 could not connect to printers and the XP could not talk to internet!

We had a similar problem about a year ago that seemed to have been caused by large release of MS updates, which was resolved by new updates a few days later. However not so this time. Although obvious now it took some time to realise that the lightning storm that had happened overnight was the cause. Since the storm the following did not work.

1. 2 of the 8 ports on the down stairs ethernet switch.
2. On board Windows 7 Ethernet
3. Ethernet Lan Card on XP
4. 3 of the 4 connectors on the router
5. Home PC no power

On investigation an unusual phenomena had occurred and it was said that a lightning fireball had rolled across the sky to hit the roof of a house 2 fields away. I suspect this had induced a current in the long ethernet cable, a good length of which runs through the roof of this house, and this had caused the damage.

I bought two new Ethernet LAN PCI cards and a switch, replaced the one in the XP, added the second into a spare slot on the Windows 7, and all OK. The Home machine is off to PC repair shop as I do not carry any parts to try and fix a dead machine. Tomorrow I fit new router so that hopefully home users can also access Internet when business users are active, because at the moment only one surviving cable socket for all.

eBay "Please provide the correct information in the highlighted fields."

Just spent two evenings trying to add new ebay items only to keep getting above message every time. By chance discovered reason was because the gallery photo I used had blanks in the name. The name was correct, and when used embedded in description was fine, but when used as first free ebay photo which is then used for gallery it looked fine but caused the above error when I tried to complete process. By getting rid of the blanks, replaced them with hyphen, all was OK!

Online site to see output from HTML

In my exploration of iPad I have set myself the task of producing an eBay item using only the iPad. I will post my experiences later but one thing I wanted was a place to see output from HTML I wanted ultimately to post into eBay.

Several online places but in the browser I was using (Side by Side) did not appear to like Frames. Anyway the one that did the job was http://www.maths.surrey.ac.uk/explore/nigelspages/htmltry.htm

Cheap USB keyboard attached to ipad

I am typing this blog with a cheap £8 USB full sized keyboard which is attached to my ipad via the USB connector provided with the official Apple camera Connector Kit.

Now the on screen keyboard is very good, masses better than the small ipod touch I have but you can still type so much quicker with a real keyboard, probably 3 to 4 times as fast. Another advantage is the whole of the screen is available as the on screen keyboard is not shown.

Note when I plug keyboard into iPad as described above I do receive a couple of messages saying that the USB device is not supported, but I just hit the Dismiss button and all is OK.

Side by Side App for iPad.

This app let's you have up to four variable windows on your iPad. Each window can have either a web page, it uses a bespoke browser, or a notes page. Web pages can be downloaded and these can also be seen in the windows, main advantage is download files can be accessed off line, although I have problem with embedded images.

Take a look at introductory YouTube. On first use I like slick no nonsense interface.

iPad App: Side by Side

Quick blog to recommend this App. For 3 days no charge. It allows you to open up to 4 windows on Ipad simultaneously. Take a look at the Youtube introduction and give it a try.

Flickr photo sent via Blogger interface

IMG_1115 Home Made Toy People 07-01-2009 15-36-25
Originally uploaded by rodtuk

This time, hopefully, I have used my iPad to make this blogger entry direct from Flickr.