Hedgehogs don't like slugs!

Its very easy to plant ideas into peoples minds, but very difficult to remove them when they are wrong.

And the internet only makes matters worse due to the ease of content "copy & paste" operations on already incorrect information. 

Thunderbird "Download the rest of the message" is not working

Another feature of Thunderbird that I suspect has just been broken in version 60.x is the "Fetch headers only" option.

For as long as I can remember, this has been my setting of choice, but now its broke!

Has Thunderbird lost its Calendar?

A recent Thunderbird update on Debian/Ubuntu systems has resulted in the loss of the Calendar.

As it is the only calendar that I use, I'd be lost without it.

So what's the fix?

DSLR optical path: where is that spec of dust?

After a recent trip to Hurst Castle we noticed dirt spots on the photos from 2 cameras.

While giving them a clean, it occurred to me that there are quite a few places where dust and dirt can be a problem.

Thunderbird on Peppermint OS: invasion of the giant emojis

Another annoying quirk I found during my recent evaluation of Peppermint OS (V9) concerns the email client Thunderbird.

But this very minor issue has a number of easy fixes.

Peppermint OS: fix those dreadful File dialogs in LibreOffice

I've been playing around with Peppermint OS and found an issue with the LibreOffice file dialogs.

The LibreOffice File > Open, File > Save dialogs don't include useful things like mounted USB memory sticks, network links or any bookmarks that you would find in the system file manager.

You get the same dreadful dialogs in Lubuntu if you set the "Use LibreOffice dialogue boxes" option in LibreOffice.

The end of the line for gksu?

It was only recently that I upgraded my Lubuntu laptop to 18.04, and then found that some of my .desktop launchers had stopped working.

Many Linux distros have now decided to drop gksu as they feel it is unsafe to launch GUI apps as Root.

Well whoopy-do!  Safe or unsafe, I still want to do it.

Solid Conservatory Roof Conversion

Our conservatory has been a great asset for the last 15 years, but there were one or two issues we needed to address.

In addition, the crazy high temperatures during this summer have made it a no-go area during the hottest hours of the day.

So a couple of months ago we started thinking about refurbishment options.

Entroware Triton laptop: broken mouse button

I was quite upset a couple of days ago to find that my nice Entroware Triton had a broken right mouse button.

I've only had this laptop 14 months, and its been brilliant in every way ...until this happened.

So I certainly wasn't ready to give up on it and shell out for a new computer!