Today being a Sunday, we were on our normal Sunday routine which involved me getting to the newspaper shop early and then getting back in time for the Andrew Marr show at 9.00am. At this hour on a Sunday morning, the only people you happen to meet are joggers, often in pairs, and as they are watching their breaths, they generally do not relish any type of a conversation. Instead, we each make do with a grunt (if that!) as we pass in the street. After we had watched the Andrew Marr show and breakfasted, Meg and I walked down to the park in the most beautiful spring sunshine. As we walked down we saw one of our Italian friends and spent a few happy minutes with her and then we met some of our Catholic friends and we exchanged our thoughts on the current political situation (we largely think alike on such issues, as it happens). Eventually we got to the park where we really enjoyed the spring sunshine. We take down with us every day a National Trust portable stool which is incredibly light-weight and seems a little like a walking stick but in which you can pull down the seat and you have a three-legged stool. We use this every day to act as a little table whilst I pour the coffee and it always attracts a great of admiring comment from the various passers by, many of whom know us by now. We met 3-4 of our friends (with whom we generally coincide at about midday) and exchanged some stories. Then we reluctantly made our way home as we know there was a Sunday lunch to cook but we felt we had a very enjoyable and entertaining morning as the fine weather encouraged us to stop, linger and chat.
Sunday afternoons are generally well occupied with newspaper reading but today as result of late declarations and a lot of analysis of the recent elections, we let this wash over us during the afternoon as well. We sometimes tend to watch the Parliament Channel at about 6.00pm on a Sunday because they have a repeat of Question Time which is first broadcast act about 8.30 each Thursday evening. As this had been Election Day and therefore no results had been announced, we thought we might give this program a miss but thought we would give it a try for 5 minutes or so. But one of the programme’s panelists was John Bercow, the ex-speaker of the House of Commons, and he was extremely erudite and well worth listening to. So we stayed with the whole of the programme which, ss it turned out, was particularly interesting this week in both the questions asked and the analysis offered.
As I woke up early this morning, I judged it not worth going back to sleep again so I went on to my IBM ThinkPad to explore some new possibilities. As Windows 7 is massively insecure, I am going to confine my ventures on the web to the absolute minimum but I was speculating to myself whether it was possible to access the internet but without using a browser. I know that in the text editor which is my favourite editor for the MAC it is possible to just type in the full address of a website (complete with its http://) and then just click on it and this link will take you straight to the URL. So I wondered if there was a PC equivalent and after a bit of searching through bulletin boards and queries, I discovered that I was not alone in seeking for a text editor (nothing as full blown as a word-processor) and eventually settled upon NotePad++ ( a free program but which does exactly what I want) So now for my ‘regular’ visits to websites that I know about (e.g. some of my own) then I have them in a simple computer file and click the link. This worked very well and I realise that I am actually using the browser (because whether the browser gets its data from the keyboard or from a clickable link, the end result is the same and it has to ‘do its stuff’ to locate this on the internet). Anyway, I figure that this method will cut out key logging problems and means that as I am not actually firing up the browser then this might make the process a tad more secure (but I may be completely wrong on this point). I then realised that as my new browser Pale Moon is essentially FireFox and it accepts most of the early extensions written for it, whether it would be possible to locate and add on FireFTP – an FTP client which is incredibly concise and works very well. But Firefox dropped it in their later versions as it didn’t fit their latest profile but I managed to locate it, install it and run it to my satisfaction. Having installed it, I didn’t know where it actually was but Pale Moon has a clickable list of options when you click on the Pale Moon name and there, lurking at the of a section called ‘Developers’ was the program I had just installed. So yet another bonus for a little bit of playing about.
© Mike Hart [2021]