Random: Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow …, Acer Iconia W3 and Windows 8.1, Site Update

It’s been an even slower week than normal. Somehow, after having ridden my 40km as I “normally” try to do last Saturday, and going through Sunday without any problems, on Monday I started to limp.

My right ankle started to give pain, only when pressure was applied. It wasn’t the first time, normally it heals in a day or two. On Monday, I spent some time with my Dad, replacing his faultering AMD Sempron 2800+ (Socket 754, about 7 years old) with a relatively new Intel Core i3 3220 based machine, taking it easy hoping the ankle would heal.

It didn’t. On the bright side, the AMD Sempron machine worked flawlessly when I bought it home, but it was due to retire anyway. Instead, on Tuesday, it got a little worse. Instead of limping along as before, now it was hard to walk without a handrail. I spent the day resting, and upon the advice of my PhD supervisors, iced and elevated it as much as I could without causing too much pain from over-icing.

It was Wednesday, and things went even further downhill. It had progressed from a limp to literally hopping and struggling with balance. Constant dull pain in the ankle, changing to bursts of pain when moved. Couldn’t hold it in a comfortable place either. I had to see a doctor, but I couldn’t make it on my own.

Today, my mother was off work and managed to (slowly) get me into the doctors. Just walking down the stairs was impossible, so much so that I had to make it down literally sitting on my bottom. Making it up is just as hard.

I’ve had a full blood test and have been prescribed NSAIDs and a PPI. Regime of cold packs continue, but getting from bed to the computer just opposite is a case of “Ow! Ow. Owowowowowowow!” and anything more than that is just too much pain to think about. Even sleep is being disturbed by the constant pain which flares up when I turn.

Tomorrow, I’ll get my ultrasound to see what the damage is, however, I find it completely unusual since my left ankle is just fine (no signs of pain), and it didn’t happen immediately after the most likely cause … I still can’t be sure what the cause is, and what the damage is.

As a result, the number of posts won’t be growing too much, as I haven’t been able to focus on my PhD work at all. The overwhelming pain is there even just resting the foot on the ground while in a chair. Sigh. Why me!?

Acer Iconia W3 and Windows 8.1

Okay, so the last post I made seemed to make it sound like Windows 8.1 was a trivial upgrade that made things business as usual.

After a week of using Windows 8.1, I’m convinced it’s sent by the devil himself.

I managed to un-link my Live account from it through the Users control panel, but it wouldn’t let me use my old local-account name for user-name as it said that the system had already taken it. Okay, so I chose a new name, no sweat.

But then started the real disaster – Windows Update provides a new Intel graphics driver that never installs correctly, necessitating manually hiding the update and not worrying about doing it.

But then I notice the tablet crashing all the time when sleeped. Waking it up with the power button sometimes results in a checker screen and significant (5s+) delay before the lock screen comes up. Other times, pressing the power button or the hardware Windows button provokes NO response whatsoever. It’s hung.

A long-press of the power button is needed to hard-power-off the device, in which case, sometimes on start-up it appears to go “dead” right after the Acer logo BIOS screen, but it’s merely just taking a little longer to boot.

But whatever it is, this behaviour is not really welcome at all. It literally breaks the experience of Windows 8.1 – and the fault is likely driver related (c’mon Acer and Intel – release newer drivers that work) or otherwise OS related (yeah, trust Microsoft not to screw anything up and you won’t win).

They announced the pulling of the 8.1 update for RT devices as some of them bricked themselves. I’m not sure what the status of that is either.

Unfortunately, if you have upgraded, there’s no easy way out. You can’t exactly uninstall it to my knowledge. Either live with it, or do a full reinstall … I opt for the former, as it’s not exactly fun to do another reinstall.

On the other hand, I’ve noticed the right-click on Windows icon in desktop mode bringing up some abridged menu (it’s not the Start menu, don’t get excited!) for accessing control panel options, command prompt (admin) being a very useful one. They seem to have removed the whole idea of Windows Experience Index from the System screen as well. The tiles “Change PC Settings” control panel has become more fully featured, nice but really not revolutionary.

I just find it strange how Apple releases “mavericks” for free and everyone goes nuts, and Microsoft releases Windows 8.1 for owners of 8 and nobody really gives a crap. I also find it quite hypocritical for some of the Apple fanboys to come up to me and yell in my face and tell me “it’s great, we don’t need to pay for upgrades”.

I suppose they don’t remember that back in Mac OS (or System 6, 7) days, the OS upgrades in the same major version were free, and the development costs were paid for in the cost of the machine itself (one of the justifications for its expense).

Site Update

I’d have to give a big thanks to the visitors to the website for their continued visitation. This week, I received my first Google Adsense pay-out which will go towards covering all the costs of hosting. I hope the ads have not been too obstructive – if you wish to block them, I have no qualms about that (Adblock Plus does a good job of it).

The motivation has always been for the benefit of others, and as a quick place for me to show others what I’ve been doing, and a “reference” for myself and others who may be technologically inclined. I’m aware that it’s not content that everyone would appreciate, but I always hope that somebody will :).

Since around the 20th January 2013 (this year), the blog site has seen over 74,205 visits to date. Many days, view counts eclipse 350 per day. I know, it’s small compared to others, but it has far outstripped my expectations, having started this blog from a humble Raspberry Pi on my own home ADSL2+ connection.

This month, the data bandwidth use is projected to hit 69Gb. Last month, we reached a total of 51Gb. I am glad I didn’t try to do this at home – it wouldn’t have been possible.

It still runs on my own spare time and covers things which I feel are notable. It’s not really “news”, nor is it really all about “retro”. It’s a mixture, and it feels a bit disorganized. That’s probably the one thing I’m most annoyed about – the lack of organization. Getting things tagged and categorized consistently and properly is effort which will take me some time to learn.

Aside from that, the comment error message still persists. And I haven’t gotten around to even thinking about fixing it. Further to that, spammers still persist – guys, I run Akismet, so rack off! It just seems so silly to think the spammers are just so lazy that they continue to spam sites where their backlink generation schemes haven’t worked in the past and continue not to work …