Transcribe this!

As someone who transcribes the occasional parish record for the benefit of myself and others, I have come across some of the most "interesting" pages over the years - with difficult writing, creased pages etc but these ones are probably the worst yet!

Mostly a hole, with smudged ink surrounding it! And that isn't the worst record I have in this particular set.

Afraid anyone after those particular baptism records is going to be disappointed!

Useful little add on

Owing to circumstances beyond my control (the death of my laptop), I am back to using my old desktop. No real issue - I have been using this machine for years without any real problems.
Of course, I have never upgraded Firefox on here (or on my old laptop to be honest) and Gmail (and FamilySearch too as it happens) complain about the browser being old and not compatible. Bull - of course it is compatible, just that you lot don't like folks using older stuff.

On the laptop. I had managed to block the message in Forefox, but forgot how I did it. So, when the error appeared in FamilySearch recently, I had no idea that I could soon block that too!

So this is the answer to those - and probably many other irritating "elements" which get added to webpages to try to make you upgrade stuff.

Firstly, you need AdBlock Plus - but frankly, if you are not using that to stop advers cramming onto your screen ,you shouldn't be using a computer!

The added goodie is something called Element Hiding Helper for AdBlock Plus, and can be downloaded from -

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/elemhidehelper/

Once installed, simply open ABP and you should have a new option called "Select Element to Hide". Do as it says - select the irritating message or whatever and hide it. Note that it may take a few seconds - don't get impatient!
 Once it has been hidden you are free!

A marriage made in Hell

So.... BT are buying EE?  Good. Two totally useless outfits become one.

My views on both of these companies have been posted on the blog before, so no need to rant on again.
Sufficient to say that I am never ever going to go back to EE - even though, for the time I was with them they were a pretty reliable mobile network. But nobody ups their prices and then sends a message to their users basically stating "tough"

I stood by my comments and ditched them as soon as my contract ended. Wonder how many others did? Lots of ranting at the time on forums etc yet I haven't seen any news about people leaving EE in their droves....

Wrong path?

Well, great news today for us Raspberry Pi fans!  A new Pi has been released - with quad core processor and double the RAM of the older models. All still the same lovely small size format too!

But..... on the downside, the article I read stated that the foundation intend to allow Windows 10 to run on the Pi - and Microsoft have been working with the Raspberry Pi foundation to make this reality.

Whilst I personally do not use MS products, the thing which worries me the most is that, due to its popularity, Windows may well end up as the official and perhaps only operating system for the Pi before long.

That is exactly what happened with the EeePC. The original 701 EeePC ran a very modified Linux version. Not my cup of tea and I soon installed other distros. But, within a short time, Microsoft, presumably worried about the (at the time) phenomenal sales of these netbook computers, started offering a cut down XP to the manufacturers and soon Windows was the default OS on netbooks.

I suppose the average punter prefers what they know, but it wasn't as though the Linux installed on these things was complex - it was very similar to the latest Windows versions with big buttons to click with fairly self explanatory names on them.

Well, I will not be installing Windows on any Pi of mine!