Chalton and Waterlooville

One of the other delegates at the Alton group lives in Chalton and had asked if I could give him some advice. He was having issues with using Linked In, Hotmail and his wireless network.

The Linked In issue turned out to be because he had two profiles, using different e-mail addresses. Linked In was using cookies to remember which one he last used to log on. The simple solution was to "kill" one of the profiles as you can't merge two profiles. Luckily he only had two contacts on the one he wanted to kill off.

The Hotmail issue was caused by him sending and receiving email for a different account using Hotmail, so he was getting a "sent by... on behalf of..." header. Not Hotmail's fault.

The WLAN was easy enough: he just needed to type in the password. The house walls are 1 foot thick in places though, so reception in his office may be a bit flaky. However a booster or an upgraded router may be cheaper than a separate DSL line which is what he uses now. The office has a separate power supply so he can't use Ethernet over power lines. He doesn't want to put in a physical network either as this would be unsightly. He's going to test the WLAN later as we ran out of time - he needed to leave.

I then went to Halfords in Waterlooville to get some bulbs for the car. One tail/stop bulb and one headlamp. I'd noticed yesterday that they were not working. Traffic chaos in Waterlooville as they are re-surfacing the bypass and the roundabout, so that took longer than expected to negotiate! For once the guide at Halfords identified the correct bulbs! However while changing the headlamp was easy peasy, the tail lamp involved undoing 2 screws, removing the lamp cluster, then unplugging it, then undoing 4 more screws before you get to the bulbs. Then you swap the bulb and re-assemble it. I did the headlamp in Halfords car park, but had to come home to do the tail light. I then noticed that one of the number plate lights has failed...grrrr.