Opera Ugrades are losing settings

I have been an Opera user for several years. I like the layout of the browser as well as the various options that it gives you. Options such as remembering your user name and password to multiple domain login pages. Like recalling certain personal details for when you are filling in forms. But Opera, in the past, has had many drawbacks. One that I frequently come across is that certain webpages refuse to load fully – the browser will load a few elements and then freeze. That is all very well, but I need to refer to certain web pages frequently for my writing. On such occasions my only solution has been to load Firefox and, lo and behold, the webpage loads fully and immediately. Another drawback recently came to my notice, and it seems that I am not the only victim of this latest snag.

There have been numerous reports of Opera losing some of its settings during an upgrade. I first noticed this when I was logging into the back end of one of my websites last week. Usually pressing ‘Ctrl + Enter’ would bring up my user name and the password (in asterisks of course) and I would automatically be logged into the website. Not so! All I got were blank fields. That’s all very well, but I had about 150 of these login points saved by Opera. I searched for a solution through Google. I have yet to find a way to turn Opera back in time so as to place all of the data where it should be. But I did find a couple of programs that at least recover all of the data, which is stored encrypted in a file called wand.dat

The first one I found was Opera Password Recovery Master, which you can download here . With this program you get a display of the urls, user name and the first four digits of the passwords, and are told that to recover the whole passwords you need to pay for the full version of the program  for somewhere between $20 and $40, depending on the type of license. A little more googling led me to find Opera Password Decryptor, which you can download here . This program goes a little further than the previous one, giving you the full passwords and allowing you to export them all as either a text file or an html file - and it's free!

I don’t use Opera Mail, but apparently some users have lost all of their mail contacts, and some people even their bookmarks. To avoid this happening to you in the future, export your contacts and bookmarks before carrying out an upgrade, then you can always import them again if necessary. Maybe the Opera developers can look into this and incorporate into their next upgrade some appropriate code that takes care of this problem.

Google filling up hard drives with Earth

I use a Lenovo G550 with Windows 7 Home edition, a laptop that is ideal for my writing skills. I do not do any gaming, but do make a lot of use of Skype, having family overseas, and of several web design aids. I was most disconcerted a couple of days ago when the laptop announced to me that its C drive was full, and that I should do something about it. Knowing that I had only used somewhat less than a quarter of the disc space led me to doing some investigation, where I found several other instances of the occurrence with other individuals. Liz advised me to check out a youtube video that listed the best ten system applications, which I did.

To isolate the problem I used an application called JdiskReport - you need Java to be running in order to run this program. The program analyzes your hard drive, giving a graphic description of what it contains. I found that almost 200 Gb was taken up by .sst files. Further analysis showed that there were more than a million .sst files in the Google Earth unified_cache_leveldb_leveldb2 directory, all created within a few minutes of each other. You can read about this problem on the GE forum here.

Uninstalling GE will not get rid of the unwanted files, which for me were found in C:\Users\xxxxxx\AppData\LocalLow\Google\GoogleEarth\unified_cache_leveldb_leveldb2 . Substitute your user name for the x's. You'll have to manually delete all of the  .sst files. I found the quickest way was to mark them using Ctrl and dragging the pointer over them, hitting delete and then later emptying the Recycle Bin. If you have a program such a Total Commander you can mark all the .sst files and delete them.  I later re-installed the latest version of GE , and now have 200 Gb of free space to play with again.(by the way GE know about the problem and are doing their best to fix it, but they need feedback from anyone experiencing it)

Cape Cobra Visitor

Yesterday Katie started barking just outside the doors of the Lighthouse Room - after the floods in October I moved my desk there to allow the carpet tiles in the office to dry out. Her barking was persistent, so I left my writing and went out to investigate. There, up against the fence, hood extended in defense, was a large Cape Cobra. I say large - it was larger than the one that visited a year or two back outside the scullery, probably a little over 4 feet long. KT has never, to the best of my knowledge, come face to face with a snake before, and was most inquisitive, but stayed her distance as if instinctively knowing that this strange creature could be dangerous.

I ordered Katie to back off, and the visitor went off down the driveway, past the Wild Plum by the gate, and vanished into the long grass alongside Liz's Dragon Garden. 

This specimen was not the yellow color most commonly associated with the species, but a dark brown with darker markings along its length. In fact had it not been for the extended hood I would have taken the markings as those of the night adder, a more frequent visitor. The Cape Cobra is known to be one of the most dangerous species of Cobra on the continent. Its venom is made up of neurotoxins and possibly cardiotoxins, and without an anti-venom a bite will result in death within one to ten hours. Its diet consists of small rodents, lizards, frogs, birds and other snakes. It will climb trees, and one of its favorite pastimes is to raid the nests of the Sociable Weaver.

New clients for old = never

I found myself in something of a quandary a couple of weeks back. It was just after I had done some self-marketing on LinkedIn, adding a score or more of contacts to my network. I have a couple of clients that I would describe as 'bread and butter' clients, one in South Carolina and the other here in South Africa. They have each supplied me with regular assignments on a month to month basis, and I have good and well established rapport with them.

After my bit of self-marketing I received a request for a quotation from a corporate body for whom I had never written before..The assignment was for rewriting an entire technical website, something that I have done before and am perfectly capable of. However in this particular case the request was accompanied by a 38-page brief. Pages had to be written tab by tab and each one approved before progressing to the next. The whole job had to be completed in what, to me, was an unacceptable deadline, which would have meant placing my regular clients on the back burner.

The situation was somewhat delicate to me, but in the end I determined that my regular clients could never be placed in such a situation, and so I wrote to the corporate contact turning down the work and in doing so the chance of a fat cheque. The question is, did I do right?

More ramblings of the mind

This past weekend I entertained three Italian friends who are currently touring South Africa - it was such a breath of fresh air to have the house come alive again. Liz has been back in WA  for coming up to 10 months and I have been in danger of  becoming a recluse, so to have the house suddenly bursting full of European energy has meant a lot to me. Thank you my friends.

Several years ago my daughter Julie went to a clairvoyant for a reading. It must have been during the last few years of the 1900s, for I had been separated from my then wife for several years. Julie told me that the medium had told her that her father would meet someone from overseas and spend many happy years together. I took the news with a pinch of salt, having resigned myself to spending my autumn years in South Africa. Since then a lot of water has passed beneath the bridge.

Julie moved to the USA, met and married Jake and is now the proud mother of three beautiful children in New Hampshire. Then on Christmas Day in 2001 I received an email from Liz in reply to an ad I has placed in one of those dating services. We chatted for several months, and to cut a long story short, she flew to South Africa, I was divorced from my first wife, and on May 2nd 2005 married Liz.  We are completely compatible soul mates, and in the 10 years we have been together have not had bad words once.

By the time I rejoin Liz on the other side of the Pond I will have spent 40 years, give or take a couple of months, in Southern Africa. The first nine were spent in what was then Rhodesia, where the people, white and black, look the same and even sound the same as down here, but are so completely different. Everyone was friendly and no-one was afraid of a little hard work. I had dozens of friends in Rhodesia, but can count on one hand the number of true friends I have made in South Africa. My Italian friend has persuaded me to watch the movie The Truman Show, in which he likens the role played by Jim Carrey to that of the typical South African, oblivious of everything outside his immediate environment.  I will watch it with great interest.

I have recently been commissioned to write numerous articles on Positive Thinking and related subjects. For several years I have taken a close interest in Quantum physics, the science of physics at a sub-atomic level. Billions of dollars are spent each year in  Quantum physics research, and scientists have shown that many of the phenomena that are known as paranormal can, in fact, be explained quite logically at quantum levels. These include such phenomena as telekinesis, near death experience, telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, ghosts and UFOs. There is also wide belief, though not yet proof, that our consciousness is a quantum event. This would explain why, when I am chatting with Liz more than 10,000 miles away, we frequently think and say identical things at the same moment. in time.

What is Time, anyway? Well it is the one commodity that is given to each of us for free. We each have a limited amount of it, and so it is in everyone's best interest to make the best of it. Think of all that wasted time when you are stuck in a traffic jam - that used to be the best part of 2 hours a day when I lived in Midrand. Moving to the Eastern Cape did away with all of that. Unless I drive into Grahamstown or Port Alfred I am lucky to see a dozen vehicles a day. But think of all that extra time I have. I cannot believe how much time is wasted - if only people thought about it a little more, they could completely change their lives for the better, like I did.