Mystery dust.

[Bill]

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been working hard preparing my car for sale. After it was fully washed, I removed the old wax and tar spots with a solvent then used a clay bar to remove all surface contaminants. Finally, two coats of good quality wax and the paintwork looked like it had just come out of the showroom. This was all done inside my garage to ensure it couldn’t get messed up with rain or bird poo etc.

So last night I was horrified to see it was now completely covered with a fine layer of what looked like the sort of fine sand or dust that you often get when southerly winds blow in from Africa. The problem was that the car was inside, with just a small window open and the winds were coming from the east. Later that evening I noticed people in the area posting on Facebook complaining of the same thing but that didn’t really explain how it got into my garage.

Now here’s the real mystery, this morning it’s all gone and the cars back to how it was. For a moment I wondered if I’d dreamt the whole thing, but the Facebook posts are still there, and my wife confirmed she saw it as well. Maybe I’ll wake up in a bit and realize it was all a dream.

Is it possible that some kind of airborne contaminant that looked and felt like fine sand could get in then slowly dissolve away?

I’m baffled or cracking up.

 

Bill 😊

[Evil Sid]

could it have in from under the roof edges at all?

4 hours ago, Bill said:

Is it possible that some kind of airborne contaminant that looked and felt like fine sand could get in then slowly dissolve away?

the engineers answer to that is yes.

any question that starts "is it possible" should be immediately answered at that point as "yes". the reasoning being that given enough time and resources anything is possible. the answer to the next question "how much time and resources" is as much as is required to provide the desired outcome.

as for it disappearing then maybe the wind that blew it in blew it out again.

[Bill]

I was wondering if it could have been something like tree pollen, which is quite high just now, and unlike sand, it’s organic and might have shrunk away to nothing overnight.

Other than that, I can only think the fairies might have been out with their dusters. 😊

 

Bill 😊

[Bill]

Well Sid, I finally worked out where the problem was. The dust didn't disappear, it was there all along and I just couldn't see it. It turns out it was due to the angle of the sun that made it visible just before sunset; and the fact that other people reported the same in the area was just a coincidence.

Now here’s another thing, no mystery this time more a discovery. I've just realised that the computer has an excellent voice to text facility and this post has been made completely using it with only a few minor corrections to the odd word and punctuation. I discovered it by accident and found that the TV sound was being displayed on the screen more or less perfectly, a bit like teletext. I remember using some of the early speech to text systems but this is in a different league.

 

Bill 😊

[Evil Sid]

I have replaced my graphics card after the fan ground to a halt due to dust. had it all in bits but the damage was done. that led me to find out that the power supply was on its way out as well.

so i took the opportunity to finally migrate to windows ten, not something i was keen on due to the fact it buggered up my laptop when t was first installed from the freebee from microsoft.

turns out it has something called cortana which i assume is the microsoft equivalent of alexa.

not sure if it has a text to speech facilty though as i have only had it on the system for a week. my phone has that though for texting rather than typing. not sure how it would cope with my accent when i have the false teeth in though.......🤣

[Bill]

I replaced my laptop earlier this year so I had no option but to go on Windows 10. The speech to text I'm using is built into Microsoft Word and it seems to manage OK even with my false teeth. Again I'm using it now to type this or not to type this. It's pretty good but just had to delete out “do you want a coffee” accidentally added by Mrs Green. 😊

As for fans clogging up, that's been a problem all through my working life. My company provided annual service checks on all the machines we supplied which basically meant opening them up and blowing them out with compressed air. A dirty job, but vital to keep the machines running. We used to go into some offices full of PCs where the fans were working so hard to try and keep the processor cool you could hardly hear yourself think. Once cleaned out though the office became almost silent.

 

Bill 😊

[Evil Sid]

i always do mine cleaning on a three month basis, still get a big build up of dust though, as for the fan even a good blasting with an air duster, brush an ddespite several applications of wd40 it was still seized solid.

i am still using an old version of office as nearly all my stuff was written on it and i am not happy about office 365, having to renew the license every 12 months or it packs up seems a bit annoying. i know there are other free office style programs about but mine works so why change it if i don't have to is my reasoning. also not sure if the latest office will be backward compatible been caught out like that before.

i do know what you mean about the noise level though bill. there were times when my pc sounded like a turbo kicking in which was the time i would do the cleaning ahead of schedule. current setup is just a quiet faint hum in the background.

[Bill]

Yes, I know what you mean, but if the fan ceases up its normally the bearings that’s gone so doubtful that dust would have caused that. My solar stuff uses a total of three fans and they're the small type that make a lot of noise and that was one of the reasons I installed them in the garage rather than in the house. Fortunately they’re temperature controlled so not running all the time.

As for Microsoft Word, I'm fortunate that my licence is covered as part of my companies group licence and if that was not the case, I doubt I'd bother as I only use Word for composing stuff I write on the forums. It does seem backwards compatible with my old files so no problem there.

I'm full of a cold at the moment with a bad cough, so I haven't been out anywhere in the last two weeks and as much as I like a pint, I just don't want to give my problems to any of my friends. Aside from that, I've hurt my back, my arm and wrist are still giving me problems and I've got a really sore toe that's causing me to limp quite badly. This getting old thing is a real bummer!

 

Bill 😊

[Evil Sid]

there are two undertakers near me if things start getting worse......⚰️

I know that getting old feeling. have arthritis in my right hip and though most of the time it is fine sitting down and getting up again are a right pain in the leg.

could well have been the bearings that have given up the ghost. not sure how old that particular graphics card is as i have rebuilt my pc at least twice.

would have got a new one but they don't seem to come with any way of fitting a cd drive which a lot of my software is on from original cds. oddly enough i found a box whilst i was looking for something else that has about twenty floppy disks in. no idea what is on them if anything and at present no way of finding out.....🕵️‍♀️

[Confused52]

1 hour ago, Evil Sid said:

would have got a new one but they don't seem to come with any way of fitting a cd drive which a lot of my software is on from original cds. oddly enough i found a box whilst i was looking for something else that has about twenty floppy disks in. no idea what is on them if anything and at present no way of finding out.....🕵️‍♀️

Both DVD/CD drives and floppy drives are available with USB. If you can borrow them you can create iso image files and vfd vitual floppy files which windows 10/11 can mount as a drive. If you are using a vitual machine for old software the USB floppies and CDs are usually able to be connected to the emulated OS allowing then to be used. Really old software such as Word for Windows 1.1 can be run like this on Windows 3.1 and hence get round the word incompatibility issues, sort of.

PS I am still using Office 2010 too. (Just watch what you connect to on the internet)

[Evil Sid]

both laptop and pc i have at present have cd/dvd drives, in fact my desktop has two. i do also have a usb dvd drive hat was given to me, works well apart from he tray having to be opened with a paper clip.

it is just strange not to have the option of a cd/dvd drive on a computer these days. i suppose it is all download from the net similarly with the tv streaming services less dvd players about and no need for room to store cd/dvd. no dust to worry about clogging the works up either.

office 2007 is my software bundle and is adequate for my use these days word and excel being the two elements i use most, mainly for bowls scores.

p.s. i have a good little program called gizmo that i downloaded a while back which allows you to set up virtual drives for iso's