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Python and boto3 knocking my broadband out

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I knocked up a script to download a number of large zip files from s3. Super simple with boto3 and Python but it was so effective at using my 100Mb/s network connection that everything else got knocked off the network including Chrome on the same PC. Luckily boto3 1.19.5 and later now support a bandwidth limit for s3 trasnfers so after adding that I was able to keep it at a sensible level. import boto3 from boto3.s3.transfer import TransferConfig print('boto3 version') print(boto3.__version__) # Download an S3 object - max_bandwidth is in Bytes per sec so 1024**2*5 is 5 MiB/s download_config = TransferConfig(max_bandwidth=1024**2*5) s3 = boto3.client('s3') s3_client = boto3.client('s3') s3_bucket = 'your_bucket_name' filename = 'your_file' with open(filename, 'wb') as f: print(f'Downloading {filename}') s3_client.download_fileobj(s3_bucket, filename_file, f, Config=download_config) See https://boto3.amazonaws.com/v1
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Spotify lyrics not showing

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Spotify have added lyrics display on screen which supposedly have been rolled out globally. We found that it seemed to work on some of our devices by not others. Having logged out/in on different devices we confirmed it was an account rather than a device of app problem. There are suggestions online about needing to create a new account or reinstall the app but this is an unhelpful red herring. The solution is to email spotify support and to ask them to fix it. They need to do something their side that resolves the account setup which takes a few days. We had the problem on a family account, the main account was fine but one of our other accounts refused to show lyrics. A quick email to support@spotify.com followed by some clarification had it sorted in a couple of days.
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Do your iPhone device photos end up on your PC as .heic photos? This seems like it's a good format for the future but lots of websites don't yet support it for uploading photos. Rather than switch back to jpg/png here's a quick way of converting when you need to: First, download and install libvips -  https://libvips.github.io/libvips/ Now open up a Powershell prompt in a folder that has the images you need to convert: ls *.heic | % {vips.exe jpegsave $_.FullName ($_.BaseName+'.jpg')} This will loop through and create a jpg file for every heic file in the folder.
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Visio for home users

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Are Microsoft trying to kill Visio? It looks like it's impossible to buy Visio by adding it to your Office 365 Home subscription. The only solution appears to be to create a separate (dummy) business account and add Visio to that subsciption -  https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_365hp-visio/where-is-visio-for-office-365-home-premium . I won't be doing that, time to look for an alternative!
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The computer says no

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I thought I’d finally bite the bullet and try to upgrade my parents broadband to a new provider. They have been on Demon forever, but the service has atrophied as they were first bought by Thus and then Vodafone. I visited the PlusNet and BT websites to find out what packages they could switch to only to end up with some rather strange errors: You don't have a compatible phone line. To provide you with a new service we will need to give you a new phone number The phone number and postcode supplied do not match; please try again. An online chat with PlusNet resulted in an impasse. Despite my parents having the number for 30 years apparently it wasn't valid and a new number was required - the computer says no! A bit of googling took me to the excellent BT community forums which showed this is a problem that other people have had. All the providers reference an Openreach database which contains phone numbers and addresses. It's entirely possible for this database to co
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Location: London, UK
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Microsoft and Child accounts......again

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So Microsoft still make this child account thing more difficult than it should be. Today I decided to try and set up child number three with his own MS account. I added him to family and this sent him an email with the contents: a@b.c would like you to join their family as a child.....Accept Invitation Clicking on the link resulted in a link to login to MS or create a new account. Clicking create new account resulted in a URL not found error. I then decided to just try and create his account via the normal MS create new account process (login.live.com). However I could get as far as creating his account and verifying his email address but this was invariably followed by: There's a temporary problem with the service.  Googling showed that I'm not the first person to see this so it obviously isn't temporary -  cannot-verify-microsoft-account-theres-a-temporary  from 2017. My guess is that once you've invited a child via a link then trying to create the accout via
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Laptop hard drive upgrade - moving to SSD

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My daughter's 'not that old' HP Pavilion laptop has been running like a dog since upgrading to Windows 10. Windows 10 seems to rely heavily on disk I/O and the machine was permanently at 100% disk in task manager. Replacing the 500GB HDD with an SSD was going to cost <£100 so I thought I'd give it a go. Certainly cheaper than buying a new laptop. I ordered an MX300 from Crucial that also comes with a software licence for Acronis True Image. I also ordered a USB 3.0 to 2.5 Inch SATA hard drive adapter to allow me to clone the disk first. I wasn't about to reinstall Windows or go through some involved restore process. When everything had a arrived I set about cloning the hard disk using Acronis True Image software that Crucial provided a link/key to. Perhaps I misunderstood the documentation, but I couldn't get cloning to work. Acronis's software requires you to reboot in order to kick off the clone process but every time I rebooted it just came back u
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