In settings: windows update, my status shows up to date, last check 14/12/22. Pressing the check for updates  button does nothing. I tried running the Windows update troubleshooter, and it gets as far as "checking for requested reset", and nothing happens, apart from the green progress bar running. It will sit like that for many minutes.

The computer is a 3 year old desktop, core i5 Intel, 8mb ram. The hard drive has 80% storage available.

Any ideas or hints?

Edited to add - I run Malwarebytes, and Windows Defender. Neither report any problems.

The sun has many characteristics that are precisely fine tuned to support life on earth, but according to many evolutionists that is nothing to make a fuss over. Many insist our sun is nothing special. 

The famous astronomer Carl Dagan once said, ÔÇ£Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.ÔÇØ┬á

Is our sun ordinary? Not at all. Our sun is very unusual. ItÔÇÖs brighter than about 85% of all stars and has more mass than about 90%. In fact we should be very thankful that our sun is not an average star. HereÔÇÖs why. About 75% of all stars are red dwarfs. These emit about 5% of the light output of our sun. If the earth revolved around one of these our planet would be extremely hostile to life. To be warm enough the earth would have to orbit extremely close to the star. That would create a tidal lock where the same side of the earth would always face the star. Photosynthesis would be impossible on the earthÔÇÖs night side and possibly the day side as well because of the reddish light. So there would be no plant life, no food and no oxygen for us. Even worse than that, red dwarfs are unstable and they flare frequently. That would sterilise the earth if we were unlucky enough to closely orbit such a star.┬á

So 75% of all stars are unsuitable for us. Of the remaining 25% many of them are also unsuitable - theyÔÇÖre too unstable or they emit too much radiation for life to be possible nearby. Even among massive stars the sun is unusual and even among class g stars such as our sun, more than half of them are in binary or multiple systems. These systems make it much more difficult for there to be a stable climate on any planet that revolves around them. Many of them would not be able to keep any planets in stable orbits. The more we examine the universe, the more unusual our sun appears. For years astromoners have been looking for solar twins - stars with characteristics similar to our sun.┬á

Despite examining thousands of stars astromoners have discovered only a handful of candidates for twins and even these these few candidates still have significant differences from our sun. So we see that the sun is not average at all - itÔÇÖs very special.

I just thought that you might find that interesting.

My partner has just bought a 2019 Nissan March, which has a restrictor in the fuel filler so the pump nozzle will not go all the way in, and makes filling a pain. Can this be removed, and if so, how?

https://tinyurl.com/2hww2ntf

If these were law abiding citizens riding in the back of a ute or hanging out of windows stopping traffic and the like they would hit on us like a ton of bricks, but for these feral assholes they do nothing. Gangs rule the country dont they?

I know pumpkins are not in season yet but my local New world have little green buttercup squash for $13 and grey pumpkins for $18. ItÔÇÖs totally insane!!! So glad I have about 6 pumpkin plants in my garden I just have to wait till March to harvest them.

Was able to set up a new laptop with a local account only following the guide HERE

Basically, 

• connect internet initially
  
• then at the sign in form, open a command prompt with┬áSHIFT F10 and kill the internet with ipconfig /release
  
• then hit the back arrow top left corner of the sign in form, which takes you back to a new form asking for the user name and password
  

The son of the people who set up the first charity hospital here has gone missing; he'd been working as part of a team evacuating people & delivering aid there. I hope he & the other missing person are OK.


https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/1...o-his-work


"A Christchurch aid worker Andrew Bagshaw was working on the frontline of war-torn Ukraine when he went missing.

No idea if this is anything to be concerned about, I highly doubt that it will make you sicker than previous strains, but it appears its evading any natural immunity from previous covid infections.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/heal...995204002/

I have just installed Tetra copy to my Win11 PC. It seems fast in copying two large files and so I am happy with that compared to Windows copy and paste. My only problem at this stage is the font size. The font size is very small for my poor eyes and I cannot find a way to increase the font size for just this program, does anyone have any ideas?

Once more it's that time of the year and this interesting discussion will be updated as is done every year at this time.

It's possible to go back through the years and see what was expected then for the future.

It's a substantial read to go through all the years so probably better just to concentrate on this year.

Bruce Sterling is the man to watch: "Years ago <bruces> said something to the effect of "it's not global
warming, it's global weirding"" [BTW, roots of "weird" mean "to control fate"]

Also from Bruce:

"I'd like to list some of the tech phenomena I spent a lot of time
with last decade, that this decade doesn't seem to respect much, or
to care much about. Tech oligarchs still like to handwave about
them, but they're met with sullen public resistance.

Metaverses -- Facebook Horizon Worlds, virtual reality, augmented
reality

There doesn't seem to be a compelling use-case for any of these.
People mock Zuckerberg's efforts here for a lot of different
reasons, but I don't think Meta's Metaverse it would be a success in
modern cultural circumstances even if it was technically brilliant
and a sensual delight to strap on your head.

Web3, NFTs

It seems pretty clear now that this impressive craze was not so much
"blockchain art" as "lockdown art." It's what art people do
culturally when they're not allowed out of the house. One of the
most entertaining cultural freakouts I ever personally witnessed,
but it was convulsive and in many ways quite sad."

Here's another interesting quote from someone repling:

"One tech that was only mildly splashy but succeeded big has been
"collaborative filtering" which is what they called it at the MIT
Media Lab, where it was invented. "If you like this, and others who
like it also like these other things, then odds are that you too
will like them." I was there when it was demonstrated to Jeff Bezos
who saw right away its potential. It's been bedrock to how Amazon
functions for decades now. It will likely never go away."

https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue...age01.html