From the past

The necrophiliac genealogist in the family has been spending the cold weather working on her tablet exploring the furthest extends of the Jones family tree In the process she has been discovering some rather unusual events.

In 1614 William Holland, a successful mercer of Chichester endowed his old school at Steyning, Sussex with lands and rents to maintain the school with additional funds for a headmaster and up to 50 boy boarders.  During the early 18th century the school had fallen on hard times with almost no pupils.  Moreover the schoolmaster was discovered to be embezzling the funds.  The school building hadn’t been painted in almost 100 years.

Apparently the situation was saved by an ancestor of mine, Mr George Airey who arrived in 1840 as the new schoolmaster.   George was a distant relative on my paternal grandmother’s side.  He stayed at the school for 30 years.  Steyning Grammar School still exists <link here>.

We were both rather amused by one of George’s antics

“he always cut the boys’ toenails himself when their feet were washed once a week in the dining room – there were to be no ingrowing toenails in Steyning!”

Children had their feet washed once a week!  What about the rest of their little bodies?

For the second morning in succession we’ve woken to find the canal iced over.  Yesterday it was thin but by this morning it was twice as thick.

But we’re having lovely clear days with a blue sky.

I’ve been wondering how much useable life is left in the laptop battery.  This can be achieved on a Windows machine using the following commands

• Click Start button and type "cmd" (without quotes) in the search programs and files box.
• In the command prompt, type "cd %userprofile%\desktop" (without quotes) and press Enter
• Next type "powercfg -energy" (without quotes) and press Enter

It will enable a trace for 60 seconds. When the process is finished, an HTML file will be generated on your desktop including all the details you need. 

Our laptop has lost 25% of its total capacity since we bought it.

The query arose after I discovered our Garmin car gps battery has virtually no life left in it.  Of course boaters know batteries don’t last forever so at some stage the laptop battery will have to be replaced.