BH spotted the very striking caterpillar of one of these moths on our back lawn early this morning, otherwise known as the pale tussock moth. Alerted by the newspaper, we first thought of the oak processionary moth but google rapidly disabused us of this idea and then the search term 'yellow furry caterpillar' brought up the right answer. And along the way I have also learned that the processions are a threat to humans, not to oak trees, as I had thought.
Google also did well even earlier this morning. I had discovered the hard way that my new HP laptop does not have a break key, that is to say when I wanted to break into a running Excel program. The search term 'HP laptop break in' took me to an HP help forum where various people had encountered this very problem and one of them suggested 'Ctrl + Alt + Fn + Pause', which did indeed work for me too. A bit more fiddly than the 'Ctrl + Brk' I had before, but I can live with that. Apparently the trouble is that the pause key is also the (right hand) shift key, and the rule built into the keyboard for other reasons is that shift is more important than pause, so you have to indulge in trickery to make the keyboard realise that you really do mean pause rather than shift.
Why on earth did HP find it necessary to make the change? Don't they know about not fixing things that ain't broke?
Much later, I now find that the common or garden escape key does the business. I am left to wonder how HP might better have got this information to me. A tricky one given the number of small changes of this sort, few of which are of interest to any particular punter.
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