Dead Dot Matrix

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Dot matrix printers eh? You leave them standing for a year and then when you go to use them again they don’t work.

In retrospect this was a bit silly. And my joy in finding that I could get complete set of inkjet cartridges for a fiver may have been misplaced as they might have gummed everything up. I’ve narrowed the fault down to the print head or something else. A replacement print head (which may or may not fix the problem) can be obtained for around twenty five quid. So the question is: do I spend the money on a new print head or do I throw the printer away?

Vinyl Memories

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My turntable belt arrived today, so I can now play my records again. I grabbed a few from the loft and fired them up. A few things sprang to mind:

  • you seem to have to do quite a bit just to play a record. There’s a lot of faffing around for 20 minutes of music. This is of course the inspiration behind my difficultifier of days gone by.

  • the sound is surprisingly good for a what a really primitive way of storing and retrieving sound

  • I really need to get myself a record cleaner

Having said all this, it was rather nice to hear all these sounds from the past.

Humber Street in Hull is Lovely

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There is some rather nice artwork on the buildings

The weather in Hull was glorious today. We spent a goodly amount of time wandering down Humber Street looking for somewhere nice for lunch. Loads of choices, we went for Bert’s Pizza at the end which turned out to b a splendid choice. If you want to see what the future of life in Hull is really going to be like you should really go and take a look at the Fruit Market area. There’s just so much going on, and it is all nice.

Jelly belts

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Number one son has discovered the joys of vinyl records. Today I thought I’d relive some of my youth and got my record deck down from the loft. Turns out that the drive belt has turned into a kind of jelly. Ugh.

Fortunately, through the magic of Amazon it turns out you can still get belts, and even the stylus, for my elderly Panasonic deck. The order went in today. Nostalgia beckons…

Always take some toys to meetings

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Today I had a meeting about Connected Humber CIC. We are trying to spread the word about what we are doing. I took some toys along, including the prototype Air Quality sensor and my Air Quality Top Hat.

This turned out to be a real win. Everyone was very impressed (or very polite). I reckon you should always have some toys to show off when you are trying to impress. This doesn’t mean you should push them into everyone’s face as soon as you start, but that if the conversation turns to “What have you made then?”, it is really nice to be able to pull something out of your bag.

Special delivery

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Bit of a commotion outside our house today. It started with the sound of helicopters hovering overhead, then motorcycle outriders hurtled down the road, followed by a couple of police squad cars, and finally an armoured truck. And then, with full sniper cover, a helmeted guard brought a package to our front door and rang the doorbell.

Turns out that it was just a printer cartridge delivery, but with the price of these things I’m not surprised by the precautions.

Mobile Phone Navigation is still rubbish

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Wrong side of the tracks….

The satnavs that I’ve used in cars are mostly OK. The ones I’ve used in phones are mostly awful. Some observations:

  • The official Apple Maps application for iPhone actually consumes power faster than a normal car USB connector can charge it. So on a long journey your phone can go flat even if it is plugged in. On the plus side, it does make for quite a good hand warmer.

  • The Google Maps application (which you switch to because the Apple Maps one kills the battery) has a navigation display that is obscured by appointments that pop up on the screen and have no obvious way of cancelling. This is great if you are on the way to a scheduled meeting. Not.

  • The Official Apple Maps app (which you decide to use for a short journey) just plain gets things wrong. Exhibit A above. Searched for the West Avenue car park in Filey, asked the phone to navigate me there. Got taken to a residential street across the railway from my destination. Rather than using the geographical location of the thing I’ve searched for (which it seems to know because it draws it in the right place) it instead navigates to the post code which covers an area including lots of wrong destinations)

O2 Apple Watch Data Fix

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After all the fun and games getting the Apple Watch on O2 I was hoping for a happy ending. But this didn’t happen because although we could quite happily make phone calls with the device all the network and SMS features were broken. I was thinking for a while that I’d have to ring up and they’d try to sell me another watch. Wah.

But the good news is that the fix was quite simple. I opened the Apple Watch app on the connected iPhone and then went to the Mobile Data tab. This shows you the data used by the watch. Just as the phone was heading to the page it displayed a “Carrier settings update” message and offered me the chance to confirm. After doing this the watch seems to work fine with SMS and mobile data. So, if you’ve bought one (or even several) Apple watches from O2 and can’t get the data to work you might like to try this.