Mending dishwashers

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Christmas with all the family around. What better time for the dishwasher to go wrong? It still washes fine, but the trays of dishes have a habit of dropping off their support rails and plunging into the bottom of the machine when you load it.

Fortunately, I’m a lot better at repairing dishwashers than music players. A quick search of the internets revealed that it is very easy to get replacements for the wheels on the bottom of the tray. These had worn to the point of extreme wonkiness. The ones I found were identical to the originals and a lot less wonky. Result.

Breaking Bad Escape Room

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Today we went to an escape room. This is becoming something of a Christmas Tradition (tm). Well, we’ve done it twice. Last year were were breaking into a bank. This year we were in the lab. It was great. I think it was even better than the last one.

We managed to complete the tasks and get out in 59 minutes and 59 seconds (which may be as much a comment on the generosity of our hosts as much as anything else).

If you are in Hull you really should check out this. It’s a great experience.

Sega Mini Christmas

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I hope you had a great Christmas. I did. My big present was a tiny replica of a game console I never got around to owning. It’s a Sega Mini. It’s tiny, but comes with a couple of full size wired controllers. And it works a treat. It produces a nice solid HDMI output which you can scale to fit your widescreen telly and there are forty games built in. The ones I’ve played have been great fun. I really like Streets of Rage, particularly in two player mode. For the price you get a lot of entertainment.

Paid my Office 365 Subscription

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I paid my annual Office 365 subscription today. And I don’t mind doing it. It’s around the price of a proper video game and it gives me a whole bunch of online storage along with all of Microsoft Office to work with.

I ‘m a great believer in paying for things that I use. Two reasons:

  • the business model is nice and clear. I’m giving them money and they are giving me a service. I don’t want to waste brain power trying to work out how my suppliers are making a living. I also don’t want to have to worry what will happen when the venture capital runs out and the service is withdrawn.

  • I like my suppliers to have some “skin in the game”. If something breaks I want them working to fix it otherwise they won’t get paid.

Paying the Untidiness Tax

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While I was assembling devices earlier this week I discovered that I was finding it hard to work because my desk was a bit of a mess. Having thought about it, I now regard an untidy desk as a kind of “tax on effort”. If it takes ages to find the solder after you’ve put it down then you will take longer to build things. And losing the thing you’ve just made can really slow down development.

This new way of looking at the situation, along with half price storage boxes at Hobbycraft, has had me spend the last couple of days putting my stuff in order and clearing the desks. The idea is that when I want to work on one project I get out the bits for that project, work on it, and then put them away afterwards.

Let’s see how long it lasts….

Potato Clock

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First thing yesterday morning number one wife told me that she was going to get a potato clock. This threw me completely. I remembered from years ago a demonstration which showed you can power a clock from a potato (you can buy kits) but I didn’t think that science experiments were on the agenda in any particular way.

Then the fog cleared. What I should have heard was “get up at eight o’clock”. Fair enough.

In search of a backslash

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A few years ago, at an MVP Summit, I bought a keyboard from the Microsoft Store. The discount was very pleasing and the keyboard was very comfortable. I thought this made me a winner.

However, it did come with a bit of a sting in the tail, in that had the american layout, what with being sold in America. I set the Windows 10 language to match, but then I found that my pesky muscle memory was causing me to type the wrong keys every now and then. So I found a halfway house solution, using the american keyboard with the PC set to the UK layout. As long as I rely on my muscles and not my eyes to decide which key to press, it works very well. Except for the backslash key. That doesn’t seem to exist anywhere that I can find. I have workarounds, I’ve been known to search for the word “backslash” and then copy the required character from the resulting display. I can also open PowerShell and copy the character from there (you can see that I’ve given this some thought)

Anyhoo, I’m doing some C development at the moment where I seem to need the backslash key quite a lot, and so I’ve decided to ditch my american keyboard and go back to my slightly less comfy one which has the UK layout. It occurs to me that the twenty quid or so that I saved by buying a non UK keyboard has been well and truly earned. Perhaps there’s a lesson here about false economy, but I’m far to old to learn something like that…..

Password management is a thing

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When I was younger, more innocent and the internet was a friendly place (remember netiquette?) I thought that picking an out of the way phrase and using it for my passwords was a good idea. Then, a few years later, I realised that this was in fact a silly idea and started using different passwords for all my accounts. Which is just as well.

Earlier this week I received an email with my venerable old password phrase as the message subject and containing a link to a pdf document. I haven’t opened the pdf document (if that is what it is) or replied to the email. I can only assume that someone has come across my old password on a dead account, found that it doesn’t work anywhere else and is trying to use their knowledge of that one password to bounce me into revealing a few more secrets. Good luck with that.

So, I’ve checked all my passwords to make sure that none of them are harking back to the past, I’ve also signed up to a password manager and changed my important passwords into new ones, just in case.

Comic Con in Birmingham

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I’m never quite sure why I go to Comic Con in Birmingham. It’s quite a drive, there and back from Hull in a day. And the most expensive thing I ended up buying was the ticket for the car park. But we had a wonderful time. It’s rather like being at a great fancy dress party, where they also sell lots of interesting things.

Each time I think about making a costume, and each year I don’t do much - although last year I did buy what was the basis of the “Air Quality Top Hat”.

I’m not sure if I’ll be going in a costume next year, but I am sure I’ll be going..

The Ikea test

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I was assembling an Ikea bed today. I rather like assembling their furniture. Their instructions are very good, once you take the time to understand them. I failed on one bit and had to undo some parts I’d put in the wrong place. It wasn’t hard, but you had to focus a bit. And it gave me an idea.

You may have noticed that in the UK we are having an election. This will probably decide nothing and do little to arrest the spiral of once Great Britain into irrelevance. In the old days this country was a great place to be. Nowadays it is just a great place to be rich. Anyhoo, I think I’ve hit upon the perfect test for any would-be political leaders. I’d ask them to do what I just did. Take the instructions, work out what they mean and then build something. If you can’t you’re not allowed near the levers of power. Better yet, make them work in teams to do it.

From what I’ve seen of the present crop that should get rid of a pretty large number of them.

Adventures in Data Entry

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“Just type in the EID number of your device” said chap at the other end of the support chat. “It’s the 32 digit number that you can get from the About page” he added helpfully.

No worries then.

Maybe it’s my advanced age, but I really hate typing in great big numbers like this. Particularly where the consequences of getting it wrong are that nothing will work. So, I came up with a solution:

  1. Take picture of the About page on your phone and crop out just the digits in the image.

  2. Transfer it to your PC.

  3. Drop into an empty Word document as an image.

  4. Set the image to be behind the text.

  5. Then type the digits on top of the numbers in the image until it looks right (see above).

  6. Then cut the completed text out of the document and paste it into the chat window.

Worked for me.