Bring back good stuff: Humax PVR

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By rights the personal video recorder should be a dead device. It was in our house for a few months. I had thought that the rise of streaming services would remove the need for you to own a device that records programmes off air. I was wrong though. The FreeView user interface on our TV is not just bad, I think it is actively hostile. Finding programmes on the different platforms is uniformly horrible. The iplayer site deserves a special mention here, in that it seems able to work out exactly what I want to watch and then hide it.

In contrast the YouView programme guide is a masterpiece of simple design. You just scroll back into the past and get the programmes that you have told it to record for you. And you can skip past the adverts.

So today I went up into the loft, found the required shiny box and plumbed it back into our system downstairs. It’s a very old device, but I don’t think it has been bettered.

Bring back good stuff: The Wii U

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I’ve just got my Wii U down from the loft. I’m a bit cross with myself for putting it up there. Being Nintendo hardware it of course just worked. Even though it is eight years or so old. And the games are still awesome. Its interesting that the devices have held their value quite well, and there are also plenty of Wii U games for sale in the second hand shops around town too. I think there are quite a few people out there who see it as a bit of an unrecognised gem. It certainly gives you a gaming experience unlike any other, with some very interesting asymmetric game options, particularly for party games.

The other wonderful thing about the Wii U is that it runs all the original Wii games, so that I was able to fire up Wii Sports again and have a few games of tennis. Wonderful fun.

Recursive purchasing

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I was in HMV today and they had a couple of books that I really fancied. It turns out that reduced “with any purchase” works with another book that is also reduced “with any purchase”.

Oh, and the “Damn Fine Cherry Pie” book is excellent. It is a cookbook based on “Twin Peaks”. It has a whole bunch of very unhealthy but totally awesome looking recipes, along with dressing tips for the perfect Twin Peaks gathering and even some origami. Amazing value at less than three quid.

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.