Crocodile Dentist is still a thing

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When our kids were a lot younger than they are now we had a lot of fun with a game called “Crocodile Dentist”. The gameplay is simple enough: pull teeth out from the crocodile and be careful not to pick the one which makes him close his jaws and chase you across the table. Last we we got out our old copy and played it with a new member of the family and discovered that it still retains its nerve wracking charm.

It’s very pleasing to find that you can still buy it. I guess this means that there might be someone out there who has spent nearly all their working life producing copies of the game. That would look great on any CV.

Last Chance at the Little Bookshop

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The Little Bookshop in Leeds is one of my favourite places on the planet. Really. It’s just a lovely place with a great selection of kids books and a splendid cafe. We went there today for lunch and it was great.

There was a definite “end of term” feel about the whole affair, as if we were doing something for the last time for a while. I really hope that the nasty things that are coming down the tracks don’t put lovely places like this out of business. I wish them (and all places in the same position) the very best of luck.

Recycling for fun and HP's profit

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I had to do it at some point. So today I replaced all the toner cartridges in my printer. It’s been moaning for a while abut low toner and today I noticed that the print quality was getting patchy. I can’t complain too much, because the low capacity free cartridges did last quite a long time.

I thought I’d try and recycle them. This turned out to be quite easy. HP has a site where you can go to print out a postage label. Then you just bundle the cartridge boxes up, stick on the label and drop the package off a the Post Office. This is good news for the planet, and even better news for HP who can put fifty pence worth of toner in them and then sell them again for sixty quid. It would be nice is there was a formal scheme where you got discount on replacement cartridges if you’ve sent back the old ones, but I’ve not seen anything like that just yet.

A mathematical puzzle....

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This is not a picture of the right rolls. If I had brought the right rolls home I would have been able to take a picture of them. Then again, that would have meant I would not be blogging about them….

It turns out that “buy two for a reduced price” deals only really pay off if you remember to take both items home with you.

Last week I went to the Co-op to buy some bread rolls. The packs were 1.20 for one pack or 1.50 for two.

So I bought two packs. I’ve no idea why you would only buy one. Anyhoo, when I got home I found that I’d left one of them at the shop. Idiot. There are a number of ways of looking at this:

  • I’m 30 pence worse off because I’ve spent 30 pence more than the price of buying one.

  • I’m 1.50 worse off because that is the cost of replacing the pack I lost.

  • I’m 75 pence worse off because that is the cost of the pack that I lost.

I’m going for the 30 pence option….

I've made a cube

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It looks like I’ve made a cube. Although it occurs to me that I could have just joined three squares together, since you’ve no way of seeing the back from this photograph. After a week or so of pretty solid 3D printing and assembly I have learnt two things:

  • it looks really cool

  • it’s very hard to photograph

I was going to make it into a totally portable cube that could be passed around. However, I’m re-thinking this for a number of reasons:

  • it will be rather hard to fit all the electronics and the battery into the cube interior

  • the battery life will not be that great

  • somebody might drop it

So, I’m thinking of just mounting the cube on a plinth and turning it into a rather cool light.

Update: Change of plan (as if you care). Anyhoo, I’m going to make the full fat, chuckable cube and then fashion a base which I can use to turn it into a lamp.

Plumbing the depths

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Recently our electric shower has been indicating that it is not a well machine. Last week a lever linked to the power button fell off and in recent days the shower has been making the kind of noise that X-Wing Starfighters make just before they crash into the ground. And today the noise acquired a new rumble that wasn’t there before. So I guess it is new shower time again.

I’ve been installing new showers for ages. Sometimes with jetlag. Maybe I should find a more reliable brand. For me the key thing about shower fitting for me is that putting the new shower in place is the easiest part of the process. Getting the old one off the wall can however be problematic.

The shower has these highly efficient pipe gripping fittings. One of the best parts of the installation instructions is the bit where they advise you not to push your finger into the pipe hole. (I was of course instantly seized with an urge to do just that). The pipe grips are based on a Chinese finger trap design. The harder you try to pull the pipe out, the tighter it is gripped.

In fact, they grip so well that every new shower is supplied with a “push fit release tool”. The diagram above (which has to be studied very carefully) shows how the tool can be used to release these grips. However, if you use it wrongly you just end up with a bunch of skimmed knuckles and a shower that is even more firmly attached than before.

If you ever find yourself removing an “Mira Event XS” remember that the special tool should be placed on top of the fitting and then pushed vertically down to release the grip. You should not push the release tool into the enticing little gap underneath the fitting and try to use this to force the fitting up.

Of course, if this thing fails (and it will) you end up like me, trying to solve the problem by placing an open-ended spanner on top of the fitting and hitting it with a hammer. This will either release the shower from the pipe or give you a new problem so large that you will forget about all your troubles with shower removal. Fortunately I was lucky this time.

I thought I’d won once I’d removed the shower, but it seems that fate had other ideas. I wanted to replace the hose and the shower rose too. Unfortunately the design department at the shower company had made some tiny changes to shape of the hose so that the new one doesn’t play well with the old fitting left on the wall from the previous shower. So I had to take the wall fitting off. Then I find that the design department has made another change (thanks folks) so that the new fitting only needs one support bolt, leaving me with a couple of spare holes in the bathroom wall. So I had to find an elegant way of hiding these. Wah. It’s almost as if the design department exists solely to make my life more difficult. That can’t be true. Can it?

Anyhoo, the whole thing is now sorted to my satisfaction and we can enjoy smooth and quiet showers again. For a while.

Selling books by mistake

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My first and only customer….

I’ve been blogging for quite a while. And the internet continues to surprise me. A while back I wrote a silly post about a book I found in a local Waterstones bookshop. Later I get a message from Erik saying he’d like to get hold of the book that nobody seemed to want. I went back to the store, asked the assistant to find the copy and sent it off. Erik has just sent me a picture of himself with his treasured text.

I really hope he finds it useful. For me it’s really nice that something silly that I did has had a useful result.

Fuses from history

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Ian gave me these ages ago. I did a blog post about how I’d put a 3 amp fuse in the microwave with predictably hilarious results. Next time he saw me he gave me a couple of packs of fuses with great big labels on them (as if their different colours weren’t enough).

Anyhoo, today I actually used one of them. The bulb in my lovely magnifying lamp failed and as a parting shot it took out the fuse in the mains plug. So I finally had a use for a 3 amp fuse.

Thanks again Ian.

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.