Readly looks to be good value

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If you like magazines you should definitely take a look at Readly. For the price of a couple of magazines a month you can get to read pretty much all of them. The reading experience is very good on iPad. The magazines load up smartly and moving around them is a breeze. You can also read on your PC. There are quite a few crossword magazines which I thought was a bit silly at first. Turns out that you can screen shot the pages and then print them. So if you like word searches etc etc then that must makes the deal even more compelling.

Some of the “magazines” are those collection ones that you find in the newsagents. I like reading these and there are quite a few, from photography to piano playing.

Our local library uses the RB app to make available a bunch of free magazines (you really should be reading these) but the Readly app is much better and the range of reading is enormous.

If you’re looking for a few things to read during the lockdown I reckon this is a good bet. And you get two months free membership if you sign up.

Note: I’ve not got anything free from Readly, I just think that they provide a good product.

Thanks for the free book. Whoever you are.

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Whilst enjoying our government mandated walk in the outside earlier this week we came upon a blue Ikea bag full of kids books in splendid condition. Over the bag was displayed a note that said “From our house to your house. Please feel free to take one of our books”. What a nice thing to do. And number one granddaughter loves books. So I picked up a book, checked the location of the house (it was the one with rainbows in the window) and then we completed our exercise.

The next day we headed out with a “thank-you” note. When I get to the location of the blue bag I look for the rainbow in the window and find that two adjacent houses have rainbows. Dratt. Now I don’t know who to thank.

So, in the extremely unlikely event that the generous family actually read my blog I’d like to say thank you here.

Just had a thought. If I find out who they are I could give them a free copy of Begin to Code with C#. Not sure what they’ve done to deserve that though…….

Busy Fibre

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Earlier this month I re-imaged my PC. Using your skill and judgement, can you work out from the above graph of internet usages when this was?

The two peaks are around 60G each, which is rather impressive. It’s a good thing I’m on an unlimited contract. It’s also a good thing I’m on KC Lightstream fibre to the house. I shudder to think how long it would have taken to download this much content a few years ago.

The case of the haunted HomePod

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Well, that was spooky. Being a lazy sort of person I have a habit of asking my Apple HomePod to play my favourite tunes. This used to work well, with the device duly serving up a bunch of what my sister used to call “middle of the road cr*p”. However, lately it seems that the HomePod has decided that my tastes have changed to jangly guitar rock and obscure Japanese bands. Most strange. At first I thought it was Apple’s algorithms deciding it might be fun to test the limits of my taste, but today I resolved to try and find out why the HomePod thought my tastes had changed to much.

The answer is kind of interesting. The latest release of the HomePod software has the ability to recognise the voices of family members. But you have to enable this. And if you don’t enable this recognition the HomePod uses a default account for the person doing the talking. And for some reason it had fixed on number one son’s account. It must have picked up his presence on the network a while back and decided that his was the voice of power. So for the last couple of weeks I’ve been living with his tastes.

I just had to set my account as the default user and enable voice recognition and I’m back in a world of Steely Dan and the like.

Home Networking Tips

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I’m sure that most of my readers know this stuff, but just in case you don’t, here are some home networking tips. Feel free to add yours at the bottom in the comments.

  • If you can use wire, use wire. Nothing like a wired connection. If your laptop doesn’t have a socket you can get a USB adaptor (search Amazon for USB network). It makes a big difference.

  • You can also get boxes that let you send network connections over the mains wiring in your house.

  • Switch your router off and on again. It really works.

  • Try changing your WiFi channel to improve performance. Some channels are susceptible to interference from Microwave ovens and the like. Your KC router should automatically scan for a quiet channel when you reboot it, so you might find this will ease your problems a bit. There are WiFi scanner apps that you can get to tell you which channels are in use in your area. Take a look at Vistumbler if you have a PC.

  • Look at WiFi signal boosters if you have any “hard to reach” parts of the house.

  • If you keep files at home remember security. Don’t have only one copy, and don’t leave important data lying around. Tools like Microsoft Onedrive are a great way to put your files in the cloud so that they are secure. They can even find old versions if you make a bad edit.

  • Remember to “switch off” every now and then and just do something that doesn’t involve the computer (that’s the one I’m worst at following)….

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.