Smart Meter - Dumb System

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Today was going to be the day they installed our new smart meter so that we can watch our money go up in smoke in real time from the comfort of the kitchen. So I was up first thing in the garage throwing stuff into the car to clear a path to the meter ready for the swap.

The installer turns up, takes one look at the electricity meter and says he can’t fit a smart gas meter. Apparently my electricity meter is smart, but not smart enough. It is a SMET 1 when it needs to be a SMET 2. He leaves having done nothing and I headed off glumly to the tip .

I have really no idea why the installation of a smart gas meter is dependent on the electricity meter. I’m also annoyed because I deliberately waited until I knew that SMET 2 meters were being installed before getting our electricity meter done. Then they installed a SMET 1 meter anyway. I guess they had a warehouse full of the things.

Anyhoo, I’ve emailed the electricity company to ask for a meter upgrade. Let’s see how that turns out.

Golfing for real

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I’ve played a lot of golf recently. Or something. Most weeks you’ll find us firing up Walkabout golf for nine holes of fun and games. Today I got to find out if any of my Oculus Quest skills have transferred to the real world when we met up for a round of real crazy golf at Puttstars Leeds. I think my practice has made me a bit better, I can swing and hit the ball at a repeatable angle, which is nice. The major difficulty was that the greens played a lot slower, so lots of my shots fell short.

But it was still great fun. I can recommend Putstars Leeds, the folks there were friendly and they also had a whole bunch of video games. Great fun.

Stealth postman

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Our postman is lovely. Great bloke. But I think he has a bit of ninja in his soul. I think he may have perfected the art of stealth knocking. That or our doorbell is broken. This lunchtime we were having lunch (what were the chances eh?) and I received the message. “We have tried to deliver your package but nobody was home”. I hate it when that happens. I’m not in a particular hurry to use what’s in the package now being “returned to the sorting office” but this all delays the closure of actually getting the thing to my house, which I hate.

Fame at last. Or not.

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A while back I wrote a little post about ChatGPT. And then, in yesterday’s Observer I found one of their technology correspondents echoing my thoughts. “Aha!” I thought as I entered a comment on the piece making this point and linking back to my article “This is my chance to be recognised as a great seer with thousands of readers hanging off my every word”.

I checked my traffic stats this morning. They had gone down a bit. Oh well.

Wobbly network

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You know how it feels when you try to make something better and end up breaking everything. Well, today I went there. For a while I’ve been perplexed as to why the eero router next to where I work doesn’t connect to the wired network. The wire is plugged in and everything. I’ve been blaming lots of things, but today I thought I’d try to get to the bottom of the problem. So I unplugged the eero from the wire to see what happens. The answer was a bit of a surprise. All of the machines in front of me fell off the network. Everything was suddenly cut off from the internet. A quick check of network status from the service provider confirmed that things were still working (I once had all the networks in Hull fall over as I was doing some network changes at home. That was hilarious.) so it was definitely my fault.

Such is life. All the machines around me were definitely plugged in, but none of them could see the network anymore. I plugged the eero back into the network. And the machines all came back on line. Have you figured it out yet? Turns out that a cable in another room (I have a fairly tortuous home network arrangement) had become disconnected and taken the little network in my room offline. The eero in my room had noticed this and promptly reversed the way it was working. Rather than working as an access point hanging off its network connection it turned into a network connection for the tiny network in my room. That way the machines in my room stayed online, although they are now all running over WiFi. This explained the fairly appalling network performance of my computers and why the WiFi was always so busy. As soon as I fixed the broken connection everything came back to life and things got a lot faster for me, which was nice.

It would have been nice if something in the eero app could have told me what was going on. The information I get is very minimal and not that useful. It seems that to get a proper view of the network I have to pay Amazon a subscription. Which I’m far too mean to do.

Serendipity in the waste bin

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I decided today that the blog needs to be updated. I keep a diary of what I’ve been up to and the every now and then I sit down and write all the posts. I’ve no idea why I do this, it is just that I feel happier doing it than not.

Anyhoo, today I was creating the posts and I thought it might be fun to add a picture of the bottom of the boat that I tried to print earlier. It came off the print bed as it was printing so that all I had was a small chunk of the bottom of the keel and what looked like a ball of wool. Beautifully printed though. I’d dropped it in the waste paper bin so I had a little look to see if I could find it. I didn’t find it, but I did find an Aibo memory stick for the robot dogs that must have fallen off my crowded desk into the bin at some point over the last week. I’m really pleased I found this, they are quite hard to get hold of and very expensive. Plus it contains a tiny bit of “dog personality” that I really don’t want to lose.

So at least my blog is useful for something.

Space, the universe and everything at Hull Minster

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Tonight we went to see “Space, the universe and everything” at Hull Minster. It was great. A set of huge sound and light installations placed around the minster space. I didn’t take a camera, but it turns out that the iPhone is actually pretty good at capturing low light pictures. The pictures and the sounds were glorious and the venue just can’t be beat. If you can get to see this in Hull you should go. I think they are doing shows in other places too, if you get the chance you should definitely try to get there. Wonderful stuff.

Dentist fun

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Well, the boiler man couldn’t make it today, but the dentist yesterday was broadly OK, except for the filling I now have in my future. I’ve gone from “You’ve got good teeth” to “You’ve got good teeth for your age” to “You’ve got teeth?” in what seems to be a few short years. I was even complemented on my brushing technique. I was hoping for a lollipop or at least a sticker but I don’t think they do them for my age.

To the tip

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Went to the tip today. This is probably not an activity worthy of a blog post (although it is my blog) but the tip I go to is rather nice and getting there involves driving over a lovely “rickety bridge” which I’m sure has a troll living underneath it.

Each time I go I’m impressed by the increasing focus on recycling. They now help you go through the stuff you are bringing and direct you to the correct place to put it. Rather than pointing at a skip and saying “In there”.

Anhoo, it was as good a tip trip as I’ve had in a while. And it is now possible to walk to the bottom of the garage. Which is nice.

Cable Release

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This is called a cable release. You use it to trigger a camera. The right hand end screws into the shutter button and you press the plunger on the left hand end to fire the shutter without shaking the camera.

I’ve had to buy this one because my cable release has disappeared. I know that as soon as it arrives I will instantly find the original. I think it is one of the laws of the universe that this is how it works.