This is going to be a wonderful week. Starting today with a trip to the dentist, followed by a boiler service tomorrow and then an MOT test and service for the Cube on Wednesday. After which I’m probably going to do my taxes. So, an unappealing mix of pain and expense. My two least favourite things. Wish me luck.
This is the cable release I thought I had lost. I found it a few hours after the replacement arrived. What makes this even more annoying is that it was in exactly the place I thought it was. I found it when I tried to put the replacement cable release away. Oh well, I really needed two anyway…
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.
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.
Arranged for a boiler service next week. Now I just need to go into the garage and clear a path to the boiler for the plumber.
Solved two things in the kitchen today. The cutlery draw wouldn’t open properly and we couldn’t find the spatula anywhere. Turns out that the problems were related…
We let the dogs have a wander round over Christmas. I think they quite enjoyed it. Although I worry what the cat might be up to….
We even managed to light the Christmas Pudding
We had a lovely Christmas. I hope you all did too.
It’s becoming a family tradition (we’ve done it twice) to celebrate Christmas Eve with Hull Pies. Strongly recommended.
The tree is now up in the living room and the posh biscuits are now out. I think we are entering the Christmas Zone.
It seems to have got rather cold here. I’m having to give the computer hard sums so that it warms the room up.
If you are thinking about doing something, ask yourself whether it will move you forwards, backwards or sideways. If the answer isn’t forwards, don’t do it.
Apparently standing on one leg is healthy. And so is eating an apple. So I’m trying to do both at the same time as part of my lunchtime fitness regime.
The World Cup is coming. We’ve just signed up for Paramount+ at half price in the Black Friday sale. They’ll be winning ball games. We’ll be on a star ship saving the universe.
Is putting stickers on their laptop something that a person of nearly pensionable age should be doing?
Oh yes.
Once upon a time there was a greedy iphone. One day it decided to eat all its memory. “Yum yum” it said as gobbled up the last gigabyte for no discernible reason. The master of the iphone was very upset by this behaviour. Particularly as nothing now worked and he couldn’t run any programs or save any pictures. So he went on a journey on the internet to find out what kind of magic could cure his phone. He was even more upset when he discovered that even the greatest seers in the kingdom came back with “Thou must wipeth the whole thing and starteth again”. The master wondered why such a fundamental problem didn’t have a much simpler solution. Then he remembered that the wizards who had made the phone were probably busy adding tiny incremental features to the next version of the phone so that everyone in the kingdom could be persuaded to go out and buy it. This was much more lucrative work that fixing issues with phones that had already been sold.
So it came to pass that the master did indeed wipe his phone, removing everything and requiring a whole heap of re-configuration and re-registering of services. And eventually the master got a phone that was a lot less needy than before and all was well. Until the next time.
What do you do if you find yourself in Leeds with a small person to entertain? You take them to Maths City. It’s full of puzzles games and great things to do if you are interested in maths and if you like strangely shaped (and enormous) bubbles. We spent a happy hour and a bit there working our way around the different exercises. Great fun.
I carefully set all the clocks back last night. Except for the two most important ones, the alarm and the heating controller. The heating controller appears to be able to look after itself. So, when I wound it back it this morning this did not end particularly well. All fixed now, although grinding through complicated menus on the clock radio at six thirty to stop the alarm from going off at the wrong time kind of took the shine off the extra hour in bed…
Mosty of the time the devices around us just work. Which makes the occasions when they go wrong all the more scary. Yesterday my iphone started moaning about being short of memory. Which was surprising, bearing in mind I don’t do things like record videos or put lots of huge games on the device. I thought I’d sorted out the problem by deleting a few movies I had downloaded but today it ran out again. Something in my phone is eating all the memory. Searches online list a bunch of things you can do to try and fix this which end with the action “wipe the phone and restore everything”. Ugh.
Got some new boots today. The previous pair lasted ages. They started leaking during one of the damper parts of emf this year and that was it for them. The new pair were pleasingly inexpensive and seem to keep the water out.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
Make your own programming language. Find out more here.
