Goodbye to Beverly Camera Centre

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Beverley Camera Centre is no more. It closed today. I bought a couple of things and the retiring owner (if you see what I mean) was kind enough to give me a tiny digital camera which he has had lying around for a while. Tiny digital cameras are all the rage at the moment so I’m going to have a go at getting it to work. The good news is that it is powered by an AAA battery. The bad news is that it needs custom USB drivers to make it work. Should be fun.

I’m going to miss the camera centre though, it has been part of my weekly routine to drop buy there and almost never except sometimes buy something.

Spitfire in Hull

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I’m not sure if it is a real one, but it looks pretty real to me

They had a Spitfire outside Hull Minster when we went up town today. It’s a lovely looking plane. Essentially the pilot sits in behind an enormous engine which is connected to a great big fan right at the front and there whole thing flies along several thousand feet up at several hundred miles an hour under fire from the enemy. No wonder it’s called “the right stuff”. They also had a rather nice MG car from the same era.

I don’t think this car has satnav that keeps whining about needing a map update.

I love the way they have a handle on the dashboard for the passenger to cling onto

..and a very british hamper on the back

Weekend Scrapes

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Notice how I’ve left off the Number scale on the side

I’m not the kind of person who obsesses over their blog traffic (or am I?) but I’ve noticed over the last few weeks that I get peaks in traffic over the weekend. Very strange. I don’t think it is people going “At last-it’s the end of the week and I can spend my leisure time catching up with Rob”. I think it is more likely that the net might be a bit quieter during the weekend and so that’s when systems go out and scrape it for words to train their large language models. My blog contains quite a few words, so I get a lot of hits on my pages.

This does mean, of course, that my writings are all being stolen without my knowledge or permission, and they will be incorporated into random systems to make them appear ever so slightly more human. Or, at least more Rob. I don’t mind this too much though, if this means that my gift to posterity is devices that sound a bit like me, then I’m OK with that. And, what that in mind, here’s my latest grate thort:

I’ve started wearing high-visibility clothing because my wardrobe is very dark inside.

Insights from Octopus

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You don’t say

We had our gas and electricity meters replaced yesterday with new smart ones. The process was quick and efficient. Although it felt strange to be in a house where nothing worked for the hour or so it took to swap the electricity one. The data feeds seem to be working now, although it might take a bit of time for the insights to catch up.

I was looking forward to getting a gadget to put in the kitchen to monitor my energy usage, but these aren’t given away anymore. Apparently nobody uses them and they end up in the back of a drawer. Everything can be done via the app. I’m tempted to see if I can’t make something to provide a display.

We did have a brief go with Agile Octopus a while back but we gave up when the prices reached the point where it was impossible to do things economically for long periods of the day. Perhaps we’ll take a look at some of the more adventurous tariffs in the future. I’m just looking forward to not having to submit meter readings every month.