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starfleetinginterest:

what if the coins you find randomly at the bottom of drawers and in between couch cushions are actually from spiders trying to pay rent

Note to self: When making a label to distinguish the home made cider from the home made apple juice, do not simply change the word cider for juice and not think any further about it.

Particularly when you’ve decided your home-made apple cider is called “St Anne’s Feeder Canal Cider”.

The end result sounds slightly unpalatable.

So, having ordered the benighted SuperPad a new power supply toying with I discover it’s got a new fun trick. It’s now decided that the WiFi will no longer connect if it’s not in the same room as our WiFi router.

Oh ho ho, what a funny object it is.

Of course, fortunately, our Kitchen is floodwired, so I just need to get a switch to live in the server room and it will well be networked. I will find it a use…other than doorstop.

Having gone to lots of hassle to make a new power supply for the ‘SuperPad’ Android Tablet* I discovered the fault was not with the wallwart but with the connector. So I ‘fixed’ the connector. Which worked for a while, but now it’s snapped somewhat more terminally** so I went looking for the obscure and difficult-to-get-hold of size of connector that it is.

And have now ended up buying a new damn power supply because it’s a stupid size of connector that’s obscure and costs more to buy as a part than it does to just buy the supply.

Feh.

* If anything in the history of technology is less aptly named, I’m yet to find it.

** Geddit? Terminal. Connector. No? Just me then.

So, I’m told that the fact that one of our media server’s terrabyte drives is full is not, in fact, an indication that we need a bigger drive. But perhaps an indication that I should reconsider my “KEEP ALL THE THINGS” policy.

I’m not sure that that’s true.

Way back when all this was fields, and I still lived in a house in which our computer connected to BBSs, we had central heating and on the wall in our lounge was a thermostat. It was an analogue device consisting of a bimetallic strip that would turn the heating on and off.

Turn it hotter, on goes the heating, turn it lower, off it goes… it was accompanied by a little timer on the boiler that would turn it off at night and on during the day.

Now in our shiny new house with it’s shiny new boiler we have individually controlled radiators which run off a controller that’s wireless so we can sit it wherever we want in the house.

And it broadcasts its little messages to the boiler ‘Turn on’, it says.

And on goes the boiler.

‘Turn off’, it says.

And the boiler just happily ignores it and tries to turn our house into a boiling furnace of heat such that it can melt down the copper from the heating pipes and sell it for scrap, after, of course, we’ve all been roasted alive.

So, I was out and about earlier today, and just sat out on the street, notional ‘please help me’ sign scrawled on cardboard next to it was a Dyson DC07. We’ve been hunting for a replacement for our aged DC01 which despite still working seems to clog with startling frequency; it’s filters being rapidly replaced because it just stops sucking, and starts to, instead, suck.

So I knocked on the door of the house that it was sat outside. No answer. So I left it there, for a while, whilst I did my stuff. Then I came back and it cried out ‘help me’. So I hefted it into the minor (in which, incidentally, a hoover is a surprisingly neat fit) and brought it home. All the while I was worrying that despite it having been deposited on the street, it was someone’s and they’d be distressed. I got home and applied my usual high-tech fault-finding*. I assumed that the motor had gone, I understand that’s the way most dysons die.

But no, it sucked. It span up its little motor smooth as butter and sucked. Then I started to worry that I really had pilfered someone’s prized Dyson and should take it back. And then I noticed something.

The beater bars weren’t beating. A few moments later and a disintegrated belt was in my hand. I’m assuming something more must be wrong with it. But I suppose to many people, a vacuum cleaner that’s 6 years old and stops working at all is simply grounds for replacement (it’s a pretty wealthy area I was lurking in).

Still; I’ve ordered a new belt, and hopefully we’ll have a vacuum cleaner that sucks a bit better’n our old one. I might even give up the hoover junior at some point.

* Plug it in, see if it goes bang.

Clearly, as I feared, joining tumblr was an error. I don’t know what possessed me. I mean, really, it’s not like between my RSS feed (over 500 posts to read at this very moment), LJ, Twitter and G+ I don’t already have enough that I could fill my day many times over. Adding this, with it’s whole call-and-respond type thing is going to completely destroy any hope of me getting anything done that isn’t internet.

Shit.