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AS an added bonus, the mole wrench is now very easy to find.

A while back I mentioned my sinking feeling, caused by a failing gas support in my chair. The chair company have sent me a replacement, which is nice of them. However, it has proved to be impossible to fit, what with the broken part having welded itself into position. I’ve come up with a solution though. My chair now holds its position perfectly.

Curse you British Summer Time

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You’ll never guess where I bought this

The good news is that my Agile Octopus Tariff Display (which tells us how much electricity will cost us each day) handled the clock change yesterday with aplomb. It just worked. The bad news is that one of my clocks can’t be adjusted because the little knob that you turn to move the hands has broken. So I’ve taken the battery out for an hour.

In March next year I’ll have to take the battery out for 11 hours. Perhaps I should make a “time corrector” device. You plug it into the clock in place of the battery, tell the “time corrector” the time the clock is showing and over the next day it makes the clock correct.

Network isolation

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I hate it when hardware manufacturers spoil their products by skimping on one, crucial component. Take NetGear for example. They make quite good network hardware, but then they add the cheapest possible power supplies they can find. This means (for me at least) that every few years I have to buy a new 12 volt power supply to replace the one that just went pop.

I’ve just had to do it again. One of the routers in my network failed. The good news is that when this happens my eero network converts one of the Wi-Fi repeaters into a network receiver and so the network keeps going - just a lot slower than it used to. It can take me a while to discover that the network is broken in this way, I usually discover things are not right when I have to do an update to Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Stalked by tractors.. again

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This might be the same picture as last time..

A while back I got a completely unrequested tractor matchy-matchy game. I filled in a web form and sent a message asking why I’d received them. Today (of course) I received another copy of the game. I think that their standard response to a question about an order is just to send another one (although they probably don’t do this with real tractors). At any rate, I’m not going to bother them again.

Mysterious Tractor Matchy-Matchy

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The game is quite fun though….

Every now and then something happens that makes your world rock slightly on its axis. I had one such moment last week when a courier turned up with a large box. Which contained a tiny deck of cards adorned with pictures of tractors. It’s a very nice implementation of the pelmanism game. Only one thing wrong really. I’ve never ordered such a game. In fact I don’t even own a tractor (or have any plans to get one). I’ve carefully checked the order. My name and address are all properly entered. I’m not sure where this has come from. I’ve contacted the supplier to try and find out what is going on. Most strange.

Driffield Steam Fair

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There were loads of engines like this

Last week we couldn’t make our annual trip to the Whitby Steam Fair because bad weather got in the way. So today it was excellent to be able to go down to the Driffield Steam Fair and look for some traction action (sorry).

I was worried that the Driffield event might be smaller than the Whitby one, but it turned out (at least to me) to be a bit bigger. There were loads of engines, large and small bustling about the showground. There was a funfair, pizza and amazing bubble waffles. The weather had a little go at spoiling this show too, but there were only a couple of showers during the four hours we were on site. It was great. I’m definitely going again next year.