Halloween

/

If you want an insight into how nice people are, just go “Trick or Treating” near way we live (it probably helps to go on the 31st October). We had a fantastic walk around the neighbourhood. The weather was lovely, lots of folks had really gone to town on their houses and there were families wandering around dressed as skeletons and all sorts. And we got home with a bucket full of goodies. Great fun. And just a bit scary. Especially one particular doorbell……

Blog up to date

/

Writing a blog post about having got my blog up to date does sound a bit meta. And is probably only of interest to me and ChatGPT, but here we are.

I’m now properly determined to keep the blog up to date and am trying to make adding content part of my daily routine.

We’ll see how that works out.

Incidentally, I used ChatGPT to make the picture at the top of this post. It is interesting how the image creation process now uses ChatGPT to generate a text description of the required image and then makes a picture from that. I asked for something depcting an artist putting the finishing touches to a great work of art, and ChatGPT lobbed in a lot of extra words before going off and making the picture.

Ho for Ikea

/

Mildly demob happy today. A few things I’ve been working on for a while have completed and so it was off to Ikea to get some sawdust and formaldehyde to celebrate. Got a new office chair as part of the fun. I bought one a while back that was not a good buy. I had to mend it with a spanner. This one has the racy name of JÄRVFJÄLLET and incorporates a lumbar support. And it doesn’t sink down to the floor when I sit on it, which is nice.

Printers know just when to not work...

/

Met my MEng project students today. The plan was to impress them with a nicely printed overview of the course content. But the printer had other ideas. For the last few weeks it has been waking up at odd times and emptying its ink tanks so that it won’t work when I need to use it. Cunning stuff.

There was plenty of black ink. But no yellow. The thing I was printing had no yellow in it. But the printer refused to play. The online help referred to a monochrome printing mode you could use in this situation, but of course that didn’t work. My plans to impress were in tatters.

The good news is that I managed to figure it out. If you want to use the monochrome mode properly you need to install the “proper” drivers that you get from Brother, rather than the ones that are installed automatically by Windows 11.

And I’ve ordered some more ink. Should be here tomorrow.

Bye Bye Mr. Cube

/

he actually looks shinier now than when we bought him.

Sad day today. Said goodbye to “Mr. Cube”. I got him in 2010 and he’s been in the family for the last fourteen years. I’ve very fond memories of my Cube motoring days; one of the nicest cars I’ve ever owned. And he has worn extremely well. But, rather sadly, it is time for a change. If you see him out and about be sure to give him a wave and totally confuse the person driving him.

Adventures with T shirts

/

While we were in London we had a look in the Uniqlo store to find out what they are wearing in Japan at the moment. Turns out that they had a range of T shirts for the Kaiju No. 8 manga series at very tempting prices. So I bought a bunch. And also the first book of the series (it’s rather good).

If you like this kind of thing it’s worth keeping an eye on their site. Neat designs pop up every now and then at very tempting prices.