Sticky Keys

Here’s a lifestyle tip for all (both) my readers. Don’t use a key to slice through the tape on a package and then immediately try to use the same key to open the door. Slicing through tape can deposit a bunch of sticky stuff onto the key which then ends up in the lock.

I spotted the gluey residue just in time. No damage was done. Second lifestyle tip is to rub a lead pencil up and down the business end of a key a few times. This deposits a layer of graphite on the key which will find its way into the lock mechanism and make it work much more smoothly. Make sure your pencil is a lead one though, this doesn’t work with crayons.

Favourite Error Message of the Day

..that went well.

AI Bots

Just experienced a slight peak in traffic on the blog which I think is down to AI crawlers trawling the internets for stealable words and phrases. As I always say:

Serendipity is best when an artichoke and a banal runcible snodchortle slooth over to Zanzibar and munge an effervescent beverage.

That should hold them for a while.

The Wordsearch Clock is now a thing

Wordsearch clocks are now available in a choice of colour. As long as you choose black or white.

In the Money?

I got a strange email this evening from a bunch of lawyers. It’s about the Anthropic Copyright Settlement. This is a class action brought on behalf of authors whose work allegedly appeared in a couple of allegedly pirate datasets that were allegedly used by Anthropic to train their AI systems. Allegedly. Anyhoo, I searched their database and 7 of my books were identified…

The settlement amount was 1.5 Billion dollars, but individual authors only get a tiny percentage of this. It’s nice to see some action being taken on behalf of creatives who have had their work used in this way but I reckon we still have a long way to go. Or at least, we should have. Now I get to fill in a form and wait until the end of April next year for the next phase of the process. I just hope I get enough to buy a camera…..

Pop Quiz

Question 1: What is this?

Question 2: (for a 1,000 bonus points because we’d really like to know) Why doesn’t it work properly?

Swings and Roundabouts

Went to a Video Game Market today (at Doncaster) and didn’t buy anything for myself. +10 bonus points. But I did buy a camera off eBay during lunch. -10 bonus points….

Holey Stupid

I’ve got a new desk. Gone are the bright red Ikea ones that weighed substantially less than the things we put on them. Now I have a big strong counter which hopefully won’t move much when I strap a steering wheel to it.

Anyhoo, I wanted some holes for cables to go through. And I also fancied the device above, which sets a rather useful mains socket and some powered usb ports into the desk. I discovered that these are 80mm diameter. So I asked for some holes which were 80mm diameter. Big mistake. Turns out that two things which are exactly the same size don’t fit together properly. The result you see above is the result of a bunch of frantic extra sanding on my part…

Out of date spam

Does anyone know how I can delete all the emails from a particular sender on Gmail using the web client? You would think that this would be easy. There would be some way of specifying the sender and then a convenient button that you could press to delete everything.

If there is such a button, I’ve not been able to find it. All I can do is work my way through pages of mails, deleting everything in each page. It’s almost as if Google want to make it hard for you to get rid of dross so that your email fills up and you have to pay them for extra storage….

Wordsearch Clock less happy ending

The time display can be slightly ambiguous…

Hmm. What kind of person designs a word search clock and leaves out the words “hour”, “minute”, “quarter” and “half”? That would be me…

Thunderbirds are Go! - but how?

I bought some batteries and today they arrived in a package with the best stamp I’ve ever seen. But how? I can’t find anywhere on the Post Office site that you can buy stamps like these. I’d really love a full set. From what I can discover they were released in 2011. I’m tempted to buy some more batteries to try and get a package with Thunderbird One on it.

Trouble Brewing

Tomorrow I plan to throw away a huge bag of cables which I have no use for anymore.

I’m sure there is no way that this can end badly.

Slow Cooker

We ordered a slow cooker recently. It arrived surprisingly quickly.

Boiler Humour

We’ve got a plumber coming round next week to give the boiler a service.

I hope it’s not a requiem.

Problem solving

It turns out that there are two ways to approach a hardware problem:

• Discuss it with ChatGPT for a while and achieve nothing

• Connect up some diagnostic hardware and fix it in ten minutes

I think there’s a lesson here. I’d ask ChatGPT what it was if I could spare the time….

Windows Phone has still got it going on

They say it is important to keep in mind how far we’ve come in technology. But I think that sometimes it is a good idea to consider how far we haven’t come as well. In the trip into the garage that yielded my Zune HD I also found a couple of Lumia Windows Phones, including the wonderful 1520 that I got in 2013. It still works fine (although it took a few reboots before it got past a recurring alarm). Even the battery is holding up. I also found a 1020, the one with the amazing camera. That works fine too.

If either of these phones worked like they did in their heyday, with all the apps and integration that are now long gone, I’d be back on them in a heartbeat. Apple AI or no Apple AI. In my opinion the user interface beats the iPhone hands down. All this “Liquid Glass” stuff is really lipstick on a very old pig.

They don’t feel heavy, they don’t feel slow and they don’t feel old. We watch the Apple presentations and then dutifully traipse along to buy the latest upgrades (and I’m as bad as anyone for this) but it seems to me that the fundamentals of my life could be quite easily underpinned by a 12 year old design. There must be something which has moved us beyond what the Lumia can do but at the moment I’m not sure what that is.

Wrong Jug

I seem to have picked up the wrong jug again.

Liquid Glass - Thanks but no thanks

First reaction to Apple’s new “Liquid Glass” display: “That’s pretty”

Second reaction to Apple’s new “Liquid Glass” display: “I wonder how you can turn it off”

Note to graphics developers who have impressed themselves with their ability to overlay text on a background image and make the background blurry: There’s a reason why newspapers, magazines and books are not printed on semi-transparent paper. It’s because a distracting background makes something much harder to read.

Thunderbirds on the Big Screen

To celebrate 60 years of Thunderbirds (blimey!) they’ve re-mastered a pair of the best episodes and are showing them in movie theatres in the UK. You can find out more here. The show was shot on 35mm film so it should look great on the big screen. They’ve re-mastered the audio too, so it should also sound terrific.

We’ve got our tickets. Looking forward to it.

Carrot(s)

Asking for a friend: If your significant other gave you a shopping list which contained the item “Carrot” would would you expect to get told off if you only bought one?