I was given a Hitachi cordless drill about fifteen years ago. It came with a big torch. When the 1AH NiCd batteries it came with faded too far, I replaced them with newer 3AH batteries. This year they finally began to give up too, and I decided to get a New Torch.
Category: Anecdotes
-
Corncobs and beeswax
My brother is a seed breeder, and years ago he gave me a big bag of shucked maize cobs – several hundred I’d guess. He said they were good kindling. They are – if you light your fires with old diesel, the way he does 🙂 While they do burn well, they take a bit to get started.
-
Life lesson – woodworking
Our woodworking teacher in first year high school told us in our first lesson to treat the bandsaw with great respect.
He started it up. The blade blurred up to speed; the whole thing stood taller than a man, and hummed with purpose. It was like it had woken up, come alive…
He whipped a lamb shank out from behind his back and shoved it onto the band in one movement. There was the smallest “zzzt” sound. The bandsaw didn’t even slow down. Its sound didn’t change. He turned it off and it whined into silence. He held up the stump. The other half lay on the sawbed. The silence extended.
He said “that could have been your finger, your wrist or your arm. Do not fuck with this machine.”
-
Ode to a ThinkPad T30
Way back in 2003, I bought a ThinkPad T30. Yesterday, July 10 2017, I turned it off for probably the last time.
-
The cure for darkness is light. Not more darkness.
The matter of data centre security was raised recently on a network mailing list I subscribe to. Someone was wondering if data centres checked incoming equipment for “bad stuff” – explosives and what-not.
The reaction from some was “don’t talk about that, we don’t want to give people ideas”. What a muddle-headed response!
-
Electric toothbrush yuk nope nope nope
After using my electric toothbrush I always rinse the whole detachable head, dry the bristles, remove the head and tap out any water. Yesterday when I tapped out the water (from the open end that sockets onto the handle) a tiny black speck appeared on the white porcelain of the basin. Hm, I thought.
-
Mikrotik troubleshooting case study
Just for the fun of it, here’s a a case study in troubleshooting. Actually it’s a case study in stupidity too, since I should have figured this out without all the troubleshooting. Anyway, just as an exercise…
-
VirtualBox flubs IPv6 (when in doubt, go wired)
I’ve just spent an hour struggling with (I thought) IPv6 on Windows 7. IPv6 is enabled by default on Windows 7. I was seeing autoconfigured addresses on the ethernet interface, but there was no IPv6 connectivity beyond that. Looking at it with Wireshark, I could see neighbor discovery packets leaving, but answer came there none. No firewall rules were blocking ICMPv6; in desperation I turned the firewalls OFF on both source and destination test machines – still nothing. What the…?
-
Bank limits
True story: I tried to transfer some money from the Commonwealth Bank a few years ago, and struck a daily limit of $5000, with no way around it.
So when I was planning to move back to Australia from Switzerland and knew I’d need to transfer a deposit (for a house) out of Switzerland , I rang my Swiss bank. The following conversation ensued: