1. It was what I needed. I’ve been surviving on a (slightly rickety) old mono laser printer for some time now. I decided to upgrade to a colour copier/scanner/printer, to get back colour printing, to clear out the aging scanner that is only just compatible with Windows XP, and to avoid having to go to ... [More]
(With apologies to Bargearse.)
I pay $73 per year to the RACV because I want someone to get me out of a scrape when I’ve locked myself out of my car or the battery is dead or whatever. It somewhat disturbs me that what’s left over from that $73 goes into lobbying for more, bigger, faster roads. I saw ... [More]
Given there are magazines for just about every topic under the sun, I suppose you can tell a lot about a person’s interests from which ones they buy. A lot of those that I buy (or subscribe to) are pretty geeky. But I don’t normally buy railway-related magazines. Many of them I find overly-gunzelly, which ... [More]
Jeremy is rather unimpressed with the postal service. On Monday last week he mailed a letter to himself from my mum’s place, and it took until today to arrive. Some other mail had been turning up — sporadically, but something every few days. I wonder if some of the posties on post-Christmas holidays? For a ... [More]
Josh sent me a nifty device for measuring the power consumption of various devices. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for some time: to see what drains power, and how much, and to see in particular what even drains power when it’s idle. So I spent a couple of hours plugging it into ... [More]
At some stage last year I reached the point where I’d been separated/divorced for as long as I was married. I’m happy to say it’s a path that most of my contemporaries don’t seem to have followed me down. Indeed, of those who have got married and had kids, I can only think of one ... [More]
I’m alone in the house, blasting Billy Bragg on the stereo while cleaning up. Part of preparation for the concert on January 30th. Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards… my God I love that song. Does it speak to everybody in community activism like this? For those who haven’t seen it (I hadn’t), here’s the ... [More]
Spotted in Victory Park, Patterson Road, Bentleigh yesterday. (It’s where we go when the car is getting its tyres looked at.) I’ve seen a few obscure pieces of playground equipment in my time, but what is this? I can’t figure it out. It’s too high to reach, even for an adult. I wondered if it ... [More]
Unexpectedly this morning our ADSL at home got shaped — that is, slowed down to more-or-less dialup speed because we’d used all our bandwidth for the month. Fortunately it’s not the calendar month — it’s the month up until the 21st. I could blame the excessive use of YouTube in the house, but ultimately it’s ... [More]
“Computer people are the last to guess what’s coming next. I mean, come on, they’re so astonished by the fact that the year 1999 is going to be followed by the year 2000 that it’s costing us billions to prepare for it.” — Douglas Adams, 1999 — Cited by Stephen Fry I was recently remarking ... [More]
4:30am. Something. Something crawling on my face. Swipe with hand. Like a shot, out of bed, turn on light. Cockroach on bed. Swearing ensues. Oh gawd, yuck. Two people I know, and some bloggers have noted the recent presence of cockroaches, despite keeping clean kitchens. I think the little bastards are getting more daring.