K.I.S.S.

am a proud user of ‘dumb’ things, who does things the ‘dumb way.

When I mentioned the light for the fish I did not specify whether it’s turned off/on by the socket (the sockets all have switches here). It’s not. There is a switch on the wire itself.

But “is it on a timer?” someone has asked, linking to “PWR-SWITCH”.

Turning on a light with the flick of a switch does not take much effort/time (maybe one second); buying some gizmos with timers means: 1) setup time; 2) troubleshooting; 3) more moving parts which can break/malfunction; 4) tinkering time.

We could make lights with remote controls and timers decades ago. But we did not. There was no market (or use case) for that.

The Total Time of Ownership (TTO) is vastly better for “dumb” things that don’t need maintenance and studying (memorising how to operate them). They don’t have hardware issues and risky “upgrades”.

I don’t want “smart” lightings in the home, thank-you-very-much.

Appliances have gotten worse (less safe, less reliable), even branded goods from NIMA [1, 2] because people like “cheap” and companies are cheapening the production processes, materials, quality control

wo days ago we decided to carefully try to use the underwater lights we had acquired virtually for free (for context, there’s a home project this week [1, 2, 3]). I first tried them outside the water. All OK, no problems. The next step was, try the same inside the water. Oh, no. First, it was very hard to attach the darn thing to the glass. It kept floating upwards. I tried to use the water filter to force it down (in tandem), barely managed to do so. But worse yet, after some time in use we started to see the lights flickering a bit, then bright lights if not sparks came out from the socket. In the process it caused disruption to other appliances, including Rianne’s laptop. OK then, totally not worth the risk! Took it out of the socket, let it dry up for a few days. Today, in the laundry room (away from other valuable appliances and with its own distant fuse; the fusebox splits up the rooms), I plugged the thing back again. Lights not coming back up. None at all. Hmmm… try another socket. Same outcome. Try in the kitchen. Same. Just give up.

“Come on, Roy, you cannot just force it to work…”

My guess is that the fuse blew at some point. Good. Rightly so. Fuses blow up for good reasons, they’re a protection mechanism. I won’t bother replacing the fuse (I have spare ones and know how to handle these).

Whether the lights were not functioning “OK” or the goddamn thing was no longer water-resistant… who knows, right? I’ll never know. Either way, the thing was rendered unsafe to use, either underwater or outside the water (I was prepared to let it be used exclusively as the latter).

Some things are cheap for a reason. Having said that, all the other things we acquired are very good, they just needed a lot of very stubborn cleaning.

Let’s see how long those other things can last. I’m not counting on 5 years, let alone a decade.

My trust in “modern” electronics is waning. I still use appliances older than 30 years old. They still function perfectly.

ESTERDAY I ranted about my experiences with Wilko. This rant came after wasting no less than 3 days without making progress, so I wasn’t so trigger-happy. In fact, I was patient and polite all along. I was trying to be understanding. I am still polite, but obviously my rants are becoming more disruptive to Wilko, as my messages — I am told — now circulate at management level and they try to find a solution. I haven’t received the money that was ‘stolen’ from me (yet) and it’s no longer about money. It’s about a lot more than that. Had Wilko dealt with the faults of DCPayments more properly, things would be smooth and trivial for everyone. There are two parties at fault: DCPayments (of Infocash) and Wilko. The audio below explains why.

In the previous post about it I explained what had happened and shared some correspondence for the record. When I came to the store today (especially for that I had to go to Town) I was greeted by a nice lady who said she had heard about this or remembered me.

This was not the person whom I needed to speak to (I asked for management), so I was then escalated to another non-manager. She wanted me to have a bunch of forms to fill out, as if the issues are indeed quite frequent (they seem prepared for this). But still, this is not what I asked for. Here is the short conversation:

I declined to waste my time doing this and asked to speak to the manager, who turned up several minutes later and took me for a discussion at the corner (further away from clients). I needed to be escalated to the third level to speak to this manager, who was the person I was there to see in the first place. That’s the same thing which happened last time (several escalations needed). The main conversation was with him and it was amicable. Some bits were rather revealing (about what had been going behind the scenes, so to speak).

Personal lesson learned from this: record staff you speak to as they tend to lie afterwards (to cover their behind) about what they had said. This is actually the first time that I use a recording device in such a circumstance. I have never done this before. In the audio, as I pointed out, there is an alternation of what was said by the previous manager I spoke to (regarding going to the bank), or maybe an alternation of what she had said by the second manager (‘broken telephone’). He said that Wilko had 400 such machines and defended their robustness. This turned out to be a weak argument as towards the end he admitted that he himself had experienced an issue with the machines.

I am supposed to hear back by Tuesday about what happened and what happens next.

I only found out the name of the supplier, DCPayments, after I had gotten back home and looked up Infocash. Wilko never gave me the name of the supplier, or only gave it begrudgingly at the end (saying I can find the name on the machine, which sports the “Wilko” logo).

HE FRENCH firm Archos is known for its line of Linux-based products, mostly multimedia players. A month ago I bought 2 Archos Clipper units, one for myself and one for my sister. There has been not a single issue with the player so far and it was very trivial to operate (instructions come in very many languages). Battery life is as good as promised, the USB port (which also acts as a charger through the headphones jack) works perfectly well, and headphones have suffered no damage despite being pulled a lot, and the player suffered no damage — not even scratching — despite falling a lot and facing rough conditions at the gym.

There is really not a single negative thing to say about Archos Clipper. If someone else has had similar/different experiences, please share them below.

ome time ago I wrote about the health implications of cellphones, Wi-Fi and wine. There are the “only make believe” and wishful thinking studies, which much like in global warming can be funded by those with vested interest. And then there’s reality. After a study from Japan which suggests cellphones are no health hazard there’s this from the news:

Heavy mobile phone use may be linked to an increased risk of cancer of the salivary gland, a study suggests

A lot of people will be unhappy to read this. Personally, I’m glad I stopped carrying a cellphone back in 2003.

Not the actual box. Treat as
placeholder for illustrational purposes.

When you see a great deal, you simply know it! 149.95 dollars will buy you:

• AMD Duron 2.8 GHz Processor with 800 MHz FSB
• 180 Gigabyte Hard Drive
• 256 Megabytes of RAM
• K7MNF-64 nVidia nForce2 Socket A Motherboard
• nVidia nForce2 chipset

[...]

The machine will of course run GNU/Linux. It seems too good to be true, so I remain skeptic. Having toyed with the cart feature, it seems to be genuine though. The site statistics (Alexa, Netscraft), as well as some other available products, seem to suggest it is real.

Noteworthy: get Windows and double the cost of the worktstation…

Related item: Expensive Developers, Cheap Hardware

Picture from PlanetQuake

HECK out some of the strangest computer setups you have ever come across. I particularly like the one which demonstrates, side by side, the difference between a dual-head setting and a very large screen. It has recently begun being manufactured for Dell and Apple, but is rather pricey.