SoftSabot – Life in my slippers

OK just for those who don’t know, but also to save me being asked another 5,000 times.

I have had both Epson and HP (Hewlett Packard) printers over the years, midrange and top of the range of both.

HP in my opinion exceeds what Epson can only dream of doing.

In my experience, buying an Epson printer is about as sensible as setting fire to a wad of £20 notes in an ashtray just to keep your fingers warm.

That’s just my personal opinion with no malice, based on experiences of buying printers since my first one, which was an Epson, back in 1992.

Buying an HP printer means you can thankfully say goodbye to printing problems, and say hello to printing out what you really want to.

I try to download the new update for iTunes from 4 different websites and the same thing happens: it stops downloading anywhere from 20 to 43 meg into the 93 meg download.

I try to contact Canon regarding my camera and a fault, their website is down.

I try to use my dongle on my Acer which now has Windows 7  installed, it doesn’t work.

I find it very scary that we are beginning to depend so much on computers, but we still can’t make the software work properly. It’s extremely worrying I think.

I decided to buy a Blu Ray disc finally to try out in my Acer Aspire. Might as well use the heap of junk for something and as Dirty Dancing was only £7  in Tesco I decided to get it and try it out.

What a pile! The menu’s take a litte while to load, what’s that about? There’s only play menu and features.

However once the movie started I paid attention as the quality is supposed to be top grade, and my Acer is supposed to be full 1080 HD.

The movie starts and guess what? Yup. No different to any bog standard DVD.  Nothing at all.

Oh but wait, 20 minutes into the film and it starts skipping and jumping. I tried everything to alleviate this and nothing would so I had to watch it the way it was. Every few chapters were the same and when I checked the disc for dust it was pristine, and the head was clear as it should have been. The Acer is on full power and boasts 4 gig of DDR3 RAM, and 2 gig of video memory. I did a quick google and guess what? Yes you got it, this is a known problem of Blu Ray lol

So, the conclusion is … Blu Ray is not worth the energy used to say the words, and my Acer continues to be the pile of crap I knew it to be anyway.

Blu Ray was in my humble opinion nothing more than a cynical attempt to leech even more money out of people to fund the greed of the big corporations, so back to the great DVD.

Today I finally, after 5 months, got the response from Otelo that they promised last summer I’d have in 4-6 weeks.

When you have a problem with Vodafone, you contact Otelo who deal with it on your behalf. Ofcom don’t actually get involved at all. However your problem must have existed for 12 weeks before you can contact Otelo, (this is set to change to 8 weeks this year) and you must have used Vodafones internal complaints system. Well that part actually makes sense.

My basic problem is, my mobile broadband dongle with Vodafone stopped working very well, then stopped working at all last year. Between January and May I had problems which resulted in it being unusable. I was still paying the monthly fee the whole time. Vodafone sent me two new dongles, but as a program on Radio 4 recently highlighted, it’s the service itself that is at fault. They have basically oversubscribed their service, are not willing to invest anymore money in it, but are still actively selling the service. It’s not just me either. Visit Vodafones online forum and you will see hundreds of people with the same problem.

So after months of deliberation, Otelo has decided that even though I have constantly been paying my monthly fee, have had little service since Jan last year and none at all from May, their decision is that Vodafone should send me a written apology and refund me…wait for it…£30.

So as far as I am concerned, Otelo is just another paper exercise, same as the toothless trading standards and other useless organisations.

My advice to anyone suffering problems with Vodafone is don’t go down the complaints route you will get nowhere. Best just cancel your contract and go to O2 or Three both of whom offer a reasonable mobile broadband experience.

Well, was told today that despite paying £178 for MY ipod that I own to play MY songs on, I CANNOT use it as itunes has crashed!! No, you can’t just drag and drop mp3 files onto it to use it like a normal mp3 player. Shitheads at Apple!!

I am soooooooooooooo angry!! So far nowhere even close to sorting out just what the problem is but til it’s resolved, no ipod! Apple shite I wish fervently I could get a refund cos I hate this level of control of what I want to do with my purchase.

They should actually warn you that “THE USE OF AN EXPENSIVE IPOD IS EXCLUSIVELY ALLOWED ONLY…..AND ONLY…..IF ITUNES SOFTWARE IS DOWNLOADED ONTO YOUR PC AND WORKS.

BE ADVISED THAT IF ITUNES FAILS YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO USE YOUR EXPENSIVE MP3 PLAYER AND WE DON’T REALLY GIVE A SHIT WHETHER YOU CAN OR NOT AND WHETHER YOU LOSE ALL YOUR MP3′S OFF IT.”

Yer cos that actually is the truth. Apple you arses, I will never again buy one of your products and  if I could get a buyer for this ipod I would.

Actually I love the ipod, I just hate itunes and the way they try and lock you in. But hail media monkey and share pod lol

I’ve installed Coppermine photo gallery onto the server today. It handles all the photos in separate albums. Whilst Lightroom is a fabulous offline cataloguing tool, the galleries it generates are cumbersome, large and extremely difficult to edit afterwards.

Coppermine is much better as it is dedicated to the task of displaying online albums, whereas to be fair Lightroom just had that ability added as a function.

I’m going to be working on it over time to get it prettied up, and to have a common theme runnning through the blog and the gallery and later, a forum if I decide to put one on.

Earlier, I complained about a cleaning brush I’d bought from Jessops. The post is here if you wish to read it.

As a result I had to buy the kit pictured here. I finally found one in Evreux and it cost me a massive €73. The guy who sold it to me emphasized that there were 50 wipes in the kit so it should last a good while. Indeed there are and once used you can re-use them as lens wipes, or safe wipes for your spectacles, so you do get value from the kit.

However it’s become an almost daily thing, cleaning my sensor. I’m not quite sure where I’m going wrong, but I clean the sensor thoroughly then the next day there are marks on my photos again. One appeared from nowhere and I almost had to scrub the sensor with the cleaning fluid to get it clean.

I’ve thoroughly cleaned again tonight so I’ll see what tomorrow brings but I’m starting to think there’s a problem somewhere

Last night I was sitting working on the laptop when I smelled a most peculiar smell. I had the gennie running, and as the smell was coming from under where I sat, where the 2 charging units and the 5 batteries are fitted I thought I’d better move pretty sharpish like so I jumped up and switched off the gennie, then came back with the fire extinguisher and lifted the cushions. . .
Yes … my toast was done.
 
Kidding
 
No actually nothing had burned, but the mains charging unit was so hot I could not touch it. I suspect it was the thin plastic film that protects the fascia from scratches that was smelling, as it was curled and sad looking. That got binned. testament to the robust build of the Sterling charger, it appears to have suffered no ill effects.
 
So tonight I set about finding out why that had happened.
 
First thing I did was check all connections, then I disconnected all batteries bar one, and set the generator away. Small drop in speed as it chugged away so that was fine, I connected the second one, another small drop but that was fine, and I connected them all one by one until I came to the last one, the brand spanking shiny sealed Elecsol that they sent me as replacement for the one that blew up. Nah I thought, as I realised that the magic eye was red. Oops. It shouldn’t be. So I connected that one up, started the gennie and … the gennie struggled to cope. It was as if it was under massive load. So I disconnected it straight away, as last night when I smelled the smell, the charger was actually on float stage and had been for an hour, so theoretically all batteries should have been totally charged.
 
Very weirdly, the charger is so hot to touch tonight too, even though that new battery if disconnected. I really can’t say I’ve ever noticed it running hot before.
 
Anyway, out of 7 Elecsols I’ve owned 2 have failed so that’s about 28% failure rate which is enough for me to say, enough. I don’t even want this one replaced. I think I’ll just go with standard wet lead acid batteries from now on as I’ve never had any problems with them in the past. (If you’ve never seen a battery that’s exploded, check the photo out. Remember this was full of sulphuric acid too. The mud is from where it was thrown very quickly out of the door of the van.)
I’m not deliberately dissing Elecsol here, I have no axe to grind at all. Just reporting back the experiences I have. I will ring Sterling tomorrow though to find out if that charger should run that hot, as the B to B charger runs that hot too.

If you have a complaint with a mobile phone provider in the UK, you must go to Ofcom, who say there is nothing they can do so go to Otelo, who say you have to wait 12 weeks before they can do anything, that’s 12 weeks AFTER you have exhausted Vodafone’s own complaints department.

So finally the time is up and Vodafone have run out of time to respond to my official written complaint, this is about what was started in March of this year. Wow we consumers are really looked after hey?

Anyway so I rang Otelo who said, send us the letter you sent them, then we’ll draft a letter up and we’ll send it to you for confirmation, then you send it back and we’ll send it to Vodafone.

Kind of makes you think … consumer rights, yes it would be very nice to have some. Oh this by the way is the civilised Great Britain that we should all be thankful for living in because it’s so wonderful and modern and people are looked after.

Bollox.

Profit and power rules and everyone knows it.

I’ll wait with bated breath to see how long Otelo take to turn this around.

Lightroom is a fab piece of software that I use for organising my pictures but it let me down today.

I had been viewing some 48 photos and keywording them using the grid view. They were all selected for the general keywording.  A feature of this nasty horrible piece-of-shit- acer laptop I have is that if you don’t do anything on it for about 20 minutes it completely freezes. You can’t do anything with it at all. The only option is to shut the laptop off without powering down.  Well I had been on the phone so it did freeze, I had to shut it down then restart it and when I rebooted I went straight back into Lightroom to continue my work.

Now I’ve found in Lightroom that when you have multiple files selected, it’s actually not as straightforward as you think to deselect them all. I’ve got into the habit now of using the file menu to deselect as it’s the most dependable method.  Well, I assumed that as I’d had to power the lappie off improperly that the files would have been deselected. They certainly weren’t obviously selected when I went back in, but clearly they were as when I went to delete a file, I deleted all 48 photos in the folder. Now as anyone who uses Lightroom knows, delete from Lightroom if you are deleting from the disk does not have an undo feature.

So, not panicking yet I went into the recycle bin. I have two drives, and the backup drive has recycle bin turned off. Oops.

Still not panicking, I plug my external drive in and look for a recovery program that does not require an install. I found an old copy of DataRecovery by Tokiwa and yes before you ask, of course it’s free I ran this little program and within less than a minute it had not only the entire folder I’d deleted on screen, but almost 3500 other files, some that were deleted so long ago I’d forgotten about them. I had to check some just to make sure I still had them! 3 of the files once recovered were corrupted and had to go and that’s one of the minor drawbacks of this program, it doesn’t tell you what state the files are in. Neither is it completely accurate about file creation date, and it does not tell you what date the file was deleted. All of that info would be seriously useful. However, it does actually warn you if you try to recover to the same drive that this will probably fail. It is also very fast and free and once you’ve done the initial scan you can do a deep scan, for those situations maybe when you’ve reformatted. Much slower but much more accurate. So bar 3 files, 2 of which I didn’t want anyway and 1 which was not critical, I got my photos back in about 10 minutes in total. Excellent piece of work Tokiwa. You can download his free program from http://tokiwa.qee.jp/EN/dr.html and as always, if you like and use a piece of freeware, consider donating a few quid to the author.

I bought a small air-pump and brush from Jessops. It was only a couple of quid, and “Yes,” enthused the young lad behind the counter, “this should be in every photographers kit and is specially developed for digital SLR’s such as the Canon 5D. Furthermore … ” he excitedly told me, “it will save you loads of money as sensor cleaning is about £20 a time.  Not only that … ” he fervently continued, “but you can use it for your lenses too, and all the hard to reach areas such as the viewfinder window and around the controls.” OK I’m sold on it then. Sounds to me like my life hasn’t been properly complete without it.

So, sitting in the garden of the Chateau de Versailles I decide now is the time to clean my sensor as I’m getting tiny marks on every single picture I take. Out with my infallible high-tech cleaner and lets be at it then. So, the first brush against the sensor makes one thing clear and one thing not clear. It’s clear that despite frantic pressing of the small rubber bulb, I’m not going to get enough air out of this thing to dislodge a feather. You can’t hold something stable and press it that hard and that frequent anyway. Hmmm.

Also, it’s left streaky brush marks on my sensor! Grr! OK out with the trusty optical cloth and wipe those nasty marks away. I’ll start again. Ahhh but … starting again has the same effect. Not only is this device useless for blowing air out of, but it’s also leaving streaks on my sensor.  Now let me tell you these sensors are not cheap to replace!

Now another problem. The optical cloth is guaranteed not to scratch your glass, so I always carry one for the lenses. However, they make no guarantee about lint from the cloth. So now I have hundreds of tiny hairs and dots all over my screen. After much huffing and blowing, I reckon I’m about 100 times worse off than when I started.

The moral of the story is, do NOT believe the spotty kid in Jessops who says those £2 blowers are good for digital cameras. They are cheap, ineffective CRAP! and look up ^, there’s a mug shot of one of the beastly things. I’m now off to find a decent camera shop to get the sensor, mirror and screen professionally cleaned.

This is typed on my brand new laptop, the Acer Aspire 8930, bought about 8 weeks ago in desperation when Vodafone failed me (yet again!) and I thought my trusty old Dell was broken.

I fcuking hate this laptop! It’s cheap crap and I wish fervently that I’d never clapped eyes on it!

I will never ever even dream in a nightmare of owning another Acer as long as I live!!!

Well the satellite is performing OK as long as the wind stays down. The laptop appears fine since I uninstalled that IOBit software, but the batteries still seem to be wearing more quickly than they should. I think eventually I’m going to have to find a decent auto-electrician and find out exactly what the problem is.

Wish me luck tomorrow as it’s Monday, back to work and it’s been windy all weekend. As Blunderfone is still not working I rely exclusively on the satellite now.

Nothing personal, just that driving into Sandbach now reminds me of failure and the fact I face a day of listening to motor whine as the dish goes round and round and round interminably without ever working.

Actually Musa had it working within half an hour of getting here. However he clearly doesn’t know what he’s done to get it working grr!

I am heartily sick to my back teeth of Isatlan and Musa. He does not have the faintest idea what he is doing!

I contacted Ned Spencer from Point systems who tried to help and he said Musa is actually known in the industry for failed installations.

I also spoke to Barry Lieberman from Ethnet. They are the UK reseller for Datastorm bandwidth and equipment so they should know, however a phone call to him proved inconclusive except he also said he knew of Musa and was constantly fixing his mistakes. Bridge internet said the same as did everyone I’ve spoken to!

I almost felt sorry for Musa being so widely known in an industry for beig inept, but then I remember my £8,000 and all sympathy goes out of the window!

Well Musa spent the entire day here, I even fed him lunch and tea.

After starting at 9:30am he finally left at 5pm after somehow getting the unit to work. I was not elated that he’d got it to work, I knew something was wrong and I knew I’d be back.

Nevertheless he went home and I played for a while on the internet thinking what a wonderful thing technology is.

Later that night I drove up the motorway for a few miles and pulled into a service station and set the dish away to connect to the internet. Hehehe I heard that whirring sound that I’d become accustomed to over the last 2 days but no way was it going to connect.

I phoned Musa who told me a few things to try and somehow we got it working.

I am seriously not happy with this.

Damn them! Isatlan who are providing the satellite dish and other equipment, have dropped the date back to 16th December now. I’ll have to change the ferry booking grrr!! I’m still annoyed at them for taking nearly £8,000 out of my account without asking. I got it back within 2 days but

Right, I’ve looked at generators and the Honda suitcase seems to be the very best you can get.

The only problem is I don’t have Honda money. So instead I’ve sourced an SDMO Booster which uses a Honda engine, but costs a quarter of the Honda at only £550

I’ll be getting one of those then.

OK I’ve researched batteries and I am going to buy Elecsols.

They’re made from carbon fibre so supposed to be the lightest and very reliable.

Ropers have a deal on right now so I can get four for £75 each. I’ve already got two so I’ll mix and match them.

Now I need a generator. More googling!

I’ve got to get some more batteries if I’m to run the satellite system and a laptop, 40 hours a week.

Hadn’t thought about it before but, if the satellite dish takes 4 amps and the laptop 5 that’s 9 amps which is 1 x 100ahr battery per day.

At the moment I have 1 x 100ahr battery lol

Silly me.