I know, I’ve been pretty quiet on here. Work’s been…well, I’ve had night shifts, and they kill me. And we’ve been doing a feasibility study on some land that the owners accepted our offer on. It’s scary. And tight. And we’ll need a loan, almost certainly, to be able to build.

There’s a slim, slim, slim possibility that if every single thing came in ( Read more... )

We put in an offer on some land today. Went from ‘never going to find anywhere’ to “oh that’s nice” to “sign here, and here, and initial here” so fast that I’m still quietly freaking. Course, they’ll probably decline and then there’ll be the back-and-forth of offer, counteroffer (which, incidentally, is what I’ve been doing on a Rav4 EV).

Which ( Read more... )

( Read the rest of this entry » )

I didn’t think that moving to the US was going to be transformative in many ways. I mean, you take yourself with you wherever you go, and that broadly means taking your problems with you. There were some things I hoped it would change for the better. The destruction of the NHS, for example, is now distant enough that I feel sad about it, but I don’ ( Read more... )

So, our second hand roomba is quietly sat waiting a new vacuum box, and if that does the job of making it suck (rather than suck*) then it’ll get a new battery. Anyhow, Nikki proclaimed that I should strip down the gearbox before we started using it in earnest, as the 500 series roomba tends to fill the gearbox with shite and then die. And it turns ( Read more... )

…when the internet was young[1] I used to collect the odd video. You’d find some bizarre things out there. They’d be uploaded in all their 320×240 glory, usually in mpeg or flv format… It’s not a massive collection, and mainly these things can now be streamed on youtube in vastly higher quality. But I have discovered since resurrecting my media ( Read more... )

Because Linux’s move command is actually copy-then-delete if it’s not within one partition, I have to do this file shuffling in multiple chunks. Which means selecting a group of files, saying “move them”, waiting an hour while it does that, then selecting more files and doing it again. It seems to be working, so far, and I’ve done a teeeensy bit of ( Read more... )

I spent this morning watching Big Clive tearing down a cheap USB charger which, for unfortunate part-failure reasons - passed mains straight through to the USB port. Sadly for the makers, who actually seem to have given a fig about design - and who’ve actually gone to more trouble than seems common to build a reasonable piece of kit, they were let ( Read more... )

So…


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I’d kinda blocked today out to do my computer non-upgrade - well, case-upgrade, motherboard is kind of a horizontal movement. This was, of course, foolish. Foolish because whilst the board was meant to arrive today, early, and the case ‘before 10am’, this almost never happens. I mean, technically, the board was meant to arrive last week, but the ( Read more... )