When I pay for my shopping at a staffed checkout in Tesco, I don’t have to tell the checkout operator what kind of card I’m using, be it a debit or credit card, etc. I stick my card in the chip and pin machine, enter my pin, and the rest is handled by the clever wizardry inside the little grey box.
Category: Home
Xbox 360 Play and Charge Kit troubles
I’ve been having a recurring problem with rechargeable batteries for our Xbox 360 controllers. The batteries are included official Microsoft Play and Charge Kits, which include the battery and a USB charging cable. It’s a nice idea; when your battery is running flat, you connect it to the cable, plug it into a USB slot on the Xbox, and you can continue using the controller as the battery charges. The part of the cable that connects to the controller also has a light to to tell you what’s happening – red means the battery is charging, green means it is fully charged.
A while ago, the battery refused to charge. When connected to the cable it was behaving as if the battery was fully-charged – the light would go red for around 10 seconds, then go green – but when disconnected from the cable the controller would die.
No surprises
Anyone foolhardy enough to get me into a conversation about DIY will already know the stories about various bodge-jobs and shortcuts I’ve discovered, perpetrated by a past owner of this house.
Yesterday I replaced the ageing heating thermostat (a rotary-style Honeywell) with a nice shiny digital one – a Horstmann Centaurstat 7, in fact. It has quite a sophisticated built-in programmer (more so than our existing programmer, at least) and will hopefully prevent the over-heating problem we’ve had here since we moved in. I found that the old thermostat was calling for heat at a higher temperature than selected (3-4 degrees higher), causing someone (me) to turn the thermostat up in the morning, causing someone else (Charlie) to complain in the evening when it became too hot.
If it can, it will
I am slowly coming to accept the fact that seemingly simple tasks are never quite as simple as they should be. I’m mainly talking about DIY, and home improvements.
The latest ‘quick job’ that turned out to be anything but quick, was replacing our side gate. We haven’t used it since we moved into the house back in mid-2007, mainly because we didn’t have–or couldn’t find (or, probably more accurately, didn’t look for)–the key. We assumed that since we couldn’t open it, neither could anyone else (without breaking it down), and it was therefore as secure as a side gate could be expected to be.
Oooh, it’ll cost you!
We’ve finally discovered why we’ve had so much trouble trying to get quotes for the work we want done to the house. We had a consultant from Southern Electric Contracting come over to quote on doing the electrics this afternoon, and it turned out to be a much bigger job than we hoped.
Two weeks’ work, and almost £8k. And that’s just for upstairs.
Drat. We can’t take that on right now. Double-drat.
But now we know that the small, independant trades we asked to quote on various things seem to be put off by big jobs. Moving a soil pipe, laying a concrete floor, knocking a wall down, and removing a chimney breast; just a few of the ‘little’ things we wanted done.
Maybe it’s time to rethink our plans.
