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.
Learning the hard way
A few weeks ago I started seeing software failures on the Linux server. Although they were infrequent they were frustrating, to say the least, and would sometimes require me to find a workaround through configuration.
I hate my LG Viewty
I’m nearing the end of the 18-month O2 contract I took out with my Viewty. With new technology reaching obsolescence after only a short life, why post about something that is so old?
Because when the Viewty first came out, people seemed to be falling over each other trying to be the first to review the phone. They hadn’t used it in anger. And boy, this phone makes me angry. When people ask me “is it a good phone?”, I struggle not to begin ranting. It is still widely available, so if I cause just one person to stop and reconsider the purchase of a Viewty, I will consider this post to be worthwhile.
The technical details, pictures, and many reviews of people singing the Viewty’s praises are everywhere. Just google it. I’m going to skip all of that rubbish, and tell you why you should have stuck with Sony Ericsson.
Virtual snooping
Previously I’d made my opinion clear on the privacy aspect of Google Street View – in that essentially Google hasn’t done anything that can’t be done by any ordinary person with a camera walking past your house. If you don’t want to be seen playing air guitar in your wife’s underwear, simply close the curtains. Or just don’t do it.
Since then, and on a seemingly unrelated note, the BBC News website has reported on a body being dumped in a wheelie bin in Cobham, Surrey. It caught my eye because it’s not a million miles away from where I live (though not too close for comfort, I admit). The BBC News article carries a photo of the front of the house in question, guarded by police; and while the article itself attempts to protect the nearby residents’ privacy by mentioning only the name of the road, this is already too much information.
And this is where the two cross paths. With just a little effort – the road isn’t very long, and Google is quite a powerful engine – the property can be seen on Google Street View, complete with the unobscured number plate of the car on the drive. Google approximates the address at 16 Hamilton Avenue. Whether this is correct matters very little – the perception is that it might be correct. And that the car on the drive might be involved. It’s irrelevant that the Google Street View car may have driven down that road in the distant past, because information, like statistics, can be misused.
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.
