Poor little dyson on the street

So, I was out and about earlier today, and just sat out on the street, notional ‘please help me’ sign scrawled on cardboard next to it was a Dyson DC07. We’ve been hunting for a replacement for our aged DC01 which despite still working seems to clog with startling frequency; it’s filters being rapidly replaced because it just stops sucking, and starts to, instead, suck.

So I knocked on the door of the house that it was sat outside. No answer. So I left it there, for a while, whilst I did my stuff. Then I came back and it cried out ‘help me’. So I hefted it into the minor (in which, incidentally, a hoover is a surprisingly neat fit) and brought it home. All the while I was worrying that despite it having been deposited on the street, it was someone’s and they’d be distressed. I got home and applied my usual high-tech fault-finding*. I assumed that the motor had gone, I understand that’s the way most dysons die.

But no, it sucked. It span up its little motor smooth as butter and sucked. Then I started to worry that I really had pilfered someone’s prized Dyson and should take it back. And then I noticed something.

The beater bars weren’t beating. A few moments later and a disintegrated belt was in my hand. I’m assuming something more must be wrong with it. But I suppose to many people, a vacuum cleaner that’s 6 years old and stops working at all is simply grounds for replacement (it’s a pretty wealthy area I was lurking in).

Still; I’ve ordered a new belt, and hopefully we’ll have a vacuum cleaner that sucks a bit better’n our old one. I might even give up the hoover junior at some point.

* Plug it in, see if it goes bang.

Originally published at Mostly lemon based. You can comment here or there.

Hot new tech

Way back when all this was fields, and I still lived in a house in which our computer connected to BBSs, we had central heating and on the wall in our lounge was a thermostat. It was an analogue device consisting of a bimetallic strip that would turn the heating on and off.

Turn it hotter, on goes the heating, turn it lower, off it goes… it was accompanied by a little timer on the boiler that would turn it off at night and on during the day.

Now in our shiny new house with it’s shiny new boiler we have individually controlled radiators which run off a controller that’s wireless so we can sit it wherever we want in the house.

And it broadcasts its little messages to the boiler ‘Turn on’, it says.

And on goes the boiler.

‘Turn off’, it says.

And the boiler just happily ignores it and tries to turn our house into a boiling furnace of heat such that it can melt down the copper from the heating pipes and sell it for scrap, after, of course, we’ve all been roasted alive.

Originally published at Mostly lemon based. You can comment here or there.

(no subject)

I envisage commuters arriving at the station and crying out “I MUST HAVE MARMALADE!” and falling to the floor weeping.

The 1940s must have been a challenging time in Bristol.

Originally published at Mostly lemon based. You can comment here or there.

Apparently I’m wrong

So, I’m told that the fact that one of our media server’s terrabyte drives is full is not, in fact, an indication that we need a bigger drive. But perhaps an indication that I should reconsider my “KEEP ALL THE THINGS” policy.

I’m not sure that that’s true.

Originally published at Mostly lemon based. You can comment here or there.