May. 23rd, 2014

pyoor_excuse: (Default)

Amazon Escalates Its Battle Against Hachette – NYTimes.com

blood-and-vitriol:

jewess-ex-machina:

fatmanatee:

don’t buy from amazon don’t buy from amazon don’t buy from amazon

This would be gross even if Hachette weren’t my biggest client. That just makes it personally gross.

What the actual bloody fuck, Amazon.

Seconded.

Unfortunately, since back when Amazon bought Abebooks, which is where I like to get my second hand fix from; it’s got much harder. 

And for online order freaks, like me, hive.co.uk’s pretty cool. Also you can opt to have it delivered to your local bookstore which means you can err…have an excuse to go into the bookstore and buy other books :)

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

pyoor_excuse: (Default)

Some days, no matter how much I achieve I’m not satisfied with myself. Which is quite frustrating as I quietly nibble away at my self confidence despite having done everything I could have achieved.

I’d wanted to do some gardening but it’s been hacking with rain pretty much all day; so I don’t think that’s really a sensible plan.

Instead I’ve moved the new gearbox (for the minor) into the garage from the front garden (where it was delivered); I’ve put a coat of paint on a section of the trim that was on its third coat (so it’s now had four and looks lovely) and filled, sanded and painted with a first coat the last upstairs doorframe. Oh, and filled a section of skirting that got damaged way back when they lifted the carpets and sanded the floors.

I stripped down and reassembled the (third) Slim Devices squeezebox*, made up a new power supply for it*** and configured it.

And still I’m not feeling like I’ve achieved anything with my day off. Although I suspect it boils down to having listened to BBC news all day and having had the ‘UKIP HAVE WON THE WORLD’ version of the UK elections, which is just depressing, even if it’s not exactly true.

* I may have bought another one**
** Which turned out just to need a new power supply and a case that’s less glue-like
*** Which needs tweaking because it only produces 4.9 volts which, it seems, is insufficient for the poor thing.

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

pyoor_excuse: (Default)

So, I just spent ages finding an appropriate resistor to tweak the voltage output of a John’s Special Power Supply to 5 volts. Theoretically, if the two resistors you change in it are the same value it should produce a nice, healthy, 5 volts. It produced ~4.9 (4.92-4.96 ish, according to my meter). Having tried the two squeezeboxen in the kitchen with the power supply both of them failed. Putting them in the lounge with the other 5 V supply I made last time (which produces 4.97-4.99 volts) they both seemed happy. Joyous even.

Now I knew* my shiny floodwiring worked, because I’ve used it to transfer data. I’ve transferred data to-and-from my media server using the craptastic android tablet and the problems it had were the same whether it was plugged directly in to the router or into the floodwired point.

So, given that knowledge I just spent a little while routing around in my resistor collection and managed to wind the new supply up to 5.06 volts. I reckoned that was close enough for jazz, so brought it down and tried it.

Unfortunately, what this proved is that the problem lies elsewhere. I don’t entirely know if it’s the floodwiring, or the last meter between the box and the craptastic switch, or what is causing the grief, but the poor squeezebox can’t connect. In a good moment it finds the squeezebox server, but then fails. In a bad, it just wails that it can’t find it at all.

It also takes an inordinately long time to obtain an IP address. Trying ‘em in the lounge reveals no problems at all. I think I’m going to have to spend some time prodding it, but I have absolutely no network diagnostic kit.

* For, apparently, quite limited values of ‘knew’

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

January 2023

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