The legend of gruntal and why you dont buy ikea lighting

Bananas in the Falklands likes Ikea furniture – the better stuff, rather than the really cheap crap. Gruntal was a light fitting of low power complete with transformer. except that the size of gruntal does not fit the pre made holes in some older ikea wardrobe units.

Gruntals diameter is too big, and the old name of gruntal’s transformer breaks after two minutes of use if wired to more than unit.  The fittings also have changed from a rectangle connector to round so its incompatible.

Troubleshooting gruntal (now a kitchen shelf and not a light in ikea land) finds that the mains point is good but gruntal as an electrical fittting and transformer are crap even with new bulbs [easily obtainable].  It perhaps explains why lightning  and electrics is not a ikea strong point.

Clearly furniture and electrics dont mix with Ikea.

Guess time between cups and hplip

I bang on and on about HP and hplip being a bit shit, hplip says both the genuine hp inks [colour aand black] are ‘good’. And a last its an meme.

With best before ink, suicide bombers in ink cartridges which one is it. Alas it appears that HP want not to tell us.  Thats ok with us as it means less usage of the printer which also hurts HP as less ink is used while the printer is not working for a good week* or so.

Print something and cups says otherwise…..

* these are special order, dont expect to walk into a retailer and find them to take away,

fun with acsm

Book publishers are stupid, having handed the keys to amazon and adobe i find that acsm files [xml location files] dont work and that my library tells me that the kindle cannot read them, not that the monkey house has a kindle.

It would just take either to decline it the publishers of its services and if you bought drm eBooks then some stage down the line its a non book.

These publishing people are idiots.  Oh i never got further than discovering what an xml file contained, and then found for my os to read one, i would have emulate another os, and then crack the drm.

I stuck with paper books since i would have compile a lot of stuff and lets face it i ould rathe rnot have to bother with that much crap just to read fiction.  Richard Stallman is more right than wrong and will make fools of many like in the publishing business.

Milkmen in the mist

The milkman delivers milk which is a product from cows, not human ‘pleasures’*.  Anyhow the zoo has had a few and occasionally they disappear for weeks on end with as once happened and then a new one turned up asking for money owed who had no idea what happened to the last one.  I admit it is quite traditional not buying the stuff from an evil supermarket but it still works when the milkman profession does there thing.

It has just happened again and as time goes by there are more communicative with pieces of paper and a conflicting message between the old one and another new one as to why the milk stopped weeks later.  The old one had the cheek to blame the evil supermarkets for his woes as a trader** while he was not providing bottles of milk.  I suppose the zoo could have done Captain Picard tea but its milk and its not some rare substance that only a milkman has access to.

While economies of scale do factor here – simply not delivering to anybody else means a trip to his evil competitors for milk is sort of required.  Alternatively we could probably blame some cats..  It appears as if the new milkman has no such cat problems*** so far that the old one had.

Mind you perhaps Picard had the same problems.

* somebody might infer it ** the cost of milk *** a cat mafia ?

Mary Portas and Murder most something

Mary Portas (my blog) is a hate figure here in the zoo. Why I hear you say well with hmv, blockbuster, jessops, and comet going bust (mens shops) surely means she is due some blame for the charity shop curse retail has become.

OK – yes cameras are not an everyday purchase, and most humans have a phone with a camera that means the camera is not an everyday used item.  The local chemist has lost films of ours and so doing things online with a digital camera can also be safer. than entrusting an sd card or film to them.

Printer ink is hard to buy for in Mary Portas era of the charity shop in retail,  even a specialist retailer has to order things i can get.  Notice here that i cant just walk into a whsmith’s

Hmv and Blockbuster sell copyright stuff and with artists as seen on tv who cannot fill a concert,(my blog) who cannot or dont make interesting music well the writing is on the wall.  Independents i read are doing well so you wonder if the senior management are paying themselves too much rather than the prime locations and things.

Dvd’s and blueray* are also the copyright industy and you have wonder how many times people will see say the Avengers assuming they saw it at a cinema as well.  I have never been inside a Blockbuster as its a bit of a trek involving wheels.  I assume somebody at Blockbuster management thinks that was sufficient.

Our library is the closest and only place [when it is open] ]and has what Blockbuster has, even before i get to discussing online.  Nobody seems to wish to challenge it

Granny uderwear of Mary Portas ‘fashion’

Retail has become a bit of nightmare care of Mary. – way to go girl.  Good news means she is now screwing up the clothing industry c/o television may she wreck that with the professional determination she has with retail  Well done if you bought her passion killers this valentines day and lets wish our best Good luck to Mary!

* We dont own this format for sony issues.

Wheres the beef?

Bananas enjoys a bbq-cued beef hamburger and normally has to make them from scratch and its realy simple with bowl, oil  and and bit of pepper (no egg).  Why well why supermarket equivalents look like a burger except they were not palatable.

In fact a little unpleasant, our burgers tasted of beef.

Then years later (today) it is let known that beef is horse [or pony] . a fact that has put a few off that beef on label thing in Tesco’s.

Cant blame them, mind you pony burger is tasty..

Anyhow that raises another point that if beef is not being sold and instead is replaced by pork,pony and horse what happens to the price of a cow it would seem to make the market price of beef a moot point.

So as less beef is really being sold should not the price of beef go up?

The replacing of meat for other meat is something the food industry (my blog) seems unwilling to admit is a problem, or something that is blameable to somebody else in our era of cheap food.

Forth time lucky.

Have you tried to insulate an existing and older  brick house ? it is a job for professionals with filling, you can debate merits of loft insulation but since most of us do not have pumps or be willing to remove bricks and install a layer of material and then re-brick it certainly is a job for those with specialist tools.

Well in this new green world its the thing and makes some sense. Getting it done is easier than said than done.  Professor has had three people (my blog) round before it was agreed,  It requires for cavity wall lots of hole drilling between the outer wall, some ‘estimator’ did not even have a drill, another one did but could not fill the hole and since professor is not a ‘cement artist’ with quantities ready to hand its a bit hit and miss.

Another genius in the insulation industry literally came said he was too busy and then left.  Prices have gone up for doing less work and so it makes this industry worthy a blog post.

So professor was a  bit surprised when somebody came round, drilled and then refilled filled holes and was competent, they where also cheaper.  While being green is good perhaps the green industries should not make it so hard and also give people it has the tools to do some of the things.

Being green also comes with a cost a square meter of insulation cost £37 in a diy shop, you need a lot more than just one pack.

Patience might not be green, but patience* seems to be required by those in the green industry.  Perhaps greenwash is a better term for the cavity wall installation industry whom not all know there stuff

* its been an ongoing project for two years

smart tv – my ass

No drm on the old tv sets

Bananas was ‘fixing’ a tv after issues from a human.  Eventually i get the thing to look a little bit like a modern tv.  The thing has a ‘smart’ catch up tv thing and network plug which i had failed to get working through lack of bits but an old spare router, ddwrt and wds might solve.

So I get ddwrt wds noding and can websurf and stuff with no too much hassle with a computer.  Wds works so I then stick a wire into the tv from the router choose the thing and also get an ip address – a step further than last time.  The carth up thing connects and does text and images perfectly.  It sucks at moving pictures and radio even on normal versus high quality setting.

It is being honest an older smart tv appliance, with only one firmware update as the device is not made anymore. Smart tv is a joke and if they can do this to me, then smart tv that just works* is not going to happen for joe q public or if t does theres going to be a lot a scrapped very newish tv’s around with the crap support by the tv manufacturers.

Another problem for tv is that since all these devices are proprietary it means that it costs a lot to update everything.  We are not great tv fans anyhow but smart tv is exceptional buggy and inefficient.

* not that wds is hard, or that our poe devices failed to get an ip with the tv

Human junk?

telescopic ladder

Professor was impressed with a telescopic ladder he saw with an estimator type who had no sense of humour* [it came with the job] and so he deemed him to be a robot.

Ladders are either heavy, too small and too big for the thing you require them for. so this idea seemed a good idea even to professor.  Its a real clever piece of engineering and he found one returned with a 20% discount for some reason with an online retailer.

It has some signs of use but i cannot see any reason why it was returned.  Professor is happy and made us wonder about those humans who returned it after all this is a clever reinterpretation of the ladder.

* traffic warden mentally

Not exclusive anymore – the music industry and the platinum record.

Bananas was looking at the value of some music fan items, so i had a look at ebay, some odd stuff came up being the artist has some fans like me, its not like that monkey rapist* (my blog) who is now dead.

The odd stuff included photographic negatives, and platinum records which seem to be sold as house furnishings and many of these ‘reproductions’ must exist.  How low can the record industry get ? selling homewares.  Uncool.

Granted i do still like the music, and the person is not dead but the non exclusive records where very cheap for the old formats like cassette.  So if you go to a house with gold or platinum records in frames on the walls there very easy to obtain and are not the exclusive item one off item you perceive them to be.

Nobody appeared to be buying the stuff as well, so this music memorabilia market is a bit odd.

However perhaps that Michael Jackson sex doll for us zoo apes to torture** will become a reality sooner than we think.

* Michael Jackson ** if you can buy reproduction platinum records why not a sex doll ?