Bodger @bodger@computerfairi.es

Lest people think all I do is rant, I'd like to give a shout out to Arm & Hammer for their packaging redesign for kitty litter: the new boxes are easier to open and pour, nice job!

Over seventy dollars for a pizza, three salads, and two sodas? What is the world coming to?

The FCC site for complaining about spam calls admits it takes around 15 minutes to fill out. That seems excessive, especially for people who get more than 4 spam calls an hour.

Yo Logitech: it's a nice mouse but I'd like to reverse the horizontal scroll wheel, and you decided to just remove support for older operating systems so I can't? And then have your web site and customer support lie about it? Rude.

I had someone repair my old computer, and they "helpfully" upgraded the OS, to one that won't run my expensive licensed software. This sucks.

All of the scammers (even the robots) begin their calls with "How are you doing?" Legitimate callers rarely do this.

FedEx: when it absolutely, positively needs to be dropped, broken, delayed, misrouted, lied about, and then tossed out of the truck into the snow in the yard two days late.

Ikea "Alex" drawer unit + Target "Brightroom" trays = Lego happiness

If your bill pay form blocks copy and paste, you may have to wait until my bill pay services gets around to mailing you a cheque to get your money.

I'd probably buy a storage upgrade if you weren't so OBNOXIOUS about it. But with that attitude, I'm not giving you a cent. I'm looking at YOU, Google.

We bought a cheap microwave to stand in while I repaired the nice one. After just a couple of weeks, the keypad is looking shabby. Maybe it's because there's protective plastic over it? Doesn't seem to have an obvious way to peel it off. Should I?

Stayed in a hotel with actual keys. It's a nice Assa core, but the bitting seems kind of weak. Then again, hotel keys are probably on a multiple master system for housekeeping, management, etc. Then again, I've seen worse.

Got to meet a chunk of the cast of Our Flag Means Death, and they posed with us and our pride pirate flag!

I'd pretty much had enough of Epic Photo Ops mismanagement and generally avoided them for the past couple of years, but really wanted to try for a photo with Mary Elizabeth Winstead and they were the only game in town. As usual, they screwed it up royally and I missed out. So business at usual for Epic FuckUps. Con organizers, go with ANYONE BUT EPIC FUCKUPS for photo ops, please.

In the United States, if you want to park somewhere, they want you to download a different sketchy app for each different parking lot, the apps are buggy and hard to use and probably will steal your credit card. In Iceland, everyone just uses the nice reliable Parka app.

I saw an outlet plate high up on a wall with just a curiously shaped slot in it. I climbed up for a closer look, as I didn't recognize it. Apparently it's a magic outlet?

Yo, Sony: I get that your website isn't up to date and doesn't recognize serial numbers from recently produced products. And I get that you hide your contact info so I don't talk to your expensive customer service reps. What I don't get is why I have to WAIT for a BOT.

Our microwave oven died in a peculiar fashion this morning. While cooking, it would turn itself off every few seconds, then come back on and pick up where it left off. I guessed it was the usual failure mode for electronics: electrolytic capacitors. I opened it up and saw there were only four of them. I had those values in stock, swapped them in, and that fixed it!

The tractor battery swap mostly works, but it's weird. The blade motors run just fine, but the wheel motors run very slowly at full charge and slowly speed up. I don't know if it's an issue with the ESCs (same ESCs as the blade ones), the control CPU, or perhaps the accelerator position sensor. May have to do some detailed debugging.

A while back, we were discussing display options for a plant watering sensor. It occurred to me I could make a smile/frown display pretty easily and said "I just need some rubber tubing and a servo!" My friend Chris grinned at me and replied "If I had a nickel for every time someone said that to me!"