7 Jun 2013, 8:55pm
fixing things rant:
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    • Maplin Electronics – if it’s under £100 and lasts a year that’s as much as you can expect

    Way back in March 2012 Maplin sold me this 7″ TV from Maplin. My main application was lining up security cameras, but I also thought it would be useful for checking the weather forecast when in our campervan. As it was I didn’t realise there is no useful Teletext replacement on digital TV. A smartphone and the weather page on the BBC website is far more practical, unless you’re in parts of Scotland. And then you probably don’t get DTT service either.

    Today I wanted to rig a camera looking at the massive Barn Owl box kindly provided by Suffolk Wildlife Trust at the Oak Tree farm because a barn owl is a frequent visitor, occasionally to be seen at the box and there’s loads of bird crap underneath it, and some owl pellets, or so I am told by people who know about this sort of thing. I get to see this, rather than a blue screen I’d expect with no signal

    Maplin customer service is crap

    One dead Maplin TV that they refuse to replace

    So I take advantage of the glorious sunshine and take a wander through a couple of recs and the park, to it back to the store

    And they refused to replace it or refund. It was the usual runaround, sorry sir, yes, I agree it’s a bit short for the TV to fail but company policy is yadda yadda. They suggested I contacted Maplin Customer Services, where I talked to Kirsty who repeated the story. I educated her as to the Sale of Goods and that this TV was not of suitable quality as consumer durables should last longer that a year and a bit and she more or less said “f*ck you, so sue us” I wish I had a recording, but since I used Maplin’s phone to avoid paying some usurous 0844 charge I couldn’t do that. Next time I will take one of those sucker pickup coils and a recorder.

    I really try and avoid using the phone with big firms. If I have to deal with them then writing a letter is usually quicker and cheaper, plus it wastes less of my time. But if I do have to use the phone then I always record the call as a matter of policy.

    This reminds me that there are added advantages to not buying consumer crap. Not only do you not spend money. You also don’t get the sort of deliberate frustration that companies like Maplin set up to reduce their costs by avoiding their legal obligation to supply goods of suitable quality.

    I remember Maplin from a time when it wasn’t a purveyor of cheap Chinese crap but actually a supplier of useful components. They took a business decision somewhere in the 1990s to get out of the electronics hobbyist market and into the gadget end, and increased their prices to about one and a half times what they should be. And became a damn sight more successful ;)

    Now I can’t really get too excited about the £70, but I sure as hell don’t like being taken the piss of. So I got onto MSE and looked at what I should have done and exactly how to put the letter which will be the next step. I suspect that Maplin take the Ryanair policy of customer service. They spend the money on training their staff to runaround complainants enough  that they give up, and in the end there’s only so much effort I’m going to put into this.

    But it’s a little bit more than rolling over. I’ve taken MSE’s template letter, though I’m not going to threaten legal action fo a £70 TV, otherwise I think the people in Maplin’s complaints centre would be justified in having a titter.

    The official Maplin policy seems to be -

    If it’s under £100 and it lasts more than a year, that’s it, sunshine. It doesn’t owe you anything

    Not only does this sort of shoddy approach contribute to the amount of e-waste, it’s also taking the piss. A TV is not a consumable item. Okay, 10 years is asking a bit long, but five years is a reasonable minimum service life to expect.

     

    14 May 2013, 11:15am
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    • Monsanto GM – Imagine a boot stamping on a human face. Forever

    Many people have an issue with genetically modified organisms from a gut feeling and philosophical point of view. I used to take that line, but I don’t any more – the good people of the United States have been willing guinea pigs for the GM experiment over the last 20 years and it’s been in general not hazardous to human health 1

    But I am opposed from an economic point of view, and this story of Monsanto suing a farmer in the United States is why. It reminds me of a quote late on in Orwell’s 1984

    But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

    Much of what is wrong in industrial agriculture is the desperately overleveraged capital structure of farming in the West. Farming owes so much money to banks to raise the cash for the complex web of seeds, chemicals, machinery that they can’t take any risks and have to maximise production, purely to pay off the debt incurred.

    Now on the face of it, it’s an open-and-shut case. Monsanto patented their seed. Farmer Bowman buys a load of soybean seed from a bunch of guys selling it as feed, and then he goes and plants it as a late crop. Since 90% of soybeans in the US are GM roundup-ready, this is largely second-generation GM. Bowman doesn’t have any alternatives not encumbered by Monsanto’s patents. And so Bowman has Monsanto’s heavies roll up demanding protection money lawyers appear threatening to sue the shit out of him. Which they do.

    One of the most convincing proofs that there is no God is that at Monsanto’s headquarters the sign doesn’t get to look like this

    what about the 4.5 billion years of R&D before you, Monsanto?

    what about the 4.5 billion years of R&D before you, Monsanto?

    The problem I have with GM is that it means evil shits get to own most of our food supply. These guys put it well, though I don’t personally subscribe to the Monsanto makes Indian farmers commit suicide theory 2. Monsanto should be indicted for its own patent and legalistic evilness ;)

    Control over seed is the first link in the food chain because seed is the source of life. When a corporation controls seed, it controls life, especially the life of farmers.

    Now if I have a problem with some company, say Sky TV for example, or Rupert Murdoch in general, then guess what? I don’t have to buy their products! Giving up eating, however, isn’t really an option.

    However, Monsanto’s express aim in life is to seize the means of production through legalistic shit like patenting the very stuff of life, and then extracting protection money. They do that by creating an unsustainable business model that gives a sugar rush of profits at the beginning, which is the hook to get farmers dependent on a highly leveraged business model. Borrow the money to buy our seed, and you can drench it in Roundup (made by Monsanto, funnily enough), and make enough profit to pay us back. Rinse, repeat, recycle. But don’t you dare plant that seed, else we will sue the living crap out of you.

    In itself that was not so bad. What is bad is that as soon as there is any Monsanto GM in, say a cross between Monsanto crop and a neighbouring farmer’s crop, then Monsanto assert their rights over that other farmer’s crop, and say his seeds contain Monsanto patented information, Monsanto therefore forbid him planting his seed or want their payment. That’s the bit I have a problem with. Basically, if Monsanto want to take that line, fair enough. Let society then make a stipulation on Monsanto in return, to prevent the company stamping all over the rights of third-parties to mind their own business. Something like

    Okay, Monsanto, you want to assert patent rights over descendant crops that may have been contaminated. Fine. In that case, we attach the following license conditions to you being able to sell your GM seeds to farmers , to the effect of. “All GM crops must be plated under condtions of biosecurity, in negatively pressured double-skinned polytunnels that are sealed against the egress of your damn precious stuff, so it doesn’t pollute the environment or infringe the rights of other people not to use Monsanto products”

    Patent law is fine when it comes to human constructs and inventions. You don’t normally leave a television set or an iPad in a room and come back a year later to find they’ve introduced iPad technology into the light switches, the wallpaper shows eulogies of Steve Jobs and doorknobs speak to you like Siri, while the gravel in the drive can tune itself to BBC1. However the whole point of Life is to reproduce and spread genetic material, and it’s been doing that for three and a half billion years. Self replicating structures are inherently incompatible with the exclusive rights of patent law, and it’s high time that humanity in general took the fight to Monsanto and educated the piss-taking bastards that their abuse of the patent system needs to stop. There may be a case for GM technology, but the case for it is to be done in national research facilities or universities 3. Oh and the patent system needs to be updated to include the fact that Life has over three billion years of prior art and therefore no living forms whatsoever may be patented. I assume that Monsanto has already tried to patent the wheel, but didn’t manage to get that one through.

    Unfortunately in the UK we are about to lose the GM battle, because:

    We had a pro-GM lobbyist Caroline Spelman as an Environment minister before she was sacked.

    To be replaced with Owen Paterson, who says people who don’t like GM are humbugs, and if we don’t have GM in Europe WE WILL ALL STARVE. Yeah, right.

    Presumably Monsanto and its ilk have bought enough of David Cameron’s guys to get their way. Everybody has their price ;)

    Part of the problem is that Monsanto does deliver real value for their customers in the beginning, just as a drug dealer does. All the wins are at the beginning, when you switch a diverse but sort of sustainable agricultural model to a closely controlled monoculture aided by broad spectrum herbicides. Yield goes up, what’s not to like? The problem, just like with narcotics, is that to take the wins, you get locked in. To afford Monsanto’s seed prices every year, because you aren’t allowed to save and replant, you have to borrow. And to service the debt, you need the higher yields, to earn the money to pay the debts, so you then end up in debt-slavery. This is not unique to Monsanto, it is the problem for a lot of modern farms, in that they are extremely capital-intensive, thus so highly leveraged that the financial structure of farming becomes brittle and non-resilient. You coin it in the good times, then use the money to consolidate more and more holdings into huge farms with dearer machinery, becoming more and more leveraged in the process.  So when a bad year comes, like last year’s endless summer of rain in the UK, you get financially slaughtered and need to borrow even more money. Which leads to short-termism, which is a bad thing in farming, because you no longer look after the land, using the soil as a growth substrate and fertilising artificially, rather than working with the natural carbon and nitrogen cycles. GM seeds break another natural cycle, though seed saving has long gone from Western agriculture and horticulture.

    Even in the 1960s the majoriy of corn and sugar beet were F1 hybrids, ie purchased anew each season. The unique thing Monsanto brings to the mix is they are using the expensive process of GM to get themselves to sole supplier position with a dead hand on competitive alternatives. It is the rent-seeking nature of a monopolist that makes the company so dangerous, when combines with monopoly control of the essentials of life.

    Shame about the absence of that fiery hand writing on the wall. It would make terrific TV, and would be a really stylish launch for the Second Coming ;)

    Notes:

    1. It has indirectly been very bad for some Americans’ health, by making it cheap to raise industrial beef on feedlots and by putting high-fructose corn syrup into all sorts of low-grade foods. However, Americans have the choice whether to eat these or not, this is a social and business problem that has been facilitated by GM but not caused by it. ↩
    2. Even in India I don’t believe cotton is the first link in the food chain, unless they’ve found a way of reprocessing it into something edible ↩
    3. Companies welcome too – some firms make a profit on open-source material and it would be unwise to prohibit the private sector just because one example became evil. But if you even think of patenting Life then we will bulldoze your buildings, take every red cent in your accounts and debar every member of the Board from running a company ever again. Because you have shown yourself to be greedy bastards who want to control our food supply, and steal the work of over three billion years of painstaking research and development that has claimed countless lives on planet Earth. They didn’t all die for your monopolistic profits. ↩
    14 Apr 2013, 11:01pm
    living intentionally rant:
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    • Why is everything Apple so easy and so hard at the same time?

    Note this post is a random musing of an ermine poking an inquisitive snout into a wrinkle of the world that interested him. Nothing made by Apple can ever be described as frugal, there’s no personal finance angle and it’s definitely not simple living ;)

    The Ermine has avoided everything to do with Apple in life so far. I didn’t own any Apple hardware, don’t own AAPL stock, never understood the fandom. It all started badly when I began work at The Firm – everyone in the office used the little squiffy mac classic/plus computers to write reports, and there was an Apple Laserwriter laser printer.

    A Mac classic. Nasty little things, where the obvious way to shut theb uggers down is - wait for it- drag the floppy disk into the trash icon. Obvious, innit. Stupid human for thinking this neans "Computer - erase all my shit, NOW."

    Mac classic

    Much was made of the intuitive nature of the Mac, compared to the arcane command line of the PC. I didn’t find it intuitive at all. F’rinstance how d’you turn one of these off? The obvious way to shut the bugger down is – wait for it- drag the floppy disk into the trash icon. Obvious, innit? Stupid human for thinking this means “Computer – erase all my shit, NOW.”

    Unfortunately at that time you couldn’t do anything useful with a Mac as an engineer, y’know, like run circuit simulation software or the like. I had a great big 286 PC that could do this. I was able, via the Appletalk network and a shockingly expensive PC Appletalk card, to copy the output of a SPICE circuit simulation file to the office LaserWriter. I shouldn’t be too hard on Apple about the cost, this was in the late 1980s, where Novell Netware ran a piece of software on their servers for the sole purpose of counting up the number of connected network cards and kicking people off if there were more simultanous users than there were network connection licenses. Cheeky blighters. TCP/IP and the Internet came along just in time to save us from this sort of rent-seeking usury, Apple at least just collected their rent from the high cost of the network cards. However, Apple never allowed me to me print that document, because if I wasn’t in the Apple ecosystem I was Unworthy to touch their printer. I was able to get the file onto the printer, but without some sort of fork file to attach the file to something to make it do something I was stuffed.

    Every so often one of these macs would have a hissy fit and the EHT would start to flash over. We’d take it into the lab and pull it apart. We were electronics engineers, don’t try this at home. You could usually get it going again by pulling off the anode cap 1 and getting some isopropyl alcohol and cleaning round it. It was then that I was exposed to my first experience of fanboidom. Everyone crowded round to observe the most vainglorious piece of narcissistic codswallop I have seen in any piece of gear. Apple thought they were so Really Great they inscribed the signatures of the design team in the plastic moulding of the inside of the case, and everyone cooed about how marvellous this was. It was all I could do not to chunder in the wastepaper bin.

    I ended up with a deep dislike for everything Apple ever since :) When I buy a piece of equipment I own the damn thing, not the manufacturer, and this seems to be a simple fact that the Apple corporation doesn’t get. What else does a printer expect to do when it receives a PostScript file other than print it, FFS? HP got this, but Apple specifically made their printers slightly nonstandard so they would only work with Apple kit. When you buy a piece of Apple hardware, you get to check in your balls with Apple. You do it their way, or you feel the squeeze…

    So how do people use smartphone screens then?

    Fast forward 25 years, I have no smartphone. It was a struggle for me to imagine how people use any sort of website on a poxy little two inch wide screen, and in portrait mode. And I needed to understand this, else I would be authoring stuff that would really hack my users off, and in the end the user is always right, even if they’re mad as a bag of spanners. So the Ermine was in the market for an iPod touch, which does most of the things a smartphone does, but using wifi, so without tying me into a phone contract and feel the squeeze of a different corporation on my parts – the Ownership of my bank account via a mobile phone contract for the next three years.

    Now I have to say that the experience of unboxing the device, sparking it up and connecting to my wifi network was the best ever user experience of connecting a piece of computer kit I’ve ever had. The various programs look nice and run well. Since this is the Apple universe you get to call programs Apps, and they tend to be single-function. I was quickly able to run up the browser and learn what I needed to learn about the website design – and that my use of a folding CSS structure did indeed sort of track iPod and presumably smartphone screens. Thank you Skeleton CSS for doing the grunt work and saving my ass while I was authoring blind ;)

    And I discovered I was getting old :( I had lost my last pair of glasses so I was slumming it with the pair from before, on an old prescription from 10 years ago. But the iPod scales websites down if they are too wide for the screen. As you get older the short focus of your eyes drifts out. Mine was different in each eye, and I could not read the roughly 4pt text with both eyes unless I held the device so it was too far away to read. So I either read it with one eye and get a splitting headache, or do without. Getting this machine has cost me about £400 so far – £160 for the iPod and the rest because I have to accept I need varifocals and reading glasses. In the optician at least I was able to read the smallest grade of text so I will be able to read the iPod rendered website and develop with it. I can’t blame this on Apple ;)

    This is the bees knees for the job I bought it for. I can see how stuff looks like on a smartphone like screen, I now know why I get headaches using the computer and what to do to fix this, and the iPod fires up in a couple of seconds so it’s easy to see the weather, email and stuff like that. The share price screen even works well, though I was reminded of the original vainglorious streak when I see the first example stock is AAPL. The iPod doesn’t owe me anything now – I was able to finish the job and the project has already earned me more revenue than the capital cost of the iPod. And I understand how teenagers can use the web on a small screen, because the screen has a finer dot-per-inch resolution that a regular computer screen. Although the total number of picture elements is still larger on a laptop or desktop, the iPod screen picture elements are closer together, so the loss of quality isn’t as much as I had expected from the smaller physical screen size. But you do have to be under 35, or equally short-sighted in both eyes if older, to be able to see the screen well enough to use that resolution without visual aids, and you’d look kinda daft on the bus looking at your smartphone with a magnifying glass!

    How to you use this thing for music then?

    Then I thought I’d try and put music on it. This, apparently, is the primary purpose of an iPod after all, though I didn’t buy it for that reason. Now I have it, I may as well use it ;)

    First, some background. I’ve loved music over the years, and it is one of the pleasure I used to have in life. I never used portable music players in a big way – with a car commute of 20 minutes each way there’s no need. I don’t have the death-wish of cycling plugging up my ears and losing situational awareness. Call me chicken-hearted, but I like to know if a great big truck is coming up behind me, even in rural Suffolk.

    a detour into hearing

    As a result the ermine is still capable of hearing up to about 12kHz though I have to be careful to use hearing protection with power tools. The mammalian ear is strangely and poorly designed in that there is a mechanical amplifier inside. The ossicles couple the high impedance of the air to the low impedance of the fluid-filled works inside the snail-shaped cochlea, using three bones to the eardrum. Then you get to the outer hair cells, which act as chemically powered-mechanical amplifiers, they do not send signals to the brain. This cochlear amplifer is the damnedest way of getting amplification and very susceptible to damage from loud sounds, but this preamplifer gives the ear remarkable sensitivity if working right. Then you get to the inner hair cells, which occupy a tapered shape, resonating at the input end for high frequencies and further in for low frequencies, acting as a coarse spectrum analyser. As you get older you lose some of the ability to adjust tension in the eardrum and the ossicles which reduces the damaging effects of loud sounds, so you need to be  more careful to avoid exposure to excessively loud sounds from 40 onwards.  ‘Cos otherwise you start to trash the hairy preamplifier, and you get to know about that eventually, because it has a stupendous amount of amplification- about 50dB or 100,000 times power gain. Lose or seriously damage that and you are deaf as a post. Young’uns should note that you’re not immune to the damage, it just takes a little more loudness to do it. From what I hear on the Tube and on the street, some of you are doing fine wrecking that sucker. Please, for God’s sake read this and take the test. If you are below 40 and it indicates any problem whatsoever then you may want to re-evaluate your relationship to music. I am well over 40 and do fine on the test, and there are a lot more miles on the clock in my case.

    Music isn’t particularly a threat to my hearing as when I listen there is a convenient device called a volume control, and I don’t go to that many live concerts. I stopped using portable audio devices on planes  (then called a Walkman not an iPod :) ) after I got off a LHR to LAX flight and fired up the walkman in the hotel room, to be greeted by a hellaciously loud volume I’d never normally listen at. A jet plane is a stupendously loud environment already, running at 80-85dBA 2, there’s no real headroom to make any music heard safely above the engine roar unless you are using noise cancelling headphones. 80dBA is considered the danger level so you don’t want to add too much more noise to your ears inside a plane.

    Using tools and transportation which is probably my main noise risk. I use hearing protection even for things like hammering, now, and definitely for any use of power tools. I may look like a jerk, but so what. There’s not much more I can say to the young, but it saddens me when I walk on one side of the street and can hear what track someone is playing on the other side of the street from their earbuds. There is no cure for deafness, and if you are young now and start to lose your hearing before my age you are likely to spend half your life in a silent world cut off from the rest of humanity’s preferred way to communication. My Dad once worked in a glass bottling factory and was very hard of hearing towards the end of his life. It was no fun at all for him.

    back to music

    1304_1940_family_radioI grew up with actually sitting down to listen to music. Yeah, I know it sounds kinda funny now, like a family gathering round the wireless to listen to the news on the Home service. Part of this was determined by the media of the day – record players were never portable in any useful way, and I’d have never played mine on anything crappy. Each time you play a record, a little piece of it dies, and the capital cost of the record collection was by far the greatest investment in audio entertainment, even for a hi-fi nut, so I didn’t take risks.

    Cassette tapes were noisy, unclear and all round ghastly, and I was unlucky enough to be oversensitive to speed instability. I was eventually reasonably happy with CDs, and more recently have moved to a Slimserver (now Logitech) media server and streaming players, playing losslessly compressed data from the CDs (ie the player gets exactly the same digital data as was on the CD). All of these work entirely within my four walls. I don’t do Cloud anything, for the simple reason that I hate third-party dependency for anything I put effort into. Cloud is fine for something you don’t need, or only need for a few weeks, and you don’t put any effort into. My music collection has been with me for thirty years and I’d like to hang on to it…

    Getting CDs into a digital music library is something that costs a lot of effort, leastways if you start off with a few hundred CDs. Transferring my CDs was a project that took me two years using multiple PCs and CD drives, sometimes running EAC on two drives at once, ripping the CDs to lossless FLAC and Cue files, which the SlimDevices/Logitech kit can play. It’s a long, tedious and soulless job ripping CDs. You only ever want to do that once, though I had to do it one-and-a-half times because I discovered why you should not split CD albums into tracks as soon as I ran into my first live album, and reinforced again when I ran into my first classical album. It’s a bastard when you get a gap between the first and second movements of a symphony that wasn’t there on the CD, or the applause hiccups between tracks on a live CD.

    And then work went bad and other things went wrong. In a twist of fate something that had given me joy for decades came to hold no meaning for me, and there is a gap of about three years when I bought no CDs and listened to hardly anything at all, and even that with jaded perception. Although I love the idea encapsulated in Miranda Sawyer’s lovely Observer article about the power of music to score our lives, and lift spirits in adversity I didn’t find the same. Until the spell was broken earlier this year, and the music came back to life.

    Now in trying to sort this out I discover much has changed in the three year intercession. Some people actually pay for digital downloads. When it comes to information I don’t pay for what I can’t touch, and in many cases the CD is actually cheaper these days if you take it secondhand, but yes, you do need to wait for it in the post. It seems there is some unholy digital download battle between Apple/iTunes AAC and the rest, led by Amazon MP3, with cloud streaming systems like Spotify throwing in a wildcard. I don’t want any of that shit. I grew up with a standalone audio system depending on only power and what’s within my four walls. Sometimes I am going to run a party in a field with no phone service or mains electricity. No Cloud service, no tunes.

    I managed to use the iPod without trouble for everything but music. When it comes to music, there seems to be a world of hurt in store for me, because I am not a new-born come to Apple to sort my life out. I have a perfectly good existing  digital music collection, held in a free open source losslessly compressed form specifically because I don’t want any company to be able to control my usage or suddenly render my collection useless. It seems the way you are meant to get music onto an iPod, iTunes, wants to control me 100%. It wants to say how and when I can listen to my own music, and how and where I can move it. I’m not having that at all. I didn’t rent this iPod, I bought the damn thing, and  I want to use my existing music collection without handing over the keys, so iTunes is right out. I’m happy to accept compression on a portable, but not the lock-in, and as for saying what I can or can’t do with my own data, sod that for a laugh. I say what I can do in my own four walls, not Apple.

    How to get music onto an iPod without installing iTunes

    I did finally crack how to do this, without installing the infernal iTunes. I have a desktop computer with a load of electronics software, kept on XP which I have to use for ripping CDs because EAC doesn’t work on Windows 7. The last time I installed iTunes on this XP machine it installed half the contents of Steve Jobs’ control-freakery ecosystem without having the decency to ask if that really was what I meant to do. Not just iTunes but bonjour which confused the hell out of my existing streaming system, Quicktime, Apple updating service, the lot. Not an exercise I wanted to repeat.

    Because I still think in terms of albums and not tracks, I use foobar2000 to split the CD image files into tracks and convert to MP3 for the iPod, which, though proprietary is at least a widely supported standard. Somehow foobar2000 was smart enough to tell the MP3 files that they are part of an album and tell them the track number, and the iPod is bright enough to take note of this and present me the music in terms of albums again. I used CopyTrans to do the job of shifting the MP3s to the iPod. Foobar2000 can also embed the cover art, which helps brighten up the selection process on the iPod somewhat. Both programs are free though only one is open source.

    CopyTrans had to download iTunes and use some part of the guts of it, but other than that I have snatched control of my own hardware back from Apple, without making the Beast angry by jailbreaking it. It kinda scared the hell out of me when I pressed play without headphones to hear a truly nasty tinny rendition of the track sodcasted to me from the internal speakers. It’s funny to think that forty years of technological innovation has brought us a poorer portable loudspeaker reproduction quality that the first transistor radio I ever owned, because at the portable level it’s all about the size of the enclosure that baffles the out-of-phase back output of the speaker. This was nasty, tinny, distorted and unclear. It was fine when I jacked in my headphones. I’m still not sure I have the clarity/resolution of playing back on my hi-fi, but it’s entirely fit for purpose as a portable ;)

    Apple products are great and easy to use as long as you are prepared to stay in the walled garden. Do as the nice man says and use the Apple ecosystem in the way prescribed, which in my case presumably would mean paying for several hundred CDs from the Apple store again or losing another two years of my life to ripping them into a compressed format that is locked to one PC and one iPod. And it will all work a treat, in general attractively, smoothly and without serious problems apart from the hurt to your wallet. That’s the easy part of the Apple universe.

    If I’d wanted a portable music player as such, I should probably have got anything other than Apple, where you can simply dump the MP3s onto the player as a mounted mass storage device, and the player sorts it all out. However, I needed to understand the smartdevice and Apple world and this the iPod has done for me. I do like some of the one-task programs, the share prices, the weather app and, to be honest, the music player itself with the cover art. So I can accept the hoops I have to jump through to make this device work with my existing digital music library. However, it’s another example of how Apple makes life hard for free-thinking customers. I’m not particularly tempted to buy an iPad after this experience if and when my existing laptop cashes in its chips. That’s the hard part of Apple.

    I was left with a greater admiration for Apples’ craftiness and the quality of their customer experience. And a greater dislike for the company at the same time for trying to turn an Ermine into a consumer zombie. A lot of the developments in computing, information technology and telecoms at the moment are trending towards making us good little consumers who don’t have any control or creative output. You can’t write code or write books or articles on a tablet computer 3, an iPod or a Kindle, but they’re great for consuming the work of others. We are all consumers now, it seems, and soon the act of creating content, which was democratized by the general-purpose personal computer in the 1980s, will be professionalised and locked down again, by the simple act of not allowing the user to install non-approved programs ;)

     

    Notes:

    1. really don’t do this at home. You have to short the CRT to ground after removing the cap, but dielectric absorption means the some of the charge on the CRT comes back while you’re not looking, ready to give the unwary a shock ;) ↩
    2. Passenger noise environments of enclosed transportation systems, US Office of noise abatement and control ↩
    3. not fundamentally impossible, but without a real keyboard your productivity sucks ↩
    20 Mar 2013, 10:06am
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    • Cait Reilly was out of order about Poundland, but not half as out of order as the Government

    Cait Reilly shot to fame as the woman who was too special to work for her Jobseeker’s allowance because she was too busy with more important things to do with her time. In particular she wanted to do her work experience in a museum rather than Poundland.

    Now my experience of work has usually be that he who pays the piper calls the frickin’ tune, so evenually when I came to be sick of the tune I had to tell the piper to get on his bike. Then you don’t get the pay, natch. So as far as I am concerned Reilly’s case doesn’t wash. In the end if the DWP is paying you, Cait, and they say you go  to Poundland, well, you go to Poundland. Or you stop claiming JSA. The choice is yours.

    Cait Reilly in Poundland

    Cait Reilly in Poundland

    However, Reilly pressed her case through the courts, and the law of the land as it stood at the time found in her favour. Which in the end is as it should be. I’m entitled to shoot my mouth off here but the whole point of living in a complex human society is that you need organised ways of determining rules and we have one. And it found that Cait Reilly was right and the DWP and I were wrong.

    We have Parliament, which makes the laws, and the judiciary, that interprets the laws, and that’s because tough experience in human societies shows that when the guys who make the laws do the intepreting and applying it all tends to go downhill and ends up with some Big Cheese saying “You lot damn well do what I say and I call the shots round here”. The more swivel-eyed nut-jobs think we’ve already got that but I’m not one of them. Although Britain has its problems at the moment they pale into insignificance compared to the issues of some human societies at the moment that have ended up with the “I call the shots round here”, and if the price of that is that the Cait Reillys of this world get their way and a free ride at the taxpayer’s expense then that’s not too bad a price to pay for holding the thin line against mob rule ;)

    Parliament is perfectly entitled to say, having seen this debacle, that no, what they meant to happen agrees a lot more with my view on things than Cait Reilly’s. And obviously I think that’s a Very Good Thing. But what I am most certainly not happy about one little bit is the attempt by the DWP to create a retrospective law to avoid paying out the JSA that was denied to jobseekers up to now because they were wrong.

    The Department for Work and Pensions has introduced emergency legislation to reverse the outcome of a court of appeal decision and “protect the national economy” from a £130m payout to jobseekers deemed to have been unlawfully punished.

    Hello Iain Duncan Smith and the government generally. What exactly is it about unlawful that you don’t get? We’re going to a bad place when the Government shows a disrespect for the laws they make, and retrospective legislation is always a disrespect for the rule of law. Law only has meaning when it is knowable, and if people can come back in time and change laws retrospectively, then anything can be made unlawful.

    So back off, IDS and call off your dogs. By all means change the legislation from this point on, so that precious princesses like Cait Reilly do get it – claim JSA and you bloody well do what the Jobcentre tells you to do. But since that did not hold when her JSA and that of others was docked then bloody well pay it back, with interest and accept you screwed up.

    After all, the West Coast cock-up cost 50m and rising simply because of a lack of common sense – that’s what you get when you run an operation with consultants rather than competence – you end up not knowing what you’re doing. So less of this ‘protect the national economy’ bullshit. You protect the economy by plugging this particular loophole from now on. You don’t protect the economy by overturning the rule of law, chumps. I wouldn’t go as far as to say Cait Reilly deserves the money that was withheld. But she should get it, as should anybody else who was in that situation, because the Government needs to  respect the law.

    6 Mar 2013, 3:54pm
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    • Europe, Swiss move to limit banker bonuses and control fraud, Boris howls and Osborne takes it in the neck

    The European Parliament often gets a bad press, but they are at least proposing a solution to one of the problems infesting capitalism at the moment, though it seems to me the plucky Swiss are way out in front here.

    It is the principal agent problem, and it started to arise in 1993 when Bill Clinton tried to cap executive pay. He made a right bugger’s muddle of the job, because the way he drafted this simply incentivised everybody to lie to get round the cap. He probably shouldn’t have been in this space anyway. It is the job of the shareholders of a firm to sort out pay, though twenty years of executive thievery has dulled our minds to this basic fact. In the end a joint stock company is about raising money from people to do something profitable and then distributing a share of the profits to them. It isn’t actually a charity to fund lavish executive lifestyles, and the easiest way to prevent this happening is to have transparency in pay. Not necessarily a matter of public record, but the firm itself should have some idea of its pay liabilities, and a method of setting pay that is independent of the people being paid.

    In the past you’d pay an employee a wage, and a bonus depending on performance in some cases, particularly sales. What seems to have happened is people working in finance in particular have got it into their heads that they are so clever, so brilliant, that they should all be paid by performance. However, sneakily, they talk about more pay for good performance. They don’t talk about putting £10 million in an escrow account where the employer can suck out a wedge if their performance is crap. No sir, we just want performance related pay for good performance. Lest it be said that I’m picking on bankers in particular, I note fund managers don’t waive their fees if they make a mess of stock-picking, they just quietly close down the fund and start again. Hedge fund managers and some investment trusts like to charge an extra fee if they do well and the fund rises in value over a year, but remain curiously silent about not paying back the equivalent malus if the fund falls. Go figure.

    Back to the more general case of executive pay. Clinton failed to include performance related pay in the cap, so obviously nearly all pay became performance related. What sort of performance – well, whatever could be fabricated to pay more. Once you base pay on a fabricated set of metrics in the control of the payee and/or people under the influence of the payee then the outcome is going to be excessive  pay. It’s like leaving the till open – it’s going to get looted! The results are easy enough to see

    ratio of CEO pay to average

    ratio of CEO pay to average. Looks like the third peak was cut short by the recession, but the trend is still well up

    In the past, most of executive pay was basic pay, with a bonus that typically didn’t exceed basic pay – indeed twenty years ago it was rare for a bonus to get up to half basic pay. Nowadays this is obfuscated by being ‘performance related’. For most of us performance related pay is, as a contractor wryly observed to me, a way for companies to justfiy reducing pay for permies. At the top, however, it becomes a licence to print money. It also skews incentive timescales – to make the performance call at the end of the year you have to scan back at most a year’s worth of performance. So PRP inherently favours short-term metrics, but since large companies aren’t pop-up-shops, decisions made at Board level have an influence on the firm’s performance that can last for many years.

    That multi-year performance is what the shareholders get, but since PRP has to be called out annually, the Board has an incentive to take actions that favour this year rather than the future, and this is worsened by the shortening of executive tenure to less than three years on average. Heck, I’ve held stocks in companies longer than many of their CEOs have stayed, and this leads to a disturbing fact.

    The shareholders are taking long-term risk, which doesn’t impact executive pay because they’re outta there when the chickens come home to roost

    I don’t have a problem with high pay. I do have a problem with perverse incentives

    You don’t build a FTSE100 firm in three years, though you can trash one that quickly. There’s nothing wrong in paying top dollar for ‘talent’, as long as you know why you are doing it. I don’t have a problem in paying someone 1000 million pounds if they add more than that much in value to the firm per annum, and using someone at 10 million wouldn’t cut it. I can’t imagine the scenario where that extreme would apply, but it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do, a classic ROI calculation, if you can define the variables and risks with enough confidence.

    What I do have a problem with is anybody getting any form of performance related pay that is more than their basic salary, because they should have a stake in the long term as well as the short. And it seems that Europe agrees with me. Boris Johnson thinks it’s all to do with hiding the mess that is the Euro, but then he would say that. Looks like Osborne failed handsomely in his attempt to water this one down.

    There is, of course, the usual hollering from the vested interests, about how they will all scarper to Somewhere Else. Not so fast, people. Once you have paid back every red cent of the taxpayer bailouts, then yes, on your bike.

    So far the evidence is that the bonus culture has incentivized bankers (in this specific case though the rot is wider) to drive like drunks and crash the whole economy. How much tax has banking put into the British economy over the years compared to the bailout money it has sucked out of it, and do we really want more of this white-knuckle ride? And yes, governments have been complicit in permitting the TBTF company to rise. However, the TBTF operations had far more resources to hand to embed themselves into a position where they could call on a one-way bet on taxpayer money underwriting their risk-taking because the alternatives were deemed to hurt too many people.

    Gnomes of Zurich reined in

    Gnomes of Zurich reined in

    Meanwhile, over in that hotbed of anti-capitalist communism formerly known as Switzerland, a quiet revolution seems to be taking shape to address the excesses of executive pay. Again, there’s no problem paying someone a shitload of money, just that in shouldn’t be obfuscated in golden hellos, golden goodbyes, massive lumps of performance related baksheesh. It is transparency and symmetry that need to return to pay in business – with great rewards should go great risks. And the risks should be shared by those getting the great rewards, not just by the hapless company owners (that’s you and I as shareholders, or you and I as taxpayers in the most egregious examples). There needs to be rules of business so that information is available to all the stakeholders, so that they can choose what to capitalise and what to stay away from.

    Kamal Ahmed’s Telegraph article is the usual trope being trotted out – ‘banking will simply up sticks and leave’. That sort of thing didn’t wash with the Swiss, who still seem to have the quaint notion that you should take some responisbility for your actions and not just socialise the risks. Perhaps upping sticks would not be such a bad thing. The British taxpayer is probably not good for another banking bailout, and it hasn’t got its money back from the last one. It’s about time the good citizens of an economy in better shape than most of the Old World took on the risk and stepped up to the plate next time. Alternatively, it’s about time that the multifarious top agents of capitalism wind their necks in and start taking part in the risks as well as the rewards of their tremendous brilliance. At the moment they seem to treat the whole thing like a video car game, where crashing the vehicle ends up in a reboot and start again. The rest of us occupy the real world, where their crash involves lots of wreckage and real people getting hurt. Let ‘em howl.

    Most people who have an issue with executive pay have an issue with the  amount or the ratio to average salaries as such. I don’t – some of the rise in the level of CEO pay relative to the grunts may simply be the increasing scale of companies. However, I do have problems with executives acting like the robber barons looting shareholders money and using opaque metrics to award themselves rewards without risks. All hail to the Swiss for calling this out and flagging the excesses without falling into the Clinton trap of trying to cap reward.

    It shouldn’t be capped – but it should be as transparent as possible, so that the true owners of a firm have enough information to make a judgement call. That’s what needs regulation – simple, understandable pay and incentive schemes, preferably where the balance between the carrot and the stick is a lot less uneven than it is now. Golden hellos, goodbyes and handcuffs need to be limited too, because these are simply used as disguised bungs. If the firm wants to pay a shedload of money, do it. Over the table, please, not under it by sleight of hand.

    No doubt the peddlers of the Global Talent Pool meme will screech. Sod ‘em. Capitalism has done perfectly well so far with pay and bonuses that were understandable. If anything the increasingly short tenure of CEOs shows they aren’t that special compared to the people of a previous generation who ran firms for decades, really understanding them as opposed to in and out for a fast buck. I’m chuffed to see that it is the Swiss who seem to be making moves to spike this charade.

    18 Jan 2013, 12:52pm
    personal finance rant:
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    • The cost of playing the Lottery has gone up – it’s still a guaranteed shafting so why the fuss?

    a modern-day Mark of the Beast

    a modern-day Mark of the Beast

    Funny the things people get worked up about. The nation’s favourite purveyor of empty dreams, the National Lottery, is apparently raising the cost of entry from £1 to £2, and some people are getting really worked up about it.

    MPs and campaigners said the increase was a ‘tax on the poor’ and ‘sheer greed’ and research revealed pensioners and those on low incomes would be hit hardest.

    er, what’s the problem guys? The greed issue is a moot point, what about the ‘sheer greed’ of the punters? You’re buying an empty dream here, so if the price has gone up, buy less of it. It’s still an empty dream, because half of sod all is still sod all. It’s so unlikely that you’re going to win that there is an easy solution. Halve the number of times you buy a ticket :) You’re still vanishingly likely to win, indeed most buyers have more chance of pegging it in the next hour than winning the jackpot! You’re effectively buying a call option on your life, yikes!

    You could make a far better choice in where to buy your empty dreams from. Apparently lottery players spend an average of about £6 a week. Take the £300 a year, by a FTSE all-share index tracker and get on with the rest of your life like Drew from Objective Wealth has.

    You’ll get a far greater proportion of your money back in winnings, possibly even make a profit on the deal. Why? Because though there is an element of chance due to risk, you are also buying a teeny share in a productive economy. You are actually buying an asset, not the empty promise of a sliver of a chance of massive riches. Some of those companies will use your ex-Lottery money to make a profit, and they are legally bound to share some of the spoils of war with you. Which is a damn sight more than Camelot. When people are asked by their financial advisers how they feel about risk, most employees say they hate it, avoid if possible. So why the hell are they taking a bigger risk of losing all their Lottery money than of surviving the next hour? Barmy.

    Half the paid out prize money (this is not half the money takein in, remember!) goes to the Jackpot, which is what everybody thinks of when they buy the ticket. A few people get the dream, though in an evil twist of fate it then often really buggers up their lives , at the expense of millions of other people’s empty dreams.

    If you really want out of the rat-race you can buy your way out of it, just not that way. Here, here, here and here is how. It’s all about agency, taking responsibility for your life and making a start. Nowadays is the best time to prepare for buying your way out of the rat-race, because for all the moaning and griping about how hard things are now, recession, blah blah, the real fact is you are living in a rich country where many essentials of life are so much cheaper relative to earnings that it’s easier now. The reason so many of us are in debt is because we have followed the exhortations of advertisers to spend God knows how much of the increased disposable income on Wants and trifles. So stop buying consumer crap and sort out your life, rather than buying empty dreams and becoming a complainypants. Sorting your life out starts with cutting out the Lottery tickets.

    What exactly are you buying with a Lottery  ticket?

    You are buying an empty dream, a chance to daydream a little bit of your life away and pretend you aren’t a drone in an office having to put up with tosspots telling you what to do. At the same time a little part of you is telling yourself that you are a LOSER because there isn’t any other way of getting what you want, and the best chance you have is a 14-million to one chance.

    STOP doing that to yourself. It’s rude – you are the sum total of fantastic capabilities and you need to stick an axe through that negative self-view right now. It almost doesn’t matter what sort of a hole you are in life right now, if you are spending any mental clock-cycles on the infinitesimal chance a National Lottery rope is going to come down to pull you out then you are not using your capabilities to look around you, see what you have to hand and get with building yourself a ladder out of the hole, cutting steps in the sides or just sitting back and reading a book. You’re betting on a lower probability than your own death in the next 60 minutes.

    My detestation of the National Lottery isn’t particularly because it’s a rip-off, although it is. It is because it robs punters of agency by giving a lightning conductor for the abandonment of hope – either by looking for the good in their position or effecting change. I know someone who, when he was down to his last six pence 1 without a job in the 1950s 2 took more positive action than buying a lottery ticket. He took that six pence and threw it off London Bridge into the Thames, because then he knew he was starting from zero.

    Now he had nothing, and this strengthened his resolve, and he went and found a job 3. That is agency, knowing when something is holding your back. Had he spend his last sixpence on the Lottery, or the horses, the symbolism would have been very different. He would have been telling himself that he couldn’t make it without an infinitesimally likely stroke of luck.

    Good Causes you say?

    About a quarter of the money taken goes to good causes/reduces the tax burden on the rest of us. Want to keep up your work for good causes? Take a quarter of your £300 and give it directly to charities of your choice, ideally by Gift Aid so they get 20% on top from the taxman. You can’t Gift Aid a lottery ticket ;) That way your preferred charities get more money from what you’d have spent on lottery tickets!

    It won’t be you

    It really won’t. You have a 14 million to one chance of getting the winning numbers, and have to share that with any other winners. Imagine you started at 18 and bought a ticket every single day until you drew your pension at 65. You would have purchased over 17,000 tickets, and you would have improved your chances of winning to about 1 chance in 800. That’s still pretty piss poor, and most people seem to run weekly, so your lifetime chances of a jackpot win as one in over 5000. Do something better with your life, for heaven’s sake. Purchase one ticket, once, which moves the dial from zero to a chance of one in 14 million. That way you get the buzz of the empty dream, but it costs you only £2. Then let it go. That first ticket is the one that makes most of the difference to your chances.

    It could be you, but it’s very unlikely 4 to be you.

    So why do it?

    Notes:

    1. that’s about 50p in today’s money ↩
    2. I was a child when I heard the story. Even if it’s apocryphal, the symbolism is powerful IMO ↩
    3. Casual work was much easier to come by in the 1950s than now, so this isn’t as mad as it sounds ↩
    4. nearly 14 million to one against – just fuhgeddaboutit ↩
    12 Nov 2012, 4:54pm
    rant Suffolk:
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    • Christmas is a time for … getting into debt and polluting the world with low-grade plastic tat?

    The nights are drawing in towards the end of the year. After the imported ghoulishness of Halloween we have the splendid and ancient tradition of -

    • celebrating the return of the sun’s life-giving light after the nadir of the darkest day 
    • honouring the birth of Jesus Christ, emulating the gifts of the three Kings
    • splurging on our credit cards, going into debt to buy stuff for Christmas, save retailers from going bust and keep the wheels of capitalism running for another year.

    More debt, more plastic, more trash. Ah, that’s what it’s all about, and I introduced myself to some of this when I took a wander into town to get a 5 x 2.1mm breakout power cable from Maplin. They seem to have displaced all the vaguely useful, if overpriced, stuff to make way for the Christmas gadgetry. No power cable for me, then. Perhaps I could get a cheap set of Christmas lights in time for our early December party then.

    We all seem to feel a bit poorer nowadays than in the heady days of the Goldilocks economy, but clearly this isn’t bringing out an attitude of make do and mend in us. We simply want our tat, but cheaper, so welcome to the Pound shops across the high street from Maplin.

    Yes, it's only £1, but you're still being taken to the cleaners

    intense competition in the sub-prime retail space

    Let’s take a look at what we’ve got here then. What really strikes me about Christmas in these pound shops is the absolutely execrable taste and design of this garbage. If this is the stuff that appeals to the children in the family, then the parents need to do some serious soul-searching as to why they are failing to inculcate any sense of taste in their progeny. Sadly however, looking at some of the customers, I fear that this is doing the underage population of Britain a disservice – it’s the adults that seem to have no detectable sense of taste.

    People filling their baskets with plastic Xmas trash

    People filling their baskets with plastic Xmas trash in Poundland.

    Makes you want to slap these folks around the chops with a wet fish and holler in their ears

    ‘Stop fixating on the price. You’re still being taken to the cleaners because this junk should have never been made, never been shipped over here and should have been sent straight to landfill if we’d failed on the first two counts.’

    But no. It’s only a pound, so what have you got to lose? Well, a pound, duh!!!! It’s actually worse that that, because you have to buy more house to store this crap!

    How about some inflatable Father Christmases over here on the left.

    Roll up, roll up, plastic rubbish for just a pound!

    I mean, really, when is an inflatable Father Christmas ever a good idea? How are you ever going to bring up your kids to appreciate two thousand years of Western culture when you sully your dwelling and their braincases with such addled, vile and ephemeral trash? Just Say No. See the top photo – there’s a convenient bin outside the store. If you find yourself outside Poundland having spent good money on such crap then for God’s sake repent now and cram it in the bin to save everybody any further embarrasment.

    Now there’s nothing particularly wrong with Christmas lights, and the move to LED lights is a welcome one, provided they are mains-powered via an adaptor. You reduce the power consumption, and the lights should last a lifetime. However, there is everything wrong with Poundland’s battery-powered LED lights flogged here.

    Poundland e-waste designed to help them flog you batteries

    Basically this is plastic e-waste that is designed to sell you their consumable batteries. Depressingly, if you try and be clever and use rechargeable batteries you will find that the 2.4V rechargeables gives a result dim as Toc H lamp compared to the 2.8-3V from disposable batteries, because there’s a  threshold effect on the LEDs. You’d either have to change the heat-shrink encased resistor in series with each and every LED to fix that, or chuck out the battery cases and use a three-cell battery case. Neither of which the punters are going to do, so you might as well add some of Poundland’s value packs of batteries. Because they presumably have them made to a £1 price you’ll be changing them all the time but at least it keeps Poundland in business.

    Notice these are all strings of 10 LEDs because Poundland get these made to their £1 retail target, so it’s a royal PITA to string up enough of these for a show worth doing, in itty-bitty short strings with a battery box every 10 lights. They ought to give the lights away free as they’ll make it up on the batteries. Where else other than a pound shop can you buy such a short-assed string of lights? That’s the price you pay for being cheap – if you pay a bit more for a 30 or 40-light string then at least you can rig a decent show. But hey, it’s only a pound, you can’t lose!

    Oh yes you can – saving money on lights at Poundland is going to cost you a fortune by Christmas – you’re gonna get through a lot of batteries by then ;)

    Strangely enough, I escaped from Poundland without buying anything. Let’s take a butcher’s hook at Yippee next door

    Classy shopfitting, perhaps some corporate social responsibility to give the local schoolkids something to do maybe?

    Here we have a cavernous cathedral dedicated to plastic tat that used to be a JJB Sports before it all went titsup

    Cavernous cathedral of tat

    Why do they have security alarms on the escalators? I thought Poundland was bad, but the stuff on sale here defies description; it makes Poundland look like a outpost of Design Museum. I’d have thought they’d be grateful if people lifted it.

    ‘Ello madam, did we pay for this plastic abomination? No? Please, please, take more, let me get you a boxful, get it outta here!

    Why? For crying out loud, why?

    It’s at times like this that serious questions come to mind. For the last three hundred thousand years humanity has been involved with an epic struggle to self-actualise. We stand on the shoulders of giants, previous generations used hand tools to carve things of timeless beauty.

    Saxon purse lid, Sutton Hoo, about 1000 years old. Where did we start going wrong?

    Surely someone, somewhere, in the long journey from plastic pellets in some Chinese factory to the placing of this vile cat-shaped kitchen timer in pole position on Yippee’s display, should have asked themselves why? What are we doing here? And ideally smashed the mould ;) For Pete’s sake, they couldn’t even line up the eyes and whiskers graphics with the nose button, or the zero marking.  Be competent at least, even if you can’t be tasteful. Talking of which, it appear that the town is short of Christmas -themed cowboy hats. Once again the waste of human potential struck me – somebody spent time ‘designing’ this for manufacture. Bet they’re going to wish they’d spent more time at the office designing such life-affirming tat when their time is nigh, eh?

    less bad than the timer.. just. Still begs the question, why…? Just why make it, why buy it?

    It was time to get outta there, before the cloying stench of decadence sapped any more of my will to live. People are wondering why consumers aren’t buying, perhaps its because the fire of aspiration of make things of value has failed in the face of the need to make a fast buck. People are getting themselves into debt to buy shit like this for Christmas.

    In a last attempt to find something of value I went to Wilkinsons, to see their Christmas lights. I am in the market for some lights to add to the party kit. It’s a pain needing to be able to rig this for 12V battery power for the summer parties outdoors, but Christmas LED lights are easily modified for that. Wilkinsons was a large bump up in the taste department, I’m glad to see. Kitsch I can forgive in Christmas decorations, some of that goes with the territory and is even necessary, it’s the downright fugly and the appalling taste that I can do without. Thomas Kinkade kitsch, OK perhaps. Malformed plastic garbage, no. Wilkinson’s are crafty buggers, too – I thought I’d clean up this January on discounted Christmas lights from 2011, but they don’t sell them off cheap, they clear the shelves, presumably landfilling the stuff.

    Looks like the Chinese manufacturers of this Wilko product  have found a use for their chicken feathers, probably doesn’t pay to dwell too long on what happened to the birds. They probably weren’t free-range ;)

    One of the reasons people are in such dire straits now is that we have unlearned our ability to do even the most basic things for ourselves. Take this, for instance -

    Wilko wreath, plastic pine, real-ish cones, yours for £10 fully loaded

    We appear to be so deracinated that we’d prefer to spend £10 of our heard-earned dosh on a plastic (yet again) simulacrum of pine, rather than getting ourselves and/or children into the pine forests that lie to the nearth-east and north-west of the town and having away with a few pine cones from the forest floor and some branches. However, if the thought of constructing our own wreath does occur to us, then Wilko have that covered over here at the make your own Christmas wreath experience. In a nod to Poundland, all the natural stuff, holly sprigs, pine cones come at £1 throw in six-up lots. At that rate my box of firelighting pine cones is worth about fifty quid.

    £50 worth of pine cones, at Wilkinson’s rates

    It’s barmy, you don’t even have to go to the forest – Access to Nature Ipswich is holding a Festive crafts event on the 15th December where they will show people how to make Christmas wreaths and provide the materials – all free of charge! These are wholly compostable and contain no plastic.

    I came away appalled at the sheer ephemeral waste of it all. None of this stuff is going to last more than a year at best. It wouldn’t be so bad if this were just a waste of money, but this plastic trash holds a darker secret, one that people who are buying disposable plastic trash for the children should know be aware of.

    Nearly every piece of plastic ever made still exists today somewhere

    Yes, that includes biodegradable plastic other that that made of corn starch, it simply becomes smaller pieces. Plastic has only existed since the last century, and nothing on earth has yet worked out how to eat it and break it down. This TED talk has more:

    This alterative take by Brooklyn band Chairlift has something to be said for it too

    Even though I don’t have kids it made me think about trying to reduce single use convenience plastics. It’s about getting things into perspective. The plastic that keeps a hospital syringe needle clean is good even if only used once. The plastic in my computer serves me every day for about 5 years. But the plastic in a shopping bag is needless, in the face of good alternatives. And ephemeral, low-grade trash like from Yippee needs some thinking about before we continue to give the market the feedback that this is something we want more of in the world -

    Ephemeral, low-grade plastic trash from Yippee

    Perhaps something really bad happened over Halloween, and the town has been taken over by zombies, shuffling their abused plastic credit cards to the tills of Poundland and Yippee in exchange for these vile and tasteless plastic products of decadence.

    Yet again, I escaped the High Street with my wallet undented.  Not because I was dedicated to frugality, though unlike some of my fellow citizens I hadn’t come to spend money purely for the sake of spending money. No, I came away empty handed for one simple reason. I found nothing of value. This is the thing people are getting wrong when they crowd Poundland. Just as Ellen Ruppel Shell identified in her book Cheap, we have lost sight of the value side of the “value for money” equation. Without value, it doesn’t matter how cheap it is, indeed something value-free is worse than nothing, because it is an insult to dwindling resources and takes up space in homes and landfill.

    I needed cheer, and I have polluted the Web enough with pictures of trash. Two miles in the other direction from my house the crisp autumn day I cycled in the countryside for eight miles, looking for attractiveness rather than garbage.

    The light was crisp and low, and I rested my eyes on the delights of the natural world instead of the garish colours of tawdry Christmas items made in China.

    the way out of town

    Good honest crap, none of this plastic garbage. It will be returned to the soil and become something useful in due course

    Nightingale’s Hill

    I’ve lived fewer than three miles from Nightingale’s Hill for more than twenty years, and to my shame I’ve never been here before. It is remarkable how much more of the world, including the locality, I see once work is out of the way ;)

    I will come here in the Spring and see if it still hosts some of the dwindling stock of nightingales – down some 50% over the last decade. Most of the nightingales I have heard have been towards the coastal areas, though I did hear one on the way to work a year or so ago

    another place two miles from home I hadn’t observed in 20 years, though I often passed it on the way to work when driving ;)

    Finally time to head home at this tree

     

    9 Nov 2012, 6:40pm
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    • Local council leaders frame the Ermine as a victim!

    Here I am, in Ermine towers, drinking a cup of coffee in the morning, when the local council freesheet rag drops limply through the letterbox. Normally it’s full of the inside skinny on the Christmas panto and which leading local celebrity is going to switch on the Christmas lights 1 in the shattered remnants of what used to be the High Street before all the shops turned into payday lenders and charity shops.

    This time it was different. Hold the front page guys, the news today is:

    Will you be hit by welfare cuts?

    It’s a pretty leading question, no? It sets us up as losers from the off. There’s a lot of pain coming to the ordinary man in the street in the UK, because living standards are going to fall. We’ve been spending money that wasn’t ours to spend, and the hangover is usually worse than the party was good. That pain needs to get shared around a bit, and yes, we are going to see some real suffering. Everybody needs to suck in their guts and cut back, and that includes welfare recipients as well as people who are working or have worked. So if you get benefits, then it is likely you will get hit by welfare cuts. Other people get hit by earning less in real terms, or having to save money to pay taxes.

    Normally, if you earn less, one of the things that leaves you more alone is tax. Which is probably all round as it should be, indeed it was a key part of my early retirement strategy, to drive my costs down so I need to pay less tax ;) One of the things that really is intractable because it doesn’t follow this rule is Council Tax. I will never get anything off Council Tax, because you must have savings of less than £6000 to even be considered for a reduction. That’s savings, not income. So even though Council Tax is about 1/3 of my current income, I have to pay it. Which is fair enough, I knew this before I went down the path of retiring early so obviously I factored this in. However, it does rather make me spit bricks when I see all this bitchin’ about how terrible it all is for people on low incomes to have to pay something towards it. Someone on full income-based JSA has a higher income than I do. I’m okay with that fact per se, but I don’t want to hear the sob story. Got less money? Buy less shit, pal. And ice the Sky subscription.

    Now I have gone out of my way to eliminate debt, to anyone. So no repo-men can legally come knocking on my door with hobnailed boots and turf me out of my home because I owe them money. However, Council Tax is an annually self-renewing debt. In the troubled times ahead, when the shocking levels of inflation due to QE bailing out excessive borrowers start to overwhelm my pension, I can cut costs. I can start shooting pigeons and rabbits. Or I can eat ramen every day, grow spuds in the front garden and scrump apples and pears.

    But come what may, there is one bunch of people that have a hold over me with their annually renewing debt, and that is the Council. They are the only people now that can turf me out of my home if I become skint and can’t pay that debt, year after year after year. It’s as bad as continually carrying a credit card debt of £6000 2, without a chance to shift the balance to a cheaper card!

    Unlike many people, it appears, I believe in looking ahead. I note this static load on my finances, and try and hedge it. I have to save £27,000 pounds to get an income at 5% that is enough to roughly guarantee that I can pay this tax, at its current level in real terms, for the foreseeable future. If I buy about 27k’s worth of FTSE All-share I can probably expect a 3.5% annual yield 3 and to track long-term inflation in real terms.  So £27k of my net worth, as I shovel it into ISAs over then next three years, is purely dedicated to paying Councul Tax. Think of all the holidays, Sky TV subscriptions and pints of beer I have to forego to get that security. I’m prepared to do it, because that’s the law of the land, but it makes me intolerant of the whingeing of folk that didn’t have to pay it from their benefits, and now do. It’s not like they have to go out to work to pay for it or save up ;)

    So thanks, Ipswich Council, for addressing us all as people who will be ‘hit’ by these benefit cuts. It’s kinda galling that there isn’t a tip of the hat to all of us who have to stump up to pay for these benefits, because we are probably the majority of the readers of this paper. I have to save £27k just to be able to secure myself from being turfed out of my own home by the Council’s jackbooted thugs demanding money from me with the threat of force if I don’t pay. It is the one totally inflexible part of my budget, over which I have absolutely no control.

    Reading further, I observe that the whole article is basically couched in terms of how terrible it all is that we can’t keep on dishing out largesse at the expense of other council tax payers;  welfare happens to be 35% of the councils’s spend, the largest line item and considerably more than the cost of the staffing and buildings. To wit:

    The changes could mean:

    • Cuts to your housing benefit;
    • Paying part of your council tax even if you are on benefits;
    • Making rent payments yourself rather than having them made for you;
    • A limit to how much benefit you can get.

    From April, every working age adult will have to pay some council tax regardless of their income.

    Housing benefit will be restricted if you are living in a home considered too large for your needs.

    And the amount of housing benefit you receive could fall further if you have an adult living in your home who is not claiming benefit.

    I mean, for crying our loud, why have we been treating some the good citzens of Ipswich as if they were children without agency or responsibility for their actions?

    Let’s take these points in turn.

    Cuts in housing benefit

    mainly a framing statement that you may get less. As the man said, there’s no money left. Whaddya do when there’s no money left? STOP SPENDING – don’t borrow it! That, above all else, is where previous generations had an edge on us now. They understood what Wilkins Micawber meant when he said

    “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

    and they acted accordingly, rather than living on the never never.

    Paying part of your council tax even if you are on benefits;

    It’s the other side of the old 1776 cry of no taxation without representation; there should be no representation without taxation, even if that taxation does come from your benefits. Because otherwise you will vote for free stuff, paving the town streets with gold and jam today at other people’s expense. You need to have skin in the game, and understand that doing more costs more. Note that the money to pay the tax does come from the benefits, it isn’t real money in that sense and probably costs more administration. But we have to get a sense of responsibility into people, and hitting them in the pocket usually does that.

    Making rent payments yourself rather than having them made for you;

    Yeah, what exactly is the problem here?  You get your housing benefit, some/all of it needs to get paid to the landlord. The clue here is in the name, housing benefit. Just like JSA, which is supposed to keep the wolf from the door, so you get it, you pay it to Tesco for your food, right? In my early working life I hated paying landlords, it was money down the drain. So I lived in sleazy dives and shared houses with other people to reduce the fixed costs of rent and household costs. I still had to pay the buggers, I just made sure it was as little as possible.

    Paying for your shelter is part of what being a grown-up is all about, and why exactly did we infantilise people by pretending that housing was free? Grow up, people. The only people who should have their rent paid on their behalf are children, ‘cos keeping a roof over their heads is the job of their parents/guardians, and those who for some reason like disability aren’t able to comprehend or operate their household finances. Otherwise we are just creating a system where entitlement festers and escalates. Welfare was designed as a safety net, not a lifestyle choice.

    A limit to how much benefit you can get.

    I think that’s the same thing as the first statement, just double up to make it sound all mean and nasty. Of course everything has limits, because if you get more benefits, some other poor bastard has to pay more tax to pay for those benefits. Everything in the world has limits. There seems to be a subtext here, that this is done to be vindictive and mean. It isn’t. I’d love it just as much as the next man if we could return to the days of abolished boom and bust, the Goldilocks economy and everything was going swimmingly. We could afford our welfare then or so we thought. Now the repo-man has come to call, so we cant afford it so much. That means going without stuff we used to take for granted.

    The whole article has a dreadful hand-wringing tone to it, automatically assuming the readers are victims, and framing them as such. How the hell are we ever going to pull ourselves out of the crap when we have people charging around telling adults that it’s a really bad thing if they have to pay their own rent, out of the housing benefit they receive?

    Oh yeah. then we have the coup de grace in the first section:

    And the amount of housing benefit you receive could fall further if you have an adult living in your home who is not claiming benefit.

    Too bloody right. I am an adult living in the home who isn’t claiming benefit, though to be honest this Angle article makes me think I need to get off my ass and claim contributory JSA before Universal Credit comes in. And guess what? Even if I do claim JSA I don’t get my Council Tax paid for as well!

    This putative adult living in the home can bloody well find the money to sub the household directly or go out to work. We presume this adult is more connected with the household than I am, given they live under the same roof, so they should be more involved in paying towards its upkeep than me.

    So in answer to your question, Ipswich Council, no. I won’t be hit by the benefit cuts. Thank you for asking, all the same. I’ll bear it in mind, perhaps apply for JSA before April’s introduction of Universal Credit which debars me from all benefits, but if for some reason I don’t get it, then I will accept that shit happens and pay Council Tax from my own resources, even though the people you’re addressing with that article have a higher income than I do at the moment ;) This is not leading from the front, at all. Contrary to what you’d guess from the headline, most of the town’s residents won’t be hit by the benefit cuts, so don’t make out like the town is full of people like Ray’s feckless family fruitlessly frittering our financial futures away. Don’t frame us all as victims, develop some spine and stand up for your council tax payers and say what the Council will do, what it won’t, and why not. The latter could start with the infamous phrase ‘there’s no money left’

    As for the no representation without taxation, Council Tax is essentially about allocating cash resources, it isn’t about your inalienable rights as a human being. It’s all about divvying up the dosh, and if you want a say in how to divvy it up, you need to contribute towards the pot. I am not arguing against paying it, and indeed have outlined how I am going to pay for it. However, I am tired of people who don’t have to pay in having a say in how it’s divvied up. It’s easy enough to be all for paving the streets of Ipswich with gold, if you’re not part of buying the bullion. It would look lovely, but I don’t want to pay all my income towards it, thanks all the same. We do need to have a debate about how the limited resources will be allocated, and on the whole th council do a pretty good job. It’s now time for all the stakeholders to have skin in the game, so their choices are informed. If we really all do want to pave the streets with gold, I guess I just have to move, but at least I will know it really is the will of the people, and that they all have to go without something to do it.

    Notes:

    1. apparently we will have Xmas lights and they’ll be switched on on the 25th November. They’s also arranged for a market of 150 stalls to cover up the fact all the shops have turned into charity shops and Money Shops which is truly inspired – the Ermine tips his hat to fortitude in the face of adversity. ↩
    2. Assuming a typical usurous interest rate of 20% ↩
    3. Dividend yield is not the only component of the real return on the FTAS which is why there is a discrepancy. My actual Council Tax is £1200 p.a. so I neeed some capital gain over inflation and to sell down some proportion of units annually to match that. ↩
    25 Sep 2012, 5:04pm
    rant savvy shopping:
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    • an offer you can’t refuse?

    The Ermine household took a wander into town, on the lookout for a point and shoot digicam for Mrs Ermine. Savvy shoppers are going to immediately think – first mistake, wtf are they going into town for this, the best deals are always on the Internet? Well, yes, but DW is exacting on the size she wants of a P&S, and to get to know that you have to touch it and handle it. We started off at Cash Converters, it’s my favourite store for heavy stuff secondhand.You can’t help feeling that the Dark Side is taking over round these parts, however.

    Are you sure that typo on the ad shouldn’t read “a loan of £666″, Mr Cash Converters? Is this the power of competition with The Money Shop next door?

    I bought our PA amplifier there for £30, secondhand from a pub. I’ll probably get our PA speakers there as well. They are variable on small electronics – I’d say they are overpriced a bit.

    Cash Converters. Bet they don’t have ‘don’t be evil’ in their mission statement

    Cameras of the sort we wanted (compact, IS) seemed to roll up at the £50 mark. The problem with this is a P&S camera lives on borrowed time. The action of the lens coming out sucks in dirt, which either gums up the lens mechanism or gives you dust spots on the sensor. You just don’t know how a secondhand P&S has been kept, so we had a look at the new market to see if this risk is worth taking. Checked out a couple of stores on prices, a Panasonic DMC-LS5 wasn’t bad at about £70.

    Then you get the smartphone out, a Samsung G2 in DW’s case, to establish whether the price is right. Since the web browser on a smartphone is worthless for finding anything out 1 you curse the bugger and remember the county library is nearby. For the first time I got to use the Web in the library, after removing the JSA instructions left by the previous user from the table. The camera price was sort of okay, not fantastic.

    We then went to Jessops, who had a Canon 117HS for ~£80. Apparently, this is the same as a Canon 115 HS but the different model number. This is a scam so Jessops can avoid price comparison sites. Some investigation on the web showed £80 wasn’t bad for this. Yes, it’s £30 more than a secondhand digicam, but the year’s worth of guarantee for what is inherently an unreliable product has some value (cash converters warranties for a month ISTR).

    So we asked them if we could fire it up and check it out. Consternation in the ranks, and we were informed that there wasn’t a battery or charger, though these could be purchased. The Ermine voiced, perhaps a little loudly, that this was therefore a scam, it wasn’t £80 they wanted, but £80 plus the £20 cost of the essential parts to get a working camera. The sticker price was deliberately misleading. Anyway, the shop-assistant went back to see if they could find a battery, and a chap came back, and DW took over the negotiation.

    the haul, I’m glad I didn’t throw out the charger from the last Ixus

    The upshot was that she paid £85 for the camera, with a hahnel battery charger, hahnel aftermarket battery, camera case priced at £16 and a three year extended warranty. The Ermine is still not quite sure how that happened, as I’m sure the 3-year warranty was originally quoted as £20. Normally I don’t touch extended warranties, but for a product class which has a known unreliability problem it has some appeal. Particularly if they throw in a case, and drop the extra to £5 which seems a little bit less usurous. Okay, so the 12V power supply of the charger didn’t work, though the charger did. I have enough 12V supplies, and indeed it so happened that we still had the battery charger for the previous Canon Ixus so no big deal ;)

    More offers you can’t refuse. The Ermine is too poor to get a loan from the Money Shop these days

    You know you’re on the wrong side of the tracks with Cash Converters. It isn’t just the gold ads, it’s the fact they’re right next to a Money Shop. You’d have thought the Ermine is right up their street, no job, no income, what’s not to like? Hey, that sort of thing used to get you a NINJA mortgage in the bad old days!

     

    Bank card and a job? £1000 can be yours

    Well, hot damn, no £1000 today for me. Got bank card but no job, so The Money Shop ain’t talking to me today ;) Psst, got a Rolex? What’s up with that. Firstly, if you have a real Rolex or Breitling are you going to be hob-nobbing with the riff-raff in the Money Shop rather than the sort of pawnbroker with a top-hat and three gold balls outside his shop, and secondly if you are a likely client of the Money Shop your Rolex was probably £5 at the local car boot sale, no?

    So, thoroughly dejected at being not good enough for the services of The Money shop, I carried on, to observe yet another offer I couldn’t refuse

    Borrow £100 for £125? hell, YEAH!!!! Why Not? bring it on

    Why would I want to do that to myself? Really? Borrow £100 and pay back £125? Do I get fries with that? It wouldn’t be so bad if I got my dodgy motor fixed all inclusive, but no. I’ve kept this photo full size, if you look at the small print at the bottom you get to see

    Representative 1410.33% APR … Interest Rate 300% p/a fixed

    Who are this bunch of criminals and charlatans then? Say a warm welcome to the usurers at the Cheque Centre, impecunious citizens of Ipswich

    At least they can spell. It’s the Cheque Centre over here, rather than the Check Center….

    They’re actually recruiting at the moment. I was half tempted to go in and hit them up for a job, just to see what sort of punters come in to buy £100 worth of notes for £125. However, I’d probably discover a whole bunch of people who want to kill me, because even the Cheque Centre must have some criteria for lending.

    Let’s remind ourselves of what they are offering me. I go in today, with an urgent need of Stuff, so I get a load of these

    £100, waiting to be turned into booze, Harry Wraggs and Sky TV vouchers

    I turn them into beer, Sky TV minutes and harry rags

    to come back later, having had to work 25% longer to earn this lot to hand back and call it quits

    £125 – so paying 25% more is a great deal because I couldn’t wait a month?

    Whatcha say to that sort of offer? What other answer is there other than Hell No! If ever it looks a good idea to you to pay 25% for 30 days, then STOP RIGHT THERE. Sit on your hands. Think. Stop buying shit. Let the kids scream I wanna have, I wanna have,  I wanna have for all they’re worth. Because when this looks like a good deal you are in a deep hole, and rule#1 in a hole is Stop Digging.

    There are a lot of offers you should refuse in this town at the moment!

    Notes:

    1. that’s why you have apps on a smartphone, to munge the data to suit the poxy little low-resolution screen, old stagers will remember it as what was hi-tech EGA graphics in the mid 1980s. ↩
    17 Sep 2012, 10:48am
    fixing things rant:
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    • Where have the decent, middle ground consumer products gone?

    In her book Cheap, the high cost of discount culture, Ellen Ruppel Shell observes the increasing polarisation of products. Globalisation is driving most of us towards the Poundland end of the market, with stuff that is cheap, absurdly cheap compared to earlier times, and a very few people who are either fanatics or have a lot of money towards the high end. As a result, the quality and reliability of a lot of products is, quite frankly, crap, though their functionality is pretty good. Nowhere is this more apparent than in electronics. Digitalisation, higher integration of components and Chinese manufacturing have all made it a lot easier to do many things in electronics, in particular adding features and functions. These are pushed relentlessly by marketing departments, and we often fall for it. The entire history of the iPhone is an example of featureitis gone mad. Just as well this makes the product cycle so short.  The vacuum tube kitchen radio my mother had in the 1960s operated from 1960 to 1976 ISTR. None of the replacements have lasted 16 years. There’s no point in making an iPhone last more than 5 years, it will be hopelessly naff by then in the eyes of consumers.

    One of the advantages of taking an axe to consumerism is I get off some of this hamster wheel. The recent launch of the iPhone 5 left me as cold as the previous four launches. However, I still have the problem that stuff breaks down, and it seems that this is much more likely for newer stuff than kit I’ve had for a while. It makes me loath to replace something with a more modern replacement if it can be avoided, because capitalism seems to have hollowed out the middle ground. I either end up with cheap rubbish that fails me in my hour of need or top-end products that are often too fancy and too pricey for my requirements.

    Demise of a faithful friend

    This was brought home to me when my 10-year old Iriver IMP-250 mp3 cd player died. I don’t have an iPod because I don’t do portable music on the move, it’s kind of hazardous as a cyclist, and when I had my car it had a perfectly serviceable CD player ;) However, the iRiver CD player was nice for the outdoor parties because a MP3 CD would run for several hours, and being a CD player meant we could take other people’s music too. Ipods seem unreliable in this kind of service as well as being a closed box without a computer- I constructed a switchbox to select different people’s iPods but the big problem seems to be iPod battery life plummets as it gets colder when the sun goes down, I will have to run a USB hub from the main battery in future to counteract this.

    The iPod doesn’t really like to party after sundown…

    All portable audio devices live on borrowed time, due to the hard life they lead and the inevitable drop-tests. Nowadays, to make manufacturing cheaper the connectors are mounted on the main circuit boards, which is a really bad idea. Pretty much anything I make myself uses connectors mounted on the case with wires to the circuit board, because the connectors take a lot of mechanical stress. Fixing the connector to the case stabilises it, and the wires to the board take out any residual strain. However, this is a very pre-1980s constructional style.

    Transmitting the mechanical strain to the circuit board flexes the solder joints, which causes micro cracks and ratty intermittent connections. It’s why you should always try and use right-angled audio jacks on portable gear. Presumably Apple provide straight plugs so you break the iPod faster and have to get a new one, leastways the earbuds I observed on people’s iPods all had straight audio jacks.

    This 10 year old iRiver was just dead. That sort of fault is good, the ones I hate are the intermittent ones where you never really know if you’ve nutted the problem. I took it to pieces and was faced with this

    iRiver IMP250 innards. That’s a lot of small parts, as its about 13cm across

    In previous lives like at the BBC I’d fault find to individual components but that’s not going to happen with this, no circuit diagram and no service manual. You used to get one in the handbook of most consumer electronics until the mid 1970s when people expected to repair things if they went wrong.

    Even if I had these there’s no fun in trying to unsolder parts here. That involves magnifying glasses, tweezers, lots of bad language and a fair chance of knackering some other part in the process. These things are assembled in the Far East by automatic pick-and-place robots, though an awful lot of module level assembly still seems to involve humans even on the iPhone 5.

    the offending connector, black item on the left

    However, there’s a good win in faulting consumer  electronics by knowing that 90% of problems are to be found in connectors or the power supply. Power supply problems are usually associated with smoke and visible damage. Connectors, however, aren’t so obliging. Probing on the circuit boards showed battery power wasn’t getting to the player, and nor was external power, and the problem was traced to the DC jack which switched the battery to the player when the DC jack wasn’t inserted. Or not, in this case. So I unsoldered it, cleaned out the microscopic switch contacts and reassembled the part, and the player came back to life, both on external and battery power.

    iRiver IMP 250 working again, once more into the breach at the Christmas party then…

    Now I could have bought a current replacement for about £30 at Argos or a little media player secondhand from Computer Exchange for £20-ish. I had been on a previous reccy for that sort of thing but come away empty handed. I have to admit that I hat been tempted by a secondhand DJ CD mixer that looked like it could run off 12V, but then sense prevailed. Not only was I setting myself up for an audio earth loop fail, but in the end I don’t really want to be a live DJ. I want to talk to people at parties and maybe get hammered, not do a Paris Hilton ;)

    Paris Hilton DJ-ing. It didn’t go well, apparently

    The price of freedom from consumerism is still eternal vigilance. There is still somewhere in the back of my mind the ad-man’s meme ‘if you just buy this product, your problems will be solved and life will be wonderful‘. No. All I want is what I had before, thanks, it’s worked well enough for  five parties outside, and if I’m going to spend money then I should change the old hi-fi speakers, which are clapped out from being a) overdriven and b) far too small for the job of running outside, which is why they’ve been pushed too hard ;)

    Although the repair was effectively paying below minimum wage, I just didn’t want to add to the mountain of e-waste without trying at least to inquire what had caused this faithful old middle-range CD player(it cost about £120 in the early 2000s ISTR) to give up the ghost. Plus I know that once started, it will keep running outdoors past the 11 p.m point where dew starts to accumulate on metal surfaces, because the self-heating of the circuit boards stops the dew forming. It had been a surprise to me that dew forms in late evening and the small hours of the night, I’d always thought it was an early morning thing.

    More digital casualties in the pipeline

    The digital camera seems to be another terribly unreliable electronic gizmo in the modern world, particularly the point and shoot digicam. Digital SLRs seem okay, I even managed to keep one in good working order until I sold it to a colleague. Digicams, however, are a whole different world of hurt.

    I learned photography with film, and one of the great advances in photography in the early 1980s was the autofocus lens. Manually focusing was fraught even with some visual aids and just one more thing to slow you down in capturing the moment. In the 1990s manufacturers made automatic exposure work properly most of the time, and then came digital, which after some early issues sorted many of the residual problems, in particular the running costs and latency of seeing the results. Digital SLR cameras reached a point  in the late 2000s where for the vast majority of people the main improvements were to be had behind the camera, not in front of it or inside it; a rotten photographer will take poor shots no matter how expensive the gear.

    My old Canon AE-1P from the 1970s that I bought second hand in the late 1980s is still serviceable, as are the lenses. I’ve had five digicams fail on me with lens jam failures, a Fuji 1700, Canon Ixus 80, an Ixus 950, a Nikon 995, and I will have to take my Panasonic digicam to pieces to remove dust from the sensor which makes the camera useless at high f-stops (in bright light). That’s four down permanently and one fiddly repair job, in the course of ten years. I look at the cost of a digicam more as a two year rental, rather than as a capital investment. One of the advantages of digital was supposed to be you don’t have film costs any more. Looks like you still have the same costs, however, just in a different form as the gear falls apart in your hands as you use it. Money still has to made somewhere ;)

    You can make a digicam last if you keep it in a box and only haul it out for birthdays, but the whole point of a camera is you take it to interesting places and put it in front of new vistas. Every time you switch the damn thing on and the lens comes out, it sucks in a little bit of dust and fluff, which eventually gums up the lens mechanism (Canon) or gets dust into the sensor (Panasonic). On a film camera that dust only affected one frame because it was advanced with the film. On a digicam you get this after a while.

    dust on the sensor causing splodges in the sky

    The manufacturing effort seems to go in features rather than fundamentals. What’s so hard about making a digicam that doesn’t suck dust into the camera? It’s so much easier for Panasonic to say hey, this camera has got Face Tracking, than for them to say this camera won’t suck dust into the works so your pictures won’t gets spots after a year or so.

    after taking the camera apart and decoking the sensor. Face tracking is obviously more important than, say using the CPU space allocated to Face Tracking for something useful, like saving the dust pattern and removing it from future images, for instance.

    What the hell does anybody need face tracking for? If you are so drunk that you need the camera to find the face in the shot for you, then either you aren’t close enough or you don’t need to take that picture for uploading to Facebook because a) it might not be the right face and b) they’re probably as drunk as you are.

    What face recognition is for. Hat tip to Glenys for sharing with the world

    It’s hard to deny the sneaking suspicion of advanced decadence in Western capitalism here. Faced with the choice of making this kind of shot easier, or keeping the dust out of the sky, the obvious choice is sod the dust, help the Facebookers out even if they are a few sheets to the wind. Bless…

    It isn’t just the digicams, either. I have a Canon 18-75 IS zoom lens which has developed a stock fault after 5 years. This was something that cost about £350 new ISTR, and I had expected to be a decent middle ground product. Those old Canon FD lenses for the AE1 are still going fine, forty years after they were made… There’s no point in sending off the lens to be fixed if this is a stock fault, it will only happen again. Just how common it is was brought home to me in that the replacement part was only £2 on ebay, however the process of taking the lens to pieces and changing the ribbon cable is fraught and likely as not to break something else. For £2 it’s worth a go, and I’ve become happier with dismantling ribbon cables that seem to be widespread in small gadgets after learning from some videos on Youtube and experience gained with the iRiver repair. If I screw up I guess I just have to take the £600 hit on the 15-85 replacement. Or take an extra £200 hit and go with the 2.8 aperture  17-55 and get closer to the subject at the long end. I was more often short of light than of reach in using the old lens ;)

    I really miss the middle ground in many products. The AE-1P was a middle ground camera – it worked well and lasted, but that part of the market is evaporating fast. As a result I end up buying rubbish, just because I don’t think it will stay working. Tools seem to be another case in point -  you can get a set of 50 spanners for a tenner. Just don’t expect a 13mm spanner to stay a 13mm spanner after you’ve used it a few times. Fortunately I still have my old ones from the 1990s, before the Chinese got in on the act ;) I want a pillar drill. The whole point of a pillar drill is precision, and I know if I buy something for £90 then mechanical precision is not what I’m going to get. However, I don’t need a 1kW three-phase pillar drill for a thousand pounds either. Something in between, say 800W for about £300 would match my usage, but it’s not to be had locally.

    Bring back those mid-range products. Not everything is life is black-and-white where you need either something disposable or the very best. Often something well-built but less capable than the best is good enough. I don’t want to be endlessly buying junk, and throwing it out after a few uses. There’s got to be a place between the Trabant and the Rolls-Royce. As Ellen Ruppel Shell asked in Cheap

    Why was there such a scarcity of things reasonably priced? It seemed that all coonsumer goods were cheap, like the Chinese boots, or extravagant, like the Italian boots. Where, I wondered, was the solid middle ground that offered safe footing not so many years ago?

     
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