artiss.blog

Category: Life

Random thoughts on life

  • Nextbase Dashcam – Battery replacement that’s not very repair, or pocket, friendly

    Nextbase Dashcam – Battery replacement that’s not very repair, or pocket, friendly

    So many people have dashcams in their car, and I’m no exception. I have a Nextbase model but, recently, it’s been randomly restarting during journeys. After discussion with the AI support bot (I had no choice – don’t judge me!), it turned out that the internal battery was pretty much dead – after fully charging, the dashcam should stay on for around 8 minutes without a power supply. Mine shut down as soon as it had started up.

    So, a new battery it is.

    But, although Nextbase have made it easy for you to get into the dashcam (possibly for their own advantages), they’ve made it frustratingly difficult for the average person to then make the battery replacement themselves.

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  • How to get free AAA games for PC and Mac

    How to get free AAA games for PC and Mac

    There are open-source and free-to-play games available that cost nothing (up-front anyway), such as Fortnite. However, what about those AAA games, that have an up-front costs. How can you get those for free?

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  • WordPress plugins and the removal of features

    WordPress plugins and the removal of features

    A recent discussion on Reddit was about shaming plugin developers who offer free features and then take them away (with the assumption being that they make them part of the paid-for version).

    Now, I don’t agree with shaming, but I don’t think it’s a great policy. As a site owner, if I’d spent some time looking for the best plugin, implementing it and integrating its features, only for the developer – out of nowhere – to put one of the features I use behind a pay-wall, I’d be less than happy. My choice now would be to go back and find another plugin, which may not even be possible if important data was not transferable between plugins, implementing it, etc., or to pay. It feels like blackmail in a way.

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  • Mole and eMon – the forgotten support software at Boots

    Mole and eMon – the forgotten support software at Boots

    Back in the early/mid-1990s I’d been working on the IT (then IS) Help Desk at Boots the Chemist, supporting store’s POS (Point of Sale) systems. After a few years, my existing development chops were recognised and I was moved away to a more technical support team, where I would be helping to create support tools, as well as make fixed and minor enhancements to the POS system.

    My manager was very supportive of us all and allowed us to find our own path, in terms of what we’d spend our time doing. In my case, as the only person in the team with direct experience of working on the Help Desk, I wanted to do what I could to assist them.

    So I wrote Mole.

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  • Should we all be using online wish lists for gifting?

    Should we all be using online wish lists for gifting?

    [It is estimated] that $35 billion is being thrown away, around the world, in the form of poorly chosen Christmas gifts

    BBC’s 50 Things That Made The Modern Economy – Santa Claus, December 17th 2018

    For a number of years now, I’ve asked people buying me birthday and Christmas gifts to use my online wish list and I’ve converted a lot of them to doing the same.

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