Random thoughts on life
I’ve not had a clothes dryer for at least 15 years and even when I did, I rarely used it. Growing up in the 1970s, they never were a thing so I’ve got used to natural drying.
As the UK weather turns warmer, drying your clothes outside seems an even better idea now.
And, in recent years, I’ve been looking at more environmentally friendly ways to do it.
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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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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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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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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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