Friday 22 January 2016

Charity Router Barrow Boys


Colin, our builder has had to contend with the quagmire in our field while laying a patio for the cabin. For some reason we were talking about Sir James Dyson, who lives not far from us in the Doddington Estate and mention was made of his ball barrow invention. Colin opined that the ball barrow would not work on a building site as it was too unwieldy and subject to damage. This generated a couple of concepts for a barrow for use on quagmires - the aqua-barrow (barrow with skis) and the hover-barrow (like a swamp runner).

Struck charity shop gold yesterday. I've started walking into Yate on a daily basis for some exercise - 4 miles in total - and it also gives me a chance to check out the six charity shops enroute. Yesterday I managed to bag a cafetiere for £2 (you can never have enough cafetieres in our house), a brand new, unused Joules deck shirt for £5.50, a nice espresso set for £4.99 and some silicone baking moulds for £0.99 (they were exactly the ones I needed last week for the James Martin special shortbreads, and cost about £15 each on Amazon).

Just about the only form of control I have over No.1 Son in order to get him to conform to some form of basic, civilised behaviour is access to the broadband (he seems addicted to gaming and I'm at my wits' end). I set access controls on the router to limit his use, but the little bugger hacked the router and managed to circumvent my attempts to block him, either by using some VPN technique or changing his Mac address - and he's been doing it for ages. I wondered why he was so blasé about the increasing penalties I had to introduce in an attempt to get him to wash his dirty dishes. I've now taken to using a more clandestine blocking method and it was very funny last night to watch him trying to figure out what I've done. It's now cyber and psychological warfare.


2 comments:

Tertius said...

Try enrolling in this GCHQ course Bill: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35354942

Tertius said...

Or try cybrary.IT