So, I got onto the idea of Double-Edged blade shaving by cruising Reddit and ending up on /r/wicked_edge. Leisureguy‘s blog led me to Pureman to buy some things. I checked out some other shops but they didn’t have the range or prices for what I wanted. The fact that Pure Man is Australian (let alone, Brisbane-based, where I am!) is quite handy 🙂

I ordered the below:

• Proraso Aloe and Green Tea Shaving Soap
• Col. Conk Bay Rum Shave Soap
• Taylor of Old Bond Street Alum Block
• Gillette 7 O’Clock Super Platinum Blades
• Astra Superior Platinum Blades

When it all arrived, the box was kind of large, and had all these extra things in it! I couldn’t remember ordering them, but it seems they were free samples! 🙂

HPM has taken down the manual for these handy battery-backed timer devices, so I’ve recreated the documentation I could find here. We use them at work for a variety of power control situations, including turning off banks of 46″ LCD TV’s overnight, so they can handle a fair amount of power.

Catalogue number is either D817/2 or 817/2

Time Display

To change from 12-hour display to 24-hour display, or vice versa, press the CLOCK button and hold it until the LCD display changes.

So, while trying to get to the Right People ™ to fix one of our remote 3G IPWAN services, somehow I got through to a consumer-grade accounts person. The Telstra IVR is a horrible mess of “Uh, I’ll mash buttons until someone answers”.

After a few minutes of trying to convey the point, he decided to try and transfer me to a Bigpond 3G helpdesk person. Terrible idea, since they wouldn’t have the foggiest idea how to deal with my Cisco 881G router, nor access to our service details.

Going for a real “Evil Mad Scientist” shtick today. I have been pondering some simple DIY projects for making my little living space a little better, and decided that drawing them up might be handy to visualise/work on ideas.

The first one’s a bit of a storage cabinet/shelf to sit over the toilet cistern, which normally wasted space full of dust.

Basically there’s two “legs” which hold toilet paper rolls on hinged roll-holders like you’d normally see in people’s toilets, but covered by a bit of a door so they’re out of the way. On top of the legs are a shelf or two for putting things away. While drawing this up I scribbled a few ideas down for how the toilet roll holders would work, and as I thought of the implementation steps the idea morphed into something significantly easier. (from a weird elevator-pulley idea to just a hinge)

I pre-ordered it! Digital downloads make things so easy.. and paypal even more so 🙂

Sigh, I really should get a dollar every time “reboot it” fixes things.

I decided that since I’m approaching 30 years old, I should be able to order a bottle of wine and have a vague understanding of what I’ll get when it arrives.

My first choice was to go with Guzman y Gomez burritos - a 2010 Curious Kiwi Pinot Noir. RMB said either a Pinot Noir or a Rose, and I knew I didn’t want something as light and fruity as the Rose for my spicy dinner.

This is going to be image-heavy and explanation light because I’m lazy. I went looking for lantern/lighting ideas and hit up IKEA / Spotlight / Anaconda / Freedom today.

For the put-your-feasting-gear-in-a-basket idea, I present IKEA’s sole solution to the problem, the BRANAS basket:

Branas-Basket

The small one’s about $7, the big one’s $10, and unless you’re using just bowls you’ll need the big one. They come in White, Black and Birch, and all the signs I see mention “Last chance to buy” so they might be disappearing soon. Bugger.

I was cruising WalletsWeLove the other day after being introduced to it by a friend. Wallets and bags are very similar, and I seem to be obsessed with finding the perfect one for any given application I can dream up.

The perfect wallet for me is incredibly thin, ideally it would take up no more space than the items it holds, but still have a relatively simple billfold shape. I don’t like money clips (they’re ungainly) and can’t see the point of having more than one space for bills, let alone all that extra material and bulk for a trifold.

I was getting an error trying to run a remote command on a Windows XP machine on our domain today:

“Error communicating with PsExec service on [hostname]: No process is on the other end of the pipe.”

As usual, google came to the rescue but it took a lot of forum scanning to find a result. The quick fix is to do this:

 pslist \\[hostname] 

You should find a process called PSEXESVC, if you pskill it, then you should be able to use PsExec again.