Well, that went well...

Every brownout, the door locks failed, because the power supplies failed and had to be replaced.
That’s bad design. (To state the obvious.)

My guess (and probably yours) is that the setup was designed down to a price

Anybody miss Acorn Computer Ltd. yet?

Anybody miss Acorn Computer Ltd.

Non-trading company if you look

They designed RISC OS and the Acorn RISC Machine. That’s a bundle for me. Who’s done better?

So far? Everybody else.

I’m writing this on RISC OS. :-) :-) :-)

I was worried that the overhead line might have also broken, given that the farmer failed at getting a huge tractor and muck spreader around the electric pole, and in the process of trying to do so tore apart the ADSL (copper) line and crushed the base of the metal phone pole. It is leaning now. And, yeah, the farmers really don’t care much about fragile infrastructure.

As it turns out, the brownout was a red herring.

The technician, who arrived at 11am. He was scheduled to come at 8am and I called Connectel at 9 to ask where he was. You know, it really wouldn’t hurt them to fire off a quick message to say “his previous job is running over, he’ll be a little later than planned”.

There was a signal at the end of the Livebox cable, but it was reading 34. I have no idea what that is in relation to. He wobbled the connectors, plugged in, unplugged, and so on. No change. So he popped open the wall box and hooked a powerful laser to the output. This was fascinating as it showed up one place where the fibre was wound up a little too tight (a red glow as the light fails to stay within the fibre and leaks out) and a big red glow at the join point between the fibre that’s part of the socket, and the fibre from outside. It fell apart in his hands as he picked it up.

So he stripped back the fibre, clipped it, and put it into his little box to weld the ends together. It took three attempts. Once that was done, a metal sheath which for some reason was made extremely hot. Following that, everything gently wound back up inside the socket and… job done.

Even better, the replacement Livebox understood that it had never been used before, so it went and picked up the configuration of the older box from the cloud. So all my settings, No-IP, everything, all ready to go.

So thank you my little S9 for acting as a hotspot, but I can switch that off now.

:thumbsup:

Now about that drain…

Once that was done, a metal sheath which for some reason was made extremely hot.

Hot melt glue, holds the most fragile portion together in a gentle protective way.

You do understand that “the lobby scene” was set in a simulated virtual world where everybody else was hijacked by copies of Agent Smith?

I just re-watched that the other day. In full HD, from a Blu-Ray, with 7.1 TrueHD audio.

There were no miniguns used in the lobby scene.

There was a minigun used later on (where Neo is hanging out of the helicopter).

I was actually thinking more of the deforestation scene in Predator, spliced with a rampage from GTA Vice City. And the Aldershot comment? Well, I had the misfortune to drive through there a few months back. It’s enough to make anyone ‘go postal’. ;-)

Now about that drain…

Ummm… don’t. I think Rick may be on the verge of a meltdown. Which is completely relatable. If I’d had that kind of week I’d be ready to go on the rampage at the next person who said the wrong thing! :-)

Speaking of drains, I’ve been having some issues myself (hope it’s ok to post this link here):

https://www.ilikejam.co.uk/blog/30/adventures_in_plumbing/

Not quite as spectacular as what Rick’s had to endure, but I did end up with water pouring through my kitchen ceiling.

That’s almost amusingly similar to our experience a couple of years ago in our house – that we’d just bought. No photos, and I’ve not written it up – but also water getting into the kitchen from the bathroom above, via multiple routes. Luckily for us the ceiling’s okay, but I had to do a lot of work in the bathroom and roof (!) and some plaster & paintwork on one wall of the kitchen before I could put cupboards on the wall that pretty certainly used to have cupboards before the previous owners evidently had problems with water running down the wall…I’ll probably write the details up at some point, but without photos maybe not worth it.

Older plumbing stories here: https://clive.semmens.org.uk/Recounts/SewerWork.html