GRIPES

[Jerry_Atrick]

Agree.. that's why I never electrified my tool...

 

[Yenn]

Its this green electricity. So much stronger than the old coal electricity that tools burn out. Thats my theory.

[pmccarthy]

I peed on an electric fence. My tool electrified itself.

[willedoo]

The Sydney Morning Herald has been one of the free online news services. I often use the Google News listings and it's easy to recognize the Murdoch paywall crud sites and ignore them (most are not worth reading anyway unless you need a laugh).

 

Now the SMH has added an annoying popup on their news articles which is quite large and covers part of the page. It says no payment required but they want you to register an account and log in. As if anyone is going to bother putting in a username and password just to read one article. But I've tricked them. I've got a widget on my browser toolbar which toggles javascript on and off. When the popup appears, just click the widget and the page reloads without the javascript popup. It also works for some paywall sites, but only if the main page is not javascript powered, just the popup. If the main page is javascript based, turning off javascript results in a blank page with no content.

Edited June 27, 2021 by willedoo

[Marty_d]

On 23/06/2021 at 10:39 PM, Marty_d said:

Ok, my gripe for the day - bloody power tools!

 

Not long ago my De Walt 18v hammer drill started stopping intermittently, which quickly progressed to permanently.  I thought it might be a loose wire or something so pulled it apart today, cleaned everything up, put it back together and it worked.  Once.  Second pull of the trigger and nothing.  I must say I've had it over 12 years and used the absolute hell out of it on everything from old hardwood to concrete, so probably about time.

 

So then I give up on drills and start building the 2 retractable clothes airers my wife wants (so much damp weather down here this winter, stuff stays on the line for a week).  This involves putting a rounded edge on 18 lengths of 42x19 DAR pine, so of course it's over to the trusty router table which has held my old Ryobi router for the past, er, 20 years or so.

4 lengths in, all of a sudden there's a weird vibration, then sparks and smoke start coming out.  Probably a bearing as the bit was definitely not spinning in place any more!

 

Off to Bunnings and a new $150 Ryobi, which of course doesn't have the same screw pattern in the base plate as the old one, so had to drill new holes through the router table attachment.  Luckily the bench drill still works.

 

Anyway went back down after tea and ran the pine pieces through the new router.   All good now.

 

Still need to get a drill though.

 

My gripe is not so much about them finally failing - but did they have to time it so they did it together??

 

A good ending to the story -

 

Saw an ad on Gumtree yesterday, bloke selling a De Walt drill / rattler set and also some Makita stuff.  I asked him if he'd consider selling the De Walt stuff separately and he agreed.  So for $100 I ended up with a drill the same as my old one, another rattler the same as my current one, another charger and 3 batteries - so I'm pretty happy with that!

[Old Koreelah]

7 hours ago, willedoo said:

The Sydney Morning Herald has been one of the free online news services. I often use the Google News listings and it's easy to recognize the Murdoch paywall crud sites and ignore them (most are not worth reading anyway unless you need a laugh)…

Why not just subscribe? It costs very little in the scheme of things; we need to keep old-fashioned investigative journalism alive.

[Jerry_Atrick]

Useless meetings on a Firday arvo.. kills POETS day 😉

 

I am writing this while on the meeting and vaguely hearing people talk about data linkages and messages between systems *yawn*...

 

What happened to the booze cart they used to wheel out on Friday arvos?

[Marty_d]

20 hours ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

Useless meetings on a Firday arvo.. kills POETS day 😉

 

I am writing this while on the meeting and vaguely hearing people talk about data linkages and messages between systems *yawn*...

 

What happened to the booze cart they used to wheel out on Friday arvos?

Wow, you had a booze cart come in??  We had to skive off to the pub for lunch and forget to go back.

 

[Jerry_Atrick]

Technically, it was after 5 on a Friday they would wheel it out (most institutional firms).. practice has long gone.

[Marty_d]

Oh, after 5pm on a Friday.  That's about an hour after the weekend has started!

[nomadpete]

No wonder our taxes are so high!

😉

[willedoo]

Here's my gripe for the day. Have noticed in the supermarkets lately that a lot of manufacturers have changed the design and colouring of their packaging. It makes it hard for an almost old bloke to find them and I've had to sometimes exit the building without something on the shopping list. It makes me wonder if there's a slight drop in sales data immediately after a packaging change. If so, probably not significant in the scheme of things.

 

Shopping in the big two can be interesting as in recent times, apart from packaging changing after many years of the same design, the supermarkets are dropping a lot of brands they've had for years. I do more searching than shopping these days.

[nomadpete]

Dead right Willie. The big two used to offer choices of brands, but more recently, the variety has disappeared from the shelves, and is replaced by 'in house brandless' items which don't reveal who made the product. And in the deli section it's almost impossible to find Australian meats. For instance, ham might be 13% Australian. How can you get a pig that's 13% Australian? Or Bacon that's proudly labelled 5% Australian?

[Marty_d]

1 hour ago, nomadpete said:

How can you get a pig that's 13% Australian?

"Police officer", please Peter, and don't be racist.

[nomadpete]

That porker talks with an accent. How can I trust my bacon?

[onetrack]

I detest the way the "big brands" dominate the shelves and push out any competition. Ever looked at the toothpaste and toothbrush shelves to see how much Colgate have taken over those areas and eliminated any competition? Try to find a different brand of toothpaste, it will be like trying to find a dropped screw in the dirt.

 

Colgate are not alone in this technique, there are many other "big brands" doing the same on the other shelves. I often wonder why we don't have tougher monopoly and anti-trust laws, as the U.S. does.

[old man emu]

The big two charge manufacturers for shelf space. That's why enterprises like Dick Smith's foray into food went belly up - couldn't afford the cost of shelf space.

 

My local Woolworths just got a makeover. Mainly it involved changing the locations of all the types of products, sometimes just changing from one side of the aisle to the other, or the front end of the aisle to the back. That was a couple of months ago and the staff still can't remember where things are now.

 

And the change in packaging design is also a bugbear. Nestle changed the design and colour of their single serve coffees, so I didn't know for ages if the new stuff was the same as that I'd been buying for years.

 

And Arnott's in NSW must have reduced their range of biscuits because they take up very little shelf space now. 

[nomadpete]

One reason Arnotts is diminishing is that colesworths are in a race to the bottom pricewise. Take your reading glasses (it's always in the small print) and read the county of origin on the cheap biscuits. Places such as Middle East, Great Britain, eastern Europe.

How is it logical to sell these biscuits in Australia? The packaging and transport must cost more than the contents. And the packet of biscuits retails for a third of the price of Arnotts.

But after Arnotts goes out of business, just watch the price of cheap bikkies triple, and colesworths share dividends will go up.

[old man emu]

Have you noticed that in bagged potatoes the spuds are uniformly small? I'm finding that each potato from those bags is close enough to 100 gms plus or minus about 10 gms. Where do those big potatoes that we used to get to make filled baked potatoes go?  Into the gaping maws of processing plants to be spat out as accurately formed chips made from mashed potato pulp, thick cut, crinkle cut or French fries.  

[red750]

3 hours ago, old man emu said:

Have you noticed that in bagged potatoes the spuds are uniformly small?

Bagged spuds from our local Woolies are various sizes, but never really large. We had french fries from Hungry Jack's as a side serve last night and I swear a couple were 20cm long. Our local fish n chip shop regularly serves what in Vic. are referred to as potato cakes (called something else in other states), that are larger than a saucer and often nearly as big as a bread and butter plate. We refer to them as Chernobyl spuds. Make a chicken parma look small.

[old man emu]

You get big chips and burgers at HJ's. I don't know why people go past HJ's to the Golden Arches.

 

Victoria: potato cakes. NSW: potato scallops. Neither are cakes nor scallops, but are cheap and greasy.

 

[red750]

Yeah, but they taste great. At least the ones from our f'n'c shop do.

[facthunter]

Potato cakes? Starch fried in OIL that may be overheated and dangerous. If you seriously want health don't eat this stuff.. SALT, FAT  and STARCH is a killer..Nev

[red750]

Better potato cakes than Covid.   

[Dax]

2 hours ago, facthunter said:

Potato cakes? Starch fried in OIL that may be overheated and dangerous. If you seriously want health don't eat this stuff.. SALT, FAT  and STARCH is a killer..Nev

No more dangerous for your health than dairy products, in fact probably less dangerous, as diaries contain fat and salt in abundance. Diaries should be put in the same category as tobacco, which may shock lots or people, but those are the medical facts.