I spent a day and a bit fixing my crashed hard drive. Luckily I had a back-up drive. In fact I have two. Double redundancy. This has happened to me once before when I wasn’t so well prepared and at that time I did loose a bit of past data, because I hadn’t manually backed up for a few weeks.
I managed to rebuild my hard drive this time, using digital chewing gum and analogue string. It’s all a bit bodgey, so I have ordered a new drive and will swap it over when it comes.
The very next day the laser printer died. I’m not too surprised, it is 15 years old and gets through 4 toners a year with all the printing of the books. I rang up a laser repair bloke and he just laughed at me and hung up. At the next one I left a message and he never did ring back. The next call was more informative, he politely explained to me that at a $100 call-out fee and a minimum $45 service repair quote fee I could get 3 new printers including a new toner and drum in each, so why was I bothering?
I’m a bit appalled at first, but I guess that it is 15 years old, and that’s a long time in digital evolution. I’m lucky that the man down at the toner refill shop in our town still carries the stuff I need to put in them.
Still, I don’t like to throw out anything that isn’t fully worn out. I have another go at the old printer, blowing it out with compressed air and washing the paper lifting roller fingers with metho to make it sticky again, but to no avail. Although the paper handling parts are shot, I work out that I can pull out the paper tray and manually feed one sheet at a time into the mechanism and it will print it, before it goes into jam up mode with the second sheet. If I pull out the toner unit and the paper tray and then re-insert them, it clears the blockage signal. It will then take another sheet. I battle on from page 69 through to page 119 to finish one copy of Australian Wood Firing. Every ten to fifteen sheets or so, it starts to print out garbled garbage all over the page instead of text. I have to shut down the soft ware and re-boot, switch of the printer and re-start it. It does work, but I just can’t bear it.
I admit defeat. I’ve wasted 3 hours. It’s an ancient Brother printer, I google to find the model closest to this one that is currently available, and lo! There is one available for sale in Mittagong, so close. I call in and buy it the next time I’m down the street. $79 which is 50 dollars cheaper than buying the toner and drum separately. The machine is therefore free and they are paying me the equivalent of $50 to take it out of the shop. If I was not the person that I am, I could consider just buying a brand new printer each month instead of buying toner refills. It would be cheaper. What a stupid world we have created for ourselves! So mindlessly wasteful.
Anyway, I just can’t bring myself to think like that. I can’t do it. All that embedded energy, all that perfectly good stuff going to land fill.
I really hate built-in obsolescence.
Does trouble really come in three’s?
Well, No. Not digitally, surely it would be one’s and zero’s. So three’s would have to be 010101 in some sort of binary digital speak similar to this. In actual fact it is 0011, but that doesn’t look very funny, unless you are a mathematician. Most of us aren’t. And mathematicians aren’t know for their humour.
So Yes, trouble does come in 010101’s
I get it home to find that the new printer doesn’t have driver software that goes back 14 years to the age of our old computer. The system software is so old that it isn’t supported anymore.
Snookered!
I’ll have to update the operating system on the old desk top computer. It can be done apparently, you just down-load it from the cloud. Yeah sure. This computer is so old that it doesn’t even have a modem in it!
It’ll just take more time. Until then I will run everything off my laptop. We had already decided that we would not replace the desk top computer, once we got used to owning a laptop that does everything that the old desktop did, only better, faster and more conveniently. The old desk top computer doesn’t know it yet, but its digital days are numbered.
As the orders for my books keep coming in and I’m the person most amazed by this. I need to have a reliable working system to get them printed. I have been toying with stripping all the text to ASCI format and converting it to html for conversion to Apple iPad book format or Amazon Kindle format. In this way I can sell them digitally through the cloud. I can’t imagine that it is too much work to get that done, but then I still have the problem of the hundreds of images that are embedded in the text at the moment. They can’t be included in the Kindle format, so I will have to set up a data base and make the images available for down load to registered customers. It’s all starting to sound like a lot of work now, and not the kind of work that I enjoy. I certainly can’t afford to pay to have it done professionally, so that is why I’m still printing and binding books one day a month on the kitchen table.
I don’t like the idea of cutting down trees and shipping them here as paper, then me shipping that paper back across the globe to my customers in the US, Canada, UK and Europe. I do choose recycled paper to print on, but I’m noticing that it is getting quite hard to find these days. Instead, they are selling ‘certified green’ paper. It smells of bullshit to me. I was never really confident that 100% recycled paper really was, but what can you do? I choose the best from a bad bunch of options.
My sincere thanks to Len Smith, who is always a trove of good advice and amazing information about computers. I couldn’t do it without you Len!
Thanks!
I’m sure that you’ve heard enough about our grubby financial dealings, private teaching classes and our digital detours.
The other thing that happens in our kitchen is the cooking of all the green food from our garden.
We have been making some nice meals from our garden, dealing with our excesses, using up some of our many capsicums at this time of year, I have been roasting them and pickling them. They are delicious.
Even better after a day or so of ageing in the jar.
Roasting green caps over the burner flame on the stove top and after roasting the caps are placed in a plastic bag to sweat for twenty minutes
After sweating, the charred coating is scraped off and they are sliced into strips, placed in a bowl and covered in oil and vinegar dressing. I served them at the wood firing workshop and they disappeared very quickly.
It’s time to make more stock for general use. I enjoy taking stock and making stock. It’s very cheap to make and adds loads of flavour to all sorts of meals through the week.
Browning onions and garlic in olive oil and then using what is at hand in the garden to make the mirepoix.
roasting cheap stock bones from the butcher $3.50 worth
Once roasted the bones and veggies are all boiled down together. The bones and veggies are then removed and the liquor reduced and a bottle of good local red wine from Sally’s Corner Wines in Sutton Forest is added and reduced further.
Once reduced down to 1 litre, the gel is placed into 2 containers, one frozen for later and one in the fridge for this week.
It’s a fabulous thing to do that is so rewarding and it cost next to nothing and doesn’t have any preservatives or any salt.
It helps us survive and eat well on a limited budget, but most of all it is all made here in the kitchen using as much of our own produce as possible and cooked using the heat from the wood that we grew ourselves, in our own forest and burnt in the kitchen wood fired stove.
This stove was bought almost 40 years ago, 2nd hand, and is still going strong, heating our hot water , heating the house and cooking our dinner.
As winter and the cooler weather approaches, we have an excess of lemons. I
Shave off the very thin layer of zest from 25 lemons. It takes about an hour to do it well without disturbing the white pith. I want the zest to make limoncello, a lemon flavoured liquor. All the zest is added to a bottle of Vodka and left to soak for a month. After draining and filtering, it is mixed with sugar/water syrup and is delicious.
We now have 25 skinned lemons to deal with and I don’t want to waste them
I decide to use half of them for juice to make a lot of lemon juice ice cubes for the freezer. 3 trays should do it. The remaining half of the juice is made into a lemon drink cordial.
Sweet and sharp, it is really thirst quenching and I did it all with my own digits.
Digitally yours,
I am Number 4, you are Number 2
or should that be 0100 and 0010?
Tonight my Fingers Smell of Garlic 
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