Scribblings from Steve
Posts where I’m ranting about someone or something
Their FB page says:
We’re EE – the UK’s biggest and fastest overall network, offering 4G in over 100 towns and cities, as well as Fibre Broadband.
This is the coverage map for where I live….
… pretty crap really… my phone “Should” work outside most of the time.
Interesting contract – I promise to pay them money every month and they provide a service that “should” allow me to make calls.
What a stupid comment spam:
If you are going to post spam comments (which automatically get trapped by my spam filters) the least you could do is post stuff that is slightly amusing and makes sense rather than this complete bullshit The offending IP ( 84.232.199.214 ) is Canadian – which makes a change from the usual Chinese or Russian or Indian culprits.
On January 24th Andrew Timchenko from Semalt sent me a Private message on Facebook:
Dear Stephen
From now on your websites:
tty.org.uk
Canalplan.org.UK
Canalplan.EU
Canalplan.co.UK
Pubnight.org.uk
won’t be visited by our robots.
I would like to bring apology on the behalf of our company if our service caused you some troubles.
I’d told him that I wanted all subdomains on those domains removing from their systems and I was stupid enough to believe him although for a while their annoying bots stopped visiting.
But they came back – not as stupidly fast as before but doing exactly the same call to the home page, over and over again.
So if you’ve had promises from Semalt to take your domains out of their system.. double check and make sure that you’ve got a rule in your .htaccess rule to ban them
So Google is full of sites posting about the above company … they would seem to be trying to do some sort of SE ranking or are they just complete arses?
This is an example from one of my site logs … there is NO reason for this behaviour but their repeated use of IP addresses in various countries suggests that they’re either paying people to do this shit or they’ve paid for time on a bot-net.
Ask yourself…would you really trust a company who resort to these sort of tactics as a business model?
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:43 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:43 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:43 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:43 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:43 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:43 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:43 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:43 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:43 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:43 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:43 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:43 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:44 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:44 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:44 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:44 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:44 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:44 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:44 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:44 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:44 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:44 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:44 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:45 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:45 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:45 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:45 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:45 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:46 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:46 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:46 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:46 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:46 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:46 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:46 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:46 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:46 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:46 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:46 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:46 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:46 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:46 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:47 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:47 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:48 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:48 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:48 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:48 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:48 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:48 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:58 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:58 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:58 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:58 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:58 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:58 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:59 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:59 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:29:59 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:30:00 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:30:00 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
189.78.19.14 - - [16/Jan/2014:20:30:00 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5720 "http://their url removed?u=http://my website here" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" my website here
I hope the sad little Indian who connects from 125.63.89.66 and spends his time trying to break into Yahoo email accounts to send spam gets screwed over by who ever is paying people to spam people with links to a page on lefsky.com
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These are screenshots from the GooglePlay store for my UK Samsung S3. Both these apps are "System" apps which were installed by Samsung and cannot be deleted.
AllShare Play is, as you can see, not compatible with the phone which is pretty impressively crap.
Galaxy Choice, however, is compatible with my phone but its in Korean so I can't delete it.
Its not Rocket Science Samsung… add to that the "System" install of Dropbox and you have to wonder what sort of donkeys Samsung UK employ.
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After all this time, having brushed away the cobwebs and caught up with a lot of software updates, I find that my old blog still works.
A lot has changed, but apparently not the complete shite that spammers use to try to make you think that their crap is a real comment.
Take this pile of shite from “hemelektronik” :
I loved up to you’ll receive carried out right here. The caricature is attractive, your authored subject matter stylish. however, you command get bought an impatience over that you want be delivering the following. unwell without a doubt come more before once more as exactly the same nearly a lot frequently inside of case you protect this hike.
or this from “shell residences”:
I simply could not go away your web site before suggesting that I extremely loved the usual information a person supply in your visitors? Is going to be again continuously in order to investigate cross-check new posts
Or this gem from “Why a Wedding Planning Checklist is Important ” – a person so pathetic they couldn’t even come up with a reasonable sounding name:
Thanks, I have ended up searching for information on this topic for ages and yours is the best I¡¯ve identified till today. But, what about the conclusion? Are an individual sure in regards to the source?
and finally this gem of complete gibberish from “cuong hoa gunny”
Hello there, simply was aware of your blog through Google, and found that it is truly informative. I am going to watch out for brussels. I’ll be grateful if you continue this in future. Many people will be benefited out of your writing. Cheers!
Rest assured gunny – there never will be any sprouts in the blog as they are the work of the devil.
Come on guys – if you are going to spam my blog with comments then at least try to sound real and not like some badly translated manual from a third rate Chinese computer accessory company.
In which Steve mutters about the O2 broadband dongle and its broken DNS handling.
Was trying to check a problem with Canalplan AC today and as its sitting on the server in the living room I thought I should try it “remotely” rather than access off the local network.
So I got the O2 broadband dongle and powered it up and connected, and couldn’t reproduce the error… Oh well, thats how things go, especially when you are talking about IE8.
So whilst I was connected I thought I’d just hop onto this blog site and check a couple of things.
Sorry – No Can Do! Not Possible. Kept telling me the site was not available.
But it sits on the same server as Canalplan AC. It sits on blogs.canalplan.org.uk when Canalplan is on www.canalplan.org.uk.
So if one responds, then the other other should. Right?
Well you are wrong:
Here is the output of a ping command:
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6002] Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. C:Userssteve>ping www.canalplan.org.uk Pinging www.canalplan.org.uk [212.159.61.36] with 32 bytes of data:
So that’s good – its getting the IP address. It wont ever respond to pings because the router dumps them.
So lets try for the blogs:
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6002] Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. C:Userssteve>ping blogs.canalplan.org.uk Ping request could not find host blogs.canalplan.org.uk. Please check the name and try again.
Nope – its not there.
The DNS servers for O2 don’t recognise it as a valid host name.
Tosspots.
OR rather its their Windows software that is screwy. If I power up under Linux then it works fine!
I quite like my G1, and now I’ve got TasKiller it’s battery life is almost reasonable.
One of the big features of the G1 is that when you set it up you have to tie it to a Google Account. This gives you access to email and also synchronises your contacts and your calendar on the phone with your Google Account.
This gives you a lot of extra functionality. Rather than maintaining your contacts on your phone on its internal screen you can sit at your computer and login to your Google account and do all the work there and then synchronise it, and you can also do work on your email (like delete messages in bulk and move them round) from your computer which is a lot easier.
This breaks the traditional link between phone and SIM and contacts/numbers. In the past you saved numbers in the phone or on your SIM. Move phone or move provider and you’ve got fun and games getting all your contacts synced up in one place. With the G1 they are in your Google account. So change your phone to another Android phone, or change provider (which at the moment you can’t) and everything simply moves with you. Brilliant – and the G1 even allows you to import contacts from your SIM.
But what happens when your phone goes wrong? Well I found out.
The keyboard on my G1 has gone faulty with the P key and the backspace key going a bit odd and not working about 70% of the times you press them, and anyone who knows my typing will know that I use the backspace key a lot. So I phoned T-Mobile and they said “Take it to your local T-Mobile store and they’ll send it away for repair”, and so I did and yes they did.
T-Mobile gave me a loan phone, a phone that looks like it crawled out from the primordial soup, no internet, no 3G, no nothing, but most importantly : NO CONTACTS.
Where are my contacts? That’s right, they’re sitting on a Google server somewhere and the phone cannot get to them.
Now I fully understand that T-Mobile can’t keep a pile of G1s in stock as loan phones, but now with things like the G1 blurring the line between phone and internet, especially when it comes to contacts etc. I think that maybe they need to look at their loan phone policy.
As for getting my G1 back? It could be 10-15 working days. So I’m stuck in the technological backwater until I get it back, unless I can work out how to use the Viewty. The only good thing you can say about the Viewty is that Linux just works with the on-board 3G modem.
Back in 2002 Kathy and I bought a Hoover AAA 140 washing machine.
Hoover, a good name, so its going to be a good washing machine. Might last as long as my parents Hoover washing machine (aeons) or their Zanussi (not quite as long but still pretty good).
How wrong we were. Within a couple of years it needed its drum casing replace because the idiot designer at Hoover (who probably didn’t even have a degree in anything but stupidity) decided that they would use plastic for the outer drum casing and then they would secure the concrete ballast weights to it using rather thin semi self-tapping screws/bolts with no locking plates.
So what happens over time is that the bolts start to vibrate loose and then the concrete starts bouncing and suddenly one day there is a big bang as one or more of the bolts shears and the concrete flaps around inside the washing machine.
So the engineer comes and fits a new drum which has bigger mounting bolts and bigger mounting lugs and metal lock plates to stop the bolts vibrating loose. So I guess some engineer looked at the original design and having hit the first idiot round the head a bit came up with a new design.
So its been pretty OK since then, well apart from the the fabric conditioner tray syphon not really working and the tray fills up with gloop and you have to keep taking the soap tray out to clean it and then of course the spring loaded handle falls off because its made of plastic that is about as robust as a CD Jewel case hinge.
Then the other day it started spewing water all over the floor.
So I check the obvious things, I look for loose pipes, I look for loose seals on the outer drum, I check that the door seal is OK. Everything is fine.
This morning I get a big torch and I really have a good look because frankly at the moment I do not want to have to replace the machine.
I find the problem.
The pipe from the soap tray that feeds water into the washer has a hole in it. Why does it have a hole in it? Well its simple – it has a hole in it because the pipe sits about 2mm away from one of the drum mounting springs so when the drum moves on the springs during washing it rubs against the pipe. So over time it wears a hole right through the pipe wall. Hello?? HELLO? That is not bad luck: its a shaped pipe – its in the only place it can go. This is lousy design pure and simple. Vibrating springs and rubber pipes do not go together… even I know that, so it looks like the curse of the idiot Hoover designer strikes again.
So Its all wrapped up in tape for the moment and I might just buy a new pipe (apart from the fact that you probably can’t get them) and then of course its just about impossible to get the pipe on and off the soap tray because there is a large block of concrete in the way which stops you getting both hands to the pipe (one holding the pliers that hold the spring clip open, and the other to move the clip up the pipe).
So yes, this Hoover sucks.