Hooptedoodle #405a - More Care and Attention from Curry's

 In case anyone was troubled by my recent rant on the subject of our adventures as customers of Curry's, the well-known idiots, here is a little update. 

Brief resumé: a new laptop had been ordered for my son to take to university, but Curry's sent him a PlayStation 4 gaming machine instead. A complaint was made, the unwanted PS4 was collected from our house the following day (25th August), and we know from the tracking number on the receipt we were given that it arrived in Newark (Curry's online sales centre?) within a day.

Since then? Well, not much has happened really. We had a number of meaningless phone conversations and chat exchanges which refused to confirm that the returned item had been received or been checked, and there was no commitment to a refund, which "can take 2 or 3 weeks" - this being, presumably, someone else's fault. 

Yesterday there was an email which stated that a replacement item (which I sincerely hope is a laptop) is being dispatched, and will be delivered "by 24th August". Yesterday, of course, was the 8th September. [I hope you are not laughing, at the back there.]

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen. One certainty is that my son does not have any chance at all of receiving his computer before he goes away on Saturday. There are all sorts of exciting possibilities over what else might happen.

At no point has anyone said that they are sorry, or that they will do their best to rectify their stupid mistake, or anything else, really, that we might wish to hear. I can only suggest that any UK resident reading this should take great pains to avoid ever doing business with these cretins - save yourself a lot of grief, and do not give them the benefit of any profit on any such deal. It's not very likely, but if you happen to work for Curry's, or have friends who work there, then you have my sympathy, and please tell your employers that they smell very bad, and their days are numbered. Times are getting harder - businesses which cannot cope will fade away to make room for those which can. Online sellers have made a considerable fortune out of lockdown trade - sympathy is not what it might be.

Hooptedoodle #405 - I Can't Believe that Curry's Have ****ed Us Up Again

 Yet another Hooptedoodle - I am working on the homework bit of a forthcoming Zoom wargame - really enjoying it - but there's nothing to see yet, so this evening my post is just a short, fairly routine rant.

I'm not particularly looking for helpful suggestions - I just want to share the hate a bit.

My youngest son has been accepted for the university course he wanted, which of course is very good news, but the way these things are organised means that we have a fantastic amount to do in a very short time. I'm sure many of you will be well aware of all this business. We've been arranging for accommodation, new clothes, new bank account - all that - and one thing which is required is a new laptop. OK, fine.

He ordered one yesterday online from Curry's. Sometimes I can't believe that we forget so quickly, and buy stuff from Curry's despite all the grief they have given us over the years; however, here we are again, and it is definitely not my place to advise my son on where he should buy his PC. Anyway, Curry's are likely to stay in business long enough to support the guarantee, the price was reasonably competitive, and they were sending it out by courier the following day.

What can possibly go wrong?

Well, around 4pm today the courier delivered what turned out to be a PS4 - not the £1200 laptop that was ordered. The general stress levels around here are pretty high anyway, so there has been an amount of shouting and swearing - all very regrettable.

Well, it is annoying, but I'm sure it can be sorted out easily enough. In a civilised world, it is obvious that Curry's will hold up their corporate hand, and send another van, to deliver the correct item and take away the wrong one. Customer service - decency - you know the kind of thing.

Ah. Not so fast. They will send a van - tomorrow, in fact - to collect the PS4. There is no way we are getting to keep that. Then they will process the return through their magic systems, and - assuming everything is OK - he should get a refund in maybe 3 to 4 weeks. At that point, assuming the laptop is still in stock, we can start considering a replacement order. Not before. I realise that they always overstate the elapsed time, to avoid anybody getting their hopes up, but it looks pretty certain that he will have no laptop when he goes away to Glasgow on 11th September. Very little chance, I would say. Nothing can be done about it, they have their procedures, which are built upon a couple of core values: all staff are stupid and incompetent, and all customers are dishonest. Yes, I can understand that. Where did the customer service bit go? Why do we have to be rewarded for buying an expensive piece of kit from them by being subjected to a lot of graceless inconvenience?

 Of course, I have no idea, but I wouldn't expect to understand clever stuff like this.

If it were my choice, I would get my refund, and when it arrived I would have already bought a laptop from someone else - someone who isn't a disaster. However, for reasons which are more complicated then you might expect, it looks as though we are going to be forced to live through every moment of this nightmare. I am sure a replacement will arrive eventually, and I'm equally sure that my wife will have a 2-way drive to Glasgow to deliver the stupid thing. How wonderful.

So there you have it, ladies and others: I hope that Curry's get themselves organised quickly, but it's very obvious that they could not care less. Me? I care very much; I hope they go bust in the nastiest, messiest way possible - but not for a year or two... 

Remember the name.

Battle of Santiago Martir - deleted scenes...

On Friday I'll be hosting a Zoom wargame. This is a re-run of a scenario I used 3 years ago or thereabout, which I thought had some promise and was worth another shot sometime. The action featured never actually occurred, though if it had it might have been in April 1809.

I finished setting up the battlefield this morning, and was taking a few preliminary photos when it occurred to me to try a little video. I've recently enjoyed some very nice home-made wargaming movie clips on Youtube and elsewhere, and felt I should try one. I hasten to emphasise that I had no intention whatsoever of publishing my attempts, but in fact it's maybe worth a look. If you click HERE, the movie should appear from somewhere - at the moment, my chief priority is to avoid putting vast movie files on storage media I can't afford!

 

Standing-still picture of the battlefield, all set up - French and their Allies on the left, Spaniards on the right

 

The clip was filmed on my digital camera, which is not exactly the very latest tech, and I have now taken due note that I should pan more slowly, think about what I'm going to say before I start, and try to do something about the loss of picture quality resulting from file compression. However - it's no too bad, as they say around here, and it serves to give a quick walk-through who's involved on Friday. I propose to have another go, using my phone, which is more modern and should give better results. However I have now had a first attempt, and would not be frightened to try again!

If you are appalled by the experience, there's no need to rush to let me know!

More on Friday, though I don't think the movie crew will be in attendance!

Zoom - Firming Up

After learning that the world shortage of webcams, caused by demand during lockdown, has put the prices through the ceiling, I've been pottering around to see what else we can do in the short term. My Windows laptop was a big disappointment - the internal camera is very basic; I think the processing power is fine, so it might work well with an external camera (if I had one), but there is another constraint anyway, in that Zoom will only permit one computer, one tablet and one smartphone to be enabled under a single account, and my desktop Mac is already the heart of operations.

Righto - I had a shot with the Android tablet. I didn't expect a lot, but I have to say I'm very pleased with the results. I constructed various experimental stands to hold the thing, and had a couple of brief sessions with Goya and with Stryker today to see how things looked from their end. Very promising. It would be better, of course, to have two cameras on the job, but if the stand for the tablet is rigid enough and stable enough then I can take the tablet down when necessary, and offer views from other angles, or close-ups, or whatever the generals want. The beauty of the stable stand is that I can put the tablet back in its main vantage point without fiddling around adjusting everything.

The best arrangement we achieved has the tablet about 7 feet from the floor, tipped forward (on a music stand, in fact), looking down over one corner of the table. We tried various combinations of lights, with the curtains open and closed - eventually the best arrangement was with curtains closed and all the room lights on, with the camera pointing in a direction which minimised reflected light. The photos were taken by Goya, at the far end of the conversation - there is a little loss of resolution in the pictures, compared with my original screen view, but it certainly looks as though it will do the job.

Remote generals should be provided with paper maps of the table, and we'll improvise some sort of unobtrusive grid reference system to clear up any ambiguities - maybe some form of unit roster arrangement might be a good idea, too. Whatever - I think we can now go ahead. We hope to have a smallish Napoleonic game ready to roll in a week or three.

I'll continue to keep an eye on the insane world of webcams, but the pressure is off for the moment.

The view from 7 feet up in the air - screen capture from the far end of the link. A little clarity is lost in transmission, but it is surely good enough to get us going. My son points out that if I buy an expensive 1080p streaming camera Zoom will detect our rural broadband service, and default to 730p anyway. That would be a shame (though I do fancy a decent camera for creating videos anyway). The mugs do not indicate a mighty consumption of coffee, by the way, I placed them there in case we couldn't find the corners through the camera view. Needn't have worried, I think.

Fighting by Zoom?

Interesting session this evening, using the newly installed Zoom set-up for a 3-way chat  - Stryker, Goya and myself. Videoconferencing. We had some problems with my broadband playing up a bit, but it's obvious that this does offer the opportunity of some remote miniatures gaming. Quite exciting, really - Stryker showed us around the 6mm ACW game he is soloing in his hut at the moment - looks good.

I realise that a lot of people are already doing this, but it's unfamiliar to us, so a fairly trouble-free toe in the water would be a fine idea. We may change our minds at any time, of course, but at the moment the plan is that we should set up a 3-way game to try it out - and pretty soon.

Agreed Thoughts / Guidelines / Givens (any minute now we'll have a Terms of Reference):

(1) for a 3-player game, the host should be umpire and general runner-about, the remote attendees will be the two commanders.

(2) the first game shouldn't be too large, or we will put ourselves off.

(3) a gridded game would work well, since the table layout should be easily visible, and there is no scope for getting bogged down in (remote) measurement - it would also be useful for the commanders to have paper maps of the table/board, for their own reference.

(4) since I have a very clearly marked-out gridded table, and all the necessary figures, I could be the first host - and we might have a look at the CCN scenario 006 for The River Coa in the Peninsular War. We'll use my Ramekin dice-driven activation system, so we don't have problems with the Command Cards, and I'll do all the dice rolling at my end - on camera, of course [The Lovely Rita].

Lovely Rita in her previous job

My set-up ideas on this would be to have my (big, Windows 10) laptop in the games room, with (preferably) a dedicated webcam connected. If the webcam can just stream live video into the laptop through USB, then this full screen display of the battlefield can be offered via the Share Screen option in Zoom. Thus the default screen would be the normal Zoom Gallery view of the participants, with a Share Screen option of the tabletop action, as seen from the webcam (mounted on a fairly high tripod, angled down onto the table).

I assume that all this would work OK. Snag #1 is that I have to get my hands on a webcam. I realise it is possible to set up a smartphone or other device to work as the webcam, but I have an aversion to solutions involving gaffer-tape or wishful thinking, so an actual webcam which just works out of the box would be good, especially for a klutz like me - the scope for dropping an iPhone from a height of 2 metres is too obvious, and just think how that would spoil the game...

I see that the prices of conference-quality 1080p webcams are just about what you would expect - very high - but there are cheaper options, and the options are getting cheaper and better all the time. I had a look to see what is available second-hand on eBay, just to get some experience without busting the bank. When I checked these used items back against Amazon and elsewhere, I realised that, in general, new webcams are on sale cheaper than second-hand ones, and often the spec is better. This is obviously an area where technology is improving and prices are dropping fast. Hmmm.

I was looking at customer reviews on various pieces of kit - some of the Logitech units look good, but it's hard to tell with my current level of understanding without actually trying one out. That's as far as I've got - we have agreed that we would like to try something, and it would be nice if it worked without a huge amount of hassle. At this point I really would welcome some suggestions, if anyone has experience of this stuff, and would be kind enough to help out a little. Any camera recommendations? Any "don't ever do what I did" stories? All welcome.

One small downside of Zoom, of course, is that a "meeting" involving more than 2 people is limited to 40 minutes unless you have a paid account, in which case you are talking about $15 a month. As a loss leader, Zoom are currently waiving the 40-minute limit for new subscribers, and there are some supposedly "special" offers to help during the lockdown period. That's all fine, but I had a think about it. If multi-way Zoom is obviously a good thing to have access to - particularly if old chaps driving across Scotland with vans full of soldiers and scenery are likely to meet with the disapproval of The Polis for the foreseeable future, then $15 may be a snip. When I think about it, I currently pay a monthly amount for an Audible audiobook membership from which I haven't ordered anything for a while, and I also pay for a Spotify account which I never use.

I could get myself organised and save most of $15 a month with very little effort, so that's not such a disincentive. And, of course, I could then keep in contact with my long-lost relatives - two at a time, if need be. Hmmm.

If I can sort out what I need to do about a decent camera - and some reasonably decent ones are only about £30 these days - this looks rather like a goer.

Stryker does Zoom - scary

O Blog-ee O Blogg-er (Life Goes On)

This is just by way of a quick apology - I am having continuing problems with Blogger, and I wish to clear up any accidental breaches of etiquette.

Abergele Market, long ago - can you spot Desmond?

(1) A trifle to start with - the pictures which disappeared a few weeks ago have not come back, but it is reputed to be a known problem and Google are "working on it". If they come back, good - if they don't come back, I may replace the lost images. I may forget.

(2) There are certain bloggers who send comments to my blog and I don't get notified. I'm not sure why - it seems to be a regular feature of certain individuals - I keep an eye open for pending comments. If I've missed any, no offence intended.

(3) For some reason, I am only able to comment on some blogs if I use my own name, as per my Gmail account. If I have stopped commenting on your blog, it is not because I no longer love you, it is simply because I choose to use my MSFoy blog ID. Nothing sinister, it's just that if I use my real name I may get hassle from my ex-wife and the tax authorities of several Western nations. Also Max Foy's widow will be furious if she finds out he's dead.

(4) I can no longer follow any new blogs using my MSFoy ID - again, I am required to use my real name. This may be because my email provider is BTinternet - I've had occasional messages from Google that they cannot validate BT's mail server as having proper security certification - there was mention of some protocol or other (DMARC? - can't remember). Whatever, I'm not very interested.

I guess I have to be glad that it still works a bit. I am offered regular suggestions that I should try New Blogger, but I remember (with a shudder) similar pressures to move to Google+, and I am keeping my hand on my halfpenny.

I'd like to think this is the most boring post I've put here for a while - if you disagree, please don't bother to let me know.

Hooptedoodle #363 - Robot and Foy

Last week I downloaded the app for Zoom, the videoconferencing tool, and, since I've now had three prompts from friends to get my account fired up, I set about doing exactly this.

Filled in the online form to join up, and clicked the button to receive my email, so that I can reply to it and validate my account. What could be easier?

Well, my email didn't arrive. I requested a re-send, and it still didn't arrive.

I got on to Zoom's online customer support, and opened up the chat line. The chat line suggested I should check my spam folder, and maybe contact my workplace IT section for help. I confirmed that I had checked spam, and that I am my own IT support, and the chat line couldn't understand what I was talking about. "TRY AGAIN WITH DIFFERENT WORDS..." it suggested.

Tried a couple of re-wordings, and it became obvious pretty quickly that I was chatting with an expert system, and I was getting nowhere fast. I don't have a lot of time for this sort of exercise today, so I just said "Forget it for now - I'll try later."

To which the expert system replied:

"IF YOU USE LANGUAGE LIKE THAT, WE WILL BE UNABLE TO HELP YOU."

It's disappointing when an expert system has such poor expectations of its own customers. Maybe I will try again later - not sure.

The language problem, I think, is at their end - their chat line must have a very small repertoire of known words.

No worries. Maybe I'm due a return to Skype?


***** Late Edit - Happy Ending? *****

Credit where credit is due - I did receive the activation email, plus the 4 further re-sends I requested. They arrived at 03:11, which is 15 hours after I sent my original request.

OK - I'm probably operational now. I imagine the emails are sent by more robots. Thus my first impression is that Zoom's AI staff are not only sensitive but also remarkably slow. I have a couple of YouTube instructional vids to watch to get up to speed. Maybe later - my robot is still asleep.

******************************

Hooptedoodle #360 - Something Has Changed

I observe that a number of my recent blog posts will not display some of the images I inserted. I see this symbol instead of each blocked picture:

The picture is still in a library somewhere - hovering the cursor over the missing image shows a sub-caption with the name of a convincing-looking file name on a Blogger library - but I can't see the image itself, either as part of the published post or in a draft version if I switch to the editor. Oh yes - and I can't save it or open it as a separate link. For all practical purposes, the image has gone.

Hmmm.

I had a quick, rather nervous check back to 2011 or so, and I think my older posts are unchanged. This is something of a relief, since the status of my blog as one of The Wonders of the Modern Age would be severely compromised by having the pictures removed. Knocked on the head, in fact. The pictures which have been suppressed recently were (at a quick glance) some photos of book covers, which I nicked from Amazon's website, a couple of photos of items for sale taken from a 5-year-old auction catalogue, a photo of HG Wells playing wargames in his garden which I obtained from Google. My own original photos are unaffected, and I didn't look much further, so the evidence on which to base any heavy investigation is not extensive. However, not being easily discouraged, I have been pondering what's going on here.

I realise that the Amazon pictures are copyrighted, but my blog is not any kind of commercial venture, the photos could almost be described as promotional, since I was singing the praises of the books involved, and my readership is small (anyone over six feet in height, please excuse the generalisation). Quite apart from the fact that I don't suppose Amazon or anyone else would regard the inclusion of these photos as unreasonable use, or even be faintly interested in my activities, I am puzzled, if there has been a change, as to what that change is, and why.

Maybe this is an Apple thing? My desktop machine is a Mac, and my iPhone shows the same thing. However, my tablet, which is an Android device, shows this same NO ENTRY symbol, and they all do this on a variety of browsers, so this would appear to be down to Blogger / Google.

Hmmm.

Maybe there has been a tightening up on the use of unauthorised or copyrighted images? Since my own photos of my soldier collection and the games I play are all over Pinterest and TMP without any permission from me, and since I recently learned that I can order a mouse-mat, a mug or a poster from a company in the US which seems to offer a couple of my photos as stock designs, I can see some sense in this.

It could, of course, just be a glitch in Blogger - such things are not unknown. A number of the routine facilities which Blogger offers have stopped working for me over the last year - I think that this may not be unconnected with the fact that my principal sign-on uses an email account which is supported by a competitor of Google, but that's another story altogether.

Or it could be a change in Official Policy. They could be clamping down, in which case, as long as my entire blog is not wrecked, I have to shrug and say fair enough - probably not before time. If I've done bad things then it serves me right. [Drat]

To put this in context, I do not regard this as a free-for-all. I do try to behave responsibly in these matters - if I do anything that offends someone's rights, then it is normally accidental, I'll put my hand up and apologise, and remove the image straight away. It does happen, but not very often.

Some weeks ago, MSFoy received an email from a lady in the US, complaining that he had used a photo which was her property, without permission. I sent a humble apology and removed the photo promptly. I received a friendly acknowledgement - matter closed, I hope. What strikes me as a little odd about this is that the picture in question, which was in a blog post here some six years ago, was supplied by a library service I used until (I think) last year. For a while I owned a small publishing business - in fact I still do, though it is no longer trading - and I took out a paid subscription to an online library service which offered royalty-free, non-copyrighted images - clip art and photos - which could be used for small-distribution advertising and so on. It was not an expensive deal (as you would expect - quiet at the back, please), so I forgot all about it until maybe 18 months ago, at which point I cancelled my subscription.

OK - maybe that's all irrelevant, but the incident of the complaint seemed like something new. So perhaps Google have changed their rules? It would be possible for some algorithm to check the meta-data behind any image, and suppress it, I guess. I can see this would be constructive in the overall scheme of things. However, the algorithm will struggle with screen-capture images or scanned images, so I really just have to introduce an extra step to get round this. Save an image, display it in my Preview app and take a screenshot. Pick the bones out of that.

Anyway, this post has certainly gone on long enough, considering I am blundering around in the dark. I wondered whether anyone has had a similar experience recently, or if anyone knows if the law or Google usage has changed?

Change of Scene

On Thursday I travelled down to visit Graham - he of Crann Tara Miniatures, and the very fine Scotia Albion blog - a real celebrity by my standards!

Crann Tara - '45 Rebellion - British Line Command, Marching

Apart from the social side of my visit (i.e. a chance for me to bore someone else to death) and the opportunity to see some of Graham's splendid figures, and talk about how he develops and manufactures (and sells) them, I have been fascinated by his reports of his use of 3D printers, and was very keen to know a bit more.

I had a splendid day - again, I must express my appreciation of Graham's kindness and his resilience and patience in answering my stupid questions so well and so openly. I learned a great deal, I have to say, and he very kindly printed me some samples of Vauban-type fortifications, and provided me with links to some of the more promising sites which provide files for printing (including some, such as Thingiverse, which provide the files free of charge, subject to the usual courtesy rules about non-commercial use and giving credit where it's due).

I accept that the 3D printing machines are probably pretty familiar now, if not to me, but I hadn't realised that they come in various types. Graham has a Prusa machine, which prints using a plastic filament (FDM - Fused Deposition Modelling), and he also has one which is physically smaller (I have forgotten it's maker, but you can find all this on Graham's blog) - this second one produces the printed models in a resin bath rather than on a flatbed in the open air (which is what the FDM one does). Both produce astonishing results - the resin models show fine detail rather better (for figures), while the filament machine is better for buildings and similar pieces. I saw figures of various types, in all sorts of sizes, and am very impressed that the muskets and bayonets appear, faithfully and beautiful, right down to the smallest size. The afternoon was filled with tiny tanks, bren-gun careers, triremes, the hulls and sails of sailing ships, soldiers of every known size and all manner of bits and pieces for fortifications - even furniture for dolls' houses...

Prusa FDM 3D Printer - probably not the same model!

The cost of production of the pieces is very low, though the machines themselves are obviously a serious investment if you are looking for quality and reliability. Printing is slow, which is not a problem, though it requires some commonsense in scoping projects and realistic production times. I was interested to learn that with the resin machine you can group several soldiers (for example) and produce them as a single job, with the same elapsed time as a solitary figure - on the other hand, the FDM printer will do the figures as a single batch, but the times will be additive. I was about to add a note here about why this is so, but I suddenly remember that I am out of my depth.

I also saw a lot of beautiful and interesting painted soldiers, of course, which is inspirational and humbling at the same time, and we talked a lot about wargaming - no-one expected that! I had an excellent day all round. 

It's a part of the country I really don't know at all. I was favourably impressed - it was a fine, sunny day and, maybe apart from Hartlepool [!], the area is more attractive than I expected and, of course, the people are lovely. In the evening Graham took me along to the Redcar Raiders Wargaming Club, which meets in a pub (yeah!). The members were very friendly and welcoming - that's a thriving club. I wandered about, looking at the activities, trying not to do my usual Banquo's Ghost impersonation. Amongst other things, there were a number of Warhammer-style games, and Blood Bowl (which is new to me), and an interesting looking naval game called Blood and Plunder. All great fun. 

Redcar Raiders - photo borrowed from their Facebook page

Thanks again, Graham, for your time and generosity - a fascinating day, and very educational. I'm going to do some more reading online about 3D printers, to see what possibilities there are for adding the missing bits to my existing Vauban fort.

Topic Two

One result of what I have learned is that I now realise that 3D printing is the way to progress my fort and my siege gaming, whatever my timescale, and however ambitious the intentions of the project might become. One immediate casualty is that one of my interim "diversification projects" has now become defunct, which means I have a spare fort to dispose of.

I planned to put this on eBay in a few weeks. Here are some photos - if anyone is interested, please email me at the address in my profile, or else send a comment to this post (stating that it is not for publication) with your email details, so I can contact you. What I have on offer is anyscalemodels.com's Vauban fort set, with some extra pieces.  I regret that it would be a bad idea to mail it outside the UK, since the postage costs will be more than the price of the item - apologies for this, but UK only, please.

Some measurements - it is, as you see, a square fort. It's nominally 15mm scale, and it's cast in hard resin (the larger pieces are hollowed out, to keep the weight down). There are 4 walls, 4 bastions, 2 gatehouses and 4 staircases.

Overall size is 515mm square; the walls are 55mm to the top, and the straight wall sections are 180mm long, the roadway behind the rampart is 42mm wide. It is as new - I bought it about a year ago, and it has been stored, unpainted, in the original packaging - it just needs to be washed and painted. I'll try to get a painted view from Anyscale Models' website.

If you're interested, please get in touch. If there's no interest, I'll put it on eBay in a few weeks, but the price is likely to go up a bit to cover overheads.

Photo of painted Vauban Fort borrowed from Anyscale Models' website - I am offering a few additional bits

Hooptedoodle #347 - Amazon Prime Telephone Scam

Armed with our whizzo anti-nuisance phone, we have got rather used to not being hassled by morons, but the use of randomised fake caller numbers seems to have brought the problem back.

No damage done here, but just a general heads-up. This scam was going the rounds last year, based on fake emails. It's now moved to the telephone. This last week we have been averaging 3 or 4 scam phone calls a day, sent to both our landline and my wife's mobile. The sender number appears to be randomly generated - none of the numbers is listed on Who Called Me and similar sites, and a call to any of them is rejected as invalid - no such number. Thus we can block each individual number as it is used, but it doesn't help much.

On the 3 occasions we've answered the call, there is a recorded voice message (English, with an Indian-subcontinent accent) which tells us that our Amazon Prime account will now renew itself by billing us $39.99 each month. If we do not wish to renew, press "1" to speak to an account advisor.

We did not press "1", of course, though some nervous people might. None of us has an Amazon Prime account (I can't imagine why we would want one), though both of the telephones in question were used in connection with chasing up recent non-delivery problems (and promised but imaginary refunds) associated with the Amazon Marketplace. Coincidence?

I don't think changing passwords or anything is going to help - we could change our contact numbers for our Amazon accounts, I guess. For the moment we'll just try not to answer, not play along and hope they get fed up with us soon.

Anyway - keep an eye open. I have already ditched my eBay account because of the security risks. I'd hate to lose access to Amazon, but I am starting to think about not buying anything more from Amazon's "marketplace" sellers. I'm sure they are mostly bona fide, but we've come across some lulus.

eBay/PayPal - Glitch Department - Be Very Afraid...

Short post about a potential misadventure I had this week. Hopefully everything is sorted out now, but it bothers me because it looks like a security bug in PayPal, which would be a huge confidence shaker. I use PayPal quite a bit these days for all sorts of online purchases, and if I have any doubts about its sanctity I shall drop it like a hot potato.

A few days ago I completed a routine purchase on eBay - large, reputable seller I've dealt with before. Paid via my PayPal account, and received all the usual confirmations and "order completed" mails from eBay. As ever, I filed them away in the "eBay" folder - just in case - you know how it is. As ever, I didn't really look at them. After I'd filed the order details, I suddenly realised that there had been something odd about some of the information on the last document. So retrieved it and - sure enough - the delivery address was someone in London who is not me. I've never heard of this person, or had any dealings with them. I checked my PayPal account, found the payment entry, clicked on the details, and there it was again - everything was correct except the delivery address.

I mailed the seller, who is a decent, helpful chap, and explained the situation - he has agreed to send the package to my correct address, so no further worries there. The wider implications are a bit scary, though.

It seems that, as part of a routine PayPal settlement for an eBay purchase - a situation which must occur zillions - possibly even brazilians - of times every day, PayPal has correctly made payment to the seller, but has supplied him with an incorrect delivery address. From someone else's account, it seems.

Some thoughts:

* what if I hadn't spotted it? - the parcel would have gone to a complete stranger, though the seller would have no cause to suspect that anything has gone wrong. As far as I am concerned, the parcel would simply never have reached me. Another mystery of the sea.

* more worryingly, if this is a glitch in the PayPal security system, what else could go wrong? How much does this shake my confidence in PayPal? How likely am I to use it again, for anything?

I've now changed my passwords for eBay and PayPal, as one does, and I've emailed PayPal to report the incident. It isn't a catastrophe, I've caught the problem before any damage was done, the amount of money involved was not large anyway - no need to dramatise. The big problem is that I really do not wish PayPal to have frailties, or make mistakes. I use PayPal because it is convenient, provides a level of confidentiality between me and the seller, and because it is not one of the Bastard Credit Card Companies. If my faith is compromised, I shall change my habits - that's for sure.

Of course, PayPal have not yet replied, and they may send me a perfectly reasonable explanation and appropriate reassurance, but at the moment I am hard pressed to think what they could possibly say that would make me feel comfortable.

Just saying. If you use PayPal to pay for an eBay purchase - or anything else for that matter - recommend that you check very carefully all the documentation that you receive, including details of where your package will be sent.

If anything further develops, I'll stick a little post up here.

***** Late Edit *****

OK - I received an email message from PayPal explaining how I may amend my postal address if it is incorrect. No help - not what I was looking for. On Tuesday, once the Easter weekend was over, I emailed them again and explained that they had missed the point of my previous message, or had possibly not looked for any point in it, and that I had serious concerns over security.

Very quick email reply from them asked me to phone them - the number was a free UK 0800 number, but I was speaking to people in the US. Heavy going - they were going to reverse the eBay transaction and do all sorts. We sorted that out - they understood that I had sorted out shipping details with the seller, and that primarily I was worried about how the PayPal address for someone else had been supplied to the seller for my purchase.

PayPal staff said they were confident that a default shipping address had been supplied from somewhere else, and it had suppressed the request for the address from my PayPal account, but that this must be due to a fault in eBay's completion software, or in some website application used within the seller's online shop. As we say in Scotland, it wusnae them, whatever. They also said they will raise it as a potential security issue, so that the software people may include it in future reviews.

They assured me that it won't happen again, but I can promise I will be checking very carefully the details of any PayPal transactions I take part in for a while. Really not very happy about all this.

Anyway - move on - let's find something else to worry about; however, the more they tell us that nothing can go wrong, the more disturbing it is when something does.

********************

Hooptedoodle #326 - Missing Pips - Today's Pointless Conundrum

This is a puzzle that occurs to me at almost exactly 7am each day. Just how exactly is, I guess, the essence of the puzzle.

I have a digital radio next to my bed (it's actually the one that used to be in the kitchen, until the volume knob became temperamental - you know how it goes). At 6am each day it switches on BBC Radio 4 - the "Today" programme on weekdays - so that I may update myself on the latest glories of Brexit and Trump and all the other things which guarantee that I may start my day as depressed as possible. At 7am it switches off - the assumption being that either I'm already up and functioning, or else I have probably had enough delight and happiness for one morning.

The reality, of course, is that I have set the menu on the radio so that BBC R4 will come on at 06:00 and switch off at 07:00. The radio knows what time it is because the exact time is transmitted constantly along with the programme signal - so you would expect that to be pretty accurate. I mean, we are speaking of the speed of light here.

Astonishing, really - in the digital age we just expect everything to be spot on. It's worth remembering that it was only the coming of the railways which necessitated some standardisation of clocks throughout Britain, and, before that, the coming of scheduled stagecoaches was a big push towards standardisation of the calendar - prior to that it didn't matter a huge amount if your village had a different date from the village down the road. Now we have so much accuracy we can't even remember why it's important.

I digressed there - sorry.

The point of my post is that each morning the radio switches itself off just as the "pips" of the time signal are being broadcast. I don't know much about the pips, really, except that they've always been part of listening to the radio - even when it was a wireless. Six pips - 5 short ones and a long one - like this...

Originally, I think these were generated by the Greenwich observatory, but for the past 30 years or so they have just been a service provided by the BBC - they are timed exactly so that the long final pip indicates the start of the next hour.

Here's the 8am signal - impressively accurate

Because my radio is busy switching itself off at just about the time the BBC are broadcasting the 7-o'clock pips, I only hear the start of the sequence - I never hear the sixth pip. OK - we may debate accuracy and stuff like that, but the number of pips I hear before the radio cuts out varies. Yes - that's right - calm yourself now - I don't think it's anything to worry about, but the number of pips I get to hear varies mostly (randomly) between two and four - very rarely five. Never six. The BBC, which ensures accurate precision of the timing of the sixth pip and which broadcasts the time continuously so that my radio knows exactly where we are up to - yes, that BBC - manages to either fool my radio very slightly or get the timing of the audio signal slightly wrong - maybe both - every morning.

A couple of seconds is near enough for me, of course, but I don't really see how this works. Is it possible that there is some buffering or delay in the programme transmission? - I have occasionally noticed that if you switch two DAB radios to the same station they may not be quite in sync - this is especially true, I find, if you listen to the digital radio service on your TV at the same time as the same station is connected via the DAB unit.

Anyone understand how this works? Is it possible that the BBC are going to the trouble of broadcasting an exact time signal which isn't actually accurate by the time it reaches the listener? Imagine the potential chaos - stagecoaches could be crashing into each other at crossroads all over the country.

Disaster.

It'll all end in tears

Anyone know how this works? 

Donkey Award: Snake Sabres - a short digital digression

A few years ago, I saw mention of the fact that someone had developed a mod for a dice-rolling app on a smart-phone, so you could play Commands & Colors using your phone instead of Stone Age dice. Apart from a faint feeling of weary revulsion at the time, I did nothing more than make a mental note that the human species had achieved this further landmark in our technological evolution.

I was thinking idly about this the other day, and recalling that I had (luckily, perhaps?) never seen an example of this fine thing subsequently. I Googled, as one does, and found this thread on the user website, which seems once to have included a picture of the smartphone app doing its C&CN thing, but the picture has now gone missing.

Photograph missing - this is not the original missing photo, of course, it is another one

Well, it goes without saying, I don't actually care a button [perhaps "couldn't give a toss" would be more apt?], but this has piqued my interest again. My personal view is that the use of the actual, physical dice in the game (rather than an app) is a good thing, since

(1) it provides an element of much-needed exercise

(2) it gives a rare opportunity to switch the damned smartphone off and put it back in one's pocket, which is just the sort of reason we might play C&CN in the first place. [Even better, put the smartphone beneath the visitor's rear tyre, on the driveway.]

I am confident that some worthies will use this phone app and think that the game is all the better for it, and I can only say bless them, so I do not wish to mock or condemn anyone here, but if it was such a raging success, why can't I find a photo anywhere?

Anyone got a link to a picture of this app? If so, I'll be grateful and vaguely interested. If not, especially if this is because the whole idea was dropped as a stupid affectation, then I may even have a glass of the old Pinot Grigio with my dinner. How can I lose?

In a vague sort of way I am reminded of a walk I did along Hadrian's Wall six years ago, when one of my companions was in a sweat every evening trying to find somewhere to re-charge his iPhone, since he had a compass app on it. The idea of a flat phone battery resulting in our getting dangerously lost on a walk where you can either go east or west at any moment was too awful to contemplate, but fortunately I (secretly) had a small device in my pocket which used a magnetized steel pointer on a round dial to show the direction, so we were probably safe enough.

Oh yes - the title of this post is an insiders' joke term for the dice roll you need to kill a General in C&C. What fun we have, when you think about it. Since this post is a bit short of visuals, here is the house Donkey Award logo, to make the point.

Blogger Misbehaving?

I've seen a couple of posts along this theme. I'm currently having problems with Blog comments. For some subscribers (not all, and I don't understand why) I am not getting email notification of pending comments. I also now realise that these "stealth" pending comments are arriving in my Awaiting Moderation folder in batches - sometimes a while after they were submitted.

Very sorry if you've been affected - I know that Stryker, Jon Freitag, David from Suffolk and one or two others have sent comments which didn't trigger the notification email. I live in hope that Blogger will be fixed soon - I don't think any of us has done anything wrong!

I do try to keep an eye on the pending folder.

Hooptedoodle #303 - Flushed with Success [EXPLICIT]

Today was our day for a visit from the Septic Tank Man. The wagon duly arrived - all the way from Motherwell - to pump out our domestic drainage system.

As expected, it was all very professional and inoffensive. The driver/operator got about his business very quickly and efficiently - half an hour and we were done, and he was on his way to his next call.

It's not a big tank (1000 gallons), but it only services part of our house, so usage is very light really. This is our first clean-out in 13 years, and there were no problems - it was not an emergency. In the light of this (and the one-off service cost £250), consider, if you will, that Scottish Water, whom we approached late last year, will not touch your tank system unless you sign up for a 5-year minimum contract, with yearly visits which each cost more than Henderson's job this morning. Sometimes local authorities are not unlike the Mafia in their business model.

Anyway, all done, and now we are good for some years. Thank you, Mr Henderson. Remember: it may be just sewage to you, but it's his bread and butter.

...and, in case you missed their marketing push...

Lightbulb Moment - The Murky World of Illumination

The dining room lights at Chateau Foy - we like the light fittings a lot, but I need
some rather jazzier bulbs I can fit  on wargames days

Just over a week ago I had the very considerable pleasure of attending one of Stryker's classic wargames - his photos of the event are on his blog (4 posts starting with this one), and very good they are too.

The Bold Baron had a very crafty ploy up his sleeve - at the start of a turn he would bring in a couple of freestanding photographer's lamps, and we would all snap away, before the lamps were moved out of the way for play to continue. A wizard wheeze - the results are evident from his pictures.

This has got me thinking (again) about how to improve the lighting at my own wargames. I get occasional mutterings about my gloomy photos - quite rightly so; I'd like to do rather better - much better, in fact.

It was not always thus. Nearly 40 years ago, in another life and another house, I was given an old set of tripod floodlights by a friend who was a part-time professional photographer. They were OK - they came from his junk shed, but they worked well enough, though the cabling was a bit of nuisance, and visitors had to be careful not to scorch themselves. The bad news was that they were Soviet Russian (don't ask), and when the bulbs eventually died there was no way of getting hold of anything that would fit. One major obstacle to my adopting this extra-lights approach now, with more modern kit, is that I have a bigger table, and just don't have space - Stryker's room is far larger than mine.

Whatever I do is going to have to be a stew of compromises - I'll try to summarise what I need - if anyone would care to make some suggestions I'll be very grateful (practical and affordable would be good). I'd welcome some recommendations for particular bulbs (models or types?) that would do the job for me. I'm in the UK, so I need a British/European solution - no more retired Soviet stuff for me.

I fight my wargames in the household dining room - it's not ideal, but it works well enough - it is a decent size, and there are two overhead lights above the table.

Some of the uncertainty in this area stems from my outdated grasp of lighting metrics. I come from a world of traditional, incandescent coil-filament bulbs in which the folk lore is that 40 watts will do for a bedside lamp, a 60 watt lamp will do for the landing, normally we would be looking for at least a single 100 watt for a living room, and so on. This is now confused by the need to save the planet, and by the introduction of LED and other new technologies that Messrs Edison and Philips never thought of, not to mention the dodgy claims of equivalence made by manufacturers.

Our dining room has a nice dimmer circuit, so you can set the mood to anything you want (consistent with still being able to see what you are eating, of course). Most of the fancier bulb types do not work with a dimmer, but my literal "lightbulb moment" recently was the realisation that I could simply replace the normal bulbs with more suitable alternatives for the duration of a game - and if I keep the dimmer turned up full then it doesn't matter whether the bulb is designated as dimmable or not. The removal of the need to find a type of bulb which will handle both jobs is a big simplification. All I need now is a better idea of what I need for the wargames.

We currently use a pair of Philips halogen bulbs which are described as "75w, equivalent to a 105w bulb" (75w being the actual consumption of electric power, 105w being the claimed illumination equivalence in old money, just to confuse everyone). These will dim satisfactorily, and they give a good level of light for normal use, but they are not really bright enough for wargames, and too yellow for photography, especially if someone places a large mid-green table a couple of feet below the lights.

I thought maybe I could just screw in some proper photographers' lamps. Problem is they are very large - deliberately so, to avoid the hard shadows associated with a point light source - and they really don't work with our domestic downlighter fittings.

I did some background reading, to brush up my understanding of the numbers underlying the science. My Philips bulbs each produce a bit less than 2000 lumens of light, and the "warm white" colour which makes my photos so yellow is typical of domestic, household bulbs which are said to have a colour characteristic of about 2500K (that's degrees Kelvin, chaps). Never mind how the temperature relates to the colour - the point is that proper photographers' "daylight" bulbs are rated at 5500K, which is a much harder, bluish-white light, as we know.

I tried screwing in a couple of these. Not great - they are enormous, so protrude from the
shade, which gives a very uncomfortable glare. Also - and paradoxically, given my concerns
about glare - I'm not convinced that the overall level of illumination is much improved

So I'm building a picture of a pair of wargaming bulbs to keep in the drawer, specially. The overall requirements are:

* must be suitable for a large domestic light fitting - must not overheat the thing

* should be suitable for 220-240v AC, needs an E27 (European large screw) fitting, and should be about the same size as a standard bulb, so it doesn't protrude below the light shade (thus avoiding a distracting glare)

* it would be nice if it is dimmable, but it doesn't matter - dimming is not needed on wargames days  [...on the other hand, if it did dim, then it would be possible to set the lighting levels differently for normal play and photo moments...]

* I don't care too much about the technology - I'd like to save the planet, naturally, but whether it uses LEDs or whatever is not important, but...

* the bulbs must produce about 2500-3000 lumens [to put this back into terms I understand, this would be a bit more than I would have expected from a big old 150 watt incandescent bulb, which would certainly have fried my light fittings]
* ideally the colour should be whiter than my current "warm white" bulbs - the full 5500K daylight standard would be OK for photos, but is a bit harsh otherwise - does anyone produce an intermediate type of bulb, rated at say 4500K?

Mother ship. I ended up with an accidental UFO pic...

Hooptedoodle #288 - Donkey Award - another solution for a problem you didn't know you had

Courtesy of a couple of whizzo articles from newatlas.com, an exciting glimpse of the future - pick your own nightmare.

Naturally, we are all fascinated by the possibilities of the scientific world of plant nanobionics, which has recently produced such marvels as a variety of spinach which can give off a warning glow in the presence of explosives (if you don't believe me, click here). The idea is based around the development of  microparticles containing enzymes and other organic substances, which are small enough to be absorbed into the leaves, so that extra reactions can be introduced into the plant's normal repertoire.

MIT have recently developed a strain of watercress which glows in the dark. This was achieved by studying the chemical processes used by fireflies, and introducing microparticles into the humble watercress which will simulate this same light-producing trick. Thus far, it isn't very bright, to be quite honest, but the hope is that it should be possible to engineer plants as seedlings so that the trick will last throughout the life of the plant - the aim being to make it hereditary. There is hope that indoor plants will be developed which require no additional energy to produce a light bright enough to read by, thus saving some of the estimated 20% of the world's electricity bill which goes towards providing lighting. Beyond this there are visions of specially "hacked" species of trees whose leaves will glow bright enough to replace electric street lighting - just think of that.

If we ignore the potential psychological damage to confused fireflies, not to mention what chaos will hit the streets in the autumn when these wondrous shining leaves fall off, you may still wish to share with me some concern at the possibility that someday it may never be dark again. Fear not, o timid soul - the engineers at MIT are already considering that the hacked trees may be further tweaked so that they can turn themselves off on a given command, so what can possibly go wrong?

What if the plants propagate and spread naturally, beyond the places we want them? Is this the future botanic section of Jurassic Park?

I really don't know how people can be so negative when there is so much potential out there. Read all about it here.