Holiday!!!
Finally, summer holiday has arrived. Three weeks of peace, quiet, and tranquillity. ☺
The basic "rough" plan is to do some stuff outside in the first week, maybe some stuff inside for the second, and nothing for the third. But it depends upon how I feel and what the weather is like.
The only thing I sort-of have planned is to deal with some brambles (surprise!). You see where they stick out here? No idea why that happened, but I guess after years of mowing avoiding the prickly bits, there was creep. Time to push back.
Oh look, Rick obsessing over brambles again.
It's getting dark as I write this. Of course, staying in bed until half noon because I really couldn't be bothered is maybe not conducive to a nice long day, but really, I just didn't feel like upping myself at up time. I made tea, I fed my little furball, then I just dozed off again. And why not? Double whammy: It's the weekend and it's holiday. And since I'll be working eight hour days (and all hell will break loose) when I go back, I need my beauty sleep.
Well, that's my excuse. ☺
Making my blacks black
My shirt was a rather sad looking shade of grey. Since it was cotton...
It is a bag of printer toner. Well, a clothing dye that has toxic warning signs all over it and can dye cotton, viscose, and something else but not wool or synthetics like polyester. So I got three things of a suitable material and popped them into the machine on the suggested 40°C cotton wash.
Off-black things in the washing machine.
It isn't really laser toner, but it looks like it could be.
Scary warnings.
After the first fill and a few more rotations, I stopped the machine and retrieved the plastic bag. I'm supposed to leave it in place, but I can't help but think the sharp edges of the bag would be no good for clothing.
I was, of course, greeted by an absolute horror show in the washing machine. Everything was black, like noxious horrific black.
I closed the machine and carefully washed the plastic bag before dumping it and the latex gloves I was wearing. Then I started the cycle going again. As it was a proper wash and not a Magic40, it took ages. According to a service information guide for two different machines (but the programme details were the same), 18 minutes for the enzyme phase (as the water heats), about 24 minutes washing for a small detected load, two 14 minute rinses, an 8 minute rinse (but add an extra five minutes to each as my water pressure is so low), followed by a 14 minute multipart final spin.
The 40°C cotton wash cycle; most of the options
don't apply to me (my machine is the simple model).
The first rinse was like contaminated blood from a ghoul pouring from the machine.
The cross-your-fingers moment.
It didn't really get much better for the following rinses.
The instructions said to immediately perform the exact same cycle, this time using normal washing powder/liquid. So I threw in some other clothing, all black, and used a special "for black stuff" washing liquid that enhances blacks (and thank you Amandine, I didn't even know such a thing existed - though it appears that its method of operation is to coat fabrics with something that alters its reflectivity thus making it appear more black?).
As this was a larger load, the main wash cycle was going to take either 71 or 96 minutes deciding on how the machine evaluated the load. I'm guessing it took the longer option and... more ghoul blood.
I left it to get on with things while I made a ready meal to eat. Then came a welcome shock. By 11pm (having started at about half six) the machine was doing its final emptying before the big spin. The water was sort of slightly whitish, that's how it normally is for the final evacuation. No more ghoul blood! It was such a surprise that it wasn't still chucking out wet ink that I completely forgot about the cheesecake that I put on the side to defrost. Duh.
Well, here's the shirt alongside some other black stuff. It... hasn't really made it particularly black. It's slightly better, I think, but it could be blacker. Oh well, I guess ultimately I'll need to pop into one of the shops to see if I can find a replacement black shirt. This one has done me for quite a while.
Cotton shirt (top), viscose/polyester pullover (middle), something else in polyester (bottom).
Who knew matching colours would be so much trouble when your wardrobe is mostly black? ☺
Hmmm, Gémo has one for €29,99. Districenter has one for a tenner, but it's 35% cotton and 65% polyester, might be unpleasant to wear at work?
Tea 0.23 (patch)
Version 0.22 has a new button in the programme info to open an associated programme image in your browser. It wasn't released as I was testing that it worked as expected. Note that it looks as if either ITV doesn't provide images, or the regional variations don't. Likewise, channels like Talking Pictures TV don't provide images. Other channels like Film4 and Legend may give pictures, for some programmes, and not too far in the future. Placeholder images are, mostly, filtered out by Tea no image button will appear. Don't ask me why Knight Rider has a picture but The A-Team does not, I have no idea.
Pictures come in two forms. Clicking the button will request the smaller size image. Adjust-clicking the button will request the full size image. Depending on the channel and programme this may be as small as 848×480 or it could be as large as 1920×1080.
Version 0.23 is today's version and the only change is defining a system variable Tea$SlowNet to triple the fetcher timeout (15s instead of 5s). This is because RPCEmu on Linux with the NAT connection is...bizarre. It is slow to get going and has quite a tendency to fetch partial information and simply give up after a little bit has been retrieved.
By increasing the timeout and retrying, a lot, it is - eventually - possible to get results. I certainly wouldn't consider it reliable, but then NetSurf seemed to have trouble talking to http://192.168.1.10/ (the Pi2 in my bedroom and the 'server'). But, hey, maybe making the timeout longer can help?
My programme guide software for Freesat...
...running on RISC OS running on Linux.
This is a patch - you need to have version 0.21 installed. Drag the three files from the archive below on top of the existing ones within the !Tea application.
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Last read at 10:40 on 2025/12/08.
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