Rick's b.log - entry 2015/01/05

Vacuum cleaner

Enter this:

[generic publicity photo]

This isn't the exact same model as mine. It is one that looks very similar. Mine? A 1000W motor. The body is... Cheap and somewhat fragile looking. The dust collection part is a plastic bowl like a supermarket-brand "tupperware", there is no retractable flex (you have the option of fitting two plastic hooks to the rigid part of the pipe in order to wrap the flex around (reminds me of '60s style upright vacuums), and it is basically a plastic shell with a motor inside.
But I can't complain too much.

It cost me €19,99.

That's right. It cost the same as a meal out (or two if you count McDo).

With this comes a useful length of semi-rigid hose plus two pieces of rigid pipe. A large floor head with adjustable 'brush' for doing carpet or tile. There is also a mini head (curtain?) plus a crevice tool that has a flip-down brush option. That ought to be useful for doing the car dashboard. The crevice tool is 'lightly broken' (a little piece of plastic going from here to there). I ought to be able to fix that with two tiny holes and some jiggery-pokery with a paperclip. At any rate, the result will be stronger than the piece of plastic that was obviously not strong enough.

Official ratings are that it will burn through 33.6kWh per year. Given it is 1000W and running that for an hour is a kWh, that implies that the manufacturers reckon you'll only be doing thirty three and a bit hours per year. Which works out to be about forty minutes a week. Evidently a vacuum for somebody in a studio apartment...
It claims that it is "B" on tiled floors, and "D" (average) on carpet. My carpet wasn't sparkly clean afterwards, but when the comparison is the Dustbuster, anything is an improvement. It would also be unfair to compare a kilowatt vacuum cleaner's abilities with a model pushing 2400W.
There is, however, a negative point. Despite claiming to have a HEPA filter, the rating for exhaust was a "G" (the worst). This means that a certain amount of the dust that it sucks up will make it through the motor and out the back. The evidence of this is that the filter on entry to the motor was quite dusty. I suspect if anything does in the vacuum cleaner, it will be the stress of dealing with dust in the spinny-roundy part.
Even so, I really don't understand why a measuring beaker costs a fiver, a pack of rechargeable batteries costs fourteen, and this costs twenty. It just doesn't make sense.

Purely Purple Ones

Writing on the go

• It is actually a reasonably well featured word processor considering what is normally available for mobile devices.
• It is quite happy to store documents locally and work on them offline, it doesn't panic if it can't access the net.
• PC browser, PC, iPad, Android... there's a Docs implementation for pretty much everything I use (except RISC OS, meh!).
• Apple hardware has serious psychological issues syncing with anything that is neither Apple nor iTunes. Docs cuts right through all that bull. I can save a document on the iPad and retrieve it on the PC with Firefox.
• And, if I should want to include others, there are a variety of sharing options.

With the Bluetooth keyboard, it is quite pleasant writing documents on the iPad. A number of blog posts were written like this, and you can see in the screenshot a story that I am writing.

Why your WiFi sucks

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Gavin Wraith, 7th January 2015, 14:05

Purely purple ones? I think this might be another good reason for a day trip to France, beside stocking up on booze at Mamouth. For myself I prefer the green triangles, but now that I am officially diabetic I must refrain from both.

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