We've had our new dishwasher for over four months. Right from the word “go” I had problems loading it. It's clever
and can take up to 14 “places”, where the old one only took 10 or 12. The problem is that
it's their settings, made of things all a little bit smaller than what we have. The
result is not space savings: it's lot of wasted space.
As if that wasn't bad enough, the baskets are designed to be hard to fill, and the dishes
are very frequently dirty after “washing”, particularly the plates. My guess is that this
is the result of putting them too close together. I've tried to work around that by putting
dinner plates and side plates alternately:
I took the first photos of the dishwasher without flash at 3200/36° ISO , mainly because I
didn't expect it to be very effective there. But I was wrong, and to my surprise the photos
with flash looked marginally better. Here available light on the left, flash on the right:
Two ways: as a soup (that's what the Thai word ต้ม (tom) means), or fried. Well, since it's
terrible as what it claims to be, a soup, why not try the fried version? Not tom yam at all
any more, of course, but maybe frying the spices would improve them. So:
quantity
ingredient
step
Noodles from package
1
30 g
Gai lan
2
spice package
2
50 g
Cooked prawns
2
Preparation: boil noodles, fry gai lan and spice package, add noodles and prawns.
Cooking the noodles was the usual nonsense, of course:
Why do the makers make these things rectangular? Clearly circular (the best) can be
a problem, though I frequently see them like that, but what's wrong with square? I cooked
them for a little over a minute, and that was more than enough, as the instructions suggest.
But I didn't expect them to stick to the pan so much:
They even dried up and became crispy. And that proved to be an advantage, to the point that
after starting to eat the noodles, I took them and fried them more:
I most certainly won't buy any more when this lot are finished, but the idea of frying the
noodles crisply—most certainly nothing to do with tom yam—seems worth following.
I've been planning to find another Nikon user to compare my Nikon
D1 for a couple of reasons:
Take a couple of test photos. For that we need a charged battery or the optional power
supply. But I don't want to buy one, because there's no evidence that the camera will
then work.
Find the serial number of the 70-210 mm f/4-5.6 AF Nikkor. I can't find any inscription on the lens itself. But what does the Exif data say?
So I went looking at the Exif data for the one photo that Paul Shire left with me nearly 10
years ago:
It has full Exif data, including the serial number of the camera (a Nikon D4S). But that's the only
serial number. The lens was a Nikkor 200-500mm f/5.6 G
VR [6] but the Exif data didn't include a serial number! By contrast, the Olympus
cameras have 5 entries, including for extender and flash. So it looks as if that approach
is a dead end.
By default, firefox used to
change its pointer to a pointing hand when positioned over a link. And for a few weeks now,
this hasn't happened, at least on hydra.
Why? The various AI bots came up with surprisingly similar explanations, including hardware
acceleration and disabling extensions. But neither worked for me. And then I found that I
could start a firefox from tiwi on hydra:0.1 and get the hands. So it
looks strongly as if it's a change in recent firefox, and that it happened since my
last software upgrade.
I've been using firefox for nearly 21 years. I hated it then, and I still hate it. Looking back, the reasons
still seem similar. Is it worth following the pack and going to Chromium? I fear that
that will open another can of worms.
Message from Malcolm Caldwell today. He also has an LG dishwasher similar to mine. He had
bought a 5 year extended warranty for it. Now it's 5 years and one week old, and it has
required service! It's almost as if it had a timer.
He suggests putting the dishes in the back of the bottom tray, where they have enough space
not to press against the side of the tray. He's right:
But at what cost? I had put frying pans there because you can fold down the guides (still
visible in front of the plates, where there's a separate set of guides). You can't do that
in the front portion. And another stupid design decision means that you can't put the
cutlery basket flat there. The design of the tray means that it won't fit:
While I can guess excuses for the other decisions (different dishes, for example), there's
none for this one.
So: should I leave it like that? I decided to leave it until I had another instance of
dirty dishes. I didn't have long to wait: two of the large dishes (it always seems to be
them) came out dirty. So no advantage. I can live with the offset dishes.
It's been a very cool spring. Only 2 weeks until the beginning of summer, but the
temperatures have barely exceeded 25°, and most plants are reacting accordingly slowly. The
weeds are an exception, and today Jesse Walsh came along to remove a number of them, so many
that we didn't know where to put them.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
“blog”, and there is
deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle
for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to
reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do
send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate
whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise
I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
