Clean up on.. Black Friday

 

Before we rush headlong into 2008 or whatever next year will be calling itself I thought I'd ask a question. What did you order during the frenzy that was Black Friday..or was it Black Friday week or month..anyway extended black autumn winter sales. Tv? New phone? Electric toothbrush? . I ordered a mop head. To be exact I ordered 5 mop heads because that seems to be the sweet spot with value for money and postage.
Why a mophead you ask? Well partly because flash super dooper swifty speedy mops are pants when dealing with..well anything really, and we happen to have an aging,epilectic and  increasingly incontinent canine  that needs following around with something a lot more effective than a glorified babywipe on a flimsy 4 piece stick. Seriously I have no idea why we bought one of these things in the first place they've taken a simple and effective cleaning tool and turned it into a subscription for hideously expensive and largely ineffective disposable wipe refills. It's a masterclass in advertising. One wipe and you're done?..my arse but you certainly have been.

Anyhoo After being duped into buying a flashysuperspeedieshitemop sometime during the pandemic I congratulated myself on coming to my senses and bought a proper mop with wooden handle from Wilkos so we could kill 99.999% of known nasties easily with a bucket of water and a capful of knock off Dettol before granddaughter visits. When Its head needed changing after several months of sterling service I thought I'd return to town for another before realising that Wilkos had gone tits up leaving our high street a collection of charity shops, betting shops, pound shops, vape shops and dodgy looking fast food joints, none of which can be classed as purveyors of fine galvanized steel socket cotton string mop heads.
Reluctantly to the internet I went and ordered a pack of 5 mop heads from a seller on eBay with a name something like the dustpan and brush shop.

 My wife pointed out that I should have found a vendor that sounded more like mop and bucket store however a  string mop head is a mop head right? I expect reader you would think along the same sort of lines as me in that how it attaches to the handle i.e. large plastic screw thread or just a socket for a wooden handle would be the the only variables to worry about.
The package seemed rather small when the nice lady from Hermes handed it to me and I initially thought maybe it was something else. But no when opening there were 5 of these.....

which is OK if you live in a Wendy house. I did some further research...

Although I had successfully avoided all types of flash mops, auto squeegees, circular mops, strip mops,microfibre,spray,spin and Kentucky style mops (which apparently need to be accompanied by a large cleaning trolley, janitor uniform, full ppe and a risk assessment) and correctly indicated my requirement regarding a metal galvanised socket connector foolishly in my haste I'd overlooked the type/size and mistakenly ordered  'py10' ... As a layman and strictly amateur mop jockey I then assumed that size 20 would be twice as big as the size 10 toy version currently looking dwarfed in the mop bucket and would get me back to floor cleaning utopia. So I placed another order for 5 of those (avoiding the dustpan and brush store this time just in case the wife was on to something) and awaited the arrival of the courier.

 This is what turned up.

 At this point I'm giving up because clearly mop sizing isn't logical or have any internationally recognised standards and ordering another 5 in say size 14 might put me on a government watchlist as a mopfetishist. I'm just about to order some heavy duty shears for mop modification purposes.

 I miss Wilkos.  

Drive by..

  ..which I do here every now and again, not sure why. I consider writing something then get distracted by something shiny or realise it's not 2007 any more. Anyhow I noticed something amiss months ago and it's been festering in my neural network until a fortnight ago when I finally decided to do something about it.

 
You know that entry I wrote a while back about 'sites' from google being the way to host blog photos after photobucket decided to self destruct, well I hadn't factored in how google also has a habit of dropping products and services seemingly on a whim. Now I'm probably what you'd call a google fan, I have a pixel phone, google assistants dotted around the house, a google doorbell and subscription to nest which I pay for, google one which i pay for...this blog obviously.. But them dropping google sites earlier this year once again left these pages without images. I felt a bit betrayed, even though technically I wasn't using sites as intended.

 
Loopholes readers are there to be found, so in search of one I went and just as sites hosted my photoblog images for me I realised,  admittedly after a fair bit of url skullduggery, that your common or garden google drive can do pretty much the same. (Actually I suspect uploading images to and then ahem repurposing them on blogger itself might work too but it'd be much more of a faf and tbh I can't be arsed to find out) I'm not going into detail but if you share something publicly from your googledrive you can use its id to craft a url that displays whatever it is directly without google sticking an oar in and galleryfying it or plugging it into a google doc or form or whatever else google property alphabet thinks is an appropriate vessel for its web consumption.

So yeah. TL;DR Blog pics fixed again..you're welcome... woah.. look a shiny.

The Naked Birdwatcher

Friends and followers of my Instagram account may have seen footage from our cctv enabled nestbox the last two seasons showing a family of bluetits nesting and eventually fledging said box.

  

Further to this they have also been treated to my 3d printing shenanigans including the birdfeeders you can see here.

  

 For those who may be interested you can get design files for all manner of stuff 3d print wise from thingiverse and hack/remake or design your own using tinkercad. This may sound terribly expensive and complicated but when you consider a 3d printer in kit form can be had new for under £100 and print model files themselves are for the most part open source and free..well it could almost be considered rude not to have a little dabble. My entire set up including the desk, chair, the 3d printer itself, the consumables (filament cleaner fluids wipes etc) and a couple of upgrades so it's less likely to burn my house down has so far amounted to less than £200..and that includes buying a half decent second hand desktop computer to dedicate to running it.

Now, my apologies for the somewhat clickbaity title however in my defence it is a technically true statement and if I hadn't thought of it just now this rather neglected blog probably wouldn't contain this entry. You see these feeders have seen very little action in the few months since I printed them. Aside from the odd pigeon attempting a landing and usually failing or myself banging my head on them more often than occasionally when I walk down the garden both resulting in birdseed spillage all over the patio I havent needed to refill them.   For some reason though, perhaps it's the weather or the time of year when we have lots of youngsters fledging the nests or maybe the bloke next door isn't filling his plethora of feeding stations up as much, the last week or so we have begun to notice birds taking more of an interest. This morning when I got up and was making my way downstairs to the shower (hence the naked part) I noticed loads of activity around the feeders. Not wanting to miss the opportunity I quickly grabbed my camera from the cupboard and started snapping the shots you see here through the backroom window.

	TITS!! lots of them.. ..and other birds Click thumbnails to enlarge...

Fortunately I was close enough not to get any unwanted reflections..or maybe that should be read unfortunately if you arrived here purely because of the title.