#100DaysToOffload

Retirement home

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What is a chap to do whilst locked down on a rainy day and just a couple of days from retirement?  Build a retirement home!

I have never actually played Minecraft.  They do say you can tell if you are in an introvert’s home as it will not have any pictures of other people anywhere.  Similarly my Minecraft worlds are populated by just me and my menagerie.  My usual method for building a house is to find a suitable hill and start excavating it.  You eventually end up with more house than hill but the house can become a somewhat impractical, cavernous labyrinth.

[videopress kgetTdEc w=”600″ at=”3″ permalink=”false” hd=”true”]

 

Day something from #100DaysToOffload

Freebies and the decline of civilisation.

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It is a full time job trying to keep up with all of the stuff being made freely available, or at a goodly discount, to help people through their locked-down existence. For example Sound On Sound are maintaining a list of software deals available on noisy stuff. One such deal was from Heavyocity who produced a #StayHome instrument for Kontakt.

https://youtu.be/4gdTUZFL96Y

 

They asked for a $10 donation for UNICEF et al or it was available for free. Who can resist things that so delightfully bleep and bonk?

So I fill in their form to make an account – because how can you possibly buy anything without setting up an account and providing all your personal details these days? I am then sent off to PayPal to make the purchase/donation. I log in to my PayPal account but my money is rejected and I am sent back to Heavyocity with red text on my details. Red text is never a good thing. Apparently the email address I use for my PayPal account does not match the email address I used for my Heavyocity account. Who knew that was a thing? I can think of five domains I own and can use for email (there are probably more) and for most of them I will use a multitude of addresses as befits my needs. So I am a little peeved that Heavyocity has taken it upon themselves to specify which email address I should use.

Not to worry I shall just use my bank debit card. I am sent back to PayPal where I am now a guest. Before I can make my purchase/donation PayPal demands that I provide my phone number. I have had a PayPal account for many years and have never given them my phone number – which suggests that they do not really need it and so I never will. So declining to give them my phone number I return to the Heavyocity site to see if we can resolve this problem. Alas there Get In Touch and Contact Us links just take you to their Zendesk support pages with no obvious way to actually get in touch and contact them. As I do not do the whole TweetyBook thing that was not an option either.

So I just gave up and downloaded it for free.  It is very good.

 

But don’t get me started on PayPal:

A promo code you say?  Let me just type that in…..

Attention to detail

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So you are filling in your address and have a drop down menu to select your country. You scroll towards the end of the list to find the United Kingdom but it is not there. Perhaps they used Great Britain instead. So you scroll back up to find…

So you select the misplaced United Kingdom and it adds GB to the end of your address.

Day 3 of #100DaysToOffload.

Walking during lockdown

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Did a couple of miles around the park this morning. This is what lockdown looks like.

[videopress xekJ1s94]

When I was working I would walk between six and eight miles, often 20000+ steps, a day but have only managed 10000+ steps once during the last couple of weeks. Shall try and increase the daily step count more frequently from now on.

At least there was a police escort today.

And the herons had ventured from their nest on the island – which or may not be a good thing.

#100DaysToOffload

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100 days you say?

That takes us to the 3rd of August – one can only hope that by August some kind of new normal will have been established. Meanwhile one hundred days should be more than enough time to offload all the dead feeds from the three hundred and thirty something currently listed in NetNewsWire (other RSS readers are available for all platforms).

I tend to read on the iPad (where NetNewsWire works really nicely) and AirDrop pages back to the Mac when that is where they need to be. Most of the feeds come from a self hosted, but alas now defunct but still functioning, Fever. The feeds range from Astronomy to Bread Baking to Local (and not so local) History to Music and Arts to Programming and Synthesisers and numerous other eclectic points in-between. Which is all part of the joy of the Interwebs and where I heard about #100DaysToOffload.

This is day 1 of 100 Days To Offload. You can join in yourself by visiting the 100 days to offload site.