You might have noticed the website is looking a little different now. Well it was long overdue for an update and this time around I am working on making it easier to read on phones and tablets, yay! If you are like me and have your phone or tablet next to you on the sofa while knitting hopefully the changes in the days to come will help you use this site better. I thought for now at least have the content still available and a search area at the top and most people should still be able to find what they are looking for. Shortly I will work in an easy way for further navigation and seeing related posts and whatnot.
Category: Archived
Chickens!
We’ve got chickens! Yep, proper egg laying, worm eating chickens! We picked them up from a local farm just over a week ago and they’ve already graced us with 6 eggs between two of them!
Cokey (white) Sussex Star
Pickles (brown) Columbian Blacktail
Bosco (black) Bovans Nera
When I let them out of the coop this morning I found 2 soft shelled eggs underneath the roost so think the third one is going to start laying proper hard shelled eggs any day now! Feel a bit bad for whoever it was that pushed two out last night though!
Here they are on day one in their new coop:
Cokey has been laying since a few days after we got her! Then one of the other ones laid a speckled egg just the other day but we aren’t sure if it’s Pickles (the brown one) or Bosco (the black one).
The eggs we’ve had so far have been really tasty and we’re looking forward to the abundance of eggs once all three are regularly laying!
Being healthy!
I eat so much junk at work. Most mornings I will get in and have a coffee, followed by another, then it’s lunch time and I’ll have forgotten to have breakfast and pop to the co-op for a packaged chicken bacon salad and some crisps. I’ll then have 2 or 3 more cups of coffee in the afternoon, possibly intertwined with chocolate snacks and then have a nice big dinner in the evening, likely followed by something sweet.
I don’t mind healthy snacks, I would buy them now and again but I just don’t get through a bag of peanuts or sunflower seeds before I get bored of the same thing and it stays in my drawer until I find it one day spilled all over the place and scoop it all into the bin. So without making this sound like some kind of advertisement I’ll just get to the point, I saw a friend signed up to Graze. It’s a healthy eating option that DELIVERS to you 6 days of the week (just not on Sunday) and gives tons of options to pick from so you get a nice change every day. Today will be my third day having it and I’m excited! I’ve changed my eating habits to having a bowl of porridge or cereal in the morning, followed by my morning coffee. For the rest of the day I now swap between various herbal teas instead of any more coffee and snack on the Graze box throughout the afternoon.
Here’s my box for today:
And if it isn’t the 12th Aug 2010 anymore you can see my daily box here.
Also, they give you a ‘feed your friends’ discount code which gives your friends their first box free (with no commitment for further boxes) and the next one half price.
And if you use my code ( XDF3D1V3 ) then they give me a £1 off my next box which is a nice little treat for me 🙂
Recovering my classic mini’s interior
I have a 1992 original mini (lovingly referred to hereafter as ‘Jensen’) which deserved a makeover of his interior. After searching around for interior suppliers for classic mini’s I ran across Classic Core, a mini specialist company in Norfolk. I’m actually located down in Bournemouth, Dorset but they do delivery so it wasn’t a problem. They don’t currently post many prices on their website so I don’t want to say an exact value to what I paid, however I will say that they are very fair and affordable and well worth the quality they provided. If you contact them directly they will give you a cost in nearly no time at all.
I was very impressed with the excellent response time that their customer service replied to me with my many questions, and then again impressed at their turnaround time to deliver my covers to me. I ordered front and rear seat covers, a full set of door cards, the rear wheel-arch covers and also a handbrake and gear shift gaiter. I chose to have mine in a creamy/white colour with blue piping and it looks perfect if I do say so myself, I’m very pleased with the job they’ve done.
Changing the seat covers isn’t very difficult at all, and they even sent me a couple sheets of paper with step-by-step instructions. Here’s a couple of pictures showing the process:
Before/After (although only one front seat done at time of pictures):
More pictures can be seen on my flickr
The other front seat has been put in since, but only one door card due to working late and lots of rain! I will post more pictures once I have got the front door cards in.
ViaPost VS Click&Mail
Sending post direct from your computer
I received a bit of information about Click&Mail through the post the other day and for once this junk mail actually looked like it might be useful; sending post directly from my computer without having to deal with all the regular and time consuming steps of posting a typical letter. So I thought I would trial it and one of it’s competitors out to see who provides the better service, and this is what I found…
Initial Sign Up and Download of Drivers
ViaPost and Click&Mail both have equally simple websites to register and download the necessary drivers. I did notice however that the Click&Mail website does make it quite clear that you will be able to trial posting a letter whereas the ViaPost website does not, in fact I didn’t even realise I would get some free credit from ViaPost until I had finished registering and installing the driver, more than some people would have done if they weren’t sure they were going to get to try it out before committing some funds to it.
Win: Click&Mail
Printing process
Click&Mail
Driver install onto Windows, no Mac alternative so I’ve installed it onto my Windows VM. Easy, quick and puts itself in the list of printers so you just have to select it like you would a regular printing device. Once you’ve chosen it as your printing option for a document, it loads up a view of where the address needs to be. There is no option to move it about if it’s in the wrong spot or doesn’t fit within it’s red indication box though so if you’ve got the alignment wrong you’ve got to open your document to adjust and attempt to print again.
ViaPost
Driver install option onto Windows. There is also a Mac online version which you can upload your documents to and manage / send them to print that way. I tried both. The uploading process to the online management area was as expected when uploading a document, you can then preview and send when ready. There is the red address box on both the online and driver versions, their address positioning had more potential than Click&Mail’s but it soon turned sour. If you enter an address on your document that runs outside of ViaPost’s desired space for the address it will let you change it within the printing view so that you do not have to go back and do it within the document. I found this a nice experience and I was glad for the ease of ensuring my address fit where they wanted it. However, once I and the program seemed happy with the address fitting within the space allowed, I hit print, only to see that as it processed my document to print it removed quite a bit of the address, including the line with the company name, as if it decided halfway through that the address actually wasn’t acceptable and it will just take out bits as it sees necessary, random lines within the address I might add, leaving me sitting here with a now processed document that debited my account for a letter that might not even reach the recipient. Had they just gone one step further and asked me to approve the automated reduction in the address then I would have been quite pleased with the overall printing procedure from ViaPost.
It would have been an easy win for ViaPost had it not scared me into worrying what will happen to my address when I hit print in the future. I’d rather be secure in knowing and use Click&Mail.
Win: Click&Mail
Costs
Click&Mail are currently charging £0.42 and goes up as you add pages to the document. A very reasonable cost considering that includes the consumables, postage and time you’d otherwise have to incur, with a minimum top-up value of £10
ViaPost prices start at a very cost effective £0.27 and increase as you change it to a colour document or add further pages, with a lower £5 top-up starting point.
Win: ViaPost
Delivery
I have to say that I expected Click&Mail’s letter to arrive about a day before ViaPost’s as on their website’s Click&Mail offer a 2 day service whereas ViaPost is stating that they are currently on a 3 day process although do mention that they are looking to reduce this in the future.
I sent both letters on the evening of 07/07 and didn’t receive the letters (posted to my own address) until 13/07, the fourth business day after sending them. I don’t feel that this is acceptable enough to use for the sending of business post, especially such things as invoices and contracts, which you want to get to the client in a typical 1st class post method.
For this point I am giving ViaPost the win as they at least state on their website that they will take 3 days whereas Click&Mail were 2 business days off their estimate.
Win: ViaPost
Final say…
I really WANT to like ViaPost. It demonstrates an attempt at making the experience more organised, dynamic and it IS the less expensive of the two… however where it tries to surpass Click&Mail’s features is where it lets itself down. In the areas where it tries to be clever it breaks down and does various unexpected things as a result of the cleverness being unable to handle its task, resulting in a miserable and angry user who simply wants it to just WORK and not try to just assume what it is I want.
So although it is a handy service they are both providing, I will still be waiting a bit longer until the posting process is sped up to a dependable 2 day service.