The trampoline and the toothbrush

Avid readers of the Infinite Weekend will recall the Sears trampoline, which once featured in a video on YouTube when I was an aspiring front-flipper.  Since then I've followed the wise advise of my friend Dr. Bannon by putting my front-flipping ambitions on one side, and I've never posted a second video; but my YouTube channel still occasionally attracts a new devotee, and currently boasts 85 subscribers, all presumably agog for my next instalment.  Even more amazingly, the video itself has has more than forty-two thousand views.  Wow!  

Anyway, the trampoline has a cover over the springs called the "safety pad", which has been gradually disintegrating to the point where it covers the mat with little white bits of plastic which make the trampoline look as if it is suffering from dandruff. And so I decided to replace it, for the sake of neatness, reduced plastic pollution, and little Layla's delicate sensibilities.

The trampoline is a fairly high-end one made by Plum, who naturally supply spare parts for their products.  Alas, the particular "safety pad" in question is now listed as discontinued.  That is possibly just as well because they do still list the price - a somewhat eye-watering £79.99!

Of course there are others available.  After a bit of research I plumped for a generic 12ft round one in a rather fetching royal blue, for £45 from Ebay, and it turned up very promptly in a big cardboard box, which the delivery driver amusingly wedged under the handle of the front door.  This made turning the door handle on the inside very difficult for a while - in fact right up until the lovely Jackie had succeeded in digging a large hole in the top of the box with the handle on the outside.  Fortunately, the contents were undamaged.

The old safety pad was just held on with elasticated tapes, but since this is a safety pad, I was pleased that the new one came with comprehensive fitting instructions.  One can't take chances with safety, after all.  The instructions in question consisted of a single sheet of A4, with the following three panels photocopied onto it.  The captions are the original ones.

1

2

3

I know that it's frowned-upon to use actual language in instructions these days, but I do think number 3 requires a bit of explanation.  What has happened to the people from 1 and 2?  To be honest, the people in 1 were already looking a bit pissed off, as if they've been told to stand there and not move until they're ready to say sorry to each other.  Have they just had enough, and walked off the job?  If they had appeared in 3 in a kind of Ta-da! pose, arms extended, we'd have known it was all finished, and everything was alright; but just disappearing like that is a bit eerie.  

Also, I couldn't help noticing that the man from 2 (with the black tee-shirt) is not one of the men from 1 (who both have white tee-shirts).  Are they telling me it's a three-man job?  At least until the entire squad runs off to hijack a car, or whatever it is they are doing in 3?

I did my best, using my skill and judgement to put the new pad in place and tie it on with the elasticated straps provided, single-handed.   I think it'll probably be all right.  Fingers crossed.

The toothbrush has absolutely nothing to do with the trampoline, by the way.

A while ago, the lovely Jackie and I did some decorating in our bedroom, which involved painting behind a radiator.  In times gone by, one did this by fiddling around with miniature rollers and a tiny brush on a stick, but our recently-build house has handy flexible micro-bore plastic plumbing, so you can just lift the radiator off its brackets while it's still connected, and paint the wall normally.  When we did that, an electric toothbrush fell out.  Obviously one of the previous occupants had put it down on the radiator, whence it had fallen down behind, and got stuck on the pipes where they go into the wall.  And there it stayed, hidden from view, until now.

I threw out the actual brush part (obviously), but the electric handle was just like the ones we use (Braun/Oral B)  and it charged up quite happily and works OK, so I kept that.  The interesting thing about it is that it's yet another different model.  We have a cheapy one with no frills, and a slightly more expensive one which warns you if you are pressing too hard.  The "new" one is more expensive still, and it has modes.  These allow you to choose weird speed effects like slow, and pulsing, and wandering around as if deranged.  I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would want to use any of them.  Personally I just want the thing to work for as long as possible between charges.  But is has given me the opportunity to compare the various models; and I conclude that the cheapy one works just as well as the others; and that the only difference between the other two is that the expensive one has to go through all its modes to get from on to off, which means that you have to press the button four times instead of once.  Which, to my mind, is definitely not a feature worth paying more for.

You can still get toothbrushes from this range, but the top end of the market has moved on quite a bit.  You can now get a toothbrush which features Bluetooth connectivity, for some unaccountable reason.  Not to mention "enhanced A.I. and 3D Teeth tracking capabilities" which sounds ideal if you are, for some reason, unable to locate your teeth yourself.  The "interactive display" says good morning to you, and shows a little smiley face when you've finished (as long as you've done it properly).  I imagine it's comforting to win the approval of your toothbrush in much the same way as it was once comforting to be offered computing help by an uninvited animated paperclip - which is to say, not at all. 

All these features come at a cost though - around £200 actually.  If my review of stuff found down the back of the radiator is anything to go by, I say it's probably not very good value for money.

So there you have it.  I'd really like to know how sales of the £200 toothbrush range are going - I'd like to think not too well, because it's silly, but I suspect there are plenty of people who will buy the most expensive one just because it's the most expensive one.   Or maybe I'm just jumping to conclusions, and missing out on something truly marvellous without giving it a fair chance to prove itself.  Oh well.  I'll just have to wait until we move house again and hope to find one behind a radiator to find out.

Why has my comment turned into a unicorn?

One of the most annoying aspects of producing this blog is a "feature" of Blogger itself.  Blogger is the Google-provided, freely-hosted blog system through which all this mindless drivel boundless creativity finds its way to your eyeballs.  Blogger has been going gently along, being a convenient crutch all-in-one blog-writer's toolset for people like me, for nigh-on twenty years, which makes it almost inconceivably ancient in the fast-moving world of the internet.

Alas, internet misdeeds have moved on apace in the last twenty years, and so, consequently, have internet browsers.  Nowadays, it seems, it is necessary to block all sorts of once-useful things from one's browser to avoid being cloned in cyberspace, having one's personal history aired online like so much dirty washing, or having one's bank account unwittingly drained into a mysterious Bitcoin wallet somewhere in Russian cyberspace.  And one consequence of all that is that the way Blogger does comments doesn't work properly any more.

The reasons seem to be:

1. Blogger uses various cookies to find out whether you are logged into a Google account, and some modern browsers don't like them.  To a modern browser, they look like a cross-site tracking exploit, because of the external links they contain, and so the browser blocks them.  It is possible to re-enable their use by switching off cross-site protection, but obviously this exposes you to a whole raft of mysterious evil practices.  If the internet had any warranties, this would surely invalidate them.  Just as well it doesn't then!
   
   
2. Apple.
   As we all know, Apple products are - different.  And they don't play nicely with arch-rival Google's nasty old blogging system.  Apparently this applies to their entire iOS operating system, not just the Safari browser.  You can use an Apple product to look at my blog, but you can't post a comment with it!

I must admit that finding this out has come as a bit of a shock.  I don't know all that many "Apple people" (unless they're hiding it - oh, no; that's a bit like meeting someone from Yorkshire and having to ask them where they are from - doesn't happen) but I'm dismayed that none of them has complained that they can't post a comment.  Maybe they are above that sort of thing.  Or maybe they tried to, but their comment disappeared...

SO...  if you are an Android, or Windows, or Linux user and your have been frustrated by my blog's irritating habit of "disappearing" your carefully curated comments before your very eyes, there MAY be a solution for you, which would be to use Chrome.  Chrome is Google's very own modern browser, and works very well, but of course it does let all those naughty Google bits through, so everything works just fine.  The otherwise admirable Brave (which I use myself), on the other hand, is a complete non-starter, and Firefox is too, unless you are prepared to deliberately expose yourself, so to speak.  Others I can't speak for.

For Apple people, it seems there is currently no hope.  Please email me instead - you all know me personally anyway (or know someone who does).  

Clearly this situation is no good, going forward, so I have been experimenting with a Wordpress site hosted on a virtual server I already use.  Alas, the reliability of that setup is not proving to be so great - this morning it went down, taking the estimable DrBannonsBlog (newly moved to my server to solve just these problems) with it.  It appeared for a moment, but it's gone again right now.  Not really good enough.

So one way or another, it's all go, in the hectic world of blogging technical support.  If anyone knows a supplier of really reliable Linux hosting (preferably with cPanel), I'd love to hear about it, so please let me know in the comments.  Oh, hang on...

This has turned out to be one of those boring technical posts which doesn't naturally have any pictures in it.  Having been brought up on Alice in Wonderland etc, I know that a blog post without pictures is like a screwdriver with no handle, so I offer in consolation the following conversational exchange, which took place this morning, complete with illustrations.  Layla (who is now four years old) was talking to the lovely Jackie about unicorns, and the idea that they are magical creatures because they don't really exist.

Jackie: Are there any animals with a horn in the middle of their head?

A unicorn

Me: Rhinocerous?

A rhinocerous

Layla:  Triceratopses?

Two triceratops(es)

Yes indeed.  Plurals can certainly be tricky; but you've got to admire her breadth and accuracy of knowledge.

Virtual Reality

 Lockdown has had strange effects, there can be no doubt.

In the relative affluence of the house of Sears, I'm pleased to be able to say that the idea of spending a few hundred quid on something special every now and then doesn't seem like a catastrophic dent on capital, really.  On the other hand, a few thousand quid for some sort of flying machine does seem like quite a lot. And have you seen the price of gyrocopters recently!  Gyrocopters used to be the last bastion of "I built it myself out of random bits of metal and pop rivets (and it looks like it!)" aviation,

single seat gyrocopter - may swap for kayak or similar

 but they have gone super-fancy in the last few years, and prices have gone fancy too - £50k for this 15 year-old Calidus two-seater, for example. 

two seat gyrocopter - may part ex. Lamborghini

Which is definitely not going to happen in the house of Sears.  

And by this inescapable logic, it came to pass that I shelled out four hundred of the aformentioned UK dollars on an Oculus Quest 2 Virtual Reality headset, as a kind of not-so-much mid-life as nearly-end-of-life substitute for proper aeronautical toys.

Which is really quite good.  It's completely stand-alone, unconnected to anything except by wifi, and the experience it provides can be quite enveloping - "immersive" is the VR buzzword, and rightly so.  At its best, the optical performance is exciting; viewed soberly, it is, undeniably, blurry round the edges.  Nevertheless, it is perfectly possible to play a convincing game of table tennis against your Quest-equipped next-door neighbour, in real time, via the internet.  Which, actually, is a kind of "wow"-moment for me.  Believable virtual table tennis in real time?  For £400? ( or even £300, if you can tolerate only 64GB of memory - nah, 256GB will be better in the long run, trust me) Yes, indeed.

Anyway, for me the whole point of VR is simulation, so I got the nearest thing in the Oculus store to a flight simulator, which is called Ultrawings.

Ultrawings is a flying game, where you take control of different aircraft and take on "tasks" to generate income with which to progress - you can buy a different plane, or an office in a new location with the proceeds of your efforts.  Each task has Bronze, Silver and Gold achievement levels, according to your best performance.  You can crash, or fail, without penalty.  You start with an ultralight:

ultralight - easy

which is very slow and easy to fly (but still has flaps!).  The next plane is (somewhat strangely) a rocket-powered glider.  

rocket powered glider - somewhat strange

It has similar performance to a glider (very low sink rate at 50kt, but slippery in a dive), but it has a rocket motor, which provides an arbitrary period of considerable thrust (above the centre of drag!).  You usually get a few goes on the rocket in each flight.  The flaps allow near-vertical approaches at 55kt.

Obviously you get a cockpit-based view, and the cockpits are nicely sharp and detailed, even if the scenery is - well - basic.  But it's always a lovely bright day in Ultrawings, with some puffy cumulus in a blue sky, which is nice.  Alas, in Ultrawings, the air never moves.  No wind, and no lift (or sink).  Shame. 

The game has "arcade" and "simulator" modes - naturally I only play in "simulator" mode, because I really wanted a proper flight simulator, and I'm a bit embarrassed to be just playing a video game, if the truth be told.  And it's fairly realistic in some ways, but as usual, the rudder is a bit wrong.  I only discovered recently that you can change the direction of flight using rudder alone, while the wings stay level.  Gah!  The only saving grace is that flying it this way does induce unpleasant motion sickness, whereas flying it properly doesn't.  

The third plane (an absolute bargain at $20k (virtual dollars)) is a sporty aerobatic jobby that flies quite well upside down, and can fly knife-edge, but oddly still doesn't have much of a climb rate.  It crashes with a disarming ease, not least because it's incredibly difficult to grab the throttle lever in flight, which is rather necessary for a successful landing.  You have to look down to see if your little virtual glove has actually closed around the throttle lever (which, bizarrely, is still no indication that you will be able to move the damned thing).  Obviously if you do this for too long,  you are pretty much doomed.  At the moment I'm experimenting with cutting the magneto to land instead, as if I were flying a Sopwith Camel.  Not having all that much success though.

another fatal accident about to happen

The rudder suffers quite a lot from being controlled by a switch - a little thumb-stick on the left hand controller - so you can't hold part rudder continuously.  You have to give it little kicks at a suitable rate, which is very unnatural.   And it's easy to accidentally select full rudder while you're trying to grab the throttle, and thus not looking where you're going, which is (of course) usually fatal.  

The last plane (I haven't got there yet) is the so-called Gee-racer, which is really quite silly.

a really silly aeroplane

It's heavily based on the 1932 Granville Gee Bee Model R Super Sportster:

a real, silly aeroplane

which was not only real, but a serious racer in its time, and won races, not least by having the biggest available engine (22 litres and about 800hp) in an airframe about the size of a car. It also briefly held the world land plane speed record, although Supermarine et al were going quite a bit faster with seaplanes.  According to Wikipedia, it wasn't that bad to fly, although there were, inevitably, a few accidents, not least because of its unusually high stall speed of about 100mph.  After a couple of rebuilds and various  changes, including the addition of bigger (302 US gallon!) fuel tanks, and fancy flaps which brought the landing speed down to a more manageable 65mph, the company went bust and sold the thing to a chap who fitted an auxiliary fuel tank in the tail.  The company's (ex-)chief engineer warned him never to fill it, or the plane would be so tail-heavy that it wouldn't fly, but our man thought it would be OK.  He crashed on take off and died.  

So, interesting to fly then. I'm hoping for savage torque-steer effects, at least.  Might have to settle for the obvious snag of zero visibility when landing, and a few little quirks the games people have put in, like the "you can't see the instruments when facing the sun" feature you get with the sport plane.  There are quite a few deliberate quirks in the game, and overall I think they do add something to the appeal of finding out how to succeed, even if they can be - er,  extremely frustrating!

Meanwhile, I bash on with the tasks.  I have to say, this game is not a training aid.  It positively encourages some flying habits I've previously been very much encouraged to avoid, like flying extremely close to, and under, and through things, and shooting at balloons which are hidden amongst houses, and squeaking it in against the clock to land like a 1920s airshow ace, rather than flying a sedate and well planned circuit.  In other words, it's flying just as you would want it to be.

The VR experience in general has some unexpected quirks. Ultrawings cleverly figures out where you are in your real-life room - sort of - so sometimes you can restart the game and find yourself under the table, or behind the chair, or just outside the office wall.  Once I managed to fly the aeroplane from just outside the cockpit for a while, although not being able to reach most of the controls is, er, somewhat limiting.  But everything is still rendered properly, wherever you find yourself.  Just don't try to lean on that all-too-convincing table tennis table!

Obviously, I'm now sold on the whole VR flying thing on the strength of Ultrawings alone, but I'm already looking ahead.  The next step would be to improve the VR performance (and increase the number of simulators and games you can choose from enormously) by running the software on a fast PC with a decent graphics card, and connecting it to the VR headset using a superfast wifi network.  Unfortunately, all those bits would need to be bought, and the cost would be not inconsiderable - definitely a few grand, I'm afraid.  But still not in the price bracket of a real aeroplane, even a microlight, let alone a fancy gyroplane.  And don't forget, the running costs would be extremely low!

We shall see.