Oh Ikea

I hate to break it to you Ikea… 11 is greater than 10, and thus a £10 item being sold for £11 is not really ‘a discount’!

Sky+ HD Box and Surround Sound Audio Cut-Outs

A very quick post this morning before I forget; we have been watching Sky for years now, and at some point over the last year or more, we have been getting audio cut-outs via our Sony Surround sound box.

What would happen is that the sound would cut out for half a second to a second, and then come back a moment later.  If we rewound the programme by a few seconds and tried again, it invariably played ok the second time around… proving that the recording itself was not at fault, but the audio communication to the Surround Sound box — the picture quality was not being impacted during these issues.

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A Quick Tip / Reminder for Ebay Sales

Although it apparently changed a few years ago, I was surprised to find out yesterday that ebay has changed it selling fees to include postage and packing charges! That seemed pretty harsh to me… but well they don’t charge basic listing fees any more, so…  However, after a little rash of recent sales I noticed that the final value fee had been charged on postage that the auction winner had actually collected in person!

Well, after getting ebay to ‘call be back’ I had a short and successful call in which they refunded me the small fee on postage as I described… and explained what I could do to prevent the problem recurring.

If a buyer collects from you, you need to ‘re-invoice‘ them inside of ebay. This will apparently provide options for refunding postage, and will also supposedly connect to Paypal and refund any amount if necessary.

Vexing exceptions – Fabulous Adventures In Coding

Writing good error handling code is hard in any language, whether you have exception handling or not. When I’m thinking about what exception handling I need to implement in a given program, I first classify every exception I might catch into one of four buckets which I label fatal, boneheaded, vexing and exogenous.

Source: Vexing exceptions – Fabulous Adventures In Coding

 

Read Eric Lippert’s full post for ideas on classifying exception types for your circumstances, and thus whether or not you should attempt to handle such exceptions!

Windows 10 Update Stings

I finally seem to have fixed a problem that has apparently been with me for weeks since updating Windows 10, but I have not noticed!  Basically, Outlook 2013 was failing to send emails from either of my accounts that used SMTP / Imap (but was working fine for a client email address using an Exchange server).

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Making the Same Mistakes, Repetitively

When an individual makes the same mistakes repetitively, you might ask why they do so, why they don’t learn (and of course; ‘Why don’t they improve?’), and so on. When the same thing happens within a professional organisation, we need to ask why the business doesn’t learn, and why the business allows the individual to continue on that path. I think I have a couple of suggestions why this might be.

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