Hmm, orignal battery is dead and the second battery that came with the kit won't charge!

Taking it back.

Went to Currys/PC World and bought a mouse. Got this because of the high DPI, which makes it easier to use with the 4K screen.
Here's the link and it was only £6.49

Bought a Sigma 30mm f1.4 in K-mount. I don't have anything particular fast in my kit bag nor do I have a 'standard' autofocus lens (typically 50mm on full-frame or 30-35mm on APS-C) so it fills a gap nicely. I'm hoping it's going to be especially useful for a winter trip to Disneyland Paris where the f1.4 should come in handy.

Haven't played with it too much yet but it's heavier/bigger/more solid than I expected for the money. If you want a standard focal length prime for some candid street photography this might not be it. It's no pancake lens! It does seem to back focus ever so slightly but I can test properly when I have time and correct it in-camera.

A pair of ForLife Doc Martens boots. The idea here being that when they wear out, you get another pair free. And so on - for the rest of your life. So, expensive (£195 a pair - more than the regular pair in the same style), but so damn comfy. The leather has been treated to it’s supple - none of the usual rubbing around my ankle bones which I’ve always had with new shoes or boots. So, in effect, it’s like putting on a pair you’ve had for a few weeks. Taking them off is easy too. The soles are supposedly slightly thicker too. All I can feel at the moment is the bounce after almost a year without my old pair (the soles split). I’ve been using trainers and a pair of (almost completely) broken shoes.

I Doctor Martens shop opened very recently here, so I could try them on without mucking about travelling to Westfield, or buying online. My parents sent me a large wad of cash for my birthday in January, so I spent a chunk of that on these (their instructions were to buy something that will last).

Right now, I’m thinking that I need never buy another pair of shoes again.

See also Tails of Fail.

Cuckoo Clock. Found for a fiver on a charity stall on the market. I thought it might need some TLC to get it working, but all that was missing is the bob on the pendulum. I made a new one (which is a bit rough at the moment - I’ll clean that up - I just wanted to see if the clock worked properly), and it’s been running for over 12 hours with no real problems. The only thing I’m not keen on is the all brown appearance, so I may paint the leaves and bird at the top at some point. The face needs some attention too (some of the numbers have worn off). Apart from that, it’s a good one.

A Game Boy. An original Game Boy. My wife found it in a charity shop on the Saturday in the weekend before Easter. She knew it would normally be an impulse buy for me, but because of the impending Mac Mini repairs (see other thread), I didn't buy it. She went back and got it for me. So original Game Boy, five games, and a mains supply in a rather tatty black holder.

It works. I've been playing Tetris on it. All the cartridges need new batteries inside as they don't save the game state/high scores any more.

As noted elsewhere, a boxed ZX Spectrum 48K. Box contains manuals, leads, and a power supply with a curious plug. Cost me £20, and sold “for spares” but it actually works. Usually a dead Spectrum can be revived - the membrane for the keyboard breaks, or a capacitor inside may have failed. I’ll give it more of a check when I’ve replaced the plug.

Wow.

I know at my parents' house is an old ZX Spectrum 48K and a 128K both dead now. The 48K couldn't be repaired at the time and so my dad got the 128K as some sort of partial upgrade/refund type thing. I think there were a pair of microdrives, and the basic memory expansion pack, as well as the interface 1. No idea if it's all junked now.

Oooerr - if boxed, some of those may be worth something (even without the box, you may get a good price on eBay). The Interface 1 and MicroDrives, even if a little unwell, may be useful to a collector.

The only thing missing from this Spectrum is the Horizons tape. I gave it a run last night after swapping the plug for a new one, and it works fine. My TV loses the tuning for it every now and then, but they can be modded easily to output composite instead of UHF. So it will get that done eventually.

Stereo cards - 64 of them! Found these in an antiques centre over the weekend. They wanted £15 for them.


Some are badly faded, but most of them are viewable and in good conditon. There seem to be a couple of “home made” ones too.

However, two are of interest. This is one:


Unlike most of the cards I have, these are special. They are printed on tissue paper - it’s translucent paper, possibly heavier than what we know as tissue paper. It looks fairly dull until you hold it up to the light.


You get colour! Not only that, but in the one above you’ll notice that the candles shine. They have been pricked, so that the light shines through. When you see them in the viewer, they look like they shimmer because the pin pricks are just not quite aligned.

These are incredibly fragile because of what they are - you could easily punch a hole through them if you are careless. I am told by someone on a Facebook group that this one is from a sequence of cards about Louis XV, and could be worth around $60. “Tissues” as they are known are worth a lot ore than the usual photographic cards.

That these ended up in what looked liked an uncontrolled heap in a cupboard in this antiques place, and survived is incredible. We didn’t know what we had until we looked at the stack in the car. So, wow, an absolutely genuine lucky find there.

Treated myself to a 3D printer recently. It was a pain to set up, but I think I've more or less got it right now.

Had the Huawei P20 Pro for around a month now and it's the best phone I've ever owned. Although that's probably true of most people's phones on regular upgrade cycles - I mean why would you upgrade to a worse phone - I've only ever owned the more mainstream brands so had my reservations. I need not have though as it's awesome.

I have the Mate 10 Pro and the P20. Both are excellent phones.

I switched to the Mate 10 Pro in January, when my Nexus 5x beame unsuably slow, even after a reset. A colleague bought it off me and put LineageOS on it and it was much faster, but I didn't want to experiment with my main phone.

The P20 is my company phone - it was that or an iPhone SE, everything else (P20 Pro, iPhone 8, X or Galaxy S9) would have involved me putting in a large wedge of my own cash.

The P20 is great, but I prefer the Mate design, with the fingerprint scanner on the back. Otherwise the Mate 10 and P20 lines are pretty much identical, spec wise - same cameras, same processor and memory options. The only annoying this is that the P20 has now had its Pie update, whereas the Mate 10 Pro is still waiting for its update.

I also bought my wife the budget Hauwei P-Smart, when I bought the Mate. I gave her the option, but she was happy with the budget models size and it is fast enough for what she needs - a bit of web browsing and Signal. It looks like an iPhone 8 and actually feels better in the hand than the Mate and P20 - aluminium case as opposed to glass.

Mine is buried in the garage - I haven't been able to get near it for 6 months. I can never seem to clear enough space in there for a decent little workshop area.

I've got mine set up in the living room. It will stay there until I get time to clear out the crap cupboard, (which will then be renamed) or until the step-son moves out at which point his room will become an office / workshop.