GAAAAAHHHHHH Mk.VI: The Return of the Son of the 50ft GAAAH that struck back!

[Mercury Wells]

Postman Pat

Ken Barrie, who sang & did all the voices for the original series(?) aged 81 has passed away (29/07/16)

:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VayfcX2fBUk&index=1&list=PLaeuNQbB1tFI7ShCF4nwUDGP5wTHJyGPl

The proper title is "Pat's Finding Day"

I doubt that the RM will send a wreath or a rep to Mr. Barrie's funeral.

[James Harrison]

Another day, another shooting in the US 

Austin people, are you safe?

[rovingjack]

Bat in the Kitchen!

No open window screens, no open doors.

If it came in around an AC unit it had three possible routes in this level, the nursery which is highly unlikely as the door is usually closed meaning it has no real way to get all the way across the house to where it was found. Likewise for the second housemates room (door closed on the other side of the house). My room is just off the kitchen and while I have my door closed about half the time I found it slightly ajar, which I noticed because I didn't want it in my room and closed the door.

There is a housemate upstairs that shares part of his level with attic space. he' not noticed anything in his area and no bats seen when looking with a flashlight through crawlspaces.

But it is an old victorian house. so the places it could have gotten in are many, and the possibility of a nesting site is not out of the question.

where/how did it get into our living space? is it a traveler that found the wrong place to stop for the night? or is it a little one setting out from a nest we didn't know we had?

and of course the process of getting it out of the house was enough to set off panic attacks in me. They can carry bed bugs and their kin, fleas, their guano can grow a fungus that can cause illness. and lovely of lovelies they can carry rabies. so it's got all the aspects of my phobias covered (parasitic anthropods, neurodegenerative untreatable viral infection, and wild animal loose in your home while you sleep). I taped up some obvious gaps to crawl spaces, and showered and put on clean clothes.

I'm hour overdue for bed and I don't know if I'll be able to get any rest now.

why is my life doing this to me?

[Banfili]

My little brown cat used to catch bats, taking them out of mid air, bring them inside and let them go - nothing like batcatching at 2 in the morning, and when you have 12-13 foot ceilings! I used a fishing net!

Your life loves you, rovingjack, and wants to keep you on your toes!

[rovingjack]

My little brown cat used to catch bats, taking them out of mid air, bring them inside and let them go - nothing like batcatching at 2 in the morning, and when you have 12-13 foot ceilings! I used a fishing net!

Your life loves you, rovingjack, and wants to keep you on your toes!

I had two hours of sleep, alternately shivering and sweating, heart racing and mind reeling. Which upsets my digestive system making it feel like what most people expect from eating food that is a bit spoiled.

for hours after I was having full blown panic attacks. I've had some time since where I feel like I could cope, but a worry pops into my head and I get all panicky again.

On part this comes from questions like "have I plugged all openings in the living area?" "will one find it's way in again and put the toddler or us at risk of exposure to rabies?" and the return of a nagging fear of mine "did it infect the house with bedbugs/batbugs?"

the thing that bothers me is that the only answer possible for all of those is "I don't know." because you can never know if you got all openings a bat can use, and you cannot ever know if one will appear in the house again until it does, or wether it is a rabies hazard until it's caught and tested. and batbug/bedbugs are just a wait and see scenario.

update: another paranoid walk around of the apartment and house, it's possible there is space in the roof of the covered porch, but no evidence yet, I'll have to do nightly observations over the next week or so at dusk and dawn. but specifically in the area the bat seems to have centered around there is a door leading down the stairwell to the laundry room, and the raming wall around the door has a visible gap on one side that opens int the laundry room down stairs. and on the other side of that door is a steep right angle stairway with a window high out of reach, looking up the top pane was open slightly not enough to notice and there are storm windows and screams all mixed and jumbled in there. But above that window is a hatch that leads into attic crawlspace, the hatch had some gaps around the edge.

I want it to be the window. it's sealed and locked now. I worry that the attic is a valid option too though. I will pack the gap with ewspaper and tape over it for now.

[Siliconous Skumins]

Growing up in a large Victorian house that is only a mile or two from the nearest farm land, I am no stranger to the issue of finding bats flying around my house!  Before I moved out of my parents house, you could have been forgiven for thinking I was a Goth due to the number of bats that could be found wandering around my bedroom (which was in the attic).

"Wild" you ask? - They were positively livid!  

There are two common species in the UK, but I only ever had to deal with one -  the pipistrelle bat, which are TINY little things:



While it was an issue to catch them elsewhere in the house due to the high ceilings (12ft in the 1st floor /  bedrooms, and 14ft in the ground floor rooms), thankfully my bedroom was the old servant's rooms under the roof, so only average height - which made catching the little blighters MUCH easier. I used a large piece of army scrim cloth (cotton net) attached to two garden canes which I could use to stretch and fold the scrim cloth like a giant net. I could usually catch them on the first or second try. They would fly into the net, and because it's a soft loose cotton weave, they would get tangled up quickly. Though this meant I had to untangle them by hand once I had them outside. They can give you a nip, but they don't usually bite if you are careful where and how you hold them. Cute little things really...


Also I'm lucky that the UK doesn't have rabies or other nasty diseases to worry about...  

[J. Wilhelm]

Another day, another shooting in the US  

Austin people, are you safe?

I think I'm the only active Austinite on BG  

We are sound and safe. I think this shooting incident was initially mis-characterized as a terrorist act. The incident involves a male perpetrator, Endicott McCray, age 24, who was probably targeting a group, sadly resulting in a 30 year old young woman's death. The other 30-something year old female victims suffered no life threatening injuries.

http://kxan.com/2016/07/31/multiple-people-shot-throughout-downtown-austin/

Crime of passion? Gang shooting? Unless I hear otherwise, either is more likely than terrorist attack. I think the BBC latched on to the story early, because they were covering the downed balloon incident 30 miles from Austin, and living in interesting times the media began to associate the attack with terrorism.

The thing to understand about the Sixth Street and Warehouse districts in Austin, is that it is basically a pub and live night entertainment area. Alcohol, the primary product sold besides music, is not served after 1 AM, and all bars/pubs close at 2 AM.

Being a very large district in a college town (read my last post on South by South West "SXSW 2016" festival), there is an ocean of drunk college kids in the streets (sometimes people, many girls in my experience, are so drunk they are dragged or carried by friends to the street, where people will hail taxis or take mass transport (sadly not Über nor Lyft anymore due to city government legal challenges and regulation).

This mass exodus out from the bars happens between 1 and 2 AM. The human traffic on the streets (closed to traffic) is so congested, that cops patrol on horseback at that hour, and every Friday/Saturday there are at least 3 ambulances on stand by, because there are always a few cases of alcohol poisoning, petty crime, etc. Cops regularly will arrest people suspected of drunk driving.

More unsavoury elements of society also tend to mingle among the students at that hour, no doubt related to illicit drug related activity. It is possible that the shooting is gang related.

11 years ago, I used to frequent the 6th St. area twice a week (I did a lot of dumb things back then), and I hated staying so late, because the environment at 1-2 AM was so chaotic it just seemed very dangerous.  More and more as time went by, you heard about acts of violence, including deaths, at least one or two fatal incidents per year during the last few years. Then we had that drunk person plowing a car into the people during SXSW in 2014, remember that one? That resulted in 2 dead and 23 injured people - the SXSW festival did not stop.

Luckily I stopped going downtown so frequently, and I only go to 6th St. during the SXSW festival in March, and always during daylight.

[Banfili]

Australia doesn't have rabies, either. Where I lived with the cat - very much non tropical, being in the foothills of mountains, they didn't have that nasty virus the tropical bats have, either, so they were pretty safe to handle once caught. I used one of those very large hand nets with a very long handle, and snuck up on the bat. Usually only took me a few minutes.

Because a lot of Australian houses are weatherboard and lapped, with little gaps up the door and window frames, the tiny bats sometimes roost in there. They can't get in to my house, but you can see them flying about as they leave for the night and come back at dawn (if you are up early enough!)

rovingjack, given your reactions I think you could live without the bats!

[James Harrison]

Another day, another shooting in the US  

Austin people, are you safe?

I think I'm the only active Austinite on BG  

We are sound and safe. I think this shooting incident was initially mis-characterized as a terrorist act. The incident involves a male perpetrator, Endicott McCray, age 24, who was probably targeting a group, sadly resulting in a 30 year old young woman's death. The other 30-something year old female victims suffered no life threatening injuries.

Good to hear you're safe.  I'm sorry for the victim. 

[Sir Henry]

Late as ever...
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/943592/Bojeffries%20batfishing.mp3

:

and the visuals... https://swords-and-veeblefetzers.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/bat-fishing-anyone.html

[rovingjack]

rovingjack, given your reactions I think you could live without the bats!

I think mostly that I need to not be dealing with it at a time of repeated panic attacks (something, I'd not ever dealt with long term before) , and expressly not feeding into my healthy issue concerns and phobias of parasitic infestations of my residence and sleeping areas.

Having a toddler in the house part time for the last year has made the anxiety over such thing a bit sharper.

I'd wager 9 months ago it would have been startling and unfortunate situation, but now it's a bit more troubling. though I'm mostly over it (still have a minor worry that it could have come in my bedroom the day before while I slept and I'd never have known it, and given the number of scratches a maker ans artist like myself can accumulate, I'd never know if a rabid bat nicked me in my sleep. That just creeps me out. But logically I know that only between 1-6% of bats risk having rabies, and generally they do not seek out humans in the course of their illness, and the only means of transmission is their saliva into my blood or mouth, nose or eyes. So it's unlikely and not like it's spraying it everywhere. but then panic attack are not really keen on logical reasoning.

Mainly I fuss over the little one and reassure myself that no vamped up flying rat visited and nibbled on him. and remind myself that I've lived in places with bats, mice, fleas, and even bedbugs. I survived them all just fine and some time later still have the thing I cherish most without having to start over from scratch.

TL;DR the problem is with my feelings and reaction, not nessecarily the bats existence. and that's at least as important, if not even more so than finding how, why and where the bat came in. stopping it and fixing it is reasonable, constant state of fight or flight is not. I'm mostly over it but still have after shock panic once every day or too.

[Inflatable Friend]

Went wandering into the kitchen a few steps ahead of our little one who's in that 'crawl everywhere, stick everything in his mouth' phase. What delights awaited me in the room of tea and cake?

A scorpion.

An angry scorpion being a bit slow and unhappy in the middle of the kitchen floor.

Nice. Now the wife is all freaked out and I'll have niggling doubts about the safety of an unchecked shoe. Admittedly it wasn't a very well scorpion, but where there's one there's a lot more. And I thought the mosquitoes were annoying...

[Siliconous Skumins]

Trying to (and failing) connect a Debian based Linux OS (Raspian on the Raspberry Pi) to a windows network printer share.

Connecting to a shared network printer - easy right?......$&*£ NO!   
It has taken me over four HOURS just to get the damned thing to show up in the list of detected printers. I Google searched the problem, and I found three different ways to solve the problem - non worked. However various steps taken through those attempts have at least generated the ability to FIND the printer on the network, ADD the printer to the list, and then promptly fall flat on my arse when asked to select the driver - which IS NOT THERE.

Soooooo...... It seems that a fairly generic driver for that manufacturer is available to run a number of their printers in that series / model range, it just needs a "PPD file" that provides a description of the printer functions to the driver.

And the PPD file is where I am drawing a blank.  I find lots of references to it on the internet, but not the actual file.



This is the ONLY reason I dislike Linux as a "day to day" computer OS - EVERYTHING that should be simple and easy to do, takes a thousand times longer and you have to jump through hoops to get there.  There is a problem with the way Linux is coded - the furry tooth bearded folks who write the actual code of the OS, are ALL having a nerdgasm about the fact it's "NOT WINDOWS!" and proud of the fact the OS in no way resembles the crap pile that is Windows. All well and good, but the reason it's lagging behind windows is that 99% of every noob who tries it, finds it too damn hard to set up simple things or install basic stuff.

Package managers are a HUGE improvement over the original way to install anything, which was to compile it yourself directly from the source code. But there is still a LONG LONG way to go to make seting things up or installing software as easy as it is in windows.

JUST MAKE IT EASY AND QUICK FOR THE LOVE OF COG!!

[The Bullet]

Almost finished renovating two roome.
Now at the point of putting the "fancy" stuff back in.
Video projector back on the ceiling, computer set up, satellite TV did not work.
No signal.
WTF?
Worked before.
After hours of checking this and that I found that the (expensive) junction box was to blame.
The screw that holds the inner wire of the antenna cable has a wide head that touches a grounded piece of metal just beside it.
Who designs this C###?
Good part: the short-circuit did not damage the inline amplifier.

[Keith_Beef]

Trying to (and failing) connect a Debian based Linux OS (Raspian on the Raspberry Pi) to a windows network printer share.

There is an old saying, that Linux is inexpensive if you give your time for free.

JUST MAKE IT EASY AND QUICK FOR THE LOVE OF COG!!

Ubuntu.

What is your printer make and model?

[Banfili]

Long trip home!

[SeVeNeVeS]

Long trip home!

Glad you made it back OK.

My Gaahh, doing building work at home (more lead light windows) and I can't believe how much the brickdust travels! Gonna take me, uuummmm, the rest of my life to clear this crap up, every room has a layer of dust, on everything...........

Why do I do these things?

[J. Wilhelm]

Trying to (and failing) connect a Debian based Linux OS (Raspian on the Raspberry Pi) to a windows network printer share.

There is an old saying, that Linux is inexpensive if you give your time for free.

JUST MAKE IT EASY AND QUICK FOR THE LOVE OF COG!!

Ubuntu.


What is your printer make and model?

You beat me to it, but you'd have to have an Ubuntu with the kernel compatible with the Rasperry Pi? Or is it 386 archiecture? Or ARM?

Anyhow, Debian is "one notch" more "manual" than Knoppix and Mepis, which are themselves "one notch" below Ubuntu in the Debian branch of the genealogical tree. In Ubuntu you will have repositories with specific solutions to problems like that.

But I fear even then you may not find the solution. I have tried many times fruitlessly to do that for "families" of printers and scanners. Finally, I gave up, and whenever I built a new Linux system, I'd research the list of peripherals know to work with that distro... That's why somewhere in my storage, there is an Epson and not an HP scanner... Some hardware manufacturers do work with Linux from the get go. Epson and nVidia come to mind. Others like ATi, required you to scour the Internet for bits and pieces written by the same furry toothed witch familiars you speak of, who probably produced the code down in their mother's basement.  For years it was like that until enough people got together to regurgitate an ATi driver...

[Siliconous Skumins]

Trying to (and failing) connect a Debian based Linux OS (Raspian on the Raspberry Pi) to a windows network printer share.

There is an old saying, that Linux is inexpensive if you give your time for free.

JUST MAKE IT EASY AND QUICK FOR THE LOVE OF COG!!

Ubuntu.


What is your printer make and model?

You beat me to it, but you'd have to have an Ubuntu with the kernel compatible with the Rasperry Pi? Or is it 386 archiecture? Or ARM?

Oh this is not my first go on the Linux merry-go-round - No I was there way back when "Trinux" and "Minux" was still a hot thing! Those where dark days for the novice.... I still remember the long discussions on the newsgroups among the various creators of early *nix clones. 

Small rant about my experience over the years:

:

Anyhow, yes I've had my fair shake at x86 based distros, and ineviably I have always had hardware issues - usually because my *EXACT* model of [insert hardware item here] was not fully / at all supported. Thanks to a lack of ATI drivers that worked with my AGP graphics card, the best I ever got was a slightly flaky install of Fedora without any 'X' capability Via a console terminal on another machine. That novelty wore off quick...

Then came the first Live CD images, and the built in hardware detection - THAT made a difference! Finally I was able to run a working distro in the late 90's. I used Knopix quite a lot for booting and testing old hardware and server equipment I had, and for general fixing of corrupted hard disk issues for other people. Then I moved over to a Debian install, which I had some success with, later moving to an early Ubuntu release which worked really well with my hardware.  However I found that I was stuck needing Windows for several bits of software and drivers that I was unable to find a Linux replacement for, namely my CCTV and VOIP hardware. Plus I was still into PC gaming back then. As a result, I found that there was little I could do on Linux that I could not do with a Windows machine, and thus had no real incentive to swap over.

However I did dabble with various distros and newer versions from time to time. Found I hated the default (Gnome) desktop of Ubuntu and preferred KDE, and as a result nearly all my distros had the KDE desktop. And the current Ubuntu Unity desktop just plain sucks.

For the most part, I found the careful selection of distro and hardware would produce a very stable and capable machine. x86 Linux is pretty good and has very few issues with hardware comparability these days. Avoid bleeding edge hardware and aim for common mainstream manufacturers, and you're golden.

However the same is not yet quite true for the Linux distros available for single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi, pretty much all of which are ARM ports of several common distros. The Arm architecture means that the OS must be tweaked to run correctly on this CPU as it is incompatable with the x86 series CPUs, and this can have some knock-on effects on other things like drivers etc. that have been released for the x86 flavour. Not always, but just occasionally it will either require a dependency that is not ported to ARM / not working on ARM, or will result is some random issue such as a memory error while compiling / installing.


My printer is an HP Deskjet 2050 j510. The Linux printer support package has support for the HP Deskjet 2000, which is identical in every way, but the driver is not compatible...    However HP themselves have a Linux driver for the 2050 printer, this I used, and it installed the dependencies, passed the "make clean", but failed with a memory overflow during the build and install part. 


So, as the only driver available for this exact printer model has failed to build, I can safely assume I am out of luck regardless of which ARM port of linux I'm using. I do know it works on x86 however, a quick Google reveals that it work well. No mention of ARM based usage though...

I will eventually find a work around, it will just take a bit of time and effort.

[J. Wilhelm]

Tell me about it. I was so proud of myself for having a full installation of Slackware Linux    F^&* I'm old!

For a decade I favoured the AMD 64 bit + nVidia combination for Linux, knowing it was a faultless combination. You couldn't ever match the performance of ATi in Windows, but nVidia repeatedly worked faster than ATi in Linux due to partial incompatibility for the drivers. So what did AMD do?  Well, why not buy ATi and incorporate it into their APU's? GAAAH! Why Lord? *facepalm* Fortunately it wasn't too many years   before proper ATi drivers could be found with full GUI front ends and easy installation methods ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evqpassbyqA )

But yeah. Linux enjoys making you suffer. For years on end...  

Yeah. Unity sucks. But I've resigned myself to it, and probably is much less painful than the recent Windows 8 to Windows 10 adventure.

[Keith_Beef]

Tell me about it. I was so proud of myself for having a full installation of Slackware Linux    F^&* I'm old!

For a decade I favoured the AMD 64 bit + nVidia combination for Linux, knowing it was a faultless combination. You couldn't ever match the performance of ATi in Windows, but nVidia repeatedly worked faster than ATi in Linux due to partial incompatibility for the drivers. So what did AMD do?  Well, why not buy ATi and incorporate it into their APU's? GAAAH! Why Lord? *facepalm* Fortunately it wasn't too many years   before proper ATi drivers could be found with full GUI front ends and easy installation methods ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evqpassbyqA )

But yeah. Linux enjoys making you suffer. For years on end...  

Yeah. Unity sucks. But I've resigned myself to it, and probably is much less painful than the recent Windows 8 to Windows 10 adventure.

I started out with Slackware around 1996, in a file on a DOS partition of an 80MB Connor hard disc… I tried a variety of distributions and hardware and settled on Red Hat for another couple of years. At the time my employer was moving some of our work to Red Hat, too, alongside AIX, SunOS and IRIX.

I turned to Mandrake for a while, moved to the US in 2005 and switched to Ubuntu. So through all those distributions, Linux has been practically my only home system for the best part of 20 years, now.

I had to use Windows XP and XP Embedded in the US at work, then Windows 7 for almost a year back here in France. But I changed jobs about 9 months ago for an all-Debian environment, running on a mix of Dell towers and Thinkpads.

[J. Wilhelm]

Tell me about it. I was so proud of myself for having a full installation of Slackware Linux    F^&* I'm old!

For a decade I favoured the AMD 64 bit + nVidia combination for Linux, knowing it was a faultless combination. You couldn't ever match the performance of ATi in Windows, but nVidia repeatedly worked faster than ATi in Linux due to partial incompatibility for the drivers. So what did AMD do?  Well, why not buy ATi and incorporate it into their APU's? GAAAH! Why Lord? *facepalm* Fortunately it wasn't too many years   before proper ATi drivers could be found with full GUI front ends and easy installation methods ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evqpassbyqA )

But yeah. Linux enjoys making you suffer. For years on end...  

Yeah. Unity sucks. But I've resigned myself to it, and probably is much less painful than the recent Windows 8 to Windows 10 adventure.

I started out with Slackware around 1996, in a file on a DOS partition of an 80MB Connor hard disc… I tried a variety of distributions and hardware and settled on Red Hat for another couple of years. At the time my employer was moving some of our work to Red Hat, too, alongside AIX, SunOS and IRIX.

I turned to Mandrake for a while, moved to the US in 2005 and switched to Ubuntu. So through all those distributions, Linux has been practically my only home system for the best part of 20 years, now.

I had to use Windows XP and XP Embedded in the US at work, then Windows 7 for almost a year back here in France. But I changed jobs about 9 months ago for an all-Debian environment, running on a mix of Dell towers and Thinkpads.

I was in college from 94 till 2002. I was an undergraduate student until 1997. At the time, the engineering department started migrating to Linux.. I guess. I didn't realize how much in the bleeding edge I was at the time. The 64-bit software we ran for some undergraduate course homework was done in ancient DEC Alpha and Sun SPARC workstations, the latter of which cost a fortune in 1996. I would have to go down to the graduate laboratory to use one of their SPARC workstations, and around 1996 the sub department of Engineering Mechanics started trying to build a 16 PC parallel Linux system in that basement, and replacing SPARCS for PC's running. The engineering students got a separate laboratory with Red Hat linux workstations for their homework.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC

The [SPARC] architecture has gone through several revisions. It gained hardware multiply and divide functionality in Version 8.[4][5] 64-bit (addressing and data) were added to the version 9 SPARC specification published in 1994.

We all knew the savings we could get by switching to Linux (a factor of 10 to replace our Sun SPARCs for PCs)! Later as graduate student circa 1999, I was running a Cray T3E parallel processor for my research, so it was back to Unix, but my taste for Linux was growing. I started installing distros around 2003, after leaving college, and that's when I started discovering all the distros. All my research (including visualization software such as Tecplot) required running 64 bit hardware, so I started searching building my own systems as a way of preserving my data (running Tecplot and my own CFD code) and personal interests (mostly stuff in the field of CFD). When AMD came out with 64 bit chips is when I started buying 64-bit laptops and installing dual-boot systems in my own home built computers.

Eventually I started losing interest in Windows, mostly because life hit me hard (starting around 2007) and I no longer had the money to buy expensive Windows compatible software that was irrelevant for my own research. Not being a gamer, I installed my last Windows Vista on a 64 bit laptop around 2006(?). I've never looked back after that.

[selectedgrub]

I came to update my thread.
Unfortunately only 1 person has looked since the last update.

[Aubreay Fallowfield]

Bloody royal bloody mail!!!!

I have lived in my flat now for 6 years. In that time I kept getting post office accounts statements etc for the previous tenant. I would write on them "no longer at this address" and even, after about four years of it, broke into Anglo Saxon on the envelope. They sent a new bank card and I returned physically to a post office and told them. Then joy of joys a letter last year saying they would not send any more letters as there had been no activity on the account for more than five years. (I open all mail as its only me in the flat, the two cats don't get letters) peace at last I thought.

No. Another letter so I wrote on it 'stop harassing me or I will report you under the 1997 harassment act and the data protection act'. I posted it unopened and two days later the letter, minus the envelope, was posted through my door with an apology saying that the envelope was damaged in transit.

Today another letter.

I phoned them - nothing they could do as I'm not the account holder
I tweeted them - nothing they can do mark it return to sender
I emaild their customer care and got this gem

"Thank you for your email. Unfortunately the Post Office Money bracket covers many different departments and since we are unaware as to which department is sending the letters to you, we cannot inform them to stop. The best way to stop these letters from coming through to yourself is post the letter into a post box with "incorrect address" written on the envelope as stated by the Citizens Advice Bureau.
 
I am sorry that I can be of no further assistance regarding this matter."

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am a happy camper!

My complaint went from my MP to the head of the organization then on to the head of communication. Two weeks later I receive a letter full of apologies, a promise that all correspondences from them will cease immediately then came something I wasn't expecting. A goodwill gesture of £50.00 to say sorry for all the inconvenience.

For once I'm happy, happy, happy!

[Keith_Beef]

We have a Peugeot 5008. It has two extra passenger seats that fold flat into the cargo bay floor.

Today, I unfolded those seats to make sure I had not squirrelled away any small items in the nooks and crannies.

I found the temporary tyre sealant kit, supplied with the car in place of a proper spare (:sigh:) under one of the seats, nothing under the other.

So I folded one seat away, then tried to fold the other. To find that the small wheels that should run inside two parallel rails had somehow popped out and were running on top of the rails. Meaning that the seat no longer folds flat into the floor.

This car seems so good at first, then you discover a hundred little design flaws that just make you wonder what the design engineers at Peugeot were smoking at the time…

It stalls in reverse or in first gear far too easily. The on-board computer that manages the radio, CD player, BlueTooth connectivity, GPS and proximity detectors is a catastrophe. The seat adjustment mechanisms are far too flimsy (one of the the normal passenger seats has already had a latching problem). The glass has no filtering, so the inside gets stupidly hot even on moderately sunny days and the air conditioning is pathetic (my 1998 VW golf had better glass and AC).