Today has been a day of fixing things. We’ve not had much luck over the last few weeks with things breaking, but I’ve at least managed to fix two of them.
The most critical in my opinion was the hand strap on my Panasonic HDC-TM700 camcorder. The strap wore through inside the camera’s casing and sheared itself in two making it impossible to hold the thing.
So, with some guts, I grabbed my screwdrivers and pulled the thing apart. Several screws later I managed to remove the side panel and using a black lanyard I had lying around threaded a short piece 
around the internal grips and back out through the hole. Then with a bit of black thread and a needle, I sewed the strap back together. I’m hoping that this repair will last longer than the original one did – it’s not a very good design once you see inside. The grip holding the strap in place is quite a sharp piece of metal so with normal movement over time it is likely to fail. At least I know how to open it up when the time comes for a harder wearing solution. (Note, yes it is sadly out of warranty!).
Next on the list of repairs was the Mamas & Papas Aria pushchair. While carrying the pushchair over one of the many squillions of bridges in Venice we managed to lose one of the levers which allow the buggy to collapse. If you take a look at the image on the right, you’ll notice a wedge shaped piece of black plastic screwed to the side. That’s the repair. It’s a plastic spacing wedge used for laying laminate flooring and the only thing I could find which served the purpose. I cut a rawl plug in half, pushed it in to the hole where the lever once was, and screwed the wedge to the handle.
The image above left shows the remaining lever, and the image above right shows my bodge. I’m hoping this is a temporary repair until I manage to find a replacement buggy off eBay for spare parts. This buggy is brilliant and I’d like to keep it going a bit longer.
Other things are broken though. Firstly the vacuum cleaner (a Vax… don’t get one – ours was rubbish) has fallen apart. To be fair it’s been a long death but it did start to die within days of us purchasing it almost three years ago. The build quality was appalling and various bits of plastic have fallen off with the final straw being the height adjustable wheels snapping. I’ve ordered a Dyson DC25 which I’ll obviously review shortly.
Lastly we have my trusty old smartphone, the Orange SPV M700 a.k.a. HTC P3600 a.k.a. Oliver’s Fridge. I plugged it in to the dash-mount cradle as we set off for Southampton, loaded (eventually) TomTom and nothing. It seems that it has forgotten it has a GPS receiver inside and even a hard reset and re-flash of the OS has not worked. I’m assuming it is either a failed chipset or, more likely, fatigued flash chips which do wear after a time. It was one of the first fully featured smartphones as we know them today, pre-dating the iPhone by at least a year and it has a massive developer community surrounding it. I’ve been flashing it with custom ROMs and gaining new features and functionality every few months so it will be a shame to see it go, but I believe it is now time for a new phone. Watch this space.
This was the most powerful upgrade (comparatively) that I’ve ever bolted together. Usually I go for mid-range components but this time I pushed it a little further. It’s not top of the range, but the best price-performance compromise and this machine is likely to last me a lot longer than previous incarnations as a consequence. Yeah, it’s not one gadget, but a collection of components: Intel Core i5-750 quad-core processor, Gigabyte GA-P55-US3L motherboard, 8GB of DDR3 Crucial ‘Ballistix’ 1333MHz memory and an Arctic Cooling heatpipe heatsink. I’ve struggled to max it out – video encoding hits the processor and I can encode HD video in real-time on MPEG2. I have also been able to run two virtual machines without any noticeable degradation in the host’s performance. 
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