“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night…”

By | January 22, 2018
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“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

As you might know, that’s carved above the entrance to the New York Post Office (though it originally comes from some writings by Herodotus about the Persian wars).

Well, we’ve been a bit like that here since last week when we opened the doors to my Tech Inner Circle. We’ve had one person suffering from tonsillitis, another with a sickness bug and another with an ear infection. Not to mention the mystery lurgi that also struck. Oh, and a car that was crashed into (while neatly parked) by a post van.

But “are we downhearted”, as the old song goes? Well, maybe a little bit, just for a moment or two. But it certainly hasn’t stopped us – despite it all we’ve kept everything running despite the various types of lurgi trying to stop us. In fact the Tech Inner Circle has proved really popular – within minutes of opening the doors we had new members in and the first days have really kept us on our toes with so many people joining.

If you aren’t a member and aren’t sure if it might be for you, you might want to have a read of the information here.

Something I hope is useless

I don’t know for sure, but I’m fairly certain that given the choice between being burgled or not, you’d choose not. Same for having a fire burn your house down.

Me too.

But that doesn’t mean being prepared just in case is pointless. That’s why you have insurance.

But the problem is, if the worst happened and you had to claim for everything, would you know everything you had?

I’d find it hard to list everything in my house (and not just because I’m a terrible hoarder). Even if eventually I could think of everything, it’d take me a while and if my house had been burnt or burgled, I’d rather not have to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything.

That’s one time when modern tablets and smartphones can be really handy.

What you can do is take your phone or tablet, tap on the camera and choose to record a video, start it recording then walk around the house. Go into each room and slowly turn around so the camera sees everything in the room. If there are cupboards with important things in, open them and if there are bookshelves, walk up to them and move from one end to the other so it even videos what books you have.

Then if you ever are burgled or the house burnt down in a fire, you have a record of exactly what you had in it. You might want to redo it every year or so to keep it up to date.

Of course you could do the same by just taking photos, but using the video mode is quicker and easier and means you only have one file to keep safe instead of a whole bunch of photos.

Of course, if your phone or tablet is stolen or lost in the fire, you’ve lost your video. So you might want to save it somewhere else – possibly just email a copy of it to yourself so you can access it from a different device if you need to, or save a copy onto a web backup somewhere or even email it to a friend.

As I say, I hope this turns out to be useless for you – but it might be worth doing, just in case. After all, even if all it does is give you peace of mind, that’s worth having.

2 thoughts on ““Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night…”

  1. Derrick Myers

    Good afternoon you busy people. I am about to purchase a 3D printer in a kit form to build and hopefully use at some time. Have you or any of the members bought a 3D printer and if so can they offer any advice on the selection and then on any problems likely to be encountered.
    Keep up the the work, and keep taking the tablets!

    Reply
    1. Tim Wakeling Post author

      Hello!
      I’m afraid none of us have ever bought one. I’ve thought of it from time to time because I find them fascinating, but I worry I’d spend too much time playing with it!
      I did have a look – there’s lots of advice on the web but of course it’s hard to tell how independent it is – I’m sure some of the guides you see about “How to choose a 3d printer” are written by a company that makes 3d printers and might not be entirely independent!
      I did find this which looks like a useful set of questions to go through. The site it’s on might be helpful, too, as there’s quite a bit on there about what you can do with a 3d printer once you have it.
      Hope that helps a bit!
      Tim

      Reply

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