Alan's RamblingsPersonal

Rohan? Rubbish

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 18:22:00 GMT

Rohan clothing = expensive, utter junk. Over the last couple of years I've been bought two Rohan products as presents by my mother, a Rohan Daybreak down vest and a Rohan long sleeved shirt. About one inch of the vest zip has pulled clean out of the rest of the garment half way down the front. On careful examination I can see that about an inch of the back edge of the zip has been cut off during manufacture and as a result the zip fabric has shredded and pulled out of the garment. That's already in the bin. The shirt has turned into a pilled static-laden mess and is also destined for the bin as it's unwearable,

Considering how much the clothing costs the quality is awful. The products may look nice on a hanger, or if all you want is to ponce around in a wine bar, but if my experience is anything to go by they clearly aren't serious outdoor equipment. Anyone thinking about buying Rohan should save their money and buy something else, you can buy something for less than half the price and still end up with significantly better quality.

Save your money, avoid http://www.rohan.co.uk/.

Mio 687 satnav - a review

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 19:34:00 GMT

I bought a Mio 687 satnav for my wife at Christmas and I must say it's been a great disappointment. It fares very badly in comparison with the free satnav that's on my now ancient Nokia E71. Here's a list of the reasons I think you should avoid the Mio 687, and as many of the issues are software related, you should probably give the entire Mio range a miss.

The first unit I received had a faulty screen. The vendor (Lemon Digital) gave me a load of grief about charging me £30 if it wasn't faulty - which is actually illegal under UK distance selling law - and to add insult to injury they didn't refund me the £8 it cost me to return the broken one.
The Mio website was down for most of the two weeks after Christmas due to it not being able to cope with the post-Christmas load, so I couldn't update any of the software on the satnav - you only get a limited period to download the latest maps.
When I did update the software it promptly blew away my initial 3-month speed camera subscription, and despite a long email exchange with Mio tech support, they didn't manage to actually get it fixed before the three months was up.
When you upgrade the software it deletes all your saved locations, no warning.
If the download of an update fails it leaves the partially downloaded file lying around and all subsequent download attempts then fail. I had to figure out the fix myself, Mio support were no help - in fact, they are pretty hopeless.
The satnav quite often gets in a state if you update it from the PC. When you reboot the satnav it either tells you it was disconnected during sync or that there is a problem with the maps, even when neither of those things is true. The only way I found of fixing this was to do a Windows format of the satnav USB disk device and reinstall everything,
The 'smart restore' function in the PC software is neither. It gets to about 25% and then hangs forever. And once that happens, your satnav won't work. The only fix is to reformat the satnav entirely and reinstall from scratch.
Mio support sent me a link to an unpublished version of the software (http://download.mio.com/ServicePack/Desktop/Mio/Leopard_Phoenix/latest.exe) as a 'fix' for my problems, It installed ok, but when I used the satnav after installing it, every route turn was preceded by a voice instruction to either exit even if you were staying on the same road, or to do a u-turn if you were turning off.
The postcode search only uses the first 4 characters of the postcode you enter, you have to know the street name and number as well. Even the free Nokia satnav is better than that.
You can supposedly tether a mobile to the satnav so it can use to do google lookups. However the satnav only manages to pair with my Nokia about 1 time in 10, effectively making the feature useless.

I'm sure there are other things I've forgotten as well - I've had so many issues it's all become a bit of a blur, and I've lost count of how many times I've had to reformat and reinstall the bloody thing. I bought the Mio because it seemed like a good deal for the money, unfortunately not. I'd like to say I got what I paid for, but I don't consider £140 to be particularly cheap, although I would describe the 687 as rather nasty. If you need to buy a satnav, my advice would don't by anything from Mio, and don't use LemonDigital.

Sprung

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 13:13:00 GMT

Spring seems to have appeared with a real rush this year - all of a sudden everything seems to have popped into life. Here's hoping for a good summer to follow :-)

It's a secret

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 21:51:00 GMT

Went for a walk with the family yesterday evening after tea and took the following picture with the less than excellent camera on my phone but I rather like the soft effect. The location is less than 6 miles in a straight line from the house, and less than 200 metres from the nearest road, but I'm not telling you exactly where it is - it's a secret :-)

Swarm

Mon, 31 May 2010 22:27:00 GMT

We were on our way out of the house today and I'd just got into the car only to see James dash back into the house, slam the door shut and start waving and mouthing madly at me through the window. Eventually I figured out what he was trying to tell me - there was a swarm of insects in the tree behind the car. I got out and took a look, and sure enough there was - you can see the big brown mass in the tree above the back of the car.

I went inside and grabbed my camera and went back for a closer look (yes, I'm daft ;-) I've seen bee swarms on the telly before but never quite such a large one, it must have been nearly three feet long - wow! The bees didn't seem at all aggressive, they just formed a huge, quietly buzzing mass. In fact people walking past only a few meters away didn't even seem to realise they were there.

I was in a bit of a quandary about what to do. The British Beekeepers Association website has a "swarm help" page which gave a contact number for the area, but I didn't get any answer. The site also suggested contacting the local Environmental Health Officers, but today being a Bank Holiday meant that wasn't an option. The local Council website gave a contact number for another Beekeeper, but again, no answer. Hmm. Chris then remembered that she'd bought some honey in the past from a local Beekeper and as we were heading out of town in that direction anyway, we decided to knock on his door and ask for advice. When he came to the door and we explained the story to him, he immediately said that he'd come and collect the bees - wow, didn't quite expect that! Brian asked us to go back home and keep an eye on the bees as he said often they would move on from where they had settled. We duly went home, and about 10 minutes after we arrived, and for no apparent reason, the outer layer of the swarm started to fly off the swarm, and within a couple of minutes the entire swarm were in the air and on the move.

They moved across onto another tree, and then onto another, finally starting to form a bee ball again just as Brian arrived. Unfortunately they'd formed three different clusters in the tree, all over a parked car, which made getting at them rather difficult. Brian fetched an empty hive from his car and placed it as close as possible to the bees. He explained that if he got the queen into the hive the other bees would most probably follow, and that he'd put combs and food in the hive to try and make it a tempting residence for them. I asked him why they swarmed in the first place and he explained that it was how colonies propagated - the colony would hatch a new queen who stayed in the hive whilst the old queen and a good proportion of the flying bees left in a swarm to form a new colony.

You can see two of the bee balls in the tree above the car. I got a ladder from the shed and with the hive in place below, Brian climbed up and, one by one, clipped off the branches with the bee balls on them, collecting a couple of stings for his troubles. By now there was a bit of an audience watching him, several of the neighbours were as fascinated as I was and had come out to see what was happening.

Brian gently cut and carried the branches down to the hive, put the branch inside the hive and shook the bees off. I expected a storm of angry bees as he cut and carried the branches, but they just stayed in the ball and disappeared inside the hive when shaken off. Brian said it was a pretty big swarm, he estimated probably 10,000 bees or more. Once the bees were in the hive and the lid was on, Brian said that he'd leave the hive where it was until dusk, then the bees would all go inside the hive and he could safely plug the entrance and move it. When we got back home this evening the hive had gone, so I guess the rescue was successful.

Bees are having a bit of a hard time at the moment, with colonies dying out for reasons that aren't fully understood - Brian said he'd lost 7 hives over the winter, and that he was expecting some bees from the Isle of Man to see if they will fare any better. It was therefore nice to see the founding of a new colony, and Brian kindly gave me a jar of his honey when he left, so a success all round :-)