Cardscan Woes, Washing Machines, and Boilers

I mentioned that one of the things I picked up was a Dymo business card scanner. It turns out that this is possibly the worst supported scanner I've ever heard of. The drivers don't work under 64-bit versions of Windows, they knew it since 2005, and never did anything about it before it was discontinued. There's also no Mac version of the software. Their solution to both is to sell you the "professional" version which is eye-wateringly expensive, or suggest you use a 32-bit operating system instead. Oh, and forget Linux, unless I'm missing something. Since I don't actually need a business card scanner this isn't a huge problem for me, but I've wasted most of an hour trying to get the damn thing to work so I can say so before selling it, and am now just a little bit annoyed.

I'm going to try to install it onto the virtual XP environment I have on this PC, but it's crap at working with USB devices. Or I may just start it off cheap and hope someone wants to take a chance on it.

But neither is going to happen tonight, because tomorrow I have my annual central heating boiler service, and they can't give me a time of arrival, it could be any time from 8 AM to 5 PM. To add to my annoyance, they've got my mobile phone number wrong on the booking confirmation, and I will have to phone first thing to make sure that the engineer doesn't try that and give up...

Meanwhile my washing machine has died again - my earth leakage breaker tripped last night while the washing machine, dish washer and microwave were running, I eventually tracked the problem back to the washing machine. The third time I tried to get it running the 32A breaker tripped, although no other appliances were on, so I've given it up and requested assistance. Allegedly the service guy for that will come on Wednesday. Last time it took a month and six scheduled appointments before they got the bugger working, I have a feeling that this time round will not be a picnic either... I think that I may never buy Hotpoint again after this.

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