Author: Chris5156

Avatar On this day

As the year draws to a close, your Pouring Beans Calendar 2025 is running out of pages. Luckily another one is on the way, and everybody should have their copy ready for the New Year.

This is going to be the sixth consecutive year I’ve had to find just over 310 things that we have said, done, drawn or written to fill the pages of a calendar, meaning I’ve had to find 1565 things already. In my quest for content I thought I would try something new. So in 2026, you can expect a lot of the pages to reference things that have happened on that specific day in the past.

The “on this day” thing proved to be a great way of coming up with things to fill a calendar, but to make it happen I needed to find out what has happened on each day of the year. Obviously I could find old photos and look at the day and time they were taken, which got me a few. But I needed something bigger. I needed nostalgia on an industrial scale. I needed an “on this day” machine.

So I made one, and now you can play with it as well if you like. It’s in a secret location on the Beans server here.

Give it a day of the year and it will find everything that has ever happened on the Beans that day. Every post, every comment, from both New Beans and Old. It will then list them all with the year they happened, from most recent at the top to most elderly at the bottom, and it will give you links to see them in their original homes.

It was just meant to be a means to fill a calendar, but I found it hugely enjoyable and thought you might like to play with it too, so there you are. Enjoy.

Avatar “Shed Avengers 2” – mini review

A few years back, I reviewed Shed Avengers, a game I managed to complete but found somewhat frustrating. I said I probably wouldn’t play it again.

Well, the same studio has now released Shed Avengers 2, a follow up to the original, where the same hapless protagonist finds the new roof felt he fitted in the first game has started to deteriorate, allowing rain water in to his garage once more. I expect you’re both dying to get your hands on it and give it a go, but I got a sneak preview.

This is a shorter game than the first, since the whole roof doesn’t need re-felting, but don’t think for a moment that it’s going to be easier. Since the first game the garden has filled up with all sorts of new things, including the materials for a half-finished renovation of the flowerbeds and a new log store built up against the garage wall, offering new hazards and problems to solve.

The game opens with the discovery that there is still no ladder on the premises long enough to safely get you on the roof, but now with the added difficulty that the place where the ladder went last time is now home to a log store and a water butt. The only place to put the ladder is therefore down the side of the structure, which is almost a foot lower down, meaning you have to climb to the top of the stepladder and then step on the handle at the top to try and heave yourself up while the ladder wobbles about on its unsteady gravel footing.

Once you’re up on the roof, you find several large tears in the felt, plus most of the clout nails holding down the edges have torn through the felt leaving dozens of little holes. All of these need painting over with a tin of thick rubberised emergency roof repair material, which is viscous, difficult to apply and probably toxic. A thick frost had formed overnight which is only now melting, leaving the roof partly icy and entirely wet.

Maneouvering across the roof is extremely difficult. The underlying woodwork is still fragile and prone to movement, but is now overlaid with felt that is already torn and mustn’t be disturbed any more, in case more tears appear. This makes it difficult to reach all the places that need to be repaired.

I thought I’d mastered this one by the time I’d got half way around the repairs, and it was certainly a much quicker game to play than the first. But it had a final trick up its sleeve – the final level requires that you get down off the roof without sustaining a life-changing injury in order to win.

This is very tricky since you are, by now, freezing cold and can’t feel your hands. The top step of the stepladder, itself not to be stepped on according to the instructions, is so far below you that your feet don’t reach it. By rolling on to your front you can just about get your foot on to the handle which is absolutely not safe to step on, and dismounting involves a careful balancing act so as not to destabilise the ladder and fall. Naturally there is nobody else on the premises to either hold the ladder and help you down, or to find you lying on the ground with several broken bones and call the emergency services.

Like the first game, while Shed Avengers 2 presented me with interesting problems to overcome and puzzles to solve, I wasn’t keen to go back and play it again. However, it was clear at the end that there was still rain water coming in to the garage, which stopped me getting a perfect score, so I will have to give it another go in January. I can’t wait.

Avatar Jolly good: free rubber rings for all

Not to brag, but we’ve got one of those kitchen taps where you can pull the end of it and it extends out like a hose. It’s pretty good.

Recently the hose bit stopped going back in to the tap nicely, and that was because a little rubber ring that made it seal snugly in place had broken.

I did some searching online. No combination of words referring to a “washer” would produce results, nor did my searches for any kind of “grommet”. No, it turns out this wasn’t rubber or even silicone, nor was it a washer, grommet, seal or band. The thing I needed was a nitrile O-ring.

Amazon sell them for a couple of quid, so I placed my order. Here is the thing I needed. I fitted it to the tap and the tap works nicely again now.

The only issue is that Amazon won’t sell you one of them. It will only sell you a pack of 50. So I now have another 49 going spare. Assuming these things fail at the same rate as the original, this will keep my tap in full working order through to December 2175.

As a result I feel safe in letting go of a few spares if it will help my fellow man. They have an external diameter of 20mm, an internal diameter of 16mm and the band is 2mm thick with a circular cross section. Let me know if you’d like one.

Avatar Puzzle corner

It’s been a while since the Pouring Beans magazine ran a puzzle page, so for all those of you sitting on a railway platform with a pencil and ten minutes to spare, here’s this week’s fun games.

All you have to do is identify the common Beans catchphrases from the symbols.

Answers on a postcard to the usual address. The winner will be randomly selected and will win a specially branded box of Pouring Beans “After Eight” minty beans. Good luck!

Avatar The way forward

When your time comes, where will you go? How do you see yourself passing from this life to the next?

You might not have thought about it, but you probably should. Best not face the grim reaper without a plan.

I wasn’t sure how I’d go about it until the other day when I happened upon this grand Victorian monument in a London cemetery.

Then I had a look at the clear label at the front, and knew what to do.

Avatar A gift from past Chris

Past Chris has been kind to me this week.

On Thursday, at work, I spent the day installing some new equipment as part of a project we’re doing. The desks in our control room are full of ancient PCs that are long overdue for replacement and we’re now, finally, replacing them with new stuff. That means taking the old PCs out, untangling all the existing cables so they can be removed, and then running new cables to all the screens and stuff.

It takes about four hours to do a single desk if everything goes to plan, and at the end of it you have cuts and grazes all over your hands and your arms from the cable ties and the metalwork and the unexpected encounters with sharp corners as you rummage about.

One of the desks I did on Thursday four screens, plus one more that had been there for years but hadn’t got a PC attached to it. It was always meant to get a PC to support some other new stuff we’re installing which is why I’d put it there all those years ago. Thursday was the day it finally got wired up to something.

I ran a new video cable for it easily enough, but then I had to connect the touchscreen. The USB cable came out of the back of the screen, ran neatly down the monitor arm, and then vanished into the desk. Inside the desk was a rat’s nest of a million identical cables. I looked at this and then said some swear words.

Then I looked in the pod where the PCs live, because that’s where the cable would have to end up, and in there was a trailing USB cable. Attached to the cable was a green paper label. Written on the green paper label, in my handwriting, were the words “touchscreen USB for 5th PC”.

Thanks, Past Chris. You’re an absolute legend.

That would be enough good deeds, you’d think, but he did it again.

Just now I thought I’d better make a start on the Pouring Beans Calendar 2026. I opened the Pouring Beans folder on my laptop, and inside that I opened the Projects folder. (Kev may want to take notes on this example of a useful filing system for his work on the podcast.) I was going to make a new folder in there called Calendar 2026, but there already was one. That’s strange.

I opened it. Inside it I found this.

And when I opened that folder, I found this.

Inside those folders are 240 photographs, which are an extremely welcome sight when I have 315 blank calendar pages to fill.

He’s only bloody gone and done it again.

Thanks, Past Chris. If I ever get to use a time machine I’ll come back and return the favour.