Trenchwork

DH decided I needed my Christmas present early and came home with a brand-spankin’ new notebook to replace the 4+ year-old Dell I’ve been using.  It’s a Packard Bell with a brilliant little screen and all the bells and whistles I could want.  However, conversions and setups are never as easy as they should be, are they?

The PcB uses Windows Vista.  Folks, I’ve got to say that I’ve never been a Microsoft fan, but after cussing for a couple of days, I once again found myself contemplating a switch to Mac.   (Ok, I was just imagining I was cussing.  Whenever I feel a need to do so, I think about a friend who could do it so much better and immediately feel much better myself. )  Vista may be more secure on a number of fronts (and the operative word here is “may”), but it assigns ownership of important files and folders not to the administrative user, but to “System.”  And nope, you cannot log in as “System.”  That means that you cannot change certain of your own settings, or have control over certain files and folders because you don’t have the authority to do so.  Nor does changing your authority here work; it lets you go through the process and then promptly laughs at you for thinking you’ve actually accomplished something, and again locks the figurative door.

There IS a way around this foolishness, and that is to select your hard drive(s) and manually change the ownership of the HD and all subfolders and files to you.  Fortunately, you can do it in one fell swoop, so you don’t have to do that for every single file or folder.  But still . . .

I’d also thought I’d switch from Eudora to Thunderbird (I refuse to use Outlook in the same way I won’t use Word) since I see that Eudora is going to be moving to a cooperative effort with Thunderbird for e-mail.  However, that was an even bigger bust.  Thunderbird is a nice little package, but it assumes simplistic setups.  It does allow you to have multiple accounts and multiple servers, but it refuses to allow you to tailor your outgoing SMTP servers and instead assumes that the login name for the account (which is normally the one you use to *check* mail) is the same for the outgoing server, even though the two servers are different.  And you cannot change that.  The end result is that you can receive mail, but because it’s trying to access your outgoing server with an invalid username, and then prompting you for a password you don’t need, you cannot *send* mail.  Clever.  And if you happen to need to access the same account via two different locations and outgoing servers?  Not a chance.  It sees the username and assumes that there will never be two accounts with the same username.  Even more brillliant, eh?

As for Norton 360 . . . Oh, my word.   The older Norton packages were actually fairly good, but this one . . .

At one point, I ended up restoring the computer to its original, factory-setting condition (which, naturally, wipes out any installations and changes you may have made) just to regain access.  Then I promptly uninstalled some of the factory defaults, such as Norton 360, and installed Eudora instead.  Whoof.

New computers are lovely, and this one is a beaut (partly because it weighs about 4 pounds compared to the anvil-weight of the Dell), but I have to admit that I’m hoping to NOT have to do this for a while.

Of course, things felt like they were even more of a scramble because we were talking Mom and Brother through installing a new hard drive and new operating system on the machine stateside.

I’m convinced that every family should have at least one person in two critical professions:  computers, and hair dressers.  We’re managing the first.  I’ve given up on the second.

I’ve had a chance to stop and evaluate the new Babe, and I have to say that there are some things it does very well.  There are also a couple of things I wish I could change.  While this wheel will be perfect for training and orientation, and just to have an alternate, it would not have satisfied me as a first or only wheel.  It is, however, a great basic wheel.

The Babe Production double treadle is an incredibly light wheel; at 8 pounds, you can lift it with one hand pretty effortlessly.  It tends to walk a bit if you have a slick floor (such as our Pergo), but the rubber feet do pretty well at holding it in place otherwise and I didn’t notice it budging an inch on tile or linoleum.

One of the very cool bits is the treadles.  While some wheels advertise a “true heel-toe action,” this wheel really does make use of the heel.

My hand is there to give you a sense of proportion. The treadles are fixed to the frame in such a way that over half a hand extends beyond the frame, creating a kind of teeter-totter effect. In other words, you really can push down on the heel to turn the wheel. It took me a day to catch onto that little fact coming from the Rose (D’oh!), but once I did, I found the start/stop MUCH easier to control. It’s still much more difficult to establish consistency at a slower speed, but otherwise this is a truly clever gizmo.

The maiden and flyer assembly is a bit brilliant in one way.

While it’s difficult to see from this shot, the orifice is actually resting in a notch on the left maiden.  The metal bar supporting the flyer fits into an appropriately sized hole in the right maiden.  In order to change bobbins or flyers, you simply lift the thing off.  The drive band slips down to the supporting bar below the flyer, but is a snap to pick up and put back on the metal rod or bobbin groove when you put the flyer back in place.  It takes all of five seconds to change out the flyer or bobbin.

The downside is also here, however.  The band between the maiden and the flyer at the orifice end is the brake band.  You adjust it by pulling it tighter and velcroing it in position, or by loosening it and letting it sit there with no tension.  Easy.  And if you’ve got a section of yarn which needs a little encouragement to wind onto the bobbin, a quick tug on the band without changing its position will do the trick immediately.  The problem is that there’s no way to be precise here, and the moment you change the flyer, you’re back to a search to find just the right position and tension.  The wheel pulls a bit too hard for my taste, but removing the band doesn’t seem to solve the problem because then there’s no tension.  I know this is one of those things I’ll figure out and find just the right position and balance (or a substitute solution), but in the meantime, it very much makes me appreciate the ability to fine tune tension that I get with the Rose and the different strength brake springs.

The other drawback is the size of the orifice.  It’s a 3/8″, which means that you’re limited.  There is a Bulky conversion kit which will give you a 3/4″ orifice, or the Woolee Winder which will give you a 1/2″ orifice, but both are nearly or more than the cost of the wheel itself.  The cup hooks feel small to me, and when I tried a boucle on this wheel, I found myself fighting a losing battle with it in order to make it work properly—and keep the boucle loops from moving.  While the yarn fed through the orifice (although sometimes with a bit of brute encouragement), the tips of the flyer hooks caught on the yarn as it tried to slip past, and that and the tension of the yarn going around the hooks kept shifting the placement of the boucle loops.  However, my gut feeling is that a thin boucle with small loops would have no real problems.  I very much like the single, adjustable loop used by the Majacraft, and I can see where this wheel would benefit from a Woolee Winder in a major way.  An equally valuable solution, however, would be a quill attachment, and I’m hoping Nels comes up with one in the near future.

Given the purpose for this wheel, I don’t see myself buying extra attachments and conversions.  The bobbins give it a fair range of ratios (although only three), moving from a slow 5 7/8 : 1 and 7 1/2 : 1, then jumping to a quick 19:1.  However, I’m seriously considering swapping out the existing cup hooks for the next size up, or for L-shaped hooks.  That would, I think, solve half the problem, and since it will not be my  primary wheel, that would actually be enough.