This last week has been a bad one for me technically speaking. First there was the Sky Q Minibox problem. I was away when it was originally setup. It would have saved me a couple of wasted days without Sky when it went wrong had I been present at the setup.

We had a power outage that lasted twenty minutes. When it came back everything powered up except the Sky Q Minibox. It displayed a couple of screens which said “when the screen goes blank, press the Home button on the Sky Q remote”. Nothing happened. Eventually (after a couple of days) I figured, it was a bit like an old BoomBox (cassette player) of mine that was never the same after a power outage. Something had blown perhaps. Time to contact technical support for a replacement?

But I did a last search and came across an interesting message on a forum. “Make sure your Sky Q Remote is paired with the Minibox”. This is one of those things that makes you sit it up and says “What?”. It’s just a remote, isn’t it , like the other ones. Except when I looked a bit closer I noticed it had no bulb or transparent plastic screen at the end. To cut a long story short, when it was paired (is it Bluetooth?) the Sky Q Minibox worked fine. D’oh… My first encounter with a non-Infra red TV remote.

It gets worse…

Yesterday I struggled trying to run a program on my two Android phones. The same phones that had worked fine with MonoGame. This was a different software dev system (Android Studio) and a different programming language (Flutter). The trouble was sometimes it would recognise one of the phones (but not the other one) and when I started copying the program it failed with ADB Error 1. I was scratching my head over this.  I’d tried configuring, all sorts, in Android Studio, in the phones. But nothing made a difference.

I did a Google and a StackOverflow answer showed up. Maybe the problem is your cable? Well I have a few Android cables lying around so I swapped it and sure enough. It worked, and now recognised both phones, the program copied and ran ok on both phones. So with the Sky remote, it was the old adage Assume= Makes an Ass of U and Me. and with the phones, I’d assumed it was the software. configuration that was wrong.