scratch - incision: a depression scratched or carved into a surface

Nothing irritates me more than scratches. It’s the fine scratches from poor cleaning techniques that are the worst. People tend to use a grubby cloth that has been dropped on the floor to clean their precious belongings, and then wonder why things get scratched.

Today I went to Tesco and purchased 2 electronic photo frames, one for me and one as a gift. The frame itself is made of black gloss plastic – the kind that is very easy to scratch.

Anyway, I unpackaged one and set it up for myself. After loading some photos on and playing around with it, I used a clean microfibre cloth to wipe off any finger marks, and the gloss plastic is still highly reflective as it’s supposed to be.

Later, I unpackaged the other frame which is intended as a gift, only to find it had a scratch on one side of the frame. So, I return it to Tesco, and swap it for another. The guy behind the customer service checkout opens the new frame, and we find two scratches on this one.

After opening a third frame only to find scratches in the same place, the checkout guy remarks that it must be part of the design. I explain I have another frame at home exactly the same, purchased from the same store at the same time, which is absolutely mint with no scratches. He remarks that the other frame I have must be an older design. If I ever find out who designed them, I’ll be sure to commend him for making the design improvement of including scratches on an apparently “updated” version of the product.

So, I had no choice but to either ask for a refund or keep one of the scratched frames, and as I was running short of time I decided to keep it. However, when I returned home I decided to open the frame to clean off the Tesco checkout man’s grubby finger prints from where he had inspected it, only to find a myriad of scratches and swirl marks that had not showed up under the store’s bright lights.

It makes me wonder if Tesco have a batch of refurbished frames which had been returned to the factory, and cleaned by someone using a pair of old underpants dropped on the floor?

Today I found out that the following appears to be valid:

<img src=”//www.website.com/images/image1.jpg” alt=”" />

The double forward slash at the beginning of the SRC basically means use the protocol that is in existence on the current page. So if your page is running over http the image will be called from http://www.website.com/ whereas if your page is running over https the image will be called from https://www.website.com/

I tested this in IE5, IE6, IE7 and the latest versions of Firefox, Opera and Safari and it seemed to work, although it displayed a broken image in an old version of Konqueror, meaning this is a new addition to the specs or a quirk that more recent browsers have adapted.

I used to have TomTom ONE. I’ve now upgraded to TomTom 520. It was from ASDA including a carry case and a 28 day money back guarantee if you don’t like it. It has a wider screen than my old ONE, and also has voice recognition and bluetooth for hands free calls and playing MP3s. I’m hoping the bluetooth handsfree works well because it’s one of the reasons I spent the extra rather than just getting another TomTom ONE.

For an extra £20-£30 I could have got the 520T which has lifetime traffic updates for free, but in the past I’ve never needed the traffic update services.

Unfortunately text messages can’t be received/sent via the 520 using my Samsung phone, but I’m under the impression this is a limitation of the phone rather than the sat nav since the options are there but greyed out.

I hope I’ve made a good decision, and if it’s anything like my old TomTom is will be very good value for money!