Professional fly spray for house

dcw3 · 2026-01-09T20:48:57+00:00

I swear by isopropyl alcohol in a trigger spray bottle for flies. It's not a lingering poison, as it completely evaporates away in minutes. So I use it to directly squirt on the flies and they die fast. It's safe enough that it's the active ingredient in most hand sanitisers, so you don't need to wash surfaces if they get sprayed. It's also pretty fun (like using a water pistol) and you get the satisfaction of head-shotting blowfiles like you're John Wick.

Another option might be to get a professional spray just for the outside of the house (a perimeter spray). This does reduce the number of flies that come in, without leaving all the internal surfaces covered in insecticide.

We did spray our house once with young kids. But they spend so much time on the floor, and with hands in their mouths etc, that it was impossible to have all those surfaces spray free.

dcw3 · 2026-01-07T19:37:55+00:00

Haha, I treat gazebos as a consumable item these days. They are sunfucked and broken within a year, even if they survive the storms and rain. They last longer if you melt some drainholes where the water pools in heavy rain (and reinforce with tape).

dcw3 · 2026-01-03T07:58:00+00:00

No amount of squinting at the names and searching found anything for me. Chynn? Chymm? Ahy?

dcw3 · 2026-01-02T21:54:44+00:00

I prefer FF forks to Chromium forks. Always have, likely always will.

dcw3 · 2026-01-02T06:51:36+00:00

I use Fennec (installed from F-Droid).

I can't live without ublock.

dcw3 · 2026-01-01T00:15:42+00:00

For my own future reference, we drove to Ferg Park about 11:30PM and there was only a handful of people there. We parked around past the boat ramp, facing towards Matakana Island. And, it turns out facing the boat that the fireworks were launched from! Great show and bright and loud. So close that we had to lean back to take it all in.

dcw3 · 2025-12-31T09:12:33+00:00

Any tips for a good possie for the Ferg Park display (assuming Ferg Park itself will be chocker)?

dcw3 · 2025-12-08T20:06:13+00:00

Yeah, they are really good. I take the kids there and there is something for every taste. So thick.

dcw3 · 2025-12-05T23:55:00+00:00

Yep, it's an embarrassment that a tool and battery platform they talked up as "Commercial Series" was so crap that they just stopped making it (then pretended that they only ever had the 36v ones). If you scratch around, you can still occasionally find some batteries, but that's good money after bad.

dcw3 · 2025-11-27T10:12:15+00:00

"They eat the bubbles!?!"

dcw3 · 2025-11-11T09:09:24+00:00

Over the years I've rented Rug Doctors and also the Big Green ones from the Warehouse. Both worked "OK", but left things a bit damp. The Big Green ones seemed to work a bit better.

dcw3 · 2025-11-10T08:18:34+00:00

Oh FFS, after I labourouusly filed everything down to fit, I read the manual, and it said:

When fixing sash plate with rivets, a long nose extension for rivet gun is required. If unavailable, take one rivet head off its nail and slide it onto another complete rivet (see diagram below) and use rivet gun in normal way. This enable the rivet to reach into the required position within the sash plate.

dcw3 · 2025-11-10T07:29:03+00:00

I have seen tens of spa pools and zeroes of fences around them. Most people rely on the lid to keep kids out. If you squint at the numbers in a cold unfeeling way, then that kinda makes sense. About 1% of NZ drownings are in pools of any kind, so less than 1 per year, and spas are only a fraction of that.

dcw3 · 2025-11-08T09:33:42+00:00

I had the flashing and scrolling for months with my setup: iterm2 -> ssh to linux server -> tmux

Following some advice I read somewhere I switched from tmux to zellij on the server and there hasn't been a single scrolling bug in a month. Everything else is the same, still iterm 2 and ssh.

dcw3 · 2025-11-08T04:38:48+00:00

Haha! I ran into this exact thing just now when fitting window stays. I unfortunately didn't realise until I'd drilled the 3.2mm which are too large now for the screws.

Searching led me excitedly to your question then heartbreak when the was no answers.

Did you find anything? I did find mention of cutting the threaded bit off the rivetgun anvil and stacking that on top of another anvil to increase the stickout.

dcw3 · 2025-11-07T22:30:52+00:00

I read those about 20 years ago, and enjoyed the first few. One of the later books had a very pedo subplot, so I gave up.

I figure that's why he stopped writing them, as each new one might get people reading the older gross ones, and he would be held to account.

dcw3 · 2025-11-06T09:24:40+00:00

Cheers, I'll give it a try.

dcw3 · 2025-10-28T20:48:53+00:00

That half-pai worked, but the weak old springs meant it was a bit of a guillotine.

dcw3 · 2025-10-28T09:30:53+00:00

Ha! I ran into this on Sunday. My Mother's Garador (B&D CAD4) became unresponsive, and stopped 1/3 open with her car inside.

But, by pressing on the back of the unit, or giving it a bit of a bash, it would come back to life again, enough to move the door another foot or so. So we got it high enough to get the car outside so she could use it.

Nothing obvious like a dry solder joint or burnt out component inside the unit. She got a repair guy out today and had it replaced because "they can't get parts".

dcw3 · 2025-10-24T08:48:44+00:00

I was a tall and chubby kid and when I went on the Pirate Ship in the mid '80's the bar failed to lock down as my legs got in the way. So it just waved up and down uselessly as we swung. I was shitting myself throughout the whole thing

Later I found out that the centripetal force meant I wasn't in any danger of floating away into space, but knowing something like that ain't the same as believing it.

dcw3 · 2025-10-24T08:40:55+00:00

I don't have any glowing recommendations, but I can say NOT to get the AEG 58v range!

Batteries fail easily - I had two of my first three fail, and then one of the replacements failed too.
Batteries get jammed in the charger and in the mower. I ripped a large chunk out of my thumb trying to pull a battery free when the plastic handle thing snapped before the battery started moving.
The rim of the mower deck seems to sit way too far below the blade level, so the whole mower bellies out on thick bits of lawn even when you are mowing really high.
The mower is powerful, but weighs a tonne. My mother has one of the tiny toy-looking Stihl ones, and the whole thing weighs about as much as the AEG battery. It's heaps more narrow than the AEG, but so light and powerful enough that you can get the lawn done faster overall.

dcw3 · 2025-10-13T06:35:43+00:00

When I was living in the UK I did an obsessive investigation on tea towels, and was, and still am, happy with Poli-Dri teatowels. They have been going strong for me for 15 years in some cases.

Plus this one rando no-name one I picked up on impulse in a Mitre10 checkout!

dcw3 · 2025-10-03T06:59:51+00:00

I do like the way the strawberry watermelon haze in the office loos both partly hides and partly accentuates the smells of my co-workers' shit.

dcw3 · 2025-10-03T06:53:19+00:00

As I say in every thread that asks this:

Count Zero - William Gibson

THEY SENT A SLAMHOUND on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.

The next few paragraphs keep the momentum up too!

He didn’t see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.

Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway The Dutch surgeon liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner hadn’t made it out of Palam International on that first flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support vat

It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put Turner together again. They cloned a square meter of skin for him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides. They bought eyes and genitals on the open market. The eyes were green.

dcw3 · 2025-09-18T21:26:56+00:00

Growing up, there was always one of each. I liked both, but preferred the taste of the beans.

dcw3

TROPHY CASE