So on arrival at my parents on Friday, I found that the Pismos’ power cable wasn’t delivering electricity to the Pismo. I was able to charge the Pismo using mum’s clamshell iBook power cable, so kept it running OK. However, I used the Pismo quite a bit on the train from Edinburgh to Leuchars and so probably had 20 minutes of power left in the battery.

Since I knew that the yo-yo part of the power cable was almost certainly defunct (It had been tried with my power cable and a known-good one) but the plug part was new (but couldn’t be checked – or at least I couldn’t find anyone prepared to put their multimeter across terminals delivering 240V), I bought a brand-new yo-yo. This arrived on Wednesday morning by which time the battery had discharged itself.

I still can’t get the Pismo to power up.

I’m now very afraid that I’ve broken something when installing the new hard disk which arrived on Tuesday. I was so looking forward to watching DVDs in bed…