Aaah, nice warm weather, 27C today, lovely. It still gets a bit cool at night and I might start out on top of the bed sheets, but I wake up under the doona.

Last week I emailed the local office of A. H. Beard, the mattress makers, telling them once again how dissatisfied I am with the mattress I bought. No reply. I filled out their on-line survey, giving them very low marks. No response. I emailed their Sydney office. Again, no reply. They’re just ignoring me.

A. H. Beard. This is the worst mattress I’ve ever slept on, and being a traveller, I’ve slept on an awful lot of mattresses apart from my own – in hotels, I mean. Yet the best I’ve ever slept on was in a Bali hotel in 2016, in other words a mattress made in Indonesia, or even Bali. It was remarkable for its comfort, so much that my partner and I both commented on it. If only I could have that one. Mattress, I mean. I’m afraid my partner has departed. A great pity.

I think I’ll just have to sell this mattress, take a big loss and buy another one. Meanwhile, don’t buy an AH Beard mattress!

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The title refers to the referendum on Saturday. Voting is compulsory, by the way, how about that my USA friends? All it means is that attendance at a polling station and being crossed off the roll is compulsory. Once you’ve got your ballot paper, you can leave it blank or deface it, no-one will know.

Anyway, the referendum is to add a section to the Constitution to recognise Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders as original inhabitants of Australia (a proven fact) and to set up a committee (called a Voice) to advise the federal parliament on matters affecting Indigenous people. Nothing more.

The wording: The vote will decide whether we recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in our Constitution, and whether we consult with First Nations people on matters that affect them, through a Voice to Parliament. That’s it.

The Voice (committee) advice would not be compulsory and any advice would still be voted on by the parliament. If they decided it was unacceptable, then it wouldn’t pass. That’s all.

But the dirty racist NO campaigners have built up a mass of lies about this, saying it would divide the country along race lines and that it would amount to apartheid. What evil bastards No voters will be.

The slow learners believe these lies. Too many people say, “Oh, I don’t understand it, so I’ll just vote NO.” Cretins. Slow learners. Brain deficient. But above all, LAZY. Can’t be bothered making any effort to find out and understand.

I’m afraid the NO campaign is going to prevail on Saturday. For months, they’ve been spreading lies, fear, misleading claims and race hatred. I find this very depressing. It’s typical of this country – full of low intelligence, timid people with a fear of change. The contrast with the USA, the UK, Japan, Germany, France is glaring. Those countries are leaders in breaking ground, getting things done. Australia will always be laggards, too afraid to take to the front. Not everyone, obviously, but there are too few doers and too many naysayers.

It wasn’t always that way, but things have changed since early last century. There are a valiant few, fighting against the odds, trying to make breakthroughs, but they can’t overcome the great slothfull mass of dullards. Yes, if you vote No, I’m calling you a dullard, a no-hoper.

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The NBN (National Broadband Network) is a prime example. This was proposed by Labor (the progressive party in Australia) nearly 20 years ago as a nationwide fibre optic network, to carry data at 1 Gigabits per second (Gb/s) or more. It was visionary and exciting. We knew that new ideas would grow from it.

But what happened? A new Liberal-National Party government was elected and they just had to oppose it. A new minister for communications was in office (Malcolm Turnbull) and he just had to make big changes, purely to have a point of difference to Labor, who had proposed the system. It’s a long story but we ended up having a dog’s breakfast of a hybrid system, incapable of the 1Gb/s and ranking around 17th in the world internet speed rankings. Using old copper wiring instead of the glass fibre. Costing just as much as the original system would have, even more.

So I call Malcolm Turnbull the man who single handedly wrecked Australia’s fibre optic network. The wrecker.

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I’ve just been on the phone to Epson Customer Support (and I nearly started swearing at the guy, thinking it was a scam call – luckily I stopped before uttering any nasty words).

I gave them very low marks last week because I just could not navigate and use their on-line purchase page on their web site. No matter what I did, it kept sending me around in a circle between two pages. Although I kept pressing the Go to Checkout button, it took me back to asking for more details, every time. Their solution, use a different browser. I didn’t have a different browser (I use Mozilla Firefox), and by the time I was able to use Chrome, someone else had jumped in and bought the item. Grrrr!

Anyway, he asked me a few questions whether I had any other problems and I said YES! Glad you asked. My Epson ET-7700 multi-function printer scanner misses lines and colours, and leaves black ink splotches on the page, every time! Very unhappy about it. It means I can’t make any colour prints – photos, I mean. This is a $750 printer! Unfortunately I didn’t make any warranty noises in the first year because I didn’t realise how big a problem it was going to be.

Anyway, I was able to say that I’ve done all the right things, all the cleaning, replaced the Maintenance Box, done the head alignment and so on. So he’s given me the name of the service agent in Perth. We didn’t talk about warranty so it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

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Anyway, the item I was going to buy from Epson at $599, down from $799, is this:

It’s the Fast Foto FF-680W scanner. What’s so good about it?

The idea is that we’ve all got boxes and packets of old photographic prints from the days of the 1-hour photo processing shop. They sit in our cupboards and drawers and we hardly ever look at them. As well, we have masses of documents of various kinds, bills, memos, letters, single photos up to A4 size and so on.

With this machine, you load them into the feeder as shown above, in any order, and press the Start button. It feeds them through, one by one, and scans them in high resolution at a rate of one per second! That means 60 photos or documents per minute! High 2400 dpi resolution or higher.

While it’s doing this, it automatically straightens them, colour corrects them, sharpens them, and puts them into a folder that you nominate.

I missed the $599 carton-damaged machine on Epson’s web site, but yesterday I saw it advertised on Amazon Prime Day for $649 so that was it – I had to buy. It will arrive on 25 October.

I don’t have all that many prints, since I nearly always shot slides, but I do have several dozen packets of prints and a hundred or more black and white prints of various sizes. That looks like being about an hour’s work! Then what?

I have the idea of offering a scanning service. But I would need people to (a) bring their material to me; (b) accept that I would have no idea of the information in the photos; and (c) collect the results. I would put the results onto a thumb drive. The cost would be some fee depending on the time required, plus the cost of the thumb drive.

But I may be too optomistic. People are notoriously reluctant to pay anything for a service. Maybe I’m too cynical. We’ll see.