Today I was met with error code 73 when trying to login to Disney Plus on my Apple TV. Their help article says you're either on a VPN or "Attempting to access Disney+ from a country/region where service is currently unavailable" which I obviously was not.

Despite lots of articles on the web saying to trying rebooting, reinstalling, and the like, none of that worked (although I did try it anyway) because what had actually happened was Disney had blocked my IP address. I know this because when I got on live chat, explained the situation, they asked for my IP (by sending me to this ad-riddled website) then they "refreshed my IP" for me which magically fixed it. Yep, refresh the IP address, thats a thing.

No amount of rebooting was going to fix that. Next time, I'll just go straight to the live chat.

I'm not saying I'm obsessed with Mildliners but this review of the new fine versions will be my fourth post about them so make of that what you will.

These new fine versions have two tips: a fine 0.7 and an extra fine 0.5. They're longer than the standard Mildliners presumably to accommodate the fine tips and the top of the cap is embossed with an F. There are ten of these in total reusing existing colours across two sets: the calmer, darker "Set A" and the brighter "Set B". I've updated the Mildliner site to have the new sets but for the sake of completeness the available colours are:

• Gray
• Brown
• Dark Blue
• Red
• Dark Gray
• Gold
• Apricot
• Fuchsia
• Violet
• Summer Green

I think gray is probably a little too light to be useful at the extra fine size but overall this is a decent selection of colours. Two grays though? Come on. If Art from the Heart are to be believed these have limited availability although I can't verify that because Zebra don't seem to know these exist based on their website.

The extra fine tip doesn't give the kind of resistance I like from a fineliner usually but I doubt I'll be using these to write with; much more likely they get used for cover pages and general decoration. It's notable that there is now multiple definitions of "fine" across the range - the standard fine, the new fine, and the brush tipped ones mark the non-brush end as "super fine".

One other oddity when comparing them is that all the cap colours match with the exception of dark grey where the cap is much darker on the fine one than it's standard counterpart.

I paid £10 for each set of these which is about right for Mildliners and I'm impressed with them. As of right now I've only seen them on Art from the Heart but I'd imagine other retailers will get some soon.

Over the weekend I was attempting to setup my garden hose ready for the summer and my dad had helpfully given me a big bag of tap connectors he had spare but none of them fit my outdoor tap despite one of them being, to my eye, a perfect match.

This page from Hozelock explains threads on a tap are "sized according to the standard British Standard Pipe, also known as BSP". Yay standards. Looking into it more there seemed to be three options: 1/2″ BSP, 3/4″ BSP, and 1″ BSP which correspond to an outer thread measurement of 21mm, 26.5mm, and 33mm. I measured my tap with my tape measure and it looked to be 21mm or 1/2″ BSP. I found the correct adaptor I would need based on this but I already had that exact thing in my hand and it was the aforementioned one that didn't fit. The 1/2 was a tiny bit too small, the 3/4 was too big. I grabbed my calipers to get a more accurate measurement and it was actually 22mm which according to maths is larger than 21mm.

At this point I didn't really know what to search for because "like a 1/2 BSP but a bit bigger please" wasn't going to cut it. Hozelock didn't have anything on their website beyond the three standards. I still don't know how I found it (perhaps I should have used Horse) but I eventually stumbled upon this Reddit thread about tap threads where someone had included images of the exact same problem I was facing. There were a bunch of comments that linked to dead pages but the top comment was someone who had summarised everything in the thread:

For anyone else coming to this thread years later, who also had the same issue of the tap falling exactly between the 1/2" and 3/4" connectors [...] I found that my outside tap is a non-standard 5/8" thread, BUT there are connectors available for it!

I ordered a 5/8 adaptor (this Spear & Jackson BWF10 Female Threaded Brass) from Amazon, it arrived the next day, and it fit perfectly. Great success. I did see some references to another size of adaptor, 7/8", which seems to be called a "farmer's tap" but thankfully I didn't need to hunt one of those down.

As I am want to do, I posted a note about it a bit later in the day. Like many posts on my site it was as a record for myself but also on the off chance it helps someone else. To my surprise Ana replied that she had the exact same problem and had been putting it off so it helped at least one person and I have a garden hose ready for summer.