Random Advice Needed

[lesliepear]

1. I got a 10 gallon fishtank, filter and hood on freecycle the other day. I've rinsed the fish tank and tossed out the colored gravel (it had some sort of bronwish crystals mixed in it - maybe salt?). I did keep the various decorative things that were in the tank - rocks, fake plants etc. I've refilled the tank partway and left it in my shower to make sure it isn't leaking. I plan to go to the local fish store (not a chain) and show them the filter and hood and see if the filter works - I need a bulb for the hood anyway. Any other advice on cleaning out a fish tank and setting it up? I'm looking for easy to care for fish - now that Alan's older, I doubt he'll dump the whole container of fish food in the tank this time (which did in our first goldfish when he was 3!)

2. Does anyone have a GPS? I'm seriously considering one. I have a good sense of direction but some travels lately have made it desirable to have on-the-fly routing, especially in the dark. I like this one I saw at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Garmin-Widescreen-Bluetooth-Navigator-Refurbished/dp/B000YE99NQ/ref=br_lf_m_1000284401_1_4_ttl?ie=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&s=electronics&pf_rd_p=448571201&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_t=1401&pf_rd_i=1000284401&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0JRHSE1Z211SV95YYZ68

My husband wanted me to check this one out:

http://www.amazon.com/TomTom-ONE-XL-Widescreen-Refurbished/dp/B000XABAG0/ref=br_lf_m_1000284401_1_2_ttl?ie=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&s=electronics&pf_rd_p=448571201&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_t=1401&pf_rd_i=1000284401&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1JWKM5T8W7SY7E2FFJX7

I probably will get it at Amazon unless there is a super black Friday deal as I have over 125.00 in gift certificates. I'd really like one with traffic info as one trip we do every year (back and forth to Ithaca) has a section of highway (I-81) perpetually under construction it seems.

Any advice?

Comments

[siobhan-1.livejournal.com]

Garmin is good - it's the only one I've used tho so I don't know about comparisons. My mom got it for my dad who is extremely directionally challenged and now she doesn't have to drive him places.

[kukla-red.livejournal.com]

I can't help with #1 but I will say I love my GPS. I have Magellan 1600, which I don't really recommend. It seems to have some hangups, but I've made it work. It was very cheap - I got it for about $120 last December on one of those Amazon gold box special deals. It works, but there seems to be an issue with the battery life - it doesn't seem to realize that it is charged when it should be fully charged so it keeps turning itself off at inopportune moments.

That being said, I LOVE having it. It has helped me tremendously and I've loaned it to my sister-in-law when she drove down to PA for the Obama campaign and when we had friends in from England last year who needed to drive to New Jersey for a wedding. It helps with my Freecycle(TM) pickups - no more wandering around dark streets peering at non-existent house numbers!

Definitely get one. Check out www.epinions.com for product reviews before you buy.

[sisterfish125.livejournal.com]

I bought a Magellan last year and love it. However, saying that, I have found many more accessories (dash-top friction mount, etc) for Garmins.

I would recommend getting one that announces the street names. (i.e., "turn left onto Main St") instead of "turn left in 0.5 miles". This became apparent to me when I was in the car with someone who paid more for their GPS than I did for mine. John's was a Garmin, and Karen (the GPS who spoke in an Australian accent) was very good.

Maggie (my GPS) has saved my butt many times...except when I first tried to update her maps. I ended up having to send her back to Magellan for the upgrade. Magellan's customer service was less than responsive, which seemed to be par for the course when I did an online search.

[moobabe.livejournal.com]

I puffy pink heart my GPS. We had a Garmin, but replaced it with a TomTom. Garmin has more... I think they're navigational points. So if you'd use it to try to find a restaurant nearby or something, Garmin is better. TomTom is quicker at connecting to the satellite, so if you would use it more as, "Crap, we're lost and need to figure out where we are NOW" then TomTom would be better.

In my opinion. ;)

(Plus, with the TomTom, you can download John Cleese's voice giving you directions--for a price. ;)

[davmoo.livejournal.com]

Since everyone else covered GPS, I'll hit the fish tank.

This is one of those things that aquarium owners will debate as fervently as the existence of Santa, so I'm sure you will find many people who will disagree with me. But in my defense, I have 25 year old fish, so I must be doing something right ;-)

Put a couple of cups or so of bleach in a gallon of water, and *thoroughly* use it on the aquarium, the inside of the filter box, and any decorations you are keeping. Make sure everything gets covered. Then rinse with clean water just as thoroughly. Then when you fill the aquarium for real, use a liberal dose of the available chemicals to remove chlorine from tap water...bleach is chlorine, and that will remove any possible remnants of it. The bleach will have killed anything bad that might have been on the tank or its contents, and will also kill any snail eggs.

Then when you get fish, start *slow*. Get a couple of cory cats and a couple of colorful platies, and for the first month or so don't put any other fish in until the tank gets established and the bio-organisms start cycling. Then you can add some more of the common community tank fish like swordtails, zebras, guppies, etc. They are all low maintenance.

[steve98052.livejournal.com]

We have a TomTom One XL. It's really nice. The only other one we've had was an early Garmin hand-held, which didn't have any sort of maps in it; obviously the TomTom is an improvement on that sort of thing. I like it a lot. It's wrong occasionally (like one spot that showed up as a four-way intersection, but turned out to have a diagonal barrier so that it was more like two right turns), but not often.

I concur with davmoo about the fish, on the basis of his success with keeping fish alive, and on chemistry – put nasty stuff in the system to kill everything you don't want in there, then thoroughly remove nasty stuff so it doesn't kill anything you want in there.

We had one fish, a plecostomus, which lived for many years, from the time we got the tank until the time we passed it on to a new owner, plecostomus still living. I'd recommend one of them for that reason, and because they're supposed to help keep the tank clean.