I bought three things. One was an HDMI cable. It turned out to be faulty. I only figured that out after wasting more hours of my precious life trying to diagnose non-existent equipment faults. The company that sold it to me disappeared so no CGA. Oh well, it was ‘only’ $12.

Another was a mini-computer. The tale of my woes with that is ongoing and has filled many threads here.

The third was a highly-reputed Hauppauge HDMI recorder. In my naivety, I foolishly imagined reclining on my decadent couch, streaming the world at the flick of the remote, capturing whatever took my fancy in HD.

The computer still isn’t working right, and probably never will. Chinese support has advised me to ‘ask friends for help’ and ‘search the Internet’. The HD DVR 2 isn’t working correctly either, but I have been so immersed in the problems with the computer that I only just realised that.

I don’t seem to have ordinary ‘doesn’t switch on’ problems. My problems are subtle and devious and confidence-sapping. Sometimes the computer works. Sometimes it doesn’t. It is usually when I want to actually watch something that it doesn’t.

The recorder should have been simple to install. It wasn’t. It took days to determine that a faulty USB cable (supplied with the recorder) was intermittently sabotaging things. But I finally got it working, in the process chewing through many, many obstacles put up by the unfamiliar faulty computer and the unfamiliar frankly bizarre Windows 8.1 architecture. It doesn’t help that the computer is a desktop, albeit a tiny one, but comes pre-installed with a tablet OS that is completely unsuitable for it.

At long last I was able to make some test recordings. Gorgeous vivid HD recordings. At last, something that works. Or at least it did until I actually tried to play it back. Turns out the software is cutting off the last 10 per cent of every recording. No idea why. It records it, but then chucks it away during ‘finalisation’. The only way to get the whole video is to copy the file somewhere else while it is still being recorded. As soon as the recording is stopped or the program closed the end gets lopped off.

All of this has taught me a lesson. The days when products were actually tested before being shipped are long gone. The days when products were so well made that they didn’t need to be tested are also past. Quality control has become an alien concept. Along with customer service.

Never again will I buy anything new.