Mostly lemon based

Day: January 5, 2015

  • Assembly is the reverse of disassembly, but with more cleaning

    So it’s back together. I’m leaving it another day until I turn it on for the alcohol to fully dry out…

    I ended up dremmeling the memory with a polishing wheel to attempt to get the contacts clean enough to have some hope of reasonable connections being made…

    RiscPC renovations

    You can actually see the fluff on the memory stick there (that’s the painfully expensive VRAM) – which is taken before it got another spraying with isopropyl alcohol (like the big can at the back folks? I’ve spent more on cleaning this machine than it’s actually worth)…

    RiscPC renovations

    It’s weird because when I first bought those SIMMs they were so expensive and I was insanely anxious about inserting them. Everything I read was all about how static sensitive they were. And here I am going at them with a power tool attempting to get enough corrosion off for the machine to work.

    If it does all work I might be tempted to throw RISC OS 5 or 6 into it, because then it will have exciting features like ‘DHCP’ which means it won’t be quite so much work to coax it into connecting to the internet. I need to have a look and see if they include any form of networked storage access.

    Although I’ve reassembled it, if I do get a new OS I might even find it a new disk. I had a quick meandery look around, but didn’t remember where the harddisks were living (in the drawers by the desk) until afterwards. What is bugging me is I’m fairly certain that John gave me a StrongARM 233 (as opposed to my original 200Mhz) and a 2 slot backplane (although why I want to plug in the SCSI card when I’ve no SCSI drives anymore is a good question).

    RiscPC renovations

    Still it’s all back together now, and looking at least a lot more like a computer:

    IMG_20150105_163814

    And all sat back in place ready for me to throw the switch in a couple of days.

    IMG_20150105_170416

    In other exciting computer news, the media server stuff has all arrived. Although I’m still vacillating about whether I should buy it a new hard disk.

  • Dear USian tv shows

    Please, please do a better job of pretending when doing the UK (also probably the rest of Europe). It really makes it hard to stick with my suspension of disbelief when nothing, absolutely nothing looks right. Elementary’s London looked an awful lot like the US. And it turns out The Librarian’s ‘London’ looks nothing like England, not even vaguely.

    Almost every show that uses bits of the US that look vaguely like the UK fails dramatically to make the US actually look like the UK; although The Librarians is the laziest effort I’ve seen in a long time. Just blurring out US licence plates doesn’t make them look like British ones. And really simple things like road markings, signage, and interior shots with light switches. For reference, this is a British light switch:

    IMG_20150105_120130

    Neither this:

    US lightswitch

    Nor even this:

    US Light switch

    Looks sufficiently like it to pass off as one.

    It seems like small stuff, and in a show as bare-faced-silly as The Librarians you might think it doesn’t matter, but it is really distracting. Par example; go to google image search and type in ‘london shops’. Go on. Try it.

    Now tell me which bit of London this looks like, exactly?

    The Librarians in 'London'

    Even worse, incidentally, having ‘set the scene’ with some stock locationy shots, they don’t actually use the outside of that very-not-london scene anyway. At least, not sufficiently to make it worth completely screwing with the concept that it’s meant to be London.

    And where in the UK is this road?

    The Librarians in 'London'

    This road on which are parked cars with strangely blurry number plates and which oddly appears to have ‘double yellows’ (or a no-parking restriction) oddly painted down the centre of the road…

    Which is not to say I don’t like The Librarians. I mean, it’s not exactly the best writing in the world, but it’s fun and silly and enjoyable. And then they have to break my suspension of disbelief with this easy, simple, not-hard-to-fix stuff.

    Lord, you’re doing enough digital image stuff, fix the damn road markings and find a faux location that at least actually looks a bit like England…

    And don’t get me started on the Dick Van Dyke style accents… Seriously.