Mostly lemon based

Category: Computing

Computer problems

Progress (apace)

So, today was definitely one of those days where progress was made. Indeed, between yesterday and today much progress in a forward direction has occurred. The Pi is now working (although it has had to be overclocked to get enough performance to play my 30 gig HD Blu-Ray rips), I now just need to knock up a case for the LCD. For some reason some of the shows haven’t quite been picked up right to the library – and some shows have some episodes missing for no apparent reason. The naming conventions are fairly reasonably adhered to, so I’m not quite sure what’s up with that.

Anyhow, it’s working. I need to work out how to turn on two audio interfaces simultaneously (or maybe get it a USB audio interface, apparently the standard one’s a bit sucky). See, when we’re watching TV, in general we listen to the audio through the TV, but when we listen to music, that’s through the amp. The amp does not sport an HDMI connection, because it’s a proper hi-fi amp, not a home-cinema amp. It’s one of my favourite purchases, actually, that amp. Because after years of crappy amplifiers, of using my family’s cast-off Technics to replace my very repaired Eagle amplifier (which I’ll grant was a very nice amp before it was repaired, twice), the modern Cambridge Audio amplifier and Gale speakers do sound gorgeous. And yes, after watching When Albums Ruled the World I am playing my parent’s copy of Sergent Pepper. Why do you ask. Uh, sorry, so the having audio output on both the HDMI and analogue audio outputs of the Pi would be handy. I don’t know how to persuade it to do that yet. I know people have persuaded it to do that though, so I need to look that up.

So that was a good start to yesterday. Today I actually used it as intended and watched a fine rip of Blackadder (the fourth) over breakfast. Then whilst I was working on the house (I’ll get to that) I used Airplay. This Pi business is ace, to be honest. Although my phone’s working far harder than it ever has before.

Then yesterday continued well, with a trip over to see the illustrious John. I took the opportunity to take the much maligned m-audio interface with me. This has been giving me grief again, or so I thought. It turned out I was wrong. It was a poor connection in the (brand new) Maplin 1/4″ jack plug – which was making the microphone into an aerial – and picking up all the hum that was available (which is quite a lot given that it’s surrounded by lots of computing stuff). This was exacerbated by the fact I appear to have gone insane. I am convinced that I’d been using it to capture audio from the record deck. Only either I am mad, or I something very odd was happening. Because it’s only got a mono input. Err, so, yes. Either we’ve been recording the difference between the two channels for records, or..err… perhaps I’m just misremembering. It’s so long since it worked (and tbh, the connector (it turns out) died so promptly when I started trying to record the show after John fixed the M-Audio interface last time), that I’ve forgotten what it was like to use it!

Anyhow, having traced the fault, which it turned out was nothing to do with either my craptastic soldering, or the (unfairly maligned) m-audio interface (problem is, it’s actually failed twice, and so now is highly suspect whenever anything goes wrong), we lopped the jack plug-and-socket off, and I soldered the XLR connector straight onto the mic. Which is probably what I should have done in the first place, but does mean that if the m-audio does fail again then I’ve no easy way to connect the mic to the Mac. So, all pray, eh. It was however, generally, a nice social day. Spent lots of time considering a bench multimeter – since it appears that I’m going to go doing stuff I’d sort of forgotten that I loved doing. I really do rather enjoy dinking with electronics. I’d obviously help if I was good at it, or actually could remember the stuff I was taught and learned as a kid, but eventually it’ll come back to me I’m sure.

Anyhow, today was similarly productive. Having cleaned the kitchen a bit, and done some washing up, I set to work on the house. I’ve sanded the filler in the hall way (it’s ready to paint now), and the plaster’s primed, and I’ve also spent a bit of time running a bead of caulking around the ceiling-wall joint (old-new plaster). I’ve cut and fitted the small piece of timber to replace the original bit that had warped and fallen down. I’ve hung the door in the hallway (after nearly two years with no door to our kitchen we now have an extremely ill fitting one). Unfortunately, it became (rapidly) apparent that the doorway to the kitchen is hilariously far from square. As in, ‘oh that’s a witty joke’. I mean, I know that having been built on a hill in the 1930s our house has only had a passing acquaintance with right angles. Indeed, one of the things I noticed when we first looked around was that I thought the stairs were not horizontal. They’re not. But the unsquareness of the doorways is… challenging. Now, before I hung it I took off the 1960s modernism which had been applied to one side (a layer of hardboard). Confusingly, all the doors in the house have a layer of hardboard on one side – I’d understand if both sides had been tormented in this way, but it is only the one side.

More oddly, it’s the side inside the rooms. So rather than walking into the house and being hit with modernist simplicity, it’s only when you’re inside the rooms. Except, because this door’s been moved and turned around, you would have been assaulted by a non-matching door when you walked into the house. So I attacked it, and attacked it…

And as expected, underneath lurked a perfectly good door. It could do with a little filling – if we were staying then I’d get them stripped and just leave them bare with their faults. As we’re not, they’ll get a light sand and fill, and then be painted.

I also cut and put up the missing section of picture rail.

The hall’s looking really rather a lot better now. Tomorrow I shall start actually painting the hall, which is quite exciting. I also need to mount our A-B payphone on the wall and knock up a cover for the fuse box. Then I need to find out how to wire it up – my dad did try once, having had a quick look at the ‘circuit’, but never quite got it right (you could dial/hear, but not speak, even when you’d paid the requisite number of pennies/six pence/shillings). ISTR there’s a newsgroup / forum for vintage phone fans, they may well know the correct way to connect it…

That will probably max out our line’s ring-capacity.

I’ve no idea what the ‘REN’ is for phones of this age, but ISTR that when we got up to 5 phones in my parents house the phones started auto-answering, because the ring-current required was so high, that attempting to ring them made the phone system think that the phone had been answered…

Heh.

Anyhow. So, tomorrow I start the painting festival. I also need to drop off my ‘new’ bag to be repaired. And I’ve been ripping music for the last… age, and I’m continuing to do so. I’ve now made it well into the DJ box (holds 300 CDs or so). I need to have a bit of a think about this, I need more sleeves, I think. I took the DVDs out of the other box, and put them into a DVD-specific DJ-case, so the other small DJ case should be empty. This means I can start the strip-down of the CDs (so we can keep the artwork and recycle/offer the boxes up on freecycle, saving us from transporting them to Canada). Whee. So, onwards we go.

10/2/2013
A riscy business

So, I want(ed) a Squeezebox, and logitech decided to discontinue them. So the other thought that had been rattling around my brain for a while was the ‘I could use a Raspberry Pi and a VFD display‘. The trick is to find a VFD that’s easily drivable from a Pi, and a mediacentre installation that’s happy to drive a VFD. I think the poor old Pi is going to have to be controlled via the network (although, actually, I think it could probably replace the Viewsonic box – meaning we’d just need the one box doing eeeeverything).

My hesitation is that I’ve not done anything like this for a long time. I actually find myself somewhat nervous about it.

Which is odd, when you stand back an look at my history. I built (granted with help) a digital to analogue display to drive a speedometer and rev counter (and a bunch of dash lights) from a game. I then patched a game by hacking to read the contents BBC’s memory whilst it was running, finding where it was storing the speed and rpm. Then wrote an assembly language patch which overwrote the joystick controller section of the game (there was no spare memory to allocate to my hack, sadly) with a lookup table which contained output values that correlated to appropriate values to drive the AtoD at to make the speedo and rev counter (the speedo of which had been hacked to contain the guts of a rev counter) display something approximating the graphics onscreen. Then I added a driver to output those numbers to the user port on a BBC micro (thus driving the nice little D to A). All without overwriting bits of a game that was notoriously difficult to fit into the Beeb’s 32K. I designed and wirewrapped that board. I did that. No one else had done that specific thing before.

Now granted, whilst the Raspberry Pi sports the monkier ‘Model B’, harking back to the awesome BBC Micro, my ex-knowledge of 6502 assembly language is unlikely to be helpful here. But really, attaching a VFD to a Raspberry Pi is something that has been done before, and doesn’t particularly require specialist knowledge. I mean, it requires a bit of basic editing of files and understanding how to use ‘make‘ and so on. But even rusty as I am, a quick look at a Man page and I should be away with that without too much trauma.

And having written this, I feel fairly committed to making the idea come about*. And so, I shall maketh my shoppinglist(eth).

– Raspberry Pi
– VFD display (HD44780 compatible, probably 20×2)
– Powersupply (if John doesn’t mind handing me another from his selection of supplies)
– Pi case (heh)
I’ll also need to knock up some kind of VFD case, although I have an idea about how I’d like to go about doing that.

Anyhow, today is devoted to adjusting the brakes on my bike (because I’m on nights, and being able to stop on my way home (or indeed, on my way to work) is convenient.

* Although my clock project has so far failed, because the clock keeps stalling for no obvious reason, and for some reason the WAP54G caused all hell on our network and failed to extend the network to the garage, which was its entire point, but I wanted to replace that with the OpenWRT firmware anyhow, so need to retry sorting that out.

22/1/2013
Days off

Days off still feel a bit of an oddity. I allowed myself a break between the slog of the bathroom and starting the hallway, because I thought this is probably good for my sanity. In it I’ve cleaned the house, I’ve moved the website (wordpress used to be in a subdirectory, it’s now not) and upgraded wordpress (and applied a new theme, which I’m not sure about at the moment, but is the theme that I’m trying. It’s a suck-it-and-see approach*). I’ve listed my Kawasaki GT-550 on e-bay (*whimper*). I’ve been to Two Day Coffee and got more coffee. I’ve been to Maplin and got possibly the worst power tool I’ve ever owned – a battery dremel clone (and been slightly stunned to find that it’s got an AC-adaptor**, rather than a DC adaptor, which means I’ll have to look at the guts of the charger to see if I can take it to Canada. The only reason I got it, rather than any other Dremel clone, is I thought it would be useful to take to Canada. I didn’t get an actual Dremel because Kathryn already owns one, so spending twice as much on something that duplicates what we’ve already got, not handy. Although, as we’ve already considered, probably vastly better quality).

I’ve worked on the clock*** (which I’m going to continue doing after this) and I’ve tried to rejoin the nursing agency. I’ve written some more of the next episode of Dead Bug Jumping, and I’ve installed and started to toy with a new media server. I’ve ripped another 10 CDs and done 3 loads of laundry (and am pondering a fourth).

I’m not quite sure I’ve got the hang of this ‘Days off’ concept.

* The result of which may be that it sucks. I’ve got through four themes so far today.
** Which outputs 6volts at 50hz. What’s up with that? I’m assuming that, somewhere in the guts of the hideous plastic base object, there’s a rectifier.
*** Which is for-why I bought the dremel clone. Because the new clock mechanism doesn’t fit in the space previously occupied by the old clock mechanism.

16/1/2013
Onward

So, today’s progress report from the house…

Sealant in around bathroom window; it’s not as neat as I would like in a couple of patches, but I’ve definitely got better at it (also, this is way nicer sealant than the grot I’ve got previously from B&Q. Much smoother to use, but dries hella-fast).

I’ve managed to break the new toilet seat, however, standing on it to reach the window. This is upsetting, and means I’ll have to fix it tomorrow :(

In other news, the roof has (hopefully) been fixed. The company said that while long-term it’ll need the zinc replacing, the repair should last a good while. There are some slightly sad tiles up there, but nothing else needs immediate attention, which is good news.

I’ve also been ripping music like a good’un – I’ve got through in the region of 50 CDs. I’ve also been ‘tidying’ in the video and film directories, coming up with something like a naming scheme. I’ve also added a specific username for the media equipment to use (Herbert Shuffle*). I’ve also started moving media around to have one disk full of Audio and the other full of Video. Obviously it’d be nice to have a nice shiny RAID system with backup on it… But not yet, eh.

I’ve also registered for assessment of and organised sending of transcripts for both my Bachelor’s degrees to Nova Scotia, for to have them decide that I can take the exam which will hopefully lead to us exiting this country. Ironic, really, because we’re trying to work out if Kathryn can get Citizenship here, so that we can come back later. Maybe. For a bit :)

And finally, I’ve ordered an FD to Micro 4/3rds lens mount for my Lumix G1. Because**. If anyone wants to give me decent or fish-eye or ultra-wide-angle FD lens (or spots them realllllllly cheaply somewhere, or better still, free), let me know.

Uh, so I think that’s it for today. I was hoping to put up the light in the bathroom, but I was informed by Kathryn that I wasn’t doing that because I was yelping and having great difficulty moving my left arm. She was, of course, right. Although I think I could do it now, it’s probably worth letting my arm have the rest of the day off, especially because lying in bed last night and trying to turn over, I kind of looked like a beached fish as I flapped my body trying to avoid using my arm. Abduction is a bugger, adduction less so. Circumduction isn’t happening. I’m just praying I don’t have to do CPR at work because I may end up in worse shape than the patient… :-/

In other, other news, I need to sort out putting DD-WRT on the other WAP54G; this is because the WAP54G’s feeble wireless output isn’t quite enough to reach our garage (our old Belkin 802.11b router could just, just reach the garage, but was painfully unreliable and only did WEP encryption***). So I might as well sort the other power supply for it… which is something to do tomorrow.

* Bonus points if you can name the source of the username. But not many bonus points, because… obviously.
** Because I have a few FD lenses, and there’s no way I can afford any new Micro 4/3s lenses at the moment. Yes, I know this makes the pretty/shiny/small argument for buying the G1 invalid. Yes. Shut up and go away.
*** And whilst I do support the concept of open WiFi, our ADSL is so sick that sharing out the weedy connection we’ve got seems foolish.

10/1/2013
The New Rip Project

Okay, so as I’ve commented before (enough times, I’m sure), back when I originally ripped the media in our house a variety of encoders were used. The archaic Risc PC encoder (ooh, the pain), LAME on Linux (a early 2000’s version), various PC encoders… It depended on the OS I was using at the time.

Some files were encoded by others at various bitrates (128kbps….*shudder*)*. Most of the more recent stuff was done at high bit rate using VBR… But over the last few weeks I’ve been making slow-and-erratic progress on re-ripping stuff and setting up the new media system….
(more…)

9/1/2013
Master of the 8bit music

So, today I headed over to John’s with some more of our broken old sad things. Actually I headed over to see John with the hope of showing off the Music 5000. Technically, what we have is an upgraded Music 500. But anyhow, I loaded up the Volvo into a Early 80’s timewarp, and headed over. I also took our Alfa sewing machine which had stuck and wasn’t working anymore. I suspect it was in need of a service… but wasn’t sure whether there was more to it than just oiling things. Also, I didn’t have any suitable oil…

(more…)

6/1/2013
Okay, so just FLAC then?

So, when I first set up the music server I initially intended just to get the music using normal network shares. But the Viewsonic VMP74 didn’t seem to want to connect to it. Which was irritating. So I set up UPnP. Now, that’s the only way we’ve used it, pretty much (apart from iPlayer and the odd bit of YouTube). Whilst lots of things worked, files over 4Gb caused it to skip onto the next track at 4Gig, and despite thinking it supported FLAC files, it didn’t seem to work.

But yesterday I set it up to use the network shares and… it’ll play FLAC across the network (and the 30Gig Blu-Ray rips work fine). This is confusing, but happyness.

Of course, this still leaves one teensy tiny problem. iTunes. iTunes in it’s perpetual suckage does not support FLAC. Despite the fact users have been, apparently, asking for this for the last 6 releases. Hey Apple, I love your hardware, and your OS, but I have to admit iTunes is the most crappy piece of software I have to use regularly (at home, we won’t get into what I have at work).

So now everything else in the house can use FLAC, and nothing needs UPnP. I still have to dual rip everything and waste disk space so that I can have music on my iPhone. But I don’t need to transcode FLAC, and I don’t need to fire up mediatomb every time the machine starts. This makes future configuration much, much easier.

24/12/2012
Steady, if not stellar, progress

So, I’m still not back to pre-course levels of productivity, and some mornings spin by without so much as a by-your-leave (mostly with me either dinking on the laptop, watching some TV series or other* or disappearing into a book) but I’m maintaining a level of progress on the house which, whilst it’s not quite what I’d like is sufficient to keep me reasonably happy.

Today I’ve panelled in the side of the bath. For much of the last year and a half (since the heating was installed) we’ve not had any panelling on the bath, allowing open access to the crap underneath it. Giving rise to a gentle breeze through the hole in the wall where the waste water pipe exits into the roof space above the laundry/server room**. There’s still a breeze where the pipe for the waste water exits for the sink, but the bath one is now, finally, behind some panelling.

Yes, it’s scrap MDF which is about the least appropriate wood to put in a bathroom, but it’s what I’ve got lying around and I’m hoping that the application of sufficient sealant and paint will protect it well enough.

There’s quite a bit of filling to do (because I’ve screwed it in all over the place. I’ve left a nice little panel so you can access the waste water connections and the valves for the taps… And I’ve even primed it today. Tomorrow, despite being on nights, I’ll endeavour to get the sealant on around the edges and slap some filler on it. That’s about all I’m scheduling for tomorrow.

Handily, under the bath was lurking a multipack of blades for a razor which I’ve kept the handle for, which saves buying more blades for the current one for a while****. Also a lot of packaging for decorating bits which has now gone into the recycling…

I also spent some time fixing the clothes airer. A while ago it broke on one side and became rather a floppy object. I attempted to fix it with a bit of a metal sheath, but it kept coming apart and fairly quickly we got fed up of pushing it back together, and just used it with it flopping about. Now, I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise to anyone that of course this massively increased the stress on the other side of the airer, and yesterday it snapped on the other side dropping our laundry.

So today I set to with some of the spare pipework from the bathroom:

Which seems to have done the job. At least, it’s now standing up. Although it looks like the design was reliant on the flexing of the plastic (*shudder*) which means that some of the other clips that were previously fixed in place with lugs are now sliding clips. Which….well, it’s working for the minute. As it’s the third time it’s been repaired (if you count the lousy fix before) I think I’m being pretty generous to it. It falls into the ‘I don’t want to replace it before we leave’ category, because we have no need of more things that we need to ship.

I’ve also given the stairs a quick hoover, done my uniforms for work on Monday night, and had a quick hoover/pick up in the lounge… And now I’m relaxing to Blondie (Parallel Lines, on yummy yummy vinyl) whilst testing a theory about the VMP74 (which seems not to like streaming files more than 4Gb over UPnP*****). So that’s not so bad.

* Recent fixations: Community and MASH, although I’ll fairly frequently watch the Rachel Maddow Show, which is why I’m much more up on USian politics than our own. I think this is partly because Rachel Maddow is awesome, and presents a new show of a variety that just doesn’t exist here. And partly because it’s easier to cope with watching the insanity in the US than watching the painful horror going on here, as our government gut protections for those with long term illness or disability, as they’ve privatised the NHS (they really have, go look at who’s supplying NHS ‘services’ (even writing that makes me want to wash myself, it makes me feel dirty), and endeavoured to turn the lucky people with jobs against the many who are not so fortunate.
** Yes, I’m aware that this is a less than desirable combination. But it puts the server well out of the way, where the fact it’s an old machine with many, many fans is not a problem. It’s set up to shut down on all sorts of heat related errors, and has a virtually brand new power supply ***.
*** Unfortunately the PC in the garage appears to have died. I’ve not looked into this to see if this is the power supply dying or something else. But at any rate, I noticed it wasn’t running the camera software when I went down there, and on rebooting it’s not managing to restart. Indeed, it’s not even managing to POST. Which is probably bad.
**** Ever since realising that making the razor pink had little effect on it’s ability to produce smooth legs I’ve used whatever razor meets a complex mix of price/shape/number of blades criteria, and the winner for a long time was one which was sold for a long time by all the big supermarket chains in the UK. Slim, triple bladed and really, really cheap it was my fave. Unfortunately, they all stopped selling them – Tesco being the last to stock the blades. I bought several packs of the blades towards the end of production, but eventually ran out… only, apparently not.
***** It seems that it does work playing the file over the network not using UPnP.

23/12/2012
Not going smoothly

So, the media server died. Well, it’s not dead. At 10 years old the Athlon XP’s power supply started to fail. I have a faint feeling it may have failed before, but this time I wandered into the Laundry room / Store, and went ‘gosh, it smells of hot components’. Having checked over the motherboard* and found no leaking capacitors I took out the power supply (which I suspected anyhow) and peered in. And in the darkness there lurked multiple failing capacitors.

So. I thought about it. I thought I could replace the power supply. But I hate just slinging something that needs only minor work to repair it. I thought I could replace the whole PC and freecycle the old one, but a quick check of e-bay revealed that PCs that are are on there are either on buy-it-now for way more than a new power supply (or repairs to the old one) or more than I’m willing to spend.

Having visited Nikki and Kate, they had a Packaged Hell Intel P4 that was filling space in their lounge (ironically it’s one that’s been here before, and we returned to them having decided we had no use for it). Having revised my processor knowledge from 10 years ago, it’s slightly higher performance and it sports 2 gig of ram. This, it seemed was a winner. And so I brought it home and performed open heart surgery:

And then sat down and played the ‘getting a new OS onto an old computer’ game.

It’s actually not that difficult, ‘cept I didn’t want to disassemble my desk – pulling the monitor and such, but upstairs there’s no WiFi adaptor and no wired network point (yes, I should have got them to run the cable at the same time as they rewired, rather than sneaking my network cables in after they’d wired downstairs and not bothering with upstairs) and this machine plugs into the flood-wired downstairs network when it’s fully installed. So I took it upstairs, and after a couple of failed disk burns (the stack of very cheap CD-Rs that I keep kicking around providing a staggering fail rate) produced a CD which worked (they report 24x burning, but 10x is about as fast as they’ll cope with). Having installed Ubuntu I shut down the machine for the night (having found it doesn’t have VLC on the base install CD).

Then yesterday I booted it downstairs connected to the network, forgetting that X needs some tweaks before it’ll boot headless. It didn’t boot, obviously. Then I gave in and pulled the monitor from my desk (time to be grateful for LCDs) and tried again. Still not booting. After a few more goes (it’s not making it to any form of command line either) I reinstalled Ubuntu. It still failed. Then I looked at the power supply in the P4. 315Watts. Whatnow? Running the notoriously power hungry P4, three hard disks and a DVD drive? I suspect it’s a bit much for it. It already ‘whined’ – apparently it’s always done that – or at least for a long time, but I think the whine eminating from it may have been a death-whine.

So the new plan:
– Replace capacitors in old power supply and use to switch out with old power supply on Garage PC – which is the same age as the power supply that’s failed.
– New power supply in P4 – if that works and it runs properly, use that.
– If not, nick memory from P4 (although there’re only two slots in my Athlon) and use it to marginally upgrade the Athlon server.

Unfortunately, this means I get to reinstall software that I’ve spent a fair while tweaking. Mediatomb. So feh.

ETA: I was hoping to go and pick up a power supply today, from a local store (for local people). Unfortunately, ringing around demonstrated that there is a difference between “profit margin” and “I’ll wait a day or two for it to arrive from an internet supplier”. I understand they have much higher overheads, but the difference between 16 quid delivered for a 700 Watt power supply and 40 quid I go and collect it for a 500 Watt one is too much for me, even with my ideals about buying locally, to ignore. This is more frustrating because I wanted to treat myself to a new episode of The Newsroom before I went to work for my night shift, which I thought was unlikely, but I had vague hopes for. Feh, basically.

ETA2: Bollocks. Unintentionally bought my new powersupply from Scan. Bought it on ebay, didn’t pay attention to seller’s name… Arse.

ETA3: And the capacitors have arrived… The Royal Mail left them outside the house… in the rain. How helpful.

*Not motherbard, which is literally different.

18/9/2012
The good, the bad and the otherstuff

So, good news first, eh?

I am going to go and spend the afternoon doing data collection. Yay. Err, or something. No, seriously, I thought that retrieving the data for the study was going to spiral into this infinite nightmare, but actually? It’s going okay. I need to go in today for a few hours and hopefully it shouldn’t be too traumatic. Then tomorrow I can start to enter it for processing. My original-modified plan suggested I’d stick it all in a database on the computer, but I can’t get it from there into SPSS easily and I had to submit the data collection form for approval which is less easy to do with a data collection database.

The amplifier has arrived, and very nice it is too. Theoretically. It’s not like I’ve turned it on or anything, I’ve just looked at it and made a list of some of the bigger electrolytic caps (mainly power supply ones) to replace before I turn it on. I’ve even found a company that makes new electrolytic decoupling capacitors, and is not priced in the same range as many of the other audiophile ones (£30 for one fricking capacitor? That’s more than the amp cost!). And all you audiophiles can duke it out over whether using electrolytics as decoupling capacitors is a good thing or not. Me, my fig is ungiven. I just don’t want it to go ‘bang’ when I turn it on. Sadly it’s only got European mains capability, so when we go to Canada it’ll have to go, however lovely it is. But the teak and green vinyl case is quite pleasant, especially for a home-made case. And I’m just happy that I can listen to music (in the near future) in the library, without headphones on.

I’ve also got a list on Farnell at the moment of capacitors I want for the rest of the supply. Unfortunately I’ve not hit their minimum order price, so I’m hoping that John is wanting to place a Farnell order. Really I want the kind of shop that existed when my dad was a kid, filled to the brim with passive components and such, that you can just wander in and go ‘hey, I want some of these’ and they’ll have ’em. I don’t think they exist anymore tho’, at least, not in this country.

Anyhow, my paranoia derives from this telly:

I loved that telly. It was dreadful in innumerable ways. It had a grand total of four channels which I wisely tuned into the same output signal, that of my video recorder. This is because at the denouement of any TV show it would wander out of tune and you’d get dancing static instead of the fact that would make your film, or show, make any kind of sense. To alleviate this problem, they were all tuned to the same channel and you could leap across the room, hitting the channel selector to catch the vital moment. If you were quick.

It also fluctuated, vaguely, between People Are Lavender, and some strange everyone-is-from-outerspace green tint. It took an age to warm up, and warm up it did, running at approximately the same temperature as a nuclear reactor.

But for all it’s dreadfulness, there was a kind of perverse pleasure in watching TV on something so aged, and so very definitely not of our time. I doubt I’d’ve replaced it even now, had it not gone bang.

It went bang many times through its life. Early colour TVs really pushed their components to the limits, and in the case of mine, as they aged, they wandered past their limits. Indeed, it finally went bang in a sufficiently irreperable way that it ended up going to the tip. I did offer it on freecycle, my post generated a lot of ‘that was a very funny offer, I don’t want the tv, but you almost made me want it’ e-mails, but none who’d love it and take it away and fix it. That made me quite sad. I’d pulled it from the tip in my teens and my dad helped me make it work (having actually turned up at the tip with one exactly the same which I’d salvaged from my school, which had also gone bang in a manner so spectacular that the TV repair shop declared essentially ‘we could fix it, but we’d have to replace every part including the tube’ which seemed excessive).

Anyhow, I recall it having the same type of electrolytic which lurketh in my new amp. I remember it because it went “BANG” and let out magic smoke quite early in the TV’s life. Unfortunately it’s one of the ones I have so far been unable to find a replacement for, an Electrolytic 220nF, 1000V capacitor. Now, I faintly wonder if I can replace it with another kind of capacitor, because you can get 220nF 1000V capacitors, just not electrolytic ones. If anyone fancies enlightening me on this, although you probably want to know what it uses it for, and I didn’t look that closely. I just hunted out electrolytics for replacement.

Also arrived is the watch strap for my Moskva watch.

I feel it now looks very cool on my wrist…

Although, given its current atrocious lack of accuracy it’s pretty much an affectation at the moment. If I want to know the time I actually need to check a device which tells the time. Finding somewhere to service it has proven to be difficult. It never really occurred to me (and you may call me stupid for this) that watch repairers would only repair specific makes. One shop in Bristol alledgedly will look at some Russian watches, but not mine. I’ve so far had one positive ‘we can look at it…but obviously won’t be able to get any spares’ from a shop in Devon. Which is fine… It will have to wait though, because I think I’ve burned through enough cash this month. It’s odd wearing it though, I’ve not worn watches for a long time – this is purely because I wanted one for a specific evening out, and realised that I don’t have one. Then realised that there’s no point in having battery watches because I wear them so infrequently…and that lead to vintage watches, which (obviously) lead to vintage Russian watches (it being me).

I’m quite enjoying the ticking it makes, at least at the moment.

However, in bad news, the much praised media server is…making a warm component smell. I’m trying to decide between chucking in a new power supply and just picking up a crappy second hand PC. One problem is I now won’t touch either DABS* or SCAN** computers. Both have been such shitty companies, which means I’m down to ‘random suppliers’. I need to make a decision though, although I should pull the machine out (I’ve shut it down at the mo) and see whether there’s evidence of capacitor leakage on the motherboard.

On the plus side, Cathedral Pens sent the new ink sac for my little pen, which has been fitted and I shall be trying out later today :)

* Tried to charge me for a delivery the delivery company driver reportedly stole. Repeatedly. Ended up with my bank returning the funds. Tried again a year or two later to get the funds. Won’t go near with a bargepole.
** Treated me like shit when a device they supplied ceased to work a month outside the warranty and well within the UK law’s lifespan of components laws.

15/9/2012