Mostly lemon based

Category: General

  • Just a brief desire

    So, while we were at my mum’s we went down to a second hand / house clearance place in Cornwall (also to the Eden project, so I’ll post some pics from there soon). There were a few things there we were interested in, a nice mini chesterfield sofa*, a mangle**, a nice office chair for Kathryn***, a desk****, a few gramophone records of interest (including some 50’s R&B, apparently, although I’ve not yet listened to it).

    And something of interest to me. Just to me. My mum and Kathryn were firmly in the ‘no’ camp, but I was fawning over it.

    Whilst I knew we have no-where to put it, and it’s a pointless silly thing to buy… It’s a 1950’s TV set. Much like this one:

    RCA Red TV from the 1950s

    I have no use for it (apart, perhaps, from watching Dr Who), but still. I wantyed.

    Managed to resist though…

    * way too pricey for us
    ** to use as an Intaglio printing press, also overpriced.
    *** see *
    **** not overpriced, but we have no-where to put it. It was a gorgeous roll top affair

  • In which we go away and see Venice.

    So, back from holiday. Everyone ready? I’ve got some slides to show you… (more…)

  • And it spirals upward

    So, the idea for what has become Kathryn’s anniversary present came to me a while ago. About a year, I think. I thought “Oh hey, that’s a cute idea”. I pitched myself some costs and decided it was a cute/fun idea that I could probably pull off in a few days.

    Maybe a week or so.

    A year later, and it’s likely to be her present this year. It’s nearly finished. I’ve amassed everything I need to make it (I think, although I’m actually now thinking that I’m still missing one small item. Gah…. *NOW* I have everything, having placed a very, very small order for a very, very small object).

    It’s spiralled out from being a cute idea to being a reasonably well executed, vastly over the top thing. I hope that she appreciates the humour in it, and doesn’t just look at it and go “Oh lord, Kate”…which would be a fair reaction. I also hope it doesn’t break in the first few moments of existence. I’d be upset.

    It’s spiralled a little in the sense that I assumed I’d be able to pick up all the stuff I wanted at charity shops, and it turns out, I couldn’t. Indeed, mostly it’s come from ebay. Which is sort of disappointing, but has allowed me to find things I didn’t entirely expect to find, that make the concept work better than my first collection of things for it did.

    I’m quite excited about it, now I’ve done the ‘difficult’ bit, and am into the ‘fun’ bit. Unfortunately, I’m given to understand that this year is ‘Flowers/Linens’ which is about the only thing not in it, in any sense. Never mind.

    It’s also fun to find that after months and months of my brain being committed to work that it still has the fun/playful element intact, and that I still enjoy doing ridiculous things with stuff :)

  • I thought it was me

    I’m often a dozy cow. I’ll order the wrong thing because I’ll miss something blatant on the packaging, like it being the wrong size, or I’ll forget to check the shape, or whatever. I think I use up all my exacting caution at work, checking drugs or sutures, or what have you.

    So this morning, when the envelope from RS components arrived and looked…thin. And when I opened it and found this:

    Untitled

    My first thought was that I’d been a spectacularly dozy cow. 5 small surface mount components stared back at me, and the complete lack of a pick-and-place machine, or indeed a device for them to live in wandered around my consciousness, as I debated what to do. I thought I’d just have to chalk it up to my usual insanity and buy some of the right components.

    But I remembered looking at it. While I wanted an axial capacitor, I remember thinking that since the capacitors just hang in space anyway, so long as I insulate the legs it doesn’t hugely matter if it’s a radial one instead… I remember noting the size, and that 2cm was okay to fit into the space…

    So I went back, looked at the site and found this:

    RS

    …rang RS, and they’re trying to sort out (very nicely) what’s happened, and will ring me later before sending me the right component. Let’s hope that the old electrolytic in the valve radio hangs on to life until then…

  • The Amp

    So, I spent some time changing out the capacitors (well, the electrolytic and the damaged ceramic one) on the Armstrong 227M amp that I nabbed from ebay. It’s a mono valve amp, so I’ve also made up a rather nice little 1kohm inside the plug shells stereo-to-mono phono lead. Anyhow…

    Foreign made.

    (more…)

  • The list

    So, I’ve got a little list of things to do when I finish my dissertation…More for me than anyone else, really.

    (more…)

  • 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.

    And in the darkness there lurked an evil that had infinite capacity for destruction

    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:

    Open heart surgery.

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

    ...here we go again

    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.

  • 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.

    The new amp

    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:

    Ferguson Colourstar Mk II

    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…

    Strappy Moskva

    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.

  • And she writes

    A joke that only makes sense in my head.

    Anyhow, today the package came from Cathedral Pens containing (I hoped) the bits I would need to fix the Platignum fountain pen. Having cleaned it and straightened its nib, all that was left was to change the ink sac, a remarkably simple affair.

    But before we get to that, I have to point out some ace customer service. Because Cathedral Pens actually looked at my blog post, then mailed me a complimentary ink sac in a different size, because they suspected I’d mismeasured. I had. I should have gone and got the micrometer from the garage, but I didn’t. I did it with a traditional measuring stick*, and it wasn’t accurate enough.

    Not only that, as inspiration, they very kindly added in a free Parker 45 (the VW Beetle of fountain pens, apparently. Hardy and nearly indestructable).

    Unfortunately we were both not quite right, their guess from the photo was closer, but marginally too large. My measurement was marginally too small. However, given that this is my first attempt and something that I may work at in future, I looked at my minisac** and decided to try it on for size***. It was a little tight, but it did just fit over the end****. So I trimmed it to length, applied slipped it only just on, applied a thin bead of shellac *****, and snuck the sac down onto the section and left the shellac to harden. I then needed to source some unscented talc… a trip to the chemists yeilded that (Simple Talc, £1, bargain :) ).

    The pen slipped together and…

    Fixed!

    And for comparison, here’s the 45 at work:

    Untitled

    I fear the minimal size of the ink sac on my rebuild, but until I give it a bit of a workout I won’t know if it’s any good :)

    Anyhow, so that’s my excitement :)

    * Or ‘ruler’ as some would call them.
    ** That sounds wrong…somehow.
    *** It’s getting worse.
    **** I’m sorry, but I have been actually awake for 28 hours, 12 of them spent at work….
    ***** Again, thanks to Cathedral Pens for the application tip, it was perfect :)

  • Change of plans

    I was going to be good. I really was. After my one-off night shift (the worst kind of night shift) I was going to go and extract data from notes. That was the plan (batman). However… it turns out that the person who I spoke to before who said ‘same day, possibly’ was talking out of his hat, or misunderstood my request.

    Next day probably is the way it works with the notes request. So hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to do the data extraction. Today, in my tired and disorientated state I’ll dink with non work things. Hopefully the bit will arrive so I can try out my repaired fountain pen. The ink’s been sat on my desk taunting me for days….

    I’ll do some work on Kathryn’s present…

    Dunno what else. We shall see.

    I have ordered some better locks for the motorcycle (this combined with the GPS tracker should make it less interesting to thieves. That and being a D-reg, but Kawasaki GT-550s are still quite popular motorbikes).

    But essentially, the day is mine. I shall relax, poke the internet with sticks and attempt to come up with an answer to the water ingress problem. Thing is I don’t want to call a roofer, and have them go ‘Oh yeah, your roof is the problem’ when it might just be the cladding which is a bit weird and letting water run in. And I don’t want to call someone up who does cladding and say ‘our cladding is hinky, please fix it’ when it’s the roof that’s letting in water. Who do I call? That’s the question.