So, intermittently I’m overwhelmed by the magnitude and number of jobs ahead of us. We still need to:
Build the rest of the kitchen shelves
Paint the brackets (and associated screws)
Install the shelves
Build the dining area shelf (plus attach it’s light)
Install that
Finish trim in the main bath and the en-suite
Trim around the built-in bookcases
Put skirting in both bedrooms, and half the dining room
Install the pantry pullout frame
Make the pullout drawers
Install them
Make the bedroom shelves…
…and install them
And that’s before we get to: “oh yeah, and make the bedroom, furnace, coat cupboard and office doors…and install them” and “oh yeah, and build the deck.” Oh, and of course, there’s maintenance. Stuff needs painting, stuff needs cleaning, grass needs trimming. Oh yeah, and we really should put up a fence that isn’t T-posts and rusting chicken wire.
It feels endless – and the reward is (mostly) worth it. Occasionally I am just stunned – absolutely and totally – by how much we’ve achieved. About how different this space is that we crafted from the rotting, filthy, mouldering shack that we bought.
And sometimes, when I’m overwhelmed I have no idea what to do. Sometimes I can find myself stunned into immobility, contemplating the enormity of the tasks without any kind of notion of where to begin. And sometimes, today being one of them, I can manage to tame that beast and ride the fucker. Today I
Did the washing up
Loaded the dishwasher (and set it going)
Cut the lawn front…and back
Went to lowes to get the stuff to mount the shelves
Sprayed the backs of the brackets
Sprayed the screws I just bought
Ran to the co-op to get the odds and sods we need for the week (and some other odds and sods we don’t need)
Paid the utility bill
Planted a bunch of plants
Mulched around them…
Changed the broken monitor arm
and…
Sewed up some holes in a skirt.
I am *tired* but I feel like I have achieved much. The brackets are ready to go up tomorrow, so we might – just might – have a shelf. Which would be frankly amazing and make me feel like I’ve really made some progress.
There are so many points in my life where there’ve been these big deciding things. Forks in the road. Places where things could have gone so differently. Sometimes I’ve known about them, sometimes I haven’t… Random shit like, as a teen I’d go to London with one of my very few friends. We’d often go to this cafe, which, it turns out is a couple of streets away from the gender clinic I ended up going to when I came out.
I literally walked out of the underground station and thought – huh, I used to come here. I *literally* walked past it. If I’d’ve seen the sign there’s a non-zero possibility I’d’ve called them because I knew there was something not right in my gender identity – I just wasn’t ready to accept it – and so “oh I’ll go talk to someone about it” would have been a reasonable thought. I could have ended up coming out at 16, not at 20. Which for the 1990s would have been pretty fucking early*.
There’s the moment my awesome and lovely friend Kate K offered me an interview at Acorn in Cambridge, an out that would have got me out of the abusive relationship I was wandering into (maybe she knew, I was too blind to notice) *and* would probably mean I stayed in IT, and didn’t move into healthcare.
Or the day I decided it would be good to meet some random person off the internet at a bar in London. One of the absolute best decisions of my life.
Anyway, sometimes I look back and think how life would have been different if I hadn’t done the thing. Or if it would have ended up the same anyway…
But right now we’re facing down a decision. We’ve been looking at adoption for a long time. We’ve been trying to adopt now for a couple of years without any real traction. Part of this is we’re both deeply non-social people. Socialising is really tiring for me, and my work sucks pretty much all the energy I have for it – and so really I want to just hide when I get home. Also… we’ve had this little thing called COVID which has been ongoing (and is still killing or sickening a lot of people), so even more than normal we’ve not been socialising.
Added to that the more we’ve both learned about adoption, the more uncomfortable we’ve both become with the whole *shudder* adoption industry. It’s just awful. And supporting that is… difficult to navigate with any form of ethical comfort. We found an LGBTQIA friendly adoption consultant, who…hasn’t really met what we were expecting to happen. As in, the vast majority of potential matches are from people in Florida – a state it’s not legal for me to exist in. So, uh, that doesn’t really work for adopting.
So then we (well, Kathryn) found a couple of adoption agencies. One of them, PACT, sounds ideal…they’re super queer friendly and focus on adopting POC into families of colour. Which sounds perfect, except they’ve had one “Asian / Indigenous / Other” adoption basically since they were founded.
And then there’s OA&FS, which sounds great but is…very, very expensive (as in, nearly all our savings), and that timeline is LONG. Now, if it weren’t for the prospect of the GOP Nazis being elected at the next election cycle – i.e. November next year, and then the very likely probability of me being made illegal, having my healthcare removed, and then fucking thrown in a prison for the crime of existing by a bunch of dime-store-fascists, then I’d be fine with a long time line. It would actually be okay.
But now we’re facing down this choice. Do we throw our lot in with OA&FS, and hope that we can get through their process, and matched, and have everything squared away by November next year (which seems…unlikely, since they say their typical time for waiting once you’re in their adoption pool is 18 months). Do we take a punt on the Nazis not being elected (Kathryn has more hope than me on that front). Or do we try and up our game with the private adoption (which has a whole other ethical unpleasantness – I mean, I just…everything I hear tells me it’s super important people get real counseling before they make an adoption plan. That they should have life-long support available. That you, as an adoptive parent should have life-long support available).
*SIGH*
Or do we accept that parenting isn’t going to be something that happens for us. And I hate that option. I mean, I can see a life. I can see a perfectly good life. But will I always be wondering “what if”. Particularly, if the Nazi’s don’t get in next election – then will I be devastated to know that we could have stayed, we could have ended up matching.
But then there’s no guarantee anyway. OA&FS said that the last lesbian couple they had waited much more than the average – but also, the average is skewed by the fact they only effectively had one.
I just don’t know even how *I* feel. Let alone what I want to do. We’re going to sit down and chat – actually, we’re going to go for a drive and chat this weekend. A chat to work out what the hell we want to do…effectively with the rest of our lives.
It’s incredibly intense. I have no idea what the right answer is, or if there’s even a right answer.
*We don’t talk about that I asked my mum when I was 4. And they constantly had problems with me pilfering my sister’s stuff… and the stuff my grandparents brought for my sister to try on from their charity shop… I mean, *we* do, but it’s not useful to talk about it. It was the 80’s the doctors would probably have tortured me like the GOP is torturing trans kids now.
Today I was unintentionally more productive than I intended to be. I’d not intended to be productive, well, maybe a little productive, but it got out of hand, like it usually does. Although I did spend nearly 2 hours just sat on the sofa reading (Annalee Newitz, The Terraformers – it’s excellent so far). It made up for yesterday which was mostly errands, which are productive and necessary, but I’m not good at feeling like I’ve achieved anything particularly when I’m just doing the adulting needed to live in the modern world.
And yesterday was almost entirely errands (recycling run to the recycling, various stores hit up for stuff including the last two fence posts for the big bed in the garden, prescription collected…), although I did stop at Kathryn’s work for lunch with Kathryn which was very nice. I also had another go at the notPsion 3a. I’d had a suggestion on Mastodon to try applying some pressure to the top of the screen where there’s a wrap-around connector which can, apparently fail.
And the spares Psion 3a (a real one), had arrived.
The first idea didn’t work, sadly. And so I took apart the second Psion which initially didn’t seem to work at all – but when I got it somewhat in pieces I tested the screen on the Acorn and that did work – then I had a momentary nose at the spares one – and got it working! It turns out that was just a faulty battery connector cable, although the case for it is absolute garbage.
It’s cracked in multiple places (the screen hinge was broken on one side, and I think the second side disintegrated during the process of disassembly).
But then I found out something unfortunate. Despite the Acorn Pocketbook II apparently being a rebadged Psion 3A, it turns out that around 1994 – when the Acorn Pocketbook II appeared* – Psion changed the screen and the new screen got a new casing. This is something that even the person selling Psion spares on ebay who – apparently – used to work at Psion seems unware of (and didn’t seem to believe me despite me supplying photographic evidence)…
This is what the edge of an early-to-mid 3A screen looks like
…and this is what the edge of an Acorn Pocketbook II / Later Psion 3A looks like.
Contrary to popular belief, the screens are not interchangeable. I *think* the clamshell as a whole would be, if you wanted to. And they are electrically compatible. But the internals and clips inside the screen clamshell are very different and would need extensive modification to fit.
Thankfully, the photos they sent answered the question, but now I need to wait for a quote for shipping to the US :-/
However, this whole odyssey has lead me to a point where I’m a bit nervous about actually using the bloomin’ thing once I get it working. I’d kinda thought about the Psion as something I could haul to work or wherever with me so I could do a bit of writing if I wanted to. But now – having spent quite a lot of time trawling through ebay auctions and discovered that the they all seem for 1993 or prior Psion 3As… Which makes getting spares for this thing a bit tricky.
Ah well.
Anyway, I also spent a chunk of yesterday tidying my desk – we have a renewal of our adoption homestudy due, and we’re taking the opportunity to do a bit of spring cleaning. My desk I find kind of irritating – at least in part due to the fact it’s not really a desk, it’s a adjustable height workbench, with no drawers. And because of the way the strengthener is placed you can’t easily put drawers under it.
So this morning I decided to suck it up and order a new desk. It’s height adjustable, and I also ordered a monitor stand having finally got fed up with a chunk of the desk being taken up with monitor stands… anyhow, we’ll see if this works better. I hope so – being able to actually use the height adjust will be nice – and I also picked up a (shoe) rack that seems to just about support the printer, which fits under the old desk / workbench – kinda – which should mean that we can shuffle the printer to under the glowforge so I can actually have a bit of leg room.
Anyhow. So today I did a whole bunch more washing up – including a frying pan that was being given away free in a box on the street that I spotted on my run. That took a *lot* of scrubbing, but the inside has come up pretty well. The outside less so :-/
Laundry, all the adulting stuff (blech), and then I did a bit more on the house! Yes. I actually set to on the kitchen shelves – I decided to try the Laura Kampf joinery technique of clamping the two bits of wood together, then cutting them, the idea being that they’ll fit together pretty much perfectly.
This was the first time that I’ve used the biscuit joiner (it works!) and I have to say the heat and such made for a not ideal glue-drying time, which mean that I didn’t end up aligning the two halves as well as I’d like. Buuuut, I think it’ll do. We have to wait for it to dry – and yet again I’ve realized I need a *LOT* more clamps.
Unsurprisingly, that took longer than I estimated it would (there’s a shocking thing), but instead of calling it quits on working (which was my original plan), I ended up deciding to go and put the “automatic window opener” on the greenhouse (on the hottest day of the year so far, with the sun blazing down). Irritatingly, but unsurprisingly, it was horribly made and a total nightmare to fit. It doesn’t really fit our greenhouse very well, but I eventually hodged the bugger in and I think it should work.
Then, ice pop consumed, I sat down an enjoyed my book for a while. I know I have this drive to get things done, which sometimes can be kinda irritating to myself. I meant to have more of a break today – since this weekend we have the home inspection, and I’m going to be filming on Monday, and…tomorrow’s a workday. So this was a bit of a rest-fail. But I’m glad that I started on the shelves, it’ll be nice to get them up – although I still need to strip and blue the shelf brackets.
* Apparently it launched in 1995, but mine says manufactured in 1994.
Yesterday was a solid day of progress on things. In fact, in general, there’s been a lot of progress on things. We’ve been working on the temporary media stand. It’s coming along.
The many chevrons are glued down (more or less, we won’t talk about that any more than that eh…), we need to order the varnish and decide on a finish pattern for the sides (it’s the chevrons, but it has a stylised flower/plant & planet (well, I kind of think of it as a planet) engraved), and we’ve decided it’s going to be painted. The specifics of that are still being worked out…
Anyhow, the top looks pretty cool – especially for the amount of work that’s gone into it, and I think the sides will look pretty nifty too. Just a case of getting the wood top-surface trimmed (one of the errands today was getting a new blade for one of our circular saws), the sides on, and the whole lot varnished (once the varnish arrives), and praying that the bits on the top that stuck…less well than we might have liked (despite half our library being stacked on there) stay stuck down.
As usual the amount of work that we’re putting into this “temporary” object belies the likely nature of its temporaryness.
Anyhow, then yesterday after a raft of errands (there seem to have been a lot of those recently), I set to on upgrading the Z88. I’d bought a 512K RAM / 512K Flash upgrade for it, but instructions were… absent. Eventually I found this set of instructions which was much clearer than anything else I’ve found and after desoldering the original chips I replaced them and lo, it’s running OZ 4.7 (can I share that it’s wild that people are still collaboratively working on an operating system for a Z80 based machine from 1987?), then burning that onto flash chips and sending them out…?
Aaaaand, it has 512K of RAM! Isn’t that shiny.
Of course, having got it working I was terribly excited to try connecting it to the mac, at which point I discovered that of course, Apple stopped supporting the common-as-muck USB-Serial chipset that’s been around for a dog’s age. There is, apparently, the FTDI chipset variants, that are still supported – and thankfully I was within the return period for the one I got. So back that USB-Serial has gone, and a new one is (theoretically) en-route.
The other thing I need for it, ideally, is a decent set of rechargeable batteries. A set that’s actually a set (because I have a bunch of mismatched ones). In today’s massive list of errands (including switching over Raven’s tyres for the summer ones) was a run to initially Target (out of rechargeable batteries) then to Ace (needed that saw blade, also out of rechargeable batteries). Hence I’ve given in and ordered them online. Because late stage capitalism is working flawlessly *rolls eyes*
*Then* I can really have a play with it.
Since I had a bit of time before Kathryn got home yesterday, I decided I’d also like to try and fix the Acorn Pocketbook II (AKA, a Psion 3a). This, of course, did not go exactly to plan. First up, I *suspect* I’m responsible for the disintegration of the button bar during disassembly (although I’m hoping that superglue will hold that). But more importantly, the fancy replacement ribbon cable I bought in the UK, that I paid for rush shipping on? It’s…
Well…
Uh hu. Vastly too long. A couple of options are ahead of me at this point. If it’s 1mm spacing then I can just order a generic one – although whether it’ll be heat resistant is a question – but it needs to be soldered at one end (because obviously, why not? Why not solder a flexible cable permanently at one end, then socket it at the other end). Alternatively, I miiight be able to shave the kapton tape off the top surface of this, trim it shorter and solder it. It’s a possibility which I’m going to explore.
Or I could just I dunno, travel back in time and buy a spare when they made them.
As I put it on Mastodon yesterday: My genius plan of “Oh, I’ll just fix this thing incredibly fiddly object made of unobtainum using pixie dust” seems to have come a cropper for some inexplicable reason.
So today was a bit of a mission. I’d iiiintended to be back by lunchtime from a quick errand – namely, getting my glasses, grabbing some more concentrated isopropyl alcohol and distilled water, and also getting a new seal for our bidet handle which, it turns out, leaks. It leaks because the silicone seal on the hose has given up the ghost, sadly.
However, thanks to the wonders of capitalism’s finest achievements, getting isopropyl alcohol took and distilled water took three stops, and thanks to me being a twonk and wearing a nice clean wool undershirt shirt when I left the house to grab my glasses, I had to come home in-between to get changed. Then thanks to the US’s decision to stick with imperial measurements because… I dunno, they feel nice? I can’t get a seal, nor something likely to work, because the seal is metric. I could just order stacks of random seals from China or Europe – but that seams like a road that will lead to frustration and annoyance.
So. Instead after visiting many shops I came back home feeling a little dispirited.
The alcohol and distilled water are required for my ongoing attempts to revive the Acorn A4, which needs to have a nice bath in some distilled water and then a second bath in isopropyl alcohol, then a nice dry. That means it needs, probably, a whole day of work. If not a morning, then a day to rest and dry out, then a morning for reassembly. So I wasn’t intending to do that today. But I did think that the little errand to just “grab some distilled water” would be quick. Turns out not so much.
But – having got back I contemplated going out to the garage to upgrade my Z88 to 512K / 512K flash with a new OS. The idea here is that then it should connect – more happily – to the Mac. And then I can transfer files. Which means I can actually more easily use said wildebeast. However, by the time I’d had lunch, had tea, wrapped Kathryn’s prezzies and grumbled at the universe because one of her best prezzies is currently, apparently, in London (it took 4 days for it to travel about 50 miles. WTF Royal Mail, WTF?) and finally found the answer to “how do I wire this thing up” (because the instructions on the ebay page are just some pictures, which confusingly include pictures of things that I suspect might contain cut tracks, but it’s not immediately obvious where those cut tracks are, or if they’re there at all, or if there’s some other modification that should be blindingly obvious to me but isn’t instantly apparent).
Thankfully, I managed to resist the urge to run out and do that (which was tempting, but let’s be honest, it wasn’t going to happen in an hour). But I’m hoping to tackle at least one of these two projects next week. Once one (or both) of them is (are) off my “current projects” list, I’ll return to recapping the RP-119 (for which I now have the service manual!) and replacing the couple of caps I missed on the DA-1000 when I originally recapped it.
I’m also trying to build up courage to look at Rebecca again.
That’s helped by the fact that the *FANFARE PLEASE* garage and the studio now have functioning outlets. And lights. Granted, at the moment, there’s a wire draped down from the ceiling in the garage, and I need to go grab some more conduit to attach to the ceiling for all the LED lights in the garage, but…
….there’s light. I can just go in and switch on a light and *plink* lights come on.
Turning on the garage light
Unfortunately, the light doesn’t come on in the studio because the bulb holder is faulty. So we need to get a new one of them, which I meant to grab today, but I’d forgot :-/
So, having replaced all the capacitors, today was the day for reassembly. In a hilarious misjudgement I thought I’d do it before lunch, and then do something else in the sunshine after lunch.
Ha.
Ha ha.
Part of the problem was that the instructions, such as they are, are “reassembly is the reverse of these instructions”, which would be fine except the dismantling instructions have no pictures and also have no notes about some of the random small bits of metal used to make contact between, say, the board, and the case. So I’d get some chunk of the way through, look suspiciously at a bit of metal, then end up going and watching my disassembly footage and discovering I’d gone way past where I should have put it in, then having to either backtrack and dismantle, or work out a way to squirrel it in.
There were also some oddities – like the hard-drive mount, which clearly had been fouling this capacitor:
Well, when I went to install it I realized it very definitely fouls the new replacement capacitor:
I debated what to do about this, because I’m not reinstalling the original hard disk, so I could have just skipped putting the caddy in, but I feel like it adds some stiffening to a fairly floppy case, so in the end went with the expedient solution of using some tinsnips:
Eventually I managed to get the machine back together and tried for power on. Connecting a battery and trying it didn’t lead to success (although the battery reported only 20% SOC, which isn’t great considering it went into the bag at 100% so-said). Then I tried plugging in power, which still just led to the whine of the DC-DC board.
Fearing the worst, I turned it off and sat down for a bit. That led to the realization that I could try the original HDD, because it might not be happy with the SD card. That gave me the information that it was spinning up the hard drive… but the computer wasn’t complaining about a POST failure (no flashing on the floppy disk drive light), and nothing on the screen.
After another pause I realized that maybe I should reset the CMOS, because that was probably corrupt after my attacking the motherboard. That yielded a better result:
Now, I *knew* what was wrong there. The lower half of the screen is fed from a different cable and I’d had a mare of a time getting it in. I wasn’t entirely convinced it was properly seated when I assembled the screen…
…so that meant taking the screen off and that all apart again so I could reseat the cable. That done and we had a booting machine.
So then I put the SD card back in, reassembled it and lo:
I am now the proud owner of an uncommon bit of Acorn history. One example of their only laptop.
I still need to increase the friction on the screen hinges, which is…non-existent at the moment. And I think the battery is en-route to FUBAR. It does hold some charge – and will power the laptop – but it also went from 20-100% charge in about 15 minutes, which seems ‘odd’.
I also need to (apparently) install the Wizzo ROM, so the SD card reader will work, which…is a question for another day, because I don’t currently have EPROM writing capability and it also needs to have the Acorn A4 5th column stuff (the battery monitoring software is in there, and something else that I forget right now both patch the OS so it has the utilities needed to run happily on the laptop). But anyway. Yay! :)
So I spent today (literally nearly all of today, although I was kinda slow to get going) working on the A4. Having cleaned up the mainboard when I stripped it out (here), and having ordered the bits to fix it which all arrived immediately before I went away, today I girded my loins and took the board out to the garage where the big girl toys are.
I have been kinda hesitant about this because it’s a lot of surface mount repair work, and my soldering is not amazing. But anyhow, the bits have arrived, I’ve spent money on it, so… off I went.
The recommended method for getting the capacitors off the board is to cut them in half – cutting vertically down the capacitor using side snips – and running perpendicular to the solder pads. You can then chop the rest of the capacitor remnants off, leaving just tiny stubby legs still attached to the solder pads.
Which worked pretty well for most of the pads, but unfortunately for several of them, the pads were no longer attached to the board, and (as far as I can tell) were corroded to the point they weren’t really attached to anything else either, because they came off with the solder and the track back to the via either when heated (to remove the leg remnants), or came off when I was cutting the capacitor off (on the two where that happened the opposite leg+pad+via came away while I was cutting the other leg from the shredded capacitor remnants).
That led to a lot of fun with modwire – which I used to poke through some of the vias, and reconnect to the via on the other side of the board.
I also replaced some missing capacitors (no idea where they went)
After some debate, and a little test of whether I could or not, I decided against reflowing the solder on the really shonky looking resistors and capacitors in a couple of areas of the board that seem to have suffered a lot. I kinda feel like I should replace them, but I’m also not convinced I’ll be able to do so successfully, so I’d rather leave that and attack it if necessary.
I also pulled the broken contrast/brightness (not sure which) control and replaced it with the one from the spares board I picked up while I was in the UK. That was a pain – not least because it turned out that there is a solder pad that seems to just exist for stabilization (it doesn’t appear to have any tracks running to it – and that fell off when heated. Of course, it didn’t fall off the *spares* board – oh no. But unfortunately the spares board has got transformer problems and overheating problems so I don’t want to use it in the functioning A4 because I’d have to replace…everything else on it :-/
Anyhow, the computer is ready now, I think, to be reassembled… Apart from the Acorn A4 sticker which I need to work out how to remove. I’m kinda thinking acetone… but also scared to try it.
In other news, the Cambridge Z88 turns out to work just fine – although I don’t think it likes NiMH batteries. I’ve ordered a cable to connect it to a modern computer – and if that works then I will have a thoroughly distraction free typing device that I can take absolutely anywhere. I’m quite excited about that.
I also, because I didn’t think I was going to get the Z88 got…an Acorn Pocketbook II. This has the advantage of being tiny – and the disadvantage of being broken. That I may use to take to work for typing… although I do wonder if I should have sprung for a Psion 5MX, ISTR they have much better keyboards.
It needs a new cable – and I just watched a video on dismantling them… ooof. That’s more complicated than I realized. So, err, that might take a minute.
So I headed over to the UK for my mum’s 80th birthday. It’s the least complicated trip over to the UK that are done for a while – although I managed to make the ending really rather complicated, but we’ll get to that in a second. The flight over was fine and apart from me screwing up the day that the rental car was meant to arrive and thus on landing having a flurry of angst inducing text messages followed by some frantic phone calls… But even that I managed to work out.
Despite fascist TERF Island being…well, itself, the weather was lovely and I had no actual issues. In fact, my mum organized a facial / makeover and it was delightful. She’s seen the same place for years and for much of the time had the same beautician. It was a all in all a super positive experience.
We spent several days up at her home striking out on day trips to Looe, Totnes and Padstow, and just generally having a pretty chill time. We obviously dropped in to the Dutchy garden centre, because it’s impossible to visit my mum without going there. Then she’d found, and her husband had booked, a house on the coast in Fowey (which is pronounced foy, incidentally). That was absolutely lovely and had delightful views of the ferry and the river.
My unwillingness to go eat in a restaurant or sit in a jam packed pub wasn’t, I don’t think, too much of an issue. I keep reading the COVID research and long term it’s just shit, so until vaccines take us to a flu-like level of death and disability I’m probably going to just continue masking.
So yes, we pottered around. I spent a lot of time talking to my mum, and I read readme.txt and The Keepers Six. I’m so glad that I got to be there though.
the journey home though has been a bit of a nightmare, although that is at least in part my own fault because I foolishly decided to believe Google. See someone nice on Mastodon shared with me a link to someone who was willing to sell a “sold as seen” z88 at non-ebay prices. Google said that this would only add 20 minutes to my journey to the airport.
I don’t quite know what caused me to believe Google in this case because I’ve driven around the area and know that the roads are tiny and slow. I think really it was just my excitement and desire to have the Z88. So I set out this morning and leaving at 5:00 a.m. having got up at 4:45. The weather forecast was pretty rough but when I got in the car it was dry and above freezing. However, the weather rapidly deteriorated and I did most of my driving today in sleet or snow, or at best rain. At various points I was stuck on single lane roads behind trucks, or better still a truck stuck behind a tractor. The extra hour i’d tacked on in addition to charging vaporized with the Volkswagen ID3 suffering from the cold temperatures and charging super slowly. It also additionally vaporized after I took a wrong turn which then led to me being stuck in a road closure / diversion situation where the diversion wasn’t really signed posted and the Google was unaware of the road closure.
…And adding a final layer of you ain’t getting to the airport on time, the final charger was broken and all the other charges at that site were in use.
Thankfully I made it to the airport and through security…where I then realized that my flight was delayed by nearly an hour. The flight itself was fine and actually I got a whole row of seats all to myself which was very pleasant, but unfortunately today someone has chosen to drive the wrong way up i-5 leading to it being closed and traffic being terrible. Which means that my beloved who is doing her best to come and collect me is stuck in the world’s most tedious traffic — and I am facing down 24 hours of being awake…
so forgive me if this isn’t the best written post.
We’ve been making slow but steady progress on the many, many projects ongoing here at chez us. Having let the oiled pieces off-gas in the garage for about a week I took the opportunity to put them up this week – so we now have a step into our bathroom…
Which is very, very pleasing.
There is a rawness to the edges you cut into a building. It’s something that most people rarely see, because most people live and occupy finished spaces. But when you build it yourself you feel them. They rub against your daily existence reminding you of the fragility of things that we rely on. Of how much work it takes to build and make whole any given thing.
Our house has been on this edge since we owned it and in many places, where we’ve slowly covered the torn holes with trim, it’s easy to forget they exist. But in our bathroom, which curiously feels incredibly luxurious now, the ripped and coarse edges are still there. At last we are getting the trim in, but you still now the space isn’t finished yet. Despite the room itself being more or less complete, you have to pass through this short void, this space where you feel the distance between the plan and the reality. And now, we’re in that limnal moment when both the finished and the unfinished edges coexist.
It’s amazing how quickly you forget, though. All the places where the trim is up? I forget that underneath lies the coarse cut edges of drywall, nailheads just hammered flat to the surface, and the fragile, tituratable edge of the limestone. Perceptions are often shaped by what’s on the surface, and it’s so easy to forget what lies beneath.
I now need to cut some more pieces, shape them to fit, oil them and [repeat]. The biggest single job on the trim front (ignoring the skirting) is the bathroom, which I’ve kinda mentally put as my “up next”, although I should take the opportunity of having the ladder in the house tomorrow to grab measurements of the bookshelves above the doorways. Things that I can’t easily measure when Kathryn isn’t here.
We’ve also made some progress on Kathryn’s studioshed – Kathryn’s got the floor now fully grouted, so there’s just cleaning, sealing it, a bit of spray-foam under the door, popping in a few outlets and…trim. Always and forever, trim.
And in the garage I’ve made progress with the wiring that will – eventually – link to the studioshed. Thankfully, yesterday was less of a mare of a job than the first day (which was utterly miserable), and we’re now nearing the denouement, with cable now running from the south wall (still needs some conduit and an outlet box) to the east wall (needs the outlet boxes screwing to the wall) to the north wall (about 50% of conduit is done, about 25% of cable is done). I’ve also worked out what I need to do to the ceiling lights so they’ll work – which is good – because I didn’t really want to have to make up a bunch of new cable, and I don’t think I need to.
And I glued in the final filler pieces to the crates that will be our replacement media-stand. They’re dry now, so it’s time to break out the chalk paint (never used this before, but considering the shoddiness of the underlying material, chalk paint seemed like a good idea – we bought some paintbrushes today for that job, and some masking tape), and we need to lasercut the tiles to go onto the visible sides and the top surface. We miiiiight do some of that tomorrow.
And today, which wasn’t really a project day because it’s a holiday weekend here in the US*, we spent much of the day pottering in the garden. We finally cut back our raspberries – I have concluded that I have no idea when you’re meant to cut back raspberries. The advice online is either “immediately they’ve fruited” “spring” “late winter” “when there’s an A in the day and the moon is in conjunction with Venus” or “when I say so”. There’s also a whole thing about whether the canes are this year’s growth or last year’s growth…
…so we, uh cut them. I think we did it right – although I’ve just (literally as I was typing) realised that we didn’t do one the raspberry bush on the other side of the garden. Which we’ll need to do, too. Bother.
We also dug up a bunch of bramble that’s been bothering me since we got here (yay!). That’s been slow progress over the years that we’ve been here, and now – at last – that frees up another bed. Albeit a bed with craptastic soil. Although since the chickens have routled about it in it’s definately better. We also split the artichoke, which is a job that’s been overdue for years, and planted the honeyberries my sister gave us for Christmas.
We also stopped by the Urban Farm and Garden to get some fresh seed planting whatsits (because at least one of our other ones leaks), and some coir pots. They also have peat-free (albeit potting, not seedling) soil… And this year – for once – possibly for the first time ever, we put a bunch of our seeds in at the right time. Now we just need (a) them to sprout (considering many of the seeds are ancient) (b) us to keep them alive, and (c) us to get them into the garden and protect them from the chickens.
We actually have a whole bunch more seeds to plant that go in the greenhouse, and – some to direct sow (assuming that it’s not hacking down with rain in the morning). All in all, things are moving in a direction towards completion.
* We were actually thinking of “getting away” for the weekend but kept failing to organize it and now it’s here.
So I finally got myself together enough to tackle stripping down the Acorn A4 laptop. I’d been somewhat nervous about it because of all the admonishments on the forum that it’s a nightmare to get apart, and that it’s fragile. Now the latter part is true – it’s 30 years old this year – and the plastic isn’t…great.
By the way, this isn’t going to be detailed instructions – because they’re here: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~theom/riscos/a4/dismantle.html. Y’all don’t need me to reiterate them (although perhaps twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows might be necessary ;) ).
That said, step one – remove the econet expansion cover didn’t go very well. Folks on the forum said it’s super stiff y’just have to do it – so I applied more force and the econet expansion cover kinda disintegrated as it came out. Not completely, I can glue it and it’ll look okay externally. I am unsure if it was that way before I started – I mean, I clearly broke one of the tabs – but to be fair it looked like it was corroded in. There’s also some breakage around the vent, but again, I think careful gluing from the back will salvage it.
…because at some point this has had a significant battery acid leak. There was battery acid trapped under the edge of the LCD, there were crystals of NiCd corrosion on the vents…
Interestingly, though, despite some very ropey bits of the board – at least two of which are going to require me to reference the circuit diagram and work out what resistors (assuming they were resistors) go in the place where there’s now a just corroded pads with some solder on there and spaces… the acid damage isn’t as bad as I feared. It’s not as good as I could have hoped (had I not seen the crystals through the vent at the left edge of the case). But it does look – salvagable? I hope. But it’s also clearly been apart before. These resistors are apparently not OEM (which explains them, because I thought they were odd):
But also the IDE connector is missing. I’m going to replace the IDE drive with an SD through an IDE adapter. At least, I hope I am. That’s the plan. But it will, iirc, still need the cable – which is kinda annoying. I’m hoping I have the right size of connector sitting around… because otherwise it’ll be something else I need to order.
One thing I don’t need to order – and where I was (fortunately) proven right, is the screen. I ordered that on spec when I paid for the laptop, because I suspected the dead bit of the screen (right where scroll bars will land up) was, in fact, from a screen problem. And I was right, it’s a nasty, unfixable problem:
Yeah, that crack in the corner explains the strip of dead pixels. It must have happened on reassembly – yet more evidence this thing has been apart. What’s so weird is that it must have been apart – and then whoever did it put this board in which isn’t in quite as bad-er shape, despite the case being obviously contaminated with NiCd juice. So having got it all apart I spent today basically ignoring the advice not to wash it – and went ahead and washed it. At the moment, there’s a bunch of bits from one of the Acorn NOS suppliers – and it’s sorely tempting to just get that and put it all in a brand new case. But I also like the fact this is clearly a pretty early one (although, tbh, it may just be they bought all the cases right at the beginning).
I also got an ESD safe brush and threw some alcohol at the board…
Before:
After:
So I need to work out what the missing components are, and I need to also work out what the variable resistor that controls the contrast is meant to be: Then I’ll have to replace those SMD resistors, which will no doubt be super fun on a board that’s corroded like this… and *then* I can use it to write on.
