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Well, technically we’ve been back a few days and I’m having that occasionally unnerving experience of how fast I can spend money when I want to. Whilst we were away (tedious holiday post with far too many pictures coming up*) I picked up two dirty great chunks of driftwood from the shore of the lake on which we spent a couple of very nice**** nights.

These are to make the lights in the kitchen, which have been waiting, painfully, for ‘the right bit of wood’ to come along. Actually, the bits I really, really, really wanted were unreasonably heavy. If we lived in France I’d’ve been sorely tempted to take half the beach home. As it was I had to force myself to put down my original choices on the basis that ‘if I can’t carry them both, I can’t reasonably attach them to the ceiling’.

Anyhow, having brought home the free bits of wood, I’ve now ordered miles of expensive three core braided fabric coated wire, a dirty great length of braided stainless steel wire, and then I’m going to do evil things involving light bulb holders and such from our local hardware store. At least, that’s the general idea.

Anyhow, since we bought a ‘new’ (1930’s) bookcase**** from a charity shop on Friday, which is due to be delivered in a time window that starts in 30 minutes, I guess I should nip upstairs and have a quick shower…

* If I could do a slide show night for you all, you know I would**
** But at some point I got rid of my 1950’s slide projector, for reasons related to the fact it weighed approximately the same as our house***
*** And some of you are in the wrong country, although we could do it using google hangout or skype or sommat ;)
**** And cold, I’ll grant you.
***** Actually it’s one of those bow fronted display cabinet things. Not that we have more books than you could shake a (large drift wood) stick at, oh no. Nor of course did we buy books in French, not that we speak French (although Kathryn’s working on that with the help of books and comics in French. I’ll work on it later…).

So, yesterday, despite sleep deprivation and a near overwhelming tiredness I attacked the bookcase that was waiting to go up in the office. It doesn’t really match the rest of the office shelving, it doesn’t match anything in there, quite frankly, but it was the best I could find in our price range and ready in anything like in time. See, with Kathryn’s dad coming over I wanted the box shelf up above the desk. Only I don’t have a box shelf. I didn’t, as it happens, have any kind of shelf ready to go there. And having asked at the wood recycling place I found their lead time on just planned/sanded timber is four weeks. Kathryn’s dad arrives in just over 6, and the idea of me trying to cut, sand, varnish and fit a box shelf having got the wood with only two weeks (where I’d be working full time and doing a course for work) filled me with that vague dread that can only be associated with knowing that it would not work.

I could foresee him and his partner arriving, and the room being still filled with junk.

So I searched, and eventually accepted that ikea are cheaper by miles for these shelves. Indeed box shelves are ridiculously expensive, as a general rule. What we ended up with aren’t really box shelves, actually, but Kathryn was so uninspired by the ikea box shelves that we decided to get something a bit different. Actually, thinking about it, I probably should have rung our kitchen-maker and asked him, but hey, didn’t think of that then.

Anyhow, so I got the shelves, and started to assemble them and then realised that, well, really they should be cut to fit our picture rail, because they have that kind of shape at the top that suggests that the top edge should align with the picture rail. So I prepared to break out the jigsaw. Also, I realised (unfortunately whilst I was assembling them) the hanging method supplied would require cutting in to our picture rail. Now that is simply not going to happen. We’ve gone to great lengths to save our picture rail, even saving a chunk so that we could put it back in the corridor on the new section of wall. Even our kitchen still sports a picture rail.

So after some hemming and hawing, I decided to support the shelves with dirty great lumps of wood which, I decided, I would paint white. Later.

And thus, this was achieved:

And fairly quickly turned into this:

As a bonus, here’s some of our ‘top shelf’ reading matter… (although, to be fair, some of ’em are games…)

There was some swearing, of course. There was a hole into a brick which appears to be made of adamantium. Even the ‘decent’ masonry bit was laughed at… It sounded like a lump of steel, but the metal drill bit was just mocked mercilessly*. In the end, I just moved a bit and drilled a new hole, although not before some wailing and gnashing of teeth over damaging our beautiful wall.

Also, during my ‘tired’ episode I managed to kill our printer. For various reasons I had around 150 pages to print yesterday, and wound up the spring on our venerable Kyocera FS-1030D and set it printing. Off it went. Of course, in preparation for this I dumped a pile of paper (which I’d just found) into the drawer. To do this I moved the printer across on it’s little shelf so it was up against the shelves next to it, because otherwise the drawer fouls the leg of the desk. Unfortunately, I didn’t move it back.

It turns out that the printer will quite happily kill itself before admitting that it’s overheating. It stopped printing with a paper jam, and when I took the paper out, it sat twiddling its little status lights in a status light sequence that’s not in the numpty manual.

Eventually I found the service manual and discovered that the status lights meant ‘fuser thermistor (and thermal cut out) failed’. I googled the spare part. $120 dollars! The printer was only $25. Then I remembered the spares printer, and that, as I recall failed with some kind of drum/motor error. So this morning I stripped the two of them down…

Rather than switching the thermistor (because I’m a lazy toad) I just switched the entire fuser units over, and lo, the printer doth work. Thank the lord, because I needed that paper today, and lo, it is printed.

Also, side point, I love Kyocera for making the manual available. I just really wish they had a mac version of the application to configure the network card in it.

* Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries…

So, with some tweaking to Kathryn’s shifts we ended up with a 3-day weekend with both of us off for all three days. This is virtually unheard of, and so we promptly filled the days with activity. Cleaning the house (properly) on Friday, then having friends over for dinner (Olives/Nice cheese, Trout/Almonds/Asparagus/Salad, Rhubarb/Custard Tart). Then Saturday we piled into Chester an’ flew down to Cornwall. Well, actually, we sat in traffic because, of course, it’s a Bank Holiday, and we’d not really considered that.

Anyhow, we made it and after a very nice lunch headed off to my mum’s favourite nursery; the Duchy of Cornwall one. It turns out that this is an incredibly nice and shockingly reasonably priced nursery filled with plants that my mum rates very highly (in so far as she says she’s never had a plant from there which hasn’t thrived, which is high praise given the number of plants she buys). We pootled around and it became apparent that what we were going to do was return home earlier than intended the next day (i.e. today) with a large number of plants, mainly alpines, to go in the rockery which has hitherto been a pile of concrete and some mud mixed with gravel.

Not only that, but there was some intention to have a bit of a water feature thing going on, which had previously not been considered, at least, not in this form (we’d debated a pond, but it’d been scrapped).

Anyhow, having got home on Sunday we spent rather a lot of time working on the garden – and apart from much tidying, cleaning and planting, we made a rockery…

My mum bought us a very lovely Solomon Seal:

We also gave in and bought some Toms, mainly because ours our looking a little dinky for the time of year:

However, there’s still much to do…

So, yesterday I actually got a fair bit done. Which was an about-time/pleasing situation. The Volvo’s been waiting on this small plastic part which I wasn’t sure if I could get new or was going to have to fabricate in some way myself (I was bracing myself for getting a brazing torch out and asking John if I could borrow his lathe to make a metal version of it).

Thankfully, Renault who clearly care more about my V340 than Volvo still sell the parts for the engine. I’m guessing the B14 engine was used in something later than our late 80’s volvo, but I’m not sure what. It’s always difficult when you go to collect a part and they say ‘what car is it for’ and you say “I’ve no idea what Renault it’s for, I ordered it based on a part number, but it’s going in to a Volvo 340”.

They look at you for a second, then wander off trying to find your small plastic part.

Anyhow, it arrived and I ran it across to the garage where our partially disassembled Volvo has sat for a couple of weeks. Hopefully we should have Chester back (and actually running properly), possibly even today. Then I did the shopping for the week.

I stopped off at the wood recycling place to see how much it would cost for them to build a box shelf for the wall from scaffold planks. The answer is ‘more than I want to pay right now’. I think I’m going to end up getting scaffold planks and sanding them again, which is a bugger. It’s a time issue though. I want to unpack that room and need to do it before Kathryn’s Dad / his partner come over, but to do so need some shelves to unpack into.

To make the shelves requires wood.

To make the shelves I’d like to make requires wood and an awful lot of sanding sheets for our poor, much abused sander. I’m trying to work out if I have time to make them or should just suck it up and buy the box shelf from ikea. My concern there is that it won’t match the desk, the shelves on the other side of the room or the chaise. I am however starting to think that in the name of getting the room in order, perhaps it would make more sense to buy the ikea box shelf. I’m not that fond of the shelf, but it’s better than no shelf, and also would take much less time than me sanding and refinishing scaffold planks.

Feh.

Anyway, it won’t fit in the Minor without the roof rack, so it can wait until Chester’s back.

Next up was continuing progress on the stairs. I’ve let the chopped up ikea Expedit shelving unit in under the stairs, and have now slathered the surrounding low quality wood in low quality hardboard. Once I’ve bought some more glue (because I’ve run out of glue) I’ll finish covering the door and we can move on to filling and painting. Yet again I was reminded how appaulingly inaccurate the statement ‘instant grab’ is on the adhesive used for this job. Anyhow, there’s a bunch of seams to fill in, and once that’s done I can paint it all. I also need to put some shims under the centre join of the expedit shelving units (since there’s two of them stuck together) because our floor and walls have as little to do with 90 degrees as it is possible to have. Whilst I’ve supported the back end and they are screwed and sort-of-glued together, the centre join is under more stress than I’d like.

Pleasingly, we can cram another expedit unit in under the stairs offering more chances at organisation. This is good, because storage is one of our major challenges.

Having done what I could (and run out of glue) I moved on to planting potatoes. My mum sent me some very non-native potatoes (Peruvian) and they were ready chitted, so into the potato pot they went. A second pot was filled with earth for some of our ‘First Early’ potatoes (which should have gone in at the beginning of the month). Then I took the opportunity of being covered in mud to prep the pots for the tomatoes, which contrary to our early fears have managed to struggle on (despite our neglect). Having repotted them I’m hoping that they’ll prove that this early enthusiasm will produce plants worth planting. Which of course means that we need more wood to build the greenshed.

Which is all well and good, except I’m going on a 2 day course (only in Bath) in June, for which I need to do some revising. This is, of course, traditional. Lots of work on the house, a course to do and one of Kathryn’s parents coming to visit. I’m getting a distinct sense of déjà vu.

So, another little post about my dad’s activities.

Last time I posted some of his phreaking stuff, and here’s another post of some slightly less technological but non-the-less essential equipment for the 1950’s/60’s phone hacker.

Now, you’ll have to forgive me if I get anything wrong, my dad died 7 years ago and we didn’t talk about this stuff just prior to his death. It was one of those things we chatted about randomly at various points in the past… So I may not recall it all correctly.

There are two versions of this, I think. The later one:

And the earlier one:

As John said, they are indeed STD (Standard Trunk Dialling, or ‘area’) codes for every single area in the UK. The reason for the very specific breakdown of codes was that at the time there were codes that, as I understand it, were adjacent areas that were considered local. So you might live in a town, say, ‘Fredtown’ with the area code 0245. Surrounding Fredtown you’ve got ‘Potville’ on 0246, ‘Frankston’ on 0247 and ‘Joneston’ on 0249. All those exchanges in the neigbouring towns were considered by the Fredtown exchange to be ‘local’. A bit further away is Bobtown, on 0248.

Bobtown (0248), your exchange considers to be ‘long distance’. However, Bobtown is right near Frankston (0247) and the Frankston exchange thinks that Bobtown and Fredtown are both ‘local’.

If, say, you were in Fredtown and wanted to dial your friend in Bobtown (0248 12345) but didn’t want to pay the long distance rate then ringing the Frankston exchange and asking it to route a call to Bobtown (which Frankston happens to think is local) would save you paying for a long distance call.

Of course, you’d have to know which exchanges think other exchanges are ‘local’.

For which you’d require a complete set of UK dialling codes, their location, and ideally a means of organising them such that you know what is ‘local’ to what.

Which might, indeed, be the purpose of the cards.

Of course, you can also use the cards to identify which exact exchange any given number is served from, too. A handy side benefit :)

So there y’go. Phone hacking on paper.

Sadly I can’t remember exactly how the cards worked. Not that they would work now, digital exchanges spoilt all that basic simple hackery. Still, pretty nifty…

Whilst we’re here, here’s a better shot of my dad’s home-cut keys for Selkirk hall at Imperial College (the locks have sadly been changed…). That’s a bonus for y’all because the last set of photos were such hideously poor quality.

So, after a bit of a false start today*, I started to work on the house again. I spent quite a lot of time carefully working out how to construct the shelves I want to put under the stairs. Me and my MDF trimming plans spent some time together, and then I looked at the sheets of it available, and tried to work out exactly how to pack the sections I needed onto the one sheet, or one sheet and a small sheet. And then it became apparent that I’d have to get two of the sheets, most of the second one would be wastage, but there was no solution that allowed me to use a smaller sheet, because the two of the thinnest bits were still wider than the small sheet, and all the other bits had two sides longer than the small sheet. If you get what I mean.

Having stared at this problem and realised I’d be spending just shy of 40 quid for a lot of MDF I’d have no use for, and which I’d have to have cut-up to get into the minor, I then considered the possibility that perhaps I should consider modding something else.

And then it came to me. I could modify some ikea shelves. The whole design was based on the sizing for ikea’s storage boxes, the ones that slot into their shelving units. So I looked and realised that you could pick up a four-square shelf unit for £20. Granted it is mostly cardboard (but very cleverly designed cardboard).

I had a bit of a wander around ikea, considered a variety of purchases, but actually only ended up with one thing that was on no-list at all. A little set of red drawers to go under the desk in my office (there’s several whole millimeters of space, if you leave the wheels off, which I did, I then took up that space with felt feet (which I stole from the two sets of shelves I’d bought).

Having got them home and assembled them both (with glue, for extra permanence) I then took a saw to both of them lopping off one of the cubes, to leave two L-shaped storage units. yes, incidentally, I’m aware that ikea does (in fact) do some under stairs storage, but I wasn’t very fond of the bits that I could find (and it was also way more expensive).

I can’t say that it’s the neatest, most beautiful trimming. But the whole lot’s going to be slotted under the stairs and then there’s going to be some fun and games with hardboard to cover the manky wood that’s currently around, and filler, and such. Hopefully it can be made to look neat.

That done I clamped the shelves I’m intending to use as the front set, to try and make sure that it dries nice and tight, and then I came back to the house and assembled the little set of drawers to go under my desk.

This evening I started to populate the drawers. It’s quite exciting to have some ‘desk drawers’ again. Pens, and some staples, and such in a drawer, with a home. I also put some of the computing stuff in another drawer, and some of the electronics stuff in a drawer. It was quite exciting. What was more exciting was emptying a bag and a box and discovering another box is almost entirely ornaments, which can thus be discounted for the minute in the unpacking and sorting fest.

This is because my best beloved’s father and his partner are coming to visit. In the near future. The house, as may have been mentioned, is less finished than would be ideal. So the time has come for some committed house progress, I feel. Anyhow, the other thing that’s really rather required is some more shelving in the office. I have, I fear, vastly underestimated the amount of storage required in there for exciting things required for maintaining the RiscPC and the BBC Master…

My plan on that front is to wander down to BWRP and see how much a box shelf made from sanded scaffold planks might cost. If it’s too pricey, then I’ll get some scaffold planks and work on them as I did the desk. Although I’m a bit wary of my skills at producing a box-shelf from them. But hey, we can but try.

In car news, apparently, the part required to bring ‘im back to life is available ‘next day delivery’ from Renault. I just need to ring our local Renault dealer and order it… Thanks to the awesome folks at volvo 300 mania for that. I was getting a bit worried, although a large chunk of that was worrying about how you search for something without a name or a part number…

* I tried to do my tax return. This would have been fine if I actually had the P60 to fill in my tax return. However, I’d neglected the fact that my P60 doesn’t arrive until, I think, the May payslip. After much sorting of the filing stuff, and fishing through other sections of the cabinet thinking I’d suffered from insanity I realise that, in fact, I’m a numpty and I actually haven’t had it yet.

…include being ill.

I get bored. I don’t like sitting still. I get fed up watching TV or dinking on the internet all day. If I’m well and chose to spend a day dinking and relaxing on the internet, that’s fine. But if, like today, I’m required by my body to do so I’m gradually driven nuts.

I thought I was feeling better, so I stood up to have a shower, then decided as soon as I got in that nice warm water that actually, sitting down was more the thing.

One very rapid shower later and I’m back on the sofa.

Kindly friends have provided the last two episodes of The Americans and Elementary (both awesome). I’ve watched more MASH than you can shake a stick at and the original pink panther movie.

I didn’t at least sleep through much of today, which is what I did with yesterday.

And I ate lunch at lunch time and breakfast at breakfast time. Neither exactly went down well, but certainly they went down better’n yesterday’s food.

I’m off tomorrow anyhow (ill or no) so hopefully by the end of tomorrow I’ll be back on my feet, otherwise I’ll be driven screamingly insane I’m sure.

So, for essentially the last month I’ve had a succession of viral illnesses. This is mostly, I suspect, because my work have a sickness policy that 4 separate episodes of illness in a year is enough to get you managed for your sickness. I was on 3. Given that I spend my days surrounded by ill people, I don’t think that’s wholly unreasonable. But hey, that’s my opinion. Thus, when I got ill after our trip to the States, I resolutely declined to take any time off sick.

So for the past month I’ve tracked towards being well, switched onto or back from nights and… got unwell again. But I’ve given in today.

I actually went into work, feeling as I do faintly nauseous. No diarrhoea, no vomiting, nothing specific to point to, but I couldn’t really face breakfast (I managed about 3 spoons of cereal before deciding that it wasn’t happening) and my coffee and OJ were half drunk, but I still couldn’t say “I’m definitely too ill to go”. So I went. And then over the past hour it’s evolved to moments of feeling like I’m going to hurl. Cold/hot sweats. Just feeling insanely rubbish.

Part of me thinks I should try and sleep it off, but I don’t feel sleepy at the mo. So hot water bottle/cold water from the tap and some kind of light, unintelligent entertainment is in order.

In other news, I lost in my battle with the printer yesterday. I think I need to take it to someone with a WinXP / Vista / more modern Windows than I have, so as it can be configured to use DHCP. Feh.

So, years ago Nikki gave me a Buffalo Airstation so I could connect some of my archaic non-wifi enabled devices to our wifi network. I realised when I bought our Kyocera FS-1030D that I could use the Airstation so that we could have a wireless network laser printer. This would be ‘nifty’ as they say.

Of course, I’d forgotten what a pigging bastard the AirStation is to configure. Currently, I think it’s configured right, but I’ve never worked out how to connect to *it* once it’s configured to be on the network. Conceptually it’s meant to be ‘transparent’ I suppose, but that means I configure it to work via DHCP and it goes ‘plink’ and appears on the network only as an IP address that’s unreachable until you connect it to something.

And then you can’t tweak it’s configuration because it just hands everything straight to the device it’s attached to.

Which is unhelpful.

Then I connected it to the moderately archaic 1030D. Now, the 1030D was around when I was a network administrator and knows nothing of this WiFi of which you speak. It also knows about Mac OS 9 (with the odd nod to X in the configuration stuff) and is, thankfully, still supported by Kyocera’s Network Admin utility. The only problem is that Kyocera’s Network Admin utility is Windows only.

I do not have a Windows machine. I have a mac.

Macs and Mac OS 9 software aren’t friends anymore. They don’t talk. Not at all.

So the Mac configuration utility won’t run. The Windows run might run if I had a windows machine. It doesn’t, anywhere obvious, say what the minimum spec for the Windows app is, so I can try it on my Windows 2000 Server install on VMWare, but… most things look quite puzzled about the idea of running on Win2k. Although, to be fair, that’s kinda appropriate for installing a Kyocera FS-1030D driver.

Once I’ve got this massive behemoth of networking software installed, the next step is to see if I can tell the printer to please get an IP address that I can talk to. It’s moments like this when I really miss the obtuse and difficult interfaces of printers with displays on such that you can go painfully through them and configure things. Because at the moment I can’t configure the bloody thing at all.

This is, of course, one of the perils of having IT experience. You know stuff is possible, even with crappy old equipment that was never exactly the best, so you go and try things that other people probably wouldnae even consider. And that leads you down paths of circling insanity as you try and find user manuals for equipment that was considered out of date 5 years ago. Still, it gives me something to do.