Mostly lemon based

Blog

  • Positive / negative

    So, today is a day with occasional frustrations, and attempts to maintain optimism. I’m waiting for feedback from Cardiff U on my dissertation. The question of how to develop it into something that’ll pass hovers in my brain, especially since I realised that thanks to moving deadlines I’m now running one month short at the end, since we’ll be on holiday.

    In the mean time I set up the database on my laptop to allow me to capture data for the audit, and then spent about an hour trying to work out how to get Excel to talk to mySQL. The answer? Not easily. There are a few hacks, but basically Excel 2011 won’t work properly with the mySQL ODBC stuff on Mac OS, which is ‘a pig’. In the end I found an application that will extract the data in the form of a nicely formatted spreadsheet, which should allow me to then dink with the data. Thus, data collection should be easy, and data analysis easy. All I need is data location and abstraction. I’ll be writing my audit proposal and submitting it to work today, at least, that’s the plan.

    Having had a shuffle of my days off, meaning that I couldn’t collect the bike wheel when I’d arranged to, yesterday I rang them and asked if it was ready. They’d said it would probably be ready today, but I was meant to be at work today. When I rang, he said it was ‘already finished’. So I trundled through Bristol’s hideous traffic in the car, arrived to a very confused looking person who informed me that no, it wasn’t ready.

    The person behind the counter admitted it was his fault and that he’d got mixed up… no offer of anything to recompense me for the hour wasted in the middle of a nice (and very warm) day though. I know they’re a co-op and I know they’re lovely, but at this moment, on top of the fiasco of not mentioning that spokes would more than double the cost of doing the wheels? I am feeling rather less fond of them at the moment.

    However, I had one of those nice realisations – the Sturmey Archer hub is not merely easy to get spares for, but also, apparently you can just switch internals from a later AW hub into an early AW hub. So, a quick e-bay gandering later, and I’ve got a 5 quid bid on a working AW hub from 1987. That would give me a bike with working gears, for double plus awesome, and at some point later I can strip down the BSA hub and fix it :)

    On the slightly frustrating side, I finally got around to checking the Minor and the battery was flat. Not a weeny teeny bit flat, but properly flat. Or at least, I thought it was. Having put it on charge, I’m surprised to find my charger thinks otherwise, which is perhaps even more concerning. Still, I’ll leave it on charge for a bit, check the voltage and then maybe pop it back into the minor. She’s in need of moving though, her paint’s starting to go matt on the bonnet, which is going to be a bollocks to fix because it’s two-pack. I think. I also finally got over myself and rang the engineering firm. I feel like I should be more certain about what I want, but frankly, I want to talk to someone who’s an engineer and say ‘will this work, am I insane (in a bad way)’.

    Sadly, the bloke who I need to talk to is not there at the moment. And I’m at work tomorrow, so I’ll have to leave it ’til Monday. Having measured the engine, the motor is about 3cm longer than the distance from the backplate to the mount, which means that it may have to be a sort of U-shaped mount. Ideally I’d like to sketch it for them, and say “if that makes sense, please make a nice engineering diagram of it, and then if I’m happy please make it”. However, and slightly upsettingly, I’ve realised I don’t have any vector drawing packages installed on the Mac. The RiscPC, which has the most delightful of all vector drawing packages (well, when combined with the !DrawPlus enhancements) needs its battery checking before I dare plug it in. I may have to resort to the draw-photograph-send, which is pretty…cumbersome. But perhaps better than trying to explain what I’m after on the phone. I shall see what he says when I ring…

  • Please insert ridiculous wail

    One day I’m going to learn that I should check that the fault I think it is, is the fault it actually is.

    So, I stripped down the bottom bracket on my beloved bike, having taken the cotter pin out from that side, and, having collected the ball bearings together after dropping them on the floor, spent some time cleaning up the inside of the bottom bracket.

    I can see now that I really, really, really should service it properly, and that the one on the other side probably should be stripped down and cleaned as well. There was grease in there, yes, but I don’t know when it was last ‘greasy’. Much cleaning with plusgas of parts ensued, and fresh grease applied, and the bearings – which as others have suggested are tough as nails – all looked lovely when I reassembled. I’m slightly worried about the tightness to which I’ve tightened it, but it feels…okay. It runs smoothly. I guess I’ll check it in a week or so, and see how it’s feeling.

    It’s good that something needed doing with the painfully overpriced tool I’d just bought (which, it turns out, I could have got away with the crappy Halfords one, because it was lovely and easy to adjust) because that wasn’t where the crunchy/clunky feeling was coming from. The cotter pin on the other side, the chain side, that had worked loose. And lo, a quick tighten and all was well. Having seen inside there though, I’m slightly unclear as to how the oiler is meant to work. It appears to just drip oil into a space in the bottom bracket that runs in to the legs running to the back wheel. There’s no cunning device to try and get oil dripped in there to the actual bearings. And that’s ignoring the whole pack-it-with-grease-then-add-oil-later freakyness I’m noting.

    That’s what it says in my book, though. Still, if I’ve got it more or less right, then it shouldn’t need adjusting for a while. So that’s good :)

    I have now ordered the tyre for the new wheel, and hopefully an innertube. It’s a bit difficult to ascertain whether I’m getting an innertube as the company it’s coming from are…somewhat…recalictrant about answering e-mail.

  • Sticker Shock

    So, I battled through the hideous traffic to get the wheels to the bike store for rebuilding. I’d nicked the wheels off what is to be Kathryn’s Raleigh city beater for this – on the basis that they said ’20 quid each per wheel’. This statement was true, but only in the sense that the actual labour cost is 20 quid.

    When I discussed it with them, I asked about the spokes and the guy said it’d be ‘a bit extra’ for the spokes ‘if they need replacing’. I assured him they probably would. Probably all of them. This did not prompt him to comment on the cost of spokes.

    This was unfortunate.

    It turns out that they charge £1 per spoke. Given the 40 spoke rear wheel, this is ‘more than I’d like to pay’ for the moment. Granted, rusty rims eat through brake shoes, but there’s pain, and there’s dear god, how much. Especially given that the sturmey archer 3 speed hub in the borrowed wheel is also dead. I am contemplating the fearsome ‘looking at it’ – although I’ve currently applied a process of pouring lots of penetrating oil into it and hoping. If I’d’ve been quoted that before the choice would have been an easy one. It’s waaay cheaper to get a pre-made westwood rimmed wheel, and yes, the spoke count’s wrong, but hey, if anyone has figs available, they’re welcome to give them, but I certainly don’t. I can keep the old rims for the moment I become independently wealthy, perhaps through sales of my awesome stocks of junk.

    On the plus side, I can use the spare rim to rebuild my 40 spoke rear when I get around to fixing the BSA hub, and I’ve now found somewhere that charges far less per spoke, so the next wheel should be much cheaper.

  • More geekery…

    So, while I was digging up the pile of stuff which allows me to hit a local webserver and…theoretically get a view of the garage* John gave me some speakers, which had been gifted him. These speakers are of the variety that you used to get and attach to your PC so you could listen to the new-fangled MP3s and listen to the sounds from Quake. That sort of age.

    However, they lacked some important things.

    A power supply and a cable with which to connect them to said PC.

    Now, where John works they make stuff, and they found it’s cheaper to buy some of the components with a power supply, which then goes straight into the electrical waste, than to buy them without a power supply. We won’t get into the mental pain about the way the world works these days, but anyhow, with his bosses permission, John saves some of these brand-new unused power supplies. But they’re a stupid, fairly useless voltage. However, John is t’awesome.

    He looked at the design, and realised that by changing two resistors (and sometimes a capacitor) you could get anything, pretty much, between 5 and 20volts from these.

    This is handy.

    I needed a 6 volt supply, so he gave me one of these little boxen and some destructions, and I sat down at home and broke out the tools.

    Okay, so maybe a little geeky.

    Now, being as I’m me, I then wandered down to the garage muttering resistor colour codes under my breath and fished through my dad’s box of resistors. Some of these are ‘new’, for definitions of ‘new’ ending sometime in the 80s, most are probably around 1960-70, a few are 1950s resistors. Some predate colour coding.

    In a ‘probably for the best’ situation, the ones I found that matched the requirements for making 6 volts were fairly modern, but still there was a small size difference:

    The new and the old components seem to be 'slightly' different sizes. (Don't look @anachrocomputer)

    As you can see, my ‘new’ one is on at least it’s second use. Dunno what it was salvaged from before…

    So, with some bending, and some coaxing, I made this happen:

    Looks completely standard to me... Err... Mmm. I'll get me coat, shall I.

    And with some trepidation I connected it (the lead that comes with the cables does not meet British Standards, in that the fuse is…missing). It has a dinky 1/3 size plug that’s very cute, and it’s very clever. But there’s no fuse, which means it’s only fused on the extension lead, which is fused at 13a.

    Out came, approximately, 6 volts. I say approximately, because my Altai meter, which remains the only one I’ve not managed to kill reads with roughly the same accuracy as me waving my finger at it with my eyes closed and going ‘Uh, there’. Never mind. It was in the 6 volts region, and less than the 7 volts it had been producing.

    Annnyhow. I then modded the speakers to have a very long audio cable, this is because the garage PC is located in the roof of the garage, out of the way. And then I tested it. Obviously, being a numpty I’d managed to do something wrong, I’d screwed up connecting the audio lead. The easy bit, as it were. But, that is now fixed and I can listen to audio in the garage. If I can get any audio to the garage.

    I actually listened to my iPhone today, which has podcasts, which are the win :)

    * It turns out the 802.11b WAP is fast enough, just about, for it to manage to throw the data across from motion detection – over the periods of time in between detecting motion – but not fast enough to actually get the data across the in real time. It’s certainly not fast enough to stream audio data down to the garage, but I can pull up web pages. Nikki thinks she has an 802.11g thing that she’s not using that I can abuse into being a WAP point, which would rock. Once this is working I may well tweak things so that the cheap camera is actually used for motion detection, because it’s the only one with night vision. Either that or I may pick up another night vision webcam. I also need to get my beloved to help me set it up at some point, because it’s hideously out of focus, and I’ve tried focusing it and then checking, and, probably because it’s a grotty cheap piece of crap it’s a tiny range over which ‘in focus’ and ‘massively out of focus’ are close friends, and I never managed to get it decently in focus**
    ** This is assuming ‘in focus’ is an available feature, a fact of which I’m not certain.

  • I never thought it’d be this hard…

    I gave away my C-Spanner that came with the MZ, with the MZ. It was part of the tool roll, and while I delighted in it being a bit of East German history, I felt it was fair that it stayed with the bike. I thought about it and, having sold the DAF, had no other vehicles that had, or were likely to need a C-Spanner.

    And I thought, it’s only a C-Spanner. Hardly impossible to obtain.

    Apparently that was an inaccurate assumption.

    Rather than use the internet, I decided I’d get it from a local supplier. Foolish, apparently. And indeed, I assumed that it’d be easy to do. I mean, it’s a C-spanner (or hook wrench), how hard can it be.

    So I went to Bristol Bike Workshop. They could order them for me, or I could bring my bike in and they’d let me use the workshop tools… which is very lovely, but not really a long term solution and involves me putting the bike into and out of the car several times, and several trips across bristol. So I rang around, and Halfords, oddly enough said ‘oh yes, we have several options for them’. This morning I trecked, following this misspoken evidence to Halfords, who do have one of them as a part of a 35 quid set of bicycle tools.

    Feh, I thought. It’s not even a decent quality one, and since the bracket’s probably not moved since about 1940 it’s probably going to need a fair bit of welly applied to it. I’ll ring around the bike shops, one of them is sure to have one.

    Lots of bike shops informed me that yes, they have them in the workshop, but no, they don’t sell them.

    Lots of them.

    A few could order them in…in a few days.

    Unfortunately, I finished my quest after 12, when I finally gave in and rang back Bristol Bike Workshop, who informed me that sadly, because it’s after 12, it wouldn’t be in until Thursday. When I’m at work. Which is no use at all for me, because at that point I might as well buy the damn thing off E-bay where it’s half the price.

    Gaaaah.

    I’m now waiting on Bristol Tools who said they might be able to get it by tomorrow. They’re trying their suppliers.

    I learn from this that you should never, ever, get rid of tools.

    ETA: Bristol Tools Fucking ROCK. 10 minutes later, and they ring back and say ‘we have one place that has it in stock, and can get you it for tomorrow before lunch’. It is, however, 10 quid extra delivery, which is a bit painful. But it means I can sort my bike before I have to go back to work :)

  • That special hell (caution, moderate geekery ahead)

    There’s a moment as you’re hodging together archaic, or at least well obsolete technology that you think ‘oh ah, maybe using new stuff would be nice’. So, the garage security (and music) system is to be made from bits that if someone half-inches them will not cause me too much distress. Thus, the 8 year old PC (which for some reason takes several attempts to POST, but does it all by itself and has done it the same for at least several years), the freecycle 1280×1024 LCD monitor*, the keyboard sporting a handy XT/AT switch (no, not a nice IBM clicky keyboard, a Tandon knockoff)*, a PS/2 mouse*, some of those dinky little plastic speakers you used to get and connect to your ‘puter* and a WiFi dongle that was designed to work with a G3 Mac. There’s also a £3 night-vision camera, a webcam**, and soon a second somewhat better webcam. It runs Linux on a 200gig hard disk.

    Getting it running using this shonky heap of hardware has actually proven to be very easy, if a little slow. Ubuntu went on in a hitchless fashion. Motion and the handy graphical config utility kMotion went on smoothly. kMotion has some rather irritating quirks that limit Motion’s function with it***, but the handyness of the instantly viewable webpage showing multiple cameras makes for niceness. In the end, a back up utility that basically writes a CRON job which runs every 3 minutes and updates a permanently stored backup of images on a remote machine kinda made up for the bit that I couldn’t do with Motion.

    So all that works. The cheap camera can’t be used for motion detection because it sends corrupt images every few seconds and they trigger the motion detection, and it was essentially permanently recording video.

    But it’s handy for seeing what’s going on in there, so it can stay.

    And then we get to the network.

    The G3 dongle? That works fine. Drivers picked it up no problem.

    Then we get to extending the network down to the garage. I have an aged PCI 102.11b802.11b (‘scuse the thinko) network card in the media server, it’s not used because it has a nice wired connection. I would use it, but the drivers struggle to make the benighted thing work at all. It’s never been reliable. So I asked John if his venerable collection of stuff included any spare wifi kit. Didn’t have to be new, or shiny.

    He pulled out a router and a WAP box. John rocks.

    It turned out that contrary to initial thoughts, the router does not include a WiFi component. It’s just a router. But that’s handy, because the little dinky 4 port 100baseT hub that I swear is hiding in the house, is doing a damn good job of hiding. Really damn good.

    I have been through a lot of boxes today, and it’s stayed well hidden.

    So I set up the router to behave and play well with the Be Internet Wifi router. All is good.

    Then I come to the Belkin WAP box. And there’s a special hell reserved for the designer of this box.

    Yes, I’m sure you made it really very cheap. Well done. But a Windows only configuration utility? On a network device? How could you? Your mother would be ashamed.. I see her now, weeping, asking what’s become of you. How you could sell out your soul like that. A network device that can’t work without windows. For shame.

    So now I’ve updated VMWare. Hopefully, after this reboot I can download and install the software required to make the device work, and set it so it’ll only allow devices with specific MAC addresses to connect (‘cos it has WEP “security” only *sigh*).

    And *then* I can mount the computer down in the garage. And we can have our lounge back.

    * Thanks John!
    ** Thanks Nikki, I think
    *** You should be able to add any command for it to run after saving a movie or image, but you can’t add any commands that kMotion doesn’t automatically generate when it’s running as it overwrites the config files each time it’s run.

  • What they don’t tell you

    It’s the subtle creep of things I don’t have time to do that annoys me. While I don’t have time to renovate the house or start converting the car, they’re big projects that will take time. I can intellectually get my head around that. But the fact that the bottom bracket on Molly is a bit ‘clunky’ and clearly needs replacing, and that because it isn’t a ‘pop out the bearing and pop the new one in’ job (because I don’t know what bearing without taking it apart, so it’s a take it apart – work out what I need, put it back together so I can use it for work, order the part, take it apart, replace it – job). And because me and bikes are not yet entirely comfortable with one another, she’s going to have to go to the shop for it.

    Gaaah.

    I hate having other people do stuff for me that I can do myself.

    Gaaaaah.

    Also, it’s more expensive. And weak as I am, stuck in writing dissertation as I am, I’m finding my strength not to spend money on frivolities much reduced.

    Feh.

    This education m’larky is just quietly expensive, in addition to the viciously painfully expensive experience that it visibly is.

  • More tin-foil hats.

    So. Plastic, right. I’ve never been terribly fond of plastic packaging. Particularly because it’s often not sporting the appropriate recycle logo, which means that it ends up in the bin if we can’t find another use for it. And eventually you end up with hundreds of the buggers, and have to start chucking them away. But anyway, ignoring that, we’ve known for a very long time that plastic leaches chemicals into the food it surrounds. It’s a problem that’s worse when the food is hot. I’ve been vaguely aware of this for more than 10 years, but it’s slowly beginning to bother me. In that way that, well, we try to eat healthily. In years when our garden produces more than a bumper crop of slugs, we try to eat organically produced, home-grown food. This year is not turning out so well, what with it having rained pretty much continuously since March – we’ve had some soft fruit (those few strawbs that we saved from the slugbeasts) but not much else is growing.

    Anyhow, so. And then that niggling thing about plastic leaching into foods sits there, and whenever I open a packet I now think about eating plastic. I have a packet of chewing gum at work… for when I eat something very strong on my break… apparently, chewing gum is made of plastic too. Feh. And then you think about tins, I never thought of tins as being plastic, but they are – apparently – coated in plastic internally. And tetrapac cartons – I knew they had plastic in, but I think about the quantity of fruit-juice I drink… and oh dear.

    Now I know there are arguments about what’s better – the shipping cost of a lightweight plastic packet vs the shipping + recycling energy from a glass or ‘other’ container. Which obviously makes my brain hurt trying to decide which is the least-bad option. It all ends up being horribly, horribly complex, like most trying-to-work-out-what’s-eco-friendly things. It does make me feel like I’m going to turn into one of those tin-foil hat people. Otoh, as my beloved pointed out, I don’t think it’s all one vast conspiracy. So yay for that :)

    In other news, my mum now has a new linux box which is, apparently, working well for her. Yay for Ubuntu. Also, Yay for Ubuntu which is now on the last of the hackintoshes. My other 8 year old PC (I can’t quite remember why I ended up with two. Something to do with a dud power-supply, I vaguely recall) is now running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. It’s surprisingly responsive, if not actually very good when you get to doing real work. Unfortunately, during the installation process, I dropped the nice trackball that Alex sent me. Not far, you understand. Less than a foot, I think, onto a rug. And it stopped working…instantly.

    I took it apart, and couldn’t see anything obviously wrong…

    No obvious physical damage from being dropped, more's the pity. Could've fixed that.

    But thankfully, John applied his superior fixing skills to it – one of the pins on the sensor had corroded through to the point that dropping it was sufficient to break the pin. Replacing the pin with wire (using his nice temperature controlled iron) brought it back to life. Which has made me very happy :)

    He also gave me an old keyboard and mouse, so that the garage security camera / music player can go live. Only slight problem is getting Motion to work. Unfortunately, the Ubuntu installed version doesn’t seem to have installed the default config file, and also the camera I’m using at the moment – one of those old Logitech golfball quickcams, that’s a bit finnicky about working in Linux. The night-vision camera which claimed to be supported by linux is, but the night vision bit of it, not so much. Having got both cameras working…trying to get Motion to use them is proving to not be as ‘off-you-go’ as I’d hoped. While I’ve alloted the 5 minutes ‘while the bath is running’ period for having a quick dink, I don’t hold out a great deal of hope for it working this morning.

    John also gave me a wifi bridge, so hopefully I can get the network extended down to the garage without having to have the router in the larder. Which will be good :)

    All I need to do is find by 100BaseT hub, which is kicking around….somewhere. Because there’s only the one network point in the larder. Of course, the 10baseT hub has now hidden itself, along with the amp which I was *also* going to take down to John’s yesterday. Bah.

    Right, so Bath. 2000 words. Fun.

  • Trying, and failing.

    So. It’s been a stressful few days here for a variety of reasons. One of which is trying to write my dissertation which I’m not finding particularly easy, or happy making. At any rate, I got back a message last night saying I’d passed my module that I had to resubmit.

    Woo! I thought.

    Today I looked at the feedback. Now I’m deeply angry and stressed. It passed, but only just – I think – and they had the fucking gall to say “you’ve not really address the feedback”. WHAT FUCKING FEEDBACK. *Breathe*.

    This is the same department that sent me *TWO* ticks to indicate where I’d got something like 15 marks. TWO TICKS and NO COMMENTS WITH THEM. I have no fucking idea what I do well. I only know what they don’t like. It’s like learning to write in english by scrawling a series of squiggles on paper and then them telling you which ones you were cyrillic. I don’t know which ones were latin script, but I know which bits I definately don’t want. What the fuck use is that. When I asked for more feedback, I got the fucking mark scheme sent to me. I CAN READ YOU USELESS FUCKHEADS. *breathe*. I don’t know *WHERE* I’m getting marks because you won’t fucking TELL ME.

    I then went shopping. This was a mistake.

    I have been looking for some nice bookshelf speakers. And granted, I only paid £4.50 for the nice bookshelf speakers I’m now the owner of, but I had to then make it up over a fiver…which meant that I bought a couple of CDs (London Calling (The Clash) and Frank (Amy Winehouse)). Which all would have been fine if I’d’ve not then spotted the heavily discounted ‘World of Poo‘ (£6.50 for a hardback book!). I went from not knowing it existed to owning it in the space of about 10 minutes (well, slightly longer, I had to meander round Sainsbury’s ‘cos I wanted stuff they don’t sell in our local Co-Op).

    Whilst they are nice (looking) speakers (haven’t got an amp to check them with) which is important ‘cos they’re going on my nice desk in the nice library, I feel a little bad. Problem is, I want an anglepoise lamp for my desk. If I can’t find one I’ll give in and get another ikea one, but the quality of it’s not great.

    On the plus side, as I try and chill out before I (a) try and look at the obnoxious and useless feedback from Cardiff Uni (I’ve glanced, it didn’t look helpful, however it does helpfully tell me it’s not good enough for my dissertation) and (b) go back to writing my dissertation which I’ve not got very far with… err, not sure what that plus side was. Oh ah. I had a really nice coffee with my friends Nikki and Kate, and was reminded yesterday what an awesome friend Emma is. I have good people around me, and can take on the fucking world if I need to.

    I also have Röyksopp to listen to. And The Clash, and more Amy Winehouse. Ah.

  • Dear Scan

    I started using your site 13 years ago, or there abouts. And whilst I’ve made odd purchases elsewhere, I’ve always returned to your company. I’d been very impressed with your customer service, and unlike a certain other company who declined to believe their delivery driver had stolen the goods he was meant to deliver (I’m informed by the credit card company that had to beat them into submission and refund the price, that that’s where my new PC went) you were always helpful. So I kept buying from you. Your prices were good, not insane, but reliably reasonable. The Today Only offers were occasionally really good. And when I had to return some kit which turned out not to be faulty (my PC’s power supply was dying) again, impressed. Lots of thorough fault finding and checking and eventually helpful suggestions as to what else might be causing the problem.

    All good.

    Then we meet my last experience.
    – Refusal to meet your requirements under UK Law (not just according to me, also according to the Consumer Advice Bureau).
    – Unhelpful and obstructive staff
    – Claiming that Viewsonic kit should only last one year*

    Ironically, the viewsonic box turned out to…have an inherent fault. The publicly available firmware has a bug which means that in some circumstances it doesn’t work properly. Thankfully, despite your recalcitrant and unhelpful attitude, and despite the fact it was all of a month out of warranty (meaning I’d got 8 months use from it), someone provided me with a password to get some not-yet-fully-released firmware.

    That means the box now works again.

    I am unclear why it stopped working, but the fact that they fixed it despite the fact it was a month out of warranty – that means I’ll keep buying stuff from them. I won’t be buying from you again. Ever again. I may not work in IT anymore, but I’m still a geek. I still buy a reasonable amount of kit. Not necessarily expensive stuff, because I’m no gamer. But several hundred quid a year. That will now go to any of your competitors. Enjoy.

    Oh and next time I have a complaint about any of your kit, I’ll be sending it recorded delivery, CCing the CAB, prepping the small claims court claim and praying I bought it on a credit card, because they can get my money back from you.

    Your lousy customer service lost you a customer.

    Tara.

    * Technically stating that you’ll only replace goods for the duration of the warranty because that is their lifespan. You best stop trading in the UK, because that is *not* what the law here says.