So, at some point I’ll probably set up a site devoted to the EV Minor project, egged on to success in this field by Jonny’s Flux Capacitor which is awesome, but also faintly sad, because I really wanted to use that EV myself. Money, as always, being a pig that gets in the way of things.
Anyhow, so I have some questions to put to my engineering shop, and I’m putting them down here, where I can find them again. (more…)
– Fixed the front door lock (it fell off yesterday, the screws that had once held it to the door have vaporised).
– Re-fixed the alarm sensors in the garage. Until a few days ago the doors to the garage had no alarm sensors on them (‘cos I didn’t have enough range, and hadn’t bought enough sensors). A few days ago all the bits had arrived and I finally got around to adding them to the garage door with their stick on pads, and mounted the alarm repeater so that it had enough range. The alarm randomly went off this morning and on checking I found that the stick-on pads had failed – so I’ve screwed the sensors to the doors. It’s now covered by movement sensors and door sensors. I feel happier, or at least, less paranoid.
– Fixed the desk surface to the desk legs.
– Keep poking my dissertation with pointy sticks.
– Put our painting on the house insurance.
– E-mailed the engineering workshop and said I’ll get back to them soon about the Minor’s EV needs.
So, that’s not bad, I guess. :)
So, I wanted a solution to putting my laptop somewhere when I’m using the big-and-grotty 19″ LCD*. It’s good enough for while I’m recording podcasts, and it’s nice to have the extra real-estate of a 1440×900 display, but it’s also streaky and not very impressive colour rendition. Anyhow. I wanted somewhere for the laptop to live, so I can use the desk space for my many papers when I find the inspiration (tomorrow) for working on my course.
Kind of a shelf-come drawer. And thus the drelf was born.
The drelf is basically a plinth on runners with a slot cut in it to hold the cables (so they don’t escape and run amok):
It’s made from the same wood as the desk (I had a few offcuts), and for the sake of nicety also has a little channel cut just behind the front of the metal strip, so that you can pull the drelf out by a ‘handle’.
I then mounted kitchen drawer runners on the side of the hunk of wood, and this was then mounted on L-brackets under the desk:
I need to trim the ends off those screws, by the way. I expect that should happen some time around 2015.
The cables were fed through that slot in the first shot (it’s larger at the top than the bottom, so the cables can pass through easily, but the connectors on the ends of the cables won’t pass through). I popped some stick on rubber feet on the top surface of the desk to make the laptop sit above the hunk of metal reinforcing from the wood’s days as scaffold plank. And that’s basically it. The laptop’s supply is a knock-off apple magsafe adaptor that lives permanently attached to the drawer (since the original one’s died, and given my luck getting things repaired or replaced recently I’m not optimistic for apple replacing it).
And this is what it looks like in action:
I’m very pleased with it :)
* I’m trying to decide if I want to whinge about the LCD. There were no faults mentioned on the advert on ebay, and the photo hit the crappyness of the screen. On the other hand, it was only 30 quid. Feh. Unfortunately, I’ve left it a while now, so should probably just suck it up.
So, I’ve been watching politics in the UK with increasing distress. I’m now more and more convinced that this is not the place to be. We’ve wanted to leave for a long time, and have an exit strategy, but each passing day makes me more convinced that we need to do that as soon as we can reasonably do it. Not that I really know where to go, I mean, Canada appears to be trying to join the UK on its death spiral towards an unpleasantly right wing nutcase led state.
I know the UK is hideously xenophobic. Whilst I’ve had few problems since I was a kid, I’m well aware of the way that people think about immigrant families and workers here. I also hear discussions at work and the vilification of immigrant workers seems to have nicely settled in. The fact these people are often way overqualified for their jobs, and doing just whatever job they can get… those jobs being jobs no-one else wants? That seems to pass people by. But now that labour have started singing the same songsheet? It just makes me more and more worried. The policies being put in place would have meant that I probably couldn’t have married my wife, or it would have been very close. The experience was bad enough without more invasive questions about our financial status, when the state feels it’s fine to try and pick apart exactly why you want to be together.
So, it’s more and more clear that my incredibly intelligent and educated wife is not what UK politicians want in the country. Well, that’s fine. We’ll leave.
I want to leave anyway, because the piecemeal death the NHS is suffering is too horrid for me to stick out. Because we need to spend some time close to Kathryn’s family. Because other countries are better places to raise children (apparently, in Western countries, the UK ranks around 22nd for being a ‘good place to raise children’). And for many other small reasons.
It is depressing though. I was raised to believe things about the UK, about how the UK was a good place, and that we looked after the poor, that we supported those less able and enabled them to achieve, that we treated the sick according to need, that we were a safe haven of democracy to those from abroad. I was taught that we’d done horrific things in the past, that we’d learned from those mistakes and moved forwards. And I feel distressed at watching the right wing take control, at watching the extreme capitalists sucking the life from our society, at the way we’re going.
I hope our exit strategy works.
So, I’ve made, or at least started to make my drelf… or shrawer. Basically, the laptop is going to lurk, when I’m using the desk, on a combination between a shelf and a drawer, with an adaptor to connect it to the rather less exciting Acer monitor I picked up (I can’t entirely decide if the scabby quality of the output is from the very, very cheap MiniDisplayPort to VGA adaptor, or from the monitor being scabby. Looking at the output I think it’s the monitor tho’). It also connects to a dinky little powered USB hub that means I connect one connector to the laptop and get mouse/keyboard/M-Audio FastTrack and if I can find the drivers for it, the Miglia Evolution.
The drelf, which is what I’m calling it, pulls out and has a thingie to retain the cables when disconnected. I’m quite overly excited by this fun toy, and have been using it to bribe myself into working on my essay :)
The good thing about this is it makes me feel less annoyed about the death of the ViewSonic VMP74. The dinky little media player from the lounge is now deceased – at 1 year and 1 month old. To make it worse, it sat in its box for several months before we used it. But Scan computers are, it seems, unclear on the law (Sale of Goods Act 1979) and their responsibilities, so are refusing to do anything about it. Arguing alternately that it’s lasted as long as it should and that I can’t prove it’s broken. Obviously the fact it doesn’t work counts for nothing.
*sigh*
I hate arguing with companies, and would just like to tell them to behave like a decent company. But we’ll see what Trading Standards say, since Scan have stated they’re not going to do anything about it. It’s all terribly tedious. For the sake of £50 they’ve completely screwed a 10 year customer relationship.
Still, now I’ve got to get back to hacking about 300 words out of my essay. :-/
I know, I know, everyone knows that women’s clothes sizes are a joke. Or at least, all women. Most men, I suspect, also have a notion of this from contact with any woman. At least any Western woman.
But why. This rant is courtesy of the day spent shopping. Granted in charity shops, because the pain of trying to get ethical clothing that I like is just too much to bear. Anyhow, yesterday I noticed that the last pair of jeans I had that fitted reasonably have started to develop a hole in an…unfortunate area. So we toured the shops of Bristol in search of jeans. And I sort of hover around a 12/14. If I got rid of the pot-bellied look that I tend to have I’d be safely in 12 territory. As it is I’m sometimes a 12, sometimes a 14. However, the laughable idea that I could, say, pick up a 12 and expect it to be on the snug size, and pick up a 14 and expect it to be a little large, well, it is just as I say, laughable.
There were 12s I couldn’t get my arse into. There were 14s that looked like I’d rented a denim tent. Many shops and brands later I walked away with 2 jeans and thankfully my sense of self confidence intact. A 12 and a 14. Yay. Now it’s time to donate the jeans that don’t really fit, and some other clothes I really don’t wear I think. Then someone else can play guess the size.
So, I’m looking for an engineering works in Bristol (or nearby, so South Wales is fine too) that can:
– Lighten and mount a standard A-series flywheel on the output shaft of a Netgain 8″ motor.
– Mount the motor on the backplate such that the shaft and the attached flywheel align with the original output shaft/flywheel from an A-series engine, and trim the backplate to lighten it as far as reasonably possible retaining the original gearbox bellhousing mounts.
– Design and fabricate two mounts to mount the motor and attach to the existing mounting pillars or mounting holes in the Minor’s engine bay.
– Recondition a Morris Minor diff (well Riley / Wolseley 1500 diff).
I had a chat with Llewellin’s in town, and despite their statements of general reconditionyness and engineering prowess, they decree that this is all beyond their abilities (including the mog diff!).
Anyone got any recommendations for a good engineering shop that are likely to be able to do that (not necessarily all of it, I can spread the love around) and also not hugely misogynistic and won’t charge me the bonus being-a-girl price?
So, I made a shopping list this morning. Our lists are things of great beauty. Well, okay, not that. But our lists are carefully thought out. We (or one of us, if the other is at work, as today) sit down, look at shift patterns, work out when we’ll be in / out, flick through our (numerous) cookery books, select recipes. Having done so each item is popped onto the list so we don’t buy stuff we don’t need, and do buy what’s required. The list also has the recipe / day list on it. Last time we went (I think it was last time) we got to the shop with only just enough time to shop and discovered I’d left the list at home. There was a fair bit of swearing at myself.
Today, having checked and discovered that the fishmonger is shut on Sundays, the whole foods store is closed on Sundays, the bakers is closed on Sundays, indeed the only thing reliably open on Sundays is the Awesome “Gardener’s Patch”. So guiltily I decided to do the shop at Sainsbury’s. I hate shopping at supermarkets now.
I feel really guilty anyhow, then everything’s wrapped in plastic, the range is crap compared to the stores we normally shop in (where’s the fresh chard? why are there 800 varieties of frozen peas but no interesting frozen veg*). Ethical foods are stuck in the miniature ethical food ghetto, and environmentally friendly detergents are, well… it’s Ecover, Method or nothing.
Anyhow, I carefully (given the last attempt) put the list with my phone, because I knew I’d not leave without my phone. I picked up the phone, the list, money, shopping bags. Got in the car. Drove to the shop. I arrive perfectly at opening time. There are maybe 10 people in the supermarket – relative bliss. I fish in my pocket. No list. No list in the car, not in my hoodie pocket. Not on the floor between the car and the shop. I swear, a lot. I drive home. I look around the house, upstairs, everywhere I’ve been since well before making the list. It’s gone. I fish through the bin *and* the recycling. No list.
So then I swear a lot at myself, re-make the list and head back to the now packed supermarket where I find that as usual Sainsbury’s have their usual “never knowingly fully stocked” approach to things. So that sucked.
Also, by this point I was hungry (bad) and kept picking up ‘oh, we should stock up on this’ items because I’m in Sainsburys, and we don’t often go to Sainsburys and there are “stock” things that we buy in pseudo bulk from there.
It was not a cheap shopping trip.
It also sucked because I must admit I’m a wee bit stressed about the essay I’m rewriting, and my dissertation. And to top it off the dinky little Viewsonic VMP74 media player that has been serving us very well decided today to die. It powers up, passes it’s little self-test, sits for a few minutes working and then dies. Splut. So I’ve ‘mailed Scan about it, let’s wait and see how their warranty department deals. It’s just over 1 year old, but honestly? Even a crappy cheap piece of consumer electronics should last a year. Especially since it spent until November in a box.
Anyhow, I’ve regained my sanity now, and am winding down and chilling out. Essay later, that’s the plan.
* Seriously, local Sainsburys, 2 cabinets *full* of frozen peas.
So I recorded the spoken section of the next dead bug jumping. This went pretty well.
Granted my sleep deprived state may mean that it makes no sense, but it makes sense to me at the moment. I managed this despite the fact that my nice headphones have, of course, disappeared. The new mic / mic stand / pop filter all worked well. It was good.
Then I started trying to record the records.
Oh dear.
I’d not noticed, but even in the preview I can hear it now, there’s an insane amount of hum. Oddly it varies according to the position of the stylus on the record. It varies with stylus position. It’s really quite odd – I am left vaguely wondering if there’s some kind of cable fault. Which would be tedious to rectify.
I’m too tired to fix it, but I’ve spent a lot of time flailing. I’ve dinked with earth connections, I’ve dinked with cables. I’ve cleaned contacts. It’s all done sod all. I suspect I need to try it with my main amp, and see if the hum is deck-related or amp-related, or something else. It’s made more complex by the fact that since the preamp and the deck had no earth, I made the deck’s earth run to the plug; but the cambridge amp is clearly a popper amp, and it has an earth point. But connecting that – that’s likely to create a new earth loop and more humming. This will, sadly delay the show, which is a shame, because I really rather enjoyed it up until I couldn’t coax the humming to stop.
So, last night I finally got around to getting mediatomb to transcode FLAC files into WAV and throw that at the media box in the lounge, rather than FLAC which – I thought it could play – but it can’t. This was awesome. I also got it to transcode the video from FLV files into MPEG. Again, the awesome.
Then I tried to coax it into playing MOVs by the same trickery. Unfortunately, as I quit mediatomb, I restarted it. A foolish error, which appears to have done something hideous somewhere inexplicable. I say hideous, and I say inexplicable, because having erased every reference I can find to the bastard software from the linux box. Having uninstalled it, and trawled the disk removing every trace I can find of the database, when I fired up a fresh install it still complained about database permission error. Another attempt, more fiddling and tweaking the permissions of the newly installed version – that led to a ‘creating new database message’ which I’d’ve had more faith in if the disk access was high (‘cos it should be scanning disks). But it wasn’t.
I am now on my final attempt at fixing it before I resort to the nuke-the-site-from-orbit approach. The machine *only* runs Ubuntu and Mediatomb. That is its entire purpose in life. I can, if I have to, take the machine and put a fresh install of Linux on it, because somewhere, hidden somewhere obscure without any obvious filename reference is some sodding mediatomb file that I can’t find and that is causing me grief. Either that, or something odd’s happened to sqlite, equally beyond the level at which I’m functioning, and also the amount of time I’m willing to spend on it. Seriously? I thought an hour or so I’d have this fixed. 3 hours later I’m no further on than I was when I started, really.
ETA: I seem to have managed to beat it into submission without the aforementioned reinstall. It’s currently rebuilding the database. It appears there were several problems. I’d broken the config file (in a nebulous way I’ve not worked out yet), and there was a database problem. My CLI skills haven’t had such a workout in a long time, and are sorely lacking now. I can’t remember half the commands, and vi defeated me :(