This website is not masterful. It is devoted to things
I do either because they need doing, or because I enjoy doing them,
and which someone else might possibly want to do. Perhaps if my
mistakes are included here in enough detail someone else might not
make them…
I am not an engineer, or a software developer, or a mechanic, or a
carpenter, or a bookbinder, or anything else I might pretend to be on
these pages. I am just an Amateur, but in real life I’m a PhD student
in Theology. Except insofar as the aformentioned things I am not come
in to it, this is unlikely to be apparent here.
This website is purely static, and is the successor to a wordpress
blog.
Too Many Directories
Posted on March 4, 2023
| John Morris
My PhD has too many directories in it.
I have—currently—three parts, and each of those has several chapters. All the chapters have been written independently, so I have a structure which more or less looks like this:
titlepage.tex thesis.tex -- 1.part1 | +- 1.chapter1 | +-- standalone.tex +-- title.tex +-- chapter1.tex +- 2.chapter2 etc, only with three parts and sensible names. Each of the chapters builds to a separate pdf with standalone.
[Read More]Migrating Home Assistant (and thoughts on over-engineering)
Posted on February 28, 2023
| John Morris
Home Automation is largely a gimmic. Even the founder of Home Assistant writes blog posts pointing out that turning the lights on from your phone is pretty pointless, except for showing off (not that I’ve ever turned a light on from my phone to show off…). Another of these posts tries to think of a useful smart light and comes up with:
Imagine a brave new world where you walk into a room and the light is already on, as you have naturally come to expect after years of living with such a technology.
[Read More]Hacked
Posted on November 12, 2022
(Last modified on November 13, 2022)
| John Morris
I got hacked.
There are all kinds of fun exploits people use to get into systems they’re not supposed to be in. In my case they used ssh. Normally ssh is secure. None of my passwords are brute-forceable. (Yes, you shouldn’t have public-facing password ssh… but that’s no fun when you’re on someone else’s computer and need to get in in a hurry.) But in a moment of weakness I had needed a blank slate to test an environment regression against.
[Read More]Tracking down a faulty ABS sensor
Posted on June 17, 2022
| John Morris
Like many ageing Honda Civics our VSA and ABS lights have been coming on sporadically for the last few months. Now they’re stuck on all the time.
First I suspected the battery, so I duly measured the no-load voltage (~12.6V: not great, but not awful either), the voltage dip when running the fuel pumps, (~11.6V) and the voltage dip when starting (briefly around 10V, but I didn’t have a scope on it).
[Read More]Ignition Barrel Repair
Posted on December 31, 2021
| John Morris
Halfway down the country, at 7.30 in the morning (having been on the road since 5.30) the key stopped turning in the ignition. We have an old (‘06) Honda Civic, and the AA man blamed the age. He was able to force the key round, doing much the same thing I’d been doing, only more effectively, and we drove on, to repeat the same rigmarole the next time it was started.
[Read More]Python Is (sort-of) Functional
Posted on November 24, 2021
| John Morris
I recently had to parse a csv file which looks like this:
"key","val" "key","val" "key","val" "col1","col2","col3","col4" ... row data here The obvious, imperative solution would be:
from csv import DictReader def parse(f): props = {} for line in f: if not line.strip(): break k, v = line.strip().replace('"', "").split(",") props[k] = v reader = DictReader(f) data = list(reader) return props, data With the walrus operator we can save a few lines at the cost of non-obvious syntax:
[Read More]“Modern Authentication”: Outlook365 in Emacs
Posted on October 29, 2021
(Last modified on March 9, 2023)
| John Morris
A few weeks ago I received an email from the university stating:
Further to our previous communication advising about a change to basic authentication for Durham mailboxes, on 28th October 2021 we will be removing the ability to connect to University email via IMAP and our records indicate that you currently access email in this way.
This, apparently, is down to the fact that
Basic authentication is no longer secure enough to support modern working as it does not support security features such as Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).
[Read More]ClosedFridge: RIP OpenFridge
Posted on October 14, 2021
(Last modified on October 15, 2021)
| John Morris
Refrigerate in peace, OpenFridge.
The hardware OpenFridge was controlling is no more. It now looks like this:
Heat Exchange
Door
Obviously, it should not look like this. What follows is a post-mortem, because it is worth learning from one’s mistakes.
The final moments of a fridge After fixing the defrost I did not get around to replacing the blown thermal fuse. The Chinese sensors were supplied with some kind of wire which breaks if you so much as look at it, and I was afraid I would knock the wire at some point and crash the system.
[Read More]Plane Repair
Posted on August 21, 2021
| John Morris
Exactly how flat does a sharpening stone need to be? Exactly how flat, for that matter, does a plane need to be?
I’m on holiday. Here is a toy plane, a soft building block, and a half brick (not cut by me):
The plane started out rather rusty, as did the iron (why do I always forget to take ‘before’ photos?). The plane sole, lubricated with water, was used to flatten off the soft building block, and it was then used to take the rust off the iron.
[Read More]Motorcycle Alarm
Posted on August 19, 2021
(Last modified on August 20, 2021)
| John Morris
Apparently one of the local bike thieves was eyeing up the bike. Certainly a car was driving down the road, crawling opposite the bike, and then driving off again. Having had one bike nicked I didn’t much fancy losing another. Thus we had to make the house look a lot more secure in a hurry; and the shops were closing that evening and not reopening till Tuesday. For it was the New Year.
[Read More]