Jack of All Trades

This was a sudden impulse last summer: I’d seen a ‘sunrise’ alarm clock (which fades on slowly to simulate sunrise, theoretically bringing you out of deep sleep naturally and waking you up gently). My sister mentioned having difficulty getting up and needing multiple alarm clocks. Ergo.

First thought: where to get the light? I had a look in the LED parts draw, but it was disappointing, as was the draw of old led torches and bike lights. None of them gave a reasonable light: more like a little pin-prick than the sun. So off down the road to the bricolage shop (or bric-a-brack as we call them) and I came back with this:

Dad rather liked my clock. In fact, he went looking for ‘a clock with hands and an adjustable chime’. Which, of course, made me wonder whether I could make one.

The first question was the hands: I liked the leds at the front of mine, and didn’t see the point in moving real hands around with a stepper motor or something of the kind. A digital clock should, I think, look digital. Looking online for things like ’led ring clocks’ showed the odd design, but none with all three hands in one ring, and three rings struck me as a bit much. Thus I started looking on farnell for bicolour leds to make the hands out of, and found an orange/red led on clearance at around 10p each: and also some red/green rectangular leds. Now, wouldn’t it be nice to have the ’ticks’ in the display differently shaped as well as coloured?

I don’t much like PCBs, but I like wiring ICs up even less. Up till now I’ve made boards with the toner-transfer-and-any-old-container method. The trouble is that I hate making up ferric cholride and always make the bare minimum, and during etching the concentration falls off, the rate slows, and you get poor definition and damage. So I decided to make a proper vertical etching tank, big enough to do a large board and still not run out of etchant. Casting about the shed found a large transparent dust-sheet, and I wondered about using it for the tank. With care an unpierced section could be found, and a bag was taped together:

This project began when the noise of the ethernet switch opposite my college room became unbearable. I picked the room for the view, which was sublime: the valley falls away so steeply you can see right down, over the trees, to the river, and climbs again the far side in a steeply wooded bank over which the pigeons perform what I can only describe as buzzing runs on the squirells. In the distance, the rolling hills, at night the moon and by day the sun—morning and evening, opposite corners of the window. Sometimes the outside world would come a little closer:

Moving is not much fun. Moving pianos is even less fun: you have all the difficulty of moving a 300kg object coupled with the worry that you’ll twist it out of shape, drop it, strain it, or just shake it too much.

Moving, however, just round the corner—700yds, according to Google—is at least easier than moving halfway round the world. But moving a piano 700yds is not apparently any easier than moving it 300 miles: you can’t wheel it, not on those little coasters, or even on a furniture dolly. And the seven hundred yards in question included one gravel drive, a hundred yards of dodgy pavement, three LVAs and two sharp corners—and then a lot of road, not to mention steps at the far end. On the other hand, I couldn’t find a van for less than £300. Split with my housemate that’s £150: surely that money could be spent on something I could keep at the end of the day?

I arrived back yesterday to discover that the fridge, or more specifically the fridge-freezer, had been off for at least a week.¹ The same week, coincidentally, that temperatures in the range of southern France on a cool day have lead to pantograph cables all falling off. Oops. Hopefully the repairs will be more heat-tolerant… Thus in this heat wave²—well, it was certainly warm—the inside of the fridge/freezer got to goodness knows what temperature (fridges make good beer-brewing ovens, as google will show).

One should not over-brew one’s coffee. This is a fault (mea culpa) I occasionally commit. One should probably not use one’s coffee pot to reheat coffee, and if one does, one should pay some attention to how long it is on for. Else it will boil dry, and then that heat has got to go somewhere… In this case, it went into the handle, the silicone rubber seal between the two sections and the knob. The handle drooped, faded and expired with a great groan. Already it had broken off when the pot hit the floor at a velocity not specified in the design; now its weakened frame gave up the ghost. (Why do they use thermoplastics for these things? Because this aluminium pot cost ~£6. But it came with not only an (ungrammatical) warranty, but also a spare silicone sealing ring and filter! So all is not lost.) Here is the dismembered carcass:

I have a piano to tune. And also to restore: a few hammer shafts to bend, hammers to file, a bit of crud to clean out, bridle straps to replace, etc, etc. The piano cost £40 from Ebay and is in remarkably good nick, and any piano is better than none! But an out of tune piano is no good.

Now students, I feel, should not really spend money having their pianos tuned—at least, not students of Theology.¹ But who is to say I cannot tune it myself? So I read a few books (I am doing an arts degree after all!) and websites, and it seems a moderately competent person with a tuning meter can expect to do a reasonable job in a day—the kind of job a tuner would do in half an hour. I’ll settle for that: it’ll make things infintely more playable, and I can’t start work regulating an out-of-tune piano. It’s just too painful on the ear.

The radio we use in the kitchen to make washing up bearable stopped working. Specifically, it wouldn’t turn on, but the power LED was constantly flashing on and then fading off. What makes me think the power supply might have died? Lo and behold, after purchasing a cheap multimeter (it’s incredible how cheaply one can get some things now: in ten years the price of test equipment has plumetted): the ‘8v’ output was about 3v, and the ‘15v’ output was 0v. Hmm. Here’s the very crude power supply:

Can we take a moment to remark on how wonderfully useful PdfJam is? Behind the scenes it’s just LaTeX. Thus you might be surprised to notice that

pdfnup --nup 1x1 --paper a5paper --no-landscape image.png 

Is an excellent way to turn an image—say, a bunch of screenshots of a page which you concatenated with

convert image1.png image2.png image3.png -append image.png

Into (say) an a5 pdf, ready to be turned into a full-length pdf with