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.

Networked Clock with Hands

 Posted on January 12, 2020  (Last modified on August 13, 2021)  |  John Morris

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. [Read More]
Clocks 

Vertical Etching Tank

 Posted on January 12, 2020  (Last modified on August 13, 2021)  |  John Morris

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. [Read More]

Networked Alarm Clock

 Posted on January 12, 2020  (Last modified on August 13, 2021)  |  John Morris

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. [Read More]
Clocks 

How to Move a Piano

 Posted on January 12, 2020  (Last modified on August 13, 2021)  |  John Morris

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. [Read More]

How To Break a Freezer

 Posted on July 28, 2019  (Last modified on August 13, 2021)  |  John Morris

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). [Read More]

CoffeePot, short and stout; here's my handle...

 Posted on May 23, 2019  (Last modified on October 6, 2020)  |  John Morris

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. [Read More]

Piano Tuning Lever

 Posted on December 9, 2018  (Last modified on August 13, 2021)  |  John Morris

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. [Read More]

Radio repair

 Posted on December 2, 2018  (Last modified on August 13, 2021)  |  John Morris

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. [Read More]

PdfJam: for more than just pdfs

 Posted on November 25, 2018  (Last modified on October 6, 2020)  |  John Morris

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 [Read More]

Bicycle Stand

 Posted on November 7, 2018  (Last modified on August 13, 2021)  |  John Morris

After a few months of balancing my bicycle between two walls where once, it would seem, was a pantry, it got too annoying. Ideally one would like some kind of stand to hold the bike out the way, vertically. The internet turns up many such designs. After a trip around the rather poor selection of wood available at B&Q (the only place open), I settled on something slightly different—an L-shaped half-lapped frame with wooden chocks to space it, and the bicycle balanced with just a small inward turning moment counteracted by its own weight. [Read More]