Memory Lane, 29th July 2022: Onions, onions everywhere

Posted on March 1, 2024 by james

It looks an awful lot, drying in the sun, but we will eat all of these

Some of them are hardly small, either.

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“Why should I pay for the NHS?”

Posted on February 29, 2024 by james

What is it with all the brain-dead cretins who say “I don’t use the NHS, so why should I pay for it?” (through taxation, basically).

Perhaps they wouldn’t use the NHS given time to plan, but if they have a heart-attack or are involved in a road accident or (perish the thought) part of a building falls on their head, who will it be that comes out to scrape them up and deliver them to A&E where some frankly astonishing NHS staff (yes, I’ve had a visit myself recently) will try to put them back together? Perhaps they’d prefer that no-one bothered. Sometimes I think that’s not an outcome that would distress me too much.

Not only that, but who pays for the medical care of all those people on whom their selfish little lives depend? The shop-workers, bin-men (bin-people?), plumbers, electricians, farmers and people with myriad other skills that they don’t have and without whom their own lives would be even more miserable, or, more probably, short.

The same applies to schools: “I don’t have children so I shouldn’t have to pay for schools”. Gah! Sounds like you yourself didn’t go to one that taught you to think.

Taxation isn’t about paying for what you directly get out of the system. It’s about paying for a society that works (and yes, I’m well aware of the arguments to be made that right now, it’s not working very well) and supports everyone. So fine, if you don’t want to contribute, go off and live in your ivory tower (but build it yourself so you’re not employing the services of anyone who needs the services that our taxes pay for). Or you could just grow up.

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Memory Lane, 26th July 2022: One of my favourite vegetables

Posted on February 29, 2024 by james

This one.

There’s something about their obvious fractal nature that appeals to my Computer Science/Maths background. I really must try to grow more of them.

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Another C++ fail

Posted on February 29, 2024 by james

Oooh! C++20 has std::format that would allow me to easily format file modification times from std::filesystem/chrono.

Oh, allegedly it does in MSVC and Clang, but not in the C++20 support with the GCC that’s part of Mint 21.3 or the versions of Ubuntu/Debian on which it is based (which I thought was supposed to fully support C++20).

I found a workaround by using libfmt as a drop-in replacement. Unfortunately the version shipped with Mint 21.3 has a bug that means it doesn’t work for the way I want to use it — I get a compiler error. It’s fixed in a later release, but I really don’t want to get into carrying third-party libraries around.

Irritation factor eleven, Mr. Sulu. I guess I’ll have to do it the hard way then.

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OBD2 reader fail

Posted on February 29, 2024 by james

My daughter’s Nissan is not very happy at all and showing the “Eek! Something’s wrong!” light on the dash, so I decided I’d get a cheap OBD2 reader to find out what it thinks is the problem. It’s an ELM327-type Bluetooth device that plugs into the socket and connects to an app on a tablet or phone. Or I guess on a PC/laptop if that’s what you’re after.

Only mine didn’t. On my Android phone, an Android tablet, my Linux laptop and a MacOS laptop the device would show up in a scan and I could attempt to pair with it, but after probably less than ten seconds the connection would drop. None of the four or five different apps I tried from the Play store made any difference. The red “powered up” LED shows on the unit and occasionally I get blue and green LEDs flashing which I assume is something attempting data transfer, but no dice. Not even fluffy ones.

My father-in-law has a Vauxhall Meriva (yeah, he’s the one), so I thought I’d have a try with that. Once I’d found the OBD socket (some of the trim in the centre console has to be removed because it’s “under” the electric handbrake switch), I found it worked just fine. That’s not a good sign from my point of view. Back to the Nissan.

This time I found an app that allowed the BT connection to be made within the app and I managed to get a little bit further, but the data transfer eventually timed out without telling me anything useful. Not happy.

So, I’ve decided to give a wired reader a try. No idea if it will be any better and I don’t really see why it should be, but it’s the next cheapest option.

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Memory Lane, 23rd July 2022: Heeeere’s Tommy!

Posted on February 28, 2024 by james

Tommy tomato 😀

Tomatoes in the polytunnel, looking heathly. About forty plants in all. Sounds a lot, but we get through an awful lot of tomatoes, in salads, soup, pizza sauce, pasta sauces and probably other things too. All close to 1.8m (6′) tall. Not too many looking ripe yet, but that will come soon.

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Getting my bandsaw to cut straight

Posted on February 28, 2024 by james

Well, not my bandsaw. My father-in-law’s. But I probably use it the most.

He bought it years ago and has used it for all sorts of stuff that probably wasn’t ideal when we didn’t have a chop saw/mitre saw. Then I started using it a bit more and noticed a few problems. The whole saw wobbled because one leg of the stand seems to be too short. The table tipped “backwards” away from the blade, so cuts always went further into the wood on the bottom surface than the top. The lock on the lower door has also fallen apart. I keep that close with a small wooden wedge. Possibly not Health and Safety-friendly, but it does the job. Given that my father-in-law installed a set of grinding wheels right over where he stores petrol for the mower, I think H&S would probably have had a heart attack before they got anywhere near the bandsaw should they have foolishly decided to visit.

Then one of the blade bearings blew itself to smithereenys and I decided that I’d replace them all and fix some of the other issues whilst I was at it.

Since then however I’ve been unable to get the saw to stop a cut “drifting” to the left (or the workpiece moving to the right, whichever you prefer). So last night I sat down and watched a load of videos on that YouTube about setting up bandsaws to see if I could get it sorted. I came up with a few possible causes:

  • Blunt/damaged/worn-out blade
  • Misaligned fence
  • Blade not sitting correctly on the crown of the top wheel
  • Misaliged table
  • Blade tension

I knew the blade was good because it was only replaced recently, so I didn’t worry about that. Same for the blade tension, which I checked when I put the blade on.

Fence alignment to the blade is a bit awkward to check because of the set of the teeth. I believe some vendors produce a tool to help with that, but I don’t have one. Instead, I moved the fence over to one of the mitre slots and adjusted it to line up with the mitre slot. If I get the table square later, then I should be good.

The blade was clearly sitting too far forward on the top wheel, so I adjusted the wheel to get the correct positioning as close as I could tell, turned the wheel a few times by hand to make sure the blade wasn’t moving about wildly and then started up the saw for a few seconds. The blade still looked nicely-seated, so I was happy with that.

All these things made no improvement at all 🙁 A test cut still showed the cut drifting to my left. So, to table alignment. I released the four bolts holding the table to the tilt mechanism and discovered that there’s really not a whole lot of adjustment, but I did my best, rotating the table clockwise from above because the cut was drifting left. For a rightwards drift I’ve have gone anti-clockwise. Whilst holding the table so it couldn’t move back, I nipped up a couple of the bolts to keep it in place and then did all four back up properly.

This time I had more success. A test cut appeared to go in a nice straight line, so until I find out otherwise I’m going to call the problem fixed.

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At last a use for my scrap ply

Posted on February 28, 2024 by james

After making a few clearer boards and suchlike for my beehives this winter I’ve ended up with quite a lot of small pieces of ply that I’ve kept because they’re actually quite decent quality and I’d prefer not to put them in the wood-burner or anything like that.

Much as I dislike using plastic, I’ve not found an entirely brilliant alternative to plastic plant labels as yet. Lolly sticks are a possibility that I might try, but I’m not sure they’ll stand up to being outdoors for very long. I therefore use the plastic ones, but try to re-use as many as possible from year to year. The writing on the labels isn’t always easy to clean off, so I just leave it on and use them for the same things each time.

When you have hundreds of labels however, finding the one you’re after is a bit of a pain. Earlier this year I split them into separate small plant pots alphabetically, so cabbage, calabrese and carrot labels are in a “C” pot, and pea, pepper and parsley seeds are in a “P” pot. That works ok and speeds up finding the right label, but the pots often fall over or get caught on things and it’s all a bit more awkward than I’d like.

So, today as I was walking past this bucket of ply offcuts for the umpteen-hundredth time, I thought “Hmmmm”. A few hours later, this was born.

I’m hoping it will do the job at keeping the labels organised and be more stable. We shall see.

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Memory Lane, 22nd July 2022: Give peas a chance

Posted on February 27, 2024 by james

Last of the fresh peas for this season 🙁

But I have saved pods from a couple of varieties to sow again next year. The mangetout dry quite quickly

The podding peas, not so much.

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I think something died in the workshop

Posted on February 27, 2024 by james

There’s certainly a strange smell in there. I think it could be a mouse. Or possibly a squirrel.

What definitely has died are two of the LED striplights that I bought a couple of years ago. They’re quite common on that south American river shopping place: 40W 4′-ish LED batten lights that run on 240V without an external transformer. They’re very bright and quite low-profile, so handy in a workshop. In that respect they’re much better than the fluorescent tubes I had previously. Unfortunately they don’t seem very reliable.

I’ve replaced three so far that started flickering and eventually died after I’d ignored them for long enough and a fourth flickers very badly when I start up my table saw, though appears to be fine the rest of the time. Fortunately I’ve had a few replacements from the vendor, but it’s still a pain.

After replacing one this morning I decided to open it up to see what was inside. Not very much is the answer.

I’m guessing that what we have there is a low power transformer and rectification circuit. Actually, two of them, one for each strip of LEDs that make up the light. There’s no sign of component failure that I can see and it’s a bit of a mystery still that both strips of LEDs can fail in the same way at the same time, but I suspect the electrolytic capacitors (the purple components) are most likely to blame.

I bent them upwards so I could see the spec.

100V 68µF. I can order a few of those and swap them to see what happens. Shouldn’t be expensive.

Moving them also revealed what I think is likely to be a surface-mount bridge rectifier, but I’m unable to make out the part number because the printing is quite faint.

More on this when I get hold of the capacitors.

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