Barry John

Posted on February 4, 2024 by james

has touched down between the Pearly Gates.

Perhaps “the” legend of Welsh rugby and so closely on the heels of JPR
Williams and Malcolm Price barely a month ago. It’s not even a year
since Viet Gwent stalwart Charlie Faulkner pushed over for the last
time.

It’s all a bit of a shock, really. Phil Bennett in 2022, JJ Williams in
2020, Ray Gravell and Merv “The Swerve” Davies some years back. Growing
up in the Valleys in the 70s, these were my childhood heroes.

In the words of Max Boyce:

I had a dream the other night; the strangest dream of all
I dreamt I was in Heaven, away from life’s hard call
It was as I imagined: where peace reigned all supreme
The signs to Heaven were in all in Welsh, Hell’s signs were painted green[1]

I entered through the heavenly gate; I heard the heavenly band
And there was John the Baptist, on Barry John’s right hand
He plays for the Heaven Welsh Fifteen. They’re very fit and keen
We’d play the Heaven English, if they could only raise a team

[1] A reference to road signs in Wales that were written in English
being daubed with green paint.

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Memory Lane, 13th April 2022: New toy!

Posted on February 4, 2024 by james

Given that I wasn’t working I felt the need to save money and make as much of the stuff that I needed from scrap that I had lying around. So obviously I bought a new toy:

It’s a 10″ (250mm) wide planer/thicknesser from Charnwood (model PT250?) and I have to admit that I’m quite impressed. I’ve not used it that much for squaring up sawn timber, but it’s seen a lot of use planing timber to a required thickness and the speed at which it turns wood into man-glitter is quite impressive: a decent workshop vacuum is certainly required. My only current criticisms of it are that the fence must be removed to fit the vacuum mechanism when thicknessing and that it uses one-piece knives (rather than a spiral cutter for instance, which is considerably more expensive). Sadly I’ve already wrecked one set of knives by failing to spot one nail in a piece of recovered timber I was using. Hard to say that’s not my fault however rather than that of the machine.

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Tonight Matthew, I am sewing machine repairman…

Posted on February 4, 2024 by james

Sewing machines… They work by magic, don’t they?

My daughter has been using my wife’s machine to make clothes and bags from old unwanted material such as pairs of jeans and shirts that I no longer fit into:

Unfortunately the machine had somehow gone wrong and had no tension on the upper thread at any setting of the tensioning wheel. Peering in though the gaps in the “bodywork” it appeared that the two discs that are supposed to drag on the thread to produce tension weren’t even touching. After a discussion in which we decided that it would cost more to have it serviced professionally than it would to buy a completely new one I decided I might as well take it apart and see how much damage I could do. There can’t be that many “ping-fsckits”[1] inside, surely?

We found a service manual online that explained how to remove the case, but having done so I couldn’t work out why the tensioner wheels weren’t working correctly so I decided to remove the mechanism for a closer look. At which point it exploded into a pile of springs, discs and washers. After at least one false start I managed to put everything back together and realised that the tensioning mechanism was now working correctly.

A semi-naked sewing machine

Right in the centre here is the tensioning mechanism in case you’ve not seen one before.

I have no idea why it’s now working and what problem has been corrected which is quite irritating given that I therefore have no idea how to stop it happening again, but I’m happy enough that it has saved me a packet which I can now spend on an Oxalic Acid vaporiser for my bees 😀

All I need now is a suitable spring balance so I can correctly set the tension range.

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No dig diary, 4th February 2024

Posted on February 4, 2024 by james

More seed sowing today. Red (I also have yellow) beetroot (Sanguina) sown four seeds to a cell in a twenty-cell module tray and a couple of similar trays of peas for shoots sown four seeds to a cell — I’d normally sow three, but the seed is a few years old so I thought I’d sow an extra one “for luck”. There were flowers in the plan for today too: Lobelia, which has the tiniest seeds ever, and Busy Lizzies, both for my wife to plant out in the garden. I sowed a tray of each, leaving sufficient seeds for a couple more sowings over the next few weeks. They’ll go into the propagator once they’ve had a decent soak.

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A blast from the long-distant past

Posted on February 3, 2024 by james

Back when I was at school (slates, chalk, that sort of thing, you know…) the BBC Micro was a thing: one of the first home computers, based around the 6502 processor. Quite likely it’s responsible for setting the future direction of my life. I spent a huge amount of time messing about with them in my teens, writing software both to earn myself some spare cash and for things at school.

Move on several years once x86-based PCs became affordable as home computers and with the arrival of Linux I decided to write an emulator for the BBC Micro running on Linux under X11. It actually worked reasonably well at the time; enough to play some of the original games I’d enjoyed, certainly. Even now I recall sitting in my employer’s office in Palo Alto after work when I was there to do some training or something similar, designing fonts for the teletext display mode. Here’s a random selection of screenshots…

Anyhow, I was having a little grub around in my filesystem the other day and discovered the code again, so after adding some CMake build files to take over from the original Imakefile system, I’ve uploaded it to github. Sound doesn’t work any more because as far as I recall it used ALSA, but I’ll see if I can fix that in the coming weeks and perhaps make a few other improvements too.

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Memory Lane, 3rd April 2022: Green Onions

Posted on February 3, 2024 by james

Booker T and the MG’s, isn’t it, pop-pickers?

Well, perhaps 🙂 Two years ago it was time to be planting out my onion seedlings. These had been sown on the 8th February, four seeds (ish) to a cell in module trays. Hundreds of them, because we eat an awful lot of onions.

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No dig diary, 3rd February 2024

Posted on February 3, 2024 by james

More chippping of apple tree prunings today. Nearly all done now, and would perhaps have been completely finished but I was too lazy to go and buy more fuel. Once that’s done I can chop down a few more sycamore trees to make even more 😀 They’re in the way anyhow — two are alongside the workshop and have been rubbing against the roof whilst a third is leaning over the garden at a rather disconcerting angle. I may have to start spreading the wood as I chip it fairly soon because I’m running out of dumpy bags to put it in. I’ve started on the eighth already and don’t seem to have that many left.

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No dig diary, 2nd February 2024

Posted on February 2, 2024 by james

My plan for today was to finish feeding all the brash from my apple trees through the chipper so it was all ready for making my flower and strawberry beds. I managed about half of it before some bits broke off the end of a branch I was feeding though and got jammed in the cutting drum of the chipper. Whilst the drum would still rotate, it wouldn’t go anywhere near as fast as the engine wanted it to so I had to kill the engine quickly before the drive belts turned to smoke and flame.

After dragging it back to the workshop I had to remove the hopper and (whilst wearing gloves, because the knives can leave you with a nasty cut even without the motor turning — don’t ask me how I know; I just know, ok?) clear all the trapped lumps of wood out of the cylinder the drum rotates in. I was particularly pleased when I offered the hopper back up to the chippper body (balanced on a couple of sawhorses because of the weight) and three of the bolts slipped right through the mounting holes allowing me to get the nuts on and keep it in place whilst I hunted for the final bolt in the mud where it had fallen.

A quick check that the engine was now happy and it, err, started to rain, so I abandoned the rest until tomorrow. It’s amazing how often it rains when the Met Office says there’s a five or ten percent chance of precipitation. I guess they must be one of those groups of people for whom one in a million chances happen nine times out of ten.

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Memory Lane, 2nd April 2022: Attack of the giant beetroot

Posted on February 2, 2024 by james

I think this must have been in one of the veggie beds for almost a year. It reached the point where I decided I couldn’t pick it and just had to leave it to see how big it would get. By the time I finally removed it from the ground it really didn’t look at all appealing to eat. It’s in a “mushroom tray”, which if I recall correctly are around 40cm x 30cm, or about 16″x12″ in old money.

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3d printing for learning to play the violin

Posted on February 2, 2024 by james

Who knew? My niece is learning and her mum asked if this could be printed to help her with hand positioning. It’s a bit “stringy”. Put that down to old (and cheap) PLA.

Apparently the idea is that the octopus is placed on the back of the hand and the pupil has to keep it from falling off whilst bowing, so no rolling from side to side or anything like that.

I’m not sure what Nigel Kennedy or Vanessa-Mae would make of it, but I guess anything is worth a go if it means there’s less chance of sounding like you’re strangling a cat.

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