Enter the blind man

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We had a blind man come to see us today. Which sounds a bit like a contradiction in terms, but actually he was hanging some vertical blinds. Up until now I’ve hung all the binds in the house myself but this time I thought I’d let someone else take the strain and responsibility of drilling three holes in a line and then fitting some clips into them. The good news is that all went well, although apparently I’ve been hanging blinds in the wrong way for the last twenty years. Oh well.

Rob's Ten Minute Rule

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I’ve invented “Rob’s Ten Minute Rule”. It goes like this: “It is often worth spending ten minutes on something that you are not sure about”. In ten minutes of searching and chatting with ChatGPT you can usually find out if something is a good idea or not. If it looks promising you can spend another ten minutes (or maybe even more) pursuing it. If it doesn’t work you walk away from the idea only having lost ten minutes of your life.

Farewell Mike

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A sad day today. I went to the funeral of Mike Brayshaw. I worked with Mike for quite a few years. He was a wonderful fellow who wore his deep knowledge very lightly and worked tirelessly to educate and support students and the university. I’ve got great memories of loading Raspberry Pi devices into his car and driving off to a conference. There is a lovely in-memorium here.

Farewell Mike, a great person taken far too soon.

The Boiler Detective

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This is almost exactly how it looked

On Monday mornings our boiler stops working. How does it know? Has it been programmed to make the worst day of the week a little bit worse by making the house cold? I’ve tried asking for help with it, but once reset it seems to come back to life. The fault code is as enigmatic as the sphinx. And it is hard to mend something that isn’t broken. The worst kind of bug.

Anyhoo, I’ve figured it out. It turns out that Sunday night in our house is also “have a soak in the bath” night. The rest of the week we have speedy showers, but on Sunday a hot tub is in order. And the bathtub and the boiler share the same downpipe. When the bath is emptied the huge surge of water overwhelms the pipe and causes the to back up into the condensation drain for the boiler. The boiler doesn’t like this, and shuts down. And we wake up cold on Monday morning.

I’m going to get the plumbing looked at when the boiler is serviced. We are still going to have baths, but I’m tempted to 3D print a flow limiter to put in the plug hole so that the bath drains more slowly.

Snowed In

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It even has the helecopter

They say that one of the best ways to give the gods a good laugh is to make long term plans. Well, we had made long term plans for today. These involved a trip to Harrogate, a nice meal out and a visit to, wait for it, a camera shop (and the Knitting and Stitching Show for others in the party). But then the snow came, followed by the weather warnings, followed by the traffic alerts. So we stayed home. Wah.

But we didn’t let that beat us. Turns out that you can buy Lego at Barkers, which is just a quick walk from our house. And it is right next to a lovely coffee shop. So it was out for a coffee, pick up the Lego Mars Rover that I’ve been coveting for months, and then back home to build it. It’s a lovely model with a really clever steering action. Then we went out for tea. It wasn’t the nice day we we’d planned, but it was very nice nonetheless.

Even Brokener

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the black thing at the bottom is a big capacitor for the flash.

We thought we’d have a look at one of my broken Nikon cameras today. The good news is that the back came off without too much hassle (once we found the screws behind the viewfinder surround). The bad news is that the picture above shows what you see next. The service manual now says you have to unsolder some of the ribbon cables and remove the rear circuit board. We are presently summoning up the courage to do this…

Learning the Data Protection Act - and Fixing the World

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I’m in the process of re-becoming a member of staff at Hull University. Things have changed a bit since I started. For one of the jobs I started back in the day the induction consisted of “Welcome to the department Rob. You’re giving the second year networking course. It starts next term”. Actually, I may be being a little unfair here. I think I did get sent on a DEC VMS system management course too.

Anyhoo, nowadays employers are much keener to make sure you know stuff. I’ve had to do seven training courses about things I thought I knew everything about but it turned out I didn’t. Today I did my Data Protection training. I knew a bit already, but what impressed me about this stuff was that people have sat down and thought about the implications of data breaches and what constitutes good behaviour by those holding data. Then they’ve made some sensible, enforceable, rules.

Now, if we can only make it illegal for companies to collect data about us when we publish things, and illegal use collected data to recommend other things, we might be on our way out of our current mess…..

Halloween

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If you want an insight into how nice people are, just go “Trick or Treating” near way we live (it probably helps to go on the 31st October). We had a fantastic walk around the neighbourhood. The weather was lovely, lots of folks had really gone to town on their houses and there were families wandering around dressed as skeletons and all sorts. And we got home with a bucket full of goodies. Great fun. And just a bit scary. Especially one particular doorbell……

Blog up to date

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Writing a blog post about having got my blog up to date does sound a bit meta. And is probably only of interest to me and ChatGPT, but here we are.

I’m now properly determined to keep the blog up to date and am trying to make adding content part of my daily routine.

We’ll see how that works out.

Incidentally, I used ChatGPT to make the picture at the top of this post. It is interesting how the image creation process now uses ChatGPT to generate a text description of the required image and then makes a picture from that. I asked for something depcting an artist putting the finishing touches to a great work of art, and ChatGPT lobbed in a lot of extra words before going off and making the picture.

Ho for Ikea

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Mildly demob happy today. A few things I’ve been working on for a while have completed and so it was off to Ikea to get some sawdust and formaldehyde to celebrate. Got a new office chair as part of the fun. I bought one a while back that was not a good buy. I had to mend it with a spanner. This one has the racy name of JÄRVFJÄLLET and incorporates a lumbar support. And it doesn’t sink down to the floor when I sit on it, which is nice.

Printers know just when to not work...

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Met my MEng project students today. The plan was to impress them with a nicely printed overview of the course content. But the printer had other ideas. For the last few weeks it has been waking up at odd times and emptying its ink tanks so that it won’t work when I need to use it. Cunning stuff.

There was plenty of black ink. But no yellow. The thing I was printing had no yellow in it. But the printer refused to play. The online help referred to a monochrome printing mode you could use in this situation, but of course that didn’t work. My plans to impress were in tatters.

The good news is that I managed to figure it out. If you want to use the monochrome mode properly you need to install the “proper” drivers that you get from Brother, rather than the ones that are installed automatically by Windows 11.

And I’ve ordered some more ink. Should be here tomorrow.