Owen

Phonetos

2009-06-16T23:52:18Z

MP3 Player Restoration

2009-05-27T01:18:51Z

Having stumbled through to my mid-twenties on a archaeic mix of personal music technologies such as "tapes", "minidiscs" and "listening to music through speakers in the privacy of my own home", about 5 years ago I got my first MP3 player. The play in question is a Cowon Iaudio X5 (which is very good by the way, especially with rockbox) but over time the battery has been dying and a year or so ago I managed to drop the mean time between intermittent failures on the disk to about 2 days by unceremoniously propelling it across the office in a cable-tripping-over incident. Instead of buying an iPod I decided to have a go at fixing it:

New battery (ebay) : £10.
32Gb CF card ( MyMemory) : £45 (it was on sale currently seems to be about £60).
CF- 1.8" Toshiba adaptor ( LinITX) : £10 .

Opened case, removed drive, de-soldered old battery, re-soldered new battery (make mental note, buy a new nib for soldering iron and some flux, curse EU for banning lead solder), reassemble.

Charge, test, play, woop.

House letterbox

2009-03-27T11:05:50Z

One of the most annoying things about our new house is the flapping letterbox, we are quite high up (175ft anyway) on a relatively exposed spot and the wind makes it flap continuously.

Fortunately I ordered a big box of Neodymium-Iron-Boron supermagnets a while ago from wondermagnet :
.

I was able to affect a successful repair by supergluing two connecting magnets to the flap and the letterbox respectively:

Prompt snubbing of those people who claimed that owning 100 assorted supermagnets would never be of any use for anything.

Plastering

2009-03-22T00:36:39Z

I do realise that decoration is very boring, but this will not stop me from inflicting my enthusiasm on you (and other people):

Dave the plasterer came and did a fantastic job on our fireplace :

There is something about taking a bag of powder and some water and making things which are not flat or solid-looking, flat and solid looking which I am unnaturally excited about. Either that or I've drunk too much tea (plasterers seem to drink a lot of tea).

aspviz-3d

2009-03-18T01:11:06Z

Last year Marina and I converted a few hours of frivolous time-wasting into a paper about visualsing answer set problems in 2D.

I've had a 3D block puzzle (which has belonged to the lab since I have been here) sat incomplete on my desk for the last couple of months and after a couple of hours of tinkering with the original visualisation code, I can now visualise problem solutions in 3D:

from

to:

Much joy; I no longer have 6 pieces of randomly shaped wood sat on my desk. Hoorah.

Arabic

2009-03-13T11:17:14Z

I have always liked learning languages, I suspect that this can be attributed to a subconscious feeling that being able to communicate with everybody will some how make the world a better place. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm has not always been met with an equal level of ability or study and so far (at 29 and three quarters), my efforts have led me to have smatterings of French, German, Russian and Spanish. I speak none fluently but by my reckoning I should be able to buy a train ticket, order a beer or have a brief conversation about the weather in the native language of about 20% of the worlds population (English included of course).

The University offers subsidised language lessons to staff which I decided to take advantage of (until the bean counters change their mind - which they appear to be doing at the moment) and rather than doing the sensible thing and actually learning one of the languages I have already started to some level of usefulness I decided that learning a new language would be a good idea.

I've always fancied learning Dutch or Greek but the university doesn't have any courses, Mandarin and Japanese frankly scare me, which left me with a choice of Italian or Arabic. No offense to the Italians (well not much anyway) but Arabic won on the grounds that it has more speakers (~250M in various dialects), and it sounds cooler and there are three speakers in my office I can inflict my efforts on.

Arabic is hard, no two ways about it:

Pronunciation is hard: being a semitic language, Arabic draws on a completely different set of vowel and consonant sounds than Romance and Slavonic languages. Arabic has 28 letters in the basic alphabet (with several additional letters), most of which represent digraphs (consonant + vowel). Within the alphabet there are, for example, three sounds for "H" (ح‎,خ,ﻫ) one of which can best be described as "breathing out loudly", three "S"s, three "T"s, two "D"s and Qaf (ق‎) which is a completely unfamiliar sound to the western ear which can best be described as "the sound you make when you are choking on a squirrel". There are plenty of cases where confusing similar letters will lead to offense, my favorite so far being: قلب (Qa'lb): heart/sweetheart and كلب (Kah'lb) which means dog.
Reading is hard: Arabic text is closely tied to the script, each letter may be written differently depending on whether it appears at the start, in the middle or at the end of the word, unless it is after other letters which break the flow of the pen, also in some cases letters roll together in unusual ways. In addition the vowel sound (long/short etc) associated with each letter is either left implicit (in most text), or supplemented by a complex set of diacritics which themselves are difficult to parse (used in dictionaries/the Quran).
The grammar is complex compared to Latin languages. Arabic seems to have a bit of everything: Complex verb conjugation (stem + prefix + suffix), genders, noun declension by case and gender, a ridiculously complex plural (which has permutations for singluar, dual and plural) which change by case and so on.
Almost everything about the language is irregular and so far (after 6 weeks) any mention of a rule or convention about the language has been predicated with a "well this applies some of the time but there are of course lots of irregularities".

Saying that, It's been quite fun.

Eating out

2009-03-05T00:24:51Z

I've just got back from dinner at Aqua on Walcot st., great place for a restaurant; in a converted (presumably methodist) church, high ceilings and all that, swanky modern decor, relaxed atmosphere, all good.

Shame that the service, food and wine were a bit crap really. There were about 15 people in the restaurant, being served by 4 waiters who managed to be both slow and, when prompted for service, rude. I had mussels which tasted of nothing and lacked the advertised crostone, and liver with a balsamic sauce which seemed to be lacking any ingredients other than balsamic vinegar, yeilding what I can only describe as pickled liver. Cost £30 inc 1/3 of a bottle of wine.

Tonight was the seventh time I've eaten out in the last nine days and it was probably the worst, which, considering that one of these places was at schipol airport, is saying something.

Dinner

2009-02-25T12:25:46Z

Went to Lieve on Herengracht for dinner last night. Food was amazing and each of the (4) courses was accompanied by a specially selected beer(e47pp inc drinks). After that we did some more drinking, my head hates me.

Lounge phase 2: dismantling

2009-02-02T12:55:20Z

Lounge floor is still not finished, unfortunately replacement boards are not easy to come by with modern ones being either too thick or too thin and reclaimed ones being both expensive and out of stock at our local reclamation yard.

In an attempt to at least get something done this weekend I opted for removing the boxing on the side of the chimney breast in the lounge (this used to hold the water, gas and electricity for the old boiler of doom).

First step was removing the plywood and frame, then disconnecting and re-patching the ring-main which ran down to the old boiler control box, then cutting and where possible removing the dead pipes (they should all have been disconnected when the heating was installed, but you never know...). The boiler installers were kind enough to completely remove the gas pipe to the fireplace which made life a little less stressful (because being squirted with water and electrocuted is less scary than being set on fire).

The white box is a patch box for the upstairs ring main which ran down to the boiler (the other wires are just control wires which (hopefully) are now both disconnected at the other end and I will pull up next time i get the floorboards up upstairs).

The boiler pipes are still largely in place and I will get rid of them when I do the fireplace. You can just about see the soot from where the boiler flue gas appears to have been leaking into the lounge...

Emmy the great

2009-01-20T19:29:03Z

Are playing in bath on friday the 6th Feb, anybody want to come and see them?

Lounge phase 1

2009-01-11T23:31:42Z

First stage of lounge re-decoration is replacing/reinforcing some worm-eaten joists.

Needless to say this was not finished in the anticipated time frame (some confusion over the number of mm in an inch and how exactly to use a circular saw). On the plus side the lounge now looks a bit like a set for the crystal maze.

Lounge video

2009-01-07T12:06:30Z

Lounge in 3D

2009-01-06T00:44:34Z

Instead of doing the things which I probably should have been doing this evening (see previous bathroom-related construction work), I've been making a 3D model of our lounge under the cover of "seeing what our floor might look like". It's probably fair to say that I have got a little carried away, in fact I suspect I passed that point when I started looking for my digital camera to capture realistic textures for our existing upholstery and obsessively re-measured all of our furniture.

Anyway the initial results are here:

There is also a walkthrough movie in the making, but, for the want of my own personal render farm that won't be ready till sometime tomorrow.

DIY 101

2009-01-04T19:20:28Z

Today we broke the first rule of DIY:

Do not, under any circumstances try and do more than one room at once.

The sealant around our bath was going a bit mouldy so we decided to replace it this turned out to be a bigger job than we'd originally estimated:

Science Museum

2008-12-11T00:25:31Z

I was in London today to see off a friend who is going to Singapore for a few months. Shaking off the necessary hangover from last night, it was decided that a visit to the science museum would be a fitting thing to do.

Having read about it in the press I decided that we should go and see the Japan Car exhibit which alleges to provide an exploration of Japanese car design and its relation to the growing city. The exibit, it turns out, is a gross dissapointment (especially when you consider that it costs £8 to get in), consisting of a mixture of boring (the cars themselves) and a pile of pretentious and patronising design twaddle which fails to excite in any way.

Some small consolation comes in the fact that the exit to the exhibition hall leads you directly into the "Listening post" installation which, I think is one of the best examples of public art that I've ever seen.

New central heating, in pictures

2008-09-19T10:15:55Z

As anybody who has been following 561's blog will know, we have had our central heating replaced over the last week. Mostly things have gone well except for the discovery of more exciting features of our house (cracks and woodworm).

We started by removing the skirting boards and lifting the (cheap) laminate flooring in the lounge, this turned out to be hard work, especially as the screws attaching the skirts to the battens were covered in what appeared to be epoxy plumbing putty rather than say wood filler. The laminate flooring was of the old, glued together type so (to my relief) we decided to abandon any hopes of putting it back down again and ripped it to shreds (this was fun after the hassle with the skiring boards).

In the process of getting everything up we found some interesting things including the 1980s majorette truck which fell out from behind the radiator and obvious signs of woodworm in some of the boards in the lounge.

On monday they arrived with the radiators and a large amount of pipe. We had to rearrange the spare room (again) to give them access to the floor boards not having finished unpacking yet, this was not much of a problem. During the day they put in most of the new pipework upstairs, including routing the gas pipe around the kitchen to get to the new boiler.

On tuesday almost all of the radiators went in except for the spare room. When they took the radiator out of the lounge, a number of exciting things dropped out including 16 matchbox toys, a child's slipper and a bart simpson doll.

Wednesday was mostly spent installing the new boiler and connecting it up the gas and it's new pipes, by the end of the day we had both heating and hot water.

Thursday was all about removing the old system, they took out the old boiler and rough-plastered the fire place (we might open that up again when we finish the lounge). Like me, the boiler was manufactured in Preston and around 30 years old and aparrently well onto it's last legs. We were left with a big pile of stuff outside the house which they came and collected on Saturday.

One of the installers noticed what appeared to be some slipping behind the wallpaper upstairs and suggested that there was probably a crack underneath which of course there was. Just one more thing to look at.

Leaving the house to one side for a few days, on Saturday I hired a petrol hedge trimmer and opened a new front in our ongoing war against our remarkably vigerous Leylandii (which I've now sworn to chop down when funds/time allow). Six hours and fourteen garden recycling bags later, the hedge had been placated for another year. In the process of doing one side I got a bit carried away and cut through a section of the chain-link fence, hedge trimmer didn't blink an eye.

zootalures @ 2008-09-01T10:05:00

2008-09-01T09:06:43Z

Police go after leaders of anarchist group, get confused.

Wouldn't it be cool if?

2008-08-17T10:22:57Z

Wouldn't it be cool if the whole world had sprung floors?

Grrrdening

2008-07-14T17:56:18Z

nPower meter services are incompetent fools, spent 1hr on the phone to them this afternoon (mostly on hold), I got angry. They are giving us another £20 and we still do not have a new electricity meter.

To relax I attacked our brambles. To put it simply, the brambles lost and I won... now I need to decide where to hide the bodies.

I also spent some time transplanting gastropods from all over the garden to the side with the ground elder in the hope that they would do the same job on that side as they did on the other one.

Internet

2008-07-08T22:12:19Z

Internet broken please not to be breaking it any more.

Gong fail

2008-06-15T22:40:47Z

Moir Lockhead, occasional ~~labour party donor~~ friend and employer of people who choose to make spontaneous donations to the labour party and CEO of the public transport company that bought you the £125 saver return to London and the £1.50 a mile bus ticket in Bath got a knighthood for.. services to public transport... sigh.

Electricals

2008-05-24T21:41:18Z

We went to maplin this afternoon, mostly to spend the maplin vouchers that my former co-works gave me when I left (thanks).

Among a miscelleny of toys, I bought a readers digest guide to home electrical installation (on the same shelf as the dummies guide but thinner and with bigger pictures) and some light switches to replace the broken one in our hall and the stupid dimmer in our bedroom.

Having judiciously read and re-read the section on the correct wiring of one-way and two-way light sockets (and the paragraph about how it's mostly illegal to re-wire your house nowadays) I turned off the electricity at the mains, and unscrewed the broken switch frontpiece in our hallway.

The hallway switch has one two-way switch for the upstairs landing (because you often want to turn the lights off upstairs before you spend a night sleeping on the sofa..^*) and a one-way switch for the downstairs light, according to the wiring guide I, I should find a single two-core and earth (for the downstairs light) and a single three-core and earth for the upstairs light (the upstairs and downstairs lights are on seperate circuits). Instead I find two two-core and earths with the live wired together from the first two core to the common of the second swtich with a bit of old-looking wire and both earths hanging around inside the switch box with no sheilding,^*, neither of the two-way wires have red tape (which, according to my book should indicate the spare live for the two-way). This means that if the downstairs light is on the downstairs circuit, they have bridged the two circuits inside the switch box ^* I don't know for sure if this is a bad thing but my limited spidey-sense about electronics seems to suggest that it might be, at the very least because the fuse blowing on one side will still leave at least one part of the circuit live.

I suppose that I should be greatful that they didn' try to use the earth wire as the spare (which is connected to the earth pad in the box upstairs, but not actually to the earth...).

After a bit of fiddling I set everything up exactly as it was, and after some finger crossing and praying it seems to work again.

Will try to find out which circuit the hall light is on and wire it properly if it is seperate, either way I suspect its fair to say that "having the electrics looked at properly" will probably have to go onto the big list of things to do for the house....

^* I mean, why would they do that!?!?!

Things & Stuff

2008-05-22T22:32:29Z

We have a new shower curtain, now the whole house smells of inflatable beach toys. The new shower curtain has a map of the world on it which doesn't include Belize.

I went to a logic seminar this afternoon, It included Linear Logic in the title; I'm interested in Linear Logic but I didn't understand much of the talk/discussion, It seemed to revolve around an argument about game semantics for proof and Category Theory which I also don't understand.

On conference

2008-05-14T15:54:22Z

Good things about being on conference

Free food
Interesting conversation

Bad things about being on conference

Complete exhaustion
No wife
Too much free food
Bad coffee

The conference hotel appears to be in the process of being re-built; complete with booming noises and the building shaking when they drive piles in next door. This morning the electrickeriy cut out for about 20 minutes leaving somebody trying to explain the curve of their graph to people by hand waving. The wireless here keeps breaking, you can tell it has down again when everybody starts fidgeting having realised that they might have to at least pretend to pay attention to the speakers.

Was something of a relief to discover that I was not the last person in the group who went to my first conference in 2002 in Lyon to graduate.

Moving House

2008-05-06T14:56:43Z

Thanks to everybody who helped us move on Saturday/Sunday much appreciated! We will endeavor to re-buy your friendship with dinner/booze at some point.

Some things we have learned from our new house so far:

How to re-felt a shed roof
That everything is much warmer when you live above ground.
How to re-plumb a leaking kitchen sink mixer tap.
How not to solder pipe joints when re-plumbing a kitchen sink mixer tap.
How to clean up a lot of water from your kitchen floor.
That trimming hedges is a lot more fun when they belong to you and you have an electric hedge trimmer.
That hedge clippings take up a lot of space.
Where to buy garden bags.
That Twerton does not get freeview!