The oddness of the bathrooom

So, for the past 2 years we’ve not really had a full bathroom. Yes, technically, it has met the criteria for being a bathroom. It has a bath, a toilet, and a sink. Indeed, I think that bar maybe the odd day, it’s been fully functioning.

However, it’s not had a floor for most of the time that we’ve lived here, and nor, since the plastering was done, has it had wall coverings. Indeed, it’s generally been a bit unpleasant to be in.

Since completing the bathroom, it’s had this odd ‘does that belong here’ sensation that it brings up in my head. When I get to the top of the stairs (and it doesn’t help that the upstairs hall is entirely filled with tools) the bathroom feels finished, and very nice, and the top of the stairs is…although it’s actually more or less finished (minus the skirting) it’s just got that ‘unfinished’ feel. It feels strange. It does, in my head at least, feel like the bathroom is an entirely separate entity from the house. Of course, it will settle down and mentally merge. I’m getting more used to it. I’m getting used to the toilet paper being on a holder on the wall. I’m happily used to getting into the shower (oh, showers, how I’ve missed thee).

But it still feels quite odd to have a finished bathroom.

In other news, the GT550 is sold and awaiting a trip to its new owner.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

A riscy business

So, I want(ed) a Squeezebox, and logitech decided to discontinue them. So the other thought that had been rattling around my brain for a while was the ‘I could use a Raspberry Pi and a VFD display‘. The trick is to find a VFD that’s easily drivable from a Pi, and a mediacentre installation that’s happy to drive a VFD. I think the poor old Pi is going to have to be controlled via the network (although, actually, I think it could probably replace the Viewsonic box – meaning we’d just need the one box doing eeeeverything).

My hesitation is that I’ve not done anything like this for a long time. I actually find myself somewhat nervous about it.

Which is odd, when you stand back an look at my history. I built (granted with help) a digital to analogue display to drive a speedometer and rev counter (and a bunch of dash lights) from a game. I then patched a game by hacking to read the contents BBC’s memory whilst it was running, finding where it was storing the speed and rpm. Then wrote an assembly language patch which overwrote the joystick controller section of the game (there was no spare memory to allocate to my hack, sadly) with a lookup table which contained output values that correlated to appropriate values to drive the AtoD at to make the speedo and rev counter (the speedo of which had been hacked to contain the guts of a rev counter) display something approximating the graphics onscreen. Then I added a driver to output those numbers to the user port on a BBC micro (thus driving the nice little D to A). All without overwriting bits of a game that was notoriously difficult to fit into the Beeb’s 32K. I designed and wirewrapped that board. I did that. No one else had done that specific thing before.

Now granted, whilst the Raspberry Pi sports the monkier ‘Model B’, harking back to the awesome BBC Micro, my ex-knowledge of 6502 assembly language is unlikely to be helpful here. But really, attaching a VFD to a Raspberry Pi is something that has been done before, and doesn’t particularly require specialist knowledge. I mean, it requires a bit of basic editing of files and understanding how to use ‘make‘ and so on. But even rusty as I am, a quick look at a Man page and I should be away with that without too much trauma.

And having written this, I feel fairly committed to making the idea come about*. And so, I shall maketh my shoppinglist(eth).

- Raspberry Pi
- VFD display (HD44780 compatible, probably 20×2)
- Powersupply (if John doesn’t mind handing me another from his selection of supplies)
- Pi case (heh)
I’ll also need to knock up some kind of VFD case, although I have an idea about how I’d like to go about doing that.

Anyhow, today is devoted to adjusting the brakes on my bike (because I’m on nights, and being able to stop on my way home (or indeed, on my way to work) is convenient.

* Although my clock project has so far failed, because the clock keeps stalling for no obvious reason, and for some reason the WAP54G caused all hell on our network and failed to extend the network to the garage, which was its entire point, but I wanted to replace that with the OpenWRT firmware anyhow, so need to retry sorting that out.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

Have you guessed I’m on nights yet?

So, today I wandered down and adjusted the brakes on my bike which, yesterday, had moved from their usual barely-adequate* to their alternate state of ‘unfortunately we are unable to meet requests for speed retardation at this time. Please contact your booking agent to find out when braking might become available again’. They’re nearly worn out, so I best order another set – I still get through them painfully quickly, albeit with no-where near the frequency that they were destroyed when I first got the bike. I’m tempted to get another set of wheels and fork out for having them rebuilt with the original axles, but I like the black spokes and the originality of the wheels. Yes, yes, I could do it myself. No, I’m unlikely to at this point.

Much joy, however, in that my bike has upped it’s gear quotient from the previous single speed to somewhere around 1.7 gears. Most of the time I can now get second, should I want it. Not all the time. She has a sense of humour about such things and will offer me second gear reliably through my ride to work on slight inclines, and will then, just as reliably decline me anything but top gear for the steepish hill at the end. However, it does seem to be improving with use. I have this faint hope that one day I’ll have all three gears. Now that would be nice.

I also had a look at** Kathryn’s bike’s gear shifter – with the intention of fitting the new cable. The new cable is now half-fitted, but the spring on the shifter broke in the process (it was quite rusty***) so I’ve ordered a ‘compatible’ shifter for it. At this point I am beyond concluding that I should have just started with a better bike and well into ‘I will damn well make this thing work’.

I also (fwiw) restarted the minor, today. The GT550 having sold means it’s time to clear up the garage and get the minor running again. Also I have to pay my car insurance soon (although I’ve not yet steeled myself to look in the envelope with the quote on it). She wasn’t keen, and sounded a little rough, but she did start – the battery’s back to trickle charging now… :)

I also had another look at the clock. This would perhaps have been more productive if it hadn’t started immediately the moment I took it upstairs. Grr. I’m not sure if I’ve got some tiny bit of crap in there when I attacked the case (not unimaginable). Or whether it’s some problem that it had before I fitted it (it being a £1 clock mechanism). I shall have to investigate further, because I popped it back on the mantlepiece (assuming I’d dislodged whatever ailed it) and it ran for 30 minutes and then stopped again. Feh. It is, however, as stated, silent (or at least very, very quiet). This would be more impressive if it worked.

* In the dry they’re fair, in the wet they’re poor, in the snow they’re laughably pointless.
** broke.
*** I know, shocking. Who’d'a’thunk it.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.