Drivers don’t seem to have adapted to the new layout yet, and motor traffic is regularly backed up on Redriff Road. I imagine that the opposite phenomenon to induced demand will eventually take hold, and people will stop trying to use that stretch if they have the chance.
I attended a “Streets for People Cycling Focus Meeting” at Southwark Council’s offices on Friday afternoon (I was invited because I had filled in their online survey) and shared some of my thoughts about the council’s cycling strategy. I cycled there along Cycleway 4, and ended up sitting at a table with Simon whose back I had seen the previous day in London Cycling Campaign’s video about the newly-opened section of Cycleway 4.
I was very impressed with the people from the council that I spoke to there. I think the cycling plan is being run by people who cycle and who care about cycling. It makes me optimistic.
I also took the chance to bend a few ears about the widespread use of the wrong kind of tactile paving on cycle paths, with reference to the official Department for Transport Guidance on the Use of Tactile Paving Surfaces (PDF). It might seem a strange obsession, but the widely misused corrugated surface is dangerous in the wet, like riding on tram tracks. Ironically, the correct surface (with 50 mm gaps between ridges) is officially referred to as “tramline” but is actually safe, unlike riding on tram tracks.
I put more RAM in the little Lenovo ThinkStation M710q I’m using as a home server. It sometimes becomes unresponsive, but I don’t know why, and there’s nothing in the logs. It’s running quite a lot of services, so upgrading from a paltry 8 GB seemed like a reasonable, simple and fairly cheap thing to try. I added a 16 GB stick to see if it improves things. It hasn’t become unresponsive since then, so maybe. All I can do is wait and see.
I was excited to discover that ConvertWithMoss now does an excellent job of converting DecentSampler libraries into MPC ones. There’s a wide range of both useful and interesting sampled instruments on decent samples and pianobook and I had a fun afternoon playing with some of the distressed pianos.
Its XML parser (which is, I think, a part of standard Java and one that doesn’t respect Postel’s law) is too strict for some of the DecentSampler files, and I had to do a bit of manual XML editing to remove duplicate attributes and close elements on a couple of them. It was easy enough for me, but would be a barrier for many.
We have a start date for our house renovation a.k.a. middle class hell. This is where we spend an awful lot of money to make ourselves temporarily homeless in order to turn our decrepit ex-rental house into, hopefully, a stylish and comfortable home. I’m sure it will be good when it’s over, but until then, it’s going to be awful. Four weeks to go until the start.
I did a couple of bits of mandolin luthiery. First, I replaced the machine heads on the archtop mandolin I recently repaired. I’ve been enjoying playing it, but the machine heads were rather poor. Some were loose, a couple were very tight, and while they stayed in tune well enough, adjusting the tuning was a bit more tricky. I found a set of Japanese-made Gotoh machine heads with exactly the right dimensions for a reasonable price so I ordered them and swapped them over. I had to fill and redrill a couple of screw holes that were just slightly off. That’s a trivial job, though, and completely invisible once the tuners are fitted. The new ones are a huge improvement in functionality, and the slightly smaller plastic buttons look attractive and are a little easier to turn without bashing an adjacent one.
On the downside, the posts are marginally shorter, and I have to be really exact about cutting the wound strings to length. It’s no worse than dealing with a bass guitar E string, though.
Second, I replaced the 3D printed bridge on the flat-top mandolin I previously fettled into a playable instrument. The PLA bridge was fine, and played well, but it lacked something aesthetically. I used a piece of the old table found in our loft and I decided to make it a bit longer, because the bridge sits between the braces and exerts quite a force on the top.
Although the top is nominally flat, there’s actually a significant convex curve, so to fit the bridge I roughly sawed a concave base, taped sandpaper to the top of the instrument, and laboriously sanded the bridge until it fit perfectly.
Then I tweaked the height and … oops. I went too low. So I sawed a few mm off the top of the bridge, levelled it, and glued on a scrap of wood. The next day, I reshaped the bridge, and this time I did a better job of setting the height. The join between the two pieces is invisible, so I’m happy with the result.
When I was satisfied with the shape and height, I gave it a couple of coats of Tru-Oil. It looks a bit more attractive in real life than the colours come across in the photograph, and I expect it will darken a bit with time.
But what does it sound like? Slightly sweeter and less brittle, perhaps. I don’t know whether that’s due to the material or the shape: to the best of my knowledge, no one has done any research into the effect of bridge length on tone. It’s still just as loud, I think.
We finished watching True Detective: Night Country. I guessed how they died, but who came as a surprise. I didn’t think the mysticism fitted entirely comfortably into the story, but it was entertaining.
A few links this week:
My new passport arrived in a total of four working days, including international post (though Dublin isn’t really very far from London). I filled in the online form on Saturday, and by lunchtime on Tuesday it had been printed and was on its way. It arrived Thursday morning.
Because the photo is converted to black and white, I think it makes me look younger. I hope it doesn’t work like a reverse Dorian Gray, my passport getting ever younger while I grow swiftly more wizened.
I did a bit more luthiery and performed a successful laparoscopic repair on a mandolin with a collapsing top which you can read about in its own post.
I went to the Millennium Dome for the first time in my life. I know it’s been rebranded for a telecoms operator, but the pedestrian signs still point to the “Dome”.
After a late lunch in Deptford, we walked to the Dome along the Thames Path. I hadn’t seen some of the new developments along there, and they’re so different from what I think of as the vernacular architecture of London that I felt like I was in another country. Maybe I’ll stroll along there on a sunny day when I want to pretend I’m on holiday.
As you get closer to the Dome, the path gets less and less amenable to pedestrians, and as you wind through fenced-off paths past the parking for the golf driving range it feels like a place no one is enouraged or even expected to visit on foot.
I thought the Dome was grim. It’s a massive tent, in which is a kind of fake street of mock-Art Deco frontages (all with the kind of uneven panel gaps you’d expect to find on a Tesla), absolutely full of the most banal, middle-of-the-road chains. There are chain restaurants, and chain shops, and chain pubs. It’s a bit like an airport without any aeroplanes. There are the normal features of prefab gentrification around the edges, like a food court marketed as a “street food” place.
There seem to be quite a few venues there. The one we went to, the Indigo, is one of the smaller ones but is still fairly large. The event itself, Criminal Live, was fun. It was grimly appropriate that one of them had had her phone swiped from her hand by a thief on a bicycle while walking around London earlier that day.
Digital flotsam of the week:
Mandolins with f-holes are usually braced with two bars that start on each side of the neck, and diverge towards the tail, as show in this diagram:
With a dentist’s mirror, I was able to confirm my initial diagnosis. I was a bit luckier than in the video above, because mine had become detached at the neck end, where it’s much closer to the hole.
I bought a cheap USB “endoscope” for £8. This came with a QR code to sideload a questionable Android application. I did not do this. Instead, I plugged it into my Linux computer, opened Cheese, and used it as a regular webcam.
The camera wouldn’t really be much use as an endoscope, as it can’t focus closer than about 3 cm from the lens, but it’s perfect for seeing inside a musical instrument while working it, and for taking low-resolution photos of the inside.
Using FreeCAD and my 3D printer, I modelled and printed a clamp that could fit through the f-hole and clamp the end of the brace in place. I used a bolt and threaded dowel (as used to assemble flat-pack furniture) to apply force, and printed jaws to fit on each end. Finally, I glued thin cork onto the jaw faces. This wasn’t a perfect clamp, because it required some effort to keep the jaws aligned while tightening, but it fit through the gap and was strong enough.
I fit the clamp and tightened it, using a thick slice of sparkling wine cork to spread the force on the top and avoid damage. This established that the clamp was viable and could pull the crack closed.
Now that I knew that I could clamp the brace, all that remained was to glue it. I used a length of silicone tubing, a syringe, a 3D-printed nozzle, and galvanised wire (intended for gardening) to construct an apparatus that would let me apply glue accurately inside the instrument. I used Titebond diulted with about 5% water to help it penetrate the gap better, and pulled and pushed on the top to work the glue into the crack.
When I was satisfied that I had enough glue in there, I applied my clamp, screwed it tight, and left it for 24 hours.
It seemed to be holding, so I went ahead with all the other jobs needed.
I drop-filled and polished out a couple of dings in the varnish. I levelled the (uneven) frets, crowned, rounded the ends, and polished them. I gave the instrument a good clean. I made a new nut, as the existing one was cracked. I took down the base of the bridge to enable a lower action. I sanded the inside of the f-holes to make their shape more even and to clean up some of the rough woodworking.
I was very nervous the first time I brought the strings up to pitch, but it held, and several days later it’s still doing fine. It’s very playable, and the action is low enough that I can keep a plectrum wedged between the strings and the frets. It might not be the loudest or best sounding instrument, but on its own, at home, it sounds very nice. And it looks good, too:
It was a fun project, and I’m delighted with the result.
]]>I applied for a new passport to replace mine that’s expiring in May. The hardest part was getting a passport photo that I’m happy to live with for the next decade. We managed to find an adequately-lit white wall at the weekend, and the rest of the application was trivial after that.
Obviously, I’m only renewing my Irish passport. There’s no point getting a British one now.
On the topic of the UK’s steadfast refusal to just be a normal modern country, they’re giving “heritage protection” to gas street lights that were already obsolescent when they were installed in 1910. A sympathetic LED replacement for the mantle would be completely fine and much less wasteful, and as long as it’s the right colour and sufficiently dim, no one would even notice.
Honestly, if feels like living in a daft theme park sometimes.
Overheard at Surrey Docks Farm, a child of around 7 or 8 looking at two calves and asking their parent, “Are those horses or cows?”
Only a couple of links this week:
I am at last getting a bit better. I’ve been up and doing things, and I went for a walk around the local area on Sunday, albeit at a noticeably slower pace than usual.
I’ve been reading magazines on my Kindle thanks to a discussion on the Linux Matters podcast. If you have a card for a library that uses Libby, you can install the Overdrive Libby plugin in Calibre and pull a magazine down to a local ePub file. This doesn’t work with my Southwark Libraries card, but that’s why I have other library memberships. Lewisham works.
It’s a bit complicated at first, but worth figuring out.
A few links:
From the lab to Jupyter : a brief history of computational notebooks from a STS perspective
This talk was less substantial than I’d hoped.
Open Food Facts: Learning and using Perl in 2024 to transform the food system!
Open Food Facts started out as a collaborative project to gather nutrition data, but manufacturers are now contributing data on their own products. It’s been adopted in France, while the Italian government is apparently, pushing to have it banned at EU level.
I’m not entirely convinced by the concept (especially around vague notions like “ultra-processed”) but I thought it was especially interesting as an example of success.
GnuCOBOL, the Free Industrial-ready Alternative for COBOL!
COBOL will never die, but you don’t have to be stuck with the same legacy suppliers. There are good, free, compatible implementations.
Ensuring Longevity: Strategies for Sustainable FLOSS Projects.
This talk was a bit vague, and not helped by the lack of visual materials.
Privacy-respecting usage metrics for free software projects
Argued that measurement has its use, and that there are ways to collect useful information without intruding on privacy, even if it restricts what you can collect. I think it’s a nice idea in theory, but whether it can survive contact with management I’m not sure.
Liquid Prompt: yes, we can drastically rethink the design of a shell prompt
Some people put a lot of effort into their terminal prompts. (Mine is just exit status if not zero, Git branch, and current directory, with a different colour on each computer so I know where I am.)
One way forward: finding a path to what comes after Unix
Why have we settled on Unix-like systems? Perhaps we should look at the successor system from the research lab that originally developed Unix.
This was an excellent talk despite the speaker being unable to connect his MacBook to the display and having to deliver it without slides. It’s worth observing that it’s not Linux that has a problem with external displays.
An entertaining end to the day from a professional magician.
How do you write an emulator anyway?
Some tips for how to get started writing emulators.
Comprehensible Open Hardware: Building the Open Book
The Open Book is an interesting project. I was hoping for a talk that went deeper into the technical details.
They’ve solved the topological naming problem! At least, that’s the claim. It’s a big deal if it works as advertised.
Even though I’ve been using KiCad for years, I’ve been pronouncing it wrong. I had been saying /ˈkaɪkæd/ (like “sky”) but apparently it’s /ˈkikæd/ (like “key”), to rhyme with FreeCAD.
LibrePCB looks like it has promise as a simpler PCB CAD system for people with less complicated requirements.
Live coding music with MicroBlocks and microcontrollers.
This was a light demo of live coding using a block-based visual programming system.
Gameboy Advance hacking for retrogamers
The GBA is surprisingly capable. You can even write games in Lua.
Running DOS & Unix on an 8-bit Commodore
This was an impressive presentation. First, the speaker showed how he built hardware and software to enable DOS to run on an oddball Commodore business computer from 1983, using a length of wire to trigger an interrupt every time I/O was accessed, and thus to simulate access to a different set of peripherals.
Then he did the same thing with a Z8001 and Z8010 MMU and ran Coherent on it.
For a brief moment, in Japan, you could buy a peripheral that would let you download Game Boy games and play them against other people online.
Now, you can simulate that connection and play people across the internet, although many of those download-only games are lost in time.
This uses an RP2040 microcontroller to simulate the external world to which a 6502 CPU is connected. The name alludes to the simulated reality of the Matrix films. It’s clever, but I wasn’t sure who it’s for. If everything is emulated, is it really retrocomputing? And at that point, why not emulate the CPU as well?
PiStorm - The evolution of an open source Amiga accelerator
This speaker presented directly from an Amiga A1200 with a PiStorm fitted. It replaces the CPU with some glue and a Raspberry Pi running a Motorola emulator at about 1300 times the speed of the original A1200 CPU.
A journey documenting the Sanco 8003 computer
This was a fun story about an electronic engineeer who found an obscure 8-bit computer by the side of the road – so obscure, in fact, that there was no mention of it on the internet. He took it home, and with a friend reverse-engineered everything about it and got it working again, running its original CP/M.
On a couple of occasions, I was physically unable to get into a room, but I missed most of these due to schedule clashes and the distance between rooms in different parts of the campus.
Most of these seem to be available as videos. I’m going to catch up on talks I missed.
]]>Because I was feeling tired and run down, I didn’t go to any of the evening social events, and I didn’t even drink a single Belgian beer. For shame!
I’ll write more about FOSDEM in another post.
Despite the crowded passport control at St Pancras, it’s still cheaper, easier, faster, and more reliable to get a train from London to Brussels than to Manchester. The sad thing is that this will almost certainly still be true for the rest of my lifetime, long after Rishi Sunak has fucked off to California.
I’m now feeling even worse. My cold has come back with a vengeance since I’ve been back in London. I’m going to sit under a blanket with a hot drink.
]]>The former Harmsworth Quays printing plant, more recently Printworks, being demolished
I successfully made nattō in a yoghurt maker. A friend from Sanshinkai mentioned that she had had success with this method, so we bought a cheap Lakeland yoghurt maker specifically for the purpose. I chose this one because it allows you to set the temperature and time of fermentation.
The process is simple: steam dried soya beans in a pressure cooker for 35 minutes (for small beans; larger ones might take longer), allow to cool, stir in the starter culture, ferment at 41 C for 20 hours, and enjoy a huge batch of nattō the next day.
We still have spare dried culture, but I was able to use the first batch of nattō to inoculate a second batch a few days later, which means that we now have infinite nattō.
In retrospect, we didn’t need to buy the starter culture. We could probably have used a commercial package to kick it off.
I gave my acoustic guitar a proper setup for the first time since I bought it. I tweaked the action at the nut, levelled and recrowned the frets to fix some choking around the 13th fret, rounded the fret ends, and polished the nut. I put on some new 80/20 strings, and they sound nicer to me than the phosphor bronze set that was on there before.
We took a walk to Greenwich and back on Sunday, as it was sunny and mild – at least, until the sun went down. On the way there, we walked past Convoys Wharf, a fenced-off wasteland that has been derelict for almost all of this century. There have been plans for its redevelopment for decades, but no obvious movement. I said, “I wonder if they’ll get round to building anything here in my lifetime.”
On the way home, I spotted an unfamiliar structure out in the Thames, in the form of a large scaffolded structure a couple of storeys high. After a quick search, I discovered that it’s Plot 22 of the Convoys Wharf site. Something is happening there. I’m most excited by the prospect of being able to walk directly along the river, instead of having to take a large diversion inland. On the other hand, that diversion takes me past the Dog & Bell, which must be my favourite pub in London, and a place I’d still take a detour to visit.
I discovered that a new pub has opened just down the road from us, and I was delighted to find that they operate as a café from nine o’clock in the morning, and encourage people to work from there. Since the demise of Vixen, there hasn’t been a convenient café nearer than Canada Water. I need a chance of scenery sometimes.
I hope this one lasts longer than a year. It was busy on Friday night, and that’s a good sign.
I’m taking the train to Brussels on Friday for FOSDEM. Let me know if you’ll also be there.
I went fishing on the internet and here’s what I found:
The downside was that we had to cycle there on a very windy evening. We didn’t get the worst of Storm Isha in London, but it was still blustery enough that a large piece of flying cardboard hit me in the face. (I’m fine, apart from a slight bruise on by nose.)
I have previously read and enjoyed Alasdair Gray’s novel Poor Things, and I like Yorgos Lanthinos’s work, so I had high expectations.
I loved the film, but it’s a very different story, and if you hoped for a strict adaptation you might be disappointed. There are many smaller alterations to the characters and plot, and I felt that it was a pity that it had lost its Glasgow setting, but the biggest change is to reality itself. The novel ends with Victoria’s testimony which refutes most of the preceding events, whereas the film presents everything as real within an unreal world.
In some respects, it reminds me of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) by Terry Gilliam, in its absurdity and hyperreality, but I think it’s ultimately a more successful film.
I finally overcame the bug that had been impeding my progress. I found the solution – or, at least, a workaround – in a comment on a closed GitHub issue from 2013.
It was a race condition.
I restrung my tenor ukulele. It was strung with nylgut strings and they always lacked the sparkle and vivacity I wanted. The ukulele should sound lively, I feel. After watching many comparison videos, I bought a pack of Martin M620 fluorocarbon strings and fitted those instead. They sound much better to me, and more like the sound I was looking for. I’m delighted with the result, and consider it £9 well spent.
Nylgut is a nylon string carefully developed to sound like stretched entrails. Fluorocarbon is really just fishing line. Sometimes less is more.
My word of the week is zythepsary. It’s not useful, apart from for the kind of self-congratulatory joke that no one will understand (“You couldn’t organise a Bacchanal in a zythepsary”), but I like how it sounds.
Just a few links this week: