Archive: 2023-01
Week 108: Looking forward
My cold has lasted a solid fortnight. I can’t remember the last time I had anything as tenacious as this.
Week 107: Feeling poorly
I’ve had a cold since Tuesday and I feel very sorry for myself. I thought it would be better by now, but if anything I actually feel worse. My nose is running, I can’t stop coughing, and my throat hurts. This is much worse than covid was for me.
Replacing the rubber grommet on a Boss pedal, metric edition
Executive summary: 9 mm open rubber grommets are readily available in the UK and work well. 10 mm might be even better if you can find them.
Week 106: None more loud
Monday’s LRUG meeting was excellent. Daniel Magliola’s talk about queues was extremely comprehensive and answered every question that came up in my mind during the course of the talk. I was glad that Matt was able to make it this time (weather and strikes having prevented it in December) to remind me why I’m very grateful that other people are doing the hard work of incrementally improving the C Ruby implementation. It’s really fascinating stuff.
Lawyers broke my build
As if CircleCI hasn’t caused enough stress and inconvenience over the past few weeks, today I pushed a small change to some code only for the build to fail entirely, for a novel reason:
Week 105: Eight bits
I soldered together a computer. It uses a Z180 CPU, which is a compatible successor to the Zilog Z80 that requires slightly less external plumbing. It follows the RC2014 modular architecture and I used kits from Small Computer Central and Z80kits to make it, specifically, the SC203 system, Compact Flash module, and Real Time Clock module.
Analysing a MySQL database with JupyterLab and pandas
For work, I needed to run some analysis on a fairly large MySQL database of document metadata, to find information about the distribution of data, to visualise it, and to sample it for deeper manual investigation.
Week 104: Never too old
We ate the eleven-year-old Christmas pudding that I found in the cupboard. I opened it to check first – it looked fine – and soaked it all day in a glug of supermarket own-brand brandy to ensure that it was adequately hydrated. After an hour of steaming, it was delicious. Can a supermarket Christmas pudding ever be too old? We have not yet discovered the upper bound.
Fire sacrifice
You might have heard of the lemon pig, the World’s newest New Year tradition.