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27 May 2009
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. 27 Mar 2009
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. 22 Mar 2009
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). 18 Mar 2009
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. |
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