Tuesday 14 November 2017

Getting there…. and a reader!

OK, we’ve now experienced the hottest Perth November week on record.  Every day has been over 30°c and when I made a trip to the hardware store last Thursday the local temperature outside the 4x4 was 40°.  Jan is missing the English winter!  When it’s cold you can add more clothes….. but when it’s hot there’s only so much that you can remove before being arrested.

This morning I made a start on routering the rails and stiles for the bed drawer fronts eventually finishing them mid afternoon.  The bed project has now come to a halt whilst I wait for the drawer handles.  The drawing for the bedhead has been finished and is waiting on access to an A3 printer.  I plan to tape the sheets of A3 together to form the 1200x700mm canal scene and the paste it to the remains of a sheet of 4mm plywood which will form the template for the bedhead.  The timber merchant has confirmed they can source a plywood panel (2400x1200mm) with a Jarrah formica laminate on one side.  I plan to use this as the bedhead.

Mid-morning Perth based reader Ken call in and introduced himself.  He also very kindly gave us his spare gas bottle which will enable us to start BBQing in the near future.  We had a great chat with Ken discovering he has already experienced one canal holiday and is keen for another.  Longer term he’s thinking of joining the Antipodean Club buying a narrowboat and spending the Australian winters cruising the inland network.   Jan already envies him and I’m starting too as well.

The TV recording pc I made from old parts (MythTV box) decided to have a mind of its own.  I repeatedly reinstalled the linux operating system only for the pc to go on strike.  EVENTUALLY the problem revealed itself.  The DVD drive was the culprit.  Once I’d disconnect the power to the DVD drive the pc decided to resume normal duties.  However by then I’d erased the entire MythTV setup which means the pc will have to be reconfigured.  Meantime I’d decided to see if I could complete one of the other projects.  Our youngest son’s internet router is “bricked” and won’t work.  Actually it’s rather dead!  I’ve previously attempted to breath life back into it using MS Windows which proved to be unsuccessful, so today I attempted the same but using Linux.

I successfully tricked the computer into thinking one of the usb ports was a serial port which enabled me to connect the router to the pc. 

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One end of the usb cable has been modified to connect to some terminals on the router printed circuit board in an effort to directly communicate with the router.

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This is the point where I had to stop for the day.  Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to make the ‘handshake’ between the pc and router which will allow me to resurrect it from the dead.

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