Week of 14th August, 2017

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Monday, 14th August

Everything is back to normal. Jane is back to childminding - 2 children today. And I'm continuing to slowly migrate to inspiration2. I'll keep latitude as a radio and blogging platform, but eventually (perhaps quite soon, once I install necessary applications) I'll retire inspiration.

Katy has been on at me to get rid of old computers, so inspiration and tord, plus Jane's old Advent desktop and my dead Acer laptop, should at least placate her for a while. Not stinker, though. I'll give him a new keyboard (the old one is losing the key legends) and install a flavour of Debian Linux, which will give him a new lease of life.

Proms recordings, and archiving, via the Pure Evoke 3 DAB radio continue. We're about half-way through the season, and I have 2 DVDs worth of recordings so far. It would be good if I could get recorded material off the Pure's SD card via USB, but that appears not to work. Never mind, pulling that SD card twice a week is not a great problem.

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Tuesday, 15th August

The Gustav Becker clock is still misbehaving. It still strikes about 3 minutes early relative to the position of the hands, and it's prone to stopping for no very good reason that I can see. This happens at about 10 minutes to the hour, so it's almost certainly (to my non-clockmaker mind) strike-related. This means that it goes into the get-it-fixed queue - after the French clock, which is due to have its pendulum looked at when my tame clockmaker returns from his holiday.

Meanwhile, the Becker is still puzzling me. According to everything I've seen online, Becker changed to sspring-driven movenets in about 1880, but according to online sources the serial number dates to about 1923 - if the clock was made in Freiburg. If it's from Braunau, Czechoslovakia, all bets on serial number dating are off - Braunau were rather more lax about numbering. I do have a picture of the back plate of the clock - where the serial number and logos are - and I need to compare logos, in hopes of at least identifying the clock's provenance.

<pause>

And the logos say Freiburg, sometime between 1877 and 1926. My reference for this is here. The only apparent difference between this and the 1875 - 1896 version is the relative position of the two logos, assuming The Clock Guy has it right. A Braunau clock would identify itself as such in the logo.

Further, this is a P64 movement (marked as such) and strikes the hour and half-hour on a single coiled wire gong - when it doesn't stop at 10-to-the-hour.

It also has an inset seconds dial - which doesn't actually indicate seconds. Even though it's marked with 60 subdivisions, the 'seconds' hand makes one sweep every 45 seconds. These "quick seconds" are a frequent feature of Becker clocks.

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Wednesday, 16th August

Our tame tree surgeons attended today, as part of their regular rounds. And we needed UKP280-worth of work. I could have used this being next week, not this week.

I've just noticed that the new battery in latitude appears to be working well. I get several hours of runtime from it - the battery display claims about 4-and-a-half hours from fully charged, although the "Low Battery" warning appears to be overly paranoid - 31% remaining, or about 90 minutes. Must see if I can adjust that - 30 minutes would be more than enough. And of course, inspiration2 has about the same endurance - not as good as current generation machines, but M$ have basically written themselves off my buying list, because of telemetry, and Macs are expensive. Good, though, just wilfully different.

Later: I've proved that the power bricks for latitude and inspiration2 (and probably inspiration, as well, but that's untested) are interchangeable, despite the different power ratings, and dire warnings from inspiration2 about "Unrecognised power adaptor" when using latitude's brick. I've also retired the OEM mains leads from both - UK BS1363 3-pin to IEC60320 C5 style - in favour of a C5-to-C8 adaptor and an BS1363-to-C7 lead with a folding BS1363 plug, like these -

Mains Lead Comparison

OEM lead to the left, adaptor and C7 "figure-8" lead to the right. That lead, by the way, is from Lindy - their No 73377.

The idea here is that the standard BS1363 plug, good though it is, is not optimal in a carry bag - the pins stick out too much.

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Thursday, 17th August

Filip, Jane's newest charge, is an escapologist - he's learned how to open the front door, which admittedly, is not difficult. Press down on the handle, and Robert is your mother's brother. Or in his case, pull down.

So we started applying the security chain - which stops him. Of course, it stops anyone getting in from outside as well - namely, and to whit, Katy, today. After the explosion when she couldn't get in, we now lock the door with the key. All this because Filip cannot be allowed out through the front door unsupervised. He'd be likely to fall down the steps, which would be ungood. Worse, after that he could run out into the road, and the Demon Murphy would ensure that someone drives past at the wrong moment. So locked door it is.

And Katy glommed on to me for the monies for inspiration2. She wanted to get her extra Sonos speaker, in person, from John Lewis. Who have raised their prices, but they still do price-matching, and Katy could point to another site (in this case, Curry's) where the old price was still posted. So, old price paid. Then she wanted chauffeured home, since daytime parking at or near her flat is still impossible, or very expensive.

Jane is at a Proms concert tonight, with Jenny. It's scheduled to end about now (21:00) so she should be back in about an hour. Be it noted, this is an early concert, since there's another one later tonight. Normally, Proms concerts run from 19:30 to 22:00 - ish.

It seems WebDAV Server on Android may not be as useful as I thought. It was very reluctant to show up in Windows Explorer on both inspiration2 and latitude, and irfanview64 crashed twice while editing the mains lead photo that I've just back-posted to yesterday's entry. I'm still learning about the Hama Photo Studio that I used as a backdrop for that photo - it's both more and less useful than I thought it would be when I bought it years ago. More, in that it gives a standard backdrop, less in that it's not big enough - even though this is the large model. The photo was taken with the Nexus 5X (the Voda. one) and downscaled to 640x480 in irfanview64 on inspiration2.

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Friday, 18th August

 That's finally prepared my bookmarks file for web browsing away from home. Or at least the first version. Twitter links to add, and comics downloads. But this is a start.

Later: Let's see if I can find the driver for the SD Card reader on inspiration. There isn't one installed by default, although the drive is present. So ask the Bigger Brain for "dell n5110 sd card driver", and the first link is to a page on Dell's website with a download - 9MB of it. That 9MB .exe file is a self-extracting archive, containing an InstallShield installer, which in turn, silently.installs the driver. There's no visible effect, until you insert an SD card, upon which event the driver installs, and you can read the card. And it'll handle at least 16GB cards - I suspect that it'll handle 32GB SD-HC. The jury is still out on SD-XC 64GB or bigger cards,  I don't have one of those easily to hand.

That's inspiration sorted. Let's see about inspiration2. Insert the card in the drive - and it's in a physically different place, despite the two machines sharing a model number. Taa-Daa! It works! So that's good. It would be nice if everything was that easy. I don't need to do latitude - he had the driver installed when I got him.

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Saturday, 19th August

Freelance today. Nothing much to say about it, other than all went well, with no problems.

Other than the usual snafu with the District Line, due to repair works in East London. East London? And the entire line is in a shambles? WTF?

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Sunday, 20th August

More freelance. And the shambles on the District Line was moderated this morning. Still non-standard, but more reliable.

More work on my online bookmarks file. Some typos corrected, and many extra links added. And in the process, I discovered that, if I want columns in a table to be top-aligned, I need to start using CSS. Because HTML5 hasn't just deprecated the VALIGN attribute, it has abolished it. And all the browsers I have access to are now HTML5-compatible.

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