Van calamity

Last Sunday, we attempted to go to Cheltenham in the van, as Sarah had a WoPoWriMo launch meetup to attend.

We're used to having to deal with ice on the hills leading out of our valley, as water from the farm fields tends to run off into the road; so if it gets cold, it turns into sheets of ice. There were a few patches of ice on the way up, but nothing like what I've managed in the past, so imagine my surprise when I turned a sharp bend onto a sheet of ice that spanned the entire road. The van promptly lost traction, so I stopped and attempted to gently reverse back around the corner to try a different route.

Sadly, the steering had no effect, quickly followed by the brakes; the van began a slow, graceful, unstoppable pirouette until it ended up like this, with the nose wedged into the bank:

That's looking down the hill from above. As you can see, I'd already done a bit of salt-spreading by the time that photo was taken; before I spread the salt, the ice was so slick that I couldn't actually stay standing if I got out the driver's side, I had to climb across Jean and get out the other side.

Sarah had a deadline, so headed off on foot to try and catch a bus, leaving me with Jean to try and free the van. I could reverse it as the rear wheels just span, despite me shoving some road salt underneath. I tried letting the rear tyres down, in the hope that a larger surface area in contact with the ground would help me get traction, but no luck.

So I proceeded to salt the ice sheet; if I could find somebody with a tractor of a 4x4, perhaps they could pull the van from above and get it free of the bank, then I could complete the turn and head off down hill. The salt began to melt the ice, and then salty water started to flow underneath the ice sheet, creating pretty patterns; and allowing me to wack it with my folding shovel to break it, at which point I found out it was a good half inch thick, even after being partly dissolved from beneath:

But the one tractor-owner I knew the number of wasn't answering, and another that a passer-by knew couldn't help, so I continued to try and get it free myself. I gave up on being able to drive backwards, so I took the folding shovel (it's actually a military surplus trenching tool. Good job I carry a military surplus trenching tool in the van, isn't it?) and dug the bank away to release it.

After making sure the ice was well gritted. I didn't want to be downhill of a tonne of van, working away at the one thing holding it in place, while it was on a slick icy surface.

After much digging (indeed, it was now two hours after getting stuck in the first place), with the steering wheel on full lock to the left and the rear wheels spinning, I managed to get the van out forwards, and set off down the hill. Surprisingly, the front of the van wasn't ruined, as I'd thought it might be:

Jean was surprisingly patient for a four year old strapped into a stranded vehicle while I worked away; I figured she'd be safer strapped in than running around on the ice with me, even if another car came and hit the van.

Many Pockets

As I have mentioned before, I have many pockets.

A few people have asked about this now, so here's a run-down on what's in them.

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Burnt Face Man

I am actually married to Burnt Face Man it would appear!

Though the initially burns after the cooling water treatments didn't look too bad - half way through yesturday Alaric started to look really rough with some sort of ichor type stuff oozing from various places on his face.

So we made a sojourn out to get a cooling cream - mainly it is his hand that's hurting him though and hampering typing.

I am now wondering if I should have called him an ambulance when it happened as perhapse they would have given him more treatment and he'd be looking less rough :/ The other thing is I am alittle concerned about infection getting in but am hoping the cream will help with that.

High power LEDs

I've got a few 3W RGB LEDs that I've been meaning to play with, so over the Christmas break, I decided to hook 'em up to the bench PSU and have a play.

As I have but one variable bench PSU with current limiting, I could only easily light one LED at a time. I didn't have big enough resistors to build individual LED current regulation circuits - I just set the current limit on my PSU to 0.35A and cranked the voltage up until it maxed out, hooked up to one LED in turn.

They are certainly dazzlingly bright:

Since the green and blue LEDs both have the same forward voltage, I figured I might be able to drive them together by using a pair of resistors as a current splitter, and setting the PSU for 700mA, thus ensuring that 350mA went to each LED.

However, my 0.25W resistors started to smoke when I got to about 400mA, so I shut it off - if one of the resistors burnt out then the entire 400mA would go into the surviving LED, overloading it (until its resistor also burnt out), and possibly making the thing explode. I ended up with a nice pair of burnt-out resistors:

Which is a shame, because I'd love to see how bright the thing is at maximum, with all three LEDs going!

My lab partner was most impressed, and asked me lots of questions about current and voltage; I had to resist her demands to keep making things, so I could go inside and write this blog post:

BlackBerry

Many moons ago I did some work writing apps for BlackBerries. I liked the things at the time; they seemed to be well-built, both from the hardware and software angles.

So when my mobile phone contract came up for renewal (meaning I can get a free new phone if I sign up for another two years), with my existing phone falling to bits and rather crashy, I was pleased to find that I was eligible for a free BlackBerry 8520!

The device is a nice evolution of the BlackBerry I was using back in 2004 or so; rather than the thumb-activated scroll wheel we now have a two-dimensional scroll thing that works like a trackball, but seems to really be the innards of an optical mouse, set up so it sees my thumb moving over a small plastic window. This works well, takes up little space, and has no moving parts apart from the click action when it's pressed in to select something. The one downside of the new hardware is that my original Blackberry had a reflective LCD; it had an optional backlight, but spent most of its time with it switched off, simply reflecting the light incident upon it (in colour!). This didn't make for vibrant, saturated, hues in photos, but it did save a lot of power, and meant that the screen was highly readable in the brightest sunshine.

There's a few rough edges in the software; my model lacks a GPS, and the supplied maps application lets me enter my home and work locations by typing in an address, then gives me the option to locate that from the current GPS position (which of course fails) or to look up the address - which also fails, claiming the state/province cannot be found. If I just put the postcode into the address and nothing else, it works - but only matches on the first part of my postcode, getting a location that's some distance away in my rural area. I'd like to have an option to choose the location I've scrolled the map to by hand, geocoding that doesn't suck, and no menu options about GPSes when I have no GPS, please.

The mail system tries to auto-configure itself. Which is a blessing, and a curse. I bet it's a blessing for many users, and their IT departments, that they can just enter their email address and password, and have the rest fetched. However, I have a funny mail setup; I have lots of different IMAP mailboxes on the same server, with usernames like "alaric-work". And there happens to be a POP3 daemon listening on the machine that hosts my employer's web site. So when I put in my work email address, it notices that the domain part of the email address has an A record, and it has a POP3 server, and that POP3 server has a user called alaric (which is the user part of my work email address) which it can log in as with that password - so it goes ahead and makes me a POP3 account... with the wrong username and wrong mail server. Which would be OK apart from the fact that there's no way of changing the protocol or username on an existing mail account.

The trick, it turns out, is to deliberately put the wrong password in on the initial setup screen. This causes the POP3 login attempt to fail, and the subsequent IMAP one (in order to be compatible with Outlook's autodetection, it tries POP3 before IMAP!) too; it then says it can't automatically configure me, and asks me to list username and mail server. It then proceeds to guess IMAP somehow (it still didn't ask me, and the machine has POP3 as well as IMAP on it), and pow, my IMAP account is set up.