Technology jinx (by alaric)

On Sunday, we were due to drive back from Essex (stopping off to pick up Minnie)... but while driving back to Sarah's parent's place that morning, I noticed that the brakes were really really feeble. As in, the pedal would go all the way to the floor without much resistance until the last part, and the car would come to a gentle stop rather than screeching to a halt.

When we got out, we saw that the rear wheels were all covered in an oily liquid that had emerged from the axle. Bah.

So we borrowed Sarah's mother's car for the journey home. It's a bit smaller than ours, and we had a lot of stuff, so it was a bit of a squeeze!

Then on Tuesday, we went out to pick up more cat litter from Stayte Services in Stroud, and as I was parking in their car park, the car stalled.

Which is an odd thing for an automatic transmission to do.

It wouldn't start again.

After a bit of sitting there groaning with our heads in our hands, it did start again, but quickly stalled once more. I began to surmise that letting the engine cool down had helped, so we left it a while, started it up, and this time I kept the revs high so it wouldn't stall again, and reversed it into a parking space. In case the problem was due to something in the fuel line, I left the engine running (with Sarah watching over it) while I went in and purchased, but it had stalled again by the time I returned. It started again after a cooling period, then I had a nervous and fraught drive home, trying to keep the revs up in slow traffic and so on. It's been fine since, though - I suspect it was just overheating in some way.

But then Wednesday morning, I got up to find the ADSL was down. So I used dialup to check for emails, and to complain to the ISP. The fridges and freezers were all running their compressors at once, and Sarah complained that some of the (flourescent) lights weren't working; and the UPS kept switching to battery mode. Checking the logs revealed that the mains voltage was around 170v instead of the usual 240v; and before long it cut out entirely, so I dragged the generator out and started it up to run the computers and the fridges and freezers - which, given enough voltage to run their compressors properly, were soon at a decent temperature, and the compressors shut off again.

The power came back, but I stayed on the generator for a while, until I was sure it was OK.

Interestingly, when the power came back and the ADSL router powered back up (it wasn't on the generator), it managed to obtain a link immediately; perhaps it was only failing because it was running on a reduced voltage, and its power supply was thus failing to provide proper power to the thing in such a way that made it unable to get a proper link. I'd expect a switched-mode power supply to still provide clean power in such situations (the computers were all quite happy on 170v), but you never know what corners might be cut in cheap equipment!

Either way, right now, I'm feeling a bit cursed...

Interesting sites (by alaric)

I came across:

Guide to Zone 6 by Quin Parker on Haddock.

This guy's decided to go to every station in Zone 6 and write a little review on each. They're quite funny.

Then following random links from there, I wandered to:

Cinnamon Thoughts - Colorful Optical Illusion which is a nice visual trick.

Motorway Cow Bridge (by alaric)

Well, I've just ported my nice image upload to blog script to run from a Web form (rather than a script on my machine that uploads via SCP), so that Sarah can use it too (and I can use it from random locations).

As a test of it, here's some pictures of a strange phenomenon we often see when going to pick Jean up from nursery - at about 5:30pm each day, Junction 11 of the M5 is visited by a parade of cows (you have to look closely to see them - I didn't want to crop the images, so you get the full context):

Fusion power! (by alaric)

Cheap affordable fusion may be on the horizon...

I've spoken in the past of the wonders of the Fusor, but recent developments in the field have occurred; Robert W. Bussard, of Bussard ramjet fame, has recently claimed that he has a design for a fusor that overcomes the obstacles to power generation, with the output power rising with the fifth power of the radius of the device.

He's just looking for a few hundred million dollars to build a prototype.

Here's hoping somebody pays up, and that it works!

Blog Sections (by alaric)

For those of you who read this blog to see how the family's doing, my computing / electronics posts are probably a bit irrelevant. And for tecchies, all the personal family stuff probably gets in the way of the bits you find interesting.

So I just thought I'd make sure everybody realised that the 'Categories' section on the right has links to separate sections of the site for Alaric (and my subtopics), Jean, Sarah, and The Family (which is about things that affect us as a whole, such as our domestic arrangements). Clicking on a section link takes you to what's basically a sub-blog only showing things in that section, with its own RSS feed and everything.

Enjoy!