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Covid - Rule Breakers at Large

Partying and mixing, it is all over the news that there were parties at number 10, they're sometime denying them but now the truth has come out there's more than just egg on faces.

And rightly there are people saying how traumatic they had it isolating and not seeing loved ones, some of whom did not make it.

And to those people I shake their hands and pat their backs they did their part.

What this post is about though is the people who say they were following the rules and blatantly did to my frustration.

In the first lock down, surrounded on three sides with neighbours in their 70's we watched them march in and out of each others houses, have drinks in each others gardens, they each had their own visitors; notably school age grand children; other people from other houses on the street coming and going and their kids like-wise going in and out... Mixing mixing, swirling and mixing.

And these idiots were the first to turn around saying "oh yes we have been strictly isolating, we have been following the rules"... 

My wife and I waited patiently for any of them to get sick, of course they didn't, we never got that satisfaction of saying "see told you so".

This blog post is all I have to say about that.

Wood Working Noob - "Cheap" Video Frustrations

I'm sick of this... These YouTube channels purporting to show how to make a "cheap" custom desk and then proceeding to pull out hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds worth of equipment.

Yes, yes "this" project cost you $100, but only because you already had the $12,000 of supporting tooling and kit ready for use.

Worse still are those videos showing them using something - like "biscuits" to connect cheap planks into a surface - and then they say "you don't need to use these"... Oh yeah, so WHAT DO YOU USE?

It is so frustrating!

I am in a quandary as to how to proceed in here and until I have a plan for the desks I don't want to start the job.

My current thinking is to find a cupboard, oak or oak veneer finish, have it stood to the right of the desk as a right hand support and float a worktop or bonded set of planks as my main desk surface, and this is to go from wall to wall on this particular wall, and this is my home desk for projects and modelling I undertake.

With my free standing ikea cheap desk being replaced with another free standing compute desk just for work purposes.

This duality of purpose to the room is important, I need to be able to just look at the desk and work not being distracted by my own home projects.

How to ignore all the stuff?  Well, I want to put things out of sight, hence the cupboard use at one end.

I also want to wall mount a book-case with French Cleats and put doors on the front of this, it might only have to be a piece from Ikea for cost purposes, but this is all a secondary from the main worksurface, and I am honestly frustrated with these "easy" or "cheap" projects all using so much expensive kit.

My equipment list is:

* Chop/Bench Saw

* Jigsaw

* Sander

And a modest budget for clamps... Stain and the like.

I can maybe get my hands on a router and a few other tools, but this is a pain to figure as a total noob.

Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt15

So, I'm literally scared of rigging... It scares me.  I therefore try to keep my technique simple, a single pair of sharp scissors, a single metal tweezer, my hands and superglue.

I then let out a pool of superglue and let it cure a little whilst I unfurl a length of rigging elastic, I'm using mig's here.

Then I use a cocktail stick to put a dot of partially cured glue at the start and end points... The start I then let the rigging rest in the dot of glue and hold with my left hand and then my dominant right hand can move the rigging into place and let it sit at the right tension (or slack) in the end dot of glue.

If I use fresh glue it simply takes too long to cure, partially cured already going and it's just right, but you can end up with thick layer upon layer of it, specially when doing multiple runs - we will look at the stern of my ship in part 16 maybe....

However, for now here are some pictures of the rigging to the signal deck and bridge wing struts.

Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt14

The penultimate post!  Yes we're nearly there with the actual paint and build, we have two pieces to give us the planform of the ship the small pieces are the anchors...

The larger piece is the main mast... which was a bit of a pest.

To get it straight under it's own weight with a single point of glue.

I went with a dot of superglue, which I had led oxidize and cure a touch.

This let it at least sit whilst I then held it with a single finger, whilst it solidified a little more.  And then finally I put a layer of extra fresh superglue with a cocktail stick on the crows nest to just hold it level.

The final touches were then to a little deck furniture.

Next, and this truly scares me, is the final pieces of rigging...

We will get to that in due time.

Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt13

Well, it's been eleven months since I started her, and now it's been nearly eight since I last touched her, but finally, after a tumultuous period I'm back at the model making bench... Working on finishing the Rodney, the first task was to remove the dust which had gathered.  Then to start to fit the out rigger boats.

I took the ship off the weighted base, and the turrets off to dust her.

The waves were the worst thing to dust.

I spotted this section of the deck, behind the middle turret mount needs painting.

The first starboard side boat, the cleats added with poly cement and left to set, then the boat gun with super glue.

Close up of the port-side boats through my new magnifying boom.

And a general look at my work bench.

Highlights are the use of my new magnifying lighting boom... lovely.

Blair Knighthood Removal Petition Link

A political one, but I found with all the news coverage the actual links to the petition were lost in the ether... so here is it... sign away...

https://chng.it/FzGXwtMv5b

My first PC from Watford Electronics (1994)

The year was 1994, I had just learned to program in Pascal, I was doing quite well in my A-Level computing course and my parents bought my brother and I a PC... With "Support".

Yes, they forked out quite a whack of cash just months before the Pentium processor came out to buy us a machine powered by an Intel 80486SX2, which ran at 50 megahertz.  It had 4 megabytes of RAM and a 200 megabyte hard drive, as well as a HDD floppy drive!  I was in love with this thing, and I'm a little bit sad when I think about it's fate later on.

We bought this beast from Watford Electronics, it included at home support for a flat fee, I'm pretty sure Watford Electronics never expected this to be an issue, but it was.

We came to use this machine, daily, without really knowing much about it at the time, but a 50Mhz machine was blisteringly fast to us, it had an S3 Trio VGA graphics card in it too and came with WE's own ISA expansion card to add a custom CD-ROM drive, which they touted as being "Dual Speed"... aka slow or very slow.

This was all fine until 1995... Yes a whole year passed.

The few friends with PC's at home had Escom Pentium based machines, having waited to ask their most affluent parents for them that Christmas gone by, and so it was my brother and I played catch up.

Sure, I had all the beans in the bag with Turbo Pascal 7.0 for DOS and my learning more and more about computing, but games were where it was at.

The first title to show some issues was CivII, which I got for my birthday from a couple of friends.  I loaded it up and it stuttered terribly on this machine; I know now that the bespoke card to link to the bus was the blame, it had no buffering and relied on the drive's throughput and this was too slow for the game.  So despite our machine appearing on paper to be more than enough to play, it struggled terribly.

So much so that my mother decided to pack the whole thing up, including my game, and send it to Watford Electronics... I'm not sure what they did with the machine, but it arrived back behaving exactly the same way as it had before, it was sub par by design, they couldn't admit that, but by damn it they had described this machine as being Dual speed and fast enough, so it was by damn it going to be.

And it was such that on a festering hot day in 1995 an engineer arrived, a suited, briefcase carrying engineer... from Watford Electronics... Under the auspices of their repair warranty service arrived to see... What?

Well he saw two kids playing games.  I think he expected an office or a school.

But no two kids and their sweaty sickly close bedroom, and he set about looking at the issues, and sure enough he agreed with us, grudgingly, but he agreed.  And set about trying to sort things out.

He reinstalled the machine, no dice, it was just as slow doing the same tasks with the software reinstalled.

He fettled about with the settings; which I had already done; resulting in things getting even slower.

And in desperation of the perspiration he reached into his bag and pulled out a selection of options, the first was a sparkling Intel Pentium Overdrive chip, which would have overlain the socket 7 and boosted us immensely.  I knew this was pretty damn expensive.  But alas his hand waved over this and selected a 486 DX2-66Mhz, he set up the motherboard and rebooted.

Telling me something I'd not understood until this point... "The SX Chip you have doesn't do floating point maths, it's all integer based".  A slight exaggeration, but about right, the SX was a DX which had failed certain tests, Intel had cut certain traces and so they sold the lower spec chip rather than writing off the failed DX in their ledger.

The DX2 however, only really made a difference in Doom... Which we played already, and it didn't make that much of a difference with the 66mhz to 50mhz jump being so small.

And so it was he reached once more to a different flap in his bag and he pulled out a tray - yes a whole tray - of 486DX4-100 chips... 100Mhz!...

Things ran like a dream then, even with his busting of my mobo jumper settings.

I pushed that chip to 114mhz on very rudimentary air cooling, and it worked well into the 2000's.  I loved that chip, and we got it by bemoaning the system.

The system itself, with the proprietary Watford stuff in it eventually broke down, I had gotten into tower cases too, so the large desktop case of mostly air was left, the hard drive failed, and the machine was itself lost in body but never in spirit.

That 486DX4-100 chip stayed with me a long while, I had it until at least 2003, and in use.