I managed to talk Kel into letting me get two racks of pork ribs after my success slow cooking the chicken bits the other day. I used a basic rub based on garlic and smoked paprika powders with a little Cajun pepper and brown sugar. It caramelised really nicely. The only thing missing I think was a baste. In spite of not basting, the ribs were quite moist still and very tasty - with just a little warmth from the Cajun pepper. Same MacGuyver technique with foil over the grill and the adjacent burner on for a slow cook (2.5hrs).

Kel got some "Chicken Ribs" from RedLea to try. The biggest problem I've had previously with little chicken things is that if you grill them, they burn. If you cook them on the hotplate, you have to burn them to cook them through. So I decided to try and slow cook them, like you would if the BBQ had a lid. As I had no lid, I put the burner on under the hotplate and covered the grill in foil. They turned out really well.

I have "un-bodged" the EGR on the Barina after a lot of de-gunking and scraping of the mating surface of the block. Whoever had bypassed the EGR used a piece of tin (which is fine), but they also use this horrible grey gunk which was a pain. There was also a slug of the stuff in the intake side of the EGR manifold! Thankfully they also gunked the original aluminum gasket in with the tin, I was able to recover it. I bypassed the EGR this time around with a piece of coke can. Click the image on the right to see the rest of the photos.

I do this occasionally and it's really tasty! All that is required is a small amount of oil on the hot plate and you can cook these calamari rings and prawn cutlets on there, no problem.

Today I was fortunate to score a Tandy TRS-80 from a friend along with a collection of tubes and old transformers suitable for tube equipment. I look forward to firing the TRS-80 up, I have never actually played with one. The key I think is going to be to clean it (obviously) and check all of the capacitors and connections before I fire it up. I don't want to let out the blue smoke!

The kids managed to ruin their XO and I could not even recover it. So, back to factory setting. This is what the flashing screen looks like.

Today I pulled the back seat out of the barina so that I could get to the innards of the seat release. I have temporarily put a cable tie around the tie rod that is snapped off the plastic release button so that I can at least actuate it and release the seat.

Unfortunately it looks like the plants hate the new tank =) I suspect it's because the is no food for them (as I am doing a fishless cycle). There is no phosphate in the water. The rest of the level (ph, amonia, nitrate, nitrite).

A bit of hose and barbs from Bunnings plus the Gauge from eBay. The little compressor is now useable! It has a valve on the bottom of the 3 way manifold because I don't have a plug for it. On the right of the manifold is a Ryco quick release connector. The regulator is from some scrapped pneumatic equipment, an SMC AR30 which will allow 0-100PSI adjustment. The only problem is that the compressor doesn't have an automatic pressure shut-off.

Finally all the gear I've been collecting for the tank has been combined. The kids and Kel are away, so this is a suprise for them. We were given this 2ft tank maybe 2-3 years ago. It came with a hang on back filter and some pretty ordinary looking gravel substrate. The gravel substrate looked like maybe 3 generations worth with no replacement =) There was a lower layer of darker small river pebble type substrate, then ther were day-glo coloured pebbles, then on the top layer some generic fine pebbles.

I decided on the larger 5-6mm gravel with some fine black gravel for  a little path and a "Volcano". I plumbed the air with two valves and a tee so you can independantly control the volume of the bubbles in both air stones. The little house came with the tank, as did the volcanic rock.

The plant on the left is Ambulia and the one on the right is an Amazon Sword.

I opened up the aircon because the blower does not seem to start. After some probing around I rubbed up against the motor body and burned myself. Yep, it's probably got shorted/burnt windings. It gets really hot. You can sometimes start the blower by giving the squirrel cage a little push. The bottom blower has nearly the same mountings but is 90W, the bottom blower pulls inside air through the condenser and then fires it out the window duct. The upper fan is just 55W, but has 3 speed taps. I may just get the 90W part and cable all three speed relays together. Usually if you need this thing on, it's going to be going full boar anyway!

Testing this Chinese eBay power supply unit under load with halogens before I fit it. It's going in a TV at work that we are resurrecting. The TV has some stupid external power supply with an even stupider 4 pin security connector on it. I am fitting this inside the TV chassis and fitting an IEC connector on the bottom of the screen so it takes mains directly.

Looks like the engine won't start because the ECU is unhappy that this sensor line is shorted to ground. The loom appears to have rubbed though. A bit of heat shrink and some solder and it's all good.

Mail flows again from my LAN. I managed to totally destroy the config on the exim smarthost... Puppet giveth, puppet can taketh away lol. It was in the wrong host group. #puppetize :D

Playing around with a top view magic eye tube: The 6E5. Also a demo of the GR-211 Tubes and some detail on the sockets that I made for them.

Kids are lucky these days.  Hardware is cheap and heavily abstracted in software. USB to TTL serial about $2 AUD. A knock-off Arduino Nano for $4 AUD both with shipping included. Took about 5 mins to get a push button flashing LEDs and sending a message on serial. You can count the lines of code on two hands. Beats the hell out of writing 300 lines of assembler. (but it isn't as fun)

Tonight I fired up the high voltage power supply and had a go at getting this EM84 display tube going.

+250VDC on the anode, The grid is being operated between -20VDC and 0VDC. The heater on this tube is 6.3V.

Positive terminal on an isolated bench supply is connected to the ground of the +250V supply to give negative voltage required to drive the grid. The negative is fed into pin 1 via a 1meg resistor to ground.

As the grid voltage aproaches 0V, the shadow widens. I put up this video demonstrating adjustment of the grid.

Had a small win with some Logitec speakers today. They were exhibiting poor volume and distortion. My first guess was caps, they looked sound, but were cheap crappy caps. I re-capped it anyway, with no result. There was also a suspect SOT-23 transistor which drives the power LED, when touched, the distortion changed. I deleted the LED circuit and connected the LED with a resistor direct to the power rail. No love. Then I noticed that touching part of the board near the power switch caused the volume to increase and the distortion improve. I shorted across the power switch and the unit came to life. I didn't even suspect the power switch, it is a sealed self-contained unit which is built into the back of the volume control. So I shorted the switch with a blob of solder (no chance getting a replacement dual gang + switch unit). Now the unit works great. Just with no off =)

Fixed up a bunch of little annoying non-technical things around the house today. Tap handles, leaking toilet cistern, broken light socket and other random stuff.

I headed out to the Postgres high availabililty meetup. The meetup was really good. They went though in a lot of detail the native replication now built in (as of like 9.1 or something) to Postgres. I will be switching my postgres replication from Slonyl to native for sure.