David Morris – brassedoff.net

Daniel’s got his Grade I euphonium exam in 10 days or so. We had a rehearsal with his accompanist this afternoon. It’s the first time Dan’s played these pieces with a piano, although he has endured me banging out some accompaniment to some of his other tunes. Mrs Woolforbrains had to sit in the car. Nerves had taken hold and she admitted to being well outside her comfort zone. To be fair, she’s doing extremely well considering that she’s learning music along with Dan. He’s doing all the playing, but Mrs W’s learning all about dynamics, notes (Every Good Boy Deserves Fishcakes and F.A.C.E etc), sharts, flats and brass fingering. I think the prospect of Dan and some pianist neither of us knew was just a bit too much. She needn’t have worried. It went very well. Dan sounded great and if he plays in his exam like he played today, I think he’ll get a very good result which will do wonders for everyone’s confidence!

We’ve all been singing “All Night, All Day” and “Postman Pat” all afternoon as we’ve been driving around Chesterfield.

I’m now off to heat up the lamb curry I made earlier for supper.

Two things I’m quite proud of (in a sad sort of way).

Firstly, I got my Phidget kit working properly. Phidgets are really cool USB interfaced ‘things’ that can be programmed easily from a variety of languages and OS. I’ve had one kicking around for a while now, but I never really managed to get it working with my language of choice (Java) on Linux because of problems building the latest version of the library. The latest and greatest version uses JNI. The Java class libraries are shim between the Java language and the OS native code. After a concerted effort over the weekend, I cracked the problem and the picture proves it’s all up and working.

For the record, the display is running from a little multi-threaded Java console app that’s displaying a substring from Java’s Date().toString() and a conversion of /proc/uptime showing the uptime of the box that’s hosting this blog: 235 days at the time of photographing. Don’t you just love the reliability of Linux systems? 235 days without a restart. All I have to do is vacuum it out occasionally (being very careful not to disturb anything and crash it!)

My second achievement for the weekend was to create a cartoon character. Now I’m no artist (or at least not with a pen and paper), but I’d got an idea in my mind for a cartoon character that I could use on the Seth Ellis web site, probably as part of a series of articles aimed at providing information for kids about the canal. The idea was pretty much a narrowboat version of Thomas The Tank Engine or similar… you know the idea, take a real-life thing, slap some googley eyes and a smiley face on it and Bob’s your uncle.

This is probably OK if you can draw.

I can’t.

…but I can cheat, and after a bit of digging around, I found an image that I could use as the basis for my cheat, and after a couple of hours with Corel Photopaint, I came up with…

roll of drums…

Seth!

Ok, I know it’s not brilliant. It sits too high out of the water, and the real boat doesn’t have a big smiley mouth painted on the bows. Mrs Woolforbrains also thinks the bow fender (his nose) is in the wrong perspective, but that’s where my artistic skills fell over.

I can also see Seth making an appearance on a few other bits and pieces of boat-related stuff over time, maybe on the run up to Christmas. The next thing I have to do is give him a stern.

What an interesting life we lead here!

I do try to be environmentally friendly. I cycle part of the way to work. We recycle cardboard, paper, glass, tins etc through the provided collection bins or bags. I have a personal commitment to carbon offsetting (that’s two links). OK I know it’s not perfect and I’d be better off not  creating the CO2 in the first place, but at least I’ve identified that I’m adding to the problem.

So, how about this one for size?

I’ve had some satnav software from my PDA for a number of years. It’s got a separate GPS receiver. The receiver takes ages to acquire a satellite lock and the maps are way out of date now. Mind you, living in Sheffield doesn’t help with that. It will be nice when it’s finished, but the best toolset to map out Sheffield at the moment is a blank sheet of paper, a pencil and a rubber. Anyway, back to the plot…

The age and inaccuracy of the maps, and the fact that I’ve been travelling to some different places for work prompted me to want to get some new maps.

The Navteq maps for the software for the PDA are in the region of £80. The latest Tomtom app for WinCE is also about the same mark. I did get a copy of Destinator 6 through, err,  ahem, some route, but that leaves an uncomfortable taste in the mouth although it worked fine

Consider then this gadget which arrived from eBuyer on Friday.

A new shiny satnav, WinCE based, touch screen, turn by turn voice prompts, integrated receiver, windscreen mount and in car charger adapter. And up-to-date UK Maps.

How much? £60 plus delivery.

So. Map update = £80. New satnav = £60.

There’s something wrong somewhere. It’s difficult to be green. We’re basically encouraged to chuck away the old tech when the software becomes out of date and replace it with new tech. Cheap Chinese imports rule ok?

Fortunately, I intend passing on the old receiver and car mount to someone else with a Dell PDA so all is not lost, but that’s not the point. How much of this redundant small tech ends up in the dustbin because people can’t be bothered to make a trip to the local tip with it where proper recycling facilities are available? Your old satnav (or mobile phone for that matter) is crammed full of ‘orrible poisonous metals – lithium, cadmium and the like, none of which you’d like to be introducing to the environment through landfill, but I doubt that stops most people.

What’s the answer? Don’t ask me? I’m as bad as the next person, lured by the newer technology and a low price that we throw away in 12 months  and replace with the newer, faster, thinner, glitzier model… and while-ever  there are people like me prepared to buy it, companies will continue to churn it out.

Ok, so I know it’s a few days late, but Tuesday was Shrove Tuesday, aka Pancake Day, and it’s compulsory. Pancakes have to be consumed. Whether you’re small and have them with ice cream and chocolate sauce, or bigger and have them stuffed with meat and covered with cauliflower and cheese sauce (yum), there still has to the be ritual flipping.

This time, I managed to get Mrs Woolforbrains in a sequence of shots that whilst not actually continuous, because everyone was in the same position, looked like a continuous sequence…

There was also the one that she and the Young Master did as a joint flip which got away. Mrs W felt compelled to pinch that one from the camera and blog about it herself.

It snowed last night on the southern outskirts of Sheffield. If you had a lie in bed this morning, you may have missed it. If, on the other hand, you were up stupidly early, whilst still dark, you would have seen a light covering of snow on the ground. Gardencam viewers wouldn’t have been able to see anything because it was dark (I wonder how much infra-red cameras are?). I was up stupidly early to answer a call of nature, so grabbed the camera. With a one-second exposure, ISO 1600 and hoping the camera didn’t move whilst I was taking the shot, this was the sodium light-lit view from the bedroom window. As I write this (noon), the snow has all but gone now.

Apologies if this one gets a bit technical, but stick with me…

Some time ago, I wrote about putting in a new router – a Cisco 877. I hoped that this would address the issues with poor signal to noise ratios on the broadband connection and enable us to go for a ‘maxed’ connection speed i.e. above the 2Mb/s we were getting (not that there’s anything slouchy about 2Mb/s).

Anyway, we asked our ISP to give it a go with the higher speed product and it was a dismal failure. The nice shiny router wouldn’t sync and eventually reverted to the stable connection speed. A few weeks ago, I asked them to try it again, and after 10 days or so of little or no service, it again reverted to its 2Mb/s stable connection speed, although it did hint that it could live at around 4Mb/s.

The curious thing was that it was OK during the day, but went belly up every evening. Plusnet were at a bit of a loss to explain the problem, citing such strange occurrences as someone’s computer with lots of cold cathode tubes knocking out a whole cul-de-sac (yeah, sounds improbable?).

Yesterday, I monitored the SNR from work and it dropped from around 20dB to 5dB at just before 4pm. What happens at 4pm? Daniel comes in from school.

He’s noisy, but not generally electrically so, so it must have been something that was getting switched on in the house, but what? Lights? TV?

My money was on the TV (a Hitachi LCD) so tonight we went on a switch on / off spree. We tried the lights (all those low-energy bulbs we’ve been fitting like good little green consumers). No, not them.

TV? Try again.

Well, it’s either the Sky+ satellite receiver or the DVD surround sound amp.

Would you like to take a bet?

The DVD surround sound amp wins.

Turning this box of tricks on knocks anything like 15dB off the signal to noise ratio on the broadband connection. I read the Wikipedia article on signal to noise ratios but despite not being hopeless at maths (I used to roll a mean partial differential equation once upon a time), I couldn’t use this to get agrip of exactly what that meant in the overall scheme of things. I also read this article on techtarget.com and between the two articles, I think this is what the scale of things is…

SNR is defined as:

SNR = 20log¹⁰(signalstrength/noise)

Call this SNR = 20log¹⁰(x)

Doing a bit of rearrangement and replacement, when my SNR is 20dB, x will be 10 so the signal is ten times stronger than the noise level.

When we switch the DVD s/s amp on, x drops down to 1.72, i.e. the good signal is under two times that of the noise level.

When you look at it like this, there’s no wonder the router was having problems distinguishing between signal and, err, crap…. there was just too much crap.

So, the problem has moved. It’s no longer a problem with the broadband connection. Instead, it’s a problem with the surround sound system, and more specifically (I suspect) the long rear speak wires. How does one remove the noise effect from these wires which (again I suspect) are acting like dirty great aerials, right in the frequency range used by the high frequency broadband signal.

Not my area of expertise I’m afraid, but if anyone who may come across this has any suggestions, I’m all ears.