May 08

Got a new gas lift for the office chair. Fitting it was slightly harder than the youtube videos made it look and as well as a rubber mallet I needed a mole wrench, hex key and needle-nose pliers. Still, it only took about twenty minutes and I had a seat that went up higher than before and shouldn’t randomly collapse on me 🙂

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Mar 27

A no brainer upgrade. Now I have a spare original B+

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Sep 27

On the 25th we had a ten-minute power outage. This is very unusual – normally years go by without a power cut around here. A little later in the day several vans arrived and men dug a hole in the pavement in front of my front door. They found what they were looking for and cut the power (not my power – it’s still on). They need a bigger hole to replace a section of cable.

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The next day they put up lots of no parking bollards and put notes in windshields waiting for the parked cars to go away.

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Today they dug the rest of the hole, patched up the fault in the cable and went away.

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I expect somebody will come and fill the hole in again soon.

May 31

This dishwasher rear rail cap cost £3.45 including delivery. It arrived this morning and I fitted it. Now the top shelf of the dishwasher doesn’t fall off its rails when you pull it out.

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Jun 08

Just stopped working. Opened it up for a look. Ordered replacement 85Mbps unit. The 1000Mbps now cost the same so next time I might replace all four with newer ones.

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Sep 23

Time to replace the DVD unit in the home theatre again.

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It was a quicker job this time. I didn’t lose any of my settings like region free or speaker delay. Successfully played my filthy rental DVD in time to return it for the next one 🙂

Jul 03

The box containing the DNS-323 and the cheapest compatible drive I could find (which was a 500GB) arrives and is unpacked.

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NAS and HD in boxes.

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Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB.

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Eco-friendly cardboard packaging on the DNS-323.

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It is even smaller than I expected.

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Cables, power brick.

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It seems quite nicely made.

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Side by side with HD before installation.

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Another view.

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Rear view.

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Front cover just slides off to slide in drive(s)

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Assembled and hacked in short order. Got lighthttpd mySQL and PHP running. Just a bit of tweaking and hardening and then I’ll find a place to tuck it away out of sight and save some desk space 🙂

Later

Tucked away in the home theatre cabinet with other fan-bearing gadgets.

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Feb 07

Today I opened up my home theatre system to clean the lens on the DVD player with a cotton bud and some isopropyl alcohol as it was beginning to get a bit fussy about rental disks (which tend to be dirty). This was the first time I’ve had to clean it since replacing the whole DVD drive mechanism a while back. It should work with occasional cleaning for a few more months and then I’ll need to replace the whole optical drive again. Or get a new home theatre system.

This is what it looks like inside from when I replaced the drive mechanism.

New drive installed except for attaching the cables.

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The old drive before it came out.

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Jan 25

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My cheap USB hub died the other day. Inside is a bit wibbly wobbly so I’m not surprised. Let’s see if the new one lasts longer.

Jan 03

For the curious, what it looks like inside. Don’t do this at home.

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Top cover off. The transparent plastic fork thing is the light guide to take the LED lights from the circuit board to the outside.

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ARM license CPU.

See HomePlug Turbo

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