My first attempt at this was a couple of years ago when I took a HP Photosmart 1200 book scanner and thought to marry it with something like a Lubitel 166U to produce a self-contained, digital Lubi. Sadly this project came a cropper when it became apparent that the HP 1200 wouldn’t work without the light enabled, as it couldn’t complete its initial calibration step [Aside: Scanners calibrate themselves using a block of black and white lines under the scanner glass right at the edge of the mechanism’s movement. The light has to be on for the scanner sensor to see this]. Now, I thought about ways to overcome this - fitting a switch to turn the LED off after calibration seemed the most likely - but put the project on hold to concentrate on other things. Sadly when I returned to it, it seemed that the scanner had been irreversibly damaged by my tinkering and nothing I could do brought it back to life. I’d like to give this another go, but I can’t seem to find another HP 1200 portable scanner anywhere.

Later, whilst reading Make Issue 14, I came across Michael Golembewski’s article about building a camera from a Canon Lide scanner. These scanners are LED based and entirely powered by a USB port, so while they’re not self contained, they can be powered by a laptop so are fairly portable.

I got myself a LiDE 20 scanner from ebay for £15 and set to work. I first tried Michael’s instructions for a simple scanner camera. This requires no modification to the scanner - you merely make the box and lens assembly to sit on top. Sadly I got no workable results from this, due to the internal light overpowering any image. So I cracked open the scanner and got hacking!

Excessive vignetting due to
shadow cast by sensor mount.

[Note: I don’t have any pics of the build process but next time I open it to tinker, I’ll stage some appropriate ones.] The scanner is very simple to open; there are no screws. Instead you simply peel up two strips of plastic on each side (held down with double sided tape) and then slide the glass out. This also means that when you put the scanner back together, a touch of duct tape will hold it in place. I open and close mine quite a bit while tinkering so this ease of access is a real boon. Now, I won’t go in to too much detail about the actual scanner modification, as you can read it on Michael’s site or in Make. However, I will say you really need to take the time to cut away the sensor housing to let more light in. If you don’t you end up with excessive vignetting.

Also, whilst I followed the instructions for masking the metal rod to prevent internal reflections, I still get a massive white line in my images. I’ll need to do more investigation into this, maybe I’ll spray the inside black.

Internal Reflections

I made the body of my camera out of good old black foamcore board and duct tape - two things no camera hacker should be without! Essentially, I cut a piece of board the size of the scanner glass, with a square hole in the middle. I then built a box open at both ends and one, that would slide over it, open at one end. These form the body and allow for focussing. For the lens, I used a magnifying loupe I had lying around, with an aperture made from black card that I taped over the loupe. I intend to build a better lens but this will do for now. I’m quite pleased with the results, aside from the reflection from the metal bar, and look forward to refining the design and taking it out and about. I’ll post more as I go.

Some sample shots:

I’m massively vain.

Moving whilst taking pictures
produces some intersting effects

What there is less of, it seems, is people writing in praise of companies and the service they have received. A search for “good customer service” will return loads of sites telling you why customer service is so important and how it can be improved, but very few specific examples of good companies. This is human nature though, I suppose; a level of good service is expected and when it isn’t achieved we moan about it. Because a certain standard of service is expected, it would take something really extraordinarily good to get most people to comment about it. And hence we finally get to the point!

I own a very nice Mark 4 Golf GTi (the 1.8 Turbo if that sort of detail floats your boat) and whilst it’s getting a bit long in the tooth it’s nice and reliable and fun to drive. However recently I noticed the exhaust was blowing a bit and was louder than it should be. As the car still has the original exhaust system on it, I was expecting a hefty bill to have the whole thing replaced. So, I took it along to a local branch of a nationwide chain that promises to quickly fit tyres and exhausts to your vehicle. Firstly, they kept me waiting for 15 minutes before anyone dealt with me, then there was a lot of the usual teeth sucking and “it’ll cost you” comments you expect from mechanics. Culminating in the manager telling me that they’d need to order in a new exhaust (before even looking at the car on a ramp) and that’d take a few days, but they can’t look at it now anyway as they’re too busy (despite having several mechanics sitting around idle) and to bring it back in a day or two. So much for a drop-in, while-you-wait service.

Instead, I decided to pop round the corner to a local firm called Plume Tyre Service, where the experience couldn’t have been more different. I was greeted as soon as I walked in by a friendly receptionist, told to take the car straight round to the service area where it was popped up on a ramp and someone looked at it immediately. 15 minutes later, in popped the mechanic to explain that there was a hole in the sleeve in the central section but that the rest of the exhaust was sound. Unfortunately they didn’t have one in stock but they would order one and have it in the next day. In the meantime they’d clamped a temporary sleeve over the hole so that I could still use my car in the meantime. I took out my wallet to pay only to be told there was no charge for this temporary repair!

This morning I took my car in again and they again greeted me immediately, stuck the car on the ramp and 20 minutes later, the new sleeve was fitted and my car was waiting for me outside. Total cost: £23.50 including VAT! The cheapest and quickest piece of work I’ve ever had done on a car.

Needless to say, I’m going to be taking my car to them for all future exhaust, suspension, MOT and tyre work. It’s just a shame that they don’t do servicing as well.

Sadly Plume don’t seem to have a website and I’m not sure how extensive their network is - it seems to just be Birmingham and some parts of the West Midlands but if you have one near to you I thoroughly recommend you pay them a visit.

Update: I’ve found their website! Plume Tyre Service would appear to be a family run business with 5 branches in the West Midlands, which probably accounts for their good service.

One thing that has been a source of immense frustration to me has been the way they configure database connections. Like most good Java apps, they make use of abstraction layers such as Hibernate, Apache DBCP and so on. However, no effort has been made to unify the database configuration, so each of these tools and layers has their own configuration file, requiring the same database connection string and credentials to be entered into them.

Now, the reason this caused me problem? I had identified two of the configuration files, but missed the critical third one, so when moving the installation from my local machine to a test server, I ran into endless fatal errors informing me that the Oracle drivers couldn’t establish a connection…

Infoglue has a graphical installer which is great for setting up a test install on your local machine as it handles these configuration files for you, but this is no good when you need to install on a headless server, hence my running into problems when moving the install from one machine to another. And don’t get me started on the fact that they obviously haven’t tested the release against Oracle as the database scripts it uses to set things up miss out vital config data that is present in the MySQL scripts. That only took me a day to figure out though, luckily ;-)

So, how could this database config problem have been avoided? Well, either by unifying the configuration into one file, or better yet, making use of a JNDI data source, as is standard on JBoss. This way, you define the connection once and then use the JNDI name to get the connection when it’s required. It’s supported by hibernate et al so why didn’t they do this? I guess the main reason is probably because it’s trickier to configure this on Tomcat than on JBoss and the default Infoglue setup is Tomcat with MySQL.

If I get time (ha!) I’ll take a look and see how much work would be involved to make this change and then see about submitting the patch back to the Infoglue developers. Don’t get me wrong, the product is good, I’m just irked by having wasted so much time on a problem that could have been avoided if vital configuration wasn’t being duplicated like this.

Here’s an example illustrating how to run Windows XP in a virtual machine on Linux using VirtualBox. I’m not picking on this one in particular, it’s merely the most recent example I’ve come across. There are many problems with this approach, including but not limited to:

• Blurred text
• Slow Pace
• Graphical artefacts obscuring what’s going on.
• Very difficult to review a section
• Specific only to that one person’s environment.
• You can’t print them out!

You have to sit through the whole thing and follow it as it goes, making notes in order to be able to do it yourself, whereas if it had been a set of written steps, you could follow the instructions at your own pace with much less hassle. I’ve seen videos illustrating how to install linux, which is completely pointless - how are you supposed to follow along toa video? Surely you’d prefer to print out a copy of the instructions to follow them if you don’t have a second computer to hand during the installation?

This sort of thing isn’t limited to software installation guides, it happens a lot on the usually fantastic instructions site, Instructables. The whole point of the instructables site is to provide step-by-step instructions on how to perform some task or create something, yet all too often you’ll see a one-step instructable that merely contains a brief intro and a link to a youtube video. Use a video to illustrate a particularly tricky step by all means, but don’t use it as a substitute for proper written instructions.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying people shouldn’t produce their own instructions and HOWTO guide, far from it, I’m just saying that the appropriate form should be used. Thankfully, video instructions don’t rank so highly when searching due to the inherent difficulties in indexing videos in search engines in any meaningful way, but they still irritate me.

I’ve just found out that there is an airport at Coventry which is serviced by Thompson Fly and WizzAir. WizzAir fly to Gdansk and Katowice in Poland, and after reading up a bit, I quite fancy the idea of Katowice - maybe make a photography trip out of it. But mainly it’s the thought of flying with a company called “WizzAir” that has me tickled.

I haven’t had a proper holiday in years - there just hasn’t been the time/money/inclination for me to go away and I’m not thrilled by the idea of going away totally on my own. The last time I went away was to a friend’s wedding in Italy last June, but that was a big family get together and the whole wedding thing depresssed me massively so I didn’t enjoy it perhaps as much as I would have liked.

I’m not a big fan of laying around on a beach, I prefer to be doing things. I’ve long had the desire to do something like a cycling tour of somewhere but can’t make my mind up where that “somewhere” is. Maybe I should go for one of those charity fund raising trips and do a bit of good while I have a holiday at the same time? Although that’s probably something to plan for next year…

This year I have plenty of holiday to use up so I’m taking a week off in October while my Mum comes to visit and then I may take a week in November just to mooch about a bit - maybe visit some friends? Anyone fancy I visit - I promise to bring cake and tea?

The changes aren’t simple cosmetic either, I’ve moved totally from a blosxom based set up to a word press one, with a new customised theme. My last experience with wordpress was when it was known as b2, so things have changes a fair bit since then ;-)

Now, as with any change of platform, there have been many issues for me to contend with, most of which were fairly straightforward to deal with thanks to the wordpress documentation and the experiences of others. Installing wordpress was a breeze thanks to the automatic installer scripts provided by my hosting provider, dreamhost. The first problem I had was to get my old posts into wordpress. Wordpress has a number of import options but not one for blosxom. Instead I had to go down the rss feed import route.

Once that was done, I was stuck with the classic issue of changed URLs. Under blosxom, I had nested categories forming part of the URL, along with the article title. One of my reasons for moving to wordpress was to get away from categories and move to tagged posts, so that approach wouldn’t work. Instead I opted to use the data based URL approach of wordpress combined with some mod-rewrite shenanigans to redirect the old URLs to their new homes. Because I didn’t have too many URLs, I opted to just manually create the redirects but it would certainly be possible to do this in a smarter, more dynamic way if you needed to. My redirects looked like this:

Redirect 301 /Articles/GingerBeer.html http://www.vurt.co.uk/2005/06/15/GingerBeer

And that was pretty much it as far as installation and setup went. I’ve installed the SimpleTagging plugin to provide tagging to my entries and have started tagging new items but haven’t yet been back to update the old ones.

The look and feel was achieved by creating a custom theme and it’s around 85% complete I reckon, just some minor bits to tweak now. No prizes for guessing that it’s based on the following 2 column layout at glish.com. The thing I’m least happy with is the searching so I’ll need to investigate that more, but I decided to release early and often rather than wait until I was entirely happy as otherwise I’d never have updated this place :-)

Commenting is now enabled so feel free to create an account and let me know what you think.

Being linux based, it’s more than just a PDA, it’s more like having a proper computer to carry around with you all the time. Without the keyboard, it’s a little slow typing using the stylus and on screen keyboard, but it’s acceptable. I’ve chatted with friends on Yahoo and MSN that way and didn’t have any complaints :-) You wouldn’t want to type for a long time that way though, which is where the bluetooth keyboard comes in. I’m using a Dell branded iGo Stowaway which is superb. It provides full size, laptop style keys in a package that folds up into something around the same size as the 770 itself.

All in all, I’m very happy with the device so far. I’ll write up my thoughts on the software and give a fuller review soon.

Now, you can use expensive proprietary cleaners for this job, but to be honest, I find ordinary washing-up liquid to be as good as anything, although if you are particularly worried about the finish of your paint job, use an ordinary car wash liquid.

For really stubborn grease, some white spirit and an old toothbrush does a great job, especially on fiddly bits like the cogs. The main chain ring came up particularly well - I hadn’t even realised it was aluminium until I’d cleaned the old black grease off it… White spirit is also great for getting rid of decades’ of old grease on bearings. I put the headset bearings in a jam jar with some white spirit and shook them until they were clean.

The next job was getting rid of surface rust, this again is a simple job, just a bit time consuming. The best thing to do is to scrunch up some aluminium foil and get rubbing - the rust will come off in no time. This doesn’t work so well on aluminium or alloy areas like the wheel rims, in those cases, a green nylon scrubbing pad and some brasso will do very nicely.

Then your wheels will go from this:

to this:

As you can see, my wheels turned out to be Rigida Super Chromix rims, which aren’t anything special but look nice.

Browsing Sheldon Brown’s Retro Raleigh pages lead me to believe it might have been a Raleigh Super Course or Raleigh Record, but the componentry seemed a little more basic on my model.

Searching the bike forums turned up the following web site with more Raleigh catalogues in it. A Browse of the 1984 catalogue opend up a few more likely candidates. It’s possibly a Stratos 10 or Medale 10, but I think Medale 10 is the more likely. The spec isn’t exactly the smae as any of the bikes in the catalogue but these seem likely. So basically it was a fairly low-end Raleigh, aimed at commuters/light-use leisure cyclists. Which is good news as I’d feel a bit bad about ripping a really nice bike to bits for use as a single speed ;-)

Not shown are the handlebars, brakes and some other bits that I intend to reuse. The deraillieurs and down-tube shifters have no future use for me, but I’ll hang on to them in case I ever want to rebuild the bike as it was originally intended.

The wheels are 27″ x 1 1/4 so it may be tricky getting new tyres for them, but hopefully online suppliers will still stock them.

Next job: cleaning everything up and taking stock of what I have