[	feel	|	tired	]
[	music	|	Wumpscut	]

That will do.

That one was a right bastard.

[	feel	|	pleased	]
[	music	|	Stranglers - The Raven	]

Sorry about the vertical dark bands. That's strobing of the fluorescent tubes disagreeing with my cameraphone.

Right, on with the next project...

[	feel	|	okay	]
[	music	|	Infected Mushroom	]

Pinched Kol's idea of skull combined with a biohazard symbol, but I needed it to be cut-out-able, so made something which works OK in monochrome.

The question is, which is best? Black on yellow or yellow on black?

[	feel	|	productive	]
[	music	|	Bill Bailey's Belgian Jazz Dr Who theme	]

OK. Last weekend went camping with gothstew, mmmarcus, aradia_uk + Damien, and Rose. It was brilliant as usual and as usual we caught excellent weather. And as usual we drank beer, talked nonsense, had a fire and stopped off at the carvery at Mottram on the Sunday. All pretty normal. And on the 24th I'm doing it all over again with a different bunch of people because it's oo_cymoril_oo's birthday on the 25th and she's coming over from Ireland.

I've started an IT course. It's dead boring, not much to say on that front.

I've pretty much finished my single-handed pet project of voluntary community work: Project Clearing-up-all-the-fly-tipped-rubbish-from-Drinkwater-park-and-the-bottom-of-Prestwich-Clough. It doesn't have a catchier title. Anyway, most of the crap has gone that was small enough to move. Plus some stuff I probably shouldn't have moved as it was far too much work (cutting up a waterlogged sofa and armchair and dragging them up a steep bank out of the stream). The guys at the tip lend me a wheeliebin so I can haul stuff back and forth more easily. You wouldn't believe how many bicycles people dump.

Today I also pleased myself by fixing an ATX PC power supply which someone gave me with the usual "you can keep it if you can make it work". Usually I can't fix things that explode when I plug them in to test them, but this time I did. Frankly I'm amazed it works. It blew a 5 amp fuse and covered the inside of its casing with black soot. I replaced a handful of components and it worked first time! Freaky.

Can't think of anything else right now.

Free Piston Power Pack - linear electrical generator

The FairDiesel Opposed Piston Barrel Engine

Starrotor - A rotary internal combustion engine using the Brayton cycle

[Broken Link] Trochilic rotary Stirling and combustion engines

Revetec - Reciprocating engine utilising counter-rotating cams

Bruce Crower's 6-stroke engine

Interesting reciprocating engine in a rotating housing

Radmax rotary engine with vanes - not even sure how to describe this one

isovolumetric engine with revolving con-rod and half-floating piston

Pivoted piston engine

[	feel	|	geeky	]
[	music	|	Theme from Pirates of the Carribean	]

I skipped Ara as I hadn't regained my energy after not being able to eat all week. I almost did go, but after a shower and shave it was quite late already. Plus I looked at the temperature outside I and that clinched it. I expect I would have sat in the corner being boring anyway and my digestive system is probably not fit for alcohol at the moment either.

Feeling a little less hermit-like now though. I spent this afternoon sweeping up leaves and the fresh air seems to have done me good.

Yesterday I was fiddling with junk from the loft and managed to make a working PC out of it. Eventually. The only spare ATX power supply I have is on its last legs though. It's rated at 350 watts, but has trouble delivering 120 without cutting out. I cleaned all the dust out of it and replaced the fan, and two caps that looked like they were leaking. The problem remains. For the moment I seem to have bypassed the problem by putting the hard drive and DVD writer on seperate IDE channels. Somehow this seems to put less load on the 3.3V line during boot up for some reason. I also downclocked the CPU, but it's running at full speed now, so that's not a problem.

Also the -5V and -12V lines seem to be too low by more than an acceptable 10% tolerance, but I can't understand what would cause that and still let the other voltages be correct. I don't have the circuit diagram for this particular PSU, but it seems to be pretty bog standard. No components look like they've got hot. In fact the whole thing runs cool. My brain hurts.