Yet another Googlewhack

An eight-sided solid made of yeast extract. Hurrah!

Another Googlewhack

I think it's wonderful that hiccup can be spelt so bizarrely and that people ride single-wheeled transportation systems.

My latest Googlewhack, preserved by TinyURL from buggering up its purity.

Telly hacking

Chris brought the old telly to my birthday pizza party. Photos and write-up of the event to follow. Anyway, on Sunday I decided to take it apart and scrap the insides before working out what to do next. (Jayne sensibly kipped whilst I hacked.)

Here's the old telly, as you saw previously. That Playmobil fella was not part of the deal, sadly. Getting hold of it meant I could measure the tube at last. 19" - bigger than I was expecting, and hoping to be honest. That's a big gap to fill and I only have a 17" monitor I can do it with. Sure, I could buy a 19" CRT monitor, but that's defeating the point!
Getting hold of it also let me see how deep the telly is. It isn't. It's not quite plasma-skinny, but it's only about 12" deep at its deepest (where the tube protudes into a relatively small plastic dome) and the plywood case is a mere 7" deep. In comparison, the monitor I'd ear-marked for the build has an 8" deep front, before it drops down where the tube extends backward; and that's a further 10". As a result, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to use this case for what I wanted. Hey ho.

On the back of the case, next to the aforementioned plastic dome, they were very pleased to be able to report that this is a hand-wired TV.

Whoa! Under about 20 years worth of grime since its last service there's a total of 11 valves - you can see a few of them there - and some strange metal box type things, which could be anything. (I wasn't in a rush to shove a screwdriver in there!) On the side of the case innards I found the manufacturing date - April 8th 1968. I'd have thought they'd be on transistors by then, but clearly not. But it all looks very tidy for a hand-wired TV...

...until you remove the circuit board and look underneath. Yikes! No PCBs here, instead there's lengths of finger-board things, and resistors and capacitors soldered to each other with aplomb. The white circular devices with multitudes of wires going to them are the sockets the valves were in. I probably ought to have salvaged them, seeing as I salvaged the valves, but didn't think to - I wasn't planning on getting the valves to work again after all this time in an attic, and am just going to frame them.

Well, the tube and circuit board are in the bin now, and just the case and knobs remain. I'll see what happens next =)

Now We Are Six (times five)

I should've blogged by now, but I haven't. Well, I have, but Mozilla crashed on my somewhat temperamental Linux box. (Mandrake's all well and good, but it's no Debian. I'm going to go back to Debian. Much easier to manage packages and 'that'. My Mandrake box has just ended up messy.) So, I did a nice big bloggage back on Friday and lost the whole lot before I got a chance to submit it. Bah.

Anyway. I am now 30. Hurrah! More news later.