Ferg's gaff – Comics, Macs, RAID, Linux, Gentoo, some science and a dash of atheism. No longer a wet lab molecular biologist, I now work for MacVector, Inc.

6 June 20236 June 2023

Sanding down an old oak table

When we were given a lovely dinner table and chairs, our old round oak table was moved to the veranda for almost alfresco dining. Even though it’s protected from direct rain it has deteriorated over the years and so it was time for a refresh.

So I sanded down and oiled.

TableSanding

I used a belt sander, starting with 40 grit, then 80, 120 and 240. A belt sander is not ideal for furniture but it’s all I have.

For the legs I just used a 1/3 sheet sander and went from 80 to 120 then 240.

the legs of a table freshly sanded

The top was finished with five coats of Tung oil, starting with 10% oil to 90% white spirit and finishing with pure Tung oil.

Tung oil is the main ingredient of many other oil products. It’s from the Tung nut and is food safe (unless mixed with solvents) and is ideal for finishing work surfaces in kitchens. The main disadvantage is that is takes a looong time to dry (the 5th coat of pure oil took four days to become touch dry and probably much longer to fully cure!). In fact it does not dry and instead cures. It needs oxygen to do so and will fully polymerize unlike other furniture oils, so is pretty much waterproof. One of its other advantages is that the end result is matt and if you need to repair a scratch or damage, then you can just wire wool a section and re-treat. The end result is generally a seamless repair. Which is pretty much impossible with other oils or varnishes without a lot of sanding work! I use tung oil mixed with solvents, to aid the initial soaking in of the oil.

a freshly sanded oak table partly oiled.

a freshly oiled oak table

The legs just had two coats.

The final result.

An oak table that has been sanded and oiled on a dust sheet over terracotta tiles.

Here’s to lots of drinks and food over the summer (wait where’s the sun?).

18 May 2023

Bye bye Facebook

So My Facebook Account Was Suspended Yesterday as It Did Not Follow “Community Standards”. I’m guessing it’s because I put a guillotine as my profile photo and made a number of anti royalty posts over the coronation (all quite mild!).
I’ve had this account since 2006ish but I do not think I will miss it. Saying that though it is inconvenient:
– I used to sell bits and bobs using Facebook Marketplace. It far easier to sell something locally than other sites.
– I was the sole admin of a Facebook Page for my job. That page is likely now orphaned and will never be updated again.
– I ran a few FaceBook ads for that company too.
– I created and was admin for my village’s Facebook group. That is the one I will miss the most. I posted the village newsletter and many other village events (including the church even though I am an atheist!)*. There is one other admin so the few hundred users will still get some use out of it.
– I setup a Facebook page for a [local campaign](https://savehoneyhill.org) to prevent a sewage works being relocated to greenbelt just outside the village.
All those are now gone.
I do have a Quest II headset. However, Meta did split off that into a separate account some months back. I guess it’s still working OK.
Still all in all Facebook is not a force for good.
Despite my misgivings I’m still on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/fergycool), but [Mastodon](https://mastodon.social/@fergycool) is where I will publish stuff.
*I did help setup the streaming of the Coronation in the church, thus showing I’m a multi layered hypocrite.

6 May 2023

Holiday journal : Corralejo, Fuerteventura, Easter 2023

So I’ve never done one of these before, but on our recent holiday I took a quick note of the day’s events. I doubt I’ll do this again, but it was interesting with my renewed enthusiasm for blogging. Everything below was written on the day, apart from some editing and an expansion of the volcano section. I also only just added photos as I wrote it in Markdown using Drafts on iOS. Just now I pasted the Markdown text into Marsedit and added the photos.

Monday

Arrive at Airport.

Bit of a mix up with getting picked up, but eventually decent journey to Corralejo by somebody who used to live in Featherstone (near where I am from). Notable that there’s now a new section to the motorway that had been opened a few days ago. So now the airport to Corralejo is quicker. Less scenic but in the dark does that matter.

Airbnb

..is as nice as we expected. We compromised with being further from the front but with a pool. Of course if we had been organised, and booked earlier, then we could have had both….!
Host was great. He asked before if we needed anything on arrival. I asked for a baguette, ham and cheese. We got some homemade mozzarella made by a mate of his, some Jamon Serrano, some Canarian goat’s cheese and more. Cracking!

## Tuesday
Quick shop for a few bits and pieces. There’s a little corner shop just around the corner.

Wednesday

Longer shop in the supermarket (Hiperdino)in El Campanerio shopping centre.

Longer shop

Thursday

Went rock pooling with my daughter on the closest beach (rocks) near the popcorn beach. Spotted many small fish in the pools. Watched a surf class with many beginners stand up. We cheered.

Last beach before the walkway. Sea nice. Stopped at an outside bar on Waikiki for cocktails (Negroni)and ended up eating tapas. Not the nicest, but when you are sat facing the sea on a beach all food tastes yummy.

Good Friday

Walk to the harbour. Lovely pork chops and chips in the restaurant just next to town beach. Seemed to be full of locals having a nice family dinner as it was a public holiday

Dinner was the first BBQ, with a chuleton steak that I got extremely stressed purchasing at the counter in Hiperdino. All my spanish escaped and was replaced by badly spoke french. Still the guy was very friendly and patient! Steak was lovely (about 3 mins either side, then lifted up higher and left to warm. Slightly overcooked.

Saturday

Bad night’s sleep. Stupidly left window open and bins (just outside) were picked up at 3am!

Easter Sunday

Full beach day

Monday

Water park

Tuesday

Volcano Express around Lanzarote with Linear Romero. The Timanfaya national park. Started off badly as we thought we were going on a large ferry but went on their own ferry. I felt very sea sick. Took all my concentration not to be sick. Not only that but once off the 30 min ferry I had the coach trip to look forward to. So more concentration required.

The trip was super touristy, it was better than expected. The guide was brilliant. We went on the French/English coach and he spoke both languages brilliantly and NOT read from a script. We visited the volcanoes, with a view demos (burning straw and pouring water down tubes that instantly, then a tour around the park on the coach with some impressive driving around the tight bends.They even had a restaurant that cooked chicken with the heat of the volcano underneath.

Then to the ubiquitous wine shop (picnic with a baguette and jamon), the Aloe Vera shop (I saw under a tree). Then to a lagoon (bit boring). Then back on the ferry. I was quite resigned at this point to being sick. But the journey back was fairly flat. Plus I saw on the side of the boat. I am wondering if the centre is worse than the side. Certainly the motion must be better. Up and down on the side, with side to side in the centre? So no nausea.
Stopped for ice-cream for my daughter (Vrobo) then a bar for a Jarra for me. Finally supermarket for another large slice of Chuleton (rib roast or T- bone) which I did 2 min either side right above the coals, then 10 mins far from the flame. Was gorgeous!

Wednesday

Very lazy day. In fact I cannot even remember what we did apart from eat out in the restaurant just above Town Beach.

Thursday

Again very lazy. Morning reading. Lunch on a beach mediocre restaurant. All afternoon in the pool then evening meal at home.

Friday.

Day around pool. Ate out again at restaurant in front of town beach.

Saturday

Mini golf, escooters and takeaway pizza.

Sunday

Flight home. Uneventful and the border control guard even smiled.

18 April 2023

It’s tulip time in the garden..

As usual I thank the previous owners of this garden of planning flowers throughout the year:

14 April 202317 April 2023

A quite enjoyable, but very weird retro computing dream.

I started putting my memories of a dream I had last night in a Mastodon post, but as I typed I realised there was a lot more weirdness to my dream than my initial memories of it as I woke and it needed much more characters!
I remember the dream starting as I dug up my Amstrad CPC464 (which in reality is long gone), which had morphed into a CPC6128 but with an integrated dot matrix printer rather than its 3” disk drive! Then I opened it up and found my old ZX81 (which I never actually owned but borrowed from school) inside it.
Then I found myself inside an electronic shop from my hometown (that I’m not sure ever existed) and found a ZX Spectrum magazine for sale with a new “circuit board” that plugged into the ZX Spectrum (shades of RPi hats here) taped to the cover as a free gift. This gave the ZX Spectrum modern GPU power with a HDMI output.
Cue playing Sorcery+ on a 4k monitor powered from the supercharged ZX Spectrum…! Note: Sorcery was an Amstrad game and never made it to the Spectrum!
The dream went even deeper into the rabbit hole from that point as that “plugin board” led me to a whole new secret group of makers that add modern hardware to the first round of personal computers to supercharge them. So lots of boxes of various plugin boards from the BBC Model B and more..!
Just what had I been eating/drinking/smoking before I went to bed?
Then this morning I see a new book documenting the era of shareware games on Daring Fireball.
I think the dream had started as I was playing Fallout 4 on my Steam Deck just before going to sleep. Ever since I got back into gaming after a 20 year break it’s still very rare that I would play games just before going to bed. But recently I’ve lost control of the Steam Deck to my daughter who has found games! She’s still a few years younger than when I had my Amstrad, but she’s loves games as I much as I did then. So my time to play is quite limited.

5 April 2023

Repurposing a door, again and again…

I love this door to our downstairs toilet.

The door was originally at the bottom of the starirs. It was originally painted and was the downstairs door to the lounge (now gone as we changed two small dark rooms into one airy room). I removed the door and sent it to be “dipped and stripped”, then added it as a new door on the downstairs toilet. I did intend to wax the door, but I’ve not done so and so the door has acquired a patina of use.

14022009236

The door has been repurposed many times. There are four other holes that have been used for various locks. Whether that was new locks, or the door was used for different doorways. When we used this in the downstairs toilet, we put the lock on the other side of the door as it swings out and so we added yet another hole! Perhaps that’s why they the previous owners had painted the door to hide those holes? I removed the filler that was in each of the old holes. I have considered covering it with a panel. But I think overall I prefer to see the holes as they show the history of the door.

21 March 2023

Before we had a bathroom

We’ve got plumbers in today replacing a few items that have broken in the 15 years since we fitted them. Before we moved into this house we had about 11 months of renovation to turn a flimsy house with no insulation, minimal plumbing and wired with appallingly dangerous wiring (rubber coated cables where the insulation had disintegrated), into something that could be lived in.

I could rant about how the plumbers back then made absolutely no thought as to future maintenance, but I will not. However, in looking for how the shower was fitted (so it can be replaced) I came across this photo before the bathroom even existed.

02062009449

In this photo the flat roof of the utility room below has been removed and replaced by joists to provide a floor. The door opening was previously a window at the top of the stairs. The shower was fitted between the two studs you see to the left and in front of the white door.

Here’s how it looks now from the exterior (the window you see is about where I was stood when I took the above photo 14 years ago.

17 March 202318 April 2023

A years old Wifi issue finally sorted! Yeah!

I’ve always wondered why I had wifi issues in my garden office on my phone and more generally everywhere else in my garden. It’s only 10m away from an access point with good quality external aerials. Which should give decent coverage over the entire garden and offices.

I have a central Draytek 2820n router connected to a Netgear GS724t switch (then another in my garden office). There are two Draytek Access points connected to the switch. AP-800 and AP-900. Both legacy products now, but OK.

Wifi reception in the house is generally decent. But in the garden and our garden offices it is rubbish. There are multiple Smart switches that are always disconnecting (in fact I threw one away a few years ago and replaced it with a new one). A pair of Sonos speakers that are always disconnecting (though they should be using SonosNet and not general wifi) and a Raspberry Pi on the boat that I can rarely reliably SSH to.

Our garden has some overhead power cables above it. These are 11kv with three phases and power the entire village.

Yesterday morning I just noticed that I was getting a very decent wifi signal on my phone (20Mbps down). Then it dawned on me that the cables are turned off today for tree work and the village is being powered by a diesel generator for the day. The naive “jumping at straws because this dammed wifi problem is never going away” person in me immediately assumed that interference from the cables was the issue

Then more knowledgeable people than me told me that a 50hz electricity cable will not interfere with a 2.4/5Ghz wifi signal. The frequencies are too different. Still something is awry. I also noticed that the three smart plugs in my garden that are generally problematic are connected without issue. Same goes for two Sonos speakers. I could even connect to the RPi with a decent connection. Enough to update Raspbian without having to use Tmux.

However, then the connection fails again and the power has yet to be restored to the cables. So what is the problem?

The Draytek router has AP central management and I configure the two Draytek access points using that tool. I’ve rarely looked at the config pages of the actual APs.

Draytek CentraAPmanagement

But now I looked at one. Turns out that it was using two wifi networks with the same SSID.

The AP in the house had both SSIDs connected to LAN-A, but the AP in the garden had one of these “pseudo” networks connected to LAN-B. The LAN-B is not connected to anything!

DraytekAPdualSSIDs

So when the power went off the APs rebooted. Then the devices get a decent connection. But as the phone roamed it switched to the SSID with no network connection and so the iPhone goes crazy with no internet connection and switches to 4G. I have no idea why the Smart switches disconnected though.

I just turned this off on both APs and everything now connects flawlessly with a strong signal. I have had this problem for years…! Sheesh…!

UPDATE March 18, 2023

So the wifi failed again. I went back to check and the multi SSID option had been re-enabled. Turns out the AP Management tool on the router has a profile that enables it, and it kept cloning it to the access points. Now that’s fixed. Fingers crossed.

UPDATE April 18, 2023

So the problem was not fully solved. The issues above were real, but the heart of the problem was hardware. In these days of reliable hardware how odd to have an issue that is not PSU related. I swapped out the AP, but the only spare AP I had did not have a built in Ethernet switch, and there’s an IP camera attached to the existing AP. So I disabled wifi on the faulty AP point (Draytel AP-900), used that as a switch and plugged in the Ethernet portless AP (Draytek AP-710). For a week before our holiday and the few days we returned it has proved to be faultless. I do need to remove that faulty unit completely. The AP in the house is plugged into an adjacent switch and so only needs a single Ethernet port. I’ll swap the two over soon.

13 March 2023

migrated blog to new hosting provider

So after moving my old hosting provider to a monthly renewal 12 months ago in preparation for moving it. I finally found a day to migrate it all over to a new provider on Saturday. I chose Mythic Beasts. A Cambridge based company that I have a few other domains hosted on and have been impressed by their plain talking sales, sensible pricing and proper technical support.

Their support pages suggests a “no downtime” workflow that involves copying their DNS entries for your new site to your existing hosting provider’s DNS record. So even though you do not know when the changes propagate through DNS servers both your existing provider and the new one’s all point to the same new server on your new provider’s site. Very straightforward.

I also discovered a cool WordPress plugin (Updraft Plus), that I’ve been using for backups for some time, has a very restore function that you can easily and quickly restore a backup to a new site. If I’d have known how easy and reliable this perhaps I would not have bothered exporting my site, and importing to a backup server. Just In Case.

7 March 202317 April 2023

Spring is coming – flowers in the garden

Our garden was well planned by the previous owners. They bought the house in 1933 and spent their lives planning the garden. No lawn, but vegetable patches in the middle and flowers around the borders. We have left the garden much wilder. The vegetables patches were replaced by grass (although we reverted part of that to vegetables patches during the first lockdown). The borders are still full of flowers. All planned so that the last weeks of Winter and Spring are full of flowers, snowdrops, aconites, crocuses, daffodils, then tulips, crown imperials, irises and plenty more. Here’s the first batch:

(The first daffodils photo is from elsewhere in the village, but it’s a lovely photo!).