Pupdate

The heat wave(s) finally let up, but much of the month was still warm and sunny, allowing for some good walks.

As I covered in an earlier post, Milo’s back in remission :)

Caskmaster

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society (SMWS) has started running a tasting competition called Caskmaster, with heats in various tasting rooms around the country and a final in November in Leith. I think it’s intended to get people into the new flavour profiles, but it was also an excuse to get some friends together for the London heat.

None of us scored very well, so we won’t be headed to Leith; though we made friends with an attendee on their own at a table next to us. He will be headed to the final, and our whole group is rooting for him.

Buxted Park

When we went to a wedding at Buxted Park it stood out as somewhere we might return to for our anniversary. We were blessed with a beautiful day for it.

Surprisingly there wasn’t a wedding happening (on what’s often one of the most popular weekends), which likely explains how we were able to get a room. We were able to walk from our room to a park bench in the grounds and enjoy the scenery and some bubbles before a wander around the grounds. Dinner was delicious, and breakfast was also excellent. Certainly somewhere we’ll consider returning to.

Cory Doctorow

The tour for ‘The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI‘ came by Brighton which gave my pal Gav and I the excuse we needed for an evening out (and a few beers). Carole Cadwalladr did an excellent job of interviewing Cory, and certainly brought a lot of her own perspective to the discussion.

RC2014 Assembly 2.0

Last year’s gathering of the retro Z80 clan was great fun, so I’m glad that Spencer organised another this year. The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) is such a great venue, and I really enjoyed the new ‘From Flowers to Fibre‘ exhibit. As with last time it was good to meet people in the community, and chat to some of the museum volunteers.

I was also very glad to have taken the train, as the queue of traffic to get into Bletchley (Theme) Park was insane (apparently because they had some kind of 40s revival event going on).

Repair

Two laptop repairs this month:

1. I noticed that my gaming laptop wasn’t charging, and diagnostics showed a fault with the battery. So I ordered a Seaplant SR04XL (affiliate link) replacement, and followed this Ifixit guide to fit it. The whole process was very simple and done in a few minutes.
2. Quite the contrast was replacing the keyboard on $son0’s gaming laptop. This video showed me how to do it, which is essentially a total strip down of the laptop (except the screen). It took hours; and the most frustrating bit was having to melt off dozens of plastic fasteners. I guess some genius at HP managed to shave a few cents off the build costs at the expense of making repair a total nightmare[1].

I also had to replace a rubber strip on my Horizon Andes 7i elliptical trainer. Towards the end of a workout one day it started to make a nasty bumping noise on each rotation, which I could also feel. It took me a while to track that down to a split rubber strip under one of the guide runners. Johnson Health Tech seem to have now hidden their parts info behind a registration wall, and I didn’t even hear back from them until after the repair was done (and I’ve still not got any access as they’re demanding more info beyond what was already asked in the registration form). Luckily I was able to find self adhesive rubber strip of similar dimensions on Amazon (affiliate link). The hardest part was cleaning off the residue of the old strip.

Solar Diary

The streak of breaking records came to an end, with a pretty average September compared to past years.

Note

[1] Since firms like HP are on the hook for repairing laptops whilst in warranty I wonder if anybody ever runs the numbers for trade offs like this where a slightly lower cost to manufacture leads to a much increased cost to repair?