mattneighbour.com

I bought my own domain name :-)

http://mattneighbour.com now points towards my own server, running my photographic portfolio website. It's served by Apache running on Fedora Core 4, hardware is my old Pentium III 800MHz, 512MB RAM. Works well enough, even though upload speed on home ADSL is only 256kbps. I've had to learn a lot of Linux system administration, and still have a lot to learn!

Please check it out!

http://mattneighbour.com

Gamelan Minster concert photos

Just a quick note to say there's some new photos of mine on Flickr, from the recent (well, a month ago) University of York Music Department concert in York Minster, with Choir and Gamelan. Here's a sample:




The rest are here.

Rushed off my feet

I know I'm too busy when days go by without me having a chance to check my favourite blogs, news sources and forum post rss feeds on Google Reader. This week I have been in work before 8am every morning and I have been leaving after 8 most days. The reason? I was commissioned to do some electronics design and build work for an art installation company, installing an installation (!) in a gallery in Bristol this weekend. I had 6 days to design circuits, order parts, build and test.

Pictures speak louder than words so here are some:





The installation consists of white plastic stools which light up, and which contain pressure sensors in their cushions. There will also be a sensor triggered by people entering the room. My box of electronics ties the sensors and lights together with a computer so that the computer software can interact with them.

The company I have done the work for is Forma. Information about the installation can be found here.

Correct diagnosis, doctor

I do like it when I get something right.

One of the academics had a big problem with his office hi-fi system. It has taken months to sort out (due to never having enough time) and still isn't sorted, but I've got to the bottom of it now. The symptom was the amp not turning on, and I fixed that eventually, sometime before Christmas. It turned out that there had been some sort of output short-circuit - the power supply fuses were blown and more seriously the output stage power transistors were blown too. Not that it was easy to fix - I went through another couple of transistors until I traced a short inside the amp, pesky little one via the main heatsink putting 50 Volts across said transistors ****smoke****

If that wasn't enough, I decided to check the speaker wiring before reinstalling the amp, as I didn't want to short circuit the output with a faulty cable. Strange, one speaker was nearly short circuit, one open circuit. Now crossover aside, a speaker is basically a coil of wire, so when measuring it's DC resistance it should measure quite low, looking simply like a piece of wire to the test equipment. One looked like this, the other like a broken piece of wire, no connection. I suspected this one to be faulty but was hesitant.


Took them back to the workbench and took them apart. Nothing on the crossover (small bit of electronics inside) looked suspect. I spotted that the problem was only on the bass driver (the cone, the woofer, the LF unit or whatever you want to call it) so I took them out of both cabinets. Sure enough, the fault was traceable down to the driver terminals - one looked like they were connected, one like they were disconnected.

Still with me? On with the fault diagnosis...

I remembered reading about a trick. If a voice coil (coil of wire behind the cone) has gone, gently pressing the cone in will feel rough and gritty. One of them felt smooth as normal. Then I tried the other - it would hardly move. When given more of a shove it scraped the sides horribly, and on closer inspection I literally saw black charred turns of wire. It smells burnt too!

So, I'm afraid the patient needs a new bass driver, cost £56 inc VAT & delivery. Not too bad.

A cool week

That was, as they say, the week that was...

This Christmas has been most pleasant. I've seen family and friends, rested, and tinkered with little geeky projects with unqualified success. In brief:

Christmas: In Lincoln with my family. Noémie finished school too late for us to go to Switzerland before Christmas, so we will spend Christmas 2006 there instead. I saw a few old friends at church on Christmas Day and caught up with others over the following few days. I spent some time with my Best Man and friend of 24 years Chris Empson; my dad had to call his house to ask Chris' Dad to tell me to go home for tea - things haven't changed since I was five years old! Back then we played with lego, now we look at music software and play each other tunes.

After Christmas: We left Lincoln on the 28th and were joined in York by Noémie's parents, who are here until Tuesday. I'm really glad they made the effort to come from Switzerland, it means a lot to Noémie. It has been nice to have them here, although sometimes I am a bit alienated by the language barrier. They can speak English, but they tend to speak French all the time with Noémie, which makes it hard for me to participate as I drift off into my own world (I can understand bits but it rapidly becomes too much effort). We visited the National Railway Museum yesterday which was ace!

New Year's Eve: Great night in with former housemates and York friends, plus Noémie's parents. We played games, drank good coffee and the boys geeked about Linux servers. Nice.

Geeky projects: I took my desktop PC to Lincoln with me so I would have something to do whilst Noémie wrote her Year 9 reports, also because I don't have time during term for my little projects. Yesterday, with a bit of help from my geeky friends, I succeeded in transforming the computer into a fileserver, running Fedora Core 4 Linux, serving files to our Windows laptops using Samba 3. This was no mean feat for someone completely new to Linux - I nearly fell at the first hurdle, installing my wireless card. I managed it in the end (all by myself!!) which gave me a HUGE sense of achievement. I am becoming a proper geek!

Over the past month or so I have also (nearly) sorted my colour-managed digital darkroom. I now have the Nikon film and Epson flatbed scanners I wrote about, and I bought the device to colour-calibrate my monitor. All I need to do now is profile my printer. I used this stuff to make my sister Elisabeth a really cool Christmas present - a photo collage of photos of her car - a super-cool original mini:




Have a look at my other photos of it on Flickr.

Five small ponies gig

Five small ponies gig
Originally uploaded by mattneighbour.

I'm currently at a gig in our church hall. It's to raise money for a woman who needs very expensive treatment for cancer. I'm doing sound, but it's a mainly acoustic setup hence the moblogging.



I haven't had chance to eat, and my stomach hurts quite a bit. Oh well. I'm boxed in behind the mixer so I can't even get any mince pies.



The 5 Small Ponies (link) are really quite good, in a really understated way. I'll be glad to get home though.

The things you can do with Google...

Frappr is a community website where people can share where they live and work, and tell others about anything important to them, pinpointing its location. It is built on Google Maps technology. I encourage all my friends to add themselves - this looks a lot better than any of those other keeping-in-touch services.

Here's me on Frappr

The fastest ftp site on Earth?

If you ever need to download some software, say, from Sourceforge, and you have the option of using the mirror service Switch, based in Lausanne, Switzerland (where Noémie's family come from!) then use that one. Here's why:


Oh, and if you've never seen that screen before, then you probably need to stop using Internet Explorer and

Just do it. Now. (Because it is so much nicer to use, far more secure and far less vunerable to popups, spyware etc.)

Christmas plans

This weekend: Visiting my sister Elisabeth in Glasgow
Next weekend (Fri 23rd): Travelling to Lincoln for Christmas
The weekend after Christmas: Noémie's parents are coming to visit us in York.

If any friends are out there reading this please get in touch if you're around York or Lincoln when we are!

What's new?

Well hello there readers, (or is that the empty void of cyberspace?)

I participated in an interview about blogging last night. Sarah Hoare (The Edit Room) is writing a dissertation on blogging, and made me think about blogging in a much different way. I guess I haven't taken it very seriously, mainly due to not really having an audience. Maybe I can change that. Maybe I won't. Maybe I don't want to.

I'm not sure I like the idea of total strangers reading my blog. Seems a bit creepy. Hmm.