Posts filed under 'General'
Let’s talk a second about emotion, actually let’s not. Emotions are a fundamental basis of our character and define in a lot of cases how we react to the world around us don’t they, so why the taboo? I think of my own family and how any expression of an emotion gets the reaction: “Man Up!” Great! An emotion is a chemical reaction, put certain chemicals into your body your emotions change yeah? We’ve all been there I’m thinking. Plausibly some emotions are the product of your thoughts, actually most emotions are just that, yourself thinking over some irrational situation or past event. You want to feel better? Change the way you think!
April 29th, 2014
Slight lack of entries of late. Yes I have been doing lots of stuff, the biggest leap forward has been my progress on my PKU diet. I have been to London to see my consultant and more recently seen a psychologist to work round my confusion when it comes to eating. When I was 12 I was told by the Doctors I could eat a normal diet, so I did for 15 years without any idea that it would disrupt my development or affect my motivation or mood, hence I flunked college, made wrong choices and ended up an emotional wreck by age 21. For six years I struggled to make sense of the conflict between my understanding of the world and what bullshit was being bombarded at me from various directions including the media and religion, when I was 27 my elder brother who is severely mentally handicapped because of PKU was put back on-diet and the change was miraculous! He morphed from a violent, self harming person, often throwing extremely angry fits, to a calm and placid man with little worry or frustration. I remember he always had scabs on the back of his hands and up his arms where he used to bite himself and thrash out at solid objects, these cleared up in a matter of months. This had a profound effect on my outlook concerning PKU and my diet, so I arranged a consultation in London and put myself back on-diet.
From that point on, I have learned to understand that the PKU diet is an immeasurably complicated task to manage and persevere, it absorbs so much free time and energy, there aren’t enough hours in the day when you are working most of those just to function as ‘normal’ in society. Eating an ordinary diet is a no-no but difficult to comprehend, so I have a conflict in my mind when it comes to the food I put in my mouth, I know I shouldn’t be eating this, but it tastes soo gooood! I have been on and off diet since 1997, often hitting rock bottom before picking myself up and carrying on, this I have done for long enough. I am now married to a wonderful woman who is highly supportive and looks after those issues regarding my diet that I don’t have time to because I am busy at work. So far it has been leaps and bounds and I am very optimistic of the future, I have all the support from the clinic in London regarding foods etc. and a sort of structure emerging that I can relate to, this being very important for the perseverance of the detestable monotony that is a PKU diet.
April 18th, 2014
Quantum Reality: The Limitless Potential Within Everything
I have pondered the reasoning about our consciousness for some years and nothing makes more sense than the fact our consciousness creates our physical reality, it explains a lot of stuff from psychology to quantum physics. The problem is discovery, once the world was considered flat by the many ancient cultures, the paradigm of a spherical Earth was developed in Greek astronomy, beginning with Pythagoras (6th century BC), surely the collective consciousness of the time would have made it flat? Consider maybe, human intelligence and consciousness is just a spec of what actually might exist, and it is the universal collective consciousness of all sentient beings that transverse space and time, that bring matter into existence, thus our small scale and rather less experienced observations made little difference.
January 7th, 2014
It’s rained a bit so far this winter which makes me a little miserable at times, my mood does take a plunge this time of year until we get a dolloping of snow but that’s looking a little unlikely at the moment. Really taking a battering and just hope things improve soon. Not liking this new theme either, seems the HTML I’ve been using for 8 years doesn’t work with this! So I will need to see what I can do about that when I can be bothered, which will probably be never. Left the transmitter project on a window sill and it corroded slightly and didn’t work, so I cleaned it, masked off all the plastic and put it under the grill to reflow and it now works again, although a couple of coil formers and a jack socket melted 😛
Keep dreaming I am back working in electronics, totally tired of domestic heating, I am qualified to design purge and test industrial gas installations in pipe sizes up to 2 meters and here I am bleeding radiators and fixing poxy leaky boilers! Time soon for a change. Got my radios set up in the garage which bothers me a little as it gets cold and damp so I butchered a blow heater and wired part of the elements upto a 13.8V supply to make a demister, so now I sling a blanket over them and they keep nice and dry… Kinda miss having that spare room for my stuff, I need that space or I go mental, specially with some of the shit that the TV is tuned into most evenings!
Now I need to book a holiday… Or some holidays, get in there before all the otherS. Organising something to look forward too is sometimes a good idea, I don’t do a lot so this year I will do a bit more… I just rambling from one load of bollocks to another here so I’ll jog on.
January 7th, 2014
Having had the same old template for 8 years I thought I might give this a new look, it may also actually inspire me to post more often. Had fun and games trying to customise the theme so I could add my own header image, the images supplied were not really applicable to say the least and it wasn’t just a case of simply replacing files, now I’ve got one up of mine, I don’t actually like it so it will change no doubt in the near future. Apparently they can be rotated which is something I may play with during it’s evolution. I notice none of my links have appeared in the sidebar and a couple of widgets I had have gone…
January 4th, 2014
Getting a little disoriented what with work and work and trying to make a living, oh and did I mention work. I won’t spend my time here complaining about it, I hear enough of everybody else’s complaints from day to day. Let’s just say I could be put to better use, and I miss the technical aspects. There has been talk at home about a move to another part of the country and a fresh start, an idea 5 years ago I would have sneered at but now is actually looking like quite an attractive prospect. I don’t see things ever evolving where I am now and a step outside this comfort zone is most likely exactly what is required, I have a goal though the barriers seem endless, I know step by step is the way to go but I have always been a live in the moment person and find it difficult to perceive that I might have the capability to achieve something in the long term, of course I must mention my pessimism, mood changes and financial rut!
On the technical front, I still haven’t built my antenna after I calculated the length of the pole required, I have begun to convert the garage to some kind of a work-space after deciding the shed may take too much time, the Compensator design process has come to a grinding halt and my home transmitter project, although technically complete, needs a boost of which I have the components but have to measure out some time as per the norm.
Nothing out the ordinary then, not getting a whole lot done…
November 18th, 2013
Transmitter power… Sourced a 2SC1971 VHF MOSFET and have a go at beefing this 100mW to about 5,000! The idea is simple, just stick it on the end with 4 Trimmers for tuning/matching and a few bits of 1mm lighting cable twisted to add some inductiveness! There’s always a bit of satisfaction in manipulating something from an electrical sphere and making it so much more interesting, lighting cable to make inductors or even with plumbing materials, a 15mm copper tube 2 meter JPole I built in 2005 is still up and running and out performs many other commercially produced aerials out there. 5 Watts may seem excessive for a transmitter to extend the audio from one room to another, but what the hell. It’s something to do and if it works I will be designing an antenna based on the highly successful JPole 😉 to resonate on 100 MHz, this should get me to Hastings from where I am (16 Miles). Slight legal issues might become apparent at this point but having driven around the chaotic London Town and been swamped with pirate radio stations left, right and center 😉 (ok the pun more appropriate for AM but hey) that bleed crap over a massive bandwidth and broadcasting day after day without intervention, I’m sure a QRP 20 minute broadcast on the south coast will not even be intercepted, or do you think differently? Of course I will have limited use for such a device, it’s more of a challenge. It will be more than likely I will build it into a box and save it for the apocalypse when I give people hope by transmitting archived episodes of The Archers convincing them they are already dead and nothing worse can ensue.
September 15th, 2013
Reached a milestone with my 500mW transmitter project today so I can control the audio around the house. It works well and is very stable based on the BH1415 FM transmitter IC, the type used in these crappy FM transmitters used for plugging your MP3 player into a car stereo… Somewhat superseded by a hundred different other configurations nowadays, it has a 3 stage RF power output which should technically be quite efficient. Need to design a small antenna now, may have a go at etching one onto a PCB if I can find any info on the subject. My original idea was to build it into an aluminium cast box and design in feed through points for power and line inputs and have a 50 Ohm BNC antenna output and inductively load a short antenna similar in length to the 802.11 types of old, this now seems a tad O.T.T. and if I am going for the internal antenna design, a rethink will be required. Chucking it all in an ABS box with a bit of spray plating may well be the way to go, or fitting the ally module into a plastic case… Hmmm
August 31st, 2013
What a bizarre couple of weeks, I have taken that step and I am now a married man. Some years ago I pondered that evolving my way of thinking and asking for a change in my life may help, I can only say that the results, although quite subtle, led me to a place, more profound and positive than I could ever have imagined. The past couple of years have been tough, the years preceding those were tougher still, I am now a product of those tough times glooped together to form a quite content and satisfied human.
August 24th, 2013
Need to get moving on this Compensator design, been a year now with family commitments taking all my spare time. I am considering a redesign to get it all fresh in my head and a couple of books on PIC development as the website I was using does not now exist. Also some ideas I had about the temperature sensor design may have to change, maybe I might use an industry bespoke boiler NTC.
With a lot going on at the moment I can’t do a great deal, one of my projects this summer is to repair and dry-line the shed so I have a room where I can work, this however is becoming increasingly difficult with the ever spiraling family budget and Her Majesty’s obligatorily among others eating into my income. Another project is an HF antenna system that might meet with objection from a neighbour or two, my plan now is just to put it up and see what happens, I think making it an issue for approval may force them to consider that it could be more of an obstruction that it actually will be and they will oppose it. Perception of my plan could get exaggerated and I know how much some people like a drama. It also involves digging up the lawn for the grounding system, so early autumn may be a wiser choice of timing, I have a way of getting the other half on board with the idea of digging the lawn up and that is to design the ground plane using copper tube with holes drilled along it’s length for irrigating the lawn in dry weather, just a small addition of a 3/4″ MIC for a Hoselock connector required at the starpoint.
With generally good weather and a clearing consciousness, all this becomes a possibility… Just a few matters to attend to in the meantime.
August 10th, 2013
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