Sirbendy

Strange one to ask, I know... I've come into posession of an old wooden cased radio...3 bakelite knobs, 6 valves, cloth speaker, seen the world a bit it's fair to say... We've been doing a house clearance of my nans..and as such I now have some excellent 60+ year old wood furniture, a wooden rocking chair of the same age in need of reupholstering, and this... It was my grandads, not been run in..a good 20 years. I popped in a fuse, powered it up while stood with a fire extinguisher and waited... it crackled..hissed, crackled, hissed..louder and louder..tried the frequency knob, no stations..tuner round and round, nothing...then all of a sudden it went silent. All the valves are glowing merrily, no sound output. Sigh..so now I'm trying to find any source of help and info I can for it. I know it's a GM Electric "Strad", yet all I can find is info on their 40's bakelite models etc, but nothing wooden cased and "war era" or just after.. Anyone out there got any ideas as to a good place to start looking for help and advice? I'd quite like to get it running again for the retro factor, plus I think it gives a much more mellow sound than "modern" radios..it'd look quite nice in the living room...

VBox RULES!!!

I'm no fan of big TVS....the MIL has a plasma, big bugger it is too. HORRIBLE to watch. Pixelation, aspect stretch, image tearing, and the energy usage? Equivalent to a 2 bar fire. Ridiculous in every sense. I have a 20something inch Tosh CRT, does the job lovely. Any replacement will be TFT, not more than 20-25 inch, and a power usage of 50watts or less. Or I might use my freeview stick and our retired Vaio..heh..that'd work quite well..

I should think so..I've got a German built Astra...!

We had some light dusting overnight...and the roads were a tad slippy this morning, but..that's it. So far anyway. Bit nippy last night mind you, we were both sat in front of the fire. Bloody amateur installed laminate flooring with no insulating layer...brr...in my little computer roon, I've had to electrical tape the gap between the skirting and the floor to seal it until I can get some silicone..the wind hits that wall, and the garage is underneath..brrrrr....

I keep our Dell TFTs when they do that...stay orange or whatever. The FP137x is well known for it. I strip them for the genesis controllers, CCFL and TFT panels. I then use the parts to patch up our other FPs that the kids have poked or that are suffering display delamination (quite a few, damn cheap tat TFTs). Some of the components get stripped out and added to my electronics collection (PCB in a vice, heat gun to the rear, pliers to the front and pull them out.) Any broken TFT panels get raided for their CCFL tubes. Projectors are a "minimal use" one..I've had several apart to try and fix discolouration of the optics...they're really quite simple, but the mirrors and filters just tarnish..I'm guessing heat related. Unfortunatly I couldn't clean the last one up, so off it went. I horde, and I know it...PC fans are another...I have a 3x3 array running off a molex for summer cooling, and I keep several for the backs of our mini-fridges, as they wear out quite fast and are only 60mm PC fans. I have one on my to-do list now, as a matter of fact.

argh, PolicyCentral Enterprise...heh...

We've just got a Bretford 24 trolley...quite nice.

We used to have to rely on external contractors for our "25 year guarantee" bit - but the preferred LEA contractor was expensive, and a relative of the guy who's in charge of LEA ICT. We demanded a "course" and they provided us with a 20 minute "prove you can terminate a cat5 box and plug" session with one of their techs, followed by "well done, you passed. You can do your own now". So we do.

We've been playing this "inter dept" for weeks... Some of them really make you swear. My "jobs in/out" whiteboard is currently sporting a few designs myself and the NM are trying....

"Mr X is in the vomit yellow IT suite"...yep, I can see that...

Lady in my Dept bought one - she loves it. Installed XP on it, (was linux), quite nippy and well behaved.

We've got IT1, IT2, Green Suite, Library, CADCAM, and the laptop trolley. Boring. However it never ceases to make me roll my eyes when I'm asked (by staff and kids) "which is the green suite?". Hmm. Let me see...our corporate/wall colours are Lilac, apart from the green suite which is..oh yes..green. Hence the name. And our servers are all "EDIT90x"...I assume someone at the LEA took the EDIT instruction and thought.."no, it's a suggestion"... Auxilliary servers are TAW900Zxxx. Every school has a zone (900 in our case) and an identifier..we're 900 (main node for zone 9), then there's 912 etc (probably a primary).

We've had an 8400 waxjet in this office for..nearly 3, maybe 4 years now..lovely unit. Ours has learned it's usage patterns, and we always cold laminate any prints from it. No probs jet. It can be a bit offputting when you're sat in the office on your own and it starts whirring, clunking and boinging behind you as it cleans itself.

Sure it's not SLT's? Look for a dummy on the floor - it's a sure fire sign...

We lose 1 occasionally in the main IT suite...Fujitsu cartridge units - very good kit. Shame that drain on unit 2 has to pump UP half a metre before entering a gravity run. Unit 2 is all gravity. TBH, it's never leaked...if the pump fails, the unit fills up, triggers the float switch and just shuts down with a fault code on the display panel. Last engineer that looked at it strapped an external pump to the unit, and it's been rock solid.

What about driving out to management's homes, sorting out the management teams home wifi? Arranging staffs home ISP? Ordering staff broadband equipment? Being at home to calls at 7pm on a sunday about it? No? Damn. Or..showing them how to work their car? No? Or maybe the site manager being asked to take the car in question into a local garage because it's making funny noises? hmm. All fun here..

google, running through Bloxx and PolicyCentral that enforces "Very safe search". Works quite nicely.

I recently bought 12 NiMH 2500Mah AAs from Maplin for about a tenner, and an "intelligent rapid charger" from 7dayshop for about £5. Belting. Also has the benefit that I can plug it into my battery bank at home and charge off the solar setup. That reminds me, I must buy a car battery from the breakers up the road..oops.

We asked for a "panic button" in CMiS to do it, coupled with a stupidly rapid laser printer.

It was a departure from the expected, but I enjoyed it. Marvin was just..everything I expected - totally accurate. The Vogons also killed me - they reminded me so much of our head librarian at that time - "did they have permission to go into Hyperspace?"..."no..".."hmmm"...

I failed first time as well..had an examiner that talked throughout about his holiday..tedious. Second test, head examiner, passed with 2 minors which I identified and correctly resolved. Amusingly, it was Test 2 where on doing the "reverse around the corner", I scuffed the back tyre lightly and muttered "b*ggerf*ckmonkeys.." and then thought "sod it, I failed that!" and relaxed for the remainder of the test, just enjoying the drive. When the examiner shook my hand and said "congrats, you passed", I had to laugh. I've never forgotten the words of my instructor - "well done boyo, you passed. You're a bloody good driver, a bit cautious, but that's OK. Now, let me just say this...if I EVER hear you've caused an accident, I'll hunt you down and break your legs, right? NO student of mine gets taught and then goes on to f*ck it up - I know where you live..well done, and good luck to you. Keep in touch"... He was ace.. Used to make me drive round the local colleges on summer days with his shades on, fag in hand, music on, windows down so he could "admire the young ladies"..also used to order me to "put your foot down, the bloody battery's going flat.." That was good - no micras for me, it was a kitted up Proton Aerodeck 1.5SE MPi (Mitsu Lancer reskin job)..went like the proverbial. Auto too, no hill start worries for moi. We had one lesson on a cold day, saw a 12 wheeler keel over on the road - messy. He got our and ran to help the driver, then ran back and said "take the car, go to the DRC centre (several miles away), get help. Hurry up, and don't scratch it."..good fun. The day after that, I had to follow him in a crunched RS2000 with an autobox to get it repaired, belonging to the DMF. First day of full license, RS2000..rock on.

USBDLM is an absolute doddle..copy to local disk, run install.bat..takes at most 30 secs. I ran it on our "image base" machine, and now all machines get it on reimaging - saved us a hell of a headache.

Other side of the coin - we're moving to a new building summer 09...and parent academy still hasn't told us any OS/Server details Novell is looking like a distinct likelihood..."overseer" of academies is a CCNA and loves it. Me, I like S2003, NM likes SLES. I think Novell is a tad retrograde as a new server OS... We'll see..

Yep..the Bravia ones, the Skoda ones, and the Honda ones I really do applaud. No poncy CGI, no cheesy voiceovers, just genuine inspiration and fun.