Posts – Page 18 – John Leach

Who are you

I found that a bunch of people at my new work have found my blog and read the terrible things I say here. A lesser person than I might now take care in that which he writes. Lucky for me I’m not a lesser person than myself.

Anyway, I realised I don’t know who reads this blog. I know of a few people, like my girlfriend (mostly to check the spelling and gramer), my Mum, probably not my Dad (me being a “commie bastard”) and some random friends (when they run out of Google news links and/or marijuana) . The Googlebot also reads it a lot. This is a testament to the gargantuan interest my whiney dribbley writing generates. Actually, for all I know, Karl Rove might read this, along with BA Baracus, my new neighbours and the ghost of Richard Whiteley.

Assuming you read this crap once in a while, and you’re able to type (this probably excludes the ghost of Richard Whiteley), then tell me who you are. Leave a comment on this post, or drop me a line. If you want to remain anonymous (how exciting) then just say hi and don’t say who you are, though I can probably track you down using my elite internets skillz (mostly google) though I “promise” not to.

Some of you may have noticed I have nothing better to do than this on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Well done.

17/7/2005 12 Comments

Patinternet

My Dad has breached the electronic frontier and now has an e-mail address: <psleach@gmail.com>. Feel free to e-mail him and say hello. Tell him who you are and why you’re e-mailing him. I doubt he’ll care who you are and why it is that you’re e-mailing him, but you never know. Be nice, as he’s tough and will kick your Dad’s ass.

I’ve told him that once I’ve posted this on my blog he’ll receive rich and interesting e-mail from diverse correspondents around the globe. Though I expect mostly he’ll just get spam.

17/7/2005 Add Comment

London bombs

Over 50 people died in the explosions in London last week. I don’t think it’s right to surrender freedoms to fight terrorism when that many people die every week in road accidents. I should have to surrender my car before I surrender my privacy and my freedom.

This terrorist act is being used, as 9/11 was, to push through privacy-busting legislation that the government has been gagging to implement. The mouth of the home secratery must have been watering in anticipation.

Within hours, both Tony Blair and George W. Bush were using news of these attacks as vindication for their own illegal and considerably more brutal attacks on Iraq. Knowing the opposite to be true, as the Joint Intelligence Committee did before the war even began, this is sickening.

15/7/2005 Add Comment

Summer solstice sun set

A Leeds sunset from the summer solstice evening. This was my first experiment with long exposures; I think this was a 5 minute exposure. I’ve tinkered with it using The Gimp to make the horizon more of a silhouette and enhance the colour of the sun set. I also removed a lit up powerstation in the foreground. I also originally saved this in the NEF raw format, just to piss Nikon off.

1/7/2005 1 Comment

Saddam behind 9/11

Tony Blair is joining in the latest spate of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) and helping blur the connection between the illegal occupation of Iraq and the attack on the World Trade Center buildings in September 2001.

In a BBC article entitled “Troops must stay in Iraq – Blair”, the government funded news corporation quotes Blair’s free word association experiment:

“Mr Blair argued the 11 September 2001 atrocities in the US upset the balance”

“Defeating “insurgents and terrorists” there would lead to the destruction of terrorism across the globe, he said”

“He said that 11 September 2001 changed his perspective on the world.”

“I took the view that if these people ever got hold of nuclear, chemical or biological capability, they would probably use it.”

This boils down to: “September 11, Iraq, Global Terrorism, September 11, Terrorism, WMD, Terrorism.”

We know there was no link between Iraq and the WTC attacks. Bush and Blair know this too, as they admitted clearly and publicly in January 2003. So why are they still telling us there was a link?

30/6/2005 1 Comment

we are paying to be lied to

March 2002

Downing Street memos: “I said [to Condoleezza Rice] you [Blair] would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was very different than anything in the States.”

“On Iraq I opened by sticking very closely to the script that you used with Condi Rice last week. We backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option.”

November 2002

Tony Blair, in a public interview: “So far as our objective, it is disarmament, not regime change – that is our objective.”

February 2003

Tony Blair, in the House of Commons: “we are offering Saddam the prospect of voluntary disarmament through the UN. I detest his regime – I hope most people do – but even now, he could save it by complying with the UN’s demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully.”

Poor old Mr. Blair having to “manage” the press, Parliment and a public opinion. Manage: (Verb) “achieve something by means of trickery or devious methods”.

28/6/2005 Add Comment

Volkswagen Corrado VR6

I was the owner of a metallic black 1995 VW Corrado VR6. Here you’ll find notes about my experiences with it: what broke, how I fixed it, how much it cost, what mileage I get, how fast it goes (on private road of course) etc.etc. I hope it’s useful to somebody out there on the Interweb.

I am in no way well experienced in the ways of petrol engines, or automobiles in general, so the information here may be a little patchy, or even downright wrong. I’m learning small chunks here and there, and documenting what I can. If you spot something wrong, or just have any comments, e-mail me.

Sold

June 2005: I’ve sold my Corrado now, to my Brother. It’s still on my road but it’ll be moving to his drive soon. He’ll be driving it while he sorts a few things out on his other Corrado (another VR6). When he’s done he’ll be selling one of them, so watch this space!

Hardware Details

2861cc displacement, 6-cylinders in a 15 degrees V, 5-speed manual, front wheel drive, ABS, 2 valves per cylinder, 190bhp (140kW) at 5800 rpm, 181lb ft (245Nm) at 4200 rpm, 66bhp/litre. Read more

My own car is standard except the alarm, the stereo and the suspension, which seems to have been lowered about 35mm (before I purchased it).

Change Log

I’ve been keeping a kind of diary of running my Corrado for a while now. I’ll start elaborating further on this page from now on too.

Immobilizer

My Corrado came factory fitted with an immobilizer. It’s enabled using an square black inductor keyfob, with an LED indicator next to the ignition point.

I’d been experiencing random starting problems and everybody was pointing at the immobilizer, but I wasn’t convinced. The reason being that I each time the problem occurred it seemed to be rectified with a top up of oil. This made me suspect the hydraulic tappits not functioning correctly without enough oil.

Well, eventually the car stopped and wouldn’t start at all. The local VW garage found a fault with the immobilizer coil, which was replaced for around £120 parts and labour. All starting problems have now ceased.

The problems I had with my car being broken into whilst at the VW dealers are a different story (Coming Soon).

Coil Pack

The coil pack does what the distributor did on older ignition systems, it supplies the spark to the spark plugs at the right time and in the right order. Rather than a rotating arm touching electric contacts, it works electronically. Rather more high brow.

Apparently, electronic failures with coil packs are rare. You’re far more likely to run into a mechanical fault, such as burnt terminals or damaged connectors. Some people thinks all pre-1998 VR6 coil packs just suck. A £300 repair job every 30,000 miles.

If it’s cracked, water gets in it and grounds the spark to the engine block, causing mis-fires. You can find details of the process of using epoxy resin to fix the cracks here. It works out marginally cheaper than replacement (£2 vs £300).

My problem

In my case, the engine idles fine, but suffers jerkyness and loss of power up to 3000rpm during acceleration. The coil pack was finger-pointed as a possible culprit, but I’m going to check out the spark plugs first. It’s far more likely they are coked up or something (at least I hope).

Some Audi S4 specific information regarding the ignition system.

Update: The guys at my garage took a look into this whilst it was being serviced. They found nothing wrong with the coil pack, but found 3 duff HT leads. A full replacement set cost £60 if I remember correctly.

Whilst this improved the situation, I now feel there is a loss of power before 2000rpm. After further discussion with the garage, they suggested I take it to an official VW stealers to have all the sensors checked. I’ve not done this yet but plan on doing soon. It’s going to cost me around £ 65, just to get it plugged in to their computer, bleh. Should invest in my own cable and software.

Ventilation system

My airflow system hasn’t worked correctly since I brute force turned the direction adjuster and snapped something. With the recent heat waves (May 2003) this became a priority as my air-conditioned air was being wasted. I took it all to pieces to figure out what was going on.

How it works

The direction dial adjusts where the air comes out from (e.g:the footwell or the windscreen vents) by adjusting two flaps. Two little arms moved by the dial operate two cables that are connected to the flaps. Taking off all the knobs and facure, unscrewing four screws and pulling the dial control box forward reveals the magic behind, including the cables. The top cable controls the footwell/windscreen flap and the bottom cable controls the flow to the dashboard vents.

In my case, the dashboard vent flap had jumped a cog restricting the movement of the cable, which in turn had restricted the movement of the dial, until I turned it too hard and broke a little bit of plastic. Luckily, once I’d fixed the movement of the cable, this missing plastic (from a track in one of the cogs in the dial that controlled the movement of the cable arm) wasn’t necessary.

The cables controlled by the dial lead further down and back behind the centre console where the air flow is controlled. The flaps are inside a moulded plastic casing and are difficult to reach. The dash vent flap is control by three cogs. One directly connected to the flap axis, one which I assume is just a gear, and another which has an arm to which the cable is connected. Here a cog had jumped, restricting the movement of the cable. I popped out the gear cog, adjusted the flap and cable to fully closed and replaced it (this was tricky).

I then reseated the arm at the other end of the cable (the dial end) into the spiral track in the cog. This cog is controlled by the dial cog seated at 90 degrees to it. You can remove the dial cog by pushing in all the tags and removing the centre part, which is the front “handle” for the dial.

It’s still a bit still to operate, but it works now.

The fan control

My fan control didn’t work when set to level 2 or 4. The dial on this just controls a copper arm with a twisted copper end. The end connects two tracks together as the arm turns. After dismantling this I found the end was bent and the end didn’t connect the two (upper and lower) tracks at certain settings. I removed the arm, cleaned and re-twisted it, and now it works fine.

27/6/2005 Add Comment

buying music online

I got an illegal copy of some Half Man Half Biscuit from a friend a few months ago. I really enjoyed it so I decided to buy some. I don’t care for inlay sleeves, or for any physical aspect of music other than the actual audio waves so I thought I’d try pay for a legal download. This proved impossible.

I firstly realised that my own specification on getting this music in either a lossless format, or an open format (such as OGG vorbis) were hilarious in the current online music climate, so settled for, well, basically *any* format. The iTunes download software isn’t supported on my GNU/Linux OS, and Apple are far too big and evil for me to give them any more money anyway. MP3.com looked promising until I realised they seem to just be a front for other online music stores, none of which had any Half Man Half Biscuit available anyway (and were just as big and evil sounding).

I gave up. I went to bloody HMV and bought an album there. And when I listened to the album when I got home, it I didn’t even like it much.

I’ve sinced downloaded more Half Man Half Biscuit and really, really enjoyed it. I think I’m just going to send a cheque direct to the band.

I once met El Hefe from the punk band NOFX. I told him I’d downloaded their latest album for free off the Internet. “Oh, then we don’t get paid” he jokily explained. I offered him a tenner directly as payment, and he turned it down. “So I can listen for free?”. “Sure” he said.

The music industry needs to change. But we already knew that.

25/6/2005 1 Comment

Nikon NEF image handcuffs

Nikon recently released a new digital SLR camera named the D2X. They have their own RAW file format named NEF which can be used to save images with no loss of quality, allowing the photographer greater control of the photo once it’s on his computer. Nikon provides software to load NEF files, but only for the Windows platform. The NEF file format has since been reverse engineered by various people, which allows the use of it in other non-Nikon and non-Windows software.

Nikon did something underhand with this new camera. They now encrypt the white balance data in the NEF file, the intention being to prevent reverse engineering. Remember, this is meta-data about photos taken by the photographer; the creator and copyright holder of the photo. Nikon seem to think they own it this meta-data.
(more…)

24/6/2005 5 Comments

over heating under reported

I had a call Sunday night reporting that some of the Internet servers at work were unreachable. We assumed that the storm had knocked out the power and the UPSes hadn’t done their job (or the power was out for too long). The site manager was unavailable so we had no other choice than to go in early the next morning, which we assumed would involve a quick power cycle or whatever.

It turned out that the storm had actually knocked out the air conditionong in one of the server rooms and for some reason the temperature alarms hadn’t worked. I’m told (by someone who arrive a bit before me and started opening doors and windows) that the thermometer read over 50 degrees Celcius. Some of the servers had detected the heat and shut themselves down (I think this happens around 70 degrees Celcius inside the computer). Some devices weren’t so clever and just stayed on, getting hotter and hotter.

So, rather than 10 minutes, we spent 2 hours waiting for things too cool enough to operate reliably. The air conditioning had died and we were awaiting an engineer for that, so we just had electric fans and windows. The heat was unbearable, in fact the wooden door frame was too hot to touch on first arrival.

That’s it. That’s the story. Sorry. No amusing punchline or “clever” observation.

20/6/2005 Add Comment

Post box

I noticed this scene on my drive to work and waited for a few days for the sun to come back before photographing it. The sun never did come back so I snapped it anyway, in case the flowers died, or the post box was blown up as part of some terrorist plot (of which there are so many here in the UK). Due to the blue being so distinct from everything else I can trivially change the hue of the flowers independent of everything else. They look good in yellow and purple, but I’ve left them as evolution intended.

17/6/2005 2 Comments

Blue tape

I took this at the site of a relatively modern building that had 80-90% burned down in West Yorkshire. I had to sneak around all the barbed wire fencing. It seemed to be some kind of storage facility for car cleaner stuff. There were hundreds of thousands of burned blister backs of wax cream or something, and rolls of this blue plastic, and lots of burned metal including a burnt out fork lift truck.

10/6/2005 Add Comment