Ashtead's Journal: Miscellanea

Another JE with various things in it:

1. Today there was snow, again. No guarantee for it lasting, but it was sufficient to make it nice and white outside, and to disrupt traffic on many of the roads around Oslo. As happens every year, trucks and trailers with less than perfect tires skid every which way and everything stops.

2. I went out and had a look at a 1959 Wurlitzer juke-box this evening. A friend of mine is thinking about buying himself one of these, but I'll have to store it for him until such time as his wife can get used to the thought of the purchase. Will make it a fait accompli of sorts... Interesting insides, there is a number of relays and solenoids, a pair of vacuum-tube amplifiers, and a bunch of levers and wires and carousels that work the record player mechanism. A counter showed some 83000 record plays having been recorded. No idea if this was during the lifetime of this unit or maybe the counter had rolled over -- it had only 5 digits.

3. I got the car back last week. It needed replacement of the generator; this is a water-cooled unit, so there was replacement of cooling fluid also. That bit of fun && games came to 17000 Kr -- newer cars are expensive. With the old one, I'd get another alternator at the wreckers' yard, pay 700 Kr and do the replacement job myself, but that's how it is.

4. The controller for the new weather station is flaky; I think it is trying to do too much at once, so here is another use for one of the Picotux devices here soon. So far, however, there is very little temperature difference between 2 meter above the grass in the backyard, and the north wall. But that is something I'll get around to when I feel like it -- so far, a periodic re-boot of the controller is sufficient. The way I notice this is that the front lights don't come on in the evening.