Alioth's Journal: Roundup-Ready JE: Moto-WTF, a bit of buzz, más espa&#2

So last weekend, I thought I'd find out why the indicators are only working on one side of the motorcycle. The reason became very clear when I looked at the flasher, in preparation to tracing the power to each blinker...

The Mito's flasher circuit requires a 3 pin flasher, with an input pin, and one pin for each side of the bike.

The flasher on the bike... had two pins, and the circuit for the entire right side was just left dangling.

I have to wonder WTF the last owner was thinking when he fitted that! Unfortunately Road & Track didn't have a 3 pin flasher when I dropped in there today, so I'll study the wiring diagram and see if I can make the 2 pin flasher work (I suspect it's not all that hard). Otherwise I'll have to either build a solid-state flasher or get one on the internet.

It turns out that the video I made last week of my Sinclair Spectrum doing streaming video with the ethernet card I made has caused a bit of a buzz. The video has got around 1100 views in just 5 days, not bad for a demo on some ancient hardware! I also got contacted by the editor of RetroGaming who wants to put something in the magazine about it. (I've also ordered some more W5100 chips, I think there's enough interest that some Speccy enthusiasts would like a Spectrum ethernet card of their own).

Finally, más español. I've got to the point that I can hear nearly every word spoken on telemadrid's news, and on the BBC Mundo podcast, even if I don't understand a lot of the words. Spanish no longer sounds like random jabbering but actual words. There are some words I have trouble with distinguishing still (and usually realise a few words later in the sentence that the word I didn't get was perhaps two words, or perhaps just one word which I thought was two, or was in the pretérito perfecto, (past perfect tense, which in English is made up of 'to have' plus verb, for instance "he has made", the structure in Spanish is very similar, haber + participle, for example, ha hecho). But when spoken quickly, because the H isn't pronounced in Spanish, I can sometimes miss it and therefore lose the meaning. Another good bit of progress is when reading Spanish, I can quite often understand words I don't know by working them out from context, or by using the Spanish dictionary and *not* the Spanish to English dictionary. (I usually look up words I guessed from context, or guessed because they are similar to English words - there are a lot of "false friends" between Spanish and English).