Me, myself, and I

So like, Google Domains.

I liked Google Domains. I had a bunch of domains registered there. I registered them with Google Domains because whatever Google's faults, they have an outstanding record on security, because they hire some of the best people in the world. It was a very well-designed, easy-to-use service that did what I wanted it to and nothing more which is exactly the sort of thing Google likes shutting down.

Of course I was notified that Google sold it to Squarespace, which I was sad about. I intended to do something before my domain was moved to Squarespace, and also that was effort, so I procrastinated and forgot about it, i.e. didn't do it. Because I didn't do it, I was automatically moved onto Squarespace, which didn't work out well.

I used Google Domains because of Google's security posture, and the fact the domain registry industry is a security tyre-fire. Ironically, the sale to Squarespace resulted in a massive security problem which allowed anyone to hijack any account. This proved past-me right, but only in the most irrelevant way possible; using Google Domains directly resulted in a time window where anyone could have hijacked all of my domains.

Squarespace also lacked basic functionality for DNS. I know why they did this; it's because their target market is non-technical people, a category which does not include me. But I do not consider complete inability to set a TTL on DNS records to be normal. I also don't consider inability to export a zone file to be normal either.

Squarespace does what it needs to do for the market it targets. It is nerfed as a DNS management tool. That plus a catastrophic security hole on day one made me want to switch to something else, which I did, eventually.

So, I made the obvious error of being on Google Domains in the first place, despite Google's history of randomly killing shit off even if you are paying for it. And I didn't migrate to something else before the Squarespace switchover, because I couldn't be bothered and/or procrastinated. Both of those things were entirely self-inflicted.

Why did I procrastinate over moving somewhere else? Because moving over DNS records was effort. That seems like an insanely trivial reason, because it is. But I have lots else to do, and that one thing to do fell by the wayside. Maybe I could have solved this for the longer term by divorcing my DNS management from my domain registrations, but that too would be effort, and then I would be paying for two things, either of which could disappear like Google Domains did. How, then, could I make moving DNS records between registrars easier?

What would be really neat is if I could manage my DNS configuration as a text file on my computer. That text file on my computer would be the source of truth, to be pushed to whatever DNS provider I am using at the time, so I can swap out providers at will. As with all text files on my computer, it could be managed as a Git repository, so I have the complete history of it available, so if I break something I can easily roll back to an earlier version. Wouldn't that be cool?

WELL IT JUST SO HAPPENS

...that this exists, and also that I eventually get to the point. It's called DNSControl, and I like it.

I make a text file called dnsconfig.js which looks like this:

// These two things are defined in my other config file, `creds.json`, which
// contains my API keys.
//
// The names in the files below do not have to correspond to provider names;
// they map to entries in `creds.json`. It's less effort to make them match
// though.
var REG_GANDI = NewRegistrar("gandi");
var DSP_GANDI = NewDnsProvider("gandi");

D(
    "lewiscollard.com",
    REG_GANDI,
    DnsProvider(DSP_GANDI),

    // Records for the apex domain and www.
    A("@", "138.68.161.203"),
    A("www", "138.68.161.203"),
    // all my other records go here
)

OK, not a text file; it's actually JavaScript with some stuff shoved into the global namespace to make it look like a DSL. Someone could mumble something about Turing-complete configuration files, and I'd mumble something back like "yeah innit". I mean, all programmers dislike the idea of writing configuration files in a programming language in theory, and then we're all secretly thankful that we get variables and loops and conditionals and stuff when someone else implements their configuration file with a programming language. And then we all go around with guilty consciences! I recommend sitting on your hands till they go numb before writing your config file; that way it'll feel like someone else is doing it.

Anyway, there's also a creds.json which looks like this:

{
  "gandi": {
    "TYPE": "GANDI_V5",
    "token": "XXXX",
    "sharing_id": "YYYY"
  }
}

This tells DNSControl which provider I want to use, and has API keys for it. I moved my domains and DNS to Gandi, because they exist, they were easy to migrate to, and they're probably as good as anyone for all I know. The "awesome" comes in when I can switch this to use any one of over 50 providers, meaning that moving my DNS records somewhere else is entirely automated (other than creating API keys for them). Awesome!

Squarespace is notably absent from that list of providers, because they don't have an API for managing DNS records. If it wasn't for this I might have even stayed with Squarespace for my domain registrations, because it is less effort. The security hole was forgivable; all software has flaws. But now that I know DNSControl exists, I don't want to manage my DNS records via a web interface ever again, so I won't.

After I changed my configuration, I run dnscontrol preview to see what things will be changed, then dnscontrol push to push them to Gandi. I could make things even fancier than this. I could set up CI, so that pushing changes to my remote Git repository automatically pushes changes to Gandi, which would save me having to run DNSControl manually after each change. That would eliminate the risk of my Git repo not reflecting reality. But for now I am happy enough that I can manage my DNS with version-controlled text files; maybe I'll do the CI thing some other day (and here I was to write "this is a magic spell which makes things disappear forever", then I realised I used that joke before).

I like that DNSControl stops you from making mistakes. It could have been a straight translator from zone files to API calls, and fortunately it is not. It has opinions, and those opinions are good because they stop you doing stupid things.

I like that DNSControl is a single binary, which is also a thing I like about Hugo. That means that I can check the binary into the repo via LFS and it'll probably work for as long as I'm using an x86-64 Linux system, which might be as close to "forever" as I care to look.

Also, finally, the documentation. It has it! Lots of it! I never had to Google anything, nor copy-paste magic spells from random GitHub issues and Stack Exchange posts as I do with most other config file formats.

Anyway, this post is really about me and things I like, because that's what this site is, rather than being any kind of useful introduction to DNSControl. But if someone somewhere reads this who hasn't heard of DNSControl might consider using it now, I wouldn't mind that at all.

I found myself at a rare loose end this weekend, fuelled by waiting for things to show up for the next stage of the Rover P5. And then I was gently reminded of something I put on the project pile.

This is a sign which I am not tall enough to photograph in full on the workbench, because it is quite long. It's a reproduction sign for Middleton Towers railway station. That's a station near me which is being restored. I've helped out down there a couple of times. I show up in a video wherein I am doing that.

Last time I went there, this sign was there and we were trying to figure out how it could be mounted. Though it had some plastic pegs on the back (presumably for mounting purposes), I worked out that a metal bracket would broaden the options for mounting it. I volunteered to make one, and then I uttered the words "I'll do that next weekend", a magic spell which makes things disappear forever.

Anyway, that is why I spent my Saturday chopping up some random bits of galvanised steel I got for free off my brother, and sticking them together with a MIG welder.

Welding galvanised steel is bad for you! Really bad! But don't worry, I used the proper safety equipment and procedures. I held my breath for a while and then blew on it a bit when I was done to move the fumes away.

I used the gasless MIG for most of this, because the temperamental gasful one was not very happy. Flux core welding doesn't work well with thin stuff like this 1mm thick steel, because flux core really likes heat and thin steel does not like heat. But, it did the job and I'm kind of used to it now.

The plastic pegs later had holes drilled through them to accept R-clips; that'll be more than sufficient to hold it. With the welds cleaned up and some Jenolite Directorust gunmetal grey on it, it looks pretty alright. :)

And that's that!

Update (2025-02-09): here it is :)

This was my Rover P5's engine.

You'll notice that it's not in the Rover P5.

So, the workshop build was completed, giving me a much nicer space to work in. The Mazda 323 GTX was fully someone else's problem while the engine is (still) being rebuilt. And some time ago I made some major life changes to give me more time and motivation; it worked! Which meant I could finally get back to the Rover P5, for which there are thousands of pounds worth of parts in storage to fit, and a list of jobs that'll keep me out of trouble for the foreseeable future. And I found myself procrastinating, again. Why?

Someone wise once told me that when I find myself procrastinating, I need to look for the fear. I think one of those fears is that I have seen some really nicely-done Rover P5s, and I doubt I will ever be able to do one as well as those. There's a fear of being judged by all the people that build all those perfect P5s. Half of that doesn't matter (it doesn't need to be perfect) and the other half is mostly something I made up (there are so very few judgy people in the classic car world and I'm actually thick-skinned faced with actual criticism rather than imaginary criticism anyway).

What I also found out was: When finished, I just wouldn't find the P5 fun to drive.

It's a beautiful car, maybe one of the most beautiful cars ever made. This one in particular, in this colour, is so beautiful that I was forced to impulse-purchase it. And yet, it has an engine designed shortly after World War II, a carburettor, a distributor with points, and 115 horsepower. The horsepower number sounds OK, but it is in a car weighing 1700 kilograms. It is substantially slower than my totally-standard 1.4 litre Ford Fiesta from 2004, even if you forget the fact that my Fiesta can corner and a P5 can't. Or that my Fiesta has actually worked every day, where a car with a carb and a distributor with points is a lottery.

A 3-litre Rover P5 is not fun to me, and I live my life one fun at a time, or something.

Anyone sensible would have sold the car at that admission-to-self. Actually, anybody sensible would not have bought impulse-purchased a non-working car for £3500 unseen over the Internet, so wouldn't reach this point in the first place. Because I'm not sensible, I decided to start a new plan: make a Rover P5 fun to drive.

I actually had several ideas. One was to develop fuel injection & electronically-controlled ignition for the IOE engine, to at least make it reliable and probably get a few more horsepowers out of it. That would open up more options, like shoving a massive turbo onto it for the lolz, and well, if that idea sounds insane that's why I didn't do it.

So, what else? Rover V8? 2JZ? K20???

They all have their merits. And yet, those are all petrol engines. Any discussion of drivetrain swaps in classic cars must eventually face the spectre of electrification.

Electric means 100% torque at zero RPM, fewer moving parts, near-silent; it's, like, the future, man. And though some consider it sacrilege to electrify a classic car, it can be argued that changing an old, unreliable, underpowered petrol engine to a modern, reliable, much more powerful one is changing the character of a car every bit as much as electrifying a car is. And nobody but the dullest of rivet-counters objects much to all the mad engine swaps out there; why object, then, to electrification?

But there's more. We all know that petrol engines pollute. Some would argue that, whatever the historic value of these old cars, an internal combustion engine in a classic car in The Current Year is like painting an historic house with lead paint, heating it with trees felled from old-growth forests, and emptying a chamber pot from its windows onto the street. Such a thing may have been a grim necessity in the past; doing it today when we have clearly better and cleaner options is entirely irresponsible. And, honestly, it's very hard to argue with that.

And that is why I bought

a Corvette engine, because fuck 'em.

This is the Chevrolet LS1, a 5.7 litre V8 petrol engine with about 350 horsepower and over 350 lbs/ft of torque, and an aftermarket that will take them to arbitrarily large power numbers. And it makes cool V8 noises! Now we're talking!!

This is not another dumb impulse purchase (he said with a straight face) but the product of a lot of thinking. I wanted reliable power in a compact package that had some hope of fitting in the P5.

I needed something well-documented; "LS1 into a Rover P5" might not have been done before, but "LS engine into something that shouldn't have an LS engine" has been done probably thousands of times. And anything you are thinking of doing with an LS1, the fine folks over at the LS1Tech.com forums have probably already done it five times and found out which of those five ways works best and which four don't.

I needed something somewhat modern; no LS engine has a distributor, and they definitely do not have a carb, which would allow me to preserve my unbroken 41-year streak of not dealing with carbs. (Yes, I would rather re-engineer a car entirely rather than ever deal with bloody carbs and this is literally what is happening here.)

It is a simple engine, compared to other modern engines with the same power figures. I reckon I could hold one in my head. Simplicity means less to go wrong, and simplicity means that if it does go wrong it's straightforward to fix. Simplicity also means that they could build them cheaper, and make up the difference with displacement.

It's kind of cheap. There are no scrapyard LS engines in England; this cost me nearly £4000 and it had to be shipped from Ireland. But if you price it against any other 350 horsepower engine it's not that bad. Sure, everyone's getting 350+ out of their K20s these days - but you won't get a K20 pushing out that kind of power reliably for £4k. Or maybe I could probably pick up one of the German V8s for that money - but then that would be a monstrously complicated engine with no substantial after-market. Or I could pick up a JZ - for substantially more money, and complexity, and that still wouldn't push 350 horsepower without modification. (This was actually my original plan. My brother talked me out of it. I am glad he did, and not just because that means losing the next several years of my life to this is not at all my fault.)

I used to hate the saying there's no replacement for displacement. You probably won't find me using it again after this very paragraph, in fact. But I have to admit there's something to it. For reliable power at a given price point, sometimes it's best to throw a bunch of unsophisticated cubic centimeters at the problem. "Quantity has a quality all its own", as Stalin once said while trying to find positive things to say about my welding. Or, "when in doubt, use brute force".

And that is how Lewis convinced himself that buying a 5.7 litre V8 was a good idea! So...

Does it fit?!

As if I'd ask that sort of question before spending all of my money on an engine! But I had a hunch that it would. Its 5.7 litre displacement seems ludicrous to anyone whose patriotism includes no eagles, but it's actually a remarkably compact engine. It's substantially smaller in most dimensions than a Rover V8, and we know a Rover V8 fits in a Rover P5. But measurements can lie; I wouldn't know for a fact that it fits until I shoved it in the engine bay and saw what it collided with.

What I didn't feel like doing, though, was lifting 215 kilos in and out more than once, because setting up the engine crane every time would be effort. Which is why I bought another LS engine!

The eagle-eyed among you will notice that this isn't really an LS engine. It's the wrong colour! This is, instead, a mockup engine, or as I like to call it, a stunt engine. It replicates all of the critical dimensions and mounting points of a real LS engine. My one even has fake cylinder heads! And it weighs like 8kg, or 15kg with the "heads", which is a weight nobody minds lifting in and out of a car. You can get one at Speedway Motors in the US. (Their website plain doesn't work with non-US delivery addresses and telephone numbers though; you'll have to give them a phone call if you're outside the US, and brace yourself for the shipping cost.)

So, I dropped the stunt engine into the P5's engine bay, in about the same place that the original IOE engine sat.

Let's talk first about what "fits" means. What that really means is that it doesn't hit anything that I want it to clear. There are some things that are non-negotiable. It can't interfere with any part of the steering. I don't want to chop out the front crossmember. I don't want to cut into the bulkhead. I don't want to redesign the suspension. I don't want to have a bulge in the bonnet, because that would look silly. Anything else - especially adding metal to the car - is up for grabs.

As you can see, there's miles of vertical space there, and no clearance problems around the heads. Let's look at the air conditioning pump.

Acres of room there, because I threw the air-con pump onto the scrap pile (not gonna need it, and saves 8kg), so there's nothing to clear. Woohoo!!

Let's look at the other side.

The big mount on the right-hand side is one of my old engine mounting points; that's going to get chopped off. The small brackets at the front are for the radiator or something, I forgot. Don't worry about those. They're in the way, but they can be anywhere on that front crossmember, and anyway nobody said that the radiator must be at the front of the car.

:)

Still, there's a possibility that the alternator will not clear the front crossmember. It's going to be tight. Even if it fits, it might be a pain to get in and out. It might necessitate a more compact alternator, and if that doesn't work I can mount the alternator at the top right of the engine as the LS-engined trucks have it. There's some possible solution for it out there even if I don't know what that is yet, so let's call that OK.

It's a bit tight around the steering box and somewhat less tight on the steering relay on the other side. Tight, but some design of engine mounting won't conflict. I can fabricate around this - run mounting rails from the rear to the front - in a way that'll allow me to get the steering components in and out.

And there's enough room at the back that I'll be able to unbolt the engine from the box with less hassle than the original engine! But while we're looking at the back...

No possible design of sump is going to clear that rear crossmember. This crossmember is negotiable though; it needs to be more or less there, but it doesn't have to look like this. It can plausibly be dropped lower and I'll pretend that this isn't going to result in any ground clearance issues.

My brother has a way of asking the obvious questions that I did not think of, such as...

And well, yes, I can.

So, an LS engine fits in a Rover P5, for some value of "LS engine" and "fits". With that point proved, I could drop the front subframe.

This was easier than expected. The six bolts that held it in actually came undone, perhaps because of plenty of penetrant applied in the days before. The only other things in the way were the old over-complicated handbrake mechanism (which is going to be replaced by something much simpler when that comes around), an earth strap, and a brake line, all of which were swiftly defeated by an angle grinder.

With the subframe on the floor, I could take a look at the original engine mounts. I said "Corvette engine" earlier because it is, but it was also fitted in many other cars, and I think these are Pontiac GTO mounts (which obviously implies this engine came from a GTO, and not a Corvette). With those bolted to the stunt engine, I could see that re-using them is somewhat plausible.

But that is without the engine at the correct height relative to the subframe; they're both sitting on the ground.

What is the correct height and location of the engine, though? I actually decided on this early on, before the old engine came out. It was to copy the forwardmost point and the crank centreline of the P5's engine. The engine is exactly central in the subframe. The very front of the vertical centre of the front pulley is 160mm from the deepest point of the dip of the front crossmember, with the front face of it sitting exactly in the fore-aft centre of that crossmember. The engine tilts back at an angle of 3 degrees. That, I decided, will be the position of the new engine; it is as good as any.

But to get the stunt engine in position on the subframe, how am I going to measure those dimensions relative to the front face and centreline of the front pulley, when my stunt engine does not have a front pulley? The answer, obviously, is to fit a front pulley to it. Here's what that looks like.

The eagle-eyed among you will notice that this isn't really an LS1 front pulley. It's the wrong colour! This is, instead, a mockup pulley, or as I like to call it, a stunt pulley. I don't actually need a whole front pulley; I need something to mark out the centreline of the crank and the stick-out of the real pulley. So I welded some shit together and came up with this. The centre of the rectangular cut-out on the front of the stunt engine corresponds with the crank centreline of the LS. After I positioned it as precisely as I reasonably could, I marked some sharp lines with a paint pen on the stunt pulley. When all four of these markings are lined up with the edges of the rectangular cut-out, like this...

...I know that the stunt pulley is exactly where it needs to be. This saves a lot of tedious measuring (it took 15 minutes to line this up perfectly to make the markings) and it's easy to validate with an eyeball that it hasn't shifted anywhere.

Anyway, let's get the fake pulley onto the fake engine, put it on the subframe and see how it goes.

To do this, I bought these cheap adjustable caravan stands to hold the subframe up to a working height...

...and lifted the stunt engine up to the correct height with this jack designed for gearboxes (which means it has a perfectly linear upwards lift unlike a conventional jack)...

...and with everything in more-or-less the right place....

...bolt the steering box and relay into the subframe and see what fouls what.

It turned out I can't use those GTO engine mounts, because they foul on the steering arms - even if they could bolt to mid-air there would be no clearance there.

Shame, because I liked them, and didn't really want to make my own, but needs must. I made an initial version of my mounts out of cardboard.

Which was fine, except there was no space to get a bolt into the engine block, so I came up with a second one...

...which I could fit to the stunt engine block using a bolt. Which meant I could turn that into steel, and to talk about turning it into steel we shall have a brief diversion about tools.

Tools! I like them! Tools help you make things! And yet I am prone as anyone to thinking that just one more tool is going to solve all my problems. What I actually needed to do instead of buying more tools was to use the ones I have.

Some of those tools are three 115mm angle grinders. They all perform exactly the same. I like having one with a cutting disc, one with a flappy wheel disc, and one with a grinding disc. It saves having to change discs, which I don't like doing because life is short.

The other one is a cheap MIG welder. It's a Clarke 151EN which my brother gave me for free (thanks Alex), which he bought for about £200 in 2013 and didn't use much.

I've converted it to use a Euro torch, to make it easier to find consumables. I also ripped out the gas feed from the welder to use it solely with flux-core (gasless) wire. A lot of people don't like flux-core welding. I kinda like it; I get nearly the same results and I don't need to worry about running out of gas. It's easy to get flux core wire from Amazon; it's more effort to get a gas bottle refilled. And I want to prove a point, and only to myself: that tooling is not what is coming between me and getting actual stuff done.

It's a cheap welder so I might burn it out before I've finished the subframe. Or I'll end up converting it to gas! But for now this will do.

Anyway, with the cheap welder and a selection of angle grinders I turned my cardboard engine mount into 3mm steel...

...and then remade it again with a 6mm main plate chopped off a generic LS engine mount, and 3mm steel for the rest...

...which almost solved the problems I had from the first round. (I'll still need to fettle it in the press a bit to get rid of some heat distortion from welding, and tidy up the welds; that can be done later.)

Those with some the mounting rubbers clear the steering arms with room to spare.

Nice! And I'll need that room to spare, because I need to fabricate some rails for these mounts to sit on. And that starts with these:

These took three revisions across three days to make. Someone who is good at this would have done it in a fraction of the time; I don't know what I'm doing, so it takes longer. That's part of the fun of this. I've never done an engine swap (if you don't count putting a slightly larger-displacement version of the same engine into a car), let alone an LS swap into something that never had an LS. I can chop up metal with an angle grinder and do an ugly job of sticking it together with a gasless MIG I got for free; those are my "skills". And this rules! If I only did what I know I'd still be soiling myself and crying for food. Just give it a go; what's the worst that can happen?

Anyway, the idea behind these sections of rail is that I can bolt them to the engine mount. Then I can get the subframe exactly level, and then get the stunt engine in exactly the right position relative to the subframe (rather than the crude approximation I did to check my steering clearances). This took three hours! And it required continued adjustment over the course of the day as the temperature changed and when I accidentally kicked the caravan stands. From there, you can fabricate outwards from the stub rails towards the front corners of the subframe. This is how a partly-completed rail looks:

And getting the engine in the right position gets a lot easier after the first quarter of these rails is in place! Here is how it extends backwards:

The box to which it extends rearwards (right in the pic above) is not strong enough for these purposes. It is a fairly-thin reinforcer between the suspension arm mounting points and the rear crossmember, which are strong enough for this job. I'll reinforce this box later.

Anyway, spend nine days straight on doing all of those things and you get something that looks like this:

That's close enough to done for the moment; it holds the engine in the correct place and at the correct angles for us to move on for a while. Let's take a look at that alternator clearance again.

That nearly fits. Nearly fitting means "doesn't fit". But "nearly" also implies a couple of solutions that aren't top-mounting the alternator (which I don't want to do because this will merely move the clearance problem somewhere else rather than solve it). One of those would be to simply notch the new subframe rails a little. But I think it would be better to solve this by fitting a modern, more compact alternator. That's the obvious solution to me, because I want to replace my alternator anyway; it and all the other ancillaries on the engine came without no guarantee that they work.

Let's talk about the sump for a second. It's abundantly clear to me that the original front-sump would never clear the steering gear. So I bought this Camaro rear-ish sump instead...

...which still won't clear the steering gear at the front! But it's a better starting point because it has the oil filter at the rear. That means it can be modified to fit. What I knew all along was that the rear of any LS sump won't clear the centre crossmember. There was a little clearance on a sump-less stunt engine - in fact, millimetres from clearing the centre crossmember with the rear sump. But modifying the sump at the rear is not a solution. The sump on the LS engines are structural; the bellhousing bolts to it. So there's a hard limit on how shallow you can make a sump at the rear, and I think the Camaro sump is as shallow as it can be in the areas that interfere with the crossmember.

Instead, that means that we have to brace the chassis with some angle iron, cut the centre crossmember out...

...and remake it, but about an inch or two lower. To do this, I took an oversized length piece of 25x50x3mm box section steel, and clamped that to some temporary angle iron pointing downwards from the outside of the chassis rail, spending as long as I needed to get it in exactly the right position.

From there, I could add some steel plate to hold it in place...

...and then add a whole load more steel and miles of flux core welding wire to make it into a centre crossmember, and by the way there goes another three days.

At which point I started to wonder how much of the weight savings from fitting an LS1 are being negated by the sheer volume of steel I'm putting into this!

After that, I knew that there was going to be some clearance problems around the starter motor. So I cut out some of the steel I just added, chopped a slice of 100mm steel pipe, and shoved that in the hole I made (it's just right of the rear of the engine below).

As promised earlier, I reinforced the box between the suspension arm mounts and the stub of the old rear crossmember by adding even more 3mm steel.

And with all that done, I could spend a day and a half going around fixing up my bad welds, cleaning up a little,...and add a little zinc-rich primer as a temporary to stop everything from rusting faster than a British car leaving the factory. While Chip Foose is not going to start hammering my inbox trying to hire me for my beautiful fabrication skills, it looks pretty OK for someone who has absolutely no clue what he is doing.

So that's where I am now: an LS engine (or stunt version thereof), sitting in a Rover P5 subframe, with most of the things clearing the things they need to clear. Some things need fettling, and some things might still need to be welded to it; this is not its final form. But this is done enough that I can call it done for now.

And that, is the easy part out of the way. :) See you next time.

Part numbers from this post:

• Stunt engine: Speedway Motors SoloSwap 12640748
• Transmission jack: Draper 09021
• Welder: Clarke 151EN
• Sump: General Motors 12640748
• Die grinder: Sealey SA671
• Zinc primer: U-POL WELD/AL
• Cardboard: Amazon single-skin envelopes (from my deliveries), Felix cat food boxes
• Steel supplied by Thomas B. Bonnett

I now have a workshop.

Which is to say I've been busy.

Inside that workshop, lives the 2.5-metre-long home-made mother of all steel workbenches.

And on that 2.5-metre-long home-made mother of all steel workbenches that lives inside the workshop are these angle grinder brackets.

I use angle grinders all the time, often enough that I always want one immediately to hand. But I don't like them being on workbenches permanently taking up space, because that space could be better used for things I am working on. What I really needed was some neat solution to hang them on a wall, or in this case the steel upstand of the 2.5-metre-long home-made mother of all steel workbenches.

I could have bought some brackets for a few quid from Amazon, but I had some 1mm galvanised steel. which was free because it was being thrown away.

I also had angle grinders to make it with, obviously, because that is what I wanted to hang on the brackets. Stuff I already had was even cheaper than a few quid. But, more importantly, making it myself meant I could have it that day, rather than at 6pm the next.

Anyway, that means I've worked out the dimensions so you don't have to! Which brings me to the point of this post. If you need one yourself, or two, or four of these crude angle grinder brackets for yourself, you can use my handy instructions below and make some of your own. You can click through to the larger image if you want to print it out.

It is optimised for being made in a hurry by someone sloppy (that's me); there are generous tolerances in several places to allow for errors.

I chose 55mm for the height, because the galvanised steel strips that were kicking around at the moment I had the idea were 110mm in width, and that meant I could fit two onto a single strip. You can modify the design to make them taller if you like, but with 1mm steel I wouldn't make them much shallower.

Enjoy!

Cars age differently these days, and by "these days" I mean "the last two and a bit decades". Cars seem to transition to "old terrible car" much more slowly, and also go through the trough of no value to "classic" much more slowly too.

What brought this to my mind, and exhibit A in my study, is Onslow's Cortina in Keeping Up Appearances.

The car, when it appears, is a self-contained joke. The joke is that it is a shit old car. The British audience in the early 1990s knows this, because it is a 1978 Ford Cortina. It has mismatched body panels and a missing grille because that is what is expected of a shit old car, and it backfires because it is the kind of car they would expect to backfire, because it is shit.

My mum owned one of these, of roughly the same age, around the time the second series of Keeping Up Appearances was airing. She bought it in a hurry after her Ford Capri was stolen from a car park in Ilford in 1991 (every Ford Capri was stolen from a car park in Ilford, in 1991), because it was cheap. She hated it to its core, and she gave it away because it was bad. I only have vague memories of it, but I do recall that the Honda Accord she owned after that was a revelation to all of us because it reliably started every time.

So, the Ford Cortina Mark IV. Terrible stopgap car for my mum, standalone visual gag in Keeping Up Appearances. It first appeared on screen in the second episode of Keeping Up Appearances in 1990. The car was built in 1978.

You may have been doing the sums in your head already, and know the point I am about to make by those sums multiplied by the title of the post. So here's the scary bit:

Onslow's Cortina is a mere twelve years old in Keeping Up Appearances.

Which is to say it's roughly equivalent...

...to a 2011 Ford Mondeo today. The Mondeo looks like a modern car to me! I have a hard time imagining that its very continued existence as a car could be considered as a joke in itself. A 1993 Mondeo, maybe, with enough gaffer tape.

Maybe I just lack imagination, and maybe someone who has watched any meaningful amount of television in the last decade could prove me wrong. But I've seen far more Mondeos of any given age than I remember seeing Cortinas as a kid. Anyone reading this probably already knows that my working car is a 2004 Fiesta, which is to say, I drive a nineteen-year-old car; a car old enough to get a driving license and drive other cars. It's a running in-joke-with-myself (I am easily entertained, usually by me) to seek them out in car parks and park next to them in some sort of shit car solidarity; this is not hard to do because fifth-generation Fiestas are still absolutely everywhere.

Let's talk about classic cars, and specifically the Ford RS2000 in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels:

The aesthetic of this film is self-consciously retro, gritty and cool - that is, what was retro, gritty and cool in 1998. The RS2000 is retro and cool in this film too - and it was a 20 year old car. Now, I don't know for a fact that a film maker would not do the same thing today with, e.g., a Ford Focus ST170...

...but I doubt it.

The flipside of cars becoming terrible cars much slower, as I said, is that they also don't get regarded as classics quite so readily. Though looking at it through the mists of time, I disbelieve that anyone in 1995 would have choked on their Corn Flakes if it was suggested that a 1972 Mini was a classic. I have an easier time imagining a certain set of people scoffing at the notion that a 2000 Mini - you know, that one - was a classic in 2023.

Maybe I am being very selective with my samples. If so, that bias is unintentional. Or maybe, again, I am just lacking imagination. There is harder evidence that I am not lacking imagination. Recall that the road tax exemption for historic vehicles used to be a rolling 25 year one; presumably, it was because so few cars lasted to a quarter-century old that there was no point in taxing them, and those that survived deserved an exemption because they were considered classic cars.

Why do cars of the late 90s and onwards seem to have aged differently to the cars of the late 1970s and early 1980s? I have some ideas:

• I am completely wrong. It's plausible; history could have frozen in my little head when new numbers came in, everything since 1997 is "modern" to me, this is all made up, and television programs actually do depict 2011 Mondeos as comedically terrible.
• Cars just last longer these days, and they last longer because they are better. I think this explains it, to whatever extent "it" is real. Rust-proofing is better, engines are built better, and self-adjusting systems mean fewer mechanical failures - no longer written off by either catastrophic failures, or by many smaller failures leading to "that's it, I'm done with this fucking car" and an early trip to the scrapyard.
• Cars have not improved so much between generations that buying a new car makes immediate practical sense, where it did in the past. For all I know a 2014 Fiesta might have real improvements over my 2004 one, but The Shed still starts every time I need it, and has a working heater. (It'd probably even have air conditioning, if I bothered to re-gas it.)
• We have a different relationship to the cars of the past, for the above two reasons.
• Or maybe, nostalgia ain't what it used to be; that, despite all the enormous technological changes of the last three decades upending basically everything, we feel closer to our immediate past than we did in 1990. Though it is an example from the United States, and one from 1973, American Graffiti stuck with me for two reasons. One is that dear God there is much to appreciate about this film but the attitude towards women makes that awkward to watch in The Current Year. But, the other is that it was a nostalgia trip about a very different, then-gone era...of eleven years before the film was made.

I don't know which of these is true, so I don't have a good conclusion to this piece. Oh no! Answers on a postcard. But I'll leave you with one last little snack for thought: the Bluesmobile was only six years old!

This was my desk chair.

I wrote about it before.

When I wrote about it before, I mentioned my concern that the much sturdier castors I fitted might end up breaking the no-metal-in-particular that cheap desk chairs swivel bases are made from. It broke a few months later.

Rather than fish another desk chair from a skip, I bought an entire swivel base assembly from Amazon for about £80. It turns out that not just the castors, but these entire assemblies are largely interchangeable between desk chairs. This thought had not occurred to me before! So, I did not have to "un-weld" the baseplate from the subframe as I had every previous time a swivel base had exploded on me. Just plop the old base plate and subframe on top of this...

...and my desk chair was fixed again. Simple!!

But, while I'm there...

Previously, I wrote:

I showed a photo of it to someone earlier today and they said "it needs arm rests". It doesn't need arm rests, but the fact someone thinks it needs arm rests means that it isn't the unquestioned best desk chair in the world.

It still did not have arm rests, so this time around I decided it was going to have arm rests. I had a pair of arm rests, salvaged from the previous donor chair.

Let's make some brackets! This time I bought (rather than salvaged) some steel for the purpose, for about £20. I still have some left over.

That turned into some smaller lengths of steel...

...which, via some dubious MIG welding and Jenolite satin black paint, turned into two slightly-wonky but almost presentable brackets for the arm rests.

Easy! (Just kidding, that took forever, because I am not all that good at this.)

As everything was dismantled (so that I could make a means to fix these brackets to the subframe), I figured I would give the subframe a cleanup and a coat of paint. It looked like this, resplendent in its original brown paint and marker pen assembly-guide scribbles from the first time I built it.

This subframe is an adapter plate between the car seat and the desk chair swivel base. It is almost always out of sight, so it didn't matter what it looked like. Still, I would never tidy it up it if I didn't do it now (the proof of this is that it has been unpainted for over a decade). This should have been just a coat of paint, but while I'm there...

...I was never very happy with those unfinished ends, either. They've never bitten me, and I've never seen them so I didn't mind them being ugly, but I always had the thought in my mind that they needed to be capped with something. This was as good a time as any to do it. So, some offcuts, some more dubious MIG welding, and some over-aggressive linishing to make the MIG welding look less dubious...

...and they look a bit better, if you don't really look at them. Which I won't! Because I'm sitting above them.

Still, the subframe that I never see now looks a lot more presentable. And when everything is bolted together...

...it has arm rests! Which was far more effort than it was actually worth, given that it never really needed arm rests. Especially when I came to use it and realised when setting the height for my arm rests I hadn't considered whether that height would allow it to fit under my desk...which meant chopping about 70mm out of the brackets the day after I assembled it all. But still, arm rests! And that, if nobody issues me some other challenge that makes me over-solve another problem that doesn't exist, should make it the unquestioned best desk chair in the world.

This is my desk chair.

It is a front seat from a 1990 Vauxhall Astra GTE, bolted to a subframe made from steel box section scavenged from some industrial shelving, welded to a swivel-chair base that I found in a skip. I've had some variant of it for over a decade, but I had cause to re-engineer it recently, so I am posting about it now. It's extremely comfortable! It is more supportive than any other chair I have used, including chairs that look like car seats, and including chairs that cost upwards of a grand.

There are two of these desk chairs in existence! My brother was dismantling an Astra GTE that he purchased for an engine donor (MOT-failure GTEs were not worth much more than scrap weight back then, and that is a memory from the "painful to think about" department, next to the working two-door Range Rover I helped dismantle...). I got the seat for free on the condition that I made the other front seat into a desk chair for him as well. That other chair is still in use by a kid in the family as a gamer chair, and that makes me happy.

It has been rebuilt several times. This is because office swivel chairs are made of no material in particular, especially the cheap kind that gets thrown into a skip when it becomes too ugly to use. Usually this does not matter, because the sitting part of a swivel chair is also made of no material in particular, so the system in its entirety has plenty of flex. The Astra seat has a lot of extra weight, and there is no flex in the over-engineered subframe, so swivel chair bases tend to break.

This is what the subframe looks like.

It's not pretty, but you can't see it when you're sitting on it. If you look closely, you can see where I cut out a reinforcing section in the middle in the latest incarnation. This is in a probably-vain attempt to try and un-engineer a bit more rigidity out of the frame. I might try speed holes next.

I had a stroke of luck last time this broke a swivel-chair base. The base collapsed, and literally minutes later I saw my neighbour throwing a shitty-looking desk chair into a skip. I'll have some of that, thank you.

This time around, I decided to give the Astra seat a deep clean after reassembling the chair. I did not know how badly it needed one. This little thing is a game changer:

It's a brush attachment for a drill, which you can buy for about £15 on Amazon as part of a set. It demolishes baked-in cat fluff and everything else on a seat that a vacuum cleaner won't touch. I was impressed.

Everything mentioned so far, I acquired for free. This time around, I have got some improved castors for it, to replace the usual scratchy-sounding castors that you get on cheap desk chairs.

These have roller bearings, seem to be made of actual metal, and its wheels are made of a material not entirely unlike that of the small bouncy balls we had as kids that could be launched at the floor and which rebounded to the height of a four-storey building. They roll very nicely. They're also a lot stronger than flimsy desk chair castors. This isn't an unqualified good. See also what I wrote about the subframe earlier; they don't flex, which means they transfer forces elsewhere. That might cause the swivel base to break earlier than it would otherwise. We'll see!

You may have noticed that it does not have arm rests. You are not the first. I showed a photo of it to someone earlier today and they said "it needs arm rests". It doesn't need arm rests, but the fact someone thinks it needs arm rests means that it isn't the unquestioned best desk chair in the world. So maybe that is a project for another day...

Here are some things that happened in my life recently, none of which really merit their own post.

The Shed passed an MOT.

It actually failed an MOT, then passed an MOT, after £164.78 of parts and labour from a local garage. It's work I could have done myself, on some theoretical level. If I had resolved to do it myself it'd have ended up in the project queue behind a bunch of other things that want my time, and I would own three cars that don't work.

I don't like spending money, but the invoice showed numbers such as "18.40", which reminded me that buying a shitty Ford for a daily was a really good idea.

I found a remnant of King's Lynn's railway network that I didn't think still existed.

These rails are on the Boal Quay, and haven't been used since 1968. I'd seen what looked like rails on Google Maps' satellite views. I assumed that either it wasn't what it looked like, or that the satellite imagery was out of date. I hadn't cared to visit them in person to see if they are still there, until a couple of weeks ago. They are still there!

I have a web page at my other website on South Lynn's railway remnants. That page has been online for over a decade now! Depending on your definition of the area, this remnant might not actually be in South Lynn. I updated the page with it anyway, hoping Actually Guy (you know the one) won't show up and complain, and while I was there I added a ton of new information, more-or-less re-writing the page in the process.

I took the photo above on my Fuji X100 (the second one). Since I bought that camera, it has been nearly everywhere with me. I have been getting used to its various weirdnesses all over again. So while I was there, I almost completely rewrote the page on my other site about it.

I've been shooting raw (RAF) in the X100, because I can. That means processing them with software, and because I am on Linux, Darktable is the best software out there. I have a webpage about that on my other site too, which was also a decade old, so while I was there I completely rewrote that as well.

One of my many weaknesses is being able to dig some, oft several, layers of "but, while I'm here..." below doing a simple thing. Still, none of that was a bad way to burn a couple of days over Christmas!

My cat is still completely adorable.

She got a new cushion for Christmas. She likes it very much.

That is all!

rip small hammer always in are hearts xxx

You just saw a photograph of a freight train. It is not very interesting to almost anyone. But maybe a story about it would be!

A few years ago I was at Downham Market station. I don't recall why I was there. It might have been because I was broke at the time and had nothing better to do; most likely I had enough money to pay for a train ticket and doing nothing in particular in Downham was more fun than doing nothing in particular where I was. And I had an Olympus Trip 35 film camera loaded with Ilford XP2 black-and-white film in a pocket. A freight train passed through the station. I thought it was interesting and the light felt nice, and so I took a bad photo of a freight train heading through Downham Market, and later uploaded it to a site called the Wikimedia Commons.

I suspect the kind of person who reads my blog would be the kind of person to know what the Wikimedia Commons is, but I shall explain for those in the cheap seats: it is a website wherein anyone can upload their own stuff on the condition that it can be used by anyone, for absolutely any purpose, with or without modification. This means that your stuff gets used in really fun and unexpected ways. I know photos of mine that are not this freight train have showed up in books from serious academic publishers, scientific papers, and PowerPoint presentations.

The fact that photos of mine were used in PowerPoint presentations might make me worry whether my putting photos out there for anyone to use might have a net-negative impact on the world. But because of the "everyone can use this without needing to ask first" nature of the Commons, and bloggers needing photos they can use for decoration, various blogging services have invented ways for authors to find photos from the Commons to use in their posts. Which means my photos have been used in about a trillion blog posts! And probably a trillion more blog posts which I will never see.

Back to that photo of a freight train. This was one of hundreds I chucked onto the Commons over the years. I thought someone else might find it interesting, some time in the future. Or it could just sit there and do nothing but take up 1.81 megabytes of disk space! Which it did, for years. Then, someone wrote a short murder-mystery set at Downham Market station.

An Australian author called Liam Saville thought that photo was the right photo as the intro pic for his work. You must go and read the story. I loved it, and as a local I appreciate that he did a bunch of very small details very correctly. All of that while hanging upside-down! (This is how Australia works. I don't know how they do it.)

But (Arlo Guthrie voice) that's not what I came to talk about today. Some time later, I had cause to visit Downham Market again, and in particular, to use the bogs at Downham Market station. And while I was in there, I noticed the walls being covered in giant prints of various trains, and in particular noticed that one of the cubicles was covered in a black-and-white photo of a Class 66 locomotive passing through Downham Market...

...and it took me more than a moment to realise I was looking at my own photo covering an entire wall of a bog at the same station I photographed it 10 years before. I think that takes the "unexpected use of my photos" crown.

There's not a moral to the story here, because life is messy and stories with a moral are rarely true stories. Instead, I'll just say that free culture is beautiful, both for the people who choose to contribute their work and for all the people that use it. The folks doing a makeover of a station found the right picture to use to cover an entire wall of a bog. An Australian author found the right picture for his short story for free, without needing to ask me first.

In a different world, wherein I was protective about whatever privileges copyright law gives me, this would have been a boring snapshot of a train that nobody would have seen, rather than a boring photo of a train that probably thousands have, which now has has its own life outside of my control. And that, makes me happy. :)

This was my mum's Mercedes 220. It was glorious.

She bought LRO 468L for £500 in either 1989 or 1990, because back then it was merely an old car (though cars aged much quicker 30 years ago). It was beautiful, silent, luxurious, and very wafty. I loved it, and everyone else did. She sold it a few months later for slightly more than she paid for it, because it needed welding work on the floorpan. A very young Me did not talk to her for a day after that.

It was last MOT'ed in 1990, so we can probably conclude it does not exist anymore (or, to avoid offending those of you who believe in the laws of thermodynamics, exists in an entirely different form). A W114 or W115 is still on my bucket list of cars to own. It might even be the next project I build, if my next project starts before the prices of these go through the roof.

Fast-forward just a few years. Recently, someone pointed out that if you search for a registration plate on Google Images, there's a good chance that it will find a photo of that car, because Google indexes any text it finds within an image, and may notice the text on the numberplate. Like ANPR, but for everything.

It worked on my car. Among others, it found a photo taken at the late Rockingham Motor Speedway, which my brother (the previous owner) took in 2007 back when "camera phone" still meant "thing with a dialpad", and posted on a forum in 2008.

It worked when I entered the registration of this Mercedes, too. I know the registration off by heart, because my memory is weird. I remember a Windows 95 product key that I last used in anger in 1997, and the registration of my mum's car from 31 years ago, and sometimes draw a blank when I have to enter my PIN into a cash machine.

The first result was the picture you saw at the top of this article. I uploaded that photo to Wikimedia Commons over 15 years ago, and things often spread to weird and unexpected places when you do that. (I'll tell you the story about the wall art in the bogs at Downham Market station some other time...)

The second and third images were the offspring of obsessive categorisation at scale. I would hope any petrolhead would know about the Internet Movie Car Database, wherein a (presumably vast) number of very dedicated people are aiming to identify every car in every film & television program. If your car appeared in the background of, e.g., an episode of The Bill in December 1984, then there's a good chance someone has captured and categorised it.

Well how about that!

But wait: It's brown! Or at least looks brown. Did it get a respray before my mum owned it? Or did a worn 80s VHS tape not reproduce the glorious red that it was? I won't ever know the answer to that, and I am okay with that.

The cars we knew in our youth are, or will be, almost all lost to time and entropy; only a very few are lucky enough to be recommissioned or restored. But this Mercedes was lucky to have its few seconds of fame on the small screen, and was immortalised, to some very tiny extent and entirely accidentally, by some extraordinarily committed people on the Internet. That's more than most cars will get, and that, is good enough for me.

What my credit card looks like, as of a few days ago:

I won't even tell you what it was a year or so ago. All I will say is that the interest payments alone at one point were pushing £250 a month, which is a non-trivial amount of money for anyone that isn't Scrooge McDuck swimming in piles of cash.

This is absolutely not some woe-is-me story, because obviously, I was a fucking idiot who made some very poor financial decisions (see also: cash furnace of a car) and I don't blame anyone but myself.

Still. Not to get too personal here, but all of my late teens and my 20s were spent not so much in a bad financial position as in no financial position at all. I got my shit together far too late, and when one does get one's shit together one starts getting credit card offers.

When you are feeling financially stable for the first time in your life, those offers look all too tempting because woohoo, I can have even more money right now and I can build my credit score and such! And of course you will pay back the whole amount at the end of the month, right? Until you start thinking that just for this month you will make that small minimum payment instead, and then they start upping your credit limit (mine increased twentyfold from when I started)...and if you do that enough times you end up with a substantial portion of your income being dead weight.

So it goes. I was an idiot! But I also learned in the last few months that even when I'm throwing a substantial amount of my income into paying off the capital on that credit card, that I can still be quite comfortable and even have a little money left at the end of the month, if I behave frugally. Which is to say, if Mazda Amy doesn't throw any new and hilariously expensive curveballs at me I might have some hope of building some savings and shit or I might forget what I just said and buy lots of car parts.

Whatever happens there: it's over, and I am much happier for it.

Today, I lost my wallet. This has a happy ending...

After topping up Mazda Amy with oil this afternoon (she's basically a Diesel at this point, in that she burns nearly as much oil as she does petrol), I went to the shop for supplies and then went for a hoon on the backroads (and by the way, that never stops being fun). When I got home, I realised I did not have my wallet anymore.

It's easy to make me anxious (possibly moreso than most people), and losing my wallet with my money-equivalent cards and my driving license was enough to trigger something not far off my worst episodes. Not so much that I could not function at all or not be able to drive as in the very worst of my episodes, but...

So I backtracked to the shop, and asked if anyone had handed in a wallet. Nobody had. I went home. Checked every inch of my car. Checked every inch of the car again. Emptied absolutely everything, tools and glovebox contents included, out of the car and checked every inch again.

No dice. Then I remembered that I realised a short while after I drove off from the shop earlier that I had not shut my passenger door properly, and pulled over to open it and shut it again. So I backtracked there to see if my wallet was there just in case I had put my wallet in the passenger door card and it had fallen out while I was loading supplies into the passenger side. Not there either. I went back to the shop and gave them my number in case anyone handed in a wallet; something I had not thought to do earlier.

Panic really set in here. In retrospect I know it was a totally manageable situation: it would require a few phone calls to cancel my cards, and going online and ordering a new driver's license card and some other stuff. But still, full panic, which I dealt with by doing another inch-by-inch search of my car and at this point I am shitting myself.

And while I was doing that last panicked search, as if that would reveal something a complete emptying of the car would not...a well-worn BMW E92 with all the seats full of family rolls into my driveway. And as it comes to a halt...the driver holds my wallet out the window. There's social distancing and all, a norm I'm not comfortable with because I wanted to hug the shit out of him and propriety these days requires that I not even give him a handshake, but it is what it is.

I asked him for a PayPal address or something I could use to send my thanks. He refused, but he did tell me the way I probably lost my wallet, which was that after loading stuff into the front passenger seat of the car I likely left my wallet on the top of my car then drove off and it went somewhere. Well, that's happened before and all I nearly lost were some onions, and maybe I need to establish a ritual for checking the roof of my car just as I have a ritual for checking exactly three times that my front door is locked when I leave...but that's another thing.

I did offer again after he explained how he got hold of my wallet to send him some money via whatever means he liked; whatever amount I sent him would have been a tiny price to pay compared to the amount of financial damage someone less decent with my credit & debit cards & my de-facto identity card could have done. But nope. Refused.

I was reminded today that there are decent, honest people out there who do the right thing just because it is the right thing to do.

Thanks, BMW E92 guy. You is good people.

I now have a Fuji X100. Early Christmas present to myself!

I actually had a Fuji X100 many years ago, I loved it, and I wrote about it in some length. I ragequit it a few months later when it repeatedly misfocused while photographing the winners of an event at a tiny track in the middle of nowhere because I can be a little capricious. I sold it to a guy I met on a train for about £250, taking about a £100 hit for what I paid for it, because I wanted it gone as fast as possible and did I mention I can be a little capricious.

I always semi-regretted selling that camera. It was somewhat old then (and is now a decade old!), but it almost always got awesome photos under any kind of nasty and/or dim artificial light, if the subject did not move too fast. And, other than Fuji's later cameras that took the X100 design and added more letters to the end, there is still nothing quite like it. (Unless you count Leica's digital offerings and...well, they're quite the thing, but I'm not paying that kind of money.)

Well, let me backtrack there. The combination of being small, being of little weight, having a fixed fast lens of "perfect normal" focal length, and looking superb under artificial light...rather describes today's flagship camera phones.

Which I have no interest in! Because I don't want to buy into either Google's obsessive tracking and the Android vendors' unwillingness to provide timely security updates, nor into Apple's lack of a fucking headphone jack (nope, I'll still never regard this as normal, and you won't talk me out of it). I've dealt with the phone manufacturers being fucking awful by compartmentalising, and having multiple phones for different purposes. Including one just as a camera! My long term plan is to switch to the pure-Linux PinePhone when the software matures, but that's not now. And the camera on the PinePhone is not all that good and seems like it will always be (which is to take nothing away from the people who are working hard on the software end of this).

I have my Nikon SLR gear of course, all of which is old and tired and malfunctioning and in a couple of cases falling apart, due to years of abuse and being used in the very dusty Norfolk Arena. I always hated lugging that stuff around. It's nice to once again have a camera I don't mind carrying!

Oh, and merry Christmas to all of you, and all of your people. :)

My brother Alex came over in his E30 to make my driveway look much cooler. 80s car friends, yay! 💕 We've been meaning to get a photo of them together, when they are both working, so we did!

Actually, the goal today was not to add even more obnoxiously loud colours to my driveway, but to get Alex's clutch working on his 1963 Land Rover, not pictured (yet). That did not work, because of a lack of parts. We thought the clutch slave cylinder was dead, because Alex had installed it upside down (which means bleeding it will not work as as it should). With the slave cylinder installed the right way up and with the system bled appropriately, the clutch still didn't work, which means the master cylinder is probably dead in some way. We didn't have a master cylinder, so that should have been the end of the day.

Except...once you start, you're sort of committed to doing something that day, so we decided to save it by getting stuff done in lieu of getting anything done that we actually wanted to, like cleaning up the chassis & an outrigger in preparation for a second fuel tank to be fitted.

By which I mean Alex cleaned up the chassis & an outrigger in preparation for a second fuel tank to be fitted. I mostly sat around making stupid jokes and offering encouragement and giving the occasional good idea. The work itself didn't require a second person.

But, I did get to hang out with my brother at a sensible distance, we had a day of fun and of getting things done that we didn't intend to do and of decades-old in-jokes, we consumed food, and Alex departed with a wicked rolling burnout down my street to round it off.

Sometimes, an unproductive day can be a good day. ❤️

Photo credit for the last and second-to-last photo: my brother's 11-year-old kid Rowan. Thanks kid!

I withdrew from social media at the start of that whole global pandemic thing. Initially it was to bring my anxiety under control, and turned out to be the best possible thing I could have done for my well-being.

On the other hand, I came to miss having a place to dump things that may or may not be of value to someone somewhere. That's what this is!

I also wanted a little place that was mine -- hosted on servers I pay for, with software I control. The current wave of deplatforming should terrify anyone that has content hosted by someone else. I like cars, cats, and writing Python code. It's unlikely I'll ever become a target for any of that, but that's probably what all those people thought who were posting nudity on that site that was 95% nudity, and we all know how that one worked out.

I have a site. Actually I have another site as well. Those sites do what they do, and one of them gets non-trivial amounts of traffic doing what it does. I did not want to repurpose those. They might get updated with the things they should be updated with, but sometimes a thing should be allowed to be the thing that it is.

So here it is, something resembling a blog. I'll be migrating a bunch of stuff from my Markdown diary files. I have a lot of these, which I gathered in the hope of getting them into a static site generator some day. They didn't end up going into a static site generator, because I was overthinking the solution (and I'll probably post about that soon).

I picked the name "Exhaust" because this is a bit of a vent. Not "vent" in the sense that makes so much discourse ugly, but a place to dump the occasional thought, a thing that has happened to me, a picture, maybe the occasional story and anything else that crosses my mind. And I can do that without caring how many likes or shares it gets! As Todd Snider put it,

I might share some of my opinions with you over the course of the evening. I'm not gonna share them with you 'cause I think they're smart, or 'cause I think you need to know 'em; I'm gonna share 'em with you because they rhyme.