Knowing what not to fear

Some people have an instinct for technology. Richard, one of my earliest friends, born a week before me and only a mile away, dead these last ten years from horrible motor neurone disease, had that instinct.

The proof could take a terrifying form. When my brother ran the bearings on the engine of his Morris Minor Richard supervised the removal of the engine, its dismantlement, the replacement of the crankshaft and the bearings, the reassembly and the reinstallation. My only contribution – other than the loan of my bathroom floor to accommodate this work – was not to drop the engine when it was put back into the car and my brother and Richard were unable to contribute any further lifting effort during the last foot or so of the transfer.

Here’s where the magic happened. With everything connected and a sump full of new oil, the engine was started. Brmmm…brmm. Fine, apart from the oil light glowing bright red on the dash. Alarmed, I reached in to switch off the ignition but Richard shook his head. Dipping under the raised bonnet he shook the engine on its mountings - vigorously. And the oil light went out.

How could he know that?

One foot on, one foot off

The hippety-hoppety antics required to propel a scooter (the children's version not a Vespa clone) surely rules it out as a serious mode of locomotion. Or does it?

The Swedes don't think so and they're pretty serious about most things. They use them for personal transport in high-bay warehouses.

The normal way of getting around a warehouse is by some kind of forklift. But that's wasteful if your journey doesn't require you to extract or re-install a load. Imagine instead a scooter rather like this but scaled up for a full-grown adult. Notably with larger diameter wheels. No brakes needed.

The floors of high-bay warehouses are deliberately made smooth so that forklifts can be aligned precisely with individual bays in the racking. Perfect for scooting. As I watched one dashing Nordic individual, with flowing yellow locks, hip-hop off into the distance it looked like fun. But perhaps that's also the drawback. In Britain we're not inclined to think of work as fun.

A hedge is much more than a fund

THIS IS FOR PLUTARCH. We're rather good at hedges in the Marches. This one is to be found at Little Brampton, also home of Aardvark Books. To techno-legitimise the inclusion of this pic here are three questions:

(1) Who on earth trims this hedge? It is over 100 m long and about 10 m high.
(2) What is the trimmer's strategy? The hedge surface is like a contoured model of the Peak District stuck on its side. Is each bulge and declivity faithfully followed?
(3) What tools are used? Given the hedge's dimensions a powered trimmer would seem likely. Given its surface variations manual shears would be more nimble.

The photograph only captures part of the hedge which acts as a boundary to the village church graveyard. It captures almost nothing of its grandeur. A mysterious aristocrat of a hedge.

Older people take more time

For the last eighteen months I have been editing a biography of Kevin Andrews, author of “The Flight of Ikaros: Travels in Greece during a civil war”, an American who supported the left-wingers in Athens during The Colonels and who took Greek citizenship thereafter.

I hold a master copy of the MS and the author responds to my editing (as well as providing his own amendments, additions and deletions) as email attachments of the transformed chapters fly between us. Just recently, long after the radical initial assaults on the MS were over, I discovered the perfect computer method for handling this.

Initially I saved the author’s latest chapters to a folder. To transfer his stuff I opened this folder and that containing the master copy and went cross-eyed moving from one chapter to the next incorporating his changes (helpfully marked in red). Since there are forty chapters much time was spent switching from one folder to the other.

Now I amend the file titles of his chapters with an X and save them direct to the master copy folder. The contents now look something like this:

Chapter One (Master file)
Chapter OneX
Chapter Two (Master file)
Chapter TwoX

I am thus always working in the same folder saving time and irritation and helping to cement the correct author/editor relationship. Another wheel rediscovered.

The techno-god of small things

Time for another legend about Monsieur Chauvel, our plumber in France and one of my techno-heros.

After he repaired the 50-year-old kitchen geyzer (see July 8) we had hot water for the hand-basin and shower in the bathroom. But neither my wife nor I are shower people. In my case I’ve never managed to adapt a shower to my main reason for practising ablution (ie, spending an hour reading).

And so M. Chauvel installed a modern electric water heater (huge and powerful) and a bath, and reversed the hot water flow in the pipe linking bathroom and kitchen. As a result the geyzer became redundant and was removed. All this was done quite painlessly while we were back home in Kingston. On our next holiday he paid us a quick visit to explain the workings of his new installation.

Finally he pointed to the spot where the geyzer had been. Its removal had required him to detach half a tile from the wall. But replacing it would be simple and he told me how. After this instruction he looked at my face and assessed the likelihood of my rousing myself and performing this simple task.

Yes, you’ve guessed it. When we next returned to the house the tile had been neatly replaced.

Refining technique improves pic

3D IMAGING This time I followed Marja-Leena's guidance. My £5 "swimming" Casio was scanned at 300 dpi (256 colours). Photoshop Elements was used to adjust the resolution to 72 ppi, to reduce the width to 200 pixels and to "save for web". The result is a 9 kb JPEG file.

It's an improvement on the flower (called Gypsophila according to my floricacious adviser) I scanned earlier. In this instance I left the scanner lid wide open; with the flower I propped the lid about 15 deg open to accommodate the black background card in an attempt to match the solid blackness Marja-Leena achieved. Fully open results in this maroon background; using the card came closer to black but, because the card was angled, caused unwanted reflections.

My conclusion is that Marja-Leena's scanner is optically superior to mine. Not surprising since it cost more than three times as much. What is pleasing is that I don't appear to have encountered the shallow depth-of-field problem that Lucy experienced.

This was purely an exercise to test the procedure. I'll keep an eye open for an opportunity which tests it for real.

Power drills - defining historical artefact

I distrust golden eras. The seventeenth century may have been great for poetry and playwriting but who cares if most of us only lived to thirty-seven. Or whatever.

The golden era of technology is today. In the 1960s we lived in an unheated flat in Stoke Newington and were so poor I had to save up to buy a power drill. A power drill! The basis of all home-based DIY. What’s more it was a lousy drill and through the louvres I could watch excessive arcing (the result of poor tolerance engineering) destroy the commutator ring.

Last week my brother had the almost unheard-of experience of having to replace his car battery. It was his own fault; his car had stood idle for 77 days while he walked from Land’s End to John O’Groats. Otherwise present-day batteries go on and on. Compare this with the 1960s when they needed intensive care if they were to start the car after a chilly weekend. Ominously, cars still came with a starter handle then.

Many talk mistily about corner-shop grocers. Forgetting that in those un-barcoded days, it took twenty minutes to buy some cheese and a few ounces of tea. And now my rant against a rosy-tinted past goes out into the world almost for free. Back then the prospect of a “long distance call” was terrifying.

Feeble steps towards third dimension

Following Marja-Leena's wonderful results in scanning three-dimensional objects here are two of my attempts. One was scanned at 400 dpi and one at 800 dpi. The latter resulted in a massive 17.2 MB file. Not that it makes much difference here. Both emerged as TIFs which are unacceptable to Blog. So both had to be enormously downsized and saved as JPEGs. The resultant degradation of quality is plain.

One thing seems clear. Both Lucy (who also tried this exercise and was disappointed by a very shallow depth of field) and I need better scanners. Marja-Leena's cost over $Can500 and allows her to scan to an incredible 1200 dpi. Also, Marja-Leena shows her pix on a website and is not restrained by the resolution limitations of Blog. But let's face it, I'm guessing.

VERIFICATION I'm sure I'm rediscovering the wheel here but Blog comments don't always go through the first time. Or even the fifth. I was horrified when this first happened to me, imagining duplicate after duplicate piling up at the addressee's blog. Now I've come to regard this as the norm. Just repeat the silly alphabet thing over and over (not forgetting to insert the password each time) until the comment is posted. I apologise for all this. I'm still only in my third month