New lab has a new iMac

 Well, new to me anyhow. Working all day on a small Macbook (though I love it for performance and battery life) is bad for the eyes, so I have furnished the lab with a pre-loved iMac 27 inches ... 

Access to the Lab is now improved ...

So instead of walking across a series of stepping stones embedded in mud, we now have some proper decking outside the lab. It is huge. Well done, Kris - it really does look spectacular. After this, the next steps will be some tidying up at the bottom, and the rockery / wild garden / pond .. looking forward to some post lock-down family gatherings here.

Fixed the Cambridge P500

Another one off the list of things to sort out .. turned out to be one of the darlington output transistors. They have integrated emitter resistors, and one had gone from 0.22 ohm to something in the hundreds of ohms, so it got replaced. While I was there I checked all the caps (no problems) and I replaced all of the heat sink compound, as there was pretty much none on the transistor I changed. Actually I changed both on that channel to make sure I had a matching pair. Applied power, and success! Sound in both.

There's quite a lot of discussion on t'Internet about the bias current, but I found in the spec for the trannys themselves that they recommend 40mA. So I put some meters on, looking for 17.6mV across the two 0.22 ohm resistors. They seemed to want to settle at 20.4mV which is close enough.

This is a budget amp, so I wasn't expecting too much, but the heatsink is a bit pissy and it feels cheap. The whole amp is not worth saving, really but it might do for a bench amp at a push. At least it is now off my bench so I can move on down the list of things to be repaired.

Changing HDD to SSD in an iMac

For a friend; I volunteered to change the hard disk to an ssd in a 2012 iMac. Well, doesn't sound too difficult, does it? I mean, how difficult can it be?

First, there is the getting in to the thing in the first place. It involved delicate prying of the screen away from the back, using guitar picks and a scalpel (very, very gently) to cut through the glue. It fought back, so I did what most people do and went to Youtube for guidance. The main thing seemed to be get it warm with a hair dryer. So, being a very hot May Day, I left the thing out in the sun for three hours to get nice and toasty inside and out.

This got me to the point where the scalpel and guitar picks started to work, and a suction cup gently pulling the front eventually got it to give way ..

So the next step is to fit the SSD in the hole where the old HD was. Now, the old HDD looks like this:

.. and the new one is too small. 

So it's off to Amazon to order up a converter. The first one wasn't the right style to fit into an iMac despite all of the promises on the web site, so I had to have another go. I also ordered up the sticky strips designed to work in an iMac to put the thing back together again. 

All done .. restoring from a Time Machine backup, only took 12 hours for 2TB of data. That has to be quite fast, but clearly benefiting from the fusion drive it was coming from as well. 

Look, Heidi - I have 27 Inches Of Loveliness in the Lab! - if only temporarily ...

Warm weather, and the Nixie clock is suddenly very accurate

My Nixie clock in the Lab is suddenly maintaining time to the second. It's controlled by a crystal, and always has run a little bit fast since I never got around to putting a trimmer cap on it. Now I know that crystals age; the mechanical stress it is under when mounted relaxes over time; purities move within the crystal, and the crystal itself might lose a bit - or gain a bit of mass as crap floats around. It's not oven controlled or anything - just room temperature controlled, and now, it's fantastic.

I was talking about replacing it and building a new one. I wonder if it heard me?

By the way ...

I am now

0x40

years old

First up, does the Lab need another name?

So when Kris was kindly constructing my home office, it clearly wasn't going to be an ordinary home office. I'm very proud of the results, including the way it's been wired up. (though I have to find the wires for the rear speakers which are routed to behind the big TV screen, and I need to get them to the fine Denon 3803 amp). All just in time for a pandemic to reduce us all to working from home.

What troubled me for a while, was what to call it. When I first got kicked out of the fourth bedroom
in Winsford Close, I moved into the rear of the garage. Most people have a garage which is never darkened with a car in the UK - ordinary folks, if they are lucky enough to have a garage don't have one where you can drive in and open the doors without dents. They fill up with gardening stuff, bits of old bikes, your fishing gear and golf clubs, and several incomplete sets of drain rods. (the missing sections having been left in drains in former residences).

So anyway, I partitioned off a half of the garage, and set up some work benches, a few computers and a modest sound system. Wired to the rest of the house via thin ethernet (gasp!) I could leave a server in there running the house file system and so on. And that's where the handle "niksgarage" came from. It replaced the name I used before, which was "niks42", which I used a lot when I was single again, as a short cut to those first questions on a bulletin board a/s/l ?

I wired the house for internet, shared out through a smoothwall box with a frog modem on it:-

The famed Alcatel Speedtouch USB ADSL modem, running at a cool 500K bits/second (a huge leap up from the 56k modem).

So that's why this, my new location, being all posh, custom designed and made is not my garage - besides, there is also a garage. And a shed, for Trish's stuff and garden tools.

Studio sounds too pretentious. (though I do have a machine called studio, which runs the music software).

Also, an office sounds too square.

stu·di·o

Noun:

A room where an artist, photographer, sculptor, etc., works

of·fice

Noun:

A room, set of rooms, or building used as a place for commercial, professional, or bureaucratic work.

So, in due deference to both the company name of Hayling Island Laboratories Ltd - itself a pun on IBM UK Laboratories Ltd at Hursley Park, my alma mater, this is now my lab. 

lab

Noun:

A laboratory: "a science lab" So, come up to the lab,  and see what's on the slab. I see you shiver with antici ... pation.