Category Archives: Technology

Machinery – How it works

Used and new brushes

Our washing machine stopped working at the weekend. It did everything that is was supposed to, the water ran in and out again, but the clothes never got washed.
A washing machine doesn’t look dangerous so I felt that I should be able to mend it. I carefully laid it on its front and unscrewed the back. Inside there were wires and pipes, an electronic thing, a big wheel and a little wheel. The big wheel was attached to the drum where my wife puts the washing and there was a large elastic band between it and the little wheel. The little wheel was on the front of a complicated thing. The complicated thing had electrical wires going it to it but no pipes. Everything inside the washing machine was covered in black dust.
I could tell that the complicated thing (I call it the convertor) must be the device that caused the washing to happen because it had the most black dust. I removed it from the machine by undoing some big bolts.
When I had it on the kitchen table I discovered how washing machines work. The convertor has two channels leading into it, each containing a stick of very, very concentrated dirty black stuff which is driven by a spring into the mechanism. Obviously the black dust corresponds to the cleanness that the machine imparts to the clothes. The convertor uses the rotation of the washing to change the dirtyness of the black stuff into electrical cleanness which is then fed into the clothes by the rest of the machine. I’m surprised that the manufacturer doesn’t provide a receptacle in which the dirtiness can be collected, it must be a cost-saving measure.
I looked on the interweb and found a shop that sells suitable sticks of black stuff. They only cost £15 for a pair! They describe them as brushes because they ‘brush’ the clothes clean. I suppose they have to use these quaint old-fashoned names because most of their customers don’t have my technical bent.
The washing machine is now working perfectly. My next project will be the microwave oven, which seems to have nearly used up all its microwaves. I have a plan to replenish them using some tin-foil, a load of old batteries and the buzzer from a Goblin Teasmade.

The Greenwich Time Signal has gone flat

Even as I write this BBC engineers are hard at work trying to find out what is wrong with the Greenwich Time Signal. The GTS is played in the seconds leading up to the top of the hour, ever hour on the World Service, less frequently on other BBC stations. Today someone noticed that it sounded a bit odd. Further listening confirmed that it was roughly a semitone lower than it should be. Nobody knows how long this has been going on for, nor what caused it, nor if the problem is affecting domestic radio as well as the World Service. One thing is sure; it will be fixed as quickly as possible. Listen now, before it is, and you’ll be hearing something unique.

Update (Wed 13 April):

Here’s a recording of World Service GTS last week
…and here’s what it sounded like yesterday

(Many thanks to Mike Campbell for finding these)

BBC doesn’t fall for tech hoax

Well, I’ll be. Wired just printed a story admitting that the story they did about toothing (picking up partners for casual sex by sending messages to Bluetooth enabled mobile phones) was a hoax. They even have a link to a blog belonging to one of the people who engineered the hoax. What amazes me is that a search of the BBC news site doesn’t produce any results at all. I wonder if they saw the story and decided it wasn’t true or just didn’t notice it in the first place, or maybe they did do the story and have just deleted it rather than print a retraction.

BBC falls for yet another hoax

World Briefing on the BBC World Service ran a three and a half minute piece today by a man they described as a Washington based journalist, James Srodes. In fact they ran it at least four times, maybe more. It was based on a letter which Mr Srodes said was written by British comedian John Cleese after the recent US election. The letter started:

To the citizens of the United States of America, in light of your failure to elect a competent President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today.

The letter went on to criticise American pronunciation and spelling, among other things. James Srodes mounted a robust defence, arguing that US English is now the accepted language of commerce around the world. Unfortunately the letter was not written by John Cleese and in fact started life on the internet in 2000, in the days before the world-wide-web made it very easy for journalists to check the accuracy of this sort of urban legend. If only James Srodes had drawn on his “30 years of experience” and done a little bit of actual journalism and investigation before he launched himself onto the airwaves.

Riddley Walker

I just finished re-reading my favourite book, Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. I first read it at school, at about the same time that I read my other favourite novel, Peter Carey’s Bliss. Put those two books together and you’ve got a map of about half my teenage character. I won’t try and explain Riddley Walker; you can find a fairly good essay about it on a science fiction website called graphesthesia, although it really isn’t science fiction. One of the things that’s interesting about the book is that it’s written in a made up language. It’s not like A Clockwork Orange but it’s a similar idea. Reading it this time I was amazed at how similar the language is to the way in which some people write nowadays. It doesn’t take a nuclear catastrophe, just a combination of text messaging, poor education and the wide availability of computers.

Chalker Marchman the 1stman of the digging he wer talking to a nothing looking witey bloak dint look no moren 10 years old. It wernt the shortness of him I aint a tall man my self but this 1 he lookit like his dad pult out too soon when they ben making him. Witey hair and pinky eyes nor you cudnt see his eye brows they were that lite.

And here’s an extract from an email from a friend. Spot the difference.

I no some people take a gap year between college and uni? what about the idear of a gap year between school and college cause its free 2 go 2 college tell u r 19 so if i took a gap yr and tryed 2 get a job and if i couldnt i went bck 2 college a yr later I would be 17 so even if i did a 2 year cource it would still be free and i would be able 2 get some experiance in theatre and re-take any exams I need 4 the course i wanna do cause GCSE retakes are only a yr long as appose to two years.

Identifont – identify fonts and typefaces

Oh baby, am I a nerd or what? I love this site. It asks you a series of questions about what the letters in a font look like and then tries to identify it for you. There are questions like What angle are the ends of the upper-case ‘C’ or What shape is the dot under the question mark. It didn’t manage to identify the font used in the 1997 Saatchi “Sensation” exhibition guide and it took 27 questions to wrongly identify the typeface used in the index and headings of the Department of Transport 1979 driving guide as “Brazilia Seven”. Nevertheless the questions really make one think about the countless tiny differences that make up the identity of a font. OK, I need to get out more. Just let me see how it does with my John Bull printing set and then I promise I’ll go to bed.