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Jolly Day Out

Emma was off school, the kids didn’t need anything from us so we decided to have a jolly day out looking at cars. Well, one car in paricular. We want a Telsa Model Y.

We were going to go look at the Tesla showroom in Manchester and then have lunch with Charlie. Unfortunately on this day he was doing some recording and wouldn’t be about – so we went to Liverpool instead which is “closer”. I say “closer” because it always seems to take ages to drive anywhere in Liverpool. It’s all traffic lights and roundabouts and little roads. We should bulldoze half of Liverpool and put a motorway straight into the centre. Anyway, I digress.

Emma trying out her new car to be

We got to the Liverpool Tesla Centre and immediately jumped into their Model Y and started pressing buttons. It’s almost exactly the same as our Model 3 but it has some funky interior lighting and buttons to fold down the back seat and close the boot. Loved it. We walked in intending to just have a look and wait until more details about the Range Rover Velar EV came out to compare the two, but we didn’t, we slapped a £200 reservation on a Model Y Long Range All Wheel Drive. We went for that spec as we’re considering driving to the Alps for Xmas and AWD seemed a sensible option. We should get it in May. Exciting.

When we left the Tesla store Emma mentioned that Lark Lane was nearby and she’d always wanted to check it out. So off we went. As soon as we arrived I felt at home. Bohemian chilled vibe, lots of little shops, bakeries and restaurants. Beautiful people. We ultimately ended up in Yum Cha, a chinese dim sum place. Absolutely fantastic. They even had Xia Long Bau – not quite up the Beijing Dumpling standard but pretty bloody close.

Whilst we were pondering what to order I heard the fella behind me talking about Spicy Wontons and how great they were. So I ordered a plate of them. Best. Thing. Ever. I’m going back and I’m buying more.

Excellent day out!

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Tofu-tastic

Those who know me will know that I like a bit of Tofu when I’m doing Asian cooking. I always used to just cover it in a bit of cornflour and fry it until it was good and firm and then mix it in with a sauce.

But I always had a dream. I always wanted to make the tofu into tofu balls like you get from the Chinese takeaway when you get Sweet and Sour Chicken. Well my dear reader. I finally got off my arse and googled how to do it. Ten minutes later…et voila

Seriously – just check that shit out.

I went the whole hog and made my own sweet and sour sauce to go over tofu balls. It was amazing. I didn’t get a picture of that bit. I was too busy eating. Definitely making it all again and it’s even got the point that I was drooling over a deep fat fryer at CostCo the other day.

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Wordling – again

You all know I’m fond of laying in bed in the morning and having a good old wordle. Well this was just too good not to screenshot and post about…yeah, that’s how empty and vacuous my life really is.

My fellow wordlers will get it

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New member of the family

My goal was to buy a new inflatable thing for the Xmas front garden dumb ass nativity scene. I didn’t quite get my crap together this year in time to get one but managed it after the “scene” had been taken down. Please be kind and welcome the Xmas Hippo into the fold.

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Chess Decanter

Oli always does a fine job of buying me Xmas gifts. This year he excelled by combining two of my favourite things, chess and drinking.

He bought me a chess piece [ Queen ] decanter which I filled with Diplomatico rum. It’s not quite that full anymore.

As an aside, in the past I could quite happily sit there drinking wine whilst playing Oli at chess and still win. He’s improved. Now I daren’t play him if I’ve had so much as a sniff of wine.

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Tetris off 2025

After all my work installing the lighty-uppy-arcade-buttons the day finally arrived. We drank Bucks Fizz from early morning. We moved onto wine. We ate turkey and ham and potatoes and vegetables with stuffing and gravy. We devoured trifle and then eventually made it down to my office.

Usually the annual Tetris-Off is myself and Charlie. This year Oli joined in with us….and annoyingly won.

The competition was all about score. Since we’re going for score the tactic is absolutely to get a “Tetris” when you clear four lines in one go. Oli, being the gung-ho, shit or bust, little turd that he is, absolutely went for it. His stack would get so close to the top but then he’d manage to pull off a Tetris and get the game back under control. It’s not really that we can blame it on fluke as we all had a warm-up game first. In the warm up it went Oli, Me, Charlie. Then we had the proper tournament, and it went Oli, Me, Charlie. So, pretty consistent stuff and unfortunately Oli takes the 2025 Tetris crown.

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The Plough @ Christmas

Pretty sure I’ve mentioned many times that I like a good family tradition of going to The Plough at the end of each term for food and drinks with the kids. We’ve missed it a few times because the kids have no respect, absolute zero, for the family tradition a la Darren. Anyway, this time they made it with the additional bonus of Big Bobble hats on heads

The dog was there with us…not entirely sure where she is at this point – but she’s deffo there.

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Mince Pies

I’m part of the Parish Council. Ever since I’ve been a member the Vice Chairman has baked fresh mince pies for the December meeting. Last year, when I was the Vice Chairman, I baked fresh mince pies for the December meeting. This year, when I find myself as Chairman of the Parish Council I was looking forward to the Vice Chairman baking up a storm, but he quit instead, and so I donned my apron.

They were lush.

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Manchester December

Managed to make it into town for drinks and food with the darling nephew birthday boy and Ellie.

Gluhwein was consumed. Beer was consumed. Indian Food was consumed and a tram ride home with some drunken teenager creating a pool of vomit. Ahhh, we’ve all been there.

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Arcade Cabinet, part 2, part 2

The lighty uppy arcade buttons arrived and I wasted no time in hooking them up to a 240v to 5v transformer that I had laying around.

The scene of devastation that is me mid-project!

After installing the wiring loom of GND and 5V throughout the cabinet I did a quick test.

We have a lighty uppy red button.

The only real problem now is that each lighty uppy button [ I have 16 of them ] now needs four wires, two for the LED and two for the microswitch that controls the button presses. Subsequently, it’s looking a bit of a mess inside the cabinet. Maybe on Arcade Cabinet Part 3 I’ll tidy all that up.

Finally….finally! It’s now ready for the tetris-off. See that bottom right button looks a bit green? It’s because it is. The button people sent me three blue LEDs and a green one by accident. They’ve since sent me out a blue LED but as I write this I haven’t installed it yet.

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Macaroons

Every year we go to the Xmas Market and every year I crave Coconut Macaroons. Love them. Favouritest thing ever. This year was no different. We tracked the Macaroon shop down to Piccadilly Gardens and I approached. The first thing I noticed was that they were about half the size of last year and the second thing was they were more expensive. Robbing bastards. I still bought them though – and yeah, they were excellent.

A couple of weeks later Emma and I were heading up to York to visit Amelia. I enquired if there was anywhere on the York Xmas Market selling Macaroons. Amelia thought not. I was disappointed. So I decided to make my own.

When I make Macaroons I make them the proper size – like the Xmas Market used to!

They turned out absolutely fantastic. Two bags of dessicated coconut, a tin of evaporated milk and a drop of vanilla. Boom

Will definitely be making them again.

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Arcade Cabinet, part 2, part 1

Yeah so I built an arcade cabinet quite a while ago. I’ve had all sorts of fun and good times with it over the years and it’s now the location of the annual Tetris-off between Charlie and myself. The only problem is when I first built it I didn’t really know what I was doing with the electrics. The earth wiring loom that came with the joysticks was a 4.8mm female spade connector which was absolutely perfect for the joysticks, but the buttons had a 2.5mm male spade. So being the “it’ll do” person that I was I put the 2.5mm spade into the 4.8mm female and crushed it with a pair of pliers. This worked ok’ish. Every now and then a button would stop working and I’d have to go digging around inside and make a repair.

Ratchetting Crimper – beautiful bit of kit

Fast forward to November 2025 and I thought to myself “must do a bit of a service on the arcade cabinet and make sure everything is working for the Tetris-off”. So I fired it up and true to form one of the buttons wasn’t working. So I opened up the cabinet and went inside. Pretty quickly found the dangling wire and reattached it. In doing so I managed to dislodge two more connections and in fixing those connections dislodge some more. I was properly pissed off. Didn’t even need the original broken button for the Tetris-off anyway.

Anyway, given that I’m now more of a man of leisure I tend to do things properly and make sure I don’t have to fix them again in the future.

So out I went to the local electricians shop place which is like a trip to Aladdin’s cave for me, and picked up the new crimper pictured above and a selection of connectors of different sizes. Turns out if I’d gone to an online components shop I’d have saved a fortune but you live and learn…plus I wanted them that day because despite my mature years I’m still an impatient bugger.

I started taking the buttons out one by one and doing a better 2.5mm female spade connection to the 2.5mm male spade connector on the button. Because I’m doing it properly I had a bunch of black wire that I made connections with a 2.5mm female spade on one end ( for the GND connection of the button ) and a 4.8mm male spade on the other end. The goal was to make it easy to identify the GND connections from the signal connections. Incidentally I also used the appropriate coloured wire for the signals, so now the red buttons have a red wire and the blue buttons have a blue wire.

Everything was going swimmingly until I came across a few buttons where the connector snapped off after I disconnected/reconnected it one too many times. They’re pretty flimsy connectors and not really designed to be mucked about with by a clumsy oaf with a pair of pliers. Rather than just buy some new buttons I thought I’d break out my trusty Dremel and my soldering iron and repair them. How hard could it be?

Buttons and microswitches
Soldering up the connection for a red button

Turns out it wasn’t really that hard. I managed to get two of the buttons working again but the green button was properly cabbaged and I’d have to buy a new one. Slightly annoying, but not the end of the world.

So I went on eBay but couldn’t find matching buttons and then I ended up on https://paradisearcadeshop.com/collections/buttons where I managed to find a matching green button.

But I didn’t buy it.

Whilst looking at green buttons I saw that you could now get a green button with an LED inside it. God damned lighty up arcade buttons! How had I not heard of these before now? So I ordered four green buttons and four red buttons to give it a bit of a test run before committing to all sixteen buttons.

This opened up a whole new can of worms…

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Fairphone

I like my phones and I’ve always been an Android fan boy. I did spend a bit of time being an Apple fan boy with an iPhone, iPad, Macbook Pro, Mac mini – all that sort of stuff. But then I had a fight with Apple about a keyboard and got kinda sick of the restrictiveness of the Apple ecosystem so switched to Android – never really looked back.

Many Android phones have passed through my ownership and the thing that’s always annoyed me about all phones in general is that in the race for smaller and lighter phones they just became practically impossible to repair. If you’ve read any of the posts on this blog then you’ll know I’m well into repairing stuff. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Quite a while ago I dropped my Pixel 6 Pro and cracked the glass case on the back. Everything worked fine so I wasn’t too bothered. But then on occasions as I put my hand into my pocket to retrieve my phone the shattered bits of glass would stick in my finger and draw blood. This annoyed me. So out came a tube of super glue and I put some super glue over the cracked glass and it smoothed it all off and held it together. Unfortunately during this repair some of the glue ran into the USB C charging port which meant I could no longer charge it with a cable. This wasn’t a massively massive problem as I had a wireless charger. It was slow and I had to remember to take the charger with me when I was away for a day or two. Still wasn’t a major problem. Until I reworked my whole home automation type stuff and the IP address for my garage door controller and office heater changed which meant I had to change some stuff in my Android home automation app that I’d written. Made the changes, rebuilt the app and then realised that I couldn’t install it on my phone as the USB C connector was knackered. This was a problem. A big one.

For a while I switched to my Mother’s old Pixel 3A that had a working charging port and I could update my software. All was going well but the camera was a bit annoying. I’d take a picture of something, hear the click and assume it was done only to find the picture took a second or two to take and I’d pointed the camera away from the subject and ended up with several pictures of my crotch.

This would not do.

On my travels across the internet I found a device called the Fairphone. Pretty popular in Europe, less so in the UK. There are many great features about this phone. It’s not some crazy power hungry power user top spec processor so the battery would last for a couple of days without charging. Three or four if you’re careful with it. It’s also made with lots of recycled parts and best of all it’s built to be repaired.

See those two screws on the back…

If I was to crack the screen it would cost me £80 to buy a new one and I could replace it myself without suction cups and heat guns and glue guns and all that nonsense. If I was to pour super glue into the USB C port it would cost me £8 to buy a new one and repair it myself. Same goes for the battery…replaceable, camera lenses…replaceable. All sorts of stuff can be fixed on it, with a screwdriver.

Wonderfully happy with my purchase. The average mobile phone lasts for 2.5yrs before ahem it’s ready for recycling which generally means it ends up in landfill. I’m aiming for 5yrs before replacing this fella. It just works. Oh, and the added bonus it was only £450 – which is better than the £950 I was looking at for a Pixel 10 Pro – which is utterly unrepairable.

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Parquet Flooring

A long long time ago I found myself with a big gap in my parquet flooring due to some building works…yeah, the extension that I’m still having to do jobs on five years later. Anyway, I just came across some old photos of the work and realised I never did a blog post about it.

This job was quite an epic.

Had to put down a DPC kind of paint job to protect from damp.

I didn’t have a bunch of oak parquet floor blocks lying around in my shed so I had to buy some. Fortunately some dude down in deepest darkest Cheshire had lifted a bunch of the up from a school floor and was selling them on eBay. Can’t remember what I bought them for but it wasn’t too bad.

Then I had to clean them all up and remove the old bitumen from the bottom of them and get ready for laying them. Once I’d created a relatively flat surface to lay them on I put down a layer of my own fresh bitumen and got cracking.

It was actually pretty good fun. Once I’d got the hang of the pattern and the angles they all went down pretty easily. You can see from the picture above that they weren’t exactly perfect joins but they were close enough and having rubbed in some oak sawdust from cutting them to shape and then varnishing them all it looked pretty bob on.

You’d never guess it wasn’t always like that

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433MHz transmitter

Every morning and every night I have to press a button on the remote control to open/close the blinds in my kitchen. In my constant efforts to have to do less things each day I feel the need to remove these two things.

Enter stage left a 433MHz transmitter that can be connected to [ you guessed it ] a Raspberry Pi and also my Flipper Zero to sniff the signal to send.

Sniffing the signal was the easy bit. I now have the hex code, and therefore the binary signal, to send the blinds up and down. Unfortunately it’s proving a bit tricky to get my Pi and transmitter to send a matching signal.

The Flipper Zero shows that it is receiving a radio transmission but it just doesn’t decode it correctly. It’s either that I don’t have the correct high/low timings for the signals…or that when I first hooked up the transmitter I attached the 5v line to the data input for the transmitter. Oooops.

I’ll keep beavering away and keep you, my dear single reader with the long hair and a talent for music, informed.

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Wordle

Wordle, you are truly a bastard

How many words are there in the english language that end with “ound” – quite a bloody few it would seem!

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Honey Fungus

Years ago I went on a foraging course in the Lake District. Slept in a sleeping bag in a hammock beneath a tarpaulin strung between two trees. All was going well until I fell out of the hammock and then whilst stuck in my sleeping bag rolled down the hill. Brandy may have been involved.

Anyway, whilst there we ate mushrooms, pigeons, deer and other stuff. Recently I was wandering through the woods with ze hound when I came across some mushrooms.

Google Lens identified them as Honey Fungus which are generally edible.

I came back the next day with a bag and picked some of them. Got them home and double checked Google’s identification with a proper book written by a proper mushroom dude who knows what he’s talking about.

It was an exact match. So I cooked it up and ate it.

I didn’t die [ obv. ] but it didn’t exactly taste brilliant. You could eat it if you were starving in the woods but I’m guessing there’s a good reason they don’t stock Honey Fungus mushrooms on the shelves of our supermarket. I’ll probably try it again, with a little garlic and see how things improve. Also, when I ate it I boiled it first which I wouldn’t normally do with mushrooms but various websites suggested it.

You’ll notice I keep talking about it in the singular – I only ate one in the hope of mitigating any stomach cramp, food poisoning, painful death scenarios.