Rick's b.log - entry 2024/03/29

Holiday

It's odd. Two Mondays ago when I took the car to be looked at, it seemed like this holiday would last for ages.
Then I blinked.
And now it's almost over.

But, then, apart from the mechanic, the vet, the dentist, and a few pleasantries with checkout girls twice, I've interacted/spoken with nobody.

☺

Electrics

The parts that I needed.

The cabling is expensive. That lot cost something like €45. It's 1.5mm 16A cable, but then it's hooked to a 16A breaker so shouldn't be overloaded. It's thicker than the extension lead cable and that coped with my heat gun and the vacuum cleaner.
I had planned to buy two sockets and install them side by side. But they were €4,50 each and this three-way socket fixture was €8 and it fit nicely.

The fiddly part was putting up the cabling. It wasn't hard, just hold it in place and whack in a cable clip with a hammer, it's just the position along the ceiling at the top of the joists was... fiddly. Ladders, balancing, holding the cable up and not whacking the hammer into soft fleshy appendages. That sort of thing.

Eventually I had the socket side sorted out, and then looked at the junction box. Inside is a 6 way screw terminal block to join the cable. Live is row 1, neutral is row 3, earth is row 5. I left some space between each of the conductors for safety, and since it fit like that.

The junction box.

At some point in the future, I will run another cable to the back of the living room to power the internet stuff from a proper earthed socket. But not today, so that's why the junction box.
The junction box should have been a bit higher, but it was a pain in the arse to deal with, so I lowered it a little.

I didn't add another breaker for this, it is slaved off of the one that switches the socket in the fuse cupboard.

I checked all of the sockets with my socket tester, and everything looked good. So it was time to insert a plug to the little multiway socket that powers the Pi and monitor. The smaller plug is for the desk lamp.

Things plugged into the new sockets.

More electrics

In the hangar is a light. That light is controlled by a switch by the back door.
This switch.

An ancient old light switch.

Not only was it wobbly, but the rubber around the cable had long since corroded so you could look down and see copper parts.
The other switch, by the way, controls the light in the hallway. It's a two-way switch that works in tandem with a switch inside. That one also needs to be replaced, but it's in better state and partly embedded in concrete, so I'm going to leave it for now.

The dodgy light switch looked just as dodgy inside.

Some interesting many-legged insects crawled out.

Time to pull all of that off the wall and install something nicer.

A nice new light switch.

Waste

Electricity price rises

Wanderer

Thirty-seven

I look on the bookshelf. Devoid of thirty sevens. I try to think of books with numbers in them, but don't get much beyond The Famous Five and The 39 Steps (or was that a movie?), Ready Player One, 1984, and something about a lot of spotted dogs.

Thinking that my life must clearly be bereft of thirty sevens, I sit down... and one is staring right at me. Did you spot it above?

To show that this is completely legit and not made up, here's a scan of part of my electricity bill.

Part of my electricity bill.

95.81 divided by 257 is 0.372801556. As the third number is a '2', it rounds down to... thirty seven centimes per unit.
There you go. My own thirty seven after having just watched a video about thirty sevens.

When discounting the often chosen numbers '69' (gee, I wonder why...) and '42', he pointed at the 42 as the number in his own Veritasium element logo. I wonder how many people would have thought of that, or would have thought of 42 as being "the answer".
Fun fact: Sometimes when doing a chemical test at work, I have to wait a little bit before performing the test (it's a bit like turning on a tap and waiting for the hot water to arrive). I count off exactly 42 seconds. I even mention that I waited for 42 seconds. I guess none of the management are familiar with the works of Douglas Adams...

Just counted the white keys on my piano. Thirty six. Lucky escape, that! ☺ But not lucky enough, because if you discount the power button (special purpose) and the volume knob (not a button), my piano has exactly thirty seven buttons to control how it works...

There are thirty seven control buttons on my piano.

How many thirty sevens are staring you in the face?

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jgh, 29th March 2024, 21:47

My internal voice is screaming that you've put that socket block rotated 90 degrees off!

Rick, 29th March 2024, 23:08

Well, if you can find a way to fit it into that space *horizontally* without warping entanglement (and, no, moving the bookshelf is not an option), I'd like to hear it. 😉

David Pilling, 30th March 2024, 02:35

It was always said that after Easter, surplus eggs were melted down. Lindt rabbits seem to turn into reindeer. But this is an interesting moment:  "Cocoa prices have surged more than 250% over the last year, surging to $10,000 per metric ton - nearly double the record high set 46 years ago" (1977).

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