Rick's b.log - entry 2026/04/06

Crisis averted!

New AA batteries.

Radio interference

But it is also possible that hooking my ESP32 up to the Linky's TIC output has also changed things. It's a twisted-pair wire, about half a metre long, nominally running at 50kHz. Given that the timing isn't absolutely guaranteed, it works by presence and absence of carrier rather than modulating it, and I've basically fitted a half metre antenna to my smart meter...
...this may also be a potential problem. God knows it doesn't take much to mess with a long wave signal.

I have attempted to mitigate this by wrapping alu foil around the Cat 5 cable I'm using between the two devices, and then grounding the alu foil to earth to act as an RFI shield. But this doesn't seem to have made much difference.

Shielding potential interference.

Unfortunately I can't go probing around to see what/how the DCF77 is being received at any particular place by listening because it's well below standard long wave, and below even what the more capable SDRs will tune down to - typically they'll start at around 500kHz or 1MHz, some will go down to 100kHz.

So my "hack" for now is to place the clock on the floor at the other side of the living room, and when it has picked up the time signal, to hang it back on the wall. It used to automatically reset itself every night at 1am (which is probably why it used a lot of battery capacity), but I think this feature might be inhibited if it can't see a good DFC77 signal as it wasn't stuck at noon this morning.

DCF77?

My CB radios. I think the Realistic (Tandy) is the CEPT/EU one.

Now, back to DCF77. The signal is a constant 77.5kHz carrier, which is reduced for a brief period once per second. If the reduction is for 0.1s, this represents a binary zero. If it is 0.2s, this is a binary one. The final second is not modulated, this serves to synchronise reception.

Therefore, in every minute, 59 bits of information are transmitted. Bit zero is always zero. Bits 1 to 14 are "civil warning bits" (meaning not disclosed) which these days also double as a 2-4 day weather forecast for about sixty European locations via MeteoTime GmbH (proprietary protocol, licence needed to decode).
There are then five status bits following: Abnormal operation, about to change between winter/summer time, summer time is in effect, winter time is in effect, and a leap second announcement. Yes, there are separate bits for winter and summer time marking, it's not a simple toggle. One could, actually, consider it a binary-coded offset from UTC (whether it's a 10 (+2) or 01 (+1).
The next bit is always '1' and it announces the start of the time encoding, which runs from bits 21 to 59.
In the bit fields that follow, the interpretation is not straight binary. The bits mean 1, 2, 4, 8, 10, 20, 40, 80.
Bits 21 to 28 are for the minutes (1-40) followed by an even parity bit.
Bits 29 to 35 are similar for the hours (1-20) and parity.
Bits 36 to 41 are the day of the month (1-20), followed by three bits (42-44) for the day of the week (1-4, Monday = 1 and Sunday = 7), five bits (45-49) for the month number (1-10), then eight bits (50-57) for the year (1-80) which does not encode the century. This is then followed by a single bit (58) even parity bit for the entire date.
And, as I said, there is no 59th bit as the final second isn't modulated; unless there's a leap second in which case a zero is transmitted here and the additional second is the unmodulated one.

It is worth noting that the time sent is for the following minute, so when the final second is noted and elapsed, the time that was given becomes current. If one really wanted, the century could be determined by matching the date with the day of the week. This is liable to a 400 year error, but that's largely immaterial as it is sufficient to know which years are leap years. How? Because the day xx00/02/28 must be a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or Sunday. Only the Monday is a leap year. All the rest are not.

Cute toy

So now I'm seven euros poorer and I have my very own lemon meringue tart sitting atop the laser printer. It's supposed to be lemon scented too, but honestly it smells like a girly sort of perfume.

A stuffed lemon meringue tart toy.

It is made by Keel Toys in Kent, which explains why one of the offerings was a cherry bakewell. It was a tough choice between that and the lemon, but cherry bakewells are unknown over here, so I went with the lemon.

Here's a photo I took of all of them in the supermarket.

Stuffed bakery goods toys.

Long weekend

So I got out the strimmer and tidied along the wall of the potager. A fair number of the supports for the wire fence on top have broken, rusted through. I'm going to have to think of a way to deal with that. Maybe drill a hole in the cement behind the broken support to put another into the hole and cement it into place? Or maybe a metal rod that can be clamped to... I dunno, it's not especially important. A "nice to do" thing, one day.

Then I went, drank a Fanta orange, and started tidying up the tree parts that were cut down. Here's me dragging two large branches while my back is asking "am I a joke to you?".

Dragging branches.

It was getting pretty hot, so I gave up on doing that and instead enjoyed a lemon cheesecake flavour ice cream cone. Thanks to having a freezer, there's always a box of these.

Lemon cheesecake ice cream.

That was followed by a pack of salt and vinegar crisps, which - thanks to Europeans starting to care more about what is actually in their food - contained actual sea salt and vinegar (powdered, 0.6%) rather than sodium diacetate that is commonly used as a fake salt and vinegar flavouring.
This was then followed by a "Manhattan" salad. I ate the roast chicken, threw out most of the lettuce and the egg yolks, and then drowned the rest in the little container of oil and balsamic vinegar.

A premade salad.

I had intended for the salad to be eaten today, but since it was so nice on Saturday... And given what I piled in, I'm genuinely surprised my stomach didn't explode.

I read some stuff on-line, listened to some music, watched the birds, watched Anna taunting the birds... It was quite a pleasant day, all things considered.

Sunday, colder, only got to about 14°C with cloud cover. This was forecast. So I wrote a story about an inquisitive fairy and the elves that didn't appreciate their traditions being questioned.

Tablet

On Sunday, since it wasn't so great outside, I found my old Smoby tablet, and while the pen worked with it, it was not the right pen. The reason is because the pen for that tablet was magenta like the tablet and it used a weird battery size, like AAAA. That's part of the reason I'm not overly upset at having lost the pen somewhere along the way.

So I went back and rummaged and found my Braun tablet, a rebadged UC-Logic WP5540U.
You know what's super-funny? I just plugged the Smoby into my PC and lsusb says... it's a UC-Logic WP5540U!

Anyway, easy, I thought. Plug it into Linux, test it, get to know how it works again.

Oh boy.
What a farce.

If it's not a supported Wacom device, then there are two things that will happen:

The most likely thing

The most annoying thing

...except there will be no pointer, no nothing. Maybe it's sending my clicks and drags to a Linux box in Malaysia (if so, sorry about that!) because they sure as hell aren't showing up here.

So I uninstalled the digimend drivers and rebooted because seeing nothing on screen is less useful than not having pen pressure.

I think the UC-Logic WP5540U is like a quarter century old. You'd have thought it and it's army of clones would have some sort of support by now, wouldn't you?

So I plug the graphics tablet into RISC OS, start up my driver, start up PhotoDesk... It seems to work fine with normal drawing, pen pressure, etc.
So I tell it to permit Adjust-clicks.
RISC OS, being made of stern stuff, instantly freezes. Completely locked solid.

Now I understand why I didn't get far with debugging this previously. After all, it is hard to debug a system that drops dead with the slightest provocation.

But, alas, my woes had only just begun. I hit reset, like one does... and nothing. A little glowing red LED is the only indication that the entire Pi isn't a ghost.

I dig up an unused µSD card and in order to try to get something going, I drop the RISC OS Open 2GB SD image onto it.

It fails to boot. As far as I can tell, the initial DOS partition (and FileCore boot block) is simply missing. DiscKnight is like "uh, no".
I copied it from file like this, so it should have worked - using dd with a 4MB block size, from unpacked image file on harddisc to the USB device.

rick@Rick-E200HA:/media/rick/BACKUPSTUFF$ sudo dd if=ro530-1875M.img of=/dev/sdb1 status=progress bs=4M
1950351360 bytes (2,0 GB, 1,8 GiB) copied, 66 s, 29,5 MB/s 
468+1 records in
468+1 records out
1966080000 bytes (2,0 GB, 1,8 GiB) copied, 84,1267 s, 23,4 MB/s
rick@Rick-E200HA:/media/rick/BACKUPSTUFF$ 

Now, as I'm looking at this the following day, it occurs to me that maybe I should have written the image to /dev/sdb and not /dev/sdb1? I just copied what the thing was originally mounted as (as a FAT32 partition). Never mind, I did something else with this µSD card, but telling you now would be messing with the timeline and I don't fancy being attacked by clockroaches, so better not to screw with time. It's a few paragraphs lower down.

In the end, I shut down my Pi 2 and booted the 3B+ with the Pi 2 card, and used that to confirm that my 3B+'s µSD was readable. I deleted everything from the FAT part of the 3B+ card and installed fresh firmware from the Pi Github, then the latest RISC OS nightly.
Then I swapped cards and, finally, about five hours later, my Pi 3B+ is running again and the tablet never worked correctly on Linux.

What a colossal waste of time, really. And, sorry, but if things are going wrong in low level code that causes an instant freeze, don't expect me to want to get on top of this in a hurry. I mean, debugging that is going to be a nightmare.

Now, let's be fair, I do not imagine that there is any causality between the tablet crash and RISC OS failing to boot. I'm guessing something somehow got corrupted with one of the boot files and any powercut or self-inflicted restart (did I mention RISC OS is flakier than a bucket full of Strawberry Danish?) would have suffered the same result. But, whatever, I spent time sorting that out so I'm not inclined to want to do something that's liable to have me hammering the reset button.

In the background as I write this, I used HForm to reformat the drive, and SystemDisc to set up the FAT partition. It's now a bootable RISC OS drive, and I'm currently copying everything across to there's a full bootable snapshot of "today". Hopefully that'll make it simpler to get a machine running if such an incident happens again. It's not so useful having stuff backed up across ShareFS if one can't bring the system up, now, is it?

So that's where we stand. The driver is broken as it doesn't support all the buttons, but it works better than Linux. Hmm... Something seems wrong here, but I can't quite put my finger on it. ☺

No love lost for Trump

While I wouldn't put it past Trump to think like that, somebody might want to remind him about lunar dust. Still, it amused me that they went from "whoa, this is amazing!" to "big gold statue" in one breath.

Why Trump really wants the USA to set up on the Moon?

I had to watch a bunch of adverts to refine the image parameters to what I wanted. It's disturbing how many adverts there are for "vibe coding" and "emergent AI that can make websites and stuff easily". I come from a generation where coding was done by hand by people that (mostly) knew what they were doing. I thought it was bad enough when people would copy-paste from StackOverflow, but to automate the process? Who fixes it when it goes wrong like we all know it will? If, that is, it ever goes reliably right.
You'll notice there are some people using AI to make things, and they're doing alright. The thing is, they know what they are doing and can catch times when the response is nonsense or otherwise broken. Vibe coders? Well, if they knew what they were doing they'd be doing it and not trying to use an AI to cheat at it. To my mind, vibe coders are like students using an AI to do their homework.

Monday

It started well. I sat down to do my bead-painting (or diamond art if you prefer the odd translation from Chinese). I guess I was on a roll as I did about as much today as all of the previous days added together.
There is a definite reduction in 'quality' when going from the painting on the canvas to the beads placed on top. This is due in part to reducing it down to something like 30 colours, and also not doing too much dithering (because that sort of thing is liable to drive people crazy). So some areas that could be improved are instead flat areas of colour.
When you are doing it, it looks a bit bizarre. You go from cream to yellow to brown, there's a bit patch that's a mix of dark grey, midnight blue, and dark green. Green! So as you're working it, it looks kind of naff. It's only when you step back and look from a distance that everything comes together. The streetlight, that I did today, doesn't look that good close up. But from further away the details emerge. It's a rather peculiar effect, but I'm now that much closer to finishing. Well, I think I've maybe done about an eighth of it. But that's still a good number of beads.

My bead picture (inset is what it is supposed to look like).

After a few hours of that, several teas, and a few too many Maltesers (I treated myself to a small bag), my back was saying "okay, that's enough".

So I went up to where I felled the branches of the oak and started cutting the wood using a manual saw.

Hand cut wood.

Beyond this point, the wood was too thick to reasonably deal with using a manual saw. It's how I cut them when perched up in the tree and it nearly wore my arms out. An alternative would need to be tried.

So I plugged one 40m extension lead into another 40m extension lead into the extension lead that I use to charge my car (so it can cope with a 2kW load) and...

...had power at the property boundary up beyond the pond, which allowed me to warm up my chainsaw. The chainsaw that, frankly, I should have used in the first place, made light work of the wood.

Chainsaw cut wood.

I didn't want to leave the wood there. There are people out tending the fields right now and I don't trust somebody not to spot it and help themselves. My farmer-neighbour probably thinks I owe him since back in 2017 (or was it 2016?) he was out one afternoon sawing up one of our trees that had fallen. So mom and I took the wheeled trolley and collected the good logs, left the rest for him (see, we're not mean!). What's he going to do, complain that we stole the wood he was stealing from us? ☺

So I piled it up on the trolley and... really struggled to move the thing. After about twenty metres I had a brainwave. I tied a rope to the trolley handle and looped it into the back of my car. There is no fixation point on my car and being made of aluminium and plastic there's not much chance of bodging something together. So I held on tightly and accelerated slowly. And nearly tore my arm off. Twice.
It was then that I had to succumb to the weight of reality and toss half the wood out and do it in two journeys.
This isn't an unusual thing, in my mind there's a battle between what needs to be done and the least effort way of doing it. Sometimes it works. And sometimes it really doesn't.

With the wood in the wood shed and my back in the corner sulking, I took the rubbish and recycling up the lane. Collection is usually today (alternate Mondays) but it'll be deferred until tomorrow because it's a holiday today.

I'm starting an hour early tomorrow, so I'll probably do chips and chicken tenders and have an earlyish night. But for now I'm sitting in the barely existent shade of an oak whose leaves have only just started, happy that the weather has been so pleasant today.

But one thing I absolutely didn't want to do was anything with a computer, other than writing these words. Not after the chaos of yesterday.

Now this is all done, and the sun is starting to lose its strength, time to sit here for a moment and just enjoy the evening before the bitey-bugs come out to play.

Me as an animé (thanks to ChatGPT).

Sakura!

The pink cherry blossom is starting!

You know the funny thing? All that has happened this weekend, and it seems that sometimes the most reliable bit of tech around is the small cylindrical things you can buy for a few euros and put inside a clock. That's where we started, and that's where we shall end. The quiet usefulness of an AA battery, a thing that was standardised in 1947 and has been around in its alkaline form since the 1960s. I put them into my Walkman in the 1982, and I'm putting them into my clock forty four years later. Sometimes things don't need to be improved, they're perfectly good enough just the way they are.

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jgh, 7th April 2026, 18:01

If you ever get proper equipment :) call me on M7JGH.

jgh, 7th April 2026, 18:13

"I come from a generation where coding was done by hand by people that (mostly) knew what they were doing"    Similarly websites. There's local elections here in four weeks, and I got a targetted message sending me to the local Greens' website. Which has photos of each of the candidates displayed one inch tall.    I noticed the site struggling as it loaded, so examined the content. Yep. All the photos are 18"x24" 1.5M behemoths *displayed* one inch tall.

David Pilling, 8th April 2026, 02:12

"Sunspots have a profound impact on the 27 MHz range (11-meter band/Citizens Band),, with higher sunspot activity—particularly during the peak of the 11-year solar cycle—greatly enhancing long-distance communication (DX). During these peaks, the 27 MHz signals are reflected back to Earth by the ionosphere, allowing for communication over thousands of miles, whereas low activity results in limited, local-only range."    Once you could listen to US CB here in the UK.

Zerosquare, 8th April 2026, 20:40

The SDR receiver I have here (SDRPlay RSPduo) can tune down to 1 kHz, but it's definitely not cheap. If you have a USB sound card that supports sampling at 192 kHz, you could try connecting a small DCF77 ferrite antenna to the line input (or to the microphone input, as long as you add a DC blocking capacitor in series) ; it could work.    If your file was created by imaging the first partition only, the /dev/sdb1 is correct ; if the image spans the entire SD card, you want /dev/sdb instead. If that's not the issue, then it's likely that the card's partition table was corrupted.    I'm not a fan of AI-generated stuff, but that self-portrait looks rather nice.

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