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FYI! Last read at 03:16 on 2024/12/18.

Now we're cooking with gas!

It is okay. The battery ran low. But you can see what I mean about the "aaaaargh!" behaviour. ☺

In a nutshell, the main... driveshaft? I'm not sure what the correct terminology is. Anyway, there are two, for the rotors spin in opposite directions. The lower blades (and outer shaft) are fairly rigidly attached. The upper blades (inner shaft) are more flexible due to the balance bar.
The inner shaft used to have two little protruding lugs which fit into the blade holder. The blade holder could tilt on these, as required by the balance bar.
During the last flight, when the helicopter fell out of the sky, these lugs were wrenched off with the force of a thousand mammoths. Well, perhaps not quite, but the upper blades flapped around like dying fish on land and it was pretty obvious that we were now talking strictly two dimensions.

So given the eBay guy has yet to get in touch with me (will he ever?), I decided to do my own repair. I removed the inner shaft, and carefully drilled a thin hole into the place where the lug should be. I then pushed a core of thickish earth cable into this hole and clipped it to size. It is loose, I decided not to attempt to glue it in place. As the rotor spins, the bit of metal rests against the end of the rotor. In essence, there's nowhere for it to go so it holds the whole assembly in place quite nicely.

Here's a picture, the magenta showing how this little metal 'rod' fits in. There are two, actually, one on the other side too.

Diagram of repair.

And while we're here, take a giggle at:

An example of Chinglish.

 

Proof reading is a lost art

So I was sitting at work eyeballing the chapter in my PHP book about string manipulation. That's when, even in my dozy semi-zombie state, I discover two bits of nonsense:
PHP book error, on page 144.

And:

PHP book error, on page 148.

The guilty party is Sams "Teach yourself PHP in 24 hours", third edition.

 

The running chinese hat!

I was looking to cook up some green tea noodles, but as I was cooking into a recipe, I didn't want to just "cook until done". I needed to know how long they'd take. Now the thing with imported foreign food is the law usually specifies that a translation of the contents must be provided. The rest? Probably not.

So I find myself staring at this:

複雑な日本語のテキスト。

I use Google translate to look up the word for "minute" (I also have a little Japanese dictionary, but Google is simpler). It is a little chinese hat, with legs, running. Or 分.
I also know the numbers, when written in Japanese, are (from one to ten): 一 二 三 四 五 六 七 八 九 十.
Zero is zero.

So let's look at this again:

Complicated Japanese text, with some stuff now understood.
The rest of the text could be telling me health benefits, serving suggestions, how to correctly drain it... the usual sort of things written on the packet. But now I know 250 grams of the noodle should go into 2.5 litres of water for six minutes.
It would be nice to know what the rest of the packet says, but it isn't necessary to know that in order to cook the noodles.

 

And finally...

Thanks to everybody who sent me New Years' greetings.

 

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