Tom's Blog

Notes on brazing in the UK

IntroductionBrazing is great for bicycle frame and rack building. It's complementary to welding. As a process it's fairly straightforward, like soldering at a higher temperature. The hard bit is finding suppliers for the consumables. Heat SourcesOxygen fuel torchesAdvantagesCan be used for a variety of

diy

Decorating

Order of operationsFinish installing trim and fillingStart filling wallsPaint trimMask trim and finish painting wallsPainting and PaintsDulux Easycare Washable & Tough Matt Emulsion Paint - really good coverage, a brilliant white. Dulex Matt Emulsion Pure Brilliant White thin, poor opacity, slightly yellow compared with

engineering

Engineering Management resource

List of management resources, and my thoughts about them.

When the party stops

The last song For years I'd woken up hungover, every cell in my body pickled, thinking it must be doing some damage. I'd push it to the back of my mind as paranoia. Around spring 2018 I developed a faint dull pain in my

Mac's Just Work

Trackpoint mouse speed is too slow and can't be increased even after editing conf settingsScreen snapping, even with Amethyst doesn't work nearly as easily or smootly as in Gnome3Keyboard layout is global rather than per keyboard, even more annoyingly on first boot it reverts

Future Trends

A colleague shared Tech in 2020: standing on the shoulders of giants with me which I thought was interesting read and really nailed how a lot of Tech companies are really existing businesses/sectors expanding where they operate. It presents regulation as the new

sleep

Have you tried X to fix your sleep Since it comes up frequently and everyone has their helpful suggestions. Cutting out coffee? Yes, I stopped drinking coffee for over a month. Initially I slept more, I didn't get any withdrawal headaches. But after the

Lean-to

This was a short building project. Partly because I had more big heavy cast iron tools than could fit in my shed and partly because my folks had been talking

About this blog

Hosting This is a blog hosted using an ElasticHosts container which is a dynamic scaling virtual machine that bills on the clock tick. Tech It uses Ghost, which I prefer over Wordpress because of its architecture. It uses JavaScript to dynamically create pages which

The exploded video player

I was involved with a group called the Curiosity Collective in Ipswich that I found through trying to setup a Hackspace there. An amazing group of people who were bright, welcoming, really interesting, and a high point of my time there. The concept behind

Spotify, Netflix and the illusion of choice

Spotify, Netflix and many other places give the illusion of endless choice. My impression is it mirrors the development of TV and other media. In the UK we used to have one channel, BBC; people would meet at their friends house to watch David

Melancholy

This is a playlist of music that I listen to when I'm feeling melancholic. For a long time I would call these playlists "untitled playlist" or more prophetic "It will have a name". I like the name "Melancholy"

Compiling and Installing FreeCAD

Long story short I decided to use an older precompiled binary (0.15) rather than the current dev version (0.18) because I wanted to move on with the design of my workbench-toolbox. If there's a feature I really want to use such as

Recumbent bike

When I was in my final year of 6th Form which is 18 years old. I designed and built a recumbent bicycle. From a hands on perspective I learnt how to weld and form wood using a vacuum press bag. On the design side

Bluetooth Heart Monitor

For my 3rd Year (2010/11) project I developed a Bluetooth Heart Monitor. This was when wearables were just starting. Polar had announced they would be releasing a wearable Bluetooth chest strap monitor in 2011. The technology was there but it had yet to