wrm
Fun with TDI plumbing
Is there an echo here?
The one in front was my brother’s car, when he decided to sell it I persuaded my boss to buy it for me. Nice car. Leather interior, just over 300 000 km on the odo. Goes not unlike the proverbial raped ape.
The one at the back belonged to a friend of my brother’s, when she decided to sell it I pounced. Cloth interior (which Tanya prefers), about 380 000 km on the odo, and for some reason doesn’t haul ass as nicely as my one does.
Both are 1.9 TDI, my one’s chassis is 12111 later but my engine is 45 earlier. Chances are they were on the same transport from Wolfsburg to South Africa.
These cars get around eighteen kilos on the litre, or a thousand kilos on a tank, whichever way you slice it that’s pretty damn good.
When I bought #2 I took it down to Barons in Claremont, got them to do the 5 gazillion point check. Mostly because I wanted to make sure the timing belt is OK but you know, it’s a good thing to get an expert under the hood, make sure there are no latent problems.
Yea right.
Fast forward a couple of months and Tanya complains that some dinky little car carrying four farmers and a pig passed her going up Constantia hill, and could I please Do Something.
So I googled it. And then I had a look.
Hmmm. That doesn’t look kosher. Lemme zoom in a bit.
That’s what almost 400 000 km’s worth of wear and tear looks like. All the vacuum is escaping, leaving nothing for the N75 boost control solenoid, which means you’re now driving a non-turbo diesel.
So new pipe was acquired (from Nesco) and installed and things are back they way they were. Not great, but adequate.
I sure hope they paid more attention to the state of the timing belt.
New Year’s Resolutions, work in progress
One Rand-Lover, filled to the brim with builder’s rubble. This is from back when we re-did Tamsyn’s bathroom. Which I didn’t blog about — my bad.
Anyway. I’ll just comment that the ride’s a lot softer with some weight in the back. Slower, but softer.
Uptime
[root@mort ~]# uname -a Linux mort 2.6.6 #1 Mon May 31 12:28:13 SAST 2004 i686 unknown [root@mort ~]# uptime 08:21:51 up 900 days, 2:10, 2 users, load average: 0.21, 0.08, 0.03 [root@mort ~]#
Try that with Windows.
But they’re moving the datacentre today so that’s as high as it’s going to get for the next couple of years.
Old friends, now obsolete
Ah yes, New Years’ resolutions. Gotta love ’em.
However, I have too much stuff. There. I said it. I mean, I firmly believe in the William Morris quote, however, times have changed.
This collection of Elektor magazines I grew up with — obsolete.
A collection of GE Ham News that someone spent money on to have nicely bound — obsolete.
Byte magazines? Obsolete.
Creative Computing? Not quite yet obsolete.
And even if I can’t find it online, scanning and dumping* is better than storing the originals until my container is auctioned off one day.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m still keeping mountains of stuff. Just not… this stuff.
* Yes, Jason doesn’t like dumping. I’m not dumping anything that’s even slightly rare, so chill.
Boat Anchor
Well, almost. In Ham Speak, a boat anchor is an old, large, probably obsolete piece of radio equipment. I have more than one.
However:
The Heathkit HW-32 only qualifies if you have a tiny boat. At about 30cm wide and 15cm high, it’s actually quite small for a 14 valve transceiver rated for 200W PEP output. OK, it only does this on a single band, 20m in this case (the HW-12 and HW-22 covers 80m and 40m respectively).
Frequency coverage is 14.2 to 14.35 MHz, for mobile SSB operation. There’s no provision for CW and no coverage of the CW portion of the band.
At 5 1/2 kilos, it’s also too light to be a boat anchor — but that’s because it doesn’t have a built-in power supply. You need to supply 800V DC, 250V DC, and -130V DC bias, as well as 12V for the filaments.
We’ve come a long long way in 50 years.
Tried and tested
I made this game stew for the second time, and it was again great.
The original is from the Weg magazine and is in Afrikaans.
• 40 g dried mushrooms
• ½ cup warm stock
• 1 kg meat in 4 cm cubes. I used gemsbok.
• ½ cup flour
• 2 onions
• garlic
• 2 tablespoons brown sugar
• 2 cups stout (I used Guinness the first time and homebrew the second)
• 1 tin cherry tomatoes, drained (reserve sauce)
• 2 tablespoons Worcester
• 2 tablespoons soy
• 4 sprigs thyme
Chop the dried mushrooms and soak in hot water or stock (I added the stock powder later). Do this before prepping the meat and onions.
Coat meat with flour and brown in oil (I skipped the flour, it makes a mess and I am yet to be convinced). Keep meat warm.
Brown onion and garlic. Add sugar, add meat, fry for five minutes (I added the stock powder to the onion mix with the sugar)
Add beer, tomatoes, Worcester, soy, thyme, mushrooms.
Cook for an hour or so. Add the tomato sauce if it looks dry.
Serve with rice.
I didn’t bother with Weg’s baby onions at the end, but it sounds like a good idea.