Simon Arlott

My bedroom door swings open by itself at high speed, which may break the hinges if it's allowed to continue moving beyond the range the door can move freely. To stop it doing this I have some cheap doorstops but the door reaches such a high speed that these gradually move across the floor each time the door opens and generate a loud noise to remind me that they're doing this.

To really stop the door moving I've made an oversized doorstop with some unused fabric and a large quantity of sand. The fabric has a repeating pattern that I wanted to have join up around the circumference so it's in the shape of a cylinder with a diameter of about 22cm. The height is 23cm so that it has enough volume to accommodate a substantial 11kg of sand that shouldn't move easily.

I started with waxed canvas for the inner layer to contain the sand and used a laser cutter to create large circles on paper to cut the materials to size. With an industrial sewing machine on the slowest possible speed I sewed these together into a cylinder leaving a gap to funnel the sand into it.

Filling the fabric with sand through a small funnel hole was difficult because the sand doesn't flow well. I used a drill with a twisted welding rod to encourage the sand to go through the funnel by keeping it clear. With enough vibration from the erratic drill movement the sand moves into the open space of the funnel but it still took 2 hours to completely fill it with sand.

After hand sewing the hole left for the funnel closed I've enclosed the whole thing inside ripstop PVC in the same shape, sealing the sand inside behind two layers of fabric.

Using some patterned cotton warp satin fabric from Electromagnetic Field 2024 I've made a cover for the doorstop. There's a zip down the side and along the bottom to allow the sand-holding inner to be inserted. Making the pattern line up across the zip on the bottom required cutting two of the same circles to allow for some overlap to make seams.

The doorstop stops the door from moving but the impact is moving the doorstop slightly each time.

To stop the door from moving the doorstop I attached rubber to the bottom, but there was still a lot of noise from the impact so I've also put foam inside the cover to absorb it.

The doorstop now no longer moves on impact and the foam disperses a lot of the energy of the moving door so it's much quieter.

We went to the Cave of Caerbannog to defeat the many Killer Rabbits with the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch:

First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.

My brother has discovered that my guest bedroom has a view of Edinburgh Castle if you look through the window from high enough up.

The freezer was full of ice and the fridge made far too much noise so I've replaced them.

I've built an IKEA KALLAX storage unit for my many boxes of stuff and made a socket holder for the WiFi Access Point.

I've moved to a flat in Edinburgh. It's in the city centre near the trams, train station and with plenty of bus stops on many different routes.
I've got the internet connection set up,

adjusted the drawers in the kitchen,

and managed to get a TV signal indoors.
There are four bedrooms so I still have a guest room as well as study/computer room and a small dining area as part of the kitchen.

I've previously modified a radio clock that can't get a reliable time signal to use NTP via an ESP32-S3 but have recently improved it so that it waits for the time to be known before powering on the radio clock, which avoids the radio clock deciding that there's no time signal and reverting to manual mode. It now also automatically presses buttons to configure the radio clock to display 24 hour time.

After leaving the freezer door open all evening twice in hot weather in previous years I started working on a fridge/freezer door alarm to warn me if this happens again. My model of fridge/freezer happens to have convenient anchor points for this:

Using an ESP32-C6 I've made the "Eightfold Seal" device that supports two doors and a buzzer alarm with increasing frequency when the door is left open. It communicates using Zigbee allowing remote configuration and status information, as well as the possibility to cancel the current alarm if the door is intentionally left open.

When either door is open even slightly, this is detected and the buzzer will sound after a delay. Here are some videos with the buzzer configured for no delay to demonstrate the sensitivity:

I had to print a custom lower profile insert for the freezer door because there's a mat nearby and very little clearance below the door because of that:

Two months ago, I had a fibre internet connection installed by Openreach, which should be much more reliable than the existing copper line, but it didn't work properly. Within 2 minutes of first being connected it had lost communication entirely and then experienced intermittent packet loss throughout every day making it unusable. After 6 engineer appointments (and they didn't even show up for the last one) they continued to blame my router as being of the "incorrect type" and "overcomplicated".

They're supposed to have a service level guarantee of 48 hours but it took 47 days for them to fix this fault, which was caused by fibre cables being swapped somewhere in the Openreach network. Most of that time was spent convincing them that there is in fact a fault somewhere in the BT Wholesale or Openreach network that needs to be fixed. It would be nice if the monopoly provider of connectivity in the UK had better processes.

Alberto Balsam have brought out "new" 300ml bottles of shampoo that Tesco sell for almost the same price (£1) as the previous 350ml bottles, so you now pay the same price for less. They did the same thing 9 years ago so the commitment to reducing plastic use is a farce because the product now comes with just 60% of the shampoo it originally had.