A couple of times a year I need a car with a tow bar, for things like the two-weeks-away medieval festival I go to, or taking things to the dump. Hiring a vehicle for these things would work out to be a thousand dollars a year or so, which isn’t viable.

Since owning the Pulsar I’ve wanted a tow bar on it, and after a fairly tight pack for festival this year I was determined to get one to be able to tow a trailer. I like the look of my slightly-racier-than-stock turbocharged ST-S model, and didn’t want a big honking cut out of the bumper like I’ve seen on some others. After shopping around a lot, I couldn’t find enough information on what this model required, as Hayman Reese (the main manufacturer really left in Australia) and some others said their kits were “All models”. A local company refused to even bring one in as they would be stuck with it if I didn’t want the required modifications.

Wednesday/Thursday

• Bought a tow bar for my Pulsar
• delivered in 24 hours flat
• missing a part of the loom, was delivered in 2 hours!
• installed the wiring without incident - ignored the hole-cutting instruction, routed the wire sensibly.
• learnt to run a tap through painted holes
• screwed up a high tensile (ish) bolt, fixed it with a file

Thursday

• Learn to double check Google Maps’s public transport instructions. Ended up in stones corner instead of Windsor. Ugh.
• Got my car serviced. They washed it (great!) but also made it smell like cigarettes (ugh!)

Friday

• Started fitting tow bar, got bumper bar off, cut hole in rear panel of chassis rail, holes don’t QUITE line up. 🙁

Saturday

• Finished installing the tow bar!
• Got confirmation that expanding the holes is fine, did so.
• Cut second hole with my angle grinder - done in under a minute - compared to an hour of careful messing around with the dremel the first time.
• Bolted it all together rather easily, carefully cut the lower part of the bar. The supplied dimensions were a little excitable, but would have done.
• Was a great feeling to do it myself 🙂

Work

• Found out I’m going to AusCERT 2016 😀

… but for the first time in nearly a decade, I don’t know of any broken links on this site. Woo!

Creations

• Created https://travelling.boryssnorc.com using Hugo
• Created https://sca.yaleman.org using Hugo
• Completed transfer of https://threegoldbees.com to Hugo
• Started work on the Octobag
• Mostly completed the Camp Wardrobe (part 1, part 2)

Stuff

• Bought some ridiculously cheap shelves and put them in the sewing room and the office. I wouldn’t recommend the 4x2 clever cube shelves from Bunnings unless you despise whoever’s going to use them, or you only need them for ridiculously light things. I’m going to nail/glue some pre-painted particle board to the back of these in a few months, just because I’m expecting them to warp.
• Bought a Ryobi shop vacuum, finally
• Set up the sewing room
• Sewing machine
• Bought some lovely scissors
• Helped Mary remove some stumps from her yard on Sunday. Wow my back hurts, I woke up 1am Monday with arms that were on a special kind of fire.
• Went to IKEA for a work light, bought a step ladder. It may sound ridiculous, me (6’9" tall) owning a step ladder, but they’re super-useful for at-roof-level-need-to-be-stable things.

People

• Went to the Buffalo Bar for Rachel’s birthday. Amazing food, great drink, lovely atmosphere until the band turned up. My ears still hurt.

Work

Can’t think of anything in particular I achieved this week (that I can write about).

I have two routers connected over the internet by an EoIP tunnel. It’s a fairly simple network design, but I wanted to learn how to configure Mikrotik’s OSPF implementation between the two sites.

<th>

Router 2

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Network: 10.1.0.0/16 EoIP interface IP: 192.168.0.2/24

Add these things to ~/.ssh/config and you’ll get magic powers.

Put your keys in ~/.ssh/ and name them by the hostname you ssh to, and you’ll automagically add them to your config without having to edit it each time. Change the directory to whatever, if you’re picky.

Login to your splunk boxes as bob, and your web servers on port 2280 as bob_web. Wildcards are great, and you can use “Host *” for everything.

I was asked to help with some math homework tonight, and the question was as follows:

Between 1pm and 2pm the minute hand will cross the hour hand, at what time will they cross?

Working it out

Another week, more parts have arrived for the coffee machine!

To save messing around with soldering and cutting more weird little cables I got myself an eBay knockoff of a RaspberryPi Prototyping Board, which exposes most of the pins I need as screw terminals. Once I get to the more permanent stage I can solder things to the included field.

After not receiving the MAX31855 breakout I tried for before xmas, I bought a MAX31865 breakout board from PlayingWithFusion.com. A neat, tiny little board which should get me some fine resolution temperature sensing!

I bought a new vacuum cleaner recently - the Miele Complete C3 Cat&Dog. A great unit, with a charcoal filter to save me from puppy smells when vacuuming. It also comes with a “Large Turbobrush”, model STB 205-3 which is quite handy for picking up fur. Today I thoughtlessly sucked up the control cord and half the runs-along-the-bottom cord for my vertical blinds (the dogs trashed them months ago).

Inhaled the cordage

I got 90% of the cord out of the brush wheel, but some of it had been sucked into the part that actually provides the power to the brush. I tried jiggling things back and forth, but nothing would budge. Time to disassemble!

I’m fairly sure I could respond to 80% of my incident reports with a summarised version of this, and it’s what I waste most of my time on.

The main problem with most people’s troubleshooting is that they don’t start by actually clarifying what’s wrong. Who, What, Where and When generally gives you a lot of information on how to find the Why.