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Showing posts from May, 2020

Rejuvenating my old bike

In the 1960s, 70s & 80s, I did a lot of touring cycling in the UK, Ireland and France. Typically 50 hilly miles a day. I put together a nice Mercian frame and decent parts to make an effective touring machine. As I lived in Cheltenham, which is fairly flat and prone to cycle theft, I also assembled a shopping/commuting machine with just 5 gears, straight handlebars, a basket and a powerful horn. The mudguards didn't match partly to save me buying a new set and also to uglify the machine and make it less likely to catch the eye of a thief. Recently I moved to Stroud, a town that has hardly any flat roads at all - and neither does much of the surrounding countryside. I brought my old Mercian with me and did some basic maintenance to deal with it being almost entirely unused for 35 years. As the washer in the pump had perished, I ordered one through Amazon and also 2 inner tubes. Being used to an 18" pump, I was pretty dubious about the 34cm Draper pump but it was ver...

Power to the JBL Link 10

A couple of months ago I bought a JBL Link 10 "smart speaker". It worked fine with a couple of niggles: Every few days, it would mute itself. You could tell it was still alive by the way the lights flashed for the appropriated length of time when you asked Google something. A full power cycle was needed to get it to speak again If I unplugged it to use it as a "radio" in the bathroom, it shut down after 15-30 minutes I finally got a clue when it it was providing the sound for a YouTube video over Bluetooth and it muted itself while I was "watching". This coincided with the sound of my central heating system shutting down for the night.  So I suspected a power surge issue. Looking at the back of the speaker, I noticed that the battery indicator had just one flashing light rather than the 5 available. Now, JBL don't supply a mains charger, but they do supply a micro-USB cable which I didn't have a convenient socket for. What I did have was...