John Graham-Cumming

The very beginning of Downton Abbey's first ever episode begins with a close up of a Morse code key being used to send a telegram that will announce the critical news of two deaths. If you're like me you instantly wondered what was being keyed.

Here's what I hear:
dah T dah dah dah O di dah di dit L dah dah dah O di dah dit R dah di dah dit C dah dah dit G di dah dit? R So, it appears that the message begins: "TO LORC GR". I assume that is meant to be "TO LORD GRANTHAM" and that the C is actually D and has been incorrectly transcribed.

Here's the audio as an MP3: Downton Abbey Series 1 Episode 1 Morse Code (first part).

Then over loud music it continues:
dah dit N dah dah dit G dit E di dah dit R di dah di dit L di dit I di di dit S dah T di dah …

Going out to lunch with friends, having a nice bottle of wine in a gastropub. Good way to spend the weekend. Then you decide the wine was really nice and you'd take a quick photograph of the label so you don't forget it.

And then you notice the text on the bottle of Domaine Tissier Sancerre Rouge 2009. Yes, it's Lorem Ipsum filler text!

Interestingly it's the version that's popular in English speaking countries and not in France. I called the vineyard in France who were only able to tell me that the bottle of wine was genuine, that there's very little of the 2009 red left, and that it's only available in the UK to the restaurant trade.

So, if you want to get a bottle as a souvenir or Christmas present for the designer in your family you'll have to persuade a restaurant to part with the bottle.

Yesterday, I complained about the lack of an eject button on an Apple USB DVD drive. That design philosophy problem goes much deeper than just a single drive. It pervades Apple products, and, although I love them, it drives me spare!

If I could say one thing to Jonny Ive it would be: "In designing to make the every day use of Apple's products a wonderful experience you're missing the moment when your users need you most. It's when everything goes wrong that the user needs the maximum help. It's in those moments (of despair) that a well designed product will surprise and delight the user."

The DVD drive is an example of the opposite. When it's working it's lovely to look at, but when it goes wrong it's as enigmatic as the 2001 monolith.

The mystical incantations necessary to remove the DVD from the drive (such as the hold down the mouse button while rebooting your machine) have to be passed on from the Apple elders in secret whispers (or found…

So you've got a DVD stuck in the external USB SuperDrive that connects to the MacBook Air? And you've tried hitting the magic Eject button on the keyboard to no avail?

And you've tried drutil tray eject at the command-line? And you've tried booting with Option held down and clicking eject? And you've tried plugging the drive into other machines (Macs, Windows PCs, Linux machines) to no avail?

What do you do?

Clearly you hit the physical eject button, right? Every DVD drive has one of those. On the SuperDrive you first look for it on the front:

Hmm. Nothing there. Perhaps it's one of those pinhole things on the back.

Or on one side:

Or, heart in hand, the other side:

I know, I know. Jonny Ive hid it on the bottom out of sight, right? It's so obvious now. Put a pinhole on the bottom where it will only be seen when needed. Form and functionality in one. Sleek lines when in use. An accessible emergency button when needed. Genius.

Nope. But, phew, at least …

A couple of weeks ago I plugged in my BBC Micro Model B and it went up in a plume of smoke.

Unfortunately, the 30 year old machine had undergone one of the most common failures. A capacitor that had been sitting there all these years failed, burst open, emitted smoke and leaked all over the circuit board.

Today, I repaired the damage. This blog post is for anyone who faces the same thing.

To fix the damage I replaced three capacitors that are likely to die over time (including the one that had burst) using a kit costing £2.70 from this site and a copy of the BBC Microcomputer Service Manual.

The kit has one electrolytic capacitor (which is polarized and has to be inserted the right way round) and two ordinary capacitors which can be inserted in any way. The three capacitors to be changed are marked C1, C2 and C9 on the circuit board. On my machine it was C2 that had failed.

The first step is to remove the power supply from its case. This is carefully described in the service man…

Some time ago I saw some GE Color Effects G-35 Christmas lights and was fascinated by the combination of color patterns that they were capable of and the fact that they only had three wires. That meant that something digital was going on.

Happily, a chap called Robert Quattlebaum did the hard work last year of hacking these lights to reveal that they are linked by a simple self-clocked serial protocol that can easily be driven by a microcontroller. That blog post gives the full details of the protocol.

Each lamp can be set to a specific brightness and an RGB color (4 bits per color). And the protocol is clocked at 30µs per bit so it's possible to refresh the entire 50 LED string at a rate of 24Hz. Perfect for hacking fun.

So I got a set and plugged them in just once (still in their packaging) to check that they worked. Here's a video of the lights getting their one real work out before the soldering iron got to them.



The first thing I did was remove the lovely plastic blu…

So, after yesterday's post about The Demon Machine I decided it would be fun to play around with the BBC Micro Model B and so I plugged it in and powered up. The familiar two-tone boot sound played and the machine was on.

About 15 minutes after power up there was a fizzing, popping sound from the computer and I ran to cut the power. Too late! A plume of blue/grey acrid smoke poured out of the left hand side of the machine right by the power supply.

I cut the power and moved the machine away from anything that might burn quickly and waited for the smoke to stop. It quickly dispersed and so I did the only thing a self respecting software engineer would do... I decided to turn it back on again.

But not without opening the power supply so I could take a look inside while it was running. Here's the PSU open after the fire:

Warning. I don't recommend that you do this sort of thing yourself. There are high voltages there, plus a bunch of electrolytic capacitors that can do …