I’d always fancied owning a Jaaaag. I was getting older, I was now a manager, my Mazda6 daily was about to expire expensively and so I wandered over to Autotrader…. There I found a 6 year old black XF with a 5 litre V8 going for £20k. It called to me. With the Stupid Car and my wife’s Kia Picanto it would bring the average number of cyliners per car in the family to 6.
In chasing down the issues with my car, I want to plumb in a fuel pressure sensor. The easy way to do this is to add a 10mm brass tee piece in the hose that goes to the engine from the fuel pump, so off to Amazon I go and buy a couple for less than £6. I get it all plumbed in and boot the car so that the system pressurises.
As soon as you put a machine on the internet, people will start poking it for weaknesses. This is mainly done by people running scripts they got from elsewhere. It’s the equivalent of walking down a row of parked cars and trying the handles to see if any are unlocked. Most servers will just respond with a 404 Not Found error and on they walk to the next server. However, I thought I’d amuse myself with this
I have a menagerie of tech at home. Connectivity ISP Andrews & Arnold, who else? Not the cheapest, but a very high quality service. I have an embarrassing number of routable IPv4 addresses. Heracles The router. A GL-iNet Brume running a self built flavour of OpenWRT. My Wireguard endpoint for any VPN shenanigans. It got it’s name as it replaced my previous router that was called Cerberus. Gru, Bob, Dave, Kevin, Stuart A collection of GL-iNet Velica They were on offer on Amazon (I think £60 a pair) so I put OpenWRT on them and set up a mesh WiFi for the house.
As so many of my posts will be about my car, I thought I’d better write something about it. It is a Fisher Fury kit car, with a 4.3L V8 engine. Background I used to have a Lotus Elise which was a lot of fun (even though I crashed it due to running out of talent). However I found it frustrating to own. Although I’m a software engineer, I find software unsatisfying as it’s ephemeral.
If anyone other than me is subbed to the RSS feed, I’m tweaking a lot of things still as I learn Hugo and that is causing all the previous posts to get re-posted. Sorry about that.
I moved all of this to Hugo and self hosting yesterday from https://prose.sh. I love the idea of what https://pico.sh is doing. All driven through ssh/rsync, simple hosting of blogs and static pages, there is a lot to like about it. It does tick a lot of boxes for my inner geek. However….. There were two papercuts with prose.sh that grinded my gears. No subdirectories, so all files (posts & images) ended up in one directory.
Many moons ago I fitted a set of Dallas DS18B20 temperature sensors in the engine bay as I didn’t trust the radiator. I put one in the water hose from the engine to the radiator, another in the hose from the radiator back to the engine. For air temps I put one in the air flow either side of the raditor. To measure this all, I buried a Raspberry Pi behind the dash and came up with a funky set of three relays so the Pi could shut itself down safely when I killed the power.
My car now takes about 48 litres of fuel. I noticed though that the gauge was not going down. Given it is not a car that sips petrol I found this hard to believe. Fuel level sensing is done by the fuel tank sender. It has a float on an arm that moves up and down with the fuel level and that in turn moves a variable resistor. First Hypothesis - Gauge is wrong I fitted a spiyda Gauge Wizard when I fitted the tank as the sender and the gauge were definitely not a matched pair.
I had a thought in the shower this morning that I do my best thinking there. I then thought about why I think best there and came to the conclusion that it was because I didn’t have my phone to distract me. It’s too easy to grab my phone and fiddle with it to occupy my mind. I don’t switch off and just let my mind wander. So to this end, I’m going to purge my phone of all consumption apps i.