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Fairphone

I like my phones and I’ve always been an Android fan boy. I did spend a bit of time being an Apple fan boy with an iPhone, iPad, Macbook Pro, Mac mini – all that sort of stuff. But then I had a fight with Apple about a keyboard and got kinda sick of the restrictiveness of the Apple ecosystem so switched to Android – never really looked back.

Many Android phones have passed through my ownership and the thing that’s always annoyed me about all phones in general is that in the race for smaller and lighter phones they just became practically impossible to repair. If you’ve read any of the posts on this blog then you’ll know I’m well into repairing stuff. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Quite a while ago I dropped my Pixel 6 Pro and cracked the glass case on the back. Everything worked fine so I wasn’t too bothered. But then on occasions as I put my hand into my pocket to retrieve my phone the shattered bits of glass would stick in my finger and draw blood. This annoyed me. So out came a tube of super glue and I put some super glue over the cracked glass and it smoothed it all off and held it together. Unfortunately during this repair some of the glue ran into the USB C charging port which meant I could no longer charge it with a cable. This wasn’t a massively massive problem as I had a wireless charger. It was slow and I had to remember to take the charger with me when I was away for a day or two. Still wasn’t a major problem. Until I reworked my whole home automation type stuff and the IP address for my garage door controller and office heater changed which meant I had to change some stuff in my Android home automation app that I’d written. Made the changes, rebuilt the app and then realised that I couldn’t install it on my phone as the USB C connector was knackered. This was a problem. A big one.

For a while I switched to my Mother’s old Pixel 3A that had a working charging port and I could update my software. All was going well but the camera was a bit annoying. I’d take a picture of something, hear the click and assume it was done only to find the picture took a second or two to take and I’d pointed the camera away from the subject and ended up with several pictures of my crotch.

This would not do.

On my travels across the internet I found a device called the Fairphone. Pretty popular in Europe, less so in the UK. There are many great features about this phone. It’s not some crazy power hungry power user top spec processor so the battery would last for a couple of days without charging. Three or four if you’re careful with it. It’s also made with lots of recycled parts and best of all it’s built to be repaired.

See those two screws on the back…

If I was to crack the screen it would cost me £80 to buy a new one and I could replace it myself without suction cups and heat guns and glue guns and all that nonsense. If I was to pour super glue into the USB C port it would cost me £8 to buy a new one and repair it myself. Same goes for the battery…replaceable, camera lenses…replaceable. All sorts of stuff can be fixed on it, with a screwdriver.

Wonderfully happy with my purchase. The average mobile phone lasts for 2.5yrs before ahem it’s ready for recycling which generally means it ends up in landfill. I’m aiming for 5yrs before replacing this fella. It just works. Oh, and the added bonus it was only £450 – which is better than the £950 I was looking at for a Pixel 10 Pro – which is utterly unrepairable.

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Parquet Flooring

A long long time ago I found myself with a big gap in my parquet flooring due to some building works…yeah, the extension that I’m still having to do jobs on five years later. Anyway, I just came across some old photos of the work and realised I never did a blog post about it.

This job was quite an epic.

Had to put down a DPC kind of paint job to protect from damp.

I didn’t have a bunch of oak parquet floor blocks lying around in my shed so I had to buy some. Fortunately some dude down in deepest darkest Cheshire had lifted a bunch of the up from a school floor and was selling them on eBay. Can’t remember what I bought them for but it wasn’t too bad.

Then I had to clean them all up and remove the old bitumen from the bottom of them and get ready for laying them. Once I’d created a relatively flat surface to lay them on I put down a layer of my own fresh bitumen and got cracking.

It was actually pretty good fun. Once I’d got the hang of the pattern and the angles they all went down pretty easily. You can see from the picture above that they weren’t exactly perfect joins but they were close enough and having rubbed in some oak sawdust from cutting them to shape and then varnishing them all it looked pretty bob on.

You’d never guess it wasn’t always like that

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433MHz transmitter

Every morning and every night I have to press a button on the remote control to open/close the blinds in my kitchen. In my constant efforts to have to do less things each day I feel the need to remove these two things.

Enter stage left a 433MHz transmitter that can be connected to [ you guessed it ] a Raspberry Pi and also my Flipper Zero to sniff the signal to send.

Sniffing the signal was the easy bit. I now have the hex code, and therefore the binary signal, to send the blinds up and down. Unfortunately it’s proving a bit tricky to get my Pi and transmitter to send a matching signal.

The Flipper Zero shows that it is receiving a radio transmission but it just doesn’t decode it correctly. It’s either that I don’t have the correct high/low timings for the signals…or that when I first hooked up the transmitter I attached the 5v line to the data input for the transmitter. Oooops.

I’ll keep beavering away and keep you, my dear single reader with the long hair and a talent for music, informed.

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Wordle

Wordle, you are truly a bastard

How many words are there in the english language that end with “ound” – quite a bloody few it would seem!

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Honey Fungus

Years ago I went on a foraging course in the Lake District. Slept in a sleeping bag in a hammock beneath a tarpaulin strung between two trees. All was going well until I fell out of the hammock and then whilst stuck in my sleeping bag rolled down the hill. Brandy may have been involved.

Anyway, whilst there we ate mushrooms, pigeons, deer and other stuff. Recently I was wandering through the woods with ze hound when I came across some mushrooms.

Google Lens identified them as Honey Fungus which are generally edible.

I came back the next day with a bag and picked some of them. Got them home and double checked Google’s identification with a proper book written by a proper mushroom dude who knows what he’s talking about.

It was an exact match. So I cooked it up and ate it.

I didn’t die [ obv. ] but it didn’t exactly taste brilliant. You could eat it if you were starving in the woods but I’m guessing there’s a good reason they don’t stock Honey Fungus mushrooms on the shelves of our supermarket. I’ll probably try it again, with a little garlic and see how things improve. Also, when I ate it I boiled it first which I wouldn’t normally do with mushrooms but various websites suggested it.

You’ll notice I keep talking about it in the singular – I only ate one in the hope of mitigating any stomach cramp, food poisoning, painful death scenarios.

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Pironman5

People who know me will know I likes me a bit of a Raspberry Pi. I use them everywhere to do everything from raising chicken coops, playing Image Fight, summoning cups of tea and controlling various parts of my house. If there was an option to fix something with a nail and a bit of string, or to build an ARP sniffing raspberry pi housed in a 3d printed weatherproof box running off a solar panel then I’d be out shopping at 3dprintersandsolarpanels.com

Anyway, I noticed that one of my Pi’s constantly had the cooling fan running. Since it was beside me on my desk in the office the noise started to piss me off. So I looked into all the /boot/firmware/config.txt type stuff and set it all up. Still the same. I started digging around all the proc files and everything seemed to be setup as it should. Still the fan span. So I thought “maybe it’s a dodgy fan”. I could get a new one….or….or… I had just been reading about a beautiful new Pi case with a processor fan, two more RGB fans, some LED’s built in to light it all up and a little tiny screen that shows the IP address, disk space, temperature…all that sort of gubbins. It was [ as you may have guessed ] marketed as a Pironman5.

It came in many pieces.

I took my time building it. Enjoying every moment. Trying to build it perfectly. The perspex sheets that made up the case came covered in brown sticky paper. As I peeled it off some of it got left behind around the place where “Pironman5” had been printed. I could have used a bit of rubbing alcohol to remove it. I could have used some blu-tack. I probably could have just rubbed it off with my finger, but noooooooo, nooooooo I had a screwdriver in my hand. “I’ll be gentle” I thought. I’m an idiot. Scratched the beejayzuz out of it. Oh well.

Herdy cup added for scale

It all worked perfectly after building it. Only annoying bit is that the processor fan still spins constantly. Pretty sure there is a hardware fault on the board where the FAN PWM is going to GND somewhere. However, it’s now in a case which makes it quieter and it’s now no longer on my desk….it isn’t even in my office so it doesn’t bother me at all. It’s taken over the duties of my tea summoner and my spotify connector so it’s taken two pi’s off my network and I suspect it will become my git server.

In summary, buy a Pironman5 for your Raspberry Pi 5 – they’re ace. Don’t scratch off the brown paper with a screwdriver – that’s just folly. I’ll be buying another one to house my baker.

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Manchester September

Another smashing afternoon out with Charlie and Ellie. We drank in Afflecks, we ate in My Thai and I managed to get the train home again without too much drama. Even managed a cheeky mid afternoon “nightcap” in The Windmill on the way home.

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Pickle House

During lockdown we got adopted by a cat. Pickle, AKA Moses, we found his owners and returned him but he kept coming back, probably because Emma kept feeding him. Eventually we started letting him come into the house but he really is a smelly cat and it was sometimes a bit unpleasant. I’m not 100% sure if it was him or our actual cat Willow that would poo in the house so we ended up kicking them both out. This is fine in the Summer but I always felt a bit sorry for him in the Winter.

So I decided to build him a house.

I had to buy some 2×1 wood to make the stud walls but all the other materials were leftovers from building my workshop.

I gave it a test run with Violet to make sure it was big enough.

Then I gave it a test run with Jason to be doubly sure. Since all 6’3 of Jason can make it in there I’m pretty sure a cat will be comfortable

It took two of us to carry it down the garden as it weighs an absolute tonne. It’s mounted on wheels to move it around a bit. It’s not 100% finished as the roof is just resting on the top but it’s pretty heavy so will survive all but the strongest of storms. The roof covering is a bit rubbish but I’ll make improvements over time.

It took Pickle about 5 minutes to move in after Emma placed some cat treats in there. The dog is also quite interested but hopefully she can’t fit through the hole. Moderately proud of myself.

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Cambridge 2025

The annual reunion/pilgrimage/drinking-session took place in Cambridge on the 12/13/14 of Cambridge depending on when you arrived and when you left. The sensible folk arrived on Friday and left on Sunday. Just the crazies Scouse and Mikey did all 3 days.

After a relatively quiet night out on Friday, ahem, Aggy and I decided a Saturday morning of Voi scooter fun was necessary

We had a few mini quests. To go take a look at the place of my first proper employment [ Philips/Simoco ] and after much head scratching and thinking “I’m sure it was around here somewhere” comments – we found it. Or rather, we found where it used to be before it got knocked down and had a housing estate built on it.

Then we went in search of the Green Man – found it – and then remembered it was called the Green Dragon – or to be honest it may be the other way around.

After scooting we went to the pub.

Obviously we started the day at The Prince Regent and had a few warm up drinks there. We then headed off to play Shuffle Board and Beer Pong at some Boom Bar place in Cambridge. Hands up I fully expected it to be shit, however we all had quite a lovely time.

From left : Me, Aggy, Lofty, Scouse, Gordy, Caspell, Alvie, Mikey and Photobomber.

We tend to visit Thaikun each year and try to soak up the beer with Thai food. This time we [ or maybe just “i” ] was/were absolutely hammered.

It was not a great idea giving us a “serve” yourself beer thing

It got messy. Clothes were removed. Beer was spilled. Videos were made. Not entirely sure we’ll be allowed back next year. Should have left a much bigger tip.

It all gets a little blurry after this but we went to Sainsbury’s which was like an episode of Supermarket Sweep and I woke up with all kinds of random crap in my bag and then we finished the night at The Butter Bar in Christ’s College which since we were all guests there was very much like our own little Gentlemen’s Drinking Club.

Wake. Breakfast. Voi to car. Charge car in Bar Hill Tesla and then shoot up to visit Mr Howarth before finally making it home on the morning of the Monday – definitely in need of some rest.

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Shadow Board

My newly built workshop was beginning to look a bit of a mess with tools strewn hither and thither. My good friend Jason made a “shadow board” in his garage and so I thought I’d do the same with some left over OSB.

You should always start with a hammer
The chisel mounting thing didn’t quite work out, as you’ll see in the next picture.
I had to use a magnetic strip to hold the chisels up. Worked out alright though.

So far so good. But I still had a crap load of Ryobi tools scattered around the workshop. My first thought was to put up another piece of OSB and then have little shelves for the tools to sit on. This didn’t feel like a great idea though, the shelves may get knocked and then an expensive bit of kit falls on to a concrete floor and breaks. I realised I couldn’t be the first person to be suffering from this problem so I did some googling and found these Ryobi-green plastic wall mounts that you screw in and mount your tools on the fake battery connector shape thing that protrudes from the mount.

Genius

I only ordered 5 as a bit of a test, but they’re great. I’ll be ordering 5 more….hmmmm, maybe 10.

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How the mighty have fallen

Not so long ago I was driving around in a big ass Porsche. Skiing in the French Alps. Renting private villas in the Summer and generally having more money than I knew what to do with.

Now.

Now look at me.

Can’t even afford to buy real Vimto!

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I’m an angel

Oli and I went to Winstanley College to sign him up for his A-Levels. After we’d done all that picking subjects and listening to the head teacher’s speech nonsense we headed back to the car. On the way to the car we found this…

Oli absolutely refused to let me take a picture with him on it…pussy. So I had to get him to take one of me. Not sure why I felt the need to cross my arms though. Felt kinda angelic to do so.

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Wake On LAN

For a long time I’ve wanted to be able to send a “magic packet” from my laptop to my desktop in order to power on my desktop machine remotely. Unfortunately my old ass motherboard didn’t support it which was always a source of frustration.

my old ass dusty motherboard

Then I bought a new Raspberry Pi 5 because they released a new version which had 16G RAM which I desperately needed to build some software. When I bought the Pi I also bought an NVME HAT and a new 1TB NVME. Unfortunately something wasn’t working but I wasn’t sure what was causing the error. So I went ahead and bought a new NVME from Crucial via Amazon and it worked first time. So I knew the NVME was at fault and returned it to Pimoroni expecting a refund. I didn’t get a refund, I got a replacement.

My old ass motherboard had an NVME slot so I thought “oooh, I don’t really need a 4th drive in this desktop machine but I’ll plug it in anyway”. So I took it apart, plugged in the NVME drive, put it all back together and booted it up. Nothing, except for the dreaded BIOS beeps of death. 5 of them – which means something is wrong with the motherboard or the processor. Expensive. “No worries” thought I – I’ll just take out the NVME drive again. Took it apart, removed the NVME, put it all back together. 5 beeps. Damnit.

This desktop machine has been my workhorse for about a decade. When I first got it I absolutely maxed it out. It was beautiful. Silent. Fast. Compiled code in seconds. However, it seems taking a ten year old motherboard and plugging in a cutting edge NVME drive wasn’t a great idea.

I did some research and went for a reasonable Ryzen motherboard with a new AMD processor. £200 for the pair and my existing DDR4 RAM was compatible. The MoBo arrived and I ripped the entire machine apart. Came to put my RAM in and realised the new board only had 2 DDR4 slots – whereas I had 4 8G DDR4 modules.

So I fired it up with 16G RAM. Tried to do a build whilst some background processes were running and ran out of memory. This would not do. I quizzed Oli about his machine and he had 32G made up of 2 * 16G modules. So we swapped. It was a win win. I got 32G again and Oli got 32G but the RAM I gave him was faster than the RAM he had. Since he’s a gamer he’ll benefit from faster RAM – about 50% faster. To me the speed of RAM didn’t really matter so much.

Get to the point Darren!

After a few weeks of my new AMD Ryzen motherboard I once again remembered my goal of being able to do a WOL [ Wake On Lan ] – I did a quick check on the motherboard and it indeed supported Wake-On LAN.

So…..I set up a systemd job to enable Wake-On LAN each time it boots and I can now finally fire up my laptop and run a script which basically does:

wakeonlan <MAC ADDRESS>

and as if by magic my desktop starts up and gets on with doing it’s thing whilst I eat breakfast.

So I now have a slightly faster, slightly quieter desktop again and I haven’t quite got around to testing if the replacement NVME drive works anywhere.

Clouds, silver linings and all that.

But hey kids, in general if your machine is working fine and you don’t need another 1TB of storage then just leave it alone. Put the NVME in the spares cupboard and get on with life. But WOL is cool 🙂

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Trampoline Moving

Many many years ago when my kids were little they decided they wanted a trampoline. Being the doting father I am I bought them one, and then built it. A few years later it was getting a bit small and knackered but they still played on it all the time so we bought a bigger one.

I didn’t have a photo of the original so this is a screen grab from a video showing the OG trampoline in the background and the new one in the foreground.

After a few years the “new” one started showing signs of wear and tear and then a storm came in.

2017

I got Uncle Chris to do a bit of welding and did some work to bring it all to a working state but I’d be constantly repairing it and was getting pretty annoyed with the whole situation.

2020

Eventually I decided it was a bit of an embarrassment and decided it had to go. Getting fed up with buying new trampolines, building them and disassembling the old one I decided the next trampoline was gonna be a keeper. Plus I was earning good money at the time thanks to Sky so I basically bought the best outdoor trampoline on the market

A thing of beauty, weighs a tonne.

This trampoline was then secured to the ground with ground anchors and ratchet straps and survived many many storms without incident.

Fast forward to 2025 and the underneath of the trampoline was looking a proper mess since I couldn’t fit the ride-on mower beneath to keep the ground looking good. Every now and then I’d get the strimmer and fly-mo out but it was a PITA to do that and eventually it all just got overgrown.

I assembled the Droylesden Avengers, stocked up on beer and wine and invited them along for a trampoline moving party. Which involved 10 minutes of trampoline moving and 5 hours of drinking beer and wine.

four “burly” men moved it and then I ran the ride-on over the mess that was left behind. It’ll green up soon enough and the untrained eye will never know.

A side-quest to this whole adventure was to get rid of the random beers left over from Oliver’s after party party.

As we can see Deej turned out to be a superstar and take a Fosters for the team. Charlie and James likewise helped to get rid of some bottles of Madri. Then we got stuck into far too much wine. We drank the whole recent delivery from Naked Wines, drank my two bottles of wine that I’d brought back from the winery in Greece and generally just emptied the wine fridge. Still, it was worth it.

Mission accomplished. I suspect the next trampoline moving day will be August 2026.

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Bench Repairs

John, my father in law : “Darren, could you have a quick look at our garden bench and give it a quick tidy up?”

Me : “Sure, shouldn’t take long”

2 months later :

Every single screw, nut and bolt was rusted. They all had to be drilled out, chiseled out, or angle-grinded off.

The wood was rotten in a few places so that had to be chiseled out and filled with wood filler.

Two of the slats were too far gone to be saved so I had to go out and buy new slats that were about the right size and then plane them down to be close enough to the originals so that it wasn’t too noticeable.

The metal work was all scrubbed down and painted with some metal paint and then the whole thing had to be reassembled. I think Oli and I may have put the back rest on upside down though.

Still, I was pretty proud of the end result.

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Chilli update

After returning from Greece I was super excited [ I wish I could say “we” but it’s really just me ] to find that my chilli fruits were going red.

This is partly due to Charlie and Ellie doing a super job of keeping them watered in our absence. Many thanks!

A while later they started to be properly ready and I harvested a few and put them into my home made bowl that I created on a wood turning course.

We’ve now started putting them in dishes and I’m absolutely loving the results.

It would be easier to just buy them from the shop but as my wise-beyond-his-years-son pointed out “It’s not about the destination – it’s about the journey”

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Greece, is the word

The family Steele boarded an EasyJet flight and traveled to Cephalonia where a not-so lovely car and a rather lovely villa were waiting for us

Just normal for Greece innit
Loved the villa!

Whilst there we mostly took it easy but tried to get out in the car during the mornings when it was a bit cooler.

We saw this lighthouse from land, and then again from the sea when we were out with Denis

We had lots of lovely meals together

and Emma and I had a rather lovely day learning about, and more importantly, drinking Cephalonian wines.

We had a full day out on the boat with Denis, where unfortunately I managed to get completely burned by the hot Greek sun!

and we spent some time in Agostoli

Before finally returning home after one last farewell to the villa

All in all – we had a brilliant time. Absolutely love Greece. The people, the food, the incredibly cheap wine, the blue skies – everything!

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Three stripe dog walk

For quite a while I’ve been suffering from either Plantar Fasciitis or a bit of a bruised heel. No idea which and it doesn’t really matter. It’s bloody painful – sometimes. Anyway, in an attempt to not hobble around like an old man I’ve been taking ze hound for a walk in my trainers for a while. This is fine at the moment in a beautiful British Summer, but I’ll have to go back to my boots in the Winter. Walking in my trainers does seem to have improved things but recently disaster struck.

My sole became disconnected from my heel. I spent the rest of the walk with a funny flapping slapping noise coming from my foot as I hobbled along.

The day it all began

My trainers are currently in my garage waiting for a bit of super glue but I’m pretty sure a bit of plastic or rubber or something fell out of the heel as I walked so I’m going to walk the same route a few times and see if I can find the fally outy bit before committing to glueing the trainers back together

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Tesla air filters

I noticed that my air con didn’t seem to be quite as effective as I thought it should. It could just have been my imagining things as the UK was bloody hot at the time, well, you know, by UK standards. It was either get the air con system re-gassed or put some new air filters in as they may have become blocked. A bit of googling and it seems the air filters should be changed every two years. The car is now five years old and I can almost guarantee they’ve never been done – so that was the first stop.

Order new air filters

Watch youTube video about how to replace air filters

Rip car apart and change filters

It wasn’t a particularly tricky job, but laying on your back across the door frame looking up underneath the steering wheel to remove some air vent ducting was a trifle uncomfortable.

Air filters replaced. No real noticeable difference in the air con but the UK has cooled down a bit now so no rush. I’ll probably start investigating re-gassing the system soon. Maybe it can wait until Spring – we’ll see