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Problems
after eight years with the ankle replacement
After five great years, part of my ankle implant
failed, but was successfully repaired on the 18
May 2011. After less than a week I was fully
mobile. Full story.
Then, in Summer 2014 there were two other
problems, but this time it was my bones rather
than the implant that failed. First, the other
ankle became really troublesome and turned out
to be too far gone already for a replacement.
But before that could be dealt with, the bones
around the original replacement suffered a
pretty catastrophic collapse. That was repaired
in September 2014 and we started looking at the
planned fusion of the left ankle. Foiled again:
the work done in September had failed yet again
and needed urgent attention. Nevertheless, I
persuaded my consultant that I needed the left
one fixing first because the right one was fine
as a 'good foot' for rehab but the left one
wouldn't be. The fusion on the left ankle was
finally done on the 30 September 2015 amd the
right ankle managed very well as 'the good foot'
throughout the 12 weeks of recuperation.
I've been keeping a PDF diary
of developments rather than a web page,
and this has become quite an epic as it starts
early in 2014. As of the 21 December 2015 - the
day I got the cast removed from the left leg
-the diary has a picture: the x-ray of my left
ankle fusion! It still reports on the state of
my bones but casts its net much wider. By August
2017 it had reached a total of 450 pages,
covering a wide range of topics other than my
body. One old schoolmate has been following it
with touching faith for some time. The diary had
become less about my old bones and more about
various crises in our extended family which
really shouldn't be made public, so the link to
it has been removed.
Beyond
digital TV
The
digital TV minefield (see
below) - my quest for a really
good way to watch and record TV - settled down
about a year ago (I'm writing this in the 11
June 2014). Recently, though, some
new questions cropped up, triggered by
the fact that our 32in Panasonic Viera LCD
telly, bought over seven years ago, has started
to play up and may soon need replacing. Smart TV
is the (fairly) new thing, and I started
investigating TV's that behave like tablets.
Then I was tipped off by our tech-savvy grandson
Barney about smart TV boxes
- cheap but very powerful Android computers that
plug into an HDMI socket and connect to your
wi-fi network and from there to the Internet.
The obvious advantage is that a spanking new
smart TV costing several hunred quid is likely
to go out-of-date technologically fairly
quickly. A super-quality full-HD LED non-smart
telly connected to a £45 Android device can be
updated far less expensively. I have ordered the
box - with an awesome specification - for just
over £43 post-free, and will report my progress
here...
Home-made
yogurt - update 22 May 2014
Read the whole story of
my home-made yogurt or, if you are already
making your own, just the following tip. I've
found that whisking my freshly-chilled batch
leaves it rather grainy. For no particular
reason, I recently decided to pour off the
tablespoon or so of clear liquid from the top of
the Thermos before pouring the yogurt into its
container. Result: a much smoother and creamier
product. Why? I have no idea!
Sourdough
focaccia!
The 5 May 2014 saw my
first three sourdough focaccias emerge from the
oven. Not only was I delighted with them, but
Patricia - who had always been a bit unhappy
with the sourdough flavour - ate them with
relish too! My sentimental attachment to artisan
flour from local windmills has taken a hammering
from Allinsons' Very Strong White Bread
Flour. It feels like treachery, but this is a
truly amazing flour producing a wonderfully
elastic dough.
The
Great Mobile Phone Saga
There used to
be an excited bit here about my new mobile phone
and how great it was to be using Acorn
technology again after all these years and to
have found a really brilliant Linux-based
computer in the form of a smartphone. I must
have taken that piece down in a fit of pique
when the phone went phut. Now I'm getting sorted
out, so you may be interested in the whole tale -
or just the most
recent developments. I now have a lovely
new Samsung Galaxy SIII (also with Acorn's ARM
technology at its heart), and I'm really
impressed...
A
busy week on the food front - 6
February 2014
This has been a pretty
productive week, with the year's first batch of
sourdough bread, a fresh batch of yogurt and a
third attempt at cold-smoked
salmon (all the previous attempts have
been edible but need work!). The chaos of
Christmas is finally over and life returns to
whatever passes for normal!
New
information on home-smoking fish
- 8 March 2014
As far as I know, the only page I lost
when transferring my content to this new site
was the one on hot-smoking fish. I've just
started cold-smoking and have begun a new page to record
my exploits. To my amazement and delight,
I'm already producing 'ordinary' smoked salmon
of far higher quality than some that I've
bought! The method is still a bit haphazard, but
each batch is an improvement on the previous
one.
Sourdough
bread - update 20 October 2013
The baking goes on. The latest report
(and the first new 'real' content in the new version
of the site) is on an experiment to 'clean
up' the culture. This and the bread batch that
follows will be found at the
end of the Sourdough 2012-13 page.
We live
on a lump of rock
I started writing this page on the
13 June 2013. It's an attempt to bring together
a lot of the science I've learnt over the last
few years in a fairly easy-to-read form, so I've
aimed it at our grandchildren. It will be
interesting to get their feedback on whether it
really is easy to digest!
Digital
TV and broadband - update 13 May 2013
My broadband speed from BT has improved
lately, showing an average of around 4.5Mbps.
However, I’m now waiting for the installation of
an Infinity 2 package - superfast
fire-optic broadband! So the time has come to
get BBC iPlayer and its equivalents
from other channels running on the Humax FreeSat+
box. The 4-meg speed should be fine, but
fibre - wow! I’m now also waiting for a starter
kit of PowerLine adaptors, which will
give me an Ethernet connection between the Humax
and my BT router. This will be reported in an
update to The digital TV
minefield, but meanwhile I can report
that yesterday (3 May) afternoon I received the
kit, plugged one unit into the mains and via
Ethernet into my BT router, and repeated the
process at the other end with the FoxSat box.
The BBC1 red button showed ’BBC iPlayer’, which
just worked - true Plug-and-Play! Eventually I
found ITV Player too, not on the red button but
just as a channel (903). Last night we used the
iPlayer for real, dishing up old episodes of
’Octonauts’ to calm the grandkids down. It
worked fine!
Today the BT engineer came and installed my
infinity package. Unfortunately the new HomeHub
had to be installed near the BT master socket,
which happens to be in the sittingroom.
Hard-wiring this to my desktop PC with and
Ethernet cables (as the old one has been
connected for years, would need a lot of
wall-drilling and loft-crawling, so - having
established with the old Toshiba laptop, my
smartphone and the Kindle that the wireless
performance is far better than before, I'm
considering ordering a wireless dongle for the
desktop machine. Meanwhile, I’m writing this on
the laptop, which is doing fine...
In the end, I discovered that I could get a flat
ribbon Ethernet cable. I ordered a 10-metre one
and ran it under the carpet to the desktop
machine in my office. Problem solved.
Update 21 March 2014
Different online broadband speed checkers
produce quite a range of upload and download
speeds. http://www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk/,
which I've used for ages, currently shows an
incredible 166 Mb/s download and 15 Mb/s upload
speeds. These arent reflected on my PC because
other local factors get in the way, but it means
I can use the higher quality setting on BBC
iPlayer with no hiccups.
My
Canon EOS 300D and Windows 7 - update 30 April
2013
On the 3 October 2011, I reported that I’d
reconciled these
two ill-matched partners simply by
changing the camera’s communication mode from
’Normal’ to ’PTP’ (peer-to-peer?). Windows 7 now
saw the camera as just another removable disc,
so no software was needed.
Last week - disaster. After all these years
the camera stopped communicating via USB - one
day fine and the next day nothing. This morning
I connected two elegant card readers bought from
Amazon (a multi-function one for £3.99 and a
dedicated Compact Flash one for £3.30), inserted
the camera’s Compact Flash card (not compact at
all!) and saw a new drive labelled ’EOS_DIGITAL
(E:)’. File transfer was much quicker than with
the camera.
Life,
the universe and everything
After watching the BBC’s The Seven Ages of
Starlight and learning about neutron stars, on
the 8 November 2012 I added some new stuff to my quest
for a non-counterintuive explanation of -
well - everything. Thanks to quark stars and
quark matter (still theoretical), I seem to have
arrived at a pretty convincing model of an
oscillating universe - and maybe stumbled on a
clue to what dark matter might be! On the 13
November, a
BBC news story threw yet another cat among
the pigeons, and me back into my ongoing dispute
with scientific orthodoxy. Then on the 20
January 2013 The Observer published a
short item on the newly discovered Huge-LQG, which
really shook things up. Probably even more
momentous was the release in March 2013 of a new
and far more detailed map of the cosmic
microwave background, revealing features that
’challenge the foundations of our current
understanding of the Universe’.
Two
colonies of bugs in my fridge
A one-day sourdough breadmaking course at The
School of Artisan Food on Sunday 13 March 2011:
learned a great deal and brought home bread and
sourdough starters that are still breeding in
the fridge after over two years - and getting
better! Read about
the course and the bread I made during 2011.
And the latest recipes and news, try Sourdough bread
2012/13. The technique - and the bread -
have been improving all the time, and after just
over two years I think I finally have a recipe
to stick with (latest news 21 May 2013).
Since the 10 January 2011, I have been making
yogurt in a Thermos flask at least once a week,
each innoculated from the previous one and going
well after over two years. Read
the whole story, with the latest
update from the 8 May 2013.
Talking
of food...
The two items above reflect that I use the web
rather than a notebook to record my cookery
experiments. Along with many of my favourite
recipes and techniques, they’re all in The Online Cookbook.
Back
to infinity
I’ve just watched the Horizon
programme, To Infinity and Beyond,
again and added a bit to what I wrote about
it just over two years ago...
Looking
back on Quantum: A
guide for the Perplexed
I just re-read the page I wrote after reading
Jim Al-Khalili’s fascinating book, and was
pretty chuffed with it. It’s
here...
Rant
No 1
Pay the Murdochs for F1 coverage? No way! Read
my complaint to the
BBC.
Rant No 2
There are some serious thoughts on Government
IT cock-ups at the end of the
Politics page. They were shared with Henry
Porter of The Observer (reluctantly)
and Sir Alec Jeffreys, inventor of DNA
profiling, and fed back to the Department of
Justice. My thoughts on
capital punishment are on the same page
(please read this, Mr President!).
Rant No 3
Why I thought I’d vote NO but didn’t in the
Alternative Vote referendum - my arguments with
myself and thoughts on the coalition...
Latest
news on human origins
A useful article in The Observer on
the 19 June 2011, a new book not to be missed
and a suprisingly effective BBC1 series - see The diary
of a wandering mind.This and almost all
other science is dealt with in the more
accessible A Short History of Nearly
Everything by Bill Bryson, which I found
surprisingly good.
More
general bone problems?
My exercises
for stiff necks, shoulders, backs and legs
- a workout that really helps when these old
bones are punishing me
The
Digital Switchover
This happened in our house years ago, with the
basic Sky package. Then came DVD-recording,
Freeview, DVD-RAM discs - and now a Freesat PVR.
Follow the
saga here...
My
best mate for some years from about 1960...
...with whom I lost touch around 1975, has a fascinating and
rapidly-growing blog with lots about folk,
jazz and Brazilian music, and even bits about
me!
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