Radio Times

Over the past few days I have been tinkering with an old 40s radio. I was mostly soldering in new wires where the old rubber ones had crumbled, and replacing the foil-and-paper capacitors (which are susceptible to moisture). Tonight I finally got to a stage where I could plug it in and try it:



The controls light up, which looks cool, but I'm only getting faint static at the moment. I'm very pleased that it actually turns on - that means the transformer is ok. Tomorrow I shall rig up an improvised aerial.

Ideas

Here is an interesting list of things to do with the "economic stimulus" money. My favorite is of course the Open Source software grants; and, as one of the comments says, this should be combined with a policy of a full adoption of open software for anything that is publicly funded - it's cheaper and historically more accessible. Plus more paid holiday time can't be bad.

Mmmmm

Today we tried out the Raj Mahal Indian Restaurant, which is apparently the only curry house in town at the moment. It was lunchtime so the buffet was in operation; an unusual (to me) "all-you-can-eat" arrangement. The food was lovely - a fair choice of beef, chicken and veg curries with rice and naan. For afters we had some aromatic Indian rice pudding and some of those sugar-coated fennel seeds. The guy we went with said it was unusually busy, but we didn't mind as that means business is good, and they will certainly get more business from us.