One of the first cars I owned was a 1988 F plate Citroen AX GT. Actually, I think it was my third car.

It wasn’t a bad car, a little quirky with a plastic boot with only glass connecting it to the body of the car.

It was also really noisy when driving it. Wind noise mostly. That was simple enough to sort, turn the stereo up!

Jump forward 20 years or so and I am currently sat at the local Citroen garage waiting for the MoT to be completed on the work van.

Wandering around the showroom I had time to take a decent look at the DS3, a VTi120 DStyle Red. It’s black with a red roof and red accent pieces. I have to admit it doesn’t look bad and reminds me of the fun I used to have driving that old AX GT.

Then I stuck my head inside.

The photo above is of that accent piece in the interior. In this case it is the dashboard, what everybody will see when they are sat in the car. I don’t know how well it shows up in the picture but the orange peel effect in the paint just shows that Citroen still do not believe that the little things matter. With just a little more prep and colour sanding this orange peel would disappear and make the whole thing more pleasing to the eye.

A bit of pathetic nitpicking? Probably, but if they want me to spend £15,660 on a French quirky car they have to do better than this.

So, it has been a hectic few months. Since that last really bad poetry post I think we have seen sunshine just once. Fed up of cold, rain, sleet and snow (especially in April!) and would like some warm weather!

So much has happened, in no particular order:

• Christmas happened. Just like it does every bloody year.
• I became an officially licenced Amateur Radio operator. Callsign M0HHN. More about this in future posts.
• Due to Christmas and a very ill dog I failed to put the Mini through an MoT.
• Went to the Outdoors Show at the Olympia, exhibiting with Adam from UK Cache Mag.
• Had a month off work sick.
• During that month off I started playing Clash Of Clans. I haven’t stopped yet. 8 weeks later, it’s the most I have played a game in years. More than I played Battlefield 3 and CoD Black Ops combined…
• We released a UK Geocaching Podcast every month from August 2012 to today (well, after I have finished this post…) making it my personal record for continuous release.

I am sure there’s more we have done but I can’t remember. I will be updating a little more regularly with the geekery, got a new Arduino project to work on, building a quiz buzzer system so that the Mini Club can run a Bullseye (Jim Bowen stylee) night, want to build some amateur radio antennas for 2 metres and HF transmission, we have just started an Amateur Radio Club for Fareham West Scouts so we can train Scouters (leaders and young people) to pass the ham exams too. More on that at fwsarc.cornellfinch.com

I am also going to post some pictures of the crappy bases that I find in Clash of Clans as really good examples of how not to do it. Might also write some tips from what I have learned in the last 8 weeks or so too.

Ball of fire in the sky,
You hurt my eyes,
You are so bright.
But only in summer,
You are so shite!

Wanting to do some electronics with the Explorers, we have been discussing for ages the types of project that we could do with them.

Our primary aim is to get them soldering. We will give them some simply theory at the same time – how to work out resistor values and the like, but we had been kind of struggling with the actual project. I had suggested a small IC based amplifier circuit, either stereo or mono, that could be used with an MP3 player. After all, most of them have an MP3 player and they would be able to see some real results at the end of the project.

We had settled on the Stereo IC Amplifier Kit from Kitronic. This is, from what I can see, a cracking little kit that’s not too hard to build.

However, time constraints of an Explorer evening (we only get 90 minutes) means that this would have to be spread over two or three evenings, especially trying to get 30 teenagers soldering, while we try and supervise the lot. We will still do this, but we decided it would be better to go with something much simpler to start.

So, tonight we are going to attempt them to build the circuit on the right. This, as you can see, is much simpler. A battery (well, two AA cells), switch, LED and resistor. These will all be mounted on veroboard and the components soldered. Should be easy, right? *Yes, I know the resistor value is missing, it was a quick diagram for discussion purposes. **Yes, there may be issues with button bounce. Can’t do anything about it on such a simple circuit.

I built one last week from scraps I had around my kit. Took me about 20 minutes to place and solder the parts into place.

I have written a full instruction for them to follow, and of course we’ll be on standby to assist (and administer first aid to burnt fingers…) and if we get some working we’ll try sending some morse code across the HQ…

If this goes well then next term we will do some more, hopefully ending up with building the amplifier kit and then possibly a housing for it all to sit in too!

So, this Scottish bloke walks up to a French Deli…

People watching is a fun game!

I have no idea why, but this woman’s clothing fascinated me.

She was stood on the platform at a station last night. This picture was taken through the glass from the train, so I apologise for the quality.

Top hat with protective goggles and the platform shoes. She was wearing glasses so the goggles were all for show.

Stylish huh!

I mentioned a couple of days ago (on Twitter I think) that I was thinking of deleting everything on my blog and starting again. Tonight I have done just that. I moved everything (expect photos and stuff) to an archive, deleted everything from the main blog and have started again.

There was 7 years worth of posts on the old blog and I felt that they were weighing me down and not allowing me to move on in the blog. Certain expectations I had of myself that I just could not commit to. Things I have said, that, while I don’t regret, I don’t necessarily want to advertise any more.

I have new interests that have replaced many (nearly all actually) of my old ones. Yes, I am fickle like that.

I am not sure of the direction the blog will take. Facebook, Twitter, Scouting and my friends will no doubt have a bearing. Whatever, I am looking forward to the fresh start on my journey.