May 2025 – Page 3 – dangermouse.net

Fixing? the clock

So, after yesterday’s weirdness with my bedside digital clock/radio, today I tried to address the problem by taking the device apart. I unscrewed the four screws on the bottom, and pulled the case off. It was easy to locate the wires leading to the speaker, and I snipped them so that the radio could not play any more. Then I reassembled the clock and plugged it in, to see if the digital display would still work.

It did! So I put it back in the bedroom, plugged it in, and turned it on. I set the time to the correct time, which was 2:05pm at the time. But strangely the display segments in the first two digits were kind of half lit, looking like a digital 18, with the 2 showing brighter. It’s never done anything like that before. Anyway, I left it, thinking that’s probably good enough.

When my wife got home from work, I said I’d fixed the clock, and I went in to look at it. And now it was displaying the time in 24-hour mode! 17:30 instead of 5:30pm. And the weird thing is that the clock doesn’t even have a 12/24 hr mode switch. I didn’t know it could even do 24-hr display mode!

I just went in now to have another look. Now instead of 8:25pm, or even 20:25, it’s displaying 0:25, with one segment lit before the 0. It’s the 7-segment display AND of “1” and “2”. It’s trying to display a 2, but the first digit is only a half digit capable of showing only 1, since the clock doesn’t have a 24-hr mode.

Well. I have no idea why it’s trying to display 24-hr mode, but at least I can understand what the display means and read the time.

The rest of the day I wrote up a lesson plan for the new week’s ethics topic, on “Strengths and Weaknesses”. I had one class tonight, but only one student showed up, and I ran out of questions before the end! I had to make up a few other things to talk about to fill in the time. Hopefully it’ll go better with more students.

I also made a comic and walked Scully, taking her on a longish walk around the harbour shore. The day was warm, but overcast and humid. Tomorrow will be even hotter, a last blast of summer.

Spooky happenings

Our clock radio in the bedroom started blaring out radio at 6:07 this morning. Since I haven’t used the alarm (or radio) function for probably over 10 years now, I had no memory of where the controls were, so I had to turn the light on to see. Despite switching the radio off several times, it wouldn’t turn off! And then the digital clock readout started switching erratically between the correct time and 0:57. Eventually I had to switch it off at the wall plug to get it to shut up.

I’d intended to sleep for another hour, but this woke me up early and I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I’ve been wandering around in a bit of a tired daze today.

I searched online for a replacement digital clock for the bedroom. I need one with a red display, since that’s the least disruptive at night when trying to sleep. But most of the ones I could find have white or green displays, which are just too bright and bad for night vision, or unlit LCD displays. I did find some with red displays, but they were all giant displays for people with bad eyesight. I don’t need a 40cm display for my bedside clock! And they’re all battery powered, rather than mains powered. I don’t want to deal with batteries.

It seems like a simple red digital bedside clock is something that nobody makes any more. I might have to trawl second-hand stores looking for one. Or maybe tomorrow I’ll try opening the current one and seeing if I can disconnect the radio and maybe with luck the display will keep working.

Other than dealing with that, I had 5 ethics classes online, plus three hours in at the university doing Data Engineering tutoring for the students on their assessment project.

Tomorrow… hopefully I can sleep in…

More D&D and more election results

Today I continued writing up a log of the action from Friday night’s Dungeons & Dragons game. I finished it off, which is a nice achievement so soon after the game. Usually in the past I’ve neglected writing up the adventure until just before the next session, by which time I’ve forgotten a lot of the details and have to reconstruct events by questioning my players and trying to weave a coherent narrative out of their disparate recollections.

And this morning we had a much better picture of yesterday’s election results. The incumbent Labor Party have been returned with a greatly increased majority, in what several news outlets have called a “landslide” result. The conservative opposition has been decimated, losing several seats in the major cities, resulting in them having virtually no presence anywhere except rural seats. It was an unexpectedly strong repudiation of conservative Australian politics by the voters, and a welcome result for those fearing any potential Trump-like policies in this country.

This morning I did another 5k run, taking it a bit easier than yesterday. The weather has improved this weekend, with the week-long run of heavy showers finally giving way to sunny skies, but cool autumn temperatures.

My wife and I took advantage this afternoon by driving over tho Balmoral Beach to walk Scully along the beach front in the pleasant weather. In the way back we stopped off at a good-looking deli that my wife found online and checked out their products. It had a lot of European things. I ended up buying a chunk of Austrian cheese and a slice of apple strudel for dessert tonight.

The weather has definitely taken a turn away from summer and towards winter in the past couple of weeks. Leaves on some of the trees are changing colour and it definitely feels like autumn now. Although the previously forecast 26°C for mid-week has been increased to 27°C now!

D&D and Election Day!

Friday I had my usual ethics classes, and prepared for a night of Dungeons & Dragons with my friends. I had five of them over to my place and we played from 6pm to about 10:30.

In the last session they’d started to deal with the curse placed on them by the God of Swords: kill 9 people in 9 days with 9 different swords, or die! Now they had a lead from an old sage who wanted them to recover some magical artefacts from an ancient vault hidden in the hills a half day’s ride from the town they were in. He said there were rumours that the place was now overrun with snake people – suitable targets for despatching with swords if they got the chance.

They reached the hidden vault and found their way in via a ruined lookout tower, and discovered a large chamber almost filled with what looked like a black rectangular block of absolute darkness. They figured out it was solid and highly magical… and there was a giant horned skull resting on top of it. Needless to say there were plenty of shenanigans and some fighting against snake people and some cool magical things, and we all had a great time!

This morning I got up and collected the groceries from the supermarket. Normally I do this on Friday but for the third week in a row something was happening so I had to postpone to Saturday. I went for a 5k run, and I pushed myself and recorded a time of 27:02, which I’m very pleased with. I ran past a polling place, because…

Today is the federal election. We’d already voted back on Wednesday, so didn’t have to head out to a polling place today, which was nice. I read a story that for this election 47% of the electorate had already voted prior to today’s official election day. This is a record number of pre-poll votes. It’s good that we make it so easy for people to vote.

It’s now 2 and a bit hours after the close of polls in eastern Australia and in early counting it looks like our left-leaning Labor government is going to win with an increased majority. There’s a big swing away from the conservative Liberal Party, and it seems certain that their leader Peter Dutton will lose his own seat in Parliament. This is a big change from before Trump was sworn in as US President in January, when the conservatives were leading all the polls. Our swing back away from the conservatives hasn’t been as stark as in Canada at their election last week, but Trump definitely had an effect, causing Australians to react by also rejecting our own conservative party.

We shall see the full results in the coming days.

Feels like winter!

Last week everyone here was complaining how it seemed like summer just wouldn’t quit, and gee wouldn’t it be nice to have a night where the minimum temperature falls below 20°C for once, and why is it still so hot most of the way through autumn. And then yesterday and today the cold hit like a brick wall. The week of rain we’e had has slammed temperatures down and where last week we were going around in shorts and T-shirts, now we’re pulling out the winter gear and rugging up in long pants, jackets, and wearing slippers inside to keep our feet warm.

However apparently it won’t last, because the rain is forecast to clear up over this weekend and next week we’ll be back up to 26°C days again.

Today while huddling inside and trying to stay warm, I taught some ethics classes, and in between did some comics stuff and processed some photos from my Japan trip back in February. While doing this I normally would put the radio on, but lately it’s been full of election campaign ads, so I decided to play some music from my collection, and I threw on the Howard Shore soundtracks from the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies. And while listening to them I realised just how utterly depressing I find everything to do with Lord of the Rings.

I mean the fact that Frodo is so scarred by the experience and seems to have PTSD, and can’t talk to his friends any more, and decides to go off and exile with the elves in their overseas Land of Perpetual Lamentation. It’s not a standard happy ending, and I respect that, it’s just that it makes me depressed and not want to reread the books/rewatch the movies. As much as I like the story, the ending makes it kind of sour for me.

Anyway. On a happier note, here’s a photo of some sakura (cherry blossoms) I took in Japan in February.