Time: 2-3 hours
Last walked: Dec 2005

Left face B is a very pleasent alternative to Platteklip (which let’s face it, we all hate).

It winds up across the left face of the mountain, across sheer looking cliffs and rock bands - a truly improbably looking route. But the hike itself isn’t exposed, and only contains a pitch or two.

Start up Platteklip gorge, pass the contour path, and continue until the last left side corner before the path heads up into the gorge proper. This corner has a vertical section, with a large rock at the base

You know what happens with old phones, right?

The battery slowly dies, and it needs charging all the time.

So we modded this old brick by attaching the charger to the battery, increasing the phone’s usability by 1000%.

Now you never need to worry about the battery running out, just plug it in. AND because it has a 3-pin plug, you never need an adapter.

Details:

• The Nokia 2110 in question had a broken charging socket, so it was unchangeable
• We smashed the charger case open, and took out the PCB.
• Then we soldered the 3-pin plug’s wires, and the 6V out wires on to the PCB.
• The PCB was superglued into the blue box, which was cut to fit onto the battery, and holes were gouged for the wires.
• Then we superglued the box to the battery, leaving the wires poking out.
• The plug had a hole cut in the top (for the wires) and was attached to the base of the battery & box (superglue again), and wired up.
• The negative wire was soldered straight onto the battery negative terminal (and the wire embedded flush into the battery).
• The positive wire was soldered to a copper clip superglued to the battery, that hits the +ve desktop charging contact. (well it just missed, so we enlarged the contact…)
• Everything got another dollop of superglue, and all the contacts got a good filing.
• That was it!

It is was in use everyday by Nicholas Abbot for a couple of years (although he had to enlarge his trouser pockets <grin>).

Updates:

1. The brick has lost it’s aerial. It now has an internal ‘piece of wire’…
2. One of the clips that holds the battery to the phone has broken, it is now held on by a shoelace.
3. It has a modular (ie. removable) alarm clock attached to the back, above the battery.
4. It has suffered beer immersion, but it still works like a bomb (make that ‘works like a brick’).
5. Unfortunately, due to the beer (and some brandy & coke), the superglue holding the alarm clock dissolved, and the alarm clock is no more.
6. The ‘piece of wire’ aerial was ineffective (as it was shielded on three sides by the phone), so it has been externalised. The wire has been coiled up and superglued into a little stub aerial above the aerial hole. A strip of bookbinding cloth tape was superglued around the coiled aerial for support and strength.

The ultimate mod!

Pictures:

Bashbot was originally an idea and bash snippet from Jonathan Hitchcock. I took it and bastardised it beyond imagination.

It’s a fully-featured, modular IRC bot.

The modules come in 2 types:

• Commands are matched by filename. I.e. “bot: foo bar” will run the command foo if it exists.
• Regex commands are matched by a regex in the file’s first line (commented). So a regex-command beginning with # ^(.*) is( also)? (.*)$ will be executed if you try and set a factoid with “bot: Spinach is a vegtable”

Included modules:

• announce

Back in the days of using dial-up, I wrote this firewall & QoS script. All in one and relatively easy to use for my specific use case. However it only really works for single machines or small networks routers with no DMZ and only one router.

Mozilla Address Book exports pretty terrible LDIF. To add these LDIF files to an LDAP directory, you must first run it through this utility. It will turn the LDIF into schematically correct LDIF. If will (hopefully) not maul data that is already in the correct format.