Really Jammy Biscuit

Plugged in my bass guitar the other day. After a year or two of neglect. Only to find out something wasn't quite right. After investigating that it wasn't the leads I opened up the back of the guitar. The battery that powered the pick ups had leaked and completely dissolved the 9v battery connector. Instantly this prompted a purchase of a few spare 9v connectors. Once they had arrived I snipped off the old connector soldered them together (very badly I must admit). Now my bass is playing just like new, just don't tell anyone about what it looks like on the inside.

It seems like a lot of company's out there are looking for C# programmers. Where as have primarily used java throughout my programming experiences I have not got much of experience with C# but I intend to change that. But at this time I dont know what else im gonna make other than the tutorials I find.

So in order to showcase some of my ability as a programmer I thought I could re work my dissertation project from my Computer Science degree into a playable web app. The program itself is a code breaking game in sort of the same ilk as Mastermind. The aim of the project was to investigate and make readily available a concept of complexity called Black Box complexity. This was a Java application and I have begun work on making it available for this website as well as improve on it as I go.

My desk just needed to fit my computer so it didn't been to be so big, however given the layout of the room there wasn't many places for me to fit in the room. I always wanted a corner desk at home so we thought we might as well make me one. Now we had upgraded from a saw to a jigsaw we got hold of another big plank of chipboard, drew out a template of what we needed to cut and got to it.

To make the desk fit in the Shelfstore we needed to remove one upright from out set on the wall. And with the desk being support by two of these uprights we were then left with an unusual sized gap between these supporting uprights. So with our excess wood we made some shelves. Thankfully Shelfstore provides something called a grasshopper which can be used to attach home made pieces of wood to their modular system. We sanded and waxed just as we did with the first desk. And finishing off we attached an extra leg for support.

(I will edit these posts at a later date to include images, they are spread over both of our phones)

My partner sews, so that meant her desk needed space to fit a sewing machine, her laptop and all the other mess she creates. So we designed a desk that runs the entire width of the room. The desk itself is a big plank of chipboard that we we sawed into shape by hand and supported with a block of wood attached to the wall to stop it bowing. We sanded it down and coated the wood in a few layers of wood wax. The wax as well as protecting the wood darkened the wood in a way which made the colour match the original Shelfstore wood.

My partner and I knew we needed two desks in our study/second bedroom, we weren't gonna be able to share.
The décor of the room was already decided, it would be mainly made up of a storage solution called Shelfstore. Shelfsotre is basically the wooden Lego of the shelving world, you can get hold of all shapes and sizes and it all slots together without any need for screws (although it is advised you secure it to the wall or something before use). We have used it in my partners house and we knew it would achieve what we wanted in terms of space. However, while Shelfstore do provide types of desks they were not gonna do, for what we had in mind. Enter DIY mode.

Database: I have structured a database to allow posts so that I don't have to edit pages of HTML. This is currently functioning (Yay!) and will continue to be updated as my needs change.

This is the first in a short series of blog posts of things I've completed, with a short explanation of why I've done it. This is mostly to give me some posts to work with.

Suss out bootstrap : bootstrap is a framework developed by Twitter, useful for developing responsive websites with a mobile first focus. As this is essentially starting off with someone else's CSS, implementing it has undermined some of my aim of doing it all myself. But, with so many differnt devices out there to access the web, it seemed a stupid waste of time to develop this all myself at this point. I had to start somewhere, after all. Maybe, one day, I'll reach a point where I want to re-do this myself, but for now, this will do.

This is my to do list for the site - for jobs big and small that come to me when I don't have time to implement them, and to remind me of things to get on with when I might otherwise go on Reddit.

1. Logo
2. Update colour scheme
3. Improve the nav bar
4. Blog post synopses
5. "Read more" funtionality
6. Home page update feed - complete
7. Show date of post
8. Infinite scroll (?) / database access management/ limit loaded posts (improvement on #5)
9. (Long term) post archive
10. (Long term) other projects/more content
11. (Long term) subscribe feature?
12. Contact Details/Footer

This is a post about DIY
It should appear on the home page and the DIY project page

This is a post about Programming
It should appear on the home page and the programming project page

This is a test post
If this works wooo hoo