Welcome to JCR Developments

This is my new (slowly growing) drupal powered site....

Any new stuff I add should get added to this front page and I will try and layout the menus with some sort of logic. I am still getting to grips with the functionality of drupal and its many many different ways of achieveing the same thing.

The menalto gallery 2 embeds nicely though... still needs some tweaking to make it nice and I can't get the URL rewrite to work properly... If I enable it, then the gallery doesn't work basically. So for now, the nav menu works well, but you just get iffy URLs in the gallery... meh.

Samsung N130

Submitted by Jon Reynolds on 8 March, 2010 - 23:41
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Recently got a new netbook in the form of a Samsung N130 to replace my Advent, which met its demise at the hands of my 20 month old. It was replaced on household insurance fortunately and its spec seems basically the same. I think they're all much of a muchness really. Seems like a nice netbook for my basic purposes.

BMW E34 Log

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Oil and filter change @ 167,000 miles. Never seen so much oil come out of a car... but then I am used to cars that use their oil. This car dumped what looked like its full 6.75l of oil, hopefully indicating that it doesn't use/loose any oil. I hadn't changed it since I bought it (bad, I know) and who knows how many miles before I had it it had been changed, so it had done at least 15,000 on the last oil without loosing any.

I do try to change oil at a maximum of every 10,000 miles.

BMW E34 Front End Sorted-ish

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Well I was right, the tyres were badly out of alignment and scrubbing badly... so badly the front two tyres wore almost completely smooth in 5 days (~500 miles)! So not only a puncture to replace but now the front two tyres so it had to be new tyres all round. Now I am glad I had already replaced the wheels so I could at least buy normally priced/sized tyres. Still not what I wanted to be doing right now.

The tyres were shocking... I was shocked!

Bald Tyre 1Bald Tyre 2

 

Aftermath of changing Control Arms on the BMW

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Well after changing the control arms on the BMW to sort out worn bushes, as ever, I have inevitably introduced new problems. To be expected really... any suspension component work is always likely to throw the wheel alignment out on a car, I just didn't realise how sensitive BMWs are to badly aligned wheels.

BMW E34 Control Arms

Submitted by Jon Reynolds on 4 January, 2010 - 21:18
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One of my to do items for the BMW was to change the control arms, as the wear in the bushes/ball joints was becoming very apparent.

The symptoms are basically wobbling / vibrating of the front end of the car, not just through the steering wheel but you could feel the whole car shaking from side to side. It started at just certain speeds on the motorway, about 50 - 60 mph, which then progressed into bad vibration under braking.

It all came to a head finally at the most inconvenient time (of course) when setting off to drive home for Christmas to visit family. It just started vibrating & wobbling at nearly all speeds and felt very unsafe. So had to limp home and use the Audi, I unfortunately, but fortunately, still have.

Creating a Simple Subversion Server on Ubuntu

Submitted by Jon Reynolds on 10 December, 2009 - 23:05
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For a while I have been trying to learn some programming skills. It is something I would like to do purely for fun and if I can get to a stage where I have decent programming capabilties then I can enjoy writing applications and perhaps start giving something useful back to the Linux community.

To start with the best intentions, I decided to set up a simple Subversion version control system on my server to allow me to keep control of my programming progress in an orderly manner. This blog entry just simply describes how I went about setting it up.

Subversion is a version control system which one can use to keep track of a project and have the ability to 'check out' stuff to work on then 'check in' the changes, keeping old revisions of work in case you need to revert back to an earlier version. This is great, especially when learning, as you don't need to keep saving new copies of your program as it develops every time you want to try something new in case you mess it up and need to revert back to your previous version.

2012 Panic Article

Submitted by Jon Reynolds on 4 December, 2009 - 14:10

A small article from a newspaper (not sure which) that my father sent me highlighting how people can easily get themselves worried about mythological events with no evidence to back them up, yet fail to bat an eyelid at 'real' problems happening around them. i.e. crime, global warming, nuclear war etc...

BMW New Wheels

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The original alloys that came with the car, although I like them a lot as they have the original style and feel of the original car, are actually very annoying in as far a they are metric. This means tyres are a problem.

New Wheels

Things To Do

Submitted by Jon Reynolds on 23 October, 2009 - 11:32
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160,000 miles currently, and there is a list of things that need doing:

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