Winter Work

'Hello, World!'.
The simple sentiment of this greeting, the first baby step in writing and testing code, is a reminder of the innocent optimism in the early days of Web2.0. A time when you could luxuriate in having your own personal piece of cyberspace in which to express your ideas, no matter that there was nobody listening.
How times and the web have changed, so that this simple expression now symbolises that faith in the future that came with the new millennium.
As one of this winter's indoor projects, I have been sorting through all my electronics bits and pieces with a view to establishing a new workstation. Among the elderly goodies I retrieved was a Raspberry Pi in its fancy rainbow case and a memory card loaded with the Linux OS and Python.
It now sits hooked up to a pre-HDMI monitor, using an adaptor from Maplins, ready for some overdue action.

One of the inevitably annoying aspects of all electrical gadgetry is the excessive length of the wiring. It's seldom flexible enough to lay neatly on the worktop and refuses to straighten out when unpacked. I have used various strategies in the past to deal with this. Laying the flex stretched out along the top of a hot radiator for an hour or so has sometimes done the trick. A more drastic but effective solution has been to cut out the central part of the flex and to join the two business ends together to create a shorter lead. This time, I decided to try a different solution along the lines of creating cable tidies. I wound the leads into tight bundles  and threaded them into short pieces of tubing. I was tempted to buy some shiny aluminium tubing, but settled for scrap pieces of washing machine hose that were lying around my workshop. It seems to work OK and has left me with a much less cluttered desktop.