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Hellenic School Magazine, 1989

Guy Antony Halse — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 10:32:00 +0200

I was rummaging through some stuff at my parents' house last week, and found a copy of Harare Hellenic School's first school magazine, circa 1989. It was produced by my grade 7 class, I think as a class exercise — I remember that we had a production line doing all the stapling, etc. I just had to scan it.

The original was produced in a banda machine on the recycled paper that was typical of Zimbabwe in the 1980s and early 90s. Unfortunately that means it hasn't aged well — the paper has yellowed and the pale blue ink has faded a lot. On my copy the first page is torn, and unfortunately the lower half is missing. I think there was also a (hand-drawn) school crest on a missing front cover page.

The scan I've made is about 30MB and is a greyscale PDF. It's partly an effort to preserve this document before it deteriorates any further, and partly so we can poke fun at ourselves 25 years on.

A new home for this site

Guy Antony Halse — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 18:19:00 +0200

So I finally gave up on the idea of a FreeBSD VSP and went with the simpler, cheaper solution. I got me a Linux one :-) It's not exactly what I wanted (I like FreeBSD damnit), but it is here and it works.

Over the last couple of weeks I've migrated my DNS, mail and web off RUCUS and out of Rhodes, not because I have anything against them, but because I'm a big boy now and should be paying for my own hosting.

If anyone is interested, this site is hosted by rimuhosting, a New Zealand based VPS hosting company with machines in a Dallas co-lo centre. Mici is ammused by the name, but so far they've been nothing but efficient :-)

Oh, and it's Ubuntu for the zealots who're wondering which way I went.

Of Showers and Baths

Guy Antony Halse — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 15:23:00 +0200

I finally got the hell in with our excuse-for-a-shower this morning and decided, in good South African fashion, to make a plan.

The problem is that we have a gravity fed geyser, so the hot water pressure isn't great at the best of the times. It was just bearable in the shower in the flat ajoining ours, but we've now lost the use of that. Our flat doesn't have a proper shower, only one of those hand-held shower attachments that you get in a bath. This made things worse by trying to force that water through this tiny little 5mm hole:

I decided we needed a proper shower; one that didn't require me to hold it up, and one that did more than just trickle on me. Since we're effectively renting the house we're in at the moment, I also didn't want to spend a whole load of money on it. It seemed that the easiest solution was to utilise the existing plumbing. The hand-held shower attachment fits onto a standard 22mm nipple on the mixer, and this nipple points straight up. I decided that I could attach a pipe to it, and a shower head to the end of the pipe.

So I started by taking the old attachment off:

I then fitted a compression joint to a piece of 22mm copper pipe, and attached the compression joint to the existing nipple:

At the top of the pipe, I attached an elbow and then a standard shower arm:

This required a bit of ingenuity because the size of the pipe changed at the top. Also note the use of cable ties:

The results don't look too bad, and more importantly, the shower works well :) Total cost was R160, which is a fair price to pay for not having to hassle with holding a shower every day ... :)