1202 ALARM

Yeah, I've been driving everyone mad about the benefits of MiniDisc over vinyl ever since acquiring a bunch of old MD portables (for free) about 10 years ago, and then finding an MD deck in a charity shop for just £5 last year. Unfortunately it was not a standalone deck, but I picked up the matching amplifer-tuner for just £30 including postage on eBay so that was a bit of a win. A couple of the portables are Sony NetMD units which can link directly to a computer via a mini-USB cable. Some Wizards of the Internet ported the Linux MD software online as Web MiniDisc Pro, which runs entirely in your browder (as a PWA if you know what that means). Copying a CD to MD is a piece of cake, but what I discovered a couple of days ago is that you can also go the other way and rip pre-recorded MiniDisc albums to MP3. I have picked up a few of these free, cheap and not-so-cheap and have gone for albums I do not have on CD (why bother with that?), so this means I can play those albums in the car...

I've been planning getting the Toyota MR2 back on the road and one of the things I have been messing with for the last 20 years is getting a decent sound system without breaking the bank. The MR2 originally had the front speakers in the dashboard with an optional subwoofer under one of the seats, but the dash just doesn't provide enough baffle for a decent sound. In 2010 I built this speaker cabinet which sits between the seats and provides pretty good sound along with 'flux capacitor' visual effects! I have since recovered 2 of these weird speakers from a high-end plasma television I stripped out. The sound quality is frankly amazing for the size of the units. The internal baffle and reflex design is excellent. I want to see if these could be either fitted inside the doors or mounted as pods on the doors themselves. To go with these I need a subwoofer which can either fit under or behind the driver's seat and this little one came my way. It was part of a Hitachi s...

The Office. A facility based on change. (Robert Propst, 1968) Ministry of Justice. 102 Petty France, London SW1H 9AJ. Fitzroy Robinson & Partners in collaboration with Sir Basil Spence. 1976. Action Office II. Designed by Propst/Nelson 1970. Manufactured and marketed by Herman Miller of Zeeland, Michigan.

I have a couple of 20 LED solar strings in the tiki bar at the back of the house. After a couple of years outside the strings weren't working so well and opening up one of the solar panel units I found the AAA NiCd cell inside was only holding 0.5 volts instead of 1.2 volts when fully charged. Initially I went to a few shops looking for direct replacement strings but couldn't find any. Then in Home Bargains I found 50 mini LED strings with larger solar panels and a lithium-ion battery for only £3. So I bought 2 of these and chopped off the LED strings as I was only interested in the solar panel units. An initial test with just twist-and-tape wiring proved this upgrade would work. The next step was to take the solar panel units apart and solder the wiring for my LED strings in properly. I decided to mount the solar panel units under the composite roof to keep them dry so that hopefully they will last a few years longer than the ori...

Another garden power tool converted to run on Parkside/Lidl 20v lithium-ion batteries. This is a nice brush cutter from Ozito which had seen good service on an allotment, but had a failed 18v battery pack. I took the same approach as with the Bosch conversion and gutted the cells out of the battery pack and attached a Parkside adaptor plate. Interestingly, of the 5 cells (18650) in the Ozito battery pack, 4 are serviceable and only 1 had failed, just the same as the laptop batteries. It is working well and I still have 2 adaptor plates from my last AliExpress order for more shenanigans.

A few months ago I bought a mini electric chainsaw from Lidl to cut up wood for the stove. Going by the reduced gas bills I think the chainsaw has almost paid for itself. The chainsaw uses the Parkside 20-volt lithium-ion batteries and I bought a 4Ah battery and charger to run it. Since then I have bought a couple of other Parkside gardening tools and a larger 8Ah battery which was on offer. In all I've spent about £60 on the batteries so I want to get maximum use out of them. Now over the last few years I've acquired free or for a couple of quid, several Bosch drills. These are the last of the tools that used NiCad battery packs. The big SDS hammer drill above came with two 24-volt NiCad battery packs, one completely dead and the other almost dead. I bought a couple of 18-volt NiCad packs to run this and a smaller Bosch drill and they have been really useful, especially last summer when I was working on improving the patio lean-to. So could the Bosch dr...