Adrian’s turn this week, but I’m continuing the trend of 90s UK comedy TV references for the title.

I spent some time laying the ground for an upgrade of the online platform we use for Museum in a Box. It’s a custom website written in Python and Django that’s running on the Heroku infrastructure; so needs periodic maintenance to move up to newer versions of all of that stack. It’s not something we work on day-in day-out, so the first step is reading up on the new features, bug-fixes, etc. for the later versions to check that nothing is likely to break; and planning the steps to work through. Next will be the working through.

I’ve been on more familiar ground with some work for a bike event we’re helping with. This coming Friday there’ll be a light and music bike parade kid-friendly edition of the regular JoyRide group rides.

We’ve been pimping out a trike with some My Bike’s Got LED kits, and working on a couple of related projects:

A wire brake cable looped round on itself, with a couple of ferrules crimped in judicious locations, to make a heart shape

Channelling our inner-Libby Miller to repurpose old bike brake cables into scaffolding for an LED noodle.

A screenshot of the render from FreeCAD of the lens cap design. It's basically a short pipe with three flanges coming out of the bottom of it. It won't work particularly well as a lens *cap* because there's a big hole in the top of it, but that's deliberate. The ligra design uses the lens cap as a mounting point for the lens and expects you to cut a large hole in the middle of it to let the light through. Rather than printing a full one and then cutting a hole in it, I'm doing the hole-cutting in software!

And doing some work in FreeCAD to customise a version of Jana M. Hemsing’s Ligra projector.

A partially-assembled ligra projector. Four lengths of aluminium extrusion surround a couple of red 3D prints; the 3D prints hold a second-hand SLR telephoto lens.

Chris is using the time to dive back into the Museum in a Box code to work through the issues list. It feels a bit like swimming through treacle but there is progress and it’s good to have a chunk of time to move things on.

He also discovered that we have unintentionally been shipping small electrical heaters internationally. Or more accurately, because the courier we use has updated their website with a new HS code generator for exports, we discovered that their previous HS code generator gave us a code which was a long way away from describing the Museum in a Box we’d been using it for. We’re now accurately shipping, ‘Small, electrical, other’. Along the way we discovered that, for reasons unknown, there is a specific code for an ‘An electronic sound generator, creating an analog signal for a device producing the sound of an engine”, but not for an NFC reading box to play audio in Museums and Galleries. It’s not clear if this is an argument for more or less government.

In other news he’s going to remember to take more photos to help him remember what else he did for weeknoting.