Welcome
to the world of John Robinson the Umpteenth of Upminster

see copyright notice. Page created 2-Jul-2015 updated 12-Dec-2024. Use the button groups above to navigate quickly around the site.

Much as I loved my parents, I do wish they'd given me a more distinctive name! To clarify: I'm the John Robinson who was schooled at Engayne, Brentwood and Cambridge; worked at the BBC, Goldsmiths' and King's Colleges; walks everywhere, takes lots of pictures, and likes big old computers. You can read more about me on the 3 pages of this CV. To complete the profile (and just so that everyone knows): I'm British, male, single, heterosexual and omnivorous (and determined never to be denied the pleasure of eating well-reared and skilfully-cooked meat). I respect all religious beliefs, but personally hold sacred only the balance of nature - howsoever it came about - which I believe to be catastrophically threatened by burgeoning human numbers. Best stop there, before the profile morphs into a mission statement! Oh, and another thing - I can't be bothered with "political correctness".

This website first appeared in 2000 (as www.genre.fsnet.co.uk). Most of the popular pages are still here, with lots of new stuff and more to come. If you're looking for specific content, the site map will locate it faster than the navigation buttons! Throughout the site, red text and red-bordered images are links. I welcome all constructive comments and enquiries via the contact page.

Quick links to popular pages

Sloe Gin recipe
How to make the liqueur (and what to do with the leftovers)

Virtual Paper Tape Reader
Decodes (and encodes) images of punched paper tape

Photos of mammals
Squirrels and foxes are here, with links to many other photo galleries

Digital clocks
and lots more from my electronic projects museum

My working years
in BBC Engineering Designs and elsewhere (part of a 3-page CV)

Site map
A complete list of the 75+ feature pages on this site

Recent changes (latest first)

Updated 12-Dec-2024
Christmas cards 2020...
2024 design added

New 27-Jun-2024
Windows™ utilities
More home-grown software revealed

Updated 21-Oct-2023
Photos of mammals
Sitting fox added

Updated 21-Oct-2023
Bird photos
[another] heron replaced, green woodpecker added

Kitchen-sink drama

22-Aug-2024: After washing up the other morning, I was quite worried to find this object in the kitchen sink. It was translucent, with the look and feel of polythene. Had a washer, or some other vital component, split and fallen out of a tap, or the kettle? Or was it just a piece of packaging that I'd torn off? I spent ages thinking back over what I'd opened or unwrapped nearby during the previous 24 hours.

What I hadn't done was to smell the object; on doing so, I instantly remembered slicing an onion. It was a tough old specimen with multiple cores - and this was an inner "ring" from one of them!

When the bough breaks...

27-Jun-2024: ...the cradle will fall! In this case, I suspect the "cradle", a small (100mm) but perfectly-formed nest, was dislodged by a predator rather than by any structural failure. It appeared on my lawn underneath the horse chestnut tree, but I'm wondering if it originated in one of the smaller trees or shrubs, as the chestnut is usually the exclusive home of big birds such as wood pigeons. There's no evidence of any eggs.

It's sad to see so much construction work wasted. Rather like the destruction of a spider web that took hours to build. I wish I knew of a Nature Table to bequeath it to!

Mobile features

7-May-2024: I've been uneasily aware for a while that, on a phone screen, some pages on this site could pass for a dog's breakfast! 25 years ago, when we all used computers, tiny screens weren't an issue; now, with an ever-increasing number of visitors on smartphones, I've made an effort to overcome my cyber-luddite tendency, and embarked on a programme of markup changes and tweaks, to make the layout adapt better to the size and shape of display. At the same time I'm changing the colour scheme slightly, so that on a modern device pages look more like they used to back in the day on my laptop. Those old LCD displays really lacked contrast in the highlight region! A further improvement is to make all the cross-page links shorter and more consistent, for better indexing and offline performance.

Some of the edits are automated, but with 100 pages to revisit it's going to take a while - so please bear with me, there will be a mixture of page styles during the coming weeks. Or more likely months, with summer approaching! Hopefully the end result will be a better mobile browsing experience (and, I trust, no starving dogs).

PS. Task completed, 21-Jun-2024.

Cor blimey, strike a light

12-Sep-2023: A week ago, the fluorescent light in my bathroom began to flicker occasionally, then rapidly deteriorated until it was flashing on and off every few seconds. Not happy with ablutions by torchlight, the next morning I trekked to my nearest hardware store to get a replacement tube (5 miles away - all the local outlets have given way to a desert of coffee shops and beauty salons).

It's just as well it failed when it did; I walked out with the last remaining 30W T8 tube in the store. They're being withdrawn from sale in the UK as from this month. Who knew?

I'm staggered to see it only scores a G for energy. I know the ratings were revised a couple of years ago, but in my book 2400 lumens isn't bad for a 30W tube (ok there's a few more watts lost in the ballast). I imagine it would have rated A or B before the goalposts were moved. In any case, I'm not inclined to replace it with an LED strip, as I like the colour rendition of the modern triphosphor tube, and the soft light that results from its 360° coverage of a white ceiling. And if it's the mercury content that's upset the regulators, I note that it's a mere 0.002 grammes. I can't help thinking back to schooldays, when we innocently splashed the stuff around like water!

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