To set the scene for those who are yet to know me well enough; I have a lot of technology. Not a lot by most people’s standards, a lot by the standards of a shop like BestBuy, PC World, Maplin…well you get the idea, to a normal human’s view, I could open a shop with the stuff I don’t use on a daily basis!

Among this ridiculous collection of crazy contraptions, shiny things and boxes that go “vvvzdt” there is a decent array of data storage. Some NAS, some just stacked in computers, some semi-portable, external, internal…you get the idea. Part of that collection comes in the form of two Synology Diskstations.

These are beautiful little white boxes, flashing lights, put them in a corner, magic tech toys. You put a hard drive in them, set them up and enjoy! I have been for quite a while! One has all of my work, my portfolio, my crucial data; the other houses all of my media, my photograph collection, all of my music (now leaving my 320 CD collection simply as the ‘backup’) and all of my video files (the missus and I both had huge collections before we merged them…that was a longer time ripping than the music!).

Now for those of you reading this without the benefit of 10 years experience in the IT industry, experience of IT forensics, data recovery, deep level computer hardware knowledge and/or a ‘Matrix’ style neural interface for rapidly learning any topic you like…I shall try and keep this as simple as I can…{and put explanations in these brackets}

The long and short of getting to this point now, the point at where I feel the desire to chronicle this expedition, was the result of a list of unfortunate events; events that went thus:
I was given a 2TB {rather large} hard drive as payment for knowledge. The drive however had a couple of bad sectors {broken bits}. This was only a problem for the person who gave me the drive as it was for their business and they had the redundancy in a RAID array anyway {they just swapped this one for a new one}.
I bought myself a nice new Diskstation to wrap around my nice new hard drive.
*insert a couple of months*
I carefully spent several weeks organising and sorting all of my data on my entire network to bring all of my media together onto the new drive.
Attempting to do a system update on the new Diskstation (let’s now call it ‘Mediastation’) I discovered there was a little issue.
A short while after discovering that the update wouldn’t take, our energy supplier had a bit of an issue. Without warning, all of the electricity on the street where I live vanished.

*here is the start of the fun*

When the power came back, I fired everything back up to check it was all ok (as I was in the middle of a couple of bits at the time too) I noticed that I couldn’t connect in the usual way to the Mediastation.

After investigation, the usual checks and then the last step of Synology’s own management software, it seemed that the Media station had lost its management information and believed itself to be a completely fresh, new system.

Crap! – I thought (what I said out loud was a little different but along similar lines)

Now one thing I already know about Synology is that part of the setup of the management software involves reformatting the entire drive {wiping in clear}. My data is on there! *starts to panic*…all 1.6TB of it {enough for storing 2200 films (at average size once ripped), or about 32,000 average music albums as mp3}. Once I got my pulse back to a steady 60bpm I thought logically and rationally.

Now I’ve been actively in the IT industry for the last 10 years, starting the first incarnation of my IT business at 15. I’ve also been doing data recovery since around that time too. Over the years I’ve tried many different pieces of software on the market, some good, some not so good. With careful selection I have my trusty collection of tools that normally serve me beautifully when it comes to any recovery I have to do these days.

Since learning the craft all the time ago, I’ve brought back information from broken drives, broken partitions {like C:\ and D:\}, corrupted file systems {how your computer reads the information}, and the usual suspects of accidental reformatting or deletion (initial mistake using fdisk all them years ago that drove me to learn in the first place). So I thought this shouldn’t be too difficult compared to all that…

When setting up one of these Synology systems, the drives are split with a system partition for the core software (as it’s basically a miniature Apple Mac), then the main data partition. It’s a Linux based operating system too, so it’s all formatted to ext3 {just smile and nod here}. Simple I thought, I will throw the drive into my spare Ubuntu machine, take the data off the drive, start again from scratch and move everything back over…

Problem number one!

It turns out that the drive didn’t have any visible partitions, it didn’t even have any invisible partitions either.

Not a problem! – I thought. I will just plug it into one of my Windows machines and get cracking the usual way…external drive, forensic software, make sure all the data is intact…

Problem number two!

The drive needed to be initialised in Windows; that’s normally only needed when you first plug in a new drive, as in a brand new, fresh out the packet new drive. Hmmmmm, never a good sign! Further investigation with all the usual toys, tricks and tools provided little in the way of encouragement. Short of my old faithful forensic package; a very powerful hex editor {again, smile and nod please} which at least showed me that the data was still all there, was intact (for the most part) and just needed to be brought back to life.

My tech instincts kicked in here at this point. I knew this sort of procedure could potentially be destructive so I needed to do this properly. Thankfully after some careful negotiation, I was fortunate enough to acquire another 2TB drive (long story, don’t ask) and after a fully day of anticipation, forensically cloned the entire drive. At least now if I try and recover from the new drive, break it or damage the data, I can still clone it again.

This is pretty much standard procedure for any forensic outfit simply for that reason, you leave the original drive and data untouched and you have the freedom to do anything needed to bring it back on the other drive, safe in the knowledge that things will be ok in the end. Needless to say, the average human isn’t in the position to go out and just buy another drive the same size…hence my very careful negotiation to get my new drive as a donation.

Thinking about the drive structure and how the data is laid out, logically, repairing the partitions would be the best place to start.

Problem number three!

As it happens, discovering after the best part of 2 full days (48 hours) of scanning, the majority of the partition information is actually not there. There are no partitions to find, to rebuild, it’s simply not there. Typically, of all the places for the bad sectors to choose, they seem to have decided to land right in the one place I didn’t want them too; right in the (metaphoric) page number section. The computer simply knows there are words in the book but can’t look for page numbers.

To make things as easy to understand as possible for this next part; think of a dictionary, all in order, you go to the start, it says it’s in alphabetical order. You want to find the word “monumental”, you flick to the section with words starting with the letter M, find the word, read the description. That’s how drives on Windows normally store data (I know, I know, it’s more involved than that but *points* you explain it to them!). With this drive (remember me mentioning ext3 before?) think of the dictionary again, you look at the start, it’s in a slightly different order. Rather than A-Z it’s in Superblock 1-26 (ish). You want to find the word “arse”, head to Superblock 1 (as it’s a good place to start), you see that there a number of things called ‘inodes’.

You look between Superblock 1 and 2, there is a big list of descriptions for all manner of words…just no words. Inode-3255:A round fruit, normally red or green, quite tasty, eaten daily is supposed to keep the doctor away. Inode-6342:Girls name, name of a play in which the sun will come out tomorrow. Inode-7345:Insect, 6 legs, carries lots of stuff and turns up in your kitchen during the summer. Ok so you get the idea! We flick back and have a look at the Superblock again to see Inode-3255:Apple, Inode-6342:Annie, Inode-7345:Ant.

Again, this is heavily simplified but I’m guessing you don’t quite think I’m the same level of crazy as you did before reading this. Moving on, several days later, several other pieces of software later and I reached a point of possible meltdown. Nothing would either find the containers for the files or the right data. I was really really starting to panic at this point; nearly a week of properly hard slogging and still coming up short. Then a breakthrough! Something found some data!…several hundred thousand files!!…all named “00001234”, “00001235”, “00001236” and so on!!!

Well, at the very least I knew I would be able to get my data, just that I would have to spend the next few years sorting it all up, finding the names for everything, putting songs back into order, that sort of thing. It was something, it was a glimmer of hope, a light at the end of the tunnel. Something to stop me from just giving up. I knew that if this was at least possible, then getting the superblocks back, listing the inode codes and then finding the appropriate file name for each inode could lead me back in the right direction. Again, it would take one hell of a long time but it was at the very least, possible!

Next came a day of research, there just had to be a way of doing this. Forum posts, computer scientists breakdowns of things that noone in their right minds should know about, learning things that I know nobody I’ve ever met will actually know about. It’s infuriating but exciting at the same time. Knowing that noone else in my group of friends is actually sad enough to know this sort of stuff. I’m elevating myself to a new level of geekdom purely in the name of geek! Granted I know it’s something I usually do on a daily basis too but this sort of thing is just how I get my kicks. Some people drink, smoke, take drugs, go extreme ironing or do other crazy things; I just geek till it MHz!

Megahurt it did, my brain was ready to dribble out of my ears. Noone seemed to know, nobody had actually documented this before in a way that was easy enough to find. There are a number of companies that you can send your drive too but with the amount of data I needed to recover the bill would have topped £9000.

Then I found it! The Holy Grail! Venus’s arms! Rocking horse poo! Perpetual motion! A piece of software that actually does what I’m trying to do!!!!!!!!!!!!

FUCKING BRILLIANT!!! – I thought, and quietly shouted at myself.

After a few hours of playing with the software, it knew the drive had data, it knew it had once held ext3 partitions, it knew I wanted to find the data that is on those ext3 partitions. All I had to do was set the big scan running for it to find the traces of the files, the traces of the superblocks, the list of inodes, folders, filenames, piece it all together and present me with a list of things to click and recover on screen. I pressed the button knowing this was going to be a huge weight off my mind. The videos of my childhood would be back, the copies of my Dad’s songs, he albums would be back in my possession, my photos of my Dad and step Mum’s wedding, pictures of my baby sister, my baby brother for that matter too, granted he’s 8 now but he was a baby when I took the pictures! I would have it all back!!! – Oh the irony that I used this Mediastation to temporarily sort everything out before I backed the main stuff up!

After a good 24 hours or so of scanning, the screen was showing promise, it was about a 6th of the way through the drive, but had pretty pictures, blocks of colour with a nice key at the bottom. It had found over 700 Superblocks, buckets of files, this was looking good. I frequently checked back on progress just for my own amusement, watching my data be found, one pink square on the screen at a time.

Problem number four!

I made the fatal mistake of having to work, to not be sat in front of the screen for the predicted 6 full days of scanning that it was due to take. I didn’t fancy 144 hours straight as a sitting. Granted, I’ve probably not been far off doing that a few times but this time I decided not too. I would just monitor it remotely every couple of hours from my laptop while I was doing other household duties or enjoying the evening time with my family. The evening of the second day, after 48 hours or so of scanning; I knew it was about a third of the way through because of the progress it had been making. But I couldn’t connect to the machine remotely, something was up. It was late at night, my daughter was sleep, just me and my good lady relaxing…or trying too, now I couldn’t, I had to go and check.

I ran into my computer room, my office type space, there it was, a black screen, just one line of white text:

“SYSTEM DISK ERROR. PRESS ENTER TO CONTINUE!”

I couldn’t believe it! It could have only been one possible thing. An automated Windows Update!!! That one thing that seems to know exactly the point at which you don’t want anything to happen on the computer, it decides that your computer should now be restarted!

Problem number five!

Now when you play about with very powerful software, something like a restart is something that has to be prepared for. Especially when you are playing with the very things that Windows needs to be able to run; correct partition information! Now because I was running 3 drives in this machine, one for Windows, 2 for the data recovery, I had to try and safeguard myself as much as possible. Was my data ok?…it should have been, I did the drive clone, I could still clone it again if I needed too. But either way it had set me back. I had to first fix the PC!

Bloody typical! – I thought (not quite what I actually said, but if you want the full rant then check my facebook page for that explicit little number)

To cut a very very long story only slightly shorter…After fixing windows I had to do a day long, high level scan just to make sure the data was still intact enough to try another long, low level scan and rebuild. Thankfully it was!
The progress is long, arduous, laborious, but actually working! As in really, properly, actually working! Data, filenames, folder structure, the lot!

At this point, it’s pretty much plain sailing now, I’ve managed to recover all 17,000 of my pictures and I’m plodding through the next stage, video!

Now I would like to take this final line to congratulate you on actually managing to read through (or just scroll down) to see this. So remember, always be nice to geeks, it’s their obsession with technology that fixes the things you break!

Well, like most geeks, I’m not content with just one computer or one console, or even a relatively normal amount of storage…

For this project, I decided to do something about the bland, boring, black case that housed the 250GB of storage that I had stuck in the back of my Wii and Xbox 360. I bounce it between the two for random bits of data storage that’s just related to them, (so as to keep it off my network) so it had to be a gaming theme!

I have always been, and always will be, a huge fan of Nintendo! I know it’s odd, I know I shouldn’t admit it in public, but hey, I’m out and proud; I love Nintendo! I was raised with them, or by them, either way you could say it’s a big part of who I am. So naturally I needed something Nintendo themed really.

My game of choice, the one that really got me into gaming, was Super Metroid; so I felt it just had to be that game, if it would work. I thought it was about right in size to be able to fit a 2.5″ hard drive into a SNES cartridge so I managed to grab a copy of the game from a local electronics shop.

The game in question

I discovered that the drive & controller board, are almost, exactly the right size to fit inside a SNES cartridge. On further inspection, after the picture below, I discovered it was designed with exactly this in mind. I’m pretty sure that time travel was involved and that Nintendo had this as a plan from the start…which means I must get to work on getting both a job at Nintendo 25 years ago and a time machine…I suspect the one I’m building should be ready around 1976!

After cracking open the cartridge

With some expertly honed skill (if I do say so myself), a steady artisan’s hand, and a nicely sharp Stanley knife (that’s a bit like an X-Acto knife for people who know how to correctly spell “colour”) I trimmed out the framework that normally holds the game circuit, carved a couple of holes for the LED and plug, then put it all back together. Pics below!

Now, she’s sitting pride of place next to my Wii, simply pointing out just how much of a geek one guy can be!

Well after years of designing, redesigning, re-redesigning, re-designing…there is finally an actual live site for Mortis2000…now that the company is simply a pseudonym of the original founder. Typical really as for years, as a fully-fledged limited company, we could churn out offices, computers, websites, anything IT really, yet we never decided on a website.

The problem was that our skills would always grow faster than we could allow on free time to build the site. Every time we came up with a design that worked, we would land another big job that would swing the company in a new direction; we just couldn’t keep up with designs that actually worked for us.

Finally though, after 10 years as a name in the IT world, I’ve decided to simply bring the name back to being the overall ‘me’, the person I am both on a working, professional sense and also a developing, mad scientist; the side of me you are currently reading about.

I took it upon myself to use the old Mortis2000 mantra (Design, Construction, Innovation & Solution) to be the professional side of me. I stole some time and energy of a dear friend of mine (and former Mortis2000 Director) The Matthew Bobbu, from I Make Awesome.

The skills this man has are not to be taken lightly so I badgered him into making me the 3 sites that sum up who I am, to a certain degree anyway. This part of me, WiseUmos, I would say is the “everything else” bit that’s not included with the ‘scrubbed up’ person you see working in an office, or diving behind a computer.

As the site is now live, I shall be adding, subtracting, dumping and uploading all manner of strange things. I plan to showcase mad ideas, things my parents always told me not to do, plus some of the things they told me I should be doing. As my projects come alive, you will bear witness to my signing of the birth certificate.

Well, I managed it!

After ordering some 6mm push to make buttons from ebay, I set about trying to find possible boxes from my housemate’s stash of IT crap that he’s been storing in anticipation of some steampunk projects. I narrowed it down to 2 possible boxes, a pico photo printer and an old Speedtouch modem. Sadly, it ended up having to be the modem thanks to the size of the controller board. It just wouldn’t have fit in the printer no matter how much I trimmed it.

A bit of measuring up, marking out, playing about with some tools and I had mounted the switches; as you can see below, they fit quite well.

With the buttons mounted and the knowledge of where the wiring should be, I broke out my old soldering iron and set to work. Doing the Esc key was easy as it was just 2 direct pins, pin 1 on the left panel and pin 4 on the right panel. The others didn’t turn out to be as easy; pin 15 on the left panel needed to go to both the Up and Left keys and then on the right panel, pin 8 had to connect to Left, Down and Right.

At this point I decided to daisy chain them to save a bit of fiddling, thought it would be smarter to solder them on at the switches rather than trying to cram bunched wires into small holes with just my fingers and hope they stayed in with friction alone. Here’s the mess of wires anyway before I put the 2 parts together.

I neglected to get a shot of the pins as they where all in place but I will get one when I next open it up as there is a minor problem so far. It went together reasonably well after a short problem that any of you with a sharp eye will spot. One of the wires is actually far too short to fit where it needs too. I needed to get the one connected to the Up button right the way down into pin 15 which is very near the bottom. After cutting that out and soldering a longer wire in place, it all went together quite well.

As you can see from the finished item, I had to use some electrical tape around the seam just to hold it all together as the screw hole and the clips are already mashed from Matt’s efforts and removing the guts. Didn’t turn out too badly though.

The only problem I have found so far is that something seems to have guffed along the way as the left and the down keys don’t actually do anything. I’m not sure if that was an error on my part with soldering or if I have managed to put the pin in the wrong place. The good news is that for the moment, having Esc, Up and Right will actually do most of what I want it to do anyway. I will shift forward and backward in a PDF document and also bring me out of full screen mode which is everything I was after.

As they say, being a complete geeky loon is the mother of invention…or something like that anyway; I have decided to fix a minor annoyance with a new crazy project. I’ve been trying to do a lot more reading and learning recently and with the majority of my material being PDF or other vertical ‘print style’ documents that all have to be read on a computer screen, I needed a solution that made more sense. Now, I have a HP TX2520ea laptop with the rotating touch screen (swish I know) but the problem with that is with the weight and the heat. Hold the laptop in your hand, it’s heavy and gets hot. Put it on your lap and you have the same problem, not to mention the ergonomics are not marvelous then either.

To solve this yesterday I built a little wooden easel type construction out of some 2×1 I had lay around my room. This works really well as it’s the perfect height to use on my desk, it’s at my right hand ready to use and fits in nicely with my main dual screen PC. Such superb solution to reading any documents while doing the practical work on the main computer (incidentally, the computer with the blank keyboard).

There is however a downside in that because the keyboard is now covered with the screen, things can be a little tricky. If I go into full screen on Adobe Reader while reading through a PDF, I have to try and rely on gentures with the pen or my finger to change pages, this isn’t always perfect. The other down side is that I can’t exit the full screen mode without either the Esc key or Ctrl+L…neither of which I can do with just a finger!

For this solution, I decided to stick with the age old Mortis2000 philosophy.

“Why do something the easy way when you can make a really geeky, convoluted, insane solution and learn something in the process”

Thankfully with the donation of a half broken USB keyboard from my housemate Matt, I was able to follow that path. Strictly speaking, I need Esc, Up & Down but why stop there? I have decided to make an interface box with Esc and the 4 direction arrows. This began by having to trace some circuits. As you can see from the image below, there is a lot of work to do. This is a standard UK 102 key layout with some media keys too. There are 2 banks of contacts as always so I had to trace the keys I wanted and record them down on my pad. Seen below

Tracing the keyboard contacts

Once I had found and tested the keys I was trying to find. I made sure the where all noted down properly ready for the next step, stripping out the controller board in the top left of the keyboard and bringing the cable with it. For the moment, everything it all completely exposed and clipped together as I don’t yet have a box or enough buttons to make the all work. For the moment however, I have connected the Esc key to the only push to make button I had lay around and I have ordered 4 more buttons from the interwebs.

Below you can see the button as it resides now on my laptop which at least provides me with an escape route once I’m in my reading mode. The next post shall be the finished product…or at least very close to it!

At least now I can get out of full screen mode

As a long time fan of the daskeyboard and having been newly introduced to the Happy Hacking Keyboard (HHKB) yet having never owned either one, I thought it might be a nice idea to make my own. I have delayed posting this blog to enable me to spend around a month actually getting used to this new keyboard and the benefits that having no indication on the keys will actually provide.

I am happy to say that over the last month, I have been switching between this keyboard and my laptop keyboard. This was a pretty standard thing anyway but as this is now all blank, it was a change indeed. As background, I have been touch typing for around 8 years after progressing in a less than standard fashion. Normal hunt and peck to start with as always and then as I sped up, I forced myself to not look at the keys.

Traditionally, most people would either cover their hands or would still dip and look at the keyboard out of habit. Thankfully I have managed over the last 6 years to iron out my habits of looking at the keyboard so I’m fairly competent at typing. Sadly just not at spelling…but that’s another story.

One thing that this keyboard has taught me over the last month is that I already know exactly where all the keys are on the keyboard but that on the odd occasion when I miss-key or go for a rarely used key, I still look down. This is quite perplexing for me as I was wholeheartedly convinced that I was actually quite good at not needing to look. I seem to do it only for a split second but it is enough now to remind me that I still do it. I have since been forcing myself to go for the backspace key than looking down as I know where that one is without even having to think about it; then I simply gauge by the mistake as to where I need to nudge my fingers.

I have found that my typing speed and accuracy actually went down a fair amount over the first 2 weeks of using the keyboard and I was getting most of my passwords wrong. Thankfully though with another 2 weeks of perseverance, I have manged to get back up to my normal typing speed and I have only a small way left to go until I hit my old standard of mistake making. Sadly that is still yet to improve as fast as I was hoping.

The beauty is that moving back over to my laptop keyboard is actually MUCH easier. It really is a superb way to learn by actually working out your problems on the most difficult way you can come up with. Needless to say that it doesn’t really help switching keyboards at the best of times but this really is a challenge not for the faint of heart. I am happy to report that after a month of fairly frequent use though, I’m actually back to where I was before, this can only mean that improvement shall be made in later weeks/months.

Anyway, enough about the waffle, let’s talk about the build itself! I started out with a generic, bog standard UK 102 key PS2 keyboard that I bought on eBay a few months back. It’s black, normal high-profile keys and virtually the same as everyone’s first keyboard. As a twist from the HHKB I decided to go for the additional red Esc key and to also have my W, A, S & D keys in a metallic blue for when I’m gaming, and because it looks kinda geeky too.

I used a standard sheet of sand paper (120 grit) to actually sand the tops of each key one by one. Silly I know but I fancied doing a nice job of it. The keys currently have a semi-brushed look to them but I suspect that will fade over time and with use. They are all nice and smooth though, which is the feeling I was going for. Considering keyboards with heavy use tend to become smooth in groups and as this keyboard is destined for some very heavy use indeed, I thought it would be nice to start where you will inevitably end up.

It didn’t take too long to sand each key by hand but I did experiment with a polishing bit on my Dremel at one point with some less than beautiful results. Each key took about a minute of sanding to get the desired result but naturally, it wasn’t something you could do all in one go with that number of keys. I ended up sanding them in batches which worked rather well. For the coloured keys I went for some Humbrol Enamel paint but sadly the WASD keys have not quite come out as I had hoped. For the second round of tweaks I am going to use some acrylic paint which is much lighter and then varnish over the top of them for the extra protection. Anyway, here’s the picture below at the end of round one.

The nearly finished article

For the future I shall be monitoring the typing progression for myself, painting the WASD keys again with a lighter blue, swapping out the green LEDs for some nice blue ones and with a bit of luck, converting it all over to USB and even building in a USB hub too. More to follow after round 2.

As some of you may already know, I’m somewhat of an eccentric; this post may do nothing short of confirm that I am indeed, a bit nuts. I am going to document some of my more random ideas as I’m entering a phase in my life where I am in a position to actually bring some of them to life.

For a little background on this particular project, I recently moved from Haydock to Bristol and with this I had to prioritize on what I really needed compared to what I had simply collected over the last 7-8 years of building an IT company. I did however get news from my business partner and new housemate that as he has a bigger room than the one I was moving into, he would happily let me house one of my desks next to his.

This was due to be ideal, it would mean that because his room is directly above mine, I could wander up and work on my machine in his room so that we could collaborate in person and not via something like Google Wave or phone.

This left only one problem, the machine! The desk itself was a rather standard black desk; nothing special by any means. This was easily sorted by screwing some 9mm ply to the underside of the desk, removing the top and then attaching it with a piano hinge. This turned a standard desk into something I could open, store stuff in and in turn have a little extra space. This is when it hit me…

“Ooooh! I know! I have a spare Dell machine that doesn’t really seem to work too well. Perfect!…The desk!”

…and thus the project was born. After finding a set of parts that would actually enable this machine to work, I began to build it into the desk. As it stands now, it all works, really well. But this is not the end of it, there needs to be more!

The critical information, the machine itself. It was a Dell something or other that was donated to me after completing some other work for a friend. The machine was dead, nothing I seemed to change would actually let it work. As far as I could tell, the only thing I hadn’t changed was the motherboard. It would begin to work and then just stop. Random things that could not be pinned down to anything logical.

We had problems installing windows, new RAM, optical drive, hard drive, still no joy. Let’s try Linux, 6 versions later and only one would actually boot up. This made no sense! Everything that could be swapped, had been. Things that where on the board were replaced by cards, still nothing.

After taking the board out of the box, building a custom frame out of ABS plastic to hold the heatsink onto the CPU and then building some other custom cooling, Blue Peter style, I managed to get something I could test on a table. I took the standard PSU out of the same case, hooked that up. Some RAM that I had kicking about, a random SATA hard drive I had laid around and some other bits. I pressed power and it worked!

The desk! Typically, it wouldn’t fit; the computer was far too tall. Here’s where the simple ideas work the best. I grabbed some longer screws and lowered the boards under the desk, this worked. It’s not pretty but it works. After a lot of playing around with locations, holding things together with pipe cleaners, removing anything that wasn’t actually useful and trying again, it lives.

The picture below gives you a rough idea of how it looks up to now. More will be done in the very near future and more information will be added as soon as there is something to post.

The build so far