Urika Watch – Japanese Hamazawa movement

This post is about technical details of a watch, the watch which was used by my grand-father Mr. John Ephraim Fernandez. He was a humanitarian, business man and Mayor of Trivandrum in 1950s.

The watch might have bought in 1960s or 1970s and used till his death in 1998. So the watch now (year 2024) would be around 60 years. The watch is still working with accurate time but strap and case was rusted little bit as it was not used for around 25 years after his death. The watch was with my sister since 1998 and I got it serviced in a watch repair shop in MG road, Kochi. This is what I have now after servicing.

Below is watch looked like in mint condition (photo from internet)

It took around one month to get the watch serviced as the the service person is new to this watch movement, but he is familiar with other Japanese watches like Citizen.

Watch crystal (watch face) is made of mica and it was faded little bit and there were minor scratches and cracks as you can see in the image below. The steel case and strap was rusted.

During service a new crystal was custom made using mica.

The outer strap is engraved with the URIKA logo, but inside the strap its engraved Bedford name and logo.

Stainless steel strap which has Urika and Bedford logos

The watch make is Urika a Japanese company which no longer exists. It has a Hamazawa movement which has automatic self winding and manual winding.

Hamazawa was a Japanese manufacturer that was bought by Orient/Seiko around 1980. Their movements can often be found in watches with the brand Urika, LeJour and LeGant. On research I have also seen some Benrus,  Jemis and SIGNAL watches use the same Hamazawa movement.

The watch model number is 5021-0060 with 21600 beats (alternations per hour A/h) 17 jewels. The movement is “Hamazawa 5026A” with automatic, sweep second, date, day.

A watch with 17 jewels is often called a fully jeweled watch. This means that it uses jewel (usually ruby) bearings in the mechanical movement from the balance wheel all the way to the center wheel pivot.

https://www.prestigetime.com/blog/what-are-the-jewels-in-a-watch-for.html

In the 1960’s Hamazawa released the 5000 family of movements – automatic and manual wind. They were 17 jewel movements and have a 21,600 beat. The self-winding mechanism partially uses the Seiko Magic Level System.

Components of the Hamazawa movement

As mentioned above in the strap company name is engraved as Urika, but if you look closely inside the strap its engraved with the Bedford company logo. Other Urika users also reported this. Not sure if Urika and Bedford had any collaboration.

Hamazawa movement family:
5020A = Hand winding, sweep second
5022A = Hand winding, sweep second, date
5023A = Hand winding, sweep second, date, day
5025A = Automatic, sweep second, date
5026A = Automatic, sweep second, date, day (this is what I have)

Thanks for reading. Peace ✌️ 🍺

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Some references to Urika watches:
Hamazawa: https://chronopedia.club/Hamazawa
Movement: https://17jewels.info/movements/h/hamazawa/hamazawa-5026b/
Assembly detailed information(Chinese article, use Google translate to covert to English): https://www.mobile01.com/topicdetail.php?f=376&t=5964735
Other watches which use Hamazawa movement: https://www.watchrepairtalk.com/topic/25770-what-the-heck-is-this-hamazawa-5023a/
WatchCrunch: https://www.watchcrunch.com/Chronophobia/posts/urika-a-forgotten-budget-japanese-brand-318415

Install PM2 in AWS LightSail, EC2

Install PM2 globally. This is the first step. Execute below commands in AWS terminal.

sudo npm install pm2@latest -g

Make PM2 run during startup. This will daemonize pm2 and initialize it on system reboots. This step is very important. This will automatically start pm2 in case we restart our server instance.

pm2 startup

PM2 commands

PM2 is a Production Process Manager for Node.js applications
                     with a built-in Load Balancer.

                Start and Daemonize any application:
                $ pm2 start app.js

                Load Balance 4 instances of api.js:
                $ pm2 start api.js -i 4

                Monitor in production:
                $ pm2 monitor

                Make pm2 auto-boot at server restart:
                $ pm2 startup

                To go further checkout:
                http://pm2.io/

Upgrade NodeJS in AWS LightSail

We will discuss how to upgrade NodeJS version in an Amazon LightSail instance.

SSH into your AWS LightSail instance.

Get the current NodeJS version

First get the NodeJS version and where its installed.

node -v

The above command will display the currently installed node version.

Now get the where Node JS is installed

which node

This will display the node location. We need this later.

Update Package Lists

Before installing a new version of Node.js, it’s a good practice to update your package lists.

sudo apt-get update

Download and Install Node.js

We will install the node version 20.0.1. Change this to version of your choice. The below example commands will be using version 20.0.1

Create a folder to download the files. We will create a folder named temp

mkdir temp
cd temp

Now we have created the directory and opened it

You can download the Node.js 20.10.0 binary from the official website and install it. Execute below commands one by one.

# Replace “20.10.0” with the actual version number
wget https://nodejs.org/dist/v20.10.0/node-v20.10.0-linux-x64.tar.xz

tar -xf node-v20.10.0-linux-x64.tar.xz

Now your directory should look like this.

temp directory contents

Now we will rename the existing node folder to node-old.

Navigate to the current node parent installation directory which we got from the above command which node . In our case the parent directory is /opt/bitnami

sudo mv node node-old
sudo mkdir node

Now navigate back to our temp directory and copy the new node files to the new node directory we created above.

sudo cp -r node-v20.10.0-linux-x64/* /opt/bitnami/node

New Node version files are copied.

Verify the Installation

Verify the new node and npm versions.

node -v
npm -v

Happy Coding…. 🍺

MongoDB Change the data type of a field

Problem: I want to change the data type of a field in my MongoDB collection from string to Date.

Example: I have a field in my collection called expiry which has values stored in string like 31 Dec 2021 . I need to change this to a Date object.

Solution:

db.posts.find({}).forEach(function (doc) {
  db.posts.updateOne(
    {
      _id: doc._id,
    },
    {
      $set: {
        expiry: new Date(doc.expiry)
      },
    }
  )
})

The above shell command will find all collections in my posts collection and change the data in expiry field which is of type string to Date

WordPress malware ch.trainresistor.cc

Issue: WordPress site is not loading properly. Styles are not loading in the page. All requested are redirecting to an external URL ch.trainresistor.cc

Cause: This is due to a vulnerabilty in a the wordpress plugin – “PublishPress Capabilities – User Role Access, Editor Permissions, Admin” More info on this here

Resolution: This malware affects files and database. Search for trainresistor in your PHP files contents. Replace it with your site URL.

Open the database using phpMyAdmin from your server control panel. Select your site database and then select wp_options table.

Update the fields siteurl and admin_email to your website url and admin email. See below image

After this open your site. It should work.

Remove unused plugins and update all plugins which are in use. Restore files and database if you have backup.

How to replace multimeter battery

This video explains how to replace the 9V internal battery of the multimeter.

html-to-draftjs window is not defined error

Fix for the issue window is not defined when using html-to-draftjs (npm link )

The version if the html-to-draftjs is 1.5.0 in nextjs version 10.0.5.

Below is the error thrown when integrated htmlToDraft in page.

This issue is fixed using below code at the top of the page just below imports

let htmlToDraft = null;
if (typeof window === 'object') {
  htmlToDraft = require('html-to-draftjs').default;
}

Hope this helps, happy coding
🍺🍺

View WIFI password from command prompt

Have you forgot your wifi password. You can view it from your command prompt if you know the wifi name. Open command prompt, type below command and press enter key.

netsh wlan show profile YOUR-WIFI-NAME key=clear

This will show the WIFI details along with the password.

Raspbian empty space on left

If you happen to see an empty space at the left of screen its most probably a panel you have added earlier.

In order to remove it you need to right click and delete the panel.

Click OK to delete

Once the panel is deleted you will see the space has gone and the screen will look like this

Disable Source Maps in Gatsby

Source maps are a great way to do debugging the minified/build version of the code. This often comes handy when we get a defect in production and wants to debug.

Gatsby by default generate sourcemaps in build version.

We can override this default behaviour and disable the generation of sourcemap (.map) files.

For this we can use a Gatsby plugin called gatsby-plugin-no-sourcemaps

Add the plugin gatsby-plugin-no-sourcemaps

npm i gatsby-plugin-no-sourcemaps

or use yarn command if you are using Yarn

yarn add gatsby-plugin-no-sourcemaps

After installing this plugin you need to add the entry in Gatsby plugins array.

Open gatsby-config.js and add the plugin name in plugins array. Your array will now look like below

Now go to the public folder and delete all files. Run the command
gatsby build

Build files will be generated without any sourcemap files.

Hope this helps.

Happy coding.

🔥 ☕