Month: June 2018

Posted on

BB Not 8

Here’s a replay of a recent online race I took part in on Gran Tursimo. I qualified third and then managed to win.

It was a good race although nothing too strenuous. It’s best to qualify as high as possible because there’s normally a massive shunt-scene at the first corner if you are lower down. My general method for online racing is to try and steer clear of other cars and take a wider line in corners if there are cars around me. There have been many times that I have been driving well and then some wanker punts me off! He gets a slow down penalty of 4 seconds and I end up at the back of the field. I hate that!

Posted on

Busy South East

A few weeks ago when I was in the Lake District I would occasionally look at 360Radar to see what was flying close by. I found it curious that there was quite a lack of aircraft flying compared to Kent, where I live normally. Now, the south east does have the three London main airports and most air traffic heading to the continent. Have a look at the two following views and decide for yourself. Both are the same area of land and they are taken within a minute of each other. I think the difference is striking.

Lake District Air Traffic
Lake District Air Traffic
Kent Air Traffic
Kent Air Traffic

Of course, this communication could be entitled:

There’s a lot more planes where there’s a lot more airports

Posted on

Baseline

I recently had my electricity and gas meters upgraded to “smart” meters. They aren’t that smart. All they do is upload my meter reading to the utility company at regular intervals along with this information being displayed on a screen. I look at the screen now and then but I do think that eventually I will turn it off. I know roughly how much I spend each day and it’s not really a surprise.

May Energy kWh
May Energy kWh

This graph shows the energy use each day with the lower darker bar being electricity and the light blue being gas. I have a gas boiler for water and heating along with a gas hob. The oven is electric. This can be translated into costs [at current market rates]:

May Energy Costs
May Energy Costs

At the end of May I went away for a while and I normally try to shut-down most of the energy using devices in the house. The physical process can take about 5 minutes walking around the house making sure that everything is shut down in the correct order.

If you look at the last week of May you can see low and consistent energy costs. Although no gas was used in this time period the monetary costs is the standing charge that I pay for the privilege of having a gas supply.

Minimum Running
Minimum Running

My daily energy use in a house that is mostly turned off is 2kWh. This accounts for the following items:

  • Fridge
  • Microwave clock
  • Oven clock
  • Modem / Router
  • ADS-B aircraft tracker in the loft
  • Alarm clock
  • That extension lead orange light

It is taking a while for my head to get around this bizarre and stupid unit the kWh. But here goes:

My house’s power usage at baseline is 83 Watts. A human during the normal day runs at about 100 Watts [as does a 100W incandescent light bulb]. Over the course of the day this ends up being 7.2 MJ. My house needs to consume about the same amount of food as a human to run at its lowest power consumption levels.

Wolfram Alpha has some lovely comparisons for energy usage, so 2 kWh is the same as:

  • ≈ 1.7 × energy released by explosion of one kilogram of TNT ( 1 kilogram of TNT )
  • ≈ 0.57 × average electrical energy required by an Apple iPhone 5 per year (≈ 1.3×10^7 J )

And my favourite is:

  • Relativistic mass m from E = mc^2: 80 ng (nanograms)

When I next go away it would be interesting to see how low I could get the consumption. To be fair, I could just turn the electricity off at the mains. But the only thing I could still power down is the ADS-B receiver and I like to keep that going because I can log into it from around the world.

Posted on

Probably Magic

Heading East
Heading East

This place was heading east early one morning [probably to Frankfurt] and the colour of the sky and the line of the contrails caught my eye. It looked lovely.

Wokka Over Maidstone
Wokka Over Maidstone

Then there was this Chinook. It passed right over my work place and was such a lovely sight and sound. It amazes me just how technologically amazing we are as a species. Now although I know how these things work it does seem like magic at times!

Spitfire
Spitfire

Finally, yesterday this Spitfire flew over my village. I keep trying to remind people that one day they will be gone and we won’t see them flying anymore. It’s a lesson I have learnt from seeing many planes in the 80s at various airshows without really appreciating just how special they all were.

Posted on

Bagging A Few More

Over half term I made the journey to the other end of this country to spend some time in the Lake District. While it is quite a drive the views and atmosphere are so worth it.

While in the district of Allerdale I decided to complete a few more of the Wainwrights. There are 214 fells mentioned by Alfred Wainwright in his books and I’ve got a taste for bagging some each time I go to the Lake District. My personal target is to complete the lot by the time I am 60. I’ve got 14 years to go. I need to up my rate a little but the next time I go I am planning some lovely ridge walks that should get quite a few crossed off!

On the first day I went up Walla Crag [number 204 by height].

I parked in Great Wood car park and walked up the Cat Gill route and down again via Castlerigg. It was a lovely little jaunt. Now I had a feel for it I wanted to try and get some of the lower stand-alone fells bagged. I was trying to cross off those that would mean a big detour on future longer routes so this would allow me to make as yet unplanned walks easier.

Next was Binsey [number 192 by height]. A little mound of a fell on its own to the north east of the Skiddaw range.

This was too easy. The car was parked about half way up and was really just a little stroll. The views from the top were amazing. It was a lovely warm and sunny day with visibility running at about 25km. The mist was so fine that I couldn’t see the Scottish peaks but could just see Scotland across the Solway.

Derwentwater Withies Derwentwater Withies

Another day, another walk. This time up Cat Bells [number 189 by height]. I had already completed this particular fell and so wasn’t too fussed about climbing it but I had planned to meet a work friend there.

It was pretty busy at the top and plenty of people were making this their first Wainwright. I t was nice to see so many people enjoying this countryside. The views are just lovely.

Walking down Catbells and I saw this sheep just standing and staring.

The Hills Have Eyes The Hills Have Eyes

The next day was a rest day and I went on a narrow gauge railway and then visited Muncaster Castle. The walk back took in a short distance by the river Esk. The air was so still that the water looked like a mill pond.

River Esk River Esk

I drove back to Keswick through two mountain passes. One was Harknott pass and this is a most ridiculous road. There are hairpin bends with a gradient of 1:3. There were times I couldn’t see where the road went out the windscreen while turning because the road dropped away so fast. It was a very satisfying drive. Then, there was the Wrynose pass which wasn’t as spectacular but was still very pretty.

Another rest day followed with a lovely time doing various things together with going to watch Solo. The final walk day was spent hanging around Crummock Water after getting to the top of Rannerdale Knotts [number 210 by height] adjacent to the lake.

I’m annoyed that I forgot my hat. I don’t do well in direct sunlight, I have a lack of natural head covering, not that I’m too fussed about that, and I burn easily, even with sun lotion on [SPF 50].

Crummock Water Crummock Water

That was it for the week. A journey back to the South East and good broadband bandwidths beckoned the next day. It was good to get back to upload speeds in excess of 0.4Mb/s, it was needed to chuck photos into the cloud.

Derwent Water Derwent Water
Posted on

Home On The Range

Sometime recently I went to a series of ranges near the coast, pointing towards France. I was fortunate enough to have a go on the long range. In the picture below the targets are at 100m. We practised out to 300m. It was excellent.

They Are There
They Are There

If you look closely you can see the targets at 100m. Imagine the size of those out at 300m! I was allowed twenty five rounds and could choose when to shoot them. I had time at 100m, 200m and 300m. I needed a spotter for the first few shots as the weapon wasn’t zeroed to my hold and position. The 100m targets were easy. I took five shots at them and hit 4. I wanted to try ten rounds each at the longer distances.

At the 200m I was aiming correctly but hitting elsewhere (weapon zeroing) and so once I had my spotter I hit the target five out of the ten shots in total. I waited eagerly for the 300m targets, these were 6 second exposures.

Again, I needed spotting for the first few and then after that I hit five out of the ten shots. I am bloody impressed with this and happy. When I thought it was over I checked and I still had one round left. I waited for the target to raise and when I thought there were going to be no more I rested my position. It was at that point the target popped up and I took aim and fired the shot. I can’t remember if I hit that one.

When I spoke to the console operator afterwards he said he was watching me and waiting for me to drop my aim before putting up the last exposure so I was tricked, kinda.

It was a good day and I look forward to the next one.

Posted on

Lego 62 – Model 76102

Possibly the last one from the mid-year season. This is a Guardians / Avengers mix-up. I’m not sure if I know which part of the MCU this actually comes from but that doesn’t matter. It’s got Groot.

Lego Guardians
Lego Guardians
Posted on

Not A Normal Distribution

So, I’m feeling grumpy today. Just am. Not sure why. And then I go and stupidly read an article in on the BBC News website about most babies being born at 4am. You can read the article here and I’ll be taking quotations from it.

Four o’clock in the morning is the time most babies are born spontaneously in England, with the majority arriving between 01:00 and 07:00, a study shows.

So, four o’clock is the “average” of 01:00 and 07:00. Is that how they worked this out? I’m not sure. I’m probably not going to read the original paper but it does seem a strange thing to say. Assuming that spontaneous births are reasonably random the actual number arriving at 04:00 would be quite small and the variation could be little.

While planned C-section births tended to happen on weekday mornings, births after induced labours were more likely to occur around midnight.

This makes sense. C-Sections in the morning to then make sure everyone is fine during the time when the medical cover is best. Inductions probably happen at that time because they are started in the morning and it takes that long for the effects to show. These are not surprising figures and make utter sense.

It’s this next bit that turned me into a rage.

Overall, more than 70% of births took place outside regular working hours.

And

The researchers said there could be implications for staffing of midwives and doctors, with only 28% of births taking place between 09:00 and 17:00 on weekdays.

So, an event that is reasonably random is spread throughout the day? About thirty percent of births happen in a time frame covering roughly 30% of the amount of time in a day. THIS IS WHAT WE WOULD EXPECT. The working day covers 1/3 of the 24 hours in a day and the number of births in that time period is about 1/3. This sentence made me swear out loud in our staff common room earlier today, much to the ammusment of my colleagues.

I’m going for a walk to calm down.

Posted on

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Last night I went to see the latest Jurassic Park film. I travelled to the Cineworld Cinema in Rochester. The tide was low, I could see the whole mud back. The place looked quite picturesque in the dimming sun. As is my custom I rated this film on the IMDB site and you should read the rating system within this communcation.

Do you know what? I just tried to settle down and watch this film and enjoy it. Yes, it was terrible. The plot was shocking. The script was poor and everyone can outrun a volcano. They did get Jeff Goldbloom in for a couple of shots in the studio but they left the action to the younger actors. I just tried to enojy it as an action film and not be too picky.

There must be some form a rule that indicates that sequels are really bad, except for the Godfather and I haven’t seen those movies. This is film number 5 is the series and it was as you would expect for the fifth film in a series when there is only one plot.

Was it film four when they designed a new type of dinosaur? It wasn’t long before the capitialist pigs would take that dinosaur and then try to create an army with them. There was a lot wrong with this film. But I suspended an awful lot of disbelief and managed my best to enjoy the experience.

I remember seeing the first film in Harlow and it was an utter rush. Spielberg did an amazing job creating a world where dinosaurs exist. The original film made me so excited and scared I loved it. Unfortunately for kids these days they get to follow it up with tripe.

Oh, why were there kids under the age of 10 in the cinema when it’s a film that finished at 21:45?

Posted on

These People Exist

In a communication still yet to be written I will explain how my lovely liberal views and attitudes towards people of “just be nice” are an outlier and not seen as the norm in these post-Brexit days. I feel left out in my own country. I feel my views, which are surely just about being nice, aren’t common.

So, what set this off? I was at a child’s party at the weekend and there was an “older” dad there. I have a feeling this was his second time around with kids and he and I chatted. There are three things that really pissed me off.

He looked around the party for a boy and said something along the lines of:

No girls here, that can’t be a bad thing.

My reaction was who the fuck are you to judge who a young child can invite to thier party? Who are you to say that girls are a bad thing. It seemed a very odd thing to say. Especially to someone you’ve only just met. I dodn’t say anything and let it move on. Had this been a friend of mine or someone I had known for a while I would have tried to dig down deeper into that comment but at the moment I won’t have a great deal to do with this person and so I left it.

The next thing he said was

I’ve got four boys, and a girl but she doesn’t count.

This was quite curious. I wondered perhaps he thought that this is the sort of thing you should say to a six foot skin head? Perhaps he was behaving in a way that he thought I would find acceptable. Once again I didn’t pull him up for this comment. Perhaps I should have. Perhaps I should have explained to this sexist man that his attitude will live on in the things that his son says as he grows up. Perhaps I should have said that it is people like him who mess up the future generation with thier stupid sexism. Perhaps this would have resulted in a heated argument. I don’t know. I let it pass. I’ve argued with enough friends and collegues to know it’s only best when you know someone.

The final thing that annoyed me wasn’t his sexism. It was his degradation of my career, my chosen employment. When asked what I did I replied “I’m a teacher”. his comment:

Well, that’s the end of that conversation then.

What an arrogant twat this man was. How rude and sexist to someone he had never met before he was.

There are lessons here. Maybe I should start realising that the majority of the rest of the world doesn’t think like me. Also, maybe I should have called him out on his sexism and arrogance. But, that’s not quite me. I’m not the confrontational tpye of person. I also know he’s entitled to those thoughts and beliefs. It’s just that he’s wrong.

Posted on

Backitup 2

Within this communication I essentially told you that my NAS Drive had died and I was reasonably convinced I had lost my data but had a plan to get it back.

I had originally thought I could plug the hard drives into a Sata socket and the PC would be able to read them. It didn’t. This was because they were in a RAID configuration and also Linux so I would need the iOmega NAS to be able to read them.

The data recovery software did manage to find half a terabyte of data but as I explained this wasn’t formatted well and the file names were missing, because the files were RAIDed. This was my last resort really. I have spent a LOT of time arranging the files into a decent directory structure and using decent naming conventions.

Next plan was to order exactly the same enclosure as the one that died and hope I could put my disks into it and it would read them for me to copy the files over to the new NAS drive. I found one on eBay but lost that auction at the last moment because I was busy at that time and my phone didn’t notify me. I was gutted about this.

So, I ordered the next best thing. A complete iOmega NAS drive the same as the one which died. There were no more enclosures on eBay. This was costly. However, it arrived and was as described.

The tricky bit now was wondering whether it would read my existing disks with the data, try to format them or just die in the process. I decided an order of operations which minimised my chances of data loss.

  • Turned of new Synology NAS.
  • Turned on new (but not quite) iOmega NAS. Plugged it into the network and tried to communicate with it without installing the CD based software. This worked.
  • I then called the iOmega NAS the same thing as the dead one. It was running a lower version of firmware and this bothered me slightly. The interface was different. I then turned it off.
  • I installed ONE old HDD into the second hand enclosure and turned it on while connected to the network. My plan was to try and log into the device before it decided to automatically format my data-filled drive.
  • Nothing happened. Just some flashing lights.
  • Next, I tried both old HDDs in the new enclosure and hoped. Once again . . . nothing.

I was quite distressed at this moment. The new enclosure wasn’t reading the old HDD at all and I didn’t think I would get my data back. Then I had an idea. Maybe, just maybe, the old iOmega enclosure would power up? I was convinced it was the power circuitry on the board that had died. I mean there was smoke last week.

So, I thought. I’d plug the new power cable into the old box with the HDDs just slotted in to see what would happen. The fucking thing only went and started and seemed to run just fine. I have no idea what happened last time. I don’t know what the smoke was. All I had to do now was hope that the old enclosure would survive for long enough for me to get data. In all it took about three hours to transfer everything to a HDD inside the PC. Then I had to transfer everything to the new NAS drive. This was quicker as I think it has a far better read-write rate than the old box.

So, the data was restored and I now had two copies.

I had formatted a plan. The Synology is to be the main NAS and storage centre in the house. I have also installed one of the HDD from the old enclosure into the PC and it will have only NAS drive data on it. I can used an FTP program to sync that once a month or so. This way I have a separate copy of the NAS data in a useable format. The next thing will be to get a large capacity USB memory stick and create a shortcut in in the new NAS so that whenever it is inserted into the USB port the NAS will automatically back itself up.

So, ultimately what happened:

  • Old NAS died (?) with smoke and then refused to power up.
  • Synology works really well with excellent data transfer rates.
  • New iOmega NAS works and is currently surplus, being an older model.
  • The old enclosure might be serviceable.
  • I might have just blown the fuse in the old power supply.
  • Enclosures aren’t meant to die, HDDs are.

This incident has caused me over a week’s worth of stress and worry.

I hope my new backitup plan will work. I’m working on two degrees of redundancy, I might include a third with cloud storage.

Posted on

EXACTLY

I know I shouldn’t really but I have a few spare moments and thought I should share my thoughts.

I HATE THE DAILY MAIL

I’m not going to justify it. I’m not going to say much apart from moaning about this headline:

EXACTLY
EXACTLY

Fuck the Daily Mail. EXACTLY. Really. Have you looked at the outfits and seen they are EXACTLY the same. No you haven’t you fuckers because they aren’t EXACTLY the same. Fuck You you racist piece of shit newspaper.

Posted on

Backitup

After my return from a trip to the Lake District, to be chronicled here at some point, I powered up the house. There’s quite a bit to do with IoT lights, Google Home, wireless speakers and the NAS Drive.

The NAS drive is where I have stored all my music, movies and photos for just over six years. I’ve replaced the hard disk drives once but never really thought I’d have a problem with it. So, I powered it up and went and did some stuff. When I got back to the black box I noticed there was no power light on. I checked the lead and socket power. It was all on. I pressed buttons but nothing. I then tried taking out the power lead from the box to then plug it back in. This was the second sign of trouble.

The power cable didn’t really want to leave the black box. When, after some good tugging, I got the lead out there followed a small spark, some smoke and general bad things that happen to electrical goods. Bugger.

After a quick check to see that it was definitely dead I panicked about getting the data off the HDDs. So, I ordered a USB Sata connection to join the drive to the PC. This seemed reasonable. When finally connected the PC didn’t want to read the HDD drive the drive was formatted in Linux and also had a RAID configuration. I was now starting to feel sick. The most recent photos are backed up in the cloud. But I have loads which are only on the NAS Drive. I thought I was protected because the HDD were in RAID1 configuration so the data should have been backed up in case of HDD failure.

More importantly I think was that my entire music library, along with the 100s of hours of organising it, was on the NAS. This has been a labour of love and the SONOS system uses the NAS as the music library along with iTunes [which I hate passionately].

The whole point of the RAID configuration was to make sure my data was safe. I hadn’t really considered the black box was going to be my downfall. It has died.

So, I now have some data recovery software and it has found 250GB of data but the file names are gone. I have those files transferred to the PC at the moment but my main hope is that I win a NAS enclosure the same as the one I did have. I will use this to get the data from the HDD assuming I can just plug the drives into the enclosure and it will be happy to let me read the data from them.

Reading online there are people who keep three or four copies of their data. This is something I am going to do in the future. I will have copies in the following locations:

  • PC
  • NAS Drive
  • Large capacity USB
  • Cloud

This will take a little organising but seeing as I was only at around half a terabyte on the old NAS I think I’ll be ok for a while. One of the disks I have taken out the old enclosure will be fitted into the PC and be used as the PC backup disk. I will use a USB stick plugged into the NAS to back that up and I will generally transfer stuff to the cloud as often as possible. I am currently a little sad about it all and I’m hoping that in a week’s time I’ll be fixed, up and running and generally a lot more cheery. There will be updates.

Privacy Policy Proudly powered by WordPress