I am currently working on the Raspberry Pi I have installed in the loft as a web server and aircraft spotter. It’s been a while since I mentioned it here. I thought I’d just chuck up some images.
Aircraft Tracked
This picture gives an idea of how many aircraft can be tracked at once. Be aware this was early on a Sunday morning.
Radar Splat
This splat shows how far away aircraft are detected. Please note I am not where the blue dot is, that would be quite weird. The smallest locus is up to 9,999 ft, the green is 10,000 to 19,999 ft, the purple is the 20,000s and the red is above FL300.
The second half of my summer break was spent wandering the Lake District and attending the Infest music festival in Bradford. I had a very good time and did a lot of driving. I am quite convinced that my wheel balance is out very slightly for speeds above 70 miles per hour, there’s a fine vibration there but it’s not that often you can go faster than that here in the south east of this country.
I wasn’t deliberately keeping an eye on my fuel consumption as life is too short to worry about that. Life might be considerably shorter in future due to excessive fuel use but owning Bora Horza Gobuchul gives me a slight advantage in the smugness over non-hybrid drivers.
Consumption
This image shows that over this trip I did just over a thousand miles and returned a fuel consumption of 59 miles per gallon. That’s not bad. It’s a shame Bora Horza Gobuchul doesn’t report in litres per 100km which I think I prefer, but goodness that won’t catch on, it’s waaaay too European.
My recent review of the Emoji Movie was going to include some stuff about me, but I decided to give more words to another communication.
People I chat to are largely around my age. Which is pretty much old. I’m more than likely in the second half of my life.
I have ways of communicating with these friends which could be proper phonecalls, twitter, text, this website and Whatsapp. Different friends use different communication methods. That’s just how it is. I don’t really have rules about things but I can tell you this:
I Don’t Use Emojis.
I can sometimes stretch to an emoticon. I reckon this is mostly to do with the fact that I don’t understand what the emojis mean. They are too small and I can’t be bothered to learn. Therefore I don’t use them.
If I do use an emoji then it’s normally a wink or smile. Many of the others are useless for my conversation. Grumpy and old, that’s me.
About a week ago I had been playing Crash Bandicoot quite a bit on the PS4 [ I have to say it’s incredibly frustrating] and one evening when I went to play it the PS4 said the disk wasn’t in. Now, I hadn’t taken it out so I assumed that it must be stuck in the drive somehow without the PS4 recognising it was in there.
I turned the PS4 on and off and tried a few things before looking online and finding plenty of pages that could offer tips on when the disk keeps ejecting but not many for when you can’t eject a disk. Eventually I found a page, and many crappy YouTube videos, of how to prise out a stuck disk. After taking off the shiny cover I had to turn a screw and the disk would slide out.
Except it didn’t.
So, the next step seemed to be to removed the optical drive and see if I could get the disk out that way. For this I needed time and screw drivers. So I spent a while following the dismantle instructions and then realised I need Torx T9 screw driver, which I didn’t have. So, I made the short trip to Halfords and picked up a set.
Once I had returned home I started taking away the screws for the power supply but even with the correct screw driver these didn’t really want to come undone. I was getting frustrated at the screws in the PS4.
At this point my son asked for a torch to see under the chest for some toys. I told him where the torch was and he reported back that he could see a PS4 disk under the chest. Well! That was a surprise. So I went and looked. Obviously it was the Crash Bandicoot disk and I had spend a week trying to get the PS4 to eject a disk it had already puked and somehow left under the chest.
Reasonably cheered by this I went to put the PS4 together again and then test putting in a disk. Check the game ran and then ejected the disk well.
The system is working fine. There wasn’t any need to stress!
I wrote a while ago about moving over the BT Broadband and leaving Sky TV. I still don’t miss Sky TV. I stream most TV now and can do so with multiple devices at the same time.
I received a few letters from BT offering me a new deal for when my contract is finished. I tried to use the web address to look at these offers but I have to say that the BT web design was quite shit and I got to a point where I didn’t understand what the web page wanted me to do.
So, I phoned them and spoke to someone. This person could see my offer, explain it to me and also take my instruction to accept the offer. Essentially I could let my broadband [and phone] price increase at the end of my contract, or I could UPGRADE to the next level of broadband for the same price that I pay now.
Doesn’t seem much to that decision does there? I had to sign up for two years but as they are the only company supplying high bandwidth to my village it’s not like I’m likely to change.
Here’re my latest stats:
Quite Happy
I think that’s pretty good for copper to the house, although it is fibre to cabinet.
I spent a little while this weekend making a compressed air rocket launcher. I’ve had a stomp rocket for quite a while but this was something that I used to have but lost in time gone by. So, for about a year or so I’ve been thinking of making a new one. The first of these I created after a week’s training at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. There I got simple plans and used them with parts that I suspect I carried on a motorbike although how I got the tubing home I don’t know. There are photos of this somewhere, but I’ve had a quick look and couldn’t find them.
Here are most of the bits I bought.
Some Plumbing Bits
These need to be put together using the compression joints.
Elbow Joint
The trickiest part of this build is drilling the end plate so that the car tyre valve fits it snuggly. Once you’ve spent a little time you get this wonderment:
Not Quite Finished
Once the tyre valve is fitted you get a beast that looks like this:
Launcher Ready
I don’t have any video yet, I will endeavour to get some ready and will add it to this page or my YouTube area.
I pumped the tube up to about 4 Bar and then opened the gas tap. I reckon I got about 5 seconds of flight time. I’m happy with that. I don’t really want to increase the pressure too much because I don’t want the thing to blow itself apart and kill someone!
May 28 2017 was a good day. I travelled to Duxford Airfield in Cambridgeshire for one of their airshows. Now, I’ve been to Duxford a lot and have taken some lovely photographs. I discuss my favourite birds here and more photographs are here. You can just search in that little box just over to the right.
The Imperial War Museum at Duxford is so large that it takes more than a day to see everything and that’s without a flying display to watch. I only zoomed around the hangers and static aircraft, paused at the Bloodhound replica, and then watched the gorgeous displays.
Of the static aircraft on display some were open for a walk through, I visited all of these:
Concorde
Hermes
York
Comet
Ambassador
Viscount
Britannia
VC10
Trident
One-Eleven
Herald
Of the flying aircraft, I was most impressed with the Typhoon, Rafale, Bronco and the Autogyro. All of these exhibited remarkable agility, they were stunning to watch. It was very good to see a Typhoon display for my first time along with the Rafale too. The Bronco is iconic and looked lovely. Even the World War 1 display wasn’t boring!
Bristol Britannia
Old and New
Dassault Rafale
Catalina
The Blades Display Team
Explosion
Luftwaffe Bronco
Red Devils
Typhoon
Wingwalkers
B-17
AAC Apache
If you don’t find the Catalina gorgeous then you aren’t into planes.
The weather was really hot for the day and the storms went either side of Duxford so we didn’t get wet. I had paid for a ticket upgrade so there was a marquee with tables and chairs where we sat. Along with posh portaloos and a seating area outside just by the tower this proved to be a worthwhile investment. Well worth doing as I could dump stuff and walk around with just the camera.
The photos above are a selection from the over 400 that were taken on the day. My challenge next time is to get the colours showing on the aircraft more when they are flying. Photographs of just silhouettes aren’t that interesting.
Every two weeks I spend a terrifying ten minutes standing on the edge of the school’s property watching what seems like the entire world pass by in symphony. There are around 1400 pupils who pretty much leave the site all at once. Through the narrow gates of what I have labelled the school castle.
Lorenz
At the same time there are buses, school buses and many cars trying to use all the roads entering the centre of the picture. It is horrifying watching cars in a hurry and kids who don’t look and buses fully laden navigate this chaotic corner.
My current working theory as to why there are not many accidents here is down to the nature of the corner. The exact fact that it is quite chaotic causes people to slow down and be more aware. I do think that if there was a zebra crossing or similar put here there would be more accidents. The exact nature of busy unpredictable systems is that people slow down and look more.
Ask yourself this. When driving on a motorway do you fully concentrate at all times? When driving near your home do you fully concentrate at all times? Of course you don’t. It’s human nature to diminish tasks when they seem routine. Do you turn the stereo down when getting close to an unknown destination? Of course you do. It’s all about applying brain power from one activity to another. I know that I almost lose the ability to talk when driving near junctions or when I need more observation power. It’s almost as if multi-tasking didn’t exist!
I have a communication I am trying to write but I can’t yet find the words. I know what I want to say and can probably sum it up in two short sentences but I really want to elucidate my offerings with my personal experiences, up to a point.
So, I wondered if I could glean some data from this website. It takes effort, time and concentration to write these communications, even if it doesn’t look like it. I thought I’d look at how many communications I had published each month since this site started and spot how that fits into my plans for another piece of writing.
Fooyah Communications
I don’t like Excel, or at least the graphs it draws but this is a start. Except I’m sure it doesn’t show what I expected. Believe it or not that is a good thing in science. But it won’t help me with my writing.
Perhaps a moving average would work?
Fooyah Communications Moving Average
Nope. There’s not a great deal I can take from this either. My hypothesis failed entirely. Which, again is a good thing. Great bounds in understanding are made not when things go right but when they don’t go as expected. “Hmmm, that’s interesting” is probably the most exciting thing a scientist can say.
So, this didn’t work. I need another way of getting into writing the next something. It’s currently sitting as a draft with thirty words looking all sad and alone. I will get around to it. The tricky bit will be deciding which words and what order!
Babylon 5 is a space station 5 miles long. The adventures of this ship are chronicled in the TV documentary Babylon 5. Using interviews, memoirs, video messages and data harvesting a company managed to recreate what life will be like on Babylon 5. There are some stark warnings from the future for the current political elite.
Babylon 5 series 1 episode 1. Goodbye life. Hello escapism. See you in a year or so.
So this tweet was dated 4th April 2014. That’s when I started working my way through Babylon 5. If I had paid more attention to when I started watching this then I would have tried to tweet the following two days earlier:
Babylon 5. Season 5. Episode 22. “Sleeping in light”.
So, it took me three years and 2 days to complete the series. I don’t think that’s too bad. There’re 120 or so episodes and that averages out at one episode every ten days. It was a damn enjoyable experience. Jase gave me the box set a long time ago and I’ve been using them as a way of stabilising thoughts and also watching sci-fi. I haven’t stayed exclusive to this series and I have watched others along the way.
The stories are excellent and this show deserves the accolades it gets. I really enjoyed it. Obviously some episodes aren’t as good as others but overall this was a great TV show.
I am currently working through the spin-off series, Crusade, but there is only one series of that. Then there will be the B5 films.
