My Favourite Birds

I have been lucky in my life to experience the company of two very gorgeous girls. I can remember seeing the Lockheed SR-71 fly at an airshow at USAF Mildenhall in the late 80s. The aircraft is just a wonderfully beautiful design and amazing technologically. It is a lovely aircraft.

Here’s the one on display at the Imperial War Museum, Duxford:

SR-71
SR-71 Beautiful Blackbird

Here’s the one on display at the National Air and Space Museum at Dulles in Washington DC.

Blackbird

Here’s my other favourite bird, the Honda CBR1100XX Super Blackbird. Named after the aircraft and I am proud to have owned one of these for about six years and covered around 70,000 miles on it.

Honda CBR100XX
Honda CBR100XX

Just so you know, this bike was FAST. Top speed by Honda was 186mph. I never went that fast, because the took the wing mirrors off to make that speed. I might have managed somewhere more like 71.53 metres per second.

dashboard
dashboard

If I could I would own another Honda Blackbird. I really like the matt black with gold wheels version they issued. It’s a shame that the ‘bird is no longer in production.

Recent Things

This is a boring communication listing a few things I have been organising on this website.

I have finally got around to sorting out WordTwit. This means that my website automatically posts tweets when I write a new communication. Each communication will send three tweets delayed by 5 hours because I have readers around the world. It will also tweet to both of my twitter accounts, which is nice.

I have also been adding some photographs to two main pages. There’s the page of photographs taken within Gran Turismo. This page is located here and is full of cars. I have also put some new photographs on the page with shots from my new camera.

I will shortly be updating my iTunes library online so that it reflects my current library. I have added a number of Hellektro albums and tunes to the collection.

If you’ve been following my tweets you’ll know that I don’t like my router at the moment. I am still working to fix that.

That Is All.

Nonsensical

A while ago I ordered some drum sticks from Amazon. Actually I ordered two drum sticks. They came in a box the same size as the one below. I should have written about this then, but I failed to take any photographs. I was curious when the box arrived because I had hoped that the length of the drum sticks would have warranted a 3D Pythagoras problem, but no, they were just laying lengthways in the box.

A few days ago I ordered a vertical stand for my PS4. The PS4 has lived upright for quite a while and the official stand keeps being delayed from release and so I ordered an after-market version. Amazon very kindly delivered the stand the next day. The packaging was curious. I had expected [I hadn’t learn my lesson from the drumsticks] a layer of cardboard around the stand and then addressed on top, making it letterboxable.

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This package was couriered by someone in a van and they had to knock on the door. It was most definitely not letterbox sized.

The internal dimensions were:

30cm x 40cm x 10cm

Giving a volume of 12,000 cm^3

The PS4 stand dimensions were:

1.5cm x 8.5cm x 37cm

Giving a volume of 472cm^3 [3sf]

This gives a spare capacity of 96%.

Now, this isn’t a sensible use of cardboard. It isn’t even a sensible use of space or time. However, the increased cost of delivery is probably minimal. This package requires someone to be home to accept the package, or at least a neighbour. As long as the company can deliver on the first pass then I don’t see a great deal of waste.

Water Ice

I find the water ice crystals on the roof of my car yesterday morning rather attractive.

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This photograph isn’t a brilliant representation of what I saw, so, I shall try again to take a picture next time the car is covered in a beautiful blanket.

#nerd

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CopyTrans Manager

For quite a while I have found iTunes to be thoroughly frustrating. It has issues with my music collection, randomly adds songs I’ve deleted and doesn’t like updating the artwork on my albums. iTunes also takes an age to synchronise my phone and when it does it fails to update artwork, copy playlists or new songs across to my phone. It seems to be a pretty bad and bloated piece of software. I don’t use iTunes to back up my phone and rely on the cloud for that, which I am thankful for as iTunes probably wouldn’t cope very well with it.

I searched the internet thingy and found a free piece of software called CopyTrans which has a suite of iPhone utilities. I was rather hesitant about using it as it could really mess things up. Would it work with iTunes and my phone and help me do the following:

  • Edit my playlists on my phone without me having to add songs one at a time?
  • Update the artwork on my phone without me needing to delete the songs and then load them again?
  • Copy music onto my phone quickly and efficiently?
  • Actually read my phone database and allow me to edit it (kind of)?

I do still need iTunes but only to manage my playlists on the NAS drive as that is where my Sonos system reads the files. I guess I could use a completely different music manager but iTunes works well as long as I don’t connect my phone to the PC (which is kinda the point of the software).

I downloaded CopyTrans and started it up. The Manager part of the suite is free to use. I was quite wary of doing this. I love my music and have spent ages making sure I have the songs I want and the correct artwork. It’s quite a time investment.

“Connect Your Phone”

CopyTrans wanted my phone. I connected it and waited. CopyTrans read my database and a song list appeared on my computer. I tried to copy some new songs across to my phone.

IT WORKED

AND QUICKLY

I tried editing a playlist – easy. I even tried making sure my artwork was up-to-date (I had noticed two albums only had artwork on the first song), this was really easy and IT WORKED.

The online help files are really good. It all seems so easy.

CopyTrans you have made my life a lot easier and I am thankful. I hope millions read this and use your software, but unfortunately this website only gets ~270 hits a month. More people should use CopyTrans.

Confession –  I have absolutely nothing to do with CopyTrans. I just think their software it worth a mention here.

Back To The Future

Every now and then you will see something on the internet which makes the rounds every year or so. This is just one example. Marty McFly is meant to visit us in the current (future) on a particular date. So far every one of these predictions has been wrong. The actual date is given below:

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Let’s save the date and make it more special than all those dates where people Photoshop the movie clip to make it now (or then).

If you ever suspect anything on the internet of not being what it says it is (and that’s pretty much everything) then you should look at Snopes. It’s a brilliant website that looks at the evidence for particular news/popular internet claims.

Xmas Tree Boxes

A few years ago I bought a plastic reusable Christmas tree from Homebase. It came in a box. It was nicely packaged in the box.

This late December I found myself spending more time fixing the box than I did actually taking down the decorations and tree. By mass, my box is nearly more duct-tape than cardboard. It turns out that the boxes in which Christmas trees are sold aren’t very good for the storage of Christmas trees.

I paid money for the tree and also, I assume, for the box in which it came. I would have happily spent a little more if the box was advertised as being stronger than the others and lasting more than two years in the loft.

I understand that the box is the cheap part. I also understand that my loft is at times very cold, very hot and occasionally just a little bit damp. However, should there be a manufacturer who takes notice of this communication then I will happily buy their product.

Perhaps I should start a twitter campaign for decent accommodation for reusable Christmas trees. Look out for the hash-tag: #decentboxesforxmastrees

I Don’t Get It

About five years ago there used to be three or four burnt out cars by the footpaths surrounding my village. The were rusty and were old, plants had grown in them and I couldn’t see a track or pathway to get them there. At some point there was a clean up and the footpaths and surrounds were back to a more natural look.

This morning on my run up the Downs and down them again I found a freshly burnt out car. It was still smoking. I don’t understand why someone would do this. I really don’t. It’s not that I care for cars, I just don’t get why you drive a car to a relatively quiet spot and set light to it. Seems pretty shit to me.

Here’s the route I ran:

 

Create Maps or search from 80 million at MapMyRun

 

Here’s the car I found along Common Road at the top of the Downs.

Burnt Out

Possibly a Vauxhall Corsa. I don’t really care.