Nothing to Worry About

Leaky Brakes

2011-12-13T21:59:00.000Z

I got a surprise this morning on my cycle to work. Heading down my first hill towards some traffic lights I started to pull on the brakes: a little on the front first, a bit harder, then pull on the back. The problem was as I pulled the lever for the rear brake it came right back to the bar and nothing happened. That's odd I thought. Luckily there's more than enough power in the front brake to stop easily (although a little tricky if you need to signal right at the same time). I had been away for work the previous week so my bike hadn't been ridden for around a week and a half, but it was still a surprise for the rear brake to fail completely like that.

Earlier on this year I upgraded my brakes to a pair of Shimano Deore XT M775s. I hadn't had any problems with them until now, all in all they have been pretty awesome. At work I checked the lever and calliper for signs of a leak but didn't find anything. At home tonight it was time to find the issue. I gave the lever, line and calliper a good going over, but still couldn't see any traces of oil. There was also no pool of oil on the floor where my bike had been sitting. Off came the reservoir cover and I wasn't particularly surprised to find the reservoir almost completely empty. It was a bit of a mystery, but there was not a lot else to do other than top things up.

With the reservoir topped up and a few bubbles worked out, things were starting to feel a bit more normal. Happy with the feel in the lever I replaced the diaphragm and cover, before rotating the lever back to its correct position. However, that's when the problems began... A quick squeeze of lever resulted in oil pissing out the side of the lever from under the reservoir cover. Annoyed, I went through the process of filling the system back up and making sure I tightened the cover as much as possible. Same problem. Bugger.

I was really at a loss, was there a problem with the cover? Was this the cause of my mystery failure? A bit of googling didn't turn up much and after a bit of looking around and checking the lever over I still couldn't get the cover sealed properly. While looking about online I noticed that most pictures of the levers had the covers positioned the other way around from mine, with the "Deore XT" readable from the front. With nothing else to lose I tried the cover on the other way around a everything sealed ok.

With the brake back together, the lever nice and stiff, and most importantly no leaks, I'm now a bit confused. Does it matter which way the cover is on? If so why doesn't my front brake leak? Is it just tricky to seat the cover and I got lucky? Who knows, I'm just happy that it was fixed without buying any more parts. I'll need to keep and eye on it over the next few days, but hopefully it's now sorted.

So, if you've got a M775 lever which is leaking from the reservoir cover, try it on the other way around and see if that helps.

Melville's Raspberry Beer

2011-08-04T18:46:00.000Z

I saw this in Tesco last week, so picked up a couple of bottles as it looked interesting. I'm guessing that I'm not the target market, but I'm willing to give most beers a go. There's a few fruit beers from Scottish breweries around and I was interested to see how this compared.

After having a quick wiff from the top of the bottle things didn't get off to a good start. The nose is sickly sweet and there's something not quite right in there. After taking a sip things start off okay (if not a little sweet) but then go down hill quickly. There's something seriously not right. I don't know if it's to do with the raspberries, but it really tastes like the beer is off. There's a horrible flavour there, might be skunked?

Anyway, whatever it is it's a problem. I don't think that the overly sweet flavour was ever going to appeal, but as it is the bottle was hard to finish.

After a quick Google search it appears that the beer is made by Innis and Gunn. I'm not a huge fan of theirs, but I can see why they didn't want to ruin their brand for this one. My expectation is that it won't be on sale again after the summer's over. If you're looking for a tasty berry beer then try Williams Bros Roisin instead.

Networked Music - MPD

2011-01-30T18:11:00.001Z

Over the past couple of weeks I've been hearing the experiences of a few people who have been setting up networked music solutions in their houses. The idea being small networked devices which can play music from a central sever. The commercial solutions costs are from mid-range to expensive and vary in their capabilities; ranging from playing music from a central source to syncing together to provide seamless music throughout multiple rooms.

I've oft considered setting up something similar in my flat to play music in the kitchen. We do have a small DAB radio which I can connect my iPod to, but it's a bit of a faff and the sound quality is a bit ropey. Seeing as my central file server sits in the kitchen there's already a networked device sitting there ready to go. In the past I've played around with connecting up speakers and playing mp3s by ssh-ing in and running mplayer or the like, but it's not a brilliant solution. I also kept tripping over the speakers as they weren't set up in all that great a place.

Ideally what I wanted was something which would let me connect to the server easily (from either my desktop, netbook or android mobile), select music from the library and play the songs. I was initially thinking of some sort of web based interface for mplayer but quickly stumbled across Music Player Daemon. The idea is a simple client-server architecture; the daemon sits on the server and controls the library, playlist and playing the tracks, clients then provide a nice interface, connecting across the network to the server. After a quick proof of concept on my desktop I was ready to set things up on my headless server (Ubuntu 9.10).

On the server I installed mpd and mpc - a command line client:

$> sudo apt-get install mpd mpc

After installation I needed to set the music_directory in /etc/mpd.conf:

music_directory "/share/music"

I also changed the mixer setting to "software" so that mpd can change the volume, uncomment the line below.

mixer_type "software"

With that done it was just a case of using mpc to update the library, adding some tracks to the playlist and then playing it.

$> mpc update
$> mpc add "A Fight You Can't Win"
$> mpc play

With music* now playing it was time to get remote access set up. By default mpd only allows connections from localhost, to enable remote access I opened up /etc.mpd.conf again and added a bind_to_address line for my box's IP.

bind_to_address "192.168.1.1"

I left access from localhost in so I can use mpc via SSH, but if you don't need it you can remove it. If your server is on an open network you might want to add a password to stop other people blasting out music in your house.

After restarting the daemon it was time to try and connect in from somewhere else. Using mpc again you can specify a host to connect to:

$> mpc -h 192.168.1.1 play

Rather than always using the command line to control mpd I've installed Sonata which has a nice simple interface, and the ability to scrobble tracks to last FM. On my phone I've installed Droid MPD Client which seems to work well and makes selecting tracks and managing the playlist nice and easy.

With all of the technical stuff tested and working well, all that was left to do was dust off some old PC speakers and route the cabling around the back of the fridge. I can now easily select and play music in the kitchen while I'm cooking, doing the washing up or brewing. Nice.

* A Fight You Can't Win were picked as an example as they're near the start of the alphabet and good times were had at last night's gig.

Black IPA

2011-01-20T21:14:00.003Z

'Twas just six months ago that I made a "dark IPA" (brewing, kegging) and at the time I didn't find all that much online about Dark or Black IPAs. True, it's a silly name and can't really exist, but there's really no way better way to describe the style of beer. Now, the beer blogosphere seems to be awash with hoppy darkness. There are reviews for various Black IPAs popping up all over the place.

My "dark IPA" was pretty well hopped I really turned out well. I think the aroma was unbeaten for any other beer I've brewed. I really enjoyed it and so did some of the people who tasted it. However I got the method of dispense and the occasion all wrong. I chose to rack it into a clean keg and lug it along to a summer party/BBQ (giant marquee, camping in the garden, midges and partying through the few hours of darkness). Really I should have chucked it into 330ml bottles and left it to be enjoyed once in a while of an evening at home. I'm tempted to give it another shot, but this time go darker (more chocolate malt) and bump the ABV up a bit (it came in at around 5.2%).

Not a Breath of Wind

2010-12-07T14:47:00.004Z

It's been pretty chilly in Edinburgh over the past week, and I think for the first time since I installed my weather station (just over a year ago) the wind sensor (anemometer and vane) froze. Apparently there wasn't a breath of wind; not even enough to move the vane, which I would guess would actually be impossible unless it was stuck. Things seem to be warming up now though.

Wind Speed (07/12/2010 14:52):

Wind Direction (07/12/2010 14:52):

Worst cycle of the year?

2010-11-01T19:52:00.004Z

First day at work with the clocks back, making it the first cycle home in the dark this winter. Correspondingly it was pissing it down and really windy. Still waiting on a new front mud guard so plenty of spray in the face. Really busy traffic for some unknown reason. To top it all off: a rear puncture. At least I managed to get home before the tyre got too flat.

It's raining, It's Pouring

2010-09-04T13:25:00.002Z

A few weeks ago I noticed that the rain sensor on my weather station had stopped working. I had some time today to get up on the roof and have a look. Turns out that blaming seagulls wasn't really fair (although they have made a mess of the roof). A spider had decided to make the rain sensor its home and had tangled up the tilting cup mechanism with its web. With the problematic squatter kicked out the rain sensor is fully working again. All we need now is some rain.

3 Weeks, 3 Rides, 3 Pinch Flats

2010-08-13T13:01:00.005Z

Three weeks in a row I've had a pinch flat while out riding; twice at Glentress and then again in the Pentlands on Wednesday. What am I doing wrong, after the first two I had my rear tyre pumped right up to try and solve the problem. Is the tyre shit (WTB Motoraptor)? Is my riding shit? Do I need to slow down and try to take drops and other obstacles slower/smoother? Should I consider a tubeless setup (although I sometimes change to road tyres which could be a pain)?

The rear tyre doesn't seem to be wearing all that well (after about 400 miles mixed on/off road) so I think I'm just going to change it for something else. I'm thinking about a Kenda Nevegal 2.3, hopefully a bigger/better tyre will fix the issue.

I think I need an interpreter to interpret interpretive dance....

2010-08-10T15:24:00.008Z

Last night I took my first foray into the world of interpretive dance. Inside "is a compelling new dance by Brazilian choreographer Jean Abreu, with music by post-rock band 65daysofstatatic. This work explores violence, incarceration, solitude and hope". I was there mainly for the 65daysofstatic aspect. The dancing was interesting, although I have to admit to not really "getting" all of it. Some sequences were cleverly done and really portrayed (stereotypical?) prison live; people getting beatings, rape, solitary confinement, peer-pressure, gender issues and struggling to belong within different cliques. I have to admit to getting a little bored at times and sometimes just watching the band and listening to the music. No bad thing really as 65dos were on form; the sound was amazing and really helped create the atmosphere of the show. Did I enjoy the show and have a good time? Yes. Will I be queuing up for more dance in the future? Probably not.

interpret

Rain?

2010-08-09T13:21:00.002Z

I think the rain sensor on my weather station might be broken. Apparently it hasn't rained for over a week... I'm going to blame seagulls.

The End of History

2010-07-22T10:24:00.004Z

I've long suspected that BrewDog are off their fucking nut, but they've now confirmed it. Not content with their current high ABV beers, Tactical Nuclear Penguin and Sink the Bismark!, they've really pushed the boat out and created a 55% beer - "The End of History".

A beer that strong is a pretty awesome achievement already, but they're going one step further and selling each bottle inside a specially made taxidermy stoat or squirrel. Which pushes things to whole new indescribable level of awesome. If was incredibly rich and had a spare £700 I might splash out on a squirrel.

I'm going to a BrewDog beer tasting next week at the Malt Whisky Society; I'm looking forward to some good beer and good banter.

Glentress

2010-07-15T18:11:00.003Z

Last night my brother and I decided to throw caution to the wind. Despite having chuck it down all day, after work we decided to throw our bikes in the back of his car and head down to Glentress, a very wet Glentress. It's been a while since I've been down to Glentress; not since I had my bike nicked then replaced a couple of months ago. The only trail centre riding I've done recently, and on my new bike, was a trip to Innerleithen a few weeks ago - which I found tough, very tough.

As the rain pelted off the windscreen as we drove down I wasn't feeling like our decision was the best idea. We pulled up in the bottom car park and ate a couple of sandwiches before getting our bikes out and getting ready to head up the hill. Just as we set off from the car park the rain started again and we got wet quickly. However, as soon as we hit the first part of single track I didn't care about the rain and started to really enjoy the climb. Usually it's a fairly boring slog up to the the Buzzards' Nest, but I felt unusually good; getting up the rock gardens with ease and managing a couple of the log beams despite the wet.

Once we were past the Buzzards' Nest and into the first red descent I felt really comfortable on the bike. I think I'm starting to get a feel for the new bike and was happy with it moving around under me. We continued on the red route until the start of the Spooky Wood climb, where we headed along onto the blue and the Betty Blue descent. It was dark in the woods but the sweeping berms felt good and I was happy popping out of them and getting air where I could. With the rain still lashing down we followed the blue route back to the top carpark and then took the red back down. Slippery and technical in the wet but loads of fun.

I really glad that we decided to head out despite the weather. I think I'm starting to get a better feel for new bike and how to handle it. I need to make trips to Glentress and Innerleithen a much more regular occurrence, come rain or shine.

Dark IPA - Kegged

2010-07-09T20:51:00.004Z

I've just racked the Dark IPA I made a few months ago into a keg; ready for drinking at a house warming / 30th Birthday this weekend. Holy crap it's a beast of a beer. As soon as I pulled the valve on the top of the corney it was maturing in there was a massive blast of hops, sweetness and another familiar smell that I can't quite place.

I've just drawn off a cheeky pint into a goblet (so I can get my nose in there) and it's complex to say the least. Colour wise it's a very dark brown (cola-ish); body wise it's got bite but isn't too thick; it smells amazing; and the taste is very confusing. The nose certainly packs a punch (I think the dry hopping paid off!) which I think makes the initial flavour somewhat subdued. There's a sweetness, and then fresh zesty fizz from the hops. Then there's a malty biscuity middle with the same familiar yet allusive smell/flavour from before - the closest I can pull out is that it tastes a bit like a jammy dodger. The after taste is a little briney (mmm brine...) followed by a whole load of bitterness and then a lasting sweetness.

I don't know if this beer needs more time or not?!? It's certainly drinkable - although I'm not sure what people who aren't used to hoppy beers will think. I guess I'll find out tomorrow.

Dark IPA?

2010-06-21T20:08:00.004Z

It had been a long long time since I'd done any brewing, so one Friday night a couple of weeks ago I decided to pull the brewery out of the cupboard, wash off the dust and get something going. Really, as a first brew in god-knows-how-long I should have played it safe and gone for a simple bitter, a pale ale or some 80/-. Instead I took a look at the odd bits and bobs of brewing ingredients which I had lying around and came up with a bit of an experiment - a black IPA?

It's a bit of a contradiction in terms but I'm not sure what else to call it. It's not a stout and it's not really a porter: it's a fairly strong, hop heavy, flavoursome (maybe) beer, and dark. Here's the statistics:

4kg Pale Malt
2.5kg Crystal Malt
25g Chocolate Malt (all that I had left)
100g Roasted Barley

50g Goldings (1 hour boil)
50g Challenger (30 minute boil)
113g Hallertau (5 minute boil)
113g Hallertau (dry hop in secondary)

At 15 litres the theoretical OG for this brew is 1.132 (well, IPAs should be strong) but I fell very short and ended up with an OG of just 1.063. A lack of practice, patience and a slightly stuck mash (was the malt too finely milled?) brought the efficiency down.

I had chosen to use Safale S-04 yeast; which is nice and quick and should to help clear the beer - which was looking a little murky. After around a week in primary the FG came out at 1.022, a little higher than expected (roasted barley?). An alcohol calculation works out at around 5.2%, which is maybe a little low for a proper IPA, but maybe for the best.

When transferring into a keg for secondary I had a customary taste of the half finished product and it's pretty rough! Given enough time (and some aroma from the dry hops) it should balance out, but either way, it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea. I'm going to re-rack it in a couple of weeks and see where it's at.

No matter what it actually is (anyone got any ideas?) I'm hoping that it'll turn out okay in the end. Now I need to think about what to brew next, I'm thinking that a summer wheat beer might be on the cards.

Thunderbird 3 Drag-and-drop

2010-06-01T19:11:00.001Z

Since I installed Thunderbird 3 a few weeks ago (after upgrading to Ubuntu 10.4) there's been one thing that's annoying me. I keep on top of things by keeping my inbox fairly clear. Once I'm done with a mail I'll move it into a folder (or Gmail label) so I can find it later if I need to. I use emails as a kind of complicated to-do list.

However I seem to no longer have the ability to drag-and-drop mail from my inbox into any folders. It's really, really annoying. More annoying that you would think. I can move the mail fine: right click, 'Move To', ... That works, but picking it up and dragging it doesn't. Thunderbird gives me a nice little icon with a hand and a plus while it's moving, but as soon as I let go it drifts back across my screen; like a kid in the back of a fast car giving you the finger as his Dad floors it and they glide past in the outside lane.

Surely this can't be a feature? Millions of people must drag-and-drop stuff. It's what you do to move stuff around in a WIMP environment (there's a blast from the past, don't think I've used that acronym since Standard Grade "Computer Studies"). I've searched and I've searched online and can't find any mention of a similar issue. Is it just my install/configuration that's buggered? Anyone else having the same problem?

Update (09/07/2010): Looks like the problem has been fixed in the latest update. Whoop.

Google Calendar

2010-05-19T17:21:00.005Z

Google have made some updates to the look of Google Calendar. On the whole they're quite nice, but there's one thing that's annoying me - probably for no good reason. I use Google for my personal calendars, which I separate out into different categories with different colours. The Google Calendar interface handily lists them at the side, showing the colour and letting you toggle them on/off:

Wait a minute, what's that second from the end? I don't have a tasks calendar. Oh, it's part of the new changes to Google Calendar, they've made the tasks integration with the calendar better. However, I don't use any tasks and I want to get rid of it. It's in the way, it's annoying. That's fine, you can use the settings page to turn calendars on or off:

No you can't! I want to get rid of the shitty little tasks calendar!

Like I said, there's no good reason for me to find it so annoying, but it's really annoying!

Additionally, recently Google made HTTPS the default for everyone who uses Gmail. The "always use https" settings option was added a couple of years before to Gmail's settings. Why isn't there a similar option of Google Calendar? Please.

Vodafone TopUp and Go

2010-02-12T18:00:00.003Z

At the tail end of last year I was looking at mobile broadband options to use with my Dell Mini 9. After a bit of a look about I decided that Vodafone offered the best deal because their top-up never ran out; all other providers expired after 30 or 90 days. I'll only be using the service every now and then when I'm away from home, so any plan where top-up which expired would be pretty much useless. I'd also had a chance to test a Vodafone dongle with my Mini 9 and everything worked fine under Ubuntu. I've been looking at the Vodafone modem again and at Christmas they updated their plan to give you three times the data, but with an expiry of 30 days - useless!

After a bit of reading on forums it appears that if you can get an old modem from somewhere then you can still use the unlimited plan. Vodafone don't sell the old ones on their website; only the crappy new ones. However they're still selling old ones through their eBay store. I've ordered one from eBay and I'm hoping that I will actually receive an old one. Unlimited top-ups are advertised and if it's one of the '3Gb' ones it's going straight back. Hopefully they're just using eBay to sell off old stock.

Update: True to their word Vodafone delivered me one of the 'old' 1Gb modems. Plug it into Ubuntu and it works straight out the box. Sorted.

Sendmail Setup (at long long last...)

2010-02-12T17:34:00.005Z

It's been 6 or 7 months since I migrated my email over to gmail and commissioned a new server. The original intention was to still use the server for sending mail and only make use of gmail as a kind of remote MDA/nice web-mail interface. For one reason or another I'd been putting off setting up sendmail, I'd like to say that it's because I've been busy, but really it's because sendmail's config is such a pain in the arse that I could never be bothered. I had a bit of a look into other MTAs (exim4, postfix) but what I wanted to do seems to be a little non-standard (which I'm not sure why?) and there's not a lot of information available. Last night I eventually got around to sorting it all out, and it's nice to be able to send mail myself again. It wasn't too much trouble, but here's a couple of points of interest.

For some reason I completely overlooked installing libsasl2-modules, which made it confusing when authentication works locally, sendmail works, but you can't authenticate.

By default Debian doesn't seem to come with syslog installed, that makes it a bit confusing (and hard to debug stuff) when you don't have a mail log, installing syslog-ng made things easier.

Removing local mail delivery and setting up suitable aliases can be confusing.

Not show stopping, but head scratching none the less, especially when sendmailconfig doesn't bother to alert you to any of these issues.

Kabanosy

2010-01-04T20:58:00.009Z

A four foot long sausage might be a strange Christmas gift, but I was pretty chuffed when I ripped open the wrapping to find a smoky-meaty smelling Kabanos. Kabanosy are long thin smoked sausages from Poland. They're a cured sausage usually made from pork, although beef versions (or horse in some places - I need to find one somewhere) are apparently also available, so don't require any cooking.

They can vary in taste from quite mild to very very smoky (the Tarcznski one I've got here was described by my wife as "the Islay of the sausage world") and have a quite dense oily texture. I'm willing to say that the smokier varieties are better, with this one blowing away ones which I've had before.

As they're cured they don't need cooked and work well as a meaty snack or as part of a cold platter (see below). They're pretty handy if you're going camping or out walking as they can be cut or bitten off as required and are easily munched on the hill (with no packaging to blow away). I've also used them in stews to add a bit of smoky flavour and gelatinous goodness. Generally an all rounder in sausage terms, as long as the strong flavour isn't going to overpower your dish.

Getting hold of kabanosy is pretty straight forward with most supermarkets now having Polish food sections, and Polish deli going strong in UK towns and cities.

Kabanos Platter with Cheese and Pickle
I wanted a dish that would show off the real flavour of the kabanos and compliment their strong taste. I thought that they would go well with a strong cheese and things fell into place when my wife brought home a Isle of Mull Mature Cheddar. Made with unpasteurised cow's milk it's got a nice slightly sour and briny taste.

I wanted something to cut the strong flavours of the sausage and cheese so sliced some salad gherkins - although cornichon would work just as well I think.

To finish things off we added a little caramelised red onion chutney to provide some sweetness. Together the four different flavours really come together and make a great dish which you could have as a snack or a late alternative to a cheese board.

To accompany the dish I opened a bottle of Traquair Jacobite Ale. Coming in at 8% abv it gives another strong component with a dark rounded taste and some sweetness on the finish; working beautifully with the chutney. Any strong porter with a hint of sweetness would work well, I'd be interested to try kabanosy with a smoked porter - although it might overpower things a little.

The photo above is a bit dark (I really need to setup some better lighting for food shots) and kind of hard to see. Sitting on the board from left to right are the gherkins, chutney, cheese and kabanos.

Let it Snow

2009-12-22T12:58:00.003Z

Well, it's been snowing a bit in Edinburgh over the past few days and everything is looking nice and white. All that means is I need to negotiate an icy car park when cycling to/from work and that I'm itching to get my skis out. I was through at the Xscape SnoZone in Braehead a couple of weeks ago testing out some skis (after an unfortunate incident with a battleship in the Stash last year my Scratch FSs need replaced...). It was good, but not the same; the run's not that long and the snow quite sugary. Cairngorm has been open for a couple of weeks now and the webcams keep looking better and better.

I've not had a chance to get up north yet, but I'm going to Inverness for Christmas so it would seem silly not to chuck my skis in the car and stop off on the way back down (provided I can convince Gwen to sit in the cafe for a few hours while I enjoy myself).

Hillend is also looking tempting for a cheeky evening ski. I've been there once before when there was enough snow for proper skiing and it was great. I'm also tempted by stories of off-piste action down the Lothianburn Golf Club's 14th hole.

Fingers crossed the snow lasts and we're in for a bumper year.

50 Film Century Challenge

2009-12-15T15:24:00.005Z

Last night we completed our film "challenge" for this year, 50 films split over 5 time periods; pre-19th century, 19th century, 20th century, 21st century and post-21st century. The 20th and 21st century films were easy to get ticked off as any film set in the "present day" falls into one of those categories. In total we've watched 79 films this year and I'm sure we'll get a few more in before the end of the year.

We'd had Aliens sitting as a bit of a backup all year. We were pretty confident that it was set far enough in the future (a lot of "futuristic" films aren't) to count for post-21st century, but when we started watching doubt began to set in. The technology that they have (other than Bishop) isn't all that advanced. It's like the 80s but with space ships, which makes sense really. Luckily we worked out the answer fairly early on.

Ripley has been floating about space for 57 years since her previous encounter with the aliens, but no exact year is given. Luckily she's shown her daughters death certificate which gives the death date as 12.23.20; the 23rd of December XX20 - but which century? We're told that her daughter died two years earlier which means Alien was set in XX65 of the previous century. Since Alien is set in the future and was made in 1979 the date must be at least 2122. Sorted.

Past Weather

2009-11-24T12:34:00.005Z

It's been a couple of weeks since I setup a small weather station on the roof of my flat. At the time I had thought about three separate stages for getting things up and running; installing the weather station, logging the weather data to my server and displaying the data with some nice graphs and stuff.

With the station setup pulling the data off onto my server was pretty straight forward. I opted to install Open2300 to do the difficult bit and wrote a cron to run the fetch2300 script every five minutes, logging the values to a MySQL database (I decided not to use the mysql2300 script as I wanted a little more flexibility on how the data was stored).

Since then I've also setup a basic website at weather.22-11.com which shows the current weather and some graphs for past weather. At the moment graphs are calculated for the last day, week, month and year - although it'll be a while before the last two have enough data to start wrapping. I've been using the Google Chart API to create the graphs and it seems to be working well enough at the moment. I need to spend a little time tidying up the pages and making it look nicer.

It's not all been plain sailing though. I've been having some infrequent issues with the serial connection to the weather station locking up and the crons getting queued up. I think I've managed to fix the issue but there's been a couple of days where no data's been collected (hence why some of the graphs look a bit funny). I've also got an issue of where I positioned the outdoor temperature/humidity sensor. On sunny days the temperature rockets (and humidity drops) fairly substantially. There's not much protection from the sun on the top of the roof so I'm going to need to have a look at building some sort of sun shield for the sensor.

All in all the weather station's been good fun. It's nice to have a quick look before you leave the house and see how cold/wet/windy it is.

Update:
Looks like the stability issues I was having with the weather station have been worked out. I've been having an issue were open2300 didn't seem to be returning the wind speed values correctly. After looking through the memory map and trying to work out what was going on I realised that it was returning the speeds in m/s and not km/h as I thought. That's nicely sorted, but I've just accidentally deleted all my data for the past couple of weeks. I'd not gotten around to backing up the database yet either.... oops. Maybe it's for the best now that some of issues I was having have been ironed out.

The Weather Man

2009-11-10T17:13:00.005Z

Last week I caved in after a couple of years lusting over nice graphs and bought myself a home weather station. After weighing up some of the options I settled on the Technoline WS-2350 (curiously before the start of the year I had never heard of Technoline, but now I own two of their products, the other being the awesome BC-900, I'm also loving their no nonsense product names). It was cheap, measured all the basics, could communicate with a radio connection between the base unit and sensors and has the ability to pull information from it onto a computer.

Today I set about stage one of my weather station project; setting up the weather station. The WS2350 consists of 4 main components; the base station (measuring indoor temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure), the main sensor unit (measuring outdoor temperature and humidity), a wind direction and anemometer unit, and a rain fall unit. Setting things up is fairly straight forward with the wind and rain units plugging into the main sensor unit using RJ-11. The main sensor unit communicates with the base station using a fixed cable (which also provides power) or by radio (with the power coming from a couple of AA batteries). I opted for the radio connection as running a cable from my flat up onto the roof wouldn't be totally straight forward. Depending on how things go (signal strength, battery life) I might switch to a cable in the future.

Once I had everything set up and running indoors I got out the ladder and headed up onto the roof to checkout exactly how I could mount the instruments. Above my flat there's a shared TV aerial which provides a nice pole rising above the chimney pots. The wind unit was easy to attach using the supplied "U" bolt and the main unit easy to attach further down using some cable ties. The rain unit looks like it's designed to be fixed onto a flat surface, rather than suspended, so it required a little bit of modification. I used a clamp designed for fixing aerials onto masts and drilled a couple of holes in the side of the casing to hold the unit to the pole. Inside the flat things were a bit easier and all I required was a RJ-11 extension cable to connect the unit to my server. The base unit comes with screw holes so it was easy to hang it on the wall next to my fridge (the server lives under the freezer).

Everything is up and running fine, with the temperature outside at 6.7 degrees and dropping. All I need to do now is complete phases two and three of the project:

Phase Two - write a script to pull data from the base unit and store it. This should be easy as I've already done a quick proof of concept using Open 2300.
Phase Three - write up a website to display current weather, maximum and minimums, graphs of values over time, etc, etc. I'm planning on using the Google Charts API to create the graphs.

Karmic Koala

2009-11-05T13:29:00.003Z

With the end of October having just past a few things have happened; the clocks went back, people dressed up in silly costumes, tonight everyone will be running around setting fire to things and a new version of Ubuntu has been released - 9.10, "Karmic Koala". Back in April I posted about some of the issues which I had updating my netbook and desktop last time around. Based on lessons learned then things went a bit more smoothly.

I choose to forgo a straight update in favour of a fresh install on both machines. On the netbook I don't keep much anyway, and on the desktop I wanted to get rid of the Windows XP partition in favour of using VirtualBox. Installation on the Mini 9 was the usual complicated affair of encrypting the drive and installing the OS, then booting to a live USB image to remove the swap. The biggest issue was that the Mini 9's wi-fi no longer works out of the box. It's disappointing but not a huge inconvenience and there's an easy fix. Installation of the desktop couldn't have been more straight forward with a clean install (took no time at all) and then rsyncing backed up home directories back over - all files and settings nicely kept.

I'm still getting used to some of the UI changes but most things are looking good. On the desktop everything is fine, but I think I'm going to tweak Netbook Remix's interface a little to my liking. All in all another solid release from Canonical.

Photos

2009-10-19T19:47:00.003Z

My flickr photostream gets used for everything; random photos to accompany blog posts, holidays snaps, shots of family and friends, and mixed in there, a few hidden gems. To try and highlight the "photographic" shots that I'm most proud off I've created a rehash of my 22/11 photos page - 22-11.com/photos.

I've split the page into three categories, but will probably add more later. Each category pulls out random photos at the moment, but some way to run through them all would probably be a good idea. I'd like to start taking more decent photos but I think I need to make time to specifically go out shooting. I was out in Edinburgh last weekend with a film SLR, the first time I've shot on film (and with manual focus) in ages. Hopefully I wasn't just pissing away film.

On bicycle inner tube valves...

2009-10-13T17:39:00.003Z

For bike inner tubes there are basically two different types of values; Schrader and Presta. Things used to be simple, they used to be easy. I only every bought tubes with Schrader values. Things were so simple that I actually forgot Presta valves existed, until I asked my girlfriend to pick me up a new tube and she returned with a Presta. No trouble, I didn't specify a type of value and I have a pump which can handle both (by handle both I mean fiddle about for half an hour cursing until the thing finally gets on properly and can push in some air). Things were still fine, it was a one off and once the tube burst I could replace it with a Schrader and get back on track.

I few months ago I bought a new bike (Mongoose Amasa Super) and was a bit miffed to find that came fitted with Presta values. An inconvenience but not the end of the world. A few weeks ago I replaced the tyres with some Panracer Uff'da's, which being a little bigger than my off-road tyres meant I decided to get some new tubes - letting me get back to Schraders. However, things aren't as easy as that. Another annoying thing about Presta valves is that if they're factory fitted then the rims only have holes big enough for their skinny little stems. The effort of changing tyres was getting steadily bigger, but after a trip to B&Q for the right sized drill bit I had holes big enough for the Schraders and everything was great. I rode around for two days loving the feeling of smooth tyres on tarmac, and laughing at how little effort is required to move. I then found out that I didn't clean the rims out well enough after they were drilled and a small scrap of metal had sliced one of the tubes. Presta valves are really annoying.

I still had the orignal Presta tubes which came with my bike to use as spares and before long my valves were mis-matched and I had a Presta on the back. Don't get me wrong, I've done about 150 miles with it and there's not been an issue, but next time I change tyres or get a puncture I know it's going to annoy me (the tube's also slightly too small for the tyre so the risk of a puncture is increased). For that reason I went online and grabbed a new inner tube, 26x2.5, which my wife kindly picked up from the post office this morning. Everything should be great, except I made a mistake and bought another Presta. Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn. So after changing tubes, drilling holes and changing more tubes I'll still stuck with a Presta.

I know they have their advantages; I know they hold up better with no cap on, I know they can be deflated easier and I know that they don't let out a little hiss of air when you disconnect the pump - but they're still really annoying and not as easy to use as Schrader valves. Maybe I should just put up and shut up, or buy a better pump, but it's got to the stage where I might as well work my way through the 4 Presta tubes I now have before replacing them with a nice simple functional Schrader. How I long for that day.

IMAP Grab

2009-10-08T15:57:00.003Z

A couple of months ago I switched my email over to use Gmail as a back end, with a slightly non-standard setup. I didn't want to go down the Google Apps route so had dismissed Google at first, but I came up with something which works for me. Anyway, that's hopefully going to be the subject of another post soon.

One of the parts of a move to Google's servers which slightly worried me was the lack of a backup which I control. I'd always have most of my mail kicking around in Thunderbird at home, but I didn't want to rely on that completely. After a bit of looking around at possible IMAP backup solutions I found a handy little script called IMAP Grab, which is a wrapper for getmail. It had been written specifically for the task I was trying to achieve so fits the bill nicely. There's even a handy "-_Gmail_" directory shortcut to stop it downloading the [Gmail] directory. However, it didn't work completely as planned as it looks like it was written for an American Gmail account. No trouble, after a quick one line change I had it ignoring the UK [Google Mail] directory (and the renamed "Bin") as well.

252c252
<     gmail_exceptions = ['[Gmail]', '[Gmail]/All Mail', '[Gmail]/Drafts', '[Gmail]/Sent Mail', '[Gmail]/Spam', '[Gmail]/Starred', '[Gmail]/Trash']
---
>     gmail_exceptions = ['[Gmail]', '[Gmail]/All Mail', '[Gmail]/Drafts', '[Gmail]/Sent Mail', '[Gmail]/Spam', '[Gmail]/Starred', '[Gmail]/Trash', '[Google Mail]', '[Google Mail]/All Mail', '[Google Mail]/Drafts', '[Google Mail]/Sent Mail', '[Google Mail]/Spam', '[Google Mail]/Starred', '[Google Mail]/Bin']

With a cron to run every hour I now have a live backup of my Gmail account. I really don't think I'll need it, but you never know, and it only took a few minutes to setup.

Sit Down, Pedal, Pedal, Stop and Stand Up

2009-09-28T14:53:00.002Z

I got back from sunny Ardnamurchan (ok, it wasn't sunny, it was raining and blowing a howling gale) last night after a great long weekend cycling around the peninsula. We headed up on Thursday afternoon to join Dave and Rosie at the cottage where they were doing a bit of DIY and tidying up (mostly just burning loads of tree cuttings). After a relaxing evening, some chicken pie and a few drinks we set off the next day for Sonachan, opting to cycle the 30 odd miles rather than drive. It was a nice but hilly and windy cycle consisting mainly of steep ups and downs, and a strong head-wind.

The reason we were headed out to Sonachan was to see Dave Gorman preform as part of his "Sit Down, Pedal, Pedal, Stop and Stand Up" tour. He's cycling from the most southerly, to the most easterly, the most westerly and the most northern points of the UK mainland; Ardnamurchan being the furthest west. Each night he's doing a gig, the Sonachan one being just 3 miles from the lighthouse at the point. We were expecting to be overtaken on the ride along by a fit Dave Gorman but we had under estimated our fitness and made quite good time along. After a great gig we camped in the field across the road from the hotel (the bunkhouse was full).

We had been debating if we should cycle back the next day and with only a little rain and the idea of a nice tailwind we decided that we would. We joined Dave Gorman and his "human sat-nav" Scott for the trip back to Acharacle (they were off to Glenfinnan). I was fully expecting them to pull away at the first hill - what with their road bikes and all - but we managed to keep the pace and enjoy some chat along the way. After a short stop for lunch at the Green Parrot tea room we split our seperate ways and headed back to the cottage. Knackered after 62 miles of (very hilly) cycling over two days we settled in with a few beers, burnt more garden waste and enjoyed a massive pasta bake for dinner.

Dave (Gorman) has got a few photos of the cycle up on his blog.

Brewing

2009-09-20T18:29:00.003Z

It's been a good long while since I did any brewing, but with my brother-in-law's 30th birthday (and a massive party planned) I decided to dust of the brewing kit and get back into the swing of things. I was wanting to make a beer which would be easy to drink and appeal to as many people as possible. I was thinking of something quite light and hoppy, but not too bitter, and not too strong. After a bit of searching about online and looking in a few books I amalgamated a few recipes into:

Hoppy Birthday
2.5kg Lager Malt
1.5kg Pale Malt
0.5kg Crystal Malt
25g Challenger Hops (30 minutes)
25g Challenger Hops (15 minutes)
40g Saaz Hops (15 minutes)
40g Saaz Hops (5 minutes)
Wyeast - Thames Valley

The choice of yeast was partly based on what the shop had in stock, but I think it should work. We brewed yesterday and it's currently getting under way in the primary fermenter. Everything should match up nicely for racking into a corney for secondary fermentation, waiting a month and then racking into a second corney to serve. Here's hoping everything turns out all right, I'm a little nervous because it's been so long.

Here's some photos of the brew:

Pedal for Scotland

2009-09-15T11:55:00.004Z

Since I got a new bike a few weeks ago I've been trying to cycle at least 50 miles a week, taking in a mixture of road, off-road paths and trails. All as part of my preparation for Pedal for Scotland 2009 - a 50 mile cycle from Glasgow to Edinburgh. I think the preparation worked as it wasn't too bad, don't get we wrong, I was totally shattered on Sunday night, but after a good night's sleep I was feeling fine again. I completed the course in about 4 hours and 50 minutes, with around 1 hour of that stopped. It was a pretty busy day out, it seemed like there were cyclists riding 3 or 4 a breast all the way along the route. The people taking part ranged from dodgy fat people on Harford's £50 full-sus bikes, to keen racers tearing it up the hills at an amazing speed. I think I we definitely above average, overtaking more people than overtook me. In the end it's not a race though, just a nice nike ride on a sunny Sunday.

Typically the road tyres I ordered for my bike didn't arrive until Monday, so I was doing the route on knobbly off-road tyres.

Mini Cooking

2009-08-18T19:04:00.004Z

Yet another use for the Mini 9 presents itself. I can use it in the kitchen to check recipes online. For example, at the moment I'm making tarte tatin. I'm hoping tonight's dessert goes better than last night's; our waffle iron exploded in quite a spectacular fashion, flipping a fresh waffle nicely into the air and onto the worktop.

It also means I can blog while waiting on things to come out the oven.

BrewDog's Tokyo* == Scapegoat

2009-07-27T17:09:00.010Z

A few weeks ago I posted about Vetter "33" - one of the strongest beers in the world. Today a story on the BBC News website caught my eye. It's a completely ridiculous article and the comments by Alcohol Focus Scotland are so completely over the top it's unbelievable. The group (who appear to be some sort of self appointed authority) are taking issue with the strength of BrewDog's new beer "Tokyo*", which comes in at 18.2% abv. The claim is that selling strong drinks like this will encourage an increase in binge drinking. Somehow I don't think that binge drinkers are BrewDog's target market.

I'm not denying that Scotland has a drink problem. There is a massive problem with drunk people a) knocking the shit out of each other, and b) drinking themselves to death (and costing the NHS a bit on their way). Generally speaking there's two groups of problem drinkers that I can see; those who cause trouble for others and those who are causing themselves health problems (the two are not mutually exclusive).

In the first camp we can split this down further into; teenagers hanging about street corners (drinking, causing damage to property and fighting each other/anyone who is unfortunate enough to bump into them), idiots going into town on a Friday night (getting shitfaced in crap/cheap pubs/clubs and fighting in the streets) and lastly 'hobos' who sit about on the streets all day (getting drunk, stealing stuff and fighting - a common theme). This group of people want to get drunk as quickly and as cheaply as possible. It figures then that they're not going to be spending £10 on a 330ml bottle of beer, 18.2% or not. For around the same amount of money they can instead buy 10 cans of 8% special brew (40 units), 2 bottles of 15% buckfast (20 units) or a bottle of 40% vodka (28 units) - all well above the 6 units that Tokyo* gets you. Seriously, what self respecting ned/twat/hobo would by an arty farty oak aged beer made with jasmine and cranberries. What planet are these guys living on.

Our second group of people are they guys who go to the pub every night and have 5 or 6 pints, or sit in front of the telly and go through a 6 pack of Stella. These are the 'functioning alcoholics' who are drinking day in day out. For most of these people money will be of importance. They're most likely not drinking really cheap stuff (like the vodka/buckfast) but they'll be going to the cheaper bars and picking up whatever cheap lager is on offer in Tesco. Some of this group will be tempted by this beer, they're the relatively highly paid alcoholics (doctors, teachers, middle management) that have the money to spend and enjoy the finer things in life. I don't think this beer is going to cause any increase in their drinking, or an incentive to drink more, a couple of bottles of wine or a nice bottle of single malt is probably just as good.

There's several aspects to "solving" the nation's drinking problems. Chastising brewers and trying to ban specific products isn't the answer. People who drink don't care and mostly won't be put off. Raising the price of alcohol won't work, people are going to find the money elsewhere. Just look at how many people on low incomes smoke. It's an expensive habit but once you're addicted it becomes more important than Sky TV, going on holiday or keeping on top of your debts. By trying to ban or raise the price of alcohol you're not tackling the root of the problem. All that happens is you push marginal drinkers (who could do with some support) deeper in and further away from help, and ruin it for everyone else. Why punish the whole population for the problems of a few. We need to get to the root causes, and tackle the specific groups in a sensible manner (not as blanket bans, or singling out specific age groups).

Again I'm speaking generally here - teenagers drink because they're bored, disillusioned and don't have any goals in life. People who go out drinking and fighting on a Friday, or those who drink to excess every night, probably feel that they've got something to prove and are making up for some other part of their life. A lot of homeless drunks have mental health issues which need to be treated along with their alcoholism. People drink to excess for lots of different reasons and their individual issues need addressed. Let's see more money going into programs to actually help people rather than preaching and issuing pointless press releases.

The anti-social problems from drinking aren't fixed by bans or price fixing either. There's plenty of laws already there to help tackle these problems. Lets start taking licences from shops which sell alcohol to under-age kids or to people who are already drunk. Let's start giving fines to bar staff and managers who are serving alcohol to drunk people who then go on to cause trouble at night. Let's start giving more community service sentences to idiots who drunkenly fight and cause damage. If done in a visible and well publicised way it could make other people think a little more before they go out on the piss. All these actions could be done now, with no fancy new laws, and with no negative side effects for law abiding people who enjoying having a drink a few times a week.

This has turned into a bit of a rant, well done if you're still reading. I'm not surprised by the campaigners quoted in the news article, but I am surprised by the BBC for writing such a biased and one sided piece of journalism. Political groups and the media seem to have trouble about these sorts of issues. On one hand they're publishing over the top articles about this kind of thing, making out the companies involved to be pure evil (as if people don't have any free will - "it wasnie me offfficer, it was them BrewDogs what done it"). On the other hand I'm sure newspaper and TV advertising revenues are boosted very happily by Sommerfield's latest beer offer, or an teenage drama about kids who go out on the piss all the time. Politicians shout and scream about the current economic crisis, but fail to ever say "well done" to companies like BrewDog who are weathering the storm, expanding their business and doing well. It reminds me of the computer games industry, when has anyone from Rockstar been congratulated openly for creating the best selling game of all time and making the government a shed load of money in taxes?

One result of reading the article is that it reminded me about Tokyo*, I had heard of it before but didn't know it was on sale yet. After I finish this I'm off to the BrewDog website to buy a few bottles. I'll probably share a bottle with my wife or a friend, you know, like I'd do with a bottle of wine. Just because it's a beer doesn't mean that only one person can enjoy it. Even if I do have a bottle to myself, it's my choice and no one is forcing me to do it. As long as I'm not drinking a bottle every night it's not going to cause me any harm. By drinking it I'm not going to cause anyone else any harm. What's the problem?

Google Apps

2009-07-21T13:43:00.002Z

After a small hickup last week with my mail server (thankyou sendmail for your little unexplained huffs and ridiculous config files) I was thinking about the possibility of migrating my domain to Google Apps. After all, I already have a Gmail account and use Google Calendar so everything would be tied up in one place. That was the idea, but in practice it's not that simple. Turns out that you can't link a Google Apps account with a standard Google Account, so I can't tie my existing mail and calendar into my domain, or tie apps for my domain up with my standard Google Account, iGoogle et al. I can see why they've done it, Google Apps is really aimed at businesses not individual users and it would add a shit load of complexity, it's still disappointing though.

Another annoyance which I noticed was the lack of a 'bowser connection' option for Google Apps mail accounts. There is no way to always force a secure connection for you mail. When using your own domain this makes sense, Google would need to set up an SSL certificate for your domain. However it's annoying that the option isn't there when you're using the Google supplied domain. In the end I stuck with my own server and spent a while unravelling sendmail so I could send mail through SMTPS again. I do also feel a little better knowing exactly where my mail is and what it's up to, even if it wasn't going to be doing anything evil at Google.

Vetter "33"

2009-06-24T14:22:00.005Z

Well, it's been a while since my last post. It's amazing how much of your time planning for a wedding, getting married, going on holiday for a couple of weeks and then trying to sort out everything that you've been putting off for the past month takes. Actually, no it isn't. Anyway, here's to picking up where I left off. I wanted to write some posts about food and drink.

There are many beers in the world. Dark and light, thick and thin, strong and weak. However there are only a few beers which can claim the title of "the strongest beer in the world", one of those is Vetter "33" made at the Vetter Brauhaus in Heidelberg. It's a pretty dark thick concoction and surprisingly doesn't taste all that bad (in that it's actually drinkable). I've made a few strong beers in my time, but never anything approaching 33% abv. Usually the issue with strong beers is that the yeast can't keep up and dies before all the sugar has been converted, leaving you with a sweet and sticky mess. The other problem is they end up tasting a bit like cheap wine, and by that point you'd be better just drinking wine.

Vetter they have managed to make a strong beer which tastes like beer. It's got a nice roasted malty flavour followed by the kick from the alcohol when you swallow. I'm not sure what kind of yeast they used to get it that strong (possibly champagne?) but it must have been hardy stuff. I don't think that they cheated (ice distillation and the like) so fair play to them. It's not the type of beer you'd drink often, or have more than one glass a night. Sharing a glass with friends it was pleasant enough to sip and pass around. If you're in Heidelberg and like beer then I recommend stopping in for one, unless you're on your own or driving, it's certainly an experience.

Jaunty Jackalope

2009-04-29T19:03:00.003Z

I'm both impressed and disappointed with the new released of Ubuntu: 9.04 - Jaunty Jackalope. Upgrading from 8.10 on my desktop wasn't flawless and a fresh install on my Mini 9 didn't quite go according to plan. My desktop upgrade was especially annoying as things almost worked, however Gnome and networking become a little flaky, and Amarok went into a complete huff with me. A complete reinstall later and I'm totally won over. The tweaks and improvements to Gnome are great and things feel just that little bit nippier. To be honest doing a fresh install doesn't take much longer than the upgrade so I'm inclined to give up on upgrades in future and do a fresh install every 6 months.

On my Mini 9 I had decided to do a complete fresh install, I don't really have much on there so there wasn't much to loose and I thought that a clean install would be better in terms of space and performance on the little device. I also wanted to try out the Netbook Remix Installer. After creating a USB drive and starting the install process I was a bit miffed to find that there was no partitioning options which allowed you to encrypt the drive. For a distro designed to be used on small portable devices I see it as a massive oversight. Netbooks are exactly the kind of device where full drive encryption would help protect you if it was lost/stolen. No impressed with the UNR installer I went back to the standard alternate installer and went through the process of installing Ubuntu and adding Netbook Remix on top. I did have some initial difficulties with loosing my Gnome applets which turned out to be a bug in the desktop switcher application; there's a good post on fixing the issue over on the Ubuntu Mini blog which I've mentioned before.

Mettbrötchen

2009-04-21T18:29:00.002Z

I'll just back from a rather excellent long weekend in Weinhiem, Germany. Among other touristy and holiday type things I also drank some beer and ate a lot of excellent food. For that reason I want to do a few food and drink related posts, after all, this blog was initially intended to be mostly about food and drink.

I did eat Currywurst while I was there but seeing as I talk about it a lot anyway I'm not going to write about it. I'm going to stray away from my favourite food obsession (sausages) for the first post, despite eating a lot of them.

While at the supermarket in Weinheim I was dared by my friend (Adrian, who I was staying with) to try a German snack delicacy: mettbötchen. Never to shy away from a challenge (especially a food related one - I never learned my lesson from the orange eating contest...) I was keen to give it a go, I also wanted a tasty mid morning snack. Mettbrötchen in essence is a roll filled with seasoned raw pork mince and onion. At first it doesn't sound appetising (and I'm sure there's some "rule" about not eating raw pork) but once you have one in your hand the smell of fresh meat, onion and white pepper has you salivating. It's a pretty tasty snack. The seasoning on the pork and the onion create a really nice flavour together and the texture difference between the mince and the crunchy onion is great (different textures within food is something which I really like and feel is generally over looked by a lot of people).

As the mettbötchen was chilled I thought that it also made it quite refreshing. It was a pretty cold, wet and miserable day but I couldn't help think that on a hot sunny day a mettbötchen would really hit the spot. My main meat snack of choice is the steakbake. Served hot (well, at varying temperatures between "burn your face off" and "cold and soggy") it makes a good snack for Scotland's average weather conditions, but on a hot sunny day it just doesn't hit the mark. A mettbötchen on the other hand, with it's cold soft mince, would go down a treat. The question is: can I convince Greggs to start selling them. I'm thinking not, raw pork mince isn't going to go down well with your average customer. Which leaves me thinking that I might be able to find a friendly butcher to create one for me, but alas, they're unlikely to have the onion to go with it. I suppose I could start making my own, but it takes away the quick easy on-the-go appeal, that and my co-worker might start looking at me funny and talking behind my back when I nip down to the butchers for some raw pork at lunchtime.

If you're in Germany (or anywhere else - let me know where if in Edinburgh!) and you see mettbötchen then I strongly* recommend that you try one. The Germans have got it right once again.

* Disclaimer: I don't really know if eating raw pork is advised so if you've got a sensitive stomach you probably want to wimp out give mettbötchen a miss.

GPS on the Mini 9

2009-04-09T07:15:00.004Z

The Mini 9 is such a great little device that it would seem a shame not to give it some sort of GPS functionality. My original thoughts were that it would be cool to hack in some sort of internal USB GPS dongle in a similar manner to this post. After a bit of thinking I started leaning away from internal GPS towards a detachable USB dongle which I could also use as a data logger when out walking/skiing/boarding or whatever.

As it happens my brother has recently bought just that; an i-gotu. The only problem was seeing if it would work with Ubuntu. After a quick bit of searching I found some instructions on getting it working as a usb dongle with gpsd. Putting it together into an easy little script gives you:

#!/bin/sh
modprobe navman
`echo -n "0x0df7 0x0900" > /sys/bus/usb-serial/drivers/navman/new_id`
gpsd /dev/ttyUSB0

Using the device with tangoGPS I was able track my location really well.

The second part of the i-gotu functionality is to track your position while away from a computer and then download the GPS data from the device. This allows you to take it with you while out walking/skiing/snowboarding/whatever and then see where/when/how fast you were. It also would let you geo-tag any photos which you took easily. To download the tracks from the device I used igotu2gpx. It does pretty much what it says on the tin; lets you download tracks from the i-gotu in GPX format. I didn't have any trouble using it and was able to download my tracks and view them using Viking. Unfortunately at the moment igotu2gpx only lets you download tracks and view the device information; you can't change the settings or delete tracks. Ultimately this means that you would still need a windows box to use the software which comes with the device to get any decent amount of use out of it, and that's the main reason I haven't rushed out and bought one for myself.

Until I know that I can read and write to a device I need to keep looking before settling on a GPS solution. After playing around with the i-gotu I think that an external tracker is probably a better option than hacking an internal receiver.

Intrepid Ibex on the Dell Mini 9

2009-04-03T18:01:00.003Z

I've not been particularly quick at following up my first post about my Dell Mini 9 so here's a quick post about installing a proper version of Ubuntu. Installing Ubuntu onto the Mini 9 really is a piece of cake. I followed this awesome how-to over on the ubuntumini blog - which is generally a excellent resource for all things Ubuntu Mini 9 related. The steps for installing Ubuntu are basically; make a bootable USB stick, install Ubuntu, fix the sound, install netbook remix (if you like) and then do whatever you want after that.

The main difference that I made to the install guide above was that I setup the SSD to be encrypted. I might just be paranoid but on a small portable device encryption seems like a no brainer. There is a slight overhead but compared to the issue of loosing something with potentially all your online banking and email passwords it's nothing. I did run into a few issues though. I chose to follow the installer's encryption setup, however I also wanted to install without a swap partition (thrashing the SSD aside turning over 4Gb (2*RAM size) of a 16Gb SSD to swap seemed a waste). I tried a few times but whenever I installed without a swap partition I couldn't unlock the drive. No great trouble in the end (other than a wasted couple of hours waiting on various installs) as encrypting the partitions meant that I was using LVM. LVM made it really easy remove the swap partition and then extend the root one using lvextend and resize2fs.

Google Streetview Comes to Edinburgh

2009-03-19T11:31:00.002Z

Google have finally got around to putting up the streetview images captured in Edinburgh when the Google cars were out and about. It also looks like they've updated some of the satellite images as well. It's pretty neat seeing this come to somewhere which you know. Being able finding out exactly what part or side of the road shops are on will be handy.

I saw a couple of cars driving about when they were taking photos and it didn't take long to find myself on the streets of Edinburgh. Here's me and my brother cycling past it while it's stuck in traffic.

Dell Mini 9

2009-03-17T20:53:00.006Z

I've been putting off buying a little netbook since Christmas and I finally snapped a couple of weeks ago. Dell were just about to launch their new 10 inch model and were offering £50 off the already ridiculously cheap Mini 9. A few weeks later a little package from Dell popped through my door (actually, it wasn't that little, I still had to open the door and sign for it). I opted for a fairly basic model with a 16Gb SSD, 0.3 mega-pixel webcam and no bluetooth. I also opted to pimp the RAM up to 2Gb, although unfortunately that's not something Dell offers; apparently something to do with Windows XP licences, even if you go for Ubuntu like I did. No great loss as it's not a hard thing to do and is probably cheaper to buy your own anyway.

I've decided that rather than writing a big long post I'll split up my thoughts on the mini into parts. All that means is I'll probably write a couple and then never get around to finishing the series off. Anyway, here's the first part.

Out of the Box
From Dell you can opt to have the Mini pre-installed with either Windows XP or Dell's own version of Ubuntu. I wasn't really bothered about either as I knew I wanted to put a full Ubuntu install onto it so I could tailor it to how I wanted it. I choose the Ubuntu option as I didn't want to pay extra for a Windows licence I'd never use, and I wanted to see what the Dell version of Ubuntu was like.

In the box from Dell you receive a few things including your Mini, the AC adapter, a drivers CD and a Dell Ubuntu CD. There's also the instruction manual and little guide on using Ubuntu which looked handy for people new to the OS. On the initial boot you're asked to setup some basic information (name, language, country etc) before being let loose on the Ubuntu desktop. Things generally didn't seem all that different to a standard Ubuntu install and the Dell desktop launcher looked pretty useful for getting to things quickly and easily. There's a lot of software installed by default as well as handy utilities for controlling wifi and bluetooth which you would otherwise have to install yourself. I didn't spend a huge amount of time playing around with the default install as I was eager to get cracking on setting it up how I wanted. One thing that I was immediately impressed by was how well the wifi worked. In the past I've always had some issues with setting up connections and dodgy signal strength but the Mini is totally rock solid. The number of additional networks which it picked up compared to mu old laptop was pretty amazing. I've also just realised that I don't know if the wired ethernet port works...

All in all, out of the box looks like it would work great for a normal use up to all the usual netbook type stuff. I've not seen Windows XP running on a Mini but I can imagine that the interface wouldn't lend itself nearly as well as Gnome can be configured to do. One thing which I did think was missing from the default install was out the box hard drive encryption. As a small portable computer losing (or having it nicked) it an increased possibility and it would be nice if more people were protected without them having to do anything. That's one of the reason why I had already decided I was going to wipe it and start again. Getting Ubuntu installed wasn't all plain sailing, but was good fun. Hopefully I'll post up with some details of the install soon.

PS3 Media Server

2009-02-12T14:26:00.003Z

I'm always looking for ways to make things easier, especially when it comes to computing related problems. Unfortunately the Playstation 3 doesn't support playback of mkv files which is generally a bit annoying. Up until recently I had been using a little Perl script to re-encode the audio portion of mkv files and package them up as mp4s. After that it was just a case of serving them up to the PS3 from my server using Media Tomb. I had long been thinking that rather than going through the hassle of converting the file it should be possible to convert the audio on the fly.

Luckily for me someone has done it. PS3 Media Server allows you to stream file formats to a PS3 and transcode them on the fly to a format which the PS3 can play. As well as the amazing convenience of not having to convert files it's also a pretty neat little media server which doesn't seem as clunky as Media Tomb. Setting it up on my server was easy enough although I did need to hand craft a config file - support to create them only exists through the GUI. I also had a bit of a issue with surround sound, but after updating mplayer 5.1 works flawlessly. Once I'd played around with it a bit it was just a case of creating an init file to run it as a daemon and everything was sorted.

In Car Entertainment

2009-01-14T21:36:00.005Z

I've long been pondering a good way of connecting my iPod up to my car radio. There's a few different options and I have for a while been using an iTrip. The iTrip (mostly) works but the quality isn't great and there are a few problems. Having to retune the radio on long journeys can be a bit annoying and a means for providing power to the iPod a little shaky. I've been through a few 12V-USB power adapters and none have really worked all that well, or stood the test of time.

Replacing the standard Ford head unit that I have in my Focus would be an option, but I was reluctant to do so. Ford radios are double the size of standard car radios so you need to find a blanking plate to cover the gaps above and below. I also like the way the radio blends into the curve of the controls, something which a third party radio wouldn't do. It's also a not bad radio which works well, and replacing the whole thing would be fairly expensive.

A little while ago while browsing the internet for possible solutions I found a few sites advertising a product made by Connects 2 which looked like it could do the job. It's basically an interface between your iPod and the radio which fools the radio into thinking the iPod is actually a CD multi-changer. This allows you to control the iPod through the radio head unit. Although there were lots of sites advertising the Ford Focus version none of them inspired me with much confidence. Information about the actually specifics of the unit and badly built websites put me off thinking that it was a dodgy product that probably doesn't work. The product name doesn't help, CTAFOIPOD003 isn't that catchy, and the company make lots of similar models for different OEM head units. Some were also quite expensive (as much as £120 if I remember correctly) and buying from some random website you've never heard of comes with its own risks.

Last week I was looking at the options for connecting up my iPod again and decided to take the plunge. I found a seller on eBay which had it much cheaper that I'd seen before on 'buy it now' so went for it. When the package arrived it consisted of three parts, a small box approximately 3x5x8cm and two cables; one to go between the radio and the box, and one to go between the box and the iPod. I set off to the car with the bits and the silly tools you need to get car radios out (why can't they just screw them in?). I was a bit worried about pulling the radio out as I don't have the key code to unlock it again if I cut off the power by accident. Luckily there was a fair amount of slack on the cables and I was able to bring it out completely without disconnecting anything. I first plugged everything in with the radio hanging out to check that it all worked. Everything worked so I fed the iPod cable up from the bottom of the control panel (there's a small gap with some foam covering it where it meets the centre console) and reached down inside through the gap where the radio came out. There's actually a lot of open space behind the controls so stuffing in the little box was easy, after that it was just a case of push the radio back in. I was quite glad how easy it was to get the cables down the back as it was dark and using the door light to see what I was doing.

All-in-all I've very happy with the unit. My iPod can be plugged in easily, it gets charged through the radio, and the sound quality is good (a hell of a lot better than the iTrip). After a bit of time playing around with it I've found the best thing to do is select the song/album/shuffle using the iPod and press play. The track will then play through the radio (once you've set it to use the "multi-changer" by pressing the "CD" button a couple of times). Skipping back and forward from track-to-track on an album is easy with the radio controls (including the ones on the steering column). Attempting to navigate through the iPod menus doesn't seem to work very well, but that's not really a big deal. The radio head unit will show you the track number and playing time as it would for a CD.

Happy New Year

2009-01-02T13:03:00.004Z

It's been a bit of a busy month leading up to Hogmanay, but it's come, gone and now it's 2009. December started as usual with some fairly intensive film watching for the 50 Years, 50 Films challenge (more on that later) before jetting off to the Alps for a cheeky ski trip. The snow was excellent with a big dump mid week opening up loads of fresh tracks in knee deep powder. Overall it was a brilliant week's skiing, although I did manage to snap a ski and knacker my thumb (again). After returning to Edinburgh it was a few quick days back at work before a combined families Christmas trip covering the length and breadth of the country.

Back in Edinburgh there were just a few things to tidy up before the end of the year; the film challenge, and another challenge to watch all of Futurama in one go - 30 hours worth! As it turned out we failed on both challenges. The Futuramathon meant that we didn't have enough time to fit in the last 5 films we needed. Due to illness, and possibly an under estimation of the task, the Futuramathon was called short just before the end of series 3; 18 hours and 49 episodes in. Still, not a bad attempt and a good end to the year. All that was left after that was to catch up on some sleep and then wait for the bells.

Snow

2008-11-26T16:32:00.004Z

You know it's not long until a skiing trip when you start checking weather forecasts far too much and for no good reason. I'm heading off to Avoriaz in a couple of weeks so need to start thinking about getting things sorted. My skis are going to need located and taken down to the shop for a service. I think I left them in a fairly bad way at the end of last season so they could do with some professional TLC. The Avoriaz webcam (http://www.avoriaz.com/ski-holidays/ - click in the link in the top right) is starting to look pretty snowy and they appear to have started grooming some of the runs. As long as there's a more snow and cold temperatures it should all be good for when we get there.

Like a fine wine...

2008-11-08T20:12:00.003Z

It's been a while since I brewed any beer and for one reason or another the last batch that I brewed at my flat has been sitting in secondary fermentation, in a keg, for almost a year. I've been thinking about firing the copper up again and making a beer for around christmas time so today I decided it was about time I did something about the old beer.

We mostly only bottle our beer but I do have two "corney" kegs. One of the kegs is fitted with a tap and a valve for a soda stream CO2 canister, and the other doesn't have any additional stuff added. The usual technique is to rack from the primary fermenter into the "plain" keg then either serve the beer real ale style with a hand-pump straight from this keg, or after things have settled out rack it into the second keg and serve with blanket CO2 pressure. The choice usually depends on the style of beer we've made, how quickly it's going to get drunk and if the beer needs to travel.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to drink the old beer but decided that racking it into the other keg and serving with CO2 was worth the effort if it turned out to be ok. I'm glad that I did. After transferring the beer over and pouring myself a small glass I was amazed how 'fresh' it tasted. Mould or infection wasn't going to be a problem as the keg has been completely sealed and untouched for all those months. I thought that it would probably turn out a little stale and flat but with the CO2 it's just right after it settles in the glass. The beer in question is a dark hoppy porter, and even after sitting for almost a year there's still a lot of sweet flowery aroma.

Just goes to show that you should never write off a beer until you give it a chance. I now need to decide what to brew in time for christmas. Bucking the christmas beer trend and going for a light session bitter might be a possibility.

Bounding Bouquetin

2008-11-05T21:59:00.003Z

Well, after my Ubuntu upgrade woes last week things have finally settled down. I decided to take the opportunity to upgrade the hardware in my desktop and picked up a new mobo/processor/ram. Installing a clean Ubuntu 8.10 onto the new machine didn't go all that smoothly; I kept getting random lock-ups when booting the live CD, every live CD I had in fact. In the end the issue seemed to be related to my wifi card, seeing as I never use it yanking it out was the best option.

Ubuntu 8.10 is looking pretty good. After the clean install I was amazed how easy it was to rsync a backup of my home directory off my server, logout, then log back in to be greeted with my desktop, all my history in Firefox, and once I'd installed it Thunderbird connecting to the mail server and "just working". There's still a few things I need to reinstall but I'm mostly there.

Previously I have been using Rainlendar as a nice way to sync my Google calendars with my desktop. I've not reinstalled it yet but have been looking into getting the Gnome Calendar applet working instead. Loading Google Calendars into Evolution is easy enough (readonly) but at the moment my appointments won't carry over to the applet. It's all so close and a bit annoying, coupled with Evolution constantly asking me for passwords (and generally being a bit shit) it's making me think that installing Rainlendar again is the best option.

Irritating Ibex

2008-10-31T19:45:00.007Z

I really should have learned by now that new cutting edge software isn't always a good idea. The new release of Ubuntu "Intrepid Ibex" was released yesterday and as usual I dived in and updated my desktop (I'm way behind on updating my server - I really should update and restart it, but I don't like turning it off - in the past it used to run on dodgy old hardware which usually meant a world of pain it it lost power). Things didn't go so well. I left it to update and came back to it after a couple of hours. The system appeared to have restarted and was sitting at the new login screen, unfortunately it wouldn't let me login. A quick restart revealed that I had more issues. Booting from the new kernel gave me issues:

 Starting up ...
[    0.644129] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

Mmmm, rebooting using an old kernel didn't really do the job either, everything just hung at the login stage. I booted up into the debug mode for an old kernel and dropped into a root shell. After running dpkg --configure -a and rebooting things were looking up. However I still can't login, after entering my username and password everything hangs. Running dkpg --configure -a again results in an error.

I've been thinging about switching Ubuntu and my old Window install around so that Ubuntu is on the bigger drive. Maybe this would be a good opportunity to just do a clean install and be done with. Anyway, it's halloween tonight so I'm off to dress up as a goblin, drink beer and carry around a turnip carved into the head of Frankenstein's monster. Computer issues can wait until November. Lucky I didn't try to update my laptop at the same time.

Currywurst II

2008-10-23T17:21:00.006Z

It's been a long time coming but last week I made another attempt at creating the perfect currywurst sauce. The recipe was similar to the last time but tweaked a little based on what I had in the cupboards and the ingedients listed in the Uwe Timm book The Invention of Curried Sausage:

ketchup, nutmeg, aniseed, black pepper, and fresh mustard seed

The preparation was exactly the same as last time and the ingredients used were:

1 onion
500g tomato passata
2 tbsp mild curry powder
2 tbsp hot paprika
1/2 tbsp mustard seeds
50g light brown sugar
100ml red wine vinegar
1 star anise
salt

I used the passata because there were no cans of chopped tomatos, but it actually worked out really well. The heat was much better than the last time with the hot paprika adding the right amount of spice without adding the non-currywurst flavours which the masala did. The star anise was also a good addition, although I forgot to remove it before blending, which resulted in some small shards and perhaps more aniseed flavour that there should have been. Overall I was pretty impressed. It's hard to tell it it was better than the last batch or not, I think I need to make some more tweaks and come up with some sort of hybrid. After my comments about the malt vinegar I think that this batch was missing a bit of a bite to it, perhaps next time I should try white vinegar.

The Boathouse, South Queensferry

2008-10-15T21:15:00.003Z

Excellent Place, Shame About the Food

Situated on the High Street and looking out over the Forth The Boathouse has the kind of amazing views of the bridges you'd expect from its location. Inside's not too shabby either, plain white walls with some nautical nik-naks dotted around the place give it a pleasant relaxed atmosphere. It's a pity that despite the restaurant only being around a quarter full (Wednesday evening) they had chosen to squeeze five of us onto a table for four with three people along one edge. There was plenty of room to accommodate us at a larger table or put a couple together to give us more room. The tight squeeze combined with some pretty uncomfortable seats made things less fun that they might otherwise have been.

Service wasn't particularly great either. The waitress was friendly enough, but as she was the only person there things were a bit slow. She also couldn't take no for an answer, which I suppose isn't always a bad thing. When our designated driver was asked if she would like some wine, it was politely declined, only to have her glass filled anyway. When asked if we would like more bread, and everyone saying 'no thanks', more was brought anyway. The bread itself was some pretty awful Tiger Bread with the sesame oil becoming really overbearing after a couple of bites. I have to admit that I'm not a big fan of Tiger Bread at the best of times, but I've tasted far better from a supermarket.

As a starter I opted for a bowl of mussels with a garlic and cream sauce. The mussels themselves were excellent; cooked to perfection, big and juicy. The sauce was fairly heavy with the emphasis very much on the cream rather than the garlic, nothing special but the mussels themselves made up for it. Others at the table enjoyed their starters of Seafood Bisque, grilled goats cheese, mackerel and smoked salmon; although the presentation varied across the board from 'fancy' to 'slapped on a plate'.

As a main I chose the Scallops, one of my favourite seafood dishes. I was very disappointed. A few scallops came splattered across the plate with very little else apart from a few greens and a lemon carved into a little tower. The scallops themselves were pretty much tasteless and overcooked to the point of being rubbery. Gwen had the steak, which for the price was also very disappointing. Although cooked well (rare) it was a fairly puny specimen; fairly tough and sinuey. Others had Sea Bass, Halibut and "Seared Sashimi Tuna" - how in the hell can you get seared sashimi?! Overall I don't think anyone was blown away with their meals, especially not at the prices charged, and the quantities given.

Overall I'd give it 2 out of 5, could try harder. Perhaps we caught them on a bad night, but I'm unlikely to go back and find out.

mkv2mp4 - Updated

2008-09-27T16:50:00.004Z

I've been playing around with the mkv2mp4 script which I posted about earlier in the year. I hadn't used it in a while and found that there were issues with the audio when converting larger files. I've updated the script with a slightly different method for converting the audio and updated my original post.

Sushi, Dentists, Cycling and Kayaking

2008-09-21T18:40:00.004Z

Three weeks after coming back from holiday and I'm still spending my evenings sorting through photos and slowly uploading them to flickr. I either took far too many photos while on holiday, or spend too much time thinking about which ones to upload, writing descriptions for them and adding locations. My other internet mini-project which I've been working on has been finished off. I've quite sadly migrated my Google whisky map into a database and written a script to generate a KML file, you can see the results by loading it into Google maps. The little still icons are pretty naff but I couldn't be bothered doing them properly.

As well as swiming through a sea of holiday photos I've had a pretty productive weekend. Friday night was the usual post-work drinking session followed by an unusal trip to Tang's for some sushi. We were there pretty late and the last people left so got a good bit of chat from Mr Tang who came out to talk to us. Tang's is slowly turning into one of my favorite resturants. Saturday was an early start and a trip to the dentist, which is always a fun and exciting chore. In the evening we headed around to a friend's for some drinner. Today was another early start. After gathering up all my Kayaking stuff and piling it and my bike into the car we drove up to Aberfolye where we met up with David, Rosie and her parents. We had 2 kayaks and 5 bikes so took it in turns cycling around the forest paths and kayaking on Loch Ard. The trails on the south side of the loch were good for a relaxing Sunday, we even found a short section of single track to fire down as well.

Back to work tomorrow which is no doubt going to be a busy week of meetings and writing Tender responses. As everyone seems to have gone on holiday I've been left to spec, estimate and write the technical response for a fairly large piece of work we're going for.

A Month of Numbers

2008-09-15T17:14:00.004Z

Well, it's been a good long while since I posted an update on here, but not without good reason. It's been a busy month and one I'm sure I shall remember for a good while yet. In the past month I have:

Visited 7 islands (Arran, Islay, Colonsay (ish), Mull, Iona, Skye and Handa).
Visited 17 whisky distilleries (Arran, Caol Ila, Bunnahabhain, Ardbeg, Laphroig, Lagavulin, Bowmore, Kilchoman, Bruichladdich, Oban, Tobermory, Talisker, Old Pultney, Clynelish, Glenmorangie, Dalmore and Glen Ord - until i wrote these out I thought it was only 16).
Visited the most westernly point on the UK mainland - Ardnamurchan lighhouse.
Visted the most northernly point on the UK mainland - Dunnet Head.
Driven about 2000 miles.
Visited 1/2 of the UK nations (Scotland and England).
Attended 1 wedding.
Seen god knows how many lighthouses.

It's been a busy month. I've only managed to get about half of my photos up onto Flickr and there are a lot more to come. I'm thinking that a long post about where, what and when I've been up to might take a while and to be honest I can't be bothered. Maybe I'll provide some short snippits of the trips over the next few days/weeks/months/years.

Physical and Political Knocks

2008-08-06T17:13:00.007Z

Well it's been a few months so I guess a minor collision with a car was coming sooner or later. Well, not really, in all the years I've been cycling I've only ever had a couple of accidents and today's was really nothing to write home about (although writing to the internet seems to have different rules). Similar to the the last time it was pissing down with rain, making breaking slow, and the person was coming out of a side street and didn't bother double checking. I was filtering slowly in a slow moving queue of traffic when the car level with me/over taking me decided to be nice and stop to let the person out in front of them. Some heavy breaking and a small swerve meant that I almost missed them but as it was I bumped their bumper a little (is that not what bumpers are for?).

If only people would take the time to double check before they pull out, it really is similar to the TV advert with the motorbike. Still, no harm done and maybe it'll make them be a bit more aware in future.

In other news, I think that there might be a winner in councillor contest. Some of the major problems have been fixed and the Tory guy came down to meet residents and see what else could be done. I'm inclined to sideline the contest for now with the 'round one' scores as below. The Conservatives get 3 points (fixing stuff, coming along to meet people and firing off emails about a couple of other things). Lib Dems loose 2 more points for managing to do nothing at all for the entire contest.

GB (Conservative): 5
AB (Labour): -2
JM (Liberal Democrats): -4

I feel kind of dirty that the Conservatives have won, but the guy is such a nice helpful bloke.

Flickr RSS + Google Maps

2008-07-28T12:26:00.004Z

I discovered something today (after something which my brother stumpled upon) which I didn't realise you could do with flickr's feeds and google maps. It's possible to take one of flickr's RSS feeds, with geo data, and get google maps to display the images at their locations. As an example here's some of my photos taken on Arran. It's a very neat and simple way of showing a bunch of photos easily on google maps - certainly easier than codeing a little flickr/google maps mush-up like I've done in the past. The only place in which it falls down is where multiple photos have the same location; from the map interface there's no way of viewing them all. I'm probably a bit late on picking up this neat bit of functionality but it's cool non-the-less.

The Pack Tightens

2008-07-28T12:21:00.004Z

Just a quick update on the councillor challenge. The Labour representative replied to my email which gives him a point and closes the gap. I've also decided that the last person to reply should probably be deducted a point. There's still not been any progress on the council fixing any of the problems so any effort put in by the councillors hasn't worked yet.

GB (Conservative): 2
JM (Liberal Democrats): -2
AB (Labour): -2

Councillor Action

2008-07-23T12:06:00.003Z

Well, one day in and there's now a clear leader in the Councillor Competition. The Conservative candidate replied with a very nice email saying that he'll look into it, as well as a CC on an email to some people at the council telling them to get it sorted. That earns him 3 points I reckon; one for the reply, one for the CC'd message and another for saying that he'd love to attend a residents' association meeting.

GB (Conservative): 2
JM (Liberal Democrats): -1
AB (Labour): -3

It's All About the Wurst

2008-07-23T11:43:00.003Z

Last night I finally got around to trying the Currywurst Sauce which I made on Saturday with some actual wurst. All I can say is that I'm even happier with the outcome than I was just after making it. A few days in the fridge has given it a little time to mellow and the sharp vinegar taste as all but gone, meaning that it's lost the 'sweet and sour' flavour which it had. It's not quite currywurst (needs more curry) but it's a damn tasty ketchup anyway, I'll be happy to finish the rest of it off with sausage or chips.

The Crappy Councillor Contest

2008-07-22T17:12:00.006Z

After the restructuring of local government wards at the last election, rather than a single useless councillor I now have the possibility of three, from three useless parties. It seems that while each month I diligently pay my council tax, the council sees fit to piss the money away rather than spend it on keeping the city in a good state of repair. While city centre streets get done and redone time and time again (Castle Street springs to mind) a small dead end residential street asking for things like road markings, some weeds cut back or maybe some tarmac rather than dirt, get ignored. In the interests of helping the council spend my money a little better I let them know when things need done (fixmystreet.com), they do however, mostly ignore me. I'm considering cancelling my council tax direct debit and refusing to pay until they actually spend a bit of time tidying up the local area (a couple of man hours and some tarmac would do it). I suspect though, that while it's criminal that the council have left the city in such a state, it's actually criminal for me not to hand over money to them each month.

As a final (possibly) effort I've decided to start playing my three local councillors off against each other. I'm having a contest - "The Crappy Councillor Content". I emailed each of them separately, but at the same time, asking if they can sort out some of the issues in their ward. I've not decided on the official rules yet but there will be points for replying personally and quickly, attending residents' meetings, getting things done and so forth. Points will be deducted for ignoring me, not doing anything and making up excuses.

So far there's no leader but the Labour councillor is falling behind. An out-of-office reply for someone other than yourself saying they will be back in two weeks isn't good communication. I have no idea who the person who is on holiday is, although I hope that they enjoy their two weeks off.

JM (Liberal Democrats): -1
GB (Conservative): -1
AB (Labour): -3

As an aside, if Nigel Griffiths (my MP) was part of the race he'd be well behind - out of the three times I've emailed him the last couple of months he hasn't replied to any, unless you count the email address on his website bouncing.

This little spark of passive activism has been inspired by mysociety.org and their awesome tools for annoying the people who supposedly represent our interests. I'm considering going through their list of 'stuff what needs doing', downloading their source code and seeing if I can help out with anything.

Currywurst

2008-07-19T16:03:00.007Z

It's no secret that I'm partial to a currywurst. The problem is that they're hard to find here. Don't get me wrong, I'm as big a fan of haggis pudding suppers and deep fried pies as any self respecting scot, but they're more of an evening take away - wurst can be enjoyed at any time of day. So, with the problem of getting a currywurst in Edinburgh being as it is, I've decided to master the craft and make my own currywurst sauce. I'm guessing it's going to take a few attempts to get the recipe right, but hopefully I'll get there in the end.

Currywurst Sauce No. 1

1 onion
400g chopped tomatoes (1 can)
2 tbsp mild Curry Powder
1 tbsp paprika
1/2 tbsp masala
100g white sugar
100ml malt vinegar

Finely chop the onion and fry it in a little oil until it becomes soft. Add the tomatoes, spices, sugar and vinegar, and mix together. Bring to the boil and reduce to a ketchup consistency. Remove from the pan and blend until smooth.

My first thoughts on tasting the sauce are that it's too "sweet and sour"; I think I need to reduce the sugar and vinegar so that it doesn't over power the curry flavour - I had also planned on using red wine vinegar but didn't have any. It's also a little too spicy I think, I might try using hot paprika and missing out the masala.

I've not tried the sauce over some sausage yet, which will be the real test. Although, so far, I'm quite impressed with it as a first attempt. Perhaps I need to travel to Berlin and get some sort of wurstmaster to teach me his secrets, that or find an English translation of Die Entdeckung Der Currywurst.

Update: The book's in the post! Awesome.

Dolomites

2008-06-27T16:44:00.003Z

Last week I was away on a short trip to Cortina D'Ampezzo in the Dolomites to climb some via ferrata. Via ferrata are climbing routes equipped with fixed protection and aids such as sections of ladders and stemples, the amount of aids varies from route to route depending on the difficulty and terrain. The fixed protection makes it easy to scale some amazing routes with lots of exposure relatively easily and without having to use ropes. The first ferrata were constructed in the Dolomites during the First World War where the mountains formed the front line between the Italians and Austrians.

We set off early from Edinburgh on Wednesday flying to Munich and then driving down from Germany through Austria and into Italy. We were upgraded by the hire car company from an estate to a 7 seat behemoth (Peugeot 807), with electric doors and everything, it made the 4 hour drive a bit more comfortable. On the first day we took the scenic route through the hills arriving at Cortina in the early evening and opting not to do any climbing on the first day.

We awoke to some glorious sunshine for the morning of our first full day in the Dolomites and after a "rich" breakfast headed west out of Cortina to the Lagazuoi cable car for our first climb of the day - Averau. After a fairly long walk up from the car park, climbing steadily, we reached the Averau Refugio and the base of the ferrata. Averau is a very easy ferrata featuring a couple of short assents on rock and a short set of stemples up a chimney. At the top of the ferrata it's a short stroll up (a snowy slope early in the season) to the summit. The decent follows the same route back although we opted for a small detour on an alternative path past a small lake.

After getting back to the car in good time we decided to take in another short and easy ferrata which followed the path of some waterfalls. Heading back into Cortina then north up the valley takes you to the Cascata de Fanes where there's a short ferrata that takes you under a waterfall, round the back and then down the side of one of the biggest waterfalls that I've seen up close. I think we hit it at a good time; warm weather following a cold spring meaning that the snow on the hills was melting fast.

Day 2 (of climbing) saw the weather staying good which was just as well with a long day ahead planned. We left fairly early and headed east up towards Tre Cime where a toll road takes you up to the Refugio Auronzo. From here we walked along the base of Tre Cime and round towards Monte Paterno, which we had planned on climbing. After reaching the Refugio Locatelli and watching a couple of groups turning back at a large snow filled gully we decided that the cable must be buried and the route more than a little treacherous without crampons/ice-axe; we decided instead to climb the near by Sentiero delle Scalette ferrata as an alternative.

The route up Sentiero delle Scalette follows an Austrian assent created to avoid Italian sniper fire and uses mainly ladders to reach the summit, there's a nice and exposed section near the top when you come off the ladder onto rock for the last part of the accent. When we reached the top the weather was starting to worsen slightly, after a few moments at the top the large metal cross making the summit started buzzing and crackling with static electricity. A few rumbles of thunder further away told us that we should probably be heading down as soon as possible - you don't want to be holding a long metal cable during a thunderstorm! The build up of static in the air was nothing like I've felt before, the hair on your arms was standing upright and putting your arm up in the air caused the air around your fingers to crackle. The decent follows an alternative (and less steep) route past some tunnels and fortifications dug into the rock. After a short stop and group photo at the Refugio Locatelli we headed back towards Tre Cime. On the way back we stopped and went through some of the tunnels at the end of the "Luca-Innerkofler" route which we would have done if there had been less snow, after the tunnels and a little along the route we met a snow filled gully where the cable was buried - without a hand-line, and late in the day with the weather closing in we decided to turn round and head back. Luckily (or unluckily) for us we got caught in a heavy thunderstorm about 20 minutes away from the car; the rain was refreshing but the hail stinging - the thunder, as usual in the Alps, was loud and impressive.

On day 4 the longest day of the year didn't disappoint with some glorious sunshine and blue skies. The plan for the day was to head just outside Cortina and climb the 'Michielli Strobel' ferrata on Punta Fiammes. The route climbs up from the road on a steep and fairly hard going (especially in the sun) path to the bottom of the climb. From here it zig zags slightly up the top with steep protected sections followed by traverses along paths. The views don't disappoint with a constant drop down straight into the valley and Cortina sprawling out below. There's a large ladder in the middle section of the climb but it's mostly just protected rock with little fixed aids. By this time I was starting to get into the ferrata-ing and hardly touching the cable to pull myself up where hand holds were hard to find; I think I even remember crimping on a few occasions. After you reach the summit the decent is by a massive scree slope which makes coming down much faster than going up. The scree was really good fun right until the bottom where hard packed rock with loose gravel on top caused a couple of us to slide a little - I escaped with some scratched legs and arms, another guy I was with took quite a slice out the back of his leg, ripping his shorts and splattering a fair amount of blood about. After a quick first aid stop it was a slow walk back along the valley to were we started - it was pretty hot by this point, and after going through three litres of water going up, it was thirsty as well.

Day four, and our last day. We didn't think it was possible but the weather was even better (driving back through Austria it was 35°C, which I think is pretty damn hot for June - luckily our truck had air-con). As we had a flight to catch in Munich that evening we had a short day before heading north again through Austria and into Germany. With our gear semi-packed we decided to go to Lagazuoi, take the cable car up and come down through the tunnels. The tunnels were dug out by both sides in a drawn out battle for control of the peak involving setting of deliberate avalanches, tunnelling under enemy camps to blow them up and even using explosives to blast the top off a peak. The tunnels down and the Martini Ledge are amazing and definitely worth a visit for anyone in the area. It's cool that they haven't made the place into a 'disneyland museum' - there's no lighting in the tunnels so a helmet and torch are required and some parts of the defences and the ledge and exposed and loose. You can only really imagine what life would have been like to spend time in the tunnels under the constant thread of being shot or blown up, and in the winter, freezing to death.

After getting to the airport we had a bit of wait (not least due to Easyjet delaying the flight by 2 hours and not giving out any information - at least we got home, one guy on our trip has his flight back to London cancelled) and some currywurst (which I was very happy about). I've uploaded some photos to flickr. I definitely would like to head back to the Dolomites for some more walking and via ferrata. The scale of the place and scenery is amazing.

Security Theatre?

2008-06-13T19:59:00.007Z

As a natural born cynic, grumpy bastard and paranoid worrier I've always had a bit of a passing interest in picking holes in the way things work, and more recently airport security arrangements. It doesn't really take a genius to notice that the current situation is totally fucked and I often wonder to myself if it's a case of the government (lower case 'g') being completely incompetent (they seem to be at most other things) or just plain sneaky and have some other reason for making air travel as much of a pain in the arse as possible.

Gwen's sister flew up from London last night for a long weekend with some friends. At the airport she had a can of hairspray taken off her from due to the 'War on Moisture'. The reason why she hadn't removed it from her hand luggage was because a couple of months ago before when flying she forgot to remove it from her bag, but was let through anyway. She's flown a couple of other times since then and no one said anything - she assumed the rules had changed.

In my mind there are two possible outcomes to this "incident" which the government needs to explain/clarify:

There is a real terrorist thread to air travel from liquid explosives carried on in hand luggage, in quantities greater than 100ml. If this is the case then security at Luton airport is a complete farce and represents a daily threat to all travellers in and out of the airport. The airport needs to close instantly and all staff need to be checked that they are doing their job properly. There needs to be a full investigation into why someone was allowed to fly more than once with something which could be explosive. The security staff who let the hairspray can onto the plane need to be removed from their posts. They are endangering people's lives.
There is no thread from terrorists trying to blow up aircraft with liquid explosives. If this is the case then security at Luton airport is a complete farce and the current security measures are nothing more than "Security Theatre", designed to give the impression of safety. The 'war on moisture' does nothing to safeguard lives, all it does is inconvenience passengers.

Looking at current real events there seems to be a lot of evidence pointing to the second case being true (lets leave science to the side - ah science, how good you are to us, yet seem to have no place in government policy). As my brother has pointed out before - if liquid explosives were a real threat then anyone who even dared to take them through airport security should find themselves taken down by armed police and the airport evacuated straight away - after all, they're bringing a (maybe) bomb into the airport! This doesn't happen. Every time you fly there's always loads of people having bottles of water and toiletries taken from them. If all these liquids might be explosives then why are they not secured by a bomb squad and the area sealed? Another piece of evidence is the way in which airports handle confiscated liquids. Have a look at this Edinburgh Evening New Article.

"All plastic bottles, aerosols and sharp items are recycled but the rest of the goods are binned, including the alcohol, which is poured away before the bottles are also trashed."

They pour it away! What? Pouring bottles of possibly explosive liquids down the sink with lots of other possibly explosive liquids?!?! What the fuck? If it really might be a bomb they sure as well wouldn't be fucking pouring it away! Look at the bloody photo as well; that man is holding a tray full of possibly explosive liquids. No gloves or protective suit. Just mix them all together and hope nothing reacts. You could bet that if they found a real bomb (or "suspicious package") the whole place would be sealed down and that guy would be running for his fucking life.

So which is it? Is the government endangering every air passenger's life by not stopping all (maybe) explosives from getting onto planes and not disposing of the (maybe) explosives properly? Or are they just adding stupid pointless security measures which do nothing but inconvenience travellers and boost the profits of airside shops?

I suppose I should be thankful that I've never told anyone that I don't have a bomb while at the airport, I'd probably be locked up for 42 days without trial now. I would email my MP and ask for some clarification on this, but the last time I emailed him he couldn't be bothered responding. After all, we do appear to be outsourcing government IT to Tonga so maybe it takes a while for him to check his email.

Mongol

2008-06-13T19:45:00.004Z

Last Monday I went to see Mongol tells the story of a yound Mongolian boy named Temudjin as he grows up through good times and bad (mostly bad) to become the first leader of the Mongols - Genghis Khan. It's an amazing piece of cinematography which could be likened to films by Ang Lee (I was reminded a lot of middle section in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon with the massive beautiful barren landscapes). The acting is great through out with young Temudjin (Odnyam Odsuren) in particular standing out. The battle scenes towards the end of the film are wonderfully shot and great to watch, although I thought that they could have made more of Temudjin/Genghis Khans amazing mind for battle strategy. The film is apparently the first of three so I really hope that the other two get made (the very end of the film gives mixed messages).

4.5/5

mkv2mp4

2008-05-17T10:16:00.005Z

In my last post I was saying that I needed to look into converting matroska files to mpeg4 so that I can play them on the PS3 via Mediatomb from my Ubuntu server. As it turns out it's not very difficult and after following through the instructions on a forum thread it is all working nicely. The basic work flow is to separate the video and audio tracks, change a header in the video, re-encode the audio to AAC, then put it all back together again. At the end of the thread there was a handy Perl script that someone had put together to automate the process. The script didn't seem to work but after a few minor changes (checking for the correct dependences and case sensitivity trouble) I've got a script which seems to work nicely. I've only ran this over one file so it's likely that it won't work in all situations, I'll need to do some more testing as time goes on.

I've uploaded a copy of the script for people who want to give it a go. To convert mkv files to mp4 you'll need to install the following dependences:
sudo apt-get install mkvtoolnix gpac hexedit mplayer

You also need to get the Nero AAC codec for re-encoding the audio. It's worth noting that if you're running a 64-bit version of Ubuntu you'll also need to install some additional libraries:
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

After that it should just be a case of running the script:
mkv2mp4 my_matroska_file.mkv

Takes about 10 minutes to do a 40 minute file but depending on your hardware your mileage may vary. Like I said at the top I've only tried this on a single file, and it worked. Use it at your own risk and if in doubt back everything up!

Update: I hadn't used this script in a while until recently but had a few problems with the audio conversion. The issue seemed to be being caused with larger files. I've swapped out this part of the script to do it slightly differently, which seems to have done the trick.

Playstation 3

2008-05-15T16:04:00.002Z

I finally dived into the world of next-gen consoles earlier in the week with the arrival of a shiny (well it was shiny, now it's just dusty) new PS3 through my letter box (well it didn't come through the letter box, I think). I've played other people's PS3s before and borrowed my brother's while he was on holiday a while back so I knew was I was in for. I had been putting off picking up a new console partly because of the HD format war, partly because I've not been playing games much recently and partly because I've been trying to save a bit of cash. So far I'm impressed, I've not gone over ever feature and so far have only been playing GT5 Prologue but it's been really good. The only thing which has been a bit annoying is waiting on things to update themselves (GT5 and the console firmware) which seems to take an age and stops you from doing anything while it's happening. It would be good if it could download the updates in the background and then let you install them once they're done. I've also had a quick look at the media centre options which although doesn't support an amazing amount of formats was easy to setup. After installing mediatomb onto my server and adding my shares via the web UI it was all good to go. The next step will be looking into convering MKV files to let me watch things in hi-def. I've not tried any Blu-rays or DVD upscaling yet, I'm especially interested to see how the upscaling compares XBMC.

Das Boot

2008-05-12T09:46:00.003Z

I've had a copy of Das Boot on DVD for a while but hadn't put aside the 3 and a half hours for the epic that it is. We decided to watch it last night and I have to say I was totally blown away. It's one of the best films which I've seen in a long time or at all. Despite its length there was never a slow moment where you felt the film was dragging. It's really a bit of a rollercoaster of ups downs, excitement and sadness. Everything in the film is brilliant; especially the acting and the score. Being able to make a film so good despite being mostly set inside a submarine is a pretty spectacular achievement.

I think this is definitely a highlight in our '50 Years, 50 Films' challenge. We're lagging a bit I think but there's plenty of time to catch up, and hopefully plenty of great films to catch up with!

Beer

2008-05-09T12:20:00.003Z

Tonight is that start of the annual Heriot-Watt Beer Festival and although having never been a student at Heriot-Watt going along is always a must. I think we've been going now for about 6 years from when Gwen studied there back in 2001/2002. I thought that I had missed it this year but a check a couple of weeks ago on Heriot-Watts awesome News and Events website showed that we hadn't. This isn't the first year that the website has helped me out on that one. Lets hope that the warm sunny weather lasts for a little while longer, although it does appear to be clouding over as I write this.

It ain't borked, yet....

2008-05-02T10:32:00.005Z

When it comes to sysadmin on my home machines lazy would probably be the word I would use to describe my attitude. I very much work on a 'if it ain't borked' approach; which is fine, until something breaks. My router seems to be playing up a little and has gone down a couple of times in the past couple of weeks. That's not too bad in itself, a reboot has sorted things out. The problem comes down to my laziness to setup a static IP for my sever which means that when the router was down for long enough it hopped IP and buggered up all my settings for web servers, samba, nfs and god knows what else. I've finally sorted that out and what follows is my easy config for setting up a static IP in Ubuntu (7.10 - I've not gotten round to upgrading my server yet). This isn't brain surgery and takes less than a minute to do; don't be a tool - just take the time to set it up properly rather than using DHCP!

The file which you need to change is /etc/network/interfaces. The default setup uses DHCP, as shown by the line:

iface eth0 inet dhcp

This needs to be replaced with your static IP settings, here I'm using the IP 192.168.1.100 and my router is using 192.168.1.1:

iface eth0 inet static
  address 192.168.1.100
  netmask 255.255.255.0
  network 192.168.1.0
  broadcast 192.168.1.255
  gateway 192.168.1.1

In other not computer news I finally got a ring for Gwen. She's put up some photos on her blog.

Updating Old Flickr Code

2008-04-14T20:13:00.003Z

I'm currently in the middle of moving over the hosting of the few websites I maintain to a new host. During the move I'm taking a bit of time to back through some of the code and tidy it up in places; all of the code is pretty straight forward so there's not much that needs done. One part of the site that's proven cumbersome in the past is a photo gallery which is created by getting the contents of a flickr group pool. The code was written a good few years ago and the flickr API has changed a bit since then so it needs some changes.

While tidying things up I found an annoying irregularity in the functionality of flickr.groups.pools.getPhotos. You can pass getPhotos a number of photos to return and the page which you want which handily works out which photos you need based on the size of the page and the page number; as well as the photo information it also returns the total number of photos in pool and the total number of pages - making it nice and easy to add paging to the gallery. Unfortunately though there's a bit of inconsistency when it comes to photos which aren't public. Quite correctly flickr will only return photos which are public, and the paging functionality works in giving you the number of photos you need for the page. However the total photos and total page values returned reflect the grand total, including photos you can't see. This makes things a bit annoying as you can't then count on them for working out how many pages you need to show, making easy links to each page a case of going all the way through the pool calculating the number of photos that you can see.

I'm in two minds if I should flag this as a bug with flickr. The functionality works and returns what it says it will give you, but is it what it should be returning? Either way it's a bit annoying but not a massive problem to work around. I've opted for just not showing a list of pages and relying on previous/next links instead.

Another old piece of flickr related code which I found while going through the site was a page I wrote an age ago to position photos in google maps. Shortly after writing the code flickr added their own mapping so it became somewhat out of date. I might have a play around and revive it a bit. Apart from google maps being better than yahoo's effort there's a couple of things which I think could be done neater that the flickr map.

Raceland Karting

2008-03-27T13:08:00.001Z

On Saturday I headed out to Raceland Karting as part of a stag night/day for one of my brother's friends. I'd been out to
Raceland a little over a year before to have a go on the indoor track. I really enjoyed the indoor track but found that the
karts weren't really that fast or powerful so was looking forward to giving the outdoor circuit a try. The karts on the
indoor track are rated at going up to 70mph although at what felt like the top speed going down the longest straight it
didn't seem that fast, although it was still fast enough to be pretty exciting.

The race format for the day was 3 heats, where starting positions are mixed up (aiming to give you at least one race near the
front and one near the back) and you gain points for your finishing position, then a final where starting positions are based
on the points you scored the heats. I had a fairly mediocre race in the first heat starting in the middle of pack and staying
there for pretty much the entire race. In the second heat I got off to a good start coming from near the back of the grid and
gaining a lot of positions after a pile up on the second corner. Things were going well with my kart feeling pretty fast
until the third lap when the engine starting losing power and then cutting out completely. After getting the engine
restarted by one of the marshals I limped back to the pits and dropped out of the race. On the final heat I was determined to
make up some points and with a good kart I was able to get from the middle of the grid into second place on the first
couple of laps. After that it was a case of staying on the guy in front's tail until he made a mistake and I was able to
squeeze past. Once in front I was able to stay there and win the race. For the final my points were given a bit of a boost
with the positions for the first and third races being to make an average for the engine troubles in the second heat. I
started in the middle of the pack and managed to claw my way up a few places. My kart wasn't nearly as quick as the race
before, which is probably just as well as the brakes weren't working very well. I was gaining ground quite steadily in the
second half of the race and catching up on the battle for third place. A mistake in a final effort to get into 4th, or 3rd if
it had really paid off, didn't turn out as well as I had hoped and I lost a position on the second to last corner finishing
6th overall.

The day was really good fun and the outdoor track is much better than the indoor one. The kart which you ended up getting in
a race seemed to make a huge difference which was a bit annoying as it added more of a random element into the outcome. Some
of the karts didn't seem to be running that well with the one that cut out for me, another where the throttle cable snapped in
the final and one other one which apparently had the accelerator stuck down. The lines which you took through the corners
were also obviously important with a few tricky hairpins to get round. There was a section of the course in the middle where
I seemed to be taking a different line to everyone else. This seemed to pay off most of the time allowing me to get close
behind someone (and not hitting because I was on a slightly different line) and coming out of the corner quicker letting me
overtake. I'm not sure if that was just luck or not.

On Some Days You Shouldn't Take the Bike

2008-03-26T18:21:00.005Z

There are some days on which you shouldn't cycle to work. The problem is that you don't know it's one of those days until you're back home. Today was one of those days.

This morning I had the unfortunate incident of being overtaken by a Citylink bus driver who either doesn't know how wide his bus is, or doesn't care. The stretch of of Queensferry Street heading down the hill to Dean bridge has a fairly tight bend before narrowing significantly at the start of Dean bridge. This is not a sensible place for a bus to overtake a cyclist. The result of doing so means that the front of the bus swings round into the cycle lane, in front of the cyclist (hopefully on into them), causing them to brake suddenly before the side of the bus comes round taking up all of the road space and giving the cyclist the option of mounting the pavement (and probably hitting a lamp post/pedestrian) or being hit by the side of the bus. I choose the later and to make matters worse as my arm was being dragged up the side of the bus I could see the driver staring at me in the wing mirror, with a cold look of contempt on his face. They're fairly simple concepts; people in front of you on the road have right of way, don't overtake a vehicle if the road isn't actually wide enough for both of you to be side by side.

On the way home I had a more serious, and unexpected, crash. After leaving work, waiting at the lights and then continuing along the road all the vehicles from the lights had overtaken me. On the approach to the next junction someone decided that she could nip out behind a taxi just in front of me. After realising she couldn't she proceeded to stop while her bonnet sticking out into the road; while this was happening wet roads were making my attempt at stopping/getting out the way difficult - cue a fairly classic, and in some ways amusing, tumble over the bonnet. To be fair to the woman who hit me she was nothing but apologetic for running me over. She also ~~offered~~ demanded to give me a lift home and kept apologising on route. As the "stupid neddy car" she was driving was also apparently not hers I do feel sorry for the owner; there's bound to be some scratches where I went over the bonnet and the interior, faux leather bucket seats and all, is no doubt now covered in oil from my chain. Still, if only everyone who tried to kill you was so nice.

Now that I'm back home I've decided that I shouldn't have taken the bike to work. Damage to the bike seems minimal, maybe a slight skew on the front wheel. Damage to me isn't too painful, a sore leg and shoulder - nothing the whisky I'm drinking won't help.

Skiing and Photos

2008-03-17T20:58:00.003Z

I've just back from an excellent week skiing in the Swizz Alps. I've just uploaded some photos to flickr of the trip. I also posted to my other blog about the trip earlier. Mont-blog was originally setup to chart my progress to going from lazy to climbing Mont-Blanc in a couple of weeks. Since then I've used it occasionally to post about outdoors related stuff. I'm wondering if it's worth keeping it or if I should just start posting that kind of thing on here as well. Decisions decisions.

The Cooncil - Dual Incompetence

2008-03-06T18:46:00.004Z

While I have to admit it's not often that some part of the council isn't pissing me off; it's not so common for two departments to do it at the same time.

First up is the Residents Parking Section which about three weeks ago sent me a renewal notice for my permit. I knew my permit was about to expire, and had been expecting the notice so I wrote a cheque and popped it in the post. The notice said that it took a minimum of 7 days to process and with over 2 weeks left I wasn't worried. Well, two weeks came and went and my permit expired on Tuesday. I called them on Monday (no answer) and again on Tuesday. After they searched the system I was told that my payment had been received (they still haven't cashed the cheque) and they were processing it, why it was taking 2 weeks they didn't say, although they did say that they were very busy and it was taking around 7 to 10 days. Ensured that they'd get it done as soon as possible, and that my old permit had a '14 day grace period' I hung up unhappy, but content. I'm still waiting on the permit, but then the council doesn't seem to do first class, which takes me on to the next department.

About a month ago we received an invoice for a statutory notice on our tenement which was sorted out 19 months (yes really) ago. Being that we didn't own the flat 19 months ago we're technically not liable for the payment - something which the council doesn't give two short sharp shits about. While I can understand their position that it's easier to let buyers and sellers sort that kind of thing out, taking 19 months to issue an invoice (for a pretty minor) statutory notice is ridiculous. Anyway, I sent a copy of the invoice to our solicitor and put it aside. Today we received a 'final notice' for the invoice demanding that we pay within the 7 days. Given that the date on the notice was 7 days ago that seems a bit unlikely. If the council are going to take 19 months to issue invoices and then send out demands for a payment within 7 days the least they could do is send it first class. I've written them a letter to go along with the payment but I'm thinking I might need to tone it down a bit before sending it.

Please find enclosed a cheque for the value of £****** made payable to "The City of Edinburgh Council” as payment for Invoice No ******. Please note that we are aware the payment has not been paid within seven days of the date on the 'final notice', however, as the final notice did not arrive until 7 days after it was dated this was unavoidable. Perhaps the council might consider changing the length of time given on their demands for payment, or posting items first class so that citizens might have a chance of paying invoices on time.

I note that there was only 28 days between the initial invoice and the 'final notice'. Given that it took the council almost 19 months to issue the invoice after the work was completed the amount of time given to settle the payment seems a little unreasonable. The time taken to issue the invoice also complicates matters as it increases the likelihood for property to have changed ownership, as in our case. We are still awaiting a response from our solicitors regarding liability for this invoice and have provided payment in good faith.

I also note that links between different sections of the council appear to be suffering; a simple check with the Revenues and Benefits division would have allowed you to see that the owners of the property are “Neil Wilkie” and “Gwen Dowswell”. Not “Owen Dowswell”, or indeed “O Dowswall” depending which page of the initial invoice you are looking at. Perhaps instructing your staff to proof read documents before sending them out would be beneficial, after all, you did have 19 months in which to do so.

Please could you could provide me with written confirmation of payment, and a receipt for the invoice. These will be required to pass on to our solicitor as proof of payment. If you could arrange to do this within seven days it would be much appreciated. You will note that I forked out for a first class stamp so that you might have a change of meeting this deadline, although given response times from yourselves, Revenues and Benefits, and the Residents Parking Section I would be surprised if I get a response at all.

Yours sincerely,

I guess I need to rework that a little tonight before posting it tomorrow. Still, only one more day before I'm off on holiday so it's not all bad.

Happy Bunny

2008-03-02T21:13:00.004Z

Well, it's been a pretty busy and very busy weekend. First things first I've got a bit of an announcement. As Friday was the 29th of February Gwen took her one in every four years opportunity to ask me a question. I've taken her up on the offer and I guess we're now officially hitched. We're leaving things a while until after Gwen's graduated but I suppose we should start looking for a ring. It's our 10 year anniversary in May 2009 so we're thinking about setting the date for sometime around then. With a start to the weekend like that it wasn't really going to turn out to be a bad one.

It's Gwen's, and my brother's, birthday on Monday so Saturday night was a bit of a celebration for that. It was also Amplifico's long awaited album launch and they didn't disapoint, putting on a blinding show for a capacity crowd. Before hand we headed to the SMWS for some food and whisky. After he gig there was a aftershow party along the road then after a couple of other pubs we ended up down at Studio 24. A pretty boozy night but a good one.

Today has been a bit of quiet one sorting things out around the flat. We headed down to the Caley Sample Room for lunch where I had an excellent Rabbit Ragout. The food at the Caley is always really good and today was no exception. Rabbit is one of my favourite meats but for some reason you don't really see it on menu's much. Tesco don't seem to want to sell it either so after I'm back from holiday I'll need to see which of the butchers sell some.

Power to the People, err, Person

2008-02-26T12:43:00.003Z

It's just less than a couple of weeks until I head off on a skiing trip to Wengen, Switzerland and I'm starting to think about things I'll need. One thing on my list is to get a power adapter which will charge devices through USB. Although I've got a charger for each device I own it's nice to be able to just take one which will do the job for my phone, iPod and DS (especially the DS as its adapter also requires a stepdown transformer). I do have a homemade USB charger which I constructed a few years back from a multi-plug/voltage transformer and a USB port. It works, but it does have a couple of flaws. Rather than providing a steady 5V it only gives out 4.5V and doesn't quite have enough power, which means than things take a bit longer than they should to charge. The other problem is that it's homemade, and although it's already travelled a lot, homemade electronics don't seem to be going down too well at airports in today's highly paranoid society, the Swiss police are also apparently 'no fun at all'.

It's a bit annoying that Apple have been cutting down their production costs and no longer supply chargers with the new iPods. I do have a charger for my old iPod but it's Firewire which doesn't help my other devices. The official Apple charger is a ridiculous £20 (their store also appears to be down at the moment) so it's out of the question. A search on Amazon shows plenty of possibilities but most are from other sellers and are doing themselves no favours by listing items at 1p and shafting buyers on the postage - I really don't know why Amazon allow sellers to do it, there should be some sort of system where the postage can't be higher than the item price.

A mid-price option is the Griffin Powerblock which is probably a safe buy. It's at least a branded product from a company well known for iPod accessories. What does worry me is that the product description (repeated on other sites) claims that it

handles all voltages from 110 to 240 AC, converting seamlessly to the 12 Volt DC that your USB devices need

I'm fairly sure that the last thing my USB devices need is 12 volt power. It's most likely a mistake from someone in Griffin's marketing department (probably getting confused with 12V car sockets) but worrying none the less.

Wanker Wagon

2008-02-22T22:24:00.005Z

Dear Mr Twat Face,

While it pains we to describe your head as a piece of female genitalia; using my limited vocabulary I cannot think of another way to describe you at present. You appear to think that driving around in your friend's, or in most likelihood your friend's Mum's, dark blue MK1 Ford Focus throwing objects at pedestrians is somehow 'cool' or 'exciting' it is, infact, pretty fucking stupid. I sincerely hope that they next person you strike in the neck with a heavy object is not a frail old woman, or your grandmother, as the force exerted upon their elderly head would most likely render them unconscious or dead. While I admire the accuracy at which you threw something at me while walking along Fountain Bridge at 9:20 this evening I cannot help but question why you felt the need to assert a drive-by assault on a otherwise innocent member of the public. It could be that you are so sexually inadequate that you lack female company on a Friday night, or you might be involved in some sort of homoerotic role-play scenario with your driver - it is not my place to pry on such matters. I really do hope that by inflicting an injury upon a member of the public your petty live is somehow now more fulfilled. Given my lack of general attention to the situation at hand I doubt that you will have noticed you made a successful blow, unfortunately it also means I was not able to note your registration number. I can only hope that the natural order of things has its way and you die a slow and painful death; after all, it would be no great loss to society.

HD DVD?

2008-02-20T12:54:00.004Z

Well, it's been a long time coming but it looks like HD DVD has died, or is at least fatally wounded and will have passed away within a few months. The format war, it seems, is over. The idea of buying a HD DVD player has been circling around in my head for a little while but the undecided outcome of the war with Blu-ray has always made things a little muddy. I was hoping that the demise of HD DVD might clear things up a little but it seems to have made things worse.

The cons for buying a HD DVD player are obvious; no more HD DVDs are going to be produced and even with the number of current releases things are going to get worse as time goes on. The pros however, have also gained some ground. With HD DVD players now well under £100 (with 2 free films) it begins to seem like not such a bad idea. Once you factor in that in the coming months shops will be trying to offload their stock of HD DVDs, quickly, and for the consumer, cheaply.

The further bonus for an HD DVD player is that for a while I've been thinking about getting a new DVD player. I'm currently using my xbox with XBMC up-scaling DVDs to 720p. While this looks pretty good and in the most part works I have found that it causes some disks (usually cheap ones) to judder and jerk a little. By all accounts the Toshiba HD DVD players are pretty good up-scalers which sort of takes the cost of the HD DVD part down to about £30, factor in the free films and it's pretty much a free extra.

Is buying an HD DVD player a stupid idea? As a long term investment, certainly, but as a cheap short term solution until I pick up a Blu-ray player/PS3? The jury is still out on that one.

Amarok ALAC Support

2008-02-17T15:16:00.003Z

I've had my new iPod for a few weeks and after getting it setup with Amarok by updating libgod I've not really used it any differently from my old one, well, different in that it actually works. The only new 'feature' which I've played about is syncing album art across. Even though coverflow is a totally useless feature it's quite cool for the covers to show up when tracks are playing. Today I decided to have a look at syncing some tracks encoded using Apple Lossless.

Encoding tracks is going to be a bit more difficult than decoding them so I decided to postpone that headache and quickly switched to Windows and ripped a CD using iTunes. After booting back to Ubuntu I transferred the m4u files over to my server so that they would be picked up by Amarok and added into my collection. Quite happily Amarok was able to play the tracks fine and syncing them to my iPod was no different than syncing mp3s. Unfortunately iTunes did a bit of a shit job at tagging the files and had added 'Artist - Album' for both the artist and album fields. For some reason although Amarok will play m4u files by default adding support for editing the tags needs to be compiled in, the ubuntu package doesn't have the support enabled.

After downloading the support for Amarok I set about compiling it with the '--with-mp4v2' flag. As usual compiling from source is a pain in the arse and it took a bit of tooing and throwing to get all the dependences satisfied. I'm now able to happily clean up the tags that iTunes created and everything seems to be working.

The next step is to see if I can get something which will encode files to ALAC from within Ubuntu, I'm guessing that running a Windows app through Wine is the best bet. I doubt that I'm going to start ripping much to ALAC, I'm certainly not going to be going back through all my CDs. I need to have a look into XBMC's support before I could start ripping any new music as ALAC.

SABnzbd

2008-02-01T13:26:00.000Z

Following on from installing nzbget on my new server and a comment from Bryan (a sys-admin that I work with) I decided to give SABnzbd a go. So far, I'm impressed. It was nice and easy to setup and being able to add in your newzbin account details so you can automatically download nzb files is a nice touch. I had previously written a script which did that but it was a bit of a faff and lately I had taken to just downloading them and transferring them across to the server. The web-based admin for it is also pretty cool.

I've been playing around with it for a few downloads and it's working like a charm. If I'm at home then using the web interface works well. I've not opened up any additional ports on my firewall so at the moment I'm using the command line from else where. For the command line I'm using a text-only browser which works well enough to use but has some problems. I need to fiddle around with it a bit more to see if I can iron some of them out. So far, so good.

Ireland

2008-01-31T21:40:00.000Z

Back home after a good weekend trip over to Ireland to see Gwen's sister and cousin. We got there on Friday morning and had time to head into Dublin before going back out to the airport to meet up with Gwen's brother who was flying in from Aberdeen later on. We then headed up to Drogheda to see Gwen's sister. After a relaxing afternoon we headed down to Malahide where we were staying with Gwen's cousin.

Saturday was an early start heading up to Drogheda and the Boyne region. We headed over to visit the prehistoric tomb at Newgrange. It was very similar to Maes Howe in design and apparent function although it was built to point at dawn rather than sunset on the winter solstice. After Newgrange we headed along to Monasterboice to see the graveyard, ruins and 10th century high crosses. After lunch more history followed with trips to Millifont Abbey and Trim Castle with its impressive keep and walls - some of Braveheart was also filmed there; which may or may not give it bonus points, I can't decide.

Sunday was a pretty chilled out day driving along the coast and stopping off at Howth. The market down at the harbour provided us with some of the best seafood chowder I think I've ever had. After that it was time to head back to the airport and then home. All in all a good weekend. There's some photos of the historic sites on my flickr account.

Snow, Metal and Whisky

2008-01-15T20:12:00.000Z

Had a pretty a pretty good weekend starting off early on Saturday morning heading to Glenshee in the car for some skiing. It was a pretty chilly start and before long I realised that a 50/50 mix of screen wash to water wasn't enough, visibility dropped when the scooshers on the car froze up. After the skiing I got back to Edinburgh in plenty of time to head down and catch Runemaster's first gig - supporting Conquest of Steel and Man of the Hour at Bannermans. All three bands were on top form and it was a really great night. Being back at work on Monday was softened by a trip to a whisky tasting down at the SMWS's Vaults in Leith. Five pretty exceptional whiskies (one 37 year old in there as well) and some tasty sausage in mash. We headed for a couple of drinks at the Blue Blazer on the way back and continued the evening with some more excellent whisky - a 26 year single cask Tomatin. Needless to say I was a touch late for work this morning and feeling a bit rough. Well worth it though.

nzbget install on ubuntu server

2008-01-07T19:41:00.000Z

I've just beefed up my home server a bit to replace some old (and gradually failing kit) as well as attempt to make the box a bit quieter. When setting up a new server every time I come around to installing nzbget I can never remember all the libraries which it needs. This isn't so much a how-to but a note to my future self on what I need to do. I've setup the box with a clean install of the 64 bit version of Ubuntu Server. I'm slowly adding all of the software which I use so there's not much that's already been installed.

First things first we need to get a copy of nzbget:
:> wget http://dfn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/nzbget/nzbget-0.3.0.tar.gz

Then after untarring and changing to the new nzbget folder we can run the configure script and see what's missing:

:> ./configure
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -cchecking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for gawk... no
checking for mawk... mawk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... no
checking build system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
checking host system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
checking for g++... no
checking for c++... no
checking for gpp... no
checking for aCC... no
checking for CC... no
checking for cxx... no
checking for cc++... no
checking for cl... no
checking for FCC... no
checking for KCC... no
checking for RCC... no
checking for xlC_r... no
checking for xlC... no
checking for C++ compiler default output file name... configure: error: C++ compiler cannot create executables
See `config.log' for more details.

Ah, we don't have a C compiler, I would have thought that it would have come as part of the default install, but nevermind:
:> sudo apt-get install g++

Now that we've got the compiler lets try again:

:> ./configure
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for gawk... no
checking for mawk... mawk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... no
checking build system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
checking host system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
checking for g++... g++
checking for C++ compiler default output file name... a.out
checking whether the C++ compiler works... yes
...
checking libxml/tree.h usability... no
checking libxml/tree.h presence... no
checking for libxml/tree.h... no
configure: error: "libxml2 header files were not found."

Right, first missing package libxml2. I remember from previous installs that nzbget requires some development libraries, I too lazy to work out which ones so I'm just going to install them for each library:
:> sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev

Let's try running the configuration script again:

:>  ./configure
...
checking ncurses.h usability... no
checking ncurses.h presence... no
checking for ncurses.h... no
checking ncurses/ncurses.h usability... no
checking ncurses/ncurses.h presence... no
checking for ncurses/ncurses.h... no
checking curses.h usability... no
checking curses.h presence... no
checking for curses.h... no
configure: error: Couldn't find curses headers (ncurses.h or curses.h).

After a quick google search for the appropriate package we're good to install it:
:> sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev

We then run through the same process for libpar2 and libsigc++-2.0:

:>  ./configure
...
checking sigc++/type_traits.h usability... no
checking sigc++/type_traits.h presence... no
checking for sigc++/type_traits.h... no
configure: error: "libsigc++-2.0 header files were not found in /usr/include/sigc++-2.0."

:> sudo apt-get install libsigc++-2.0-dev

:> ./configure
...
checking libpar2/libpar2.h usability... no
checking libpar2/libpar2.h presence... no
checking for libpar2/libpar2.h... no
configure: error: "libpar2 header files were not found in /usr/include."

:> sudo apt-get install libpar2-0-dev

Once those two are installed we can run the configuration script again:

:> ./configure
...
configure: creating ./config.status
config.status: creating Makefile
config.status: creating config.h
config.status: executing depfiles commands

Excellent, we have everything that we need. Now we can run the makefile and install nzbget:

:> make
The program 'make' is currently not installed.  You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install make
-bash: make: command not found

Well, we would if make was installed...
:> sudo apt-get install make

And try again:

:> make
/usr/bin/make  all-am
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/neil/nzbget-0.3.0'
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/neil/nzbget-0.3.0'

:> sudo make install
[sudo] password for neil:
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/neil/nzbget-0.3.0'
test -z "/usr/local/bin" || mkdir -p -- "/usr/local/bin"
  /usr/bin/install -c 'nzbget' '/usr/local/bin/nzbget'
make[1]: Nothing to be done for `install-data-am'.

nzbget should now be successfully installed. All that's needed is to create a config file and add your settings:

:> cp nzbget.conf.example ~/.nzbget

:> vi ~/.nzbget

This probably isn't a complete run through of everything that's needed or might crop up, it's just what worked for me. We can put everything from above into a more sensible order and save ourselves running the configuration script so many times.

:> sudo apt-get install g++ libxml2-dev libncurses5-dev libsigc++-2.0-dev libpar2-0-dev make
:> ./configure
:> make
:> sudo make install

50 Years, 50 Films

2008-01-03T13:06:00.001Z

Following on from the success of last years 30 Frankensteins Film Challenge we've decided to up the ante and go for 50 this year. The challenge is 50 Years, 50 Films; watch a film made in each of the last 50 years (1959 to 2008). The rules are pretty straight forward: one film from each year (in any order) which neither I nor Gwen have seen before. We're starting out with films which we want to see and then taking recommendations from various sources after that. I think we're going to try and get as many 'classics' as we can as well as going for a few foreign language films. We've made a good start by getting in a 1991 on New Year's Day - Delicatessen.

Happy iPod?

2007-12-12T13:03:00.001Z

My poor old iPod has been coughing and wheezing away what could be it's final weeks for a while now. Crashing a lot, loosing songs, skipping past songs which should be there and making funny noises. Last night I thought it had finally passed on when it started clicking loudly and the sad iPod screen appeared on it's little face. Neither rebooting or plugging it in could revive the poor little fellow so in a last ditch attempt I placed him in the freezer overnight.

This morning everything is different, well, some things. It's been happily playing songs to me all morning with no sad little face in sight. Who knows, maybe the cold managed to sort something in it's hard drive out, or maybe leaving it overnight was all that was needed.

I'm not sure how long it's going to last so I guess I'm now on the look out for a new mp3 player. The new iPods are tempting, but there might be something else out there which would be better.

Not as Good as Their Covers

2007-12-04T13:18:00.000Z

As part of the 30 Frankenstein challenge we had the pleasure of watching Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster. I have to admit that I bought this film based purely on the complete awesomeness of the cover. It really is a master piece of science fiction cover art. Unfortunately the film really didn't live up to how good the cover is. I wonder how many other films there are where the cover is better than the film?

Frank-a-thon

2007-11-26T12:48:00.000Z

The end of the year is coming up pretty soon and we were lagging a bit on our 30 Frankensteins Challenge so we decided to have a bit of a Frank-a-thon. We've been saving the original Universal films for towards the end so it made sense to crack them open for the marathon. The original plan was to watch all 5 in a row but we decided to just do 3 and leave the other 2 for another night.

First up where the original Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. I really like both of these films and think that they are both beautifully shot and directed. Next up was Son of Frankenstein which although still starring Karloff as the monster has a much different feel to it that the previus two. I suppose that in the years after the first film horror movies developed into a genre of their own and that is reflected in the style of Son of Frankenstein, the name fits in more ways that one. I wish that I had seen Son of Frankenstein before Young Frankenstein, it makes a lot more sense if you have seen it. Son of Frankenstein was another really enjoyable film with some great scenes and dialogue. Hopefully the final two Universal films will not disappoint either, although it'll be hard to live up to their predecessors.

Frankenstein and the Werewolf Reborn

2007-11-21T13:08:00.000Z

I didn't realise when I bought this one that Frankenstein and the Werewolf Reborn is actually two films; Frankenstein Reborn and The Werewolf Reborn. For some unknown reason the films have been rammed together with no title sequence between them and are pretending to be a single film. I'm guessing that they've been put together because they share a lot of things in common, the basis for the plot is basically the same (annoying spoilt American teenager is sent to live with her crazy Easter European Uncle) and they're both shit. I was a bit disappointed to find that they were two separate films as although I would have watched the Frankenstein one anyway, the 45 minutes I spend watching the other I can never get back.

Although being a fairly recent film, 1998, the Frankenstein segment featured the worst special effects (are they still "special" if they're shit?) out of all the Frankensteins which we've watched so far, and worst than the 1931 original. I don't think they had the budget to do the effects properly so they were added by computer afterwards, unfortunately they didn't seem to have any money for that either so they're absolutely terrible. Pretty much everything about the film was bad, the characters hollow and annoying, the acting poor, accents terrible, plot thin, pacing rubbish and it featured the shortest "it's alive" scene so far - must have been at least 30 seconds.

You can forgive a Frankenstein film for pretty much all of its flaws because quite often the good bits are really good and the bad bits so bad that they're good. Werewolfs however, just don't cut it. The second segment was worse than the first in pretty much every department (more annoying American girl, rubbish costumes and some terrible dialogue). When we realised that it was two films rammed together I had a small panic that the copy of Frankenstein Reborn we haven't watched yet was the same film, luckily it's not.

Overall I'd give "Frankenstein and the Werewolf Reborn" a measly score of 1/5. Don't bother watching this unless you're taking part in a challenge to watch lots of Frankenstein or Werewolf films, and even then only watch one or the other, but not both.

Ubuntu + iPod + last.fm

2007-11-20T13:05:00.000Z

Due to an impending network switch at work I'm no longer going to be able to listen to music streamed across our network or submit tracks to last.fm through our internet connection. I've been looking around at ways of keeping my last.fm account up to date with the tracks which I've been listening to on my iPod. To make matters a little more tricky I've also recently switched to using Ubuntu full time at home.

The program which I had used previously to sync my iPod with last.fm, Yamipod, does have a Linux verison, although recently it's been in a bit of a huff with my iPod and it means using another media player to do the last.fm stuff. I hadn't sorted out a media player under Ubuntu so ideally I was looking for something that could do everything. In reality there were 3 parts to sorting out my musical needs under Ubuntu; a decent media player which can update last.fm, getting my iPod connected and getting my iPod to sync to last.fm.

The media player: Under windows I'm a big fan of winamp, it's fairly stable and has a host of cool and useful features. After a bit of searching about I installed Amarok which although being a KDE app looked to be running fine under Gnome. I did have a few stability problems with it building my collection (via a samba share) and reading the ID3 tags but it seems to be ok now. It's fairly well featured and although it doesn't look as nice as winamp my collection looks complete, has all the tag information and is easy to search through. Most importantly in my quest to tie everything up it can submit tracks to last.fm.

The iPod: One of the cool things which I found out shortly after installing the new version of Ubuntu and switching to it full time was that when I plugged my iPod in it auto-mounted and a cool little iPod icon showed up on the desktop, well at least it did once. After the initial connection I never managed to get it to work again. I had a bit of a search around the web and everyone seemed to suggest that it should just work, although a few people seems to highlight firewire as being a bit tricky. In my current setup I was using the firewire cable at home and the USB cable at work, since I wasn't going to be plugging in my iPod at work any more I took the USB cable home to give it a try, this solved all the problems, the iPod connects and auto-mounts every time. Excellent.

The Sync: While I was searching around for a media player I had heard that Amarok handled iPods pretty well, including syncing them with last.fm. Although everything was working well I'm always a bit dubious where third party software and iPods meet, actually I'm pretty dubious where any software and iPods meet - iTunes caused me nothing but lock ups, blue screens and hassle under windows and I haven't had it installed for ages, Winamp was slightly better with the iPod but not 100% stable. Once my iPod was plugged in it showed up nicely within the 'portables' section of Amarok (even telling me that it only has a greyscale screen) and all my music was there. In the settings for the device there's a tick box to sync statistics with Amarok which I ticked. This was the moment of truth really, would all my tracks be submitted to last.fm?

Yes, everything worked, not perfectly, but it worked. Tracks which I had listened to at work on my iPod appeared in my last.fm profile. Things aren't quite right though as Amarok seemed to submit the tracks as if I had just listened to them and in alphabetical order. I assume that this is done to try and solve the spam protection problem on last.fm where if you try and sync old plays it things you're trying to fiddle your charts. It's not a perfect solution by I'm more interesting in getting my tracks on there so it can recommend me things rather than getting them there in the correct order. To be truthful I'm amazed that it all worked at all. I think the proof in the pudding will be to see if it can keep things up over the next week.

Amarok seems to be a pretty decent media player and adding more tracks onto my iPod worked flawlessly as well. I need to play around with it a bit more and work out exactly what it sends to last.fm but I'm pretty happy with it so far. If anyone else os looking for an Ubuntu + iPod + last.fm solution then I'd recommend they try Amarok as the middle man.

Crap Pub Food

2007-11-05T12:30:00.003Z

Pub food, on the whole, is usually pretty average. Sometimes it's amazing and incredibly good value for money, but more often it's complete and utter crap. Yesterday I suffered some food from so near the bottom of spectrum that it has compelled me to write about it.

Living quite close to McCowan's Brewhouse I go in there fairly often. The beer's usually excellent with a good choice and the food normally not bad. We headed in early yesterday afternoon for a quick hangover curing lunch/breakfast because there was nothing quick in the flat and neither of us could be bothered going to get anything, or cooking anything. I ordered the 'All Day Brunch', which I've had a few times before and is really just a fry up with some nice big sausages, Gwen ordered a burger. When the food came there was an immediately obvious lack of sausages. I went back up to the bar and asked, so the barmaid went off to source me some sausages. Shortly after two piping hot sausages arrived on plate, excellent, not as big as the sausages used to be, but there was still quite a plate full. I started tucking into my lunch and slowly things started to go wrong, well more wrong - let's have a run down:

Toast: It wasn't too bad, but could have been more toasty.

Eggs: Don't get me wrong, I like my eggs runny. Well, I like the yokes runny, the white not so much. The tops of the two fried eggs hadn't quite been done for long enough so the tops were still a bit on the glupy clear site. Let's hope they were lion stamped..

Bacon: Apparently it's possible to deep fry bacon so much that it turns into pork scratchings.

Beans: I'm not sure how long they'd cooked the beans for (a couple of days?).

Mushrooms: I don't even know what the hell they'd done to the mushrooms, a process of elimination lead me to identify them as mushrooms.

Our guess coming away from the pub was that the were missing a chef and one of the bar staff was having to fill in. I'm wondering if we should give them the benefit of the doubt and go back some other time (perhaps not have the brunch) and see if things are better. It was one of the worst plates of food I've been served in a long time.

Flesh for Frankenstein

2007-11-02T13:05:00.000Z

Terrible acting, atrocious accents and some really crap dialogue make up Flesh for Frankenstein, overall however, it's a not bad and fairly enjoyable film. It seems to be quite often billed as a shocking, horrifying, gory and downright sleazy film but apart from a few sex scenes (actually make that a lot of sex scenes - including Frankenstein having sex with his yet-to-revived female creation's gallbladder, "To know death Otto, you have to fuck life... in the gall bladder!") it's not that shocking. There's a few gory moments with people's heads getting chopped off, chests ripped open and other such things and I guess that compared to other films at the time it is more bloody.

We've been lagging quite badly on the 30 Frankensteins front of late but this was a good film to get back into the challenge with. Like some of the earlier Hammer Frankensteins you can forgive the bad acting and shoddy camera work for an entertaining twist on the classic Frankenstein story. We still have the original Universal Frankenstein films to watch but apart from those I don't have too many high hopes for some of the other films, still, it'll be fun finding out how bad they are.

Drinking and Driving

2007-10-29T12:47:00.000Z

Don't worry, I've not been drinking and driving. The weekend was dominated by some drinking related and driving related events. Starting out with the drinking on Saturday I headed down to Chris' for some brewing. Moving flats and general stuff has meant that we've not made a beer since May when we brewed up a beer for the CAMRA beer festival. The brewing went well and everything managed to pass without a hitch, well apart from adding the wrong hops into the boil. It was a pretty simple recipe so the difference in hops shouldn't ruin anything, just give us a slightly different beer.

On Sunday was the driving related event; Gwen's driving test. I'm pleased to say that she passed with no problems (and six minors) which is cool. I just need to sort out adding her onto the car insurance when it's up for renewal next month. We then decided to head out for a celebratory meal at Montpeliers, which was pretty tasty. I started off with a vietnamese chicked salad (sweet chilli and lime) and then duck as a main course. Gwen opted for a goats cheese starter and then the lamb, the lamb had a shit load of coriander in it but apart from that everything was tasty good. We both opted for the banoffee pie to finish up which was excellent.

Battles

2007-10-23T19:32:00.000Z

A bit late on the blogging front but last Thursday I went to see Battles at the Liquid Room. I've been a big fan of their album Mirrored for a while and love the way they build up riffs and rhythms. I wasn't sure what to expect from them live or if they'd be able to pull it off but I was totally blown away. Spending time getting everything right in the studio is one thing but to be able to then play it live between four people is pretty spectacular.

The doors opened pretty late (Mr Scruff was supposed to be playing a gig afterwards but it was moved at the last minute, I don't know if they decided to just take their time because of that) and the first band on was Dirty Projectors who were quite similar to Battles but maybe a little more indie and more vocal. Battles then started to get setup with the drums taking centre stage and a crash cymbal on a massive stand (apparently to make a 'flag for the band', and hitting it 'an event'). Kicking things off with 'Race:Out' it was clear that the gig was going to be something special. The crowd didn't seem disappointed with the set and neither was I.

Brussles

2007-10-18T12:02:00.000Z

The weekend was awesome, I flew across to Brussels on Friday morning to meet Gwen who was coming up from Venice. It was a pretty packed out weekend of general tourist capers and despite starting to come down with a mystery illness a good time was had by all, well, by all I mean both of us.

Highlights include:

The Grand Place and the Manneken Pis dressed up as the mayor, or someone.

Massive Steaks, Mussels and Chips for €10.

Lambic Beer in a nice little backstreet lambic cafe.

Our cheap as chips 5 start hotel.

The Atomium which has to be one of my favourite buildings in the world, there's loads of amazing views from all angles.

Mini-Europe: where else can you see The Eiffel Tower, Houses of Parliament, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the friggin' A Team all in one place!

The Parc du Cinquantenaire, with it's massive triple arch.

The European Parliament.

Art Nouveau Houses, even if the Victor Horta Museum wasn't open.

The Wee Man again, with no clothes, even if Gwen wouldn't let me buy a cork screw.

Tin Tin

More beer tasting.

I'm not sure how we managed to pack so much into the weekend but it was well worth it. The flights were quick and the little plane there and back was good fun, even if Belgian airport security don't like me and stole my keyring - apparently it could be used as a weapon, it's never been a problem on the hundreds of other flights it's been on, I could do a lot more damage with a duty free bottle of whisky. Hopefully I'll get a chance to go back and visit Belgium again soon and for longer.

Frankenstein Unbound

2007-10-01T18:37:00.000Z

The Frankenstein challenge hasn't been going very well recently, moving flat and life in general has been getting in the way. After getting home from the pub on Friday night/Saturday morning we turned on the TV to find Frankenstein Unbound on one of the channels. Never wanting to miss an opportunity we watched (most of) it. It was pretty bad to be honest, a Dr from the future had travelled back in time to unravel the Frankenstein myth and found not only Dr Frankenstein but Mary Shelley who was starting to write the book. There were a lot of crap sci-fi moments and a talking electric car. Hopefully we can pick things up a little again, and hopefully the remaining films aren't that bad. We've been saving the original Universal ones till later so it's not all bad.

Weekends

2007-09-03T11:57:00.000Z

Had a couple of fairly busy but good weekends. A couple of weekends ago was the Amplifico Highland Safari, which saw us heading up to Glenelg, Kyleakin (Skye) and Altandhu (near Ullapool-ish) for a series of gigs. We ended up being joined by a couple of Belgians who had come over for the gigs but their lifts had fallen through. There's some photos of the weekend up on my flickr account.

Last weekend was more Edinburgh based with some after work pubbage on Friday, traipsing round the shops and then going out for dinner for my Dad's birthday on Saturday. Just after we had finished eating the restaurant was plunged into darkness with a power cut. It was a bit weird sitting in the dark in the restaurant with some people still eating and the staff wondering if the lights would come back on. Yesterday we went out and did some climbing at Ratho before heading through to Glasgow to see High on Fire at Nice n' Sleazy's, which was a pretty good gig.

Half Way Through Frankensteins

2007-08-16T20:16:00.000Z

We've been lagging a bit since our good start in the 30 Frankensteins film challenge. On Tuesday we hit the half way point after watching the made for TV Frankenstein (what an original title). I was expecting it to be pretty crap despite the fairly decent cast but it was actually pretty good. It's an update to the classic Frankenstein tale set in the present. Frankenstein is still alive 200 years on, although is now using the alias Helios, and is back at it again creating "monsters". It's implied that he's kept himself alive by using his techniques on himself, which actually follows on pretty well from the first couple of Hammer films when Frankenstein gets a complete body transplant and moves off to London using a different name. The books which the film was based on/started out as/whatever happened by Dean Koontz are supposed to be even better than the film and explores things in more depth. I think I'll need to get whole of them and see what they're like. I've read a few of Koontz's sci-fi stuff and I think it was fairly decent.

TV Licencing Sucks

2007-07-31T12:18:00.000Z

Well, now that we've moved into the new flat and out of the old one the long drawn out process of sorting out changes of address and things in continuing. So far I've had two fuck ups, one by my credit card protection company who don't seem to employ people who can listen on the phone and didn't enter my new address into the system correctly, and more surprisingly the DVLA who sent me a new driving licence with the wrong address. They seem to have completely ignored what I wrote on the form and made up an address which doesn't exist, or could represent a flat in every block on the street. The DVLA also have the nerve to say that they always use the 'Royal Mail preferred format' for addresses, apparently the Royal Mail prefer giving their posties a hard time by making up addresses, or something. Even if they did use the Royal Mail's addresses properly I've had problems with their addresses in old flats in the past.

What's also been annoying me is that now we've moved and it's the end of the month I need to sort out the TV licence. That's cool, it's all online now, they don't even let you go to the post office any more. I'll just setup a direct debit for monthly payments and I won't need to worry about it. So, £135.50 divided by 12 months works out as £11.29 (or there abouts, the first payment would need to be slightly bigger - why don't they pick a value for the year that's divisible by 12?). Of course 12 monthly payments would be too simple, instead the TV Licensing people what you to pay double for the first six months. Why? Is there really any need to have half your money up front, or is it just another way of them scamming more money off everyone's six months and getting the interest. It's totally idiotic, Virgin Media don't make me pay 6 months in advance, Scottish Power don't make me pay six months in advance and my work doesn't pay me six months in advance, why should the TV Licence be any different?

By wait, there's another option. I could pay it in quarterly payments of £35.14 and 3 x £35.12 (again if they made it a value divisible by 12 it'd also be divisible by 4), cool, but isn't the TV Licence only £135.50? 3 x £25.12 + £35.14 = £140.50, what, so I pay monthly they demand 6 months payment up front and if I pay quarterly they charge me an extra £5! Surely the less payments there are the less work they need to do to get the money?? They should be giving me a £5 discount if anything. The TV Licence payment system is just a big fucking scam. I think that I might just pay it upfront using a credit card and pay it off to my bank over the next 12 months, they'll happily do it interest free as well.

I don't think I'd mind so much about them ripping off customers if the BBC's services weren't getting progressively worse. It seems that over the past couple of the years the quality of programming is going down hill, and over the past couple of months the news seems to be going the same way. I'm not sure if it's some sort of reaction to the growing nationalist sentiment in Scotland but the BBC's news seems to be becoming more and more focused on the south of England and less on Britain as a whole. Sometimes it has got to the point were it seems like they are deliberately discriminating against covering Scottish news stories. I didn't vote for the SNP but I am a licence payer, why should I be dragged into the BBC's pretty huff with the new Scottish government, all they are doing is alienating Scotland from the rest of Britain more and more and giving independence a boost, which maybe if that's the general feeling in southern England might not be such a bad thing. Although having been talking to some friends I have in the north of England it isn't just just Scots who are getting more and more annoyed it's everyone who doesn't live in the south of England. The recent news stories about the flooding down there are a good example, by watching the news you would think that the whole of the UK was under water, when in fact it was only a very small part of the country.

Things might not be so bad if it was just the programming quality and the news. But it now seems that despite paying all of my TV Licence I can't access all the content unless I go out and by some crappy software from a third party (Microsoft). Even then once I've forked out money so some other corporation the content which I would get from iPlayer is crippled almost to the point where there's no point downloading it anyway, I can't watch it on my TV once I've downloaded it and I can't download old programs which I might have missed. All this for things which as a Licence payer I've already paid for. It would be like the government saying that I have to have my wages paid into an account with 'Bank X', by law, and paying them a hefty fee to bank with them, and then also saying that if I don't spend my pay that month then they'll take it away, I can't save things up, I can't wait and spend a lot of money at once and I can't access 'old' money from a previous month's pay. It's totally ridiculous. It's not just about not being able to use iPlayer on Linux, of Mac OS, or any other operating system. It's about the BBC instead of creating a platform neutrual, open source DRM free solution that would allow everyone to access the content however they want to, teaming up with a massive corporation and paying them a shit load of our money without our consent and telling everyone else to go fuck themselves.

Well done BBC.

Keys!

2007-07-19T11:54:00.000Z

Well it turned out that the seller's solicitors managed to "find" a private inspection report and an electrical certificate for the flat. That meant that we managed to conclude the missives and settle on Tuesday. We've now finally got the keys to the flat. First impressions are that the kitchen is bigger than I remember and the livingroom still feels huge. Things might change a bit once all our crap has been moved in though.

We now have one week to to do some painting, buy furniture (and get it delivered), get a carpet for the bedroom and move all our stuff in. Something tells me that we're not going to get it all done in a week so I guess we'll be living out of boxes and things for a bit.

The past couple of evenings have been spent cleaning walls in preparation for painting and general tidying up (removing all the door closers for a start). There were a couple of things left in the flat which will promptly be getting chucked in the bin.

No Keys

2007-07-13T12:10:00.001Z

Well, today was meant to be the day when we picked up the keys to our new flat. Unfortunately the seller's decided to go with some incompetent solicitors who decided that despite being asked more than a month ago that they couldn't be bothered getting the council to inspect alterations that were made to the property and get the paperwork in order. This means that they didn't put an application to get a report done until yesterday, which could take 2-3 weeks. Great.

I really don't understand why this wasn't sorted out months ago. Even before our solicitors informed them a month ago they should have known as soon as the flat was on the market that they would need to get the report done before they could sell it.

At the moment there's not really any options open to us. We could attempt to negotiate keeping some money back until the report is done, but because we don't know what the report is going to say we could be leaving ourselves wide open to getting screwed. Things aren't getting desperate quite yet so we really just need to wait and hope that the council can get the inspection done quickly.

Needless to say I'm a bit pissed off. I hope that the sellers need their money and are even more pissed off with their shitty solicitors. Buying property is fun!

2007-07-06T09:32:00.000Z

I live walking to work in the rain. With no jacket. Getting soaked through with a large idiotic grin on your face. The people walking the other way look at you funny. It's like they think you're mentally unhinged. Today is a good day.

Back in the Country

2007-07-04T15:59:00.000Z

Arrived back in the UK yesterday after a long and much needed break in Chamonix. The holiday mainly consisted of lots of spectacular walks and climbs around the Chamonix valley. I also completed my first Alpine peak by climbing Mont Blanc du Tacul which was excellent. Now that we're back it should only be a week and a half until we get the keys to our new flat. Hopefully everything has been ticking along in our absence and everything is running fine. I suspect most of the next two weeks will be getting everything sorted so that we can move.