Blind foal

Aww, cute.

A few things

A busy and annoying day in work as it was my helpdesk day and so many calls came in I didn't get anything done that I wanted to before going to . The stress caused the consumption of chocolate, which of course led to guilt.

The road I normally take home over the hills was closed, so I had to follow a diversion. Perversely I deliberately went the wrong way and got lost, and for a while I genuinely didn't know where I was. Fortunately I finally caught a glimpse of the nearby wind farm and headed for it, and found myself back on familiar roads. I took a video of the wind farm, as I find the turbines fascinating to watch, and it's easy to forget just how damn big they are when you're looking at them from a couple of miles away. There was one which had it's blades turned so they weren't catching the wind.



This is an overview of one end of the wind farm.



This is the interesting shadow that the spinning turbine casts.

I met Squish the kitten again at lunchtime in her new home. She (not certain yet) is perking up a lot and is insanely cute as you can see! If you stroke her, she purrs like a little engine, but isn't quite at the playful stage yet. She does like to explore though, and will climb up on you and curl up if she can.


Here's a doodle that came about while I was waiting for PCs to image and Windows updates to install.

It works!

I just had another go at the Monstrosity and managed to get it sounding better. The bass and guitar strings are now much more in tune and it now makes some interesting sounds.

Given it's demented combination of parts hacked together in most un-luthier like ways, it sounds quite decent. The bass strings sound OK given that they're 10" shorter than they should be and the doubled guitar strings gives that nice chorus effect that I liked so much on the mandolin. I think if I could get a better pickup and some shielding in there to get rid of the buzz, it would sound much better.

WALL-E

Went to see WALL-E with Will and Vicky. It is typical Pixar, excellent animation and a good story. I really enjoyed it, not least because I've always been interested in robots.

Birthday things

Rob's birthday today, which I forgot as usual. Just texted him now.

Bizarrely I got a birthday card and a collection in work today for my 30th, which was a real surprise, being 2.5 months late. But it was certainly a nice surprise.

Squish the kitten was taken to the vet which showed that it is in good health but undernourished. Unfortunately it is still too small to tell what gender it is. It needs a lot of cuddling and playing to get it used to human contact, and lots of feeding up. Apparently it is already a lot happier than it was, which is great.

Orange Monstrosity

Nearly done. The pickup isn't mounted right yet so it's too low, and the damn thing still somehow is out of tune with itself. Not sure what's causing that but hopefully it's a setup issue which I can sort easily enough.

The pickguard is from an old bass I stripped for parts many years ago. It's actually an eyewatering shade of luminous orange which doesn't quite come across in the photo. I had a thing back then for luminous paint as can be seen by my original bass, which had a similar treatment.

That reminds me, here is a fun Flash game called Pandemic II where the objective is to create a virus and wipe out the human race. It's actually quite good.

Things

Not much today except to report that the kitten is doing fine and has been named Squish (!). Put some strings and other bits on the Monstrosity and it seems to work other than somehow being out of tune with itself, which is proving annoying as I can't figure out why.

Big update

Friday wasn't a bad day in work, and the evening was spent round at Andy's with Rob, Em, Will and Vicky. Rob and Andy made some rather tasty and spicy buffalo wings and there was plenty of BoomBlox action going on. It was a really good evening.

Yesterday was an eventful day. First it was an early start to meet up with my Dad and his wife and some of her family from Norway who I haven't seen for a very long time. It started out with the traditional Saturday coffee and scones, followed by the also traditional fish and chips for lunch, which was good. The afternoon was spent playing with iPod touch applications, laptops and looking at photos from a Norwegian zoo, which were really cool.

After that, I went home briefly to drop off the laptop, before continuing on to meet up with some people I used to work with for the usual Wii gaming and Chinese food evening. However, on the way, we saw something on the road. It turned out to be three tiny kittens. Two ran away from us while one went across the road and nearly got run over. We pulled over and managed to grab one of them but couldn't see either of the other two. A guy pulled over to help but the other two were totally out of sight.

The one we rescued clearly hadn't been handled before as it spat at me as I picked it up but it was far too small and scrawny to put up any struggle, just bones and fluff. The poor thing seemed rather shellshocked as we continued the journey. There was some debate about what to do with it but Amy and Huw decided they would keep it as they had thought about a cat before.
The evening proceeded as normal with Guitar Hero and Mario Kart aplenty and lots of food, but this time everyone was distracted because we were all keeping an eye on the kitten. He was quite subdued but he did a bit of exploring and got stuck under a radiator. He seemed happier when he could curl up on people though.

Today has pretty much been a lazy day of watching DVDs. I did however put some doubled up guitar strings and an old bass string on the Monstrosity and they made enough of an interesting sound for me to hack a pickup into it. It still needs a proper nut and the bass strings, and the pickup isn't the right size, but so it far it seems to work OK.

Malignant Narcissism.

Strikes and an experiment

The last couple of days in work have been slightly odd, due to the strikes. For various reasons I didn't strike, so it was a nice couple of peaceful days. There were still a few people in though.

Today was one of those disappointing Thursdays that keeps feeling like it's Friday.

The picture above is an experiment in progress. It is a left handed Telecaster style neck mated to a Squier Precision Bass body which I never did anything with before because it is made of plywood. I've spent the last hour or so making the neck accept the different machine head arrangement. The reason they look a bit weird and cockeyed is because they were the only spare ones I had so they didn't fit properly. It's a mess to be honest. The neck and body didn't really want to fit together, and there are two bridges because the original Squier one seems to have been screwed in by Superman.

I need some more parts and some crappy strings to test it with and then I can see if the idea is going work or if it'll be a monumental failure.

Spamming yourself

Today was my Unix day which was good fun. While attempting to debug a system monitoring script, I managed to spam myself with 95 e-mails. Good fun.

Had a look at the car after work. It has definitely had replacement panels but the chassis to my eye looks fine. The suspension has been looked at by two people and the general consensus is that there is nothing obvious that would cause it to sag in that corner. So it looks like a new spring would be a good idea. Citroen sell them for £35 each but recommend that they are installed in pairs. This combined with about an hour's labour to install each spring means it'll be about £130 or so to sort it. Bah.

By far the best application for the iPhone/iPod touch is the Remote application. This connects to your desktop running iTunes and allows you to control it over wi-fi. It looks a lot like the iPod internal player but you can see all the music on the PC. This is a really handy little program and saves having to connect to the machine using RDP all the time (it's headless).

TVR Cerbera

Quite by chance I came across this video of Jeremy Clarkson testing the then new TVR Cerbera 4.2. I once had a ride in the 4.5 litre version of one of these which was the same updated version as the picture above, except it was black.

At the time I was driving my little 900cc Fiat Cinquecento (a great little car) and I'd never experienced a really fast car. 0-60mph in four seconds comes as a real shock when you're used to a car that would take five times that time to reach that speed. The TVR was a violent, brutal, snorting vulgar beast of a car that roared and snarled. There was no traction control, no ABS, nothing. Within an instant, it would change from a grumbling muttering hulk to a screaming demon, the exhausts bellowing in rage and the tyres pouring smoke into the air. The brakes were also ridiculous, it stopped just as quickly as it accelerated.

Just look at it. It's hugely long and incredibly low. The body is curvy and swoopy in interesting ways. It has gigantic doors that open magically with a touch of the mirrors. The interior looks like the Tardis from the new Doctor Who series, and there's even two rear seats for your dwarfish friends to ride in.

It remains one of my favourite cars that I'll never own. Ever since that eye-opening ride, I've always had a soft spot for the Cerbera.

You two careful, he is a big

Yesterday was going quietly until I had a fit of energy and emptied out the not-quite-attic. It had 16 years of crap up there, with loads of rayburn dust, gunk from the cooker and mouse droppings. It took a while to take down all the crap and burn what could be burnt and prepare the rest for throwing away. Pretty much the only thing that didn't get binned was a pull-along tortoise, which I got for my first birthday. He was cleaned up and put in a safe place.

I'd forgotten about the sheer hilarity of the Backstroke of the West. It's just as good as Zero Wing.

Apps, costumes and power cut

Found that Apple had sorted out the iTunes store this morning and updated the Touch and tried a few applications. It's great at last to have something different to do on it. There are quite a few free apps to try. It's interesting to see the things people are doing with the touch screen and motion sensors.

I also had a play in a sandbox in Second Life. Sandboxes are areas where you can go and use the creation tools to make things in peace and quiet. I made a little house and a cake and was having fun until someone came along and asked if I wanted to make love to a horse.

After that, went into Rhyl with Andy, Rob and Em to try to find things for our costumes for Ed's upcoming BBQ. We found quite a few things but it's top secret at the moment so I'm not going to say anything. Picked up Midway Arcade Treasures with Rob for Rampart but infuriatingly it won't run on the 360. Also got Pyschonauts on Rob's recommendation but I didn't get a chance to try that on the 360 due to a power cut. The power is back on now.

This is why there is an ironic photo of my computer lit up by candle light. I also had a fiddle with the Inspiron's alternate hard drive which is running the sixth attempt to install Mac OS X. This time I got audio working but it still doesn't report battery times, still no wireless and it will only run one core of the CPU.

Apple is broken

Now it's telling me that the 1.1.4 firmware is the current version and if you try to find it via the website, the store is still unavailable.

Bah.

I have an urge to dig out the unicycle and pump the tyre up. Why, I don't know.

Boo Apple

The App Store is available on the iTunes store, at last. I have a look and there's loads of interesting free apps, so I download a few. I plug the iPod touch in and of course it says that it needs a new firmware update (2.0). Fair enough, so I click the update button. It then tells me that the firmware update is available for PURCHASE from the iTunes store, before telling me the store is unavailable.

So once again I have to PAY for a firmware update? How shit is that? I'll do it, if only to get the Remote application, which allows you to remote control iTunes on a PC from the touch or an iPhone.

But boo to Apple.

Frog kicking

I normally play badminton on Thursday nights but the evening was so nice that I decided to take the dog for a walk instead. While walking along I saw a piece of wood on the ground and idly gave it a kick. Except that I realised too late it was a large frog and it bounced helplessly along the road. But fortunately it seemed to be OK as it hopped away into the grass.

Pictures and a Megane

Work was meh. Went round to see Andy's new car today, which was good. It's a Renault Megane with the big bottom, but it's a really nice car. I had a quick drive and it feels really solid and pleasant to drive. The colour is nice and is coincidentally exactly the same as the Partsocaster. We took a trip up to the Caerwys McDonalds, which is the first time I've been to one in well over a year.

Below are two pictures of the Partsocaster and the Inspiron as I managed to coax my camera into life using the 360 controller rechargable batteries.

You can see the space where a neck pickup would go. I would like to put one in but I'd like to get a hot rails type one like the bridge. However they don't seem to be made for the standard size Telecaster hole and the Strat ones are too big so it would require some modification, especially if the hole in the body isn't big enough. I suppose if you made a big enough hole you could put a full size humbucker in it but that would definitely need a lot of modification. One possibility is a Fender Lace Sensor I just found on Ebay. I was able to play a passable rendition of Enter Sandman on it earlier, which was fun.

The Behemoth in all it's glory. Nothing interesting here except possibly the German keyboard layout. If I couldn't touch type that could be quite a pain. I put a spare hard drive in on Monday and succeeded in installing an alternate operating system from a certain fruit named manufacturer. It actually ran quite well other then only using a single core, and not having wireless, sound or power management. Definitely a work in progress so back to Vista for the time being.

A Mac laptop was tempting when I was looking around, but the cheapest Intel ones you can get these days is a first generation MacBook for £500, perhaps a little less, which is quite honestly ridiculous when a brand new one is £700. This would get you a 1.83ghz Core Duo, 1gb RAM and a 13" screen with integrated graphics. To get the MacBook Pro equivalent of the 9400 with the 17" screen and a proper graphics card would be £800+ easily for a first generation one.

If you can afford a new Mac it's nice that they hold their value so well, but it's real pain if you're after a second hand one.

The last of my DS games went today, so both the DS and PSP are both gone. Now the deed is done, I do miss the DS. I think I'll pick up a Phat one at some point. I don't really miss the PSP, it was a nice machine but it always seemed slightly smug and supercilious compared to the friendly cheerful DS. Ah well, they've both gone to homes where they'll be used instead of sitting there gathering dust. Odd how your interests change though.

Chinook in action

Chinooks are impressive machines with their interlocking rotor blades. Here's one airlifting another broken down helicopter in Snowdonia.

Serial ATA and goodbye to the DS...

Serial ATA has got to be the best invention of recent times. No huge flat ribbon cables blocking airflow, no stupid connectors with 40 pins just waiting to be bent, no more idiotic master/slave conflicts. The new connectors are simple, effective and common between laptops and desktops. Also it's faster and more reliable. I'm a bit behind the times I have to admit, as the Inspiron is the first machine I've had with it.

In other news, the DS went with five games today. I feel like I should be more sentimental to see it go. If it had been the original Phat DS, I might be. The old DS always felt more friendly somehow. The DS Lite, though beautiful, just didn't have the same appeal for some reason.

The only thing that made me a bit sad was deleting my town (Sayatnim) from Animal Crossing last night. It was a strange game and I enjoyed it for quite a while before it got boring. Tom Nook can fuck right off thought, the conniving moneygrubbing little bastard. When you paid off your mortgage, he'd (unasked) expand your house and charge you another few hundred thousand bells. I devastated the place by hacking down nearly all the native apple trees, as apples weren't worth anything, and planting a vast orchard of pear trees, seeded from Rob's village. Every three days I would go round, picking all the pears and selling them for bells to pay off the mortgage. If only I was that entrepreneurial in real life.

Google is my brain. If I think I spelt a word wrong, I Google it. If I want directions, I look on Google Maps. If I want to know about a place, I Google it. If I want to write about something, I do it on Google Blogger.

I find this worrying.

Fun fun fun

Went over to my Dad's today, with the Behemoth. They've just got a new laptop, which is a Toshiba something. It's got the same 1440x900 resolution 17" display as mine except it's a glossy screen so it was interesting to compare the two. I don't like glossy screens. They do make colours look vivid but the reflections they pick up drive me insane. It's the one thing I dislike about the MacBook.

We went out for their usual coffee and scones in Deganwy before meeting up with one of their friends who sells houses on a new development. She's just got engaged to a property developer who turned up in a Mercedes S-class and regaled us with tales of his friend's £120000 6-litre Bentley which accelerates to 130mph in the length of a slip road. I'm glad the AX wasn't anywhere around. It's a whole different world. Mind you when I took at closer look at his S-class, the 17" front tyres illegally had no tread on the edges and it was only the 320 CDI diesel model. The S-class is a lovely car though, I once had the opportunity to drive a previous generation S500 and it was truly sensational. The 5 litre V8 gave it some serious poke, and it was really pretty quick for something so large.

After that I spent some time reconfiguring their wireless network for maximum security, and sorted out the Vista desktop on the Toshiba, which had gone very strange. Then went on an unsuccessful hunt for a laptop case that would fit the Behemoth. The only ones I could find were stupidly expensive so gave up on that one.

While in Staples, I saw the absolute most hideous laptop I have ever seen, even worse than the pink resprayed Dells that people try to sell on Ebay. It was a HP of some sort. The top half with the (glossy) screen was metallic maroon, and the bottom half and keyboard were some sort of chrome. It had lots of glowing touch controls and it was just unspeakably tacky and awful. It was the laptop equivalent of those enormous stereos that were so popular a few years ago with giant mutated speakers that had flashy labels and things but sounded cack. I'd much rather have something understated, which is one reason why I like the Behemoth. Other than it's tremendous bulk, the silver and white case is reasonably understated and the media controls at the front only light up when you press them. It seems to have been inspired by the Apple laptops, which can't be a bad thing.

Also picked up a bottle of that stuff you chuck into your diesel tank that is supposed to clean out the injectors and the fuel system, making it run better. I have no idea if they really work but it was cheap so why not?

.kkrieger

I was reading up about procedural generation after being made aware of it by Spore and I came across this little game called .kkrieger made by .theprodukkt. It's a short FPS but the whole thing runs from a 96kb file. OK so it's not very long and the textures repeat a lot but come on, the file could actually fit into the memory of an Amstrad CPC. Interesting stuff.

Not much to report

Not done much over the last couple of days. It's been quite quiet really. The Behemoth is still running well without any trouble so far. Vista is proving quite interesting and I have to admit the Aero looks are growing on me. Mac OS X will run on this machine though, so I might get a cheap SATA drive to try it out on (120gb for £30!).

I'm currently at 29% battery after running it for a couple of hours with the screen on full brightness and the wi-fi being absolutely hammered by a test iSCSI connection to the FreeNAS box. This pretends that a file on a remote machine is an actual physical SCSI hard drive. I only tried it out because Vista includes an iSCSI Initiator which I hadn't come across before. You can treat the connected file like a real hard drive, format it, defrag it, etc, which is interesting. It's a bit slow because the FreeNAS box is a crappy old Compaq iPaq desktop PC, with a 160gb hard drive bunged in it and the wi-fi doesn't help. iSCSI is meant for enterprise level systems with gigabit network cards. Still, it might come in useful for backups or something. Vista has a function to back up the entire system to an image, but it is quite picky about what you can back up to, so an iSCSI target might work.

A quick glance at Ebay showed there were plenty of spare parts for the 9400, screens, shells, motherboads, keyboard, etc and several complete machines in various states of repair. So at least I know parts are readily available. The service manual is also on Dell's website so I know how it comes apart now. There's also some XPS M170s on there, which was another model I considered as it's exactly the same as the 9400, but with black case parts, more powerful graphics cards and LEDs that emit coloured light of your choosing out of the speaker grills and air vents (yes, really).

Someone e-mailed me about the DS in work but didn't follow it up. I sold the PSP to my colleague yesterday, and he's happy with it. He has a PS3 so can do the Remote Play stuff, and there's also an RPG coming out on it he wants to play. He's now got one of every current console out there - 360, PS3, Wii, DS and PSP. Scary.

The Partsocaster now sounds infinitely better after I discovered that I'd wired the pickup totally and utterly wrong. It now sounds really good and actually sounds much fatter than I expected, probably down to the humbucking pickup. I might look into adding the second pickup at some point, if only to fill up the hole by the neck.

Presenting the Behemoth

OK, so I bought a new laptop, like I said I was going to. It is being financed by the sale of my PSP and DS. I already nearly have sold both, so that's fine.

The laptop I chose was a Dell Inspiron 9400. Back at my last place I was very critical of Dell, as the old Latitude CPi and other models fell apart worryingly often. When we switched to Dell at the council, I was very dismayed. But fortunately the newer laptops are much improved and my desktop Precision workstation at home has been rock solid. The other good thing about Dell is that because they are fairly popular, the machines and spares parts are readily available on places like Ebay. This was just one of many Dells on there, and I had quite a choice.

I had already narrowed it down to the Inspiron 6400 or 9400, as they are pretty much the same other than the screen size. They were quite a popular model a couple of years ago so spares wouldn't be a problem. They are also quite upgradable, it's possible to swap out the Core Duo for a Core 2 Duo, the graphics card can be swapped out and even the screen can be changed.

The 9400 I got has a 2ghz Core Duo, 2gb RAM, a 120gb hard drive, a 17" 1440x900 display and the main reason I wanted a new laptop, a Nvidia Geforce Go 7900 GS with 256mb dedicated memory. It's a refurb from a place on Ebay. I didn't actually expect an operating system to be installed and while there is no COA on it, it's got a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate installed. Apparently it is fully activated but I need to check that. It also has a German keyboard, which is interesting. Z and Y are the wrong way round, there are various characters on the keyboard and the Ctrl keys are marked Strg. There was a very similar one with a 1920x1200 display but while that might be nice on a 24" screen, it might be pushing it ona 17".

So far it seems nice, although 'laptop' is rather a kind word for the hulking beast. It's so big that there is even room in the case for a mini subwoofer. I tried to take a picture but my main camera had no batteries and my phone took a hideous blurry picture. So I attached a generic picture off the Internet. I've got one of those beanbag tables that Em gave me a while back and the 9400 is a perfect fit. It makes it possible to use on your lap without blocking the many air vents. The battery works but it remains to be seen how well it lasts.

In other news, the pickup finally arrived and I've mounted it into the Partsocaster. I managed to solder it up OK and it works fine. The switch and controls do what they should and it doesn't make any bad sounds. It needs a good setup and some tweaks, but on the whole it works and makes a nice sound, especially distorted.