Got around to fixing the blog finally. Still have some maintenance to do before I can start adding new content. It’s been over five years since the last post here and I shall probably be taking this in a new direction when I do resume.
December 3, 2024
March 15, 2019
Quiet for a while…
But I’ll be posting some more soon.
August 17, 2017
New weather station
Finally found a use for the masonry bits I bought in 2010 – drilling a hole to hang the outside sensor outside the window.
New Boots
New boots (again). This time I’ll try and remember to keep track of when I started wearing them and how long they last as although I buy a few different kinds I don’t know which last longest.
December 27, 2016
November 29, 2016
Bean to Cup
Bought a new bean to cup coffee machine for Xmas and decided to put it to use rather than leave it boxed for a month. The notion was that the running costs would be considerably less than using Tassimo pods. Some experimentation will be required to get a cup of coffee the way we want it.
November 21, 2016
Kindle
I’ve been reading ebooks for many years now, and the ratio of ebooks to printed has been shifting in favour of ebooks until recently I’ve only been buying graphic novels in print form. So it made sense to finally get an actual reader to use apart from the computer screen and Mrs Wife kindly bought me a Kindle for my recent birthday. I added a case for it with a gift voucher I had.
August 16, 2016
New Hard Drives
Recently acquired a WD external USB3 8TB MyBook hard drive and two new Transcend 2.5” 1TB drives. I retired three 5+ year old 1TB drives that had been used for Time Machine backups as they were failing, repartitioned my 3TB WD Firewire drive to make a Time Machine partition and spent a couple of days copying and deleting files around the remaining drives and the new drives. I use the two Transcend drives as Time Machine backups with one plugged in and one off-site. A partition on the 3GB drive is a permanent Time Machine backup. Time Machine automatically rotates backups between the drives so I just have to remember to swap Transcend A and Transcend B offsite/onsite often enough to have a fairly up to date offsite backup of my boot drive.
Protective film still on.
Power supply and data cable.
2.5” rugged drives and transport case.
July 14, 2016
Prime Day
Prime day (July 12) came and went and I got an Amazon Fire TV Stick for £19.95. It shipped a day late with a book I had ordered earlier and arrived 14th. I already had a discounted Prime membership I got earlier so after hooking it up I am all ready to watch shows like Mr Robot, Preacher, Braindead & American Gothic.
SKY HD on HDMI 1, Fire on HDMI 3 and Blu-Ray player on HDMI 4. Just one HDMI input left free!
The biggest problem I had setting it up was typing my WiFi password incorrectly a few times due to being unable to read my own scribbles. There were no issues working with the YAMAHA receiver as expected. Apparently the Fire Stick doesn’t work properly with some makes/models of home theatre equipment but there is no official compatibility list.
April 24, 2016
Game of Thrones Season Six
Just a few hours until the first episode of season 6 of Game of Thrones. Just over a week since I finished rewatching season five on Blu-Ray at the rate of two episodes on Fridays. Rewatching S5 on Blu-Ray I realised that it was better paced and plotted than I had realised on originally watching the broadcast. Another show that benefits from binge-watching. Now that the show is (almost) completely past the published books (although I’m sure the show-runners are well-acquainted with the unpublished material) it’s hard to predict what might be in the first episode (beyond the unavoidable spoilers in trailers and such).
It seems the question of whether Jon Snow lives again might not be answered in the first episode either way, but if so it will need to be addressed by the second episode as he is too important a character to be in limbo for much of the season.
Which of the many characters appear in the first episode and which are left to be visited in episode two is also hard to guess. Now that many of the characters are beginning to meet up in larger groupings it is possible that all the important locales could be visited in a single episode. Except that new characters, and previous characters we haven’t seen for a while, are being (re)introduced so the scattering continues.
Since it has been publicised that the show hits the ground running this season rather than spending an episode or two re-establishing things it is also possible that fairly major plot developments and incidents could happen as early as episode one or two rather than further in to the season.