Recently a whole fleet of little roadworks signs have descended on us round here, each giving the date of impending roadworks and ‘possible delays’. I looked at them at first and sighed, resigned to the fact I’d end up sitting in traffic for the forseable future. I saw plenty of people ranting about it on Facebook and Twitter alike.

But something dawned on me. This year the council has done it differently. As a rule, they’d be doing all this work around September time. Just as all the schools go back. However, they seem a little bit ahead of themselves this year and are doing it all as the schools finish. So basically when the traffic is lighter – i.e. they’re doing exactly what people have been saying they should have been doing for years.

So far the disruption to me has been quite minimal. My drive home was slowed down a little because they’d taken off the top surface so I had to slow down to get over that. I think one of the back roads it due to be completely closed for a day or two next week – but that doesn’t matter because I have the choice of two alternate routes anyway; had the schools still been open it’d only be one route.

The amount of signage has been quite something too – in so much, I’ve seen approximately eight signs on one junction warning of the impending works. That’s something that they never really used to bother with. You’d maybe get a little sign strapped to a lamp post, but nothing major. This time they’ve gone all out with proper road-side signs, which are clear, and legible when whizzing by.

So I’d just like to say well done, Council. You got it right for once!

A really great little series of animations. Wonderful stuff!

Possibly one of the coolest instruments in a long time!

In my case, I often do ISDN Q.931 debugs to find out what’s going on on my voice gateways. I’ve gotten used to it now, but typing ‘undebug all’ whilst a ton of information whizzes by is less fun than it sounds.

Today, I found this useful command:

“logging synchronous”

If you enable that on your vtys or con (or aux) ports, it basically causes IOS to dump the debug still, but it’ll do it on all other lines EXCEPT the one you’re typing on, leaving it alone. I imagine it could cause some slowdowns as it has to draw your command in the same place, whilst interleaving other junk, so it could potentially cause problems on a direct console, but if you remotely telnet (I really should enable SSH one day), it’ll be a lot easier to see what’s going on.

Here’s the gist of what you need to do:

  Router(config)#line con 0
  Router(config-line)#logging synchronous
  Router(config-line)#line vty 0 4
  Router(config-line)#logging synchronous

Then wr mem as usual.

Easy!

Anyway, this is what I made this weekend:

• 50g Butter
• 40g White Chocolate Buttons
• 100g Raisins
• 100g Marshmallows (either small, or large ones cut down smaller – random sizes are more fun)
• 200g digestive biscuits
• 460g Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate

1. Melt three quarters of the chocolate with the butter. Save the remaining chocolate until the end (don’t melt it yet). Be careful not to cook the chocolate.
2. Break the biscuits up into smaller pieces, and mix with the white chocolate buttons, raisins and marshmallows.
3. Pour the chocolate onto the dry ingredients, and mix it all until evenly coated.
4. Line a shallow tin with greaseproof paper, and place the mixture into it. Spread it out evenly
5. Melt the remaining chocolate and pour it on top of the main mixture
6. Set in a refrigerator for two to three hours
7. Cut into slices/squares/consume as one piece

That made a pretty nice mix. I think you could put in more fruit, and definitely more buttons. You could probably also get away without having the butter, but it helps to thin the chocolate a bit and make it spread and stick better.

The end result looks vaguely like this:

“Om nom nom” are the words you’re thinking of, I believe.

I might take another whack at it with more fruit. Anyway, enjoy!

I decided today to see if my little HP 2133 netbook could take it. The HP has no optical drive, and I have no external USB drives. I had a IDE-USB converter thingy I’d used with an IDE CD drive in the past, but I’d blown the PSU on it. I needed another solution.

I’ve installed Linux from USB drives in the past, and I knew it was possible to install Windows onto HP Proliant servers using Smartstart and a USB drive. I was vaguely aware any PC could do it, you just needed a method.

A quick google turned up this blog entry:

HOWTO: Install Windows Vista from a high speed USB 2.0 Flash Drive – Windows Live.

I reasoned that Windows 7 is basically Vista so the theory was probably the same. I got my 4GB SanDisk USB drive, downloaded the Windows 7 Home Premium ISO from Technet, and started setting up the disk.

After plugging it into the netbook, I powered up, and selected it from the boot menu. Imagine my surprise when it worked! Not only that, but it booted, and installed perfectly fine. I wondered if it had done something stupid like installed the boot loader on the USB drive (had that happen before) or messed up the drive letters, but no, everything is where it should be.

What impressed me the most was that during the setup, it found my wireless controller, and set up my connection to the AP. Next it activated with Microsoft (although oddly told me it had expired, and must be activated), and I was in. Windows Update was already showing activity so I had a look and found all the other drivers waiting to be installed. Once they had installed and rebooted, I have a fully set up Netbook!

The start bar looks like it could be very useable on the netbook, and it seems pretty nippy. I’d run XP on it before as I decided Vista was a pointless excercise. Don’t get me wrong, I rather like Vista, and had been running it for some time, but it really doesn’t get on well with low-end hardware. This little machine seems to be OK with Windows 7 however, so I’ll have to see how it goes.

If you’re reading this, then you’re seeing the newly hosted site. Nothing has changed, I’ve just moved to a virtual private server, where I can host all my domains, and do all my own setup and control of the hosting.

I’ve had years of excellent hosting from UK Web Solutions Direct, so I was a little sad to leave them. But if you’re looking for a basic host, I can’t recommend them highly enough, so if you’re looking for a good host, give them a go!

OK, now this is pretty cool. Made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up!

The power of music! Ahhhhhhh.

I started looking elsewhere, and decided to forego a surround speaker set. Having surround sound was nice, but not a necessity. All my music is stereo, so anything else is done in hardware to make it pseudo-surround. Granted, some CDs do seem to utilise some sort of Pro-Logic encoding, but for the most part, it’s best to have things in ‘proper’ stereo. The only things I ever have in stereo are DVDs, and I watch those on the TV or projector with the decent surround system, so surround speakers on the PC seemed a bit redundant. Also, I no longer have a high-end sound card in the PC. I’m using the onboard card, so it wasn’t like I’d be losing anything there.

So for a while I briefly courted the notion of something like the Bose surround speakers, but the price put me off. Creative also did a similar set, but they used USB for the connection (i.e. the speakers are the sound card). Plus they had a silly-massive subwoofer, which didn’t seem great to me. I don’t really like subwoofers much as they send all their sound through the floor, thus annoying others. What I needed was a set of speakers which were able to produce their own bass. The speakers on my TV are a Sony set I got with a Hi-Fi system I bought some years ago. I have no sub there, but the speakers are very big, and produce plenty of bass on their own. I figured if I could get something similar for the PC I’d be onto a winner, as it would mean no sub, less cabling, and better sound.

So I managed to find these:

These are the GigaWorks T40 Series II. I found them in PCWorld, and the first thing that struck me was a) how big the box was, and b) how much it weighed. I’ve found that light, small speakers often produce a sound that is, well, light and small. But these had some bulk to them. They are of a big size, and so I settled on them.

I’ve been using them about a week now, and I’m really quite happy with them. The sound is quite well defined and very broad – I certainly felt like I was hearing everything. They’re not too bassy, and the highs don’t seem lost. The mids sometimes seem to go walkabout, but that’s something that can be tweaked. I’ve turned down the bass a little bit, and they sound pretty good now. They look and feel like proper, decent speakers, and to be honest I think they are. PC speakers have always been something of an also ran, so if you listen to a lot of music on your PC (like I do) then you can often find them somewhat lacking. These tick all the right boxes for me, so I’m quite impressed with them.

via Bathtub IV on Vimeo.

Awesome. Absolutely friggin’ awesome. You really do need to watch it full-screen though.