pikuorguk

I’ve installed Google Desktop for some useful and fun gadgets to fill my second monitor with. Currently the GMail gadget is indexing five years worth of email which is going to take ages. I had a look through my mail and found my first GMail ever, it was the welcome message, look

First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail. By now you probably know the key ways in which Gmail differs from traditional webmail services. Searching instead of filing. A free gigabyte of storage. Messages displayed in context as conversations.

A whole gigabyte of space for email! crazy! You know what? Five years and eighteen thousand emails later, I’ve only used 700MB. I now have seven gig of space, it’s going to take a long long time to fill that.

I’ve got one of those Google Wave accounts too, but it’s not that useful. I seem to recall mention of it having the ability to work in businesses, on their own servers. I like cloud computing, but I don’t trust other people with my data. I’d much prefer if I could run my own cloud on my machine here. Some sort of Google Docs server would be great, I’d use that all the time. Something where my server is the main store, but then Google’s system is a mirror, with edits and changes magically propagating throughout the whole system. Local data with remote access and off-site backup, all in one system without any extra steps required. That’d be a killer system.

Skulltag, it's Doom... but with real networking

During my time at school, before overclocking Celerons and wasting my life on the Internet became the “in” thing, I used to spend quite a lot of time playing Doom. It was, in fact the reason I spent 30 quid on a 10Base2 network card, length of coax cable and learnt all about this stuff called “IPX Networking“.

Me and a friend used to take it in turns to drag our entire PC setup – featuring ‘massive’ 15″ monitors and Cirrus Logic VLB graphics cards – around to the other’s house. Since neither of us could drive, this required a willing parent. And then we’d spend all night playing Doom, followed by Doom 2 when it came out. There was even one night where we clocked the frag counter, just to see what’d happen (it loops back round to zero).

All of that was back in 1994, and over the following years Doom has come out on pretty much everything from your toaster to digital camera. Well, maybe not the toaster, but I bet someone somewhere has tried, probably using an Arduino and Twitter account. I must have bought this damn game more times over the years than anything.

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I suppose there’s one benefit to having a knackered heating system – it requires lots of testing, to work out what’s wrong with it. It’s quite nice sitting in a roasting hot house during the day, under the guise of “testing” my heating system works.

Or in this case doesn’t. The water keeps trying to escape. The boiler man came yesterday, it’s the same bloke who does the gas inspections, and we had a bit of a play with it. Of course, since he was there things worked better than just me being there. We discovered that the boiler pressurises the system up to 4 bar quite happily, which is bad – it should only go to 2 bar. Above 3 the safety relief valve should open and send hot water outside through a little drain pipe. Sure enough, dribbling down the wall outside was some very hot water, and the pressure started to drop.

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Leaking boiler

What you’re looking at is the underside of my central heating boiler. The crusty white stuff on that pipe is limescale caused by the water in this area. The crusty white stuff shouldn’t be there, it means that pipe has a leak, and is probably partially responsible for my heating system having no water pressure.

I tried filling the radiators back up, but as soon as I started the boiler a fairly fast dripping noise came out the bottom of the boiler. A quick look with my torch showed not one, not two but four leaks on this boiler!

Here’s two of the leaks on the plumbing going to the rest of the house. And in this photo are two more leaks. One is on the pressure relief valve, the other is coming from the back, just above the copper pipe in the background.

Since this is a rented house I’ve just phoned the letting agency who are going to have a plumber call me back. Fortunately the boiler is in my kitchen with all the pipework exposed so I can see and hear this stuff happening. If it was locked away in a cupboard I’d probably never notice.

And no, this isn’t the first time I’ve run the boiler since last winter. I made the point of running it for a few hours each month and it was fine at the weekend when I used it.

Right then, here’s a nice challenge… please read carefully because it’s not the usual thing you’re already thinking…

I have a Lenovo S10e netbook running XP. It has a Synaptics touchpad with the touchpad drivers installed. For some highly irritating reason, running my finger down the left hand edge (NOT the right) makes my web browser zoom in and out.

How do I turn it off? It’s driving me crazy.

I have been into the Synaptics touchpad control panel and disabled all scrolling, touch zones and everything except the tap-to-click. The really irritating thing is it only happens in web browsers, and only zooms them in or out. And it’s really useless.

Alport Castles

Today me and my dad went for a walk in the Peak District, to a part we’ve never been to before. At the bottom of the Snake Pass is Ladybower Reservoir and the Derwent Valley. On the moorlands at the top is a place called Alport Castles, a large craggy area that looks like a quarry but is actually a natural landslip.

The walking was fairly easy (which is good, it’s been a while since I’ve been out walking) and once onto the moorland quite flat and straight forward. Once at Alport Castles we walked back towards the reservoir and down to the road where, conveniently a bus turned up and saved us a long four mile trek.

I use Google Reader to follow quite a lot of websites, blogs and anything else interesting that squirts out an RSS feed. For the curious, here is a list of my favourites. I’m leaving out the well known things like XKCD, Dilbert, Hack-a-day and so on.

• http://uncertaintimes.tumblr.com/ I have no idea what this is about, but it never fails to display interesting and random images at least once a day.
• http://cargocollective.com/learnsomethingeveryday Learn something new, every day. Information presented in nice little cartoon drawings.
• http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/ It’s a sort of programming based blog, written by Landon Dyer who I believe used to work at Atari and Apple back in the day.
• http://www.bytecellar.com/ Interesting writings about old computer systems.
• http://digitaltools.node3000.com/ A tech blog that writes about various fun and often arty things, such as nice Flash games, strange bits of hardware and art installations.
• http://www.trafficengland.co.uk/index.aspx Totally not tech related at all, this site simply tells you all about the state of the UK’s road network. Grab the RSS feed and have your own instant travel update system. If only I could get this in my car and have the relevant reports displayed while I’m driving about.
• http://impossible-world.blogspot.com/ An art blog that shows Escher-style “impossible” drawings.
• http://fcd3.blogspot.com/ A programming blog detailing the creation of a Z-Machine interpreter for Infocom games.

I often find these kinds of sites while browsing around the comment fields of popular websites. It’s fun to click the random links in people’s signatures…

What are your favourite websites to visit? I’m always interested in new things to read.

It got a bit cold last night. So cold that I had to pile an extra three layers onto my bed to keep me warm. We also had the first frost last night so I made the decision to move my chilli plants indoors where it’s warmer. I’m pretty amazed that they’re continuing to produce peppers, and that they’re big, bright, shiny red peppers too. The last plants I grew produced loads of fruit, but then dropped dead. Perhaps I can keep these plants growing all year.

Hopefully bringing the plants indoors will also produce more spicy peppers.

It’s 2009, I am sat in front of a dual core 2.6GHz machine. It contains a graphics card capable of throwing millions of polygons around the screen without breaking a sweat. The HDD is capable of some stupidly fast data transfer rate and my RAM is so large I could copy all my 8 and 16 bit software collection into it and still have room to boot Windows. Oh, I also have a 6Mb ADSL2+ connection which is capable of dragging data off the internet at 6-700K/sec (that’s kilobytes, not kilobits).

So why does Firefox take 30 seconds to grind itself into life? What’s it doing? Typing into the Awesomebar produces confusing pauses too. Surely it’s not that difficult to scan a list of previous URLs looking for likely matches.

It’s not just Firefox though. On my work PC IE8 takes forever to do anything at all. Clicking on the “new tab” button results in a frustrating two second constipated pause while it says “Connecting…”. Connecting to what? I’ve not typed in an address yet!

IE8 did like to tell me I’d just opened a new tab, in that irritating way Microsoft products do until I switched that off.

Chrome is a bit of an improvement, but since it has no plugin system I have to put up with adverts on my webpages (yes, I do run Privoxy, but it’s just not as good) and the odd braindead site saying “uhh you’re not running Internet Explorer, go away please”.

I won’t mention badly coded AJAX-driven sites that just … stop … for no reason at all because the background HTTP request has silently died and nobody thought to check for that. Google copes with this very well, Twitter seem largely clueless, and occasionally my own Wordpress installation likes to get it wrong and double-post things or not post at all.

And what’s with the meaningless progress twirlers that spin around and around? Once upon a time we had a progress bar that’d fill up. Now it’s just a thing that spins until either the page loads with the CSS missing, or “That site failed to load. Here’s a meaningless page of gibberish about why, which if you read it all will tell you at the bottom to either try reloading the page, or to ask your system administrator for help. After you’ve gone and messed around with proxy and encryption settings for no reason at all”.

One day we’ll get information instantly and will wonder what all the fuss was about. Although then we’ll probably be complaining that it takes effort to read the stuff, and why can’t it just be injected directly into our brains as we sleep.

It’s getting dark earlier now, and there are many twisty paths where I live. The sort of place you often see on the 6 o’clock news cordoned off by police tape and a little white tent nearby. According to our local council they’re called “nature trails” (I think the locals read that as “rubbish dumps”, but there you go) and they’re quite good fun to ride along.

I need a set of lights for the front of my bike that’ll light the surrounding area up well enough to not be decapitated by low branches, fall down holes, or cycle into some waiting miscreant. I also don’t have masses of money to spend, but don’t want to buy rubbish that’ll break down.

Advice please, O wise Internet…

I’ve been out on my bike once again exploring the local area. Whereas most people tend to cycle down the river’s edge, looking at the rubbish-strewn dark trails that lead off into the reclaimed wilderness but continuing, I think “that looks an interesting way” and set off down it. Sometimes it turns into a nice little loop full of local interest, other times it turns into a bit of a crap ride.

Today was the second type of trail. It looked quite promising from Google Maps’ satellite view. My aim was to cycle into town but by going down the river. I now know this is not possible, there’s a railway in the way. I did find where the locals dump their rubbish and old fridges though.

For the morbidly curious, here’s the Google Maps link and you can download the KMZ file Deadend trail.

My Google Earth is now collecting a healthy pattern of red tracks running over the reclaimed land either side of the river. Looking at the area now, you’d never think there used to be a gravel quarry and coal mine. I think I’ll now try and cycle North up the river itself, rather than the canal part. Ultimately I’d like to cycle along the Pennine Trail to Leeds and then the other way to wherever it goes.

I took my previously mentioned Asahi Pentax film camera with me. Hopefully the pictures will come out and look good. I’ve almost stopped looking at the back for a preview image

Here’s the stats for today’s ride

Created by My Tracks on Android.

Total Distance: 7.52 km (4.7 mi)
Total Time: 48:27
Moving Time: 33:32
Average Speed: 9.35 km/h (5.8 mi/h)
Average Moving Speed: 13.46 km/h (8.4 mi/h)
Max Speed: 27.90 km/h (17.3 mi/h)
Min Elevation: 68 m (222 ft)
Max Elevation: 84 m (274 ft)
Elevation Gain: 135 m (444 ft)
Max Grade: 3 %
Min Grade: -7 %
Recorded: Wed Sep 23 16:56:52 GMT+01:00 2009

Using a T-Mobile G1 with My Tracks is really really good.

• C++ STL Tutorial
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