Author: Sleepypete

Back at work now !

And feeling like I could do with another holiday. Let’s see :

Thursday – I’d given up on getting the laptop working with my old Airport Express so I went out Gromit Hunting, with an objective of acquiring a Bluetooth based widget after finishing up the Gromit Hunting.

Success !

Champion indeed.

I’m up to 55 out of 67 Gromits, Feathers and Wallaces now and I’m hoping for cool, clear skies on Friday to finish them off. I’ve enjoyed hunting them down, although some are in odd places this time. Definitely places I won’t be interested in going anywhere near if this event happens for a 4th time. Bristol has some very rough places. Not so rough obviously … but places that you suspect could turn very rough if you visited at the wrong time. (I live in a good area).

More Gromits !

Or Feathers even.

There we go. That’s the Marshal, keeping an eye on an idyllic setting at Chew Magna lake.

Yep. Not many more Gromits to go before I see them all. That’s Friday afternoon’s plan. Did I mention music ?

I’d previously used an Apple Airport Express to stream music from laptop to hifi across the network. A good bit of kit, it worked pretty well although it needed the network gear resetting occasionally because it would lose the connection.

Things got a lot worse with it last week, where it would drop the connection and the audio stream after a few hours play. Efforts to fix it (updated firmware and moving it to a socket where it had more air for cooling – it runs warm) were in vain and I started looking for an alternate solution. I actually had that solution in mind already and acquired a Logitech Bluetooth audio adaptor. (Disclosure note – I paid for it, it was not a freebie). I’d thoroughly recommend it. Sounds good, so easy to set up that they barely give you a manual (if you’ve set up anything on Bluetooth, you don’t need a manual for this) and it’s been rock solid. Ok, there have been one or two minor glitches in the audio but these are very infrequent and last less than a fraction of a second.

Yep. Recommended. It is a standalone bit of kit that picks up the audio from Bluetooth and routes it to any sound device via headphones or RCA phono cables.

A while ago, I read a hifi mag report on wireless speakers and I was very disappointed at the time. It didn’t have anything that could turn your existing hifi into a wireless receiver. It just covered stuff that was massively overpriced and was pretty much a second hifi. They didn’t cover the Bluetooth adaptors … and didn’t cover that Apple Airport Express. Hifi mag very interested in having you buy the kit that comes from the people who advertise with them and Logitech and Apple don’t advertise with them much.

Be wary of the motives of people who tell you to buy certain things … have they given that proper disclosure note to show their motives. I add short ones because a disclosure note is an FCA required thing … at least I think it’s FCA. It’s required in any case. I might even need to add “#ad” somewhere.

Anyway. Laptop is mostly tamed. I just need to :

Acquire a decent email client as the standard Microsoft one is utter garbage. I would rather pay for a new one than use that for much longer. The big issue with it is that I can’t see where to set up a series of archive folders. I’d routinely pop invoice emails into a “Business” folder and new account set up things into a “Computing” folder. And similar. There doesn’t seem to be a clean way of archiving stuff you want to actually keep.

More picture !

Gosh this build turned into a bit of a marathon. Can you tell what it’s going to be from that ? The undercarriage set up may give it away.

Lots of moving parts in this one, including an undercarriage that goes up and down plus an F35-like lift fan with doors above and below that open up. The canopy also lifts up and the twin tails go left and right.

It took a while (maybe 10 hours) and here it is :

A comment : “Wow it’s huge !”. Yep. It’s a big unit. Sadly back up to full price now too ! (I got it for £30 off).

And I now have the craving for more lego. Haha !

Still taming the new laptop.

Before diving in, here is the disclosure note : I bought the laptop and the SSD that I added to it. I’ll also be buying the Bluetooth adaptor that I’ll mention later. I also bought the Canon camera I’ll mention. But … the Acronis software came free !

I have some early impressions, plus … I need to buy even more stuff !

First thing is … speed !

I kinda knew this was coming from what we get from the machines at work but … do not buy a Windows PC/laptop without a Solid State Device disc drive in it (SSD).

What are they and why do you need them ?

They’re a bundle of memory chips that act as very fast storage. Not so fast in terms of Mbytes/s transfer rates but extremely fast to find the information that’s on them. So when Windows goes nuts swapping back and forward around its various storage places, an SSD makes an unbelievable difference in how smooth the experience is.

It’s a pleasant laptop to operate now after a little surgery yesterday instead of a disappointing pain on Monday before the SSD arrived. The other type of hard disc involves magnetic chemicals spinning on glass platters, with an arm going back and forward across the disc. They’re much faster than they used to be but that archaic technology takes its toll in the time needed to find the information that Windows is looking for.

I’ve spoken about this before a few times … It makes a massive difference though. The laptop struggled to transfer half the iTunes library over on Monday, it transferred the lot yesterday over the course of about 6 hours. That’s 16,000 tracks … (I was being selective)

Oh – before I move on, it is a complicated affair

How about the rest ?

I haven’t tried out the graphics part yet but it looks ok. Gotta be careful about your viewing angle though. That was the point of rushing into this laptop instead of holding off more, the 504 model has a TN screen instead of an IPS Panel. IPS is a display screen technology which is far superior to the older TN technology. It’s that old chestnut again. If you’re in the market for technology and two bits are the same price, buy the better one ! It seems obvious but … how many people do you know who settle for second best ?

That 504 thing … The laptop is an Asus 503VD modified to have an SSD complementing the normal hard disc. The key differences are the display and also that the 504 does not include an SD card reader slot. I kinda need that …

I was expecting this one as well but while the desktop and laptop can see my camera over wifi, neither of them can connect to it. I believe there is a key bit of software missing from the Canon drivers. But I was happily using SD card transfer with the Macbook before.

Network is a bit tricky though. Could be that the laptop doesn’t have the April update installed yet but it doesn’t want to see the other computers. It can see their iTunes libraries … but not their network shares. The other two can see it however. (Means it won’t actually be an issue).

Bluetooth is nice. Bluetooth is shiny. I’m hoping it will solve an issue I’ll get into in a sec but I was able to send a file from phone to laptop ok. Technology is progress …

My Little White Box (Apple Airport Express running Airplay) seems to have died ! Or it’s having an argument with Windows iTunes. It was pretty solid with MacOS iTunes. The interweb searching suggests that there is an issue with Windows iTunes 10.7 that isn’t present on the MacOS version. My fix will be to acquire a Bluetooth adaptor to send music from laptop to hifi again.

A disappointing issue but not insurmountable.

Other stuff :

It’s a big unit. A lot bigger than my Macbook Air. Heavier too … but more capable. It should be properly capable of showing streamed video and sport. The Macbook Air had issues with its wifi and sport streaming would be too much for its cpu (a Haswell indeed) and it would get occasional blockiness. The problem there was that to aid cooling and battery life, the cpu was underclocked to about half its normal speed.

I’m sure there’s more but it’s struggling to escape my brain at the moment !

Oh and there’s also Warcraft …. which I totally didn’t play today as I thought “I’ll open Stellaris up for an hour or two and then Warcraft”. Oops. Stellaris tends to turn into 10 hour sessions. I think only 6 today.

Perhaps more Gromits tomorrow. I still have 20 to tick off.

Or Warcraft later. The new expansion has hit and while I’ve only gone through half a zone so far, it is very impressive. Nice stories, fantastic music. Great atmosphere. They’re getting better at this stuff.

Epic things happen …

And sometimes unusual old friends appear.

Week off for me !

I suspect with what my legs feel like after Friday, I’m going to need it to recover. Lots of Gromit hunting ….

Many, many Gromits.

I started on 16 when knocking off work on Friday and was up to 47 by the time I was ready to drag my weary body home. Oh and the phone desperately wanted charge too, I doubt whether it would have lasted to do the ones at the top of Park Street !

I especially liked the Oh Bollards in the middle, the Lego Gromit and the Gromitronic with the lights.

There’s the Oh Bollards,

Lego Gromit and …

Gromitronic with lots of flashing lights. The Feathertron 3000 was good too but was behind a very reflective piece of glass which I was having trouble getting a good angle on.

Too sunny ! It was a good day for Gromit Hunting on Friday. Despite skies threatening early (and a heavy rain shower while I was in work), it was dry throughout and more than a little warm. Forgot my water bottle again ! Oops.

I don’t want to know how many miles I walked though. My legs haven’t forgotten yet. I started feeling the effects of a calf strain halfway round …. which is where you ask if you’ve passed the point of no return (i.e. it’s less distance to go forward than go back) and keep on going if you’ve gone past it. Which I had !

Bristol was putting its good side forward on Friday.

I could be living on one of those at some point in the future. Not one of those, my own barge !

The harbourside was being especially shiny.

Some lovely looking big ships out there today too.

The river, swollen by the earlier rain, was looking like chocolate. Hmmmm chocolate. The wind up there was also wanting to eat my hat. I didn’t let it although I did have one hat chasing incident earlier in the day.

By the ending stages though, I was starting to question :

STAIRS ! Why did it have to be stairs ! I might have had maybe 10 miles in my legs at this point with a diversion to an off-trail Feathers and a little more diverting around.

I’m looking forward to a quiet week now with lots of music listening. The new laptop is arriving tomorrow, although I’m definitely not thanking the credit card company who I won’t be advertising. They put a caution on my card due to me buying laptop. I don’t make a habit of buying laptops … It’s odd that they flagged that and not the washing machine. Silly people. They should really check the IP address that a transaction is coming from and use that as their check if they don’t have anything better to go on. In the event, it delayed another laptop related purchase and the card was declined at a coffee shop on Friday. Makes you think about switching to another card.

But … Gromits ! How many so far ? Here’s the map :

The green ones are the ones I’ve ticked off so far. Not yet for the red ones. Oh and there’s a couple off the map to the SW as well.

I’ve quite enjoyed the Gromit Hunting this time around. It’s getting me to see some things I never realised were around. It seems a little more commercial though. Last time with the Shauns, I think they were all outside and accessible 24/7. Most of them. This time though, more than a few are behind doors that get locked in off hours and Bristol centre still tends to run 9 to 5 for the shops. With the 2 at M Shed, I was lucky to get there when I did because I took those with only 2 minutes to go before they closed up.

Others were tucked away deep in shops. It seems a bit more commercially affected this time around which is a shame. They’re in different places too, which is great. Means we get to see more.

Anyway, that’s it from me for tonight. As always for these pictures, click for bigger. Except for the map and the montage, they’re all full resolution from the camera. Camera has lots of pixels.

Status check – still not recovered from it yet, my legs still haven’t forgiven me but at least I escaped the potentially more serious damage that was threatening from the calf strain midway around.

More later in the week perhaps !

PS Techie note on the montage … Gimp crashed with the first attempt where I tried stitching them all together at native resolution. I had a feeling it would have trouble because the image was starting out at 4608×3456 pixels … times by 30. So to make it work and make it easy, the working file was at the native picture resolution (4608×3456) and each picture was imported into its own layer. Layers make things very easy with the picture editing. Then … divide each layer by 10×10 to make them 1/100th the size and memory requirement and use the grid align tools to arrange them in a 6×5 grid. Job done in 30 minutes perhaps. Oh and when crop the arrangement down to remove the extra unused space around the outside.

More Gromits !

This one is a very endearing Dearest Gromit out by the UWE Bower Ashton campus. Friday saw me enjoying a day off work and hoping for less traffic than usual to head around some more of the outlying Gromits … with an ulterior motive.

It’s still pretty hot and dry too, as demonstrated by the condition of the fields overlooking the Bristol skyline. This was quite close to the last Gromit, just up the hill in fact.

Gromit number 13 was Wild At Heart with Ashton Court providing the venue for an iced tea lunch.

A quick hop over to Ashton Gate football stadium saw me finding Rockin’ Robin. Traffic wasn’t too bad up to this point, outside of the usual idiots on the roads. We have a lot of those ….

The motorway was clogged up by something unmentionable so I ventured into the backroads to get to the next Gromit over by Puxton Place. This one is the Merry Go Gromit, with the venue offering a charming farm shop and an activities park I’m curious about. Traffic was nasty though, was very happy that I had the air con, especially after emerging into a blast of heated air.

It wasn’t quite so bad on the way to Weston Super Mare, which was where the ulterior motive was located … I’m going to be buying another laptop very soon. It’ll be an Asus (not-sponsored) and the PC World offering was the favourite, courtesy of another discount. But ….

Bristol – none available
Weston – wasn’t honouring the discount.

If the shop isn’t being cooperative, walk away. Don’t be in a rush to spend more money than you need to ! (As it happens, the offering at Scan has got its discount back and is a superior laptop).

Oh I ended up parking at completely the wrong end of the sea front. I believed the signs ! They said “Grand Pier, park there”. And there was a mile between car park and Grand Pier. They were asking for money at the Pier so I didn’t check it out (most of the seafront prices were inflated) but waiting outside was :

I thought a slightly sad looking Giggles. Now up to Number 16 of 67 ! And starting to tick off some of the trails which are collections of Gromits.

The next set will happen on Friday, which is a possible Cunning Plan time. It’s expected to get cooler as the week progresses, which means the conditions will be well suited to the 7.5 mile walk which is the Gromit circle in town.

But … there is that possible Cunning Plan. It’s also the Bristol Balloon Fiesta this next weekend and the timings could be convenient to do part of the circle and then head to Fiesta. Or even do the whole circle and head there. I’ll have to see the timings and how things work out. (Nightglow is at 6pm so I would want to aim to be there around 5pm to sample what’s at the Fiesta.)

Oh and then there’s also laptop ordering … And a week off coming very soon ! I’ve been at the counting down the days stage for a little while now. Definitely looking forward to it.

Last word for today – it looks like Microsoft have broken something again in an update. The antimalware service was taking up a whole cpu core’s worth of processing. I.e. the cpu % load was continuously between 25 and 30%, even after letting it do its business overnight. That heats the room up and makes other stuff perform badly.

I’ve now disabled it and put Avast antivirus on. Things like this shouldn’t happen. It’s a shame we’re locked into the slavery to Microsoft products, they really don’t know what they’re doing any more and just unleash bad software on us. I’d describe that antimalware service now as …. malware.

More Gromits have been found !

That’s Cupid, the latest one from tonight. Very pink. Extremely pink. I actually drove past this one the other day but … no pic, no claim ! And I don’t use the phone when I’m driving :-). (There are exceptions).

Except for some downpours over the weekend and scattered downpours since, it’s been very hot over here. Not as hot as a lot of places … but a bit too hot for British buildings designed more to keep the heat in. So I’ve been holding off on the big Gromit Hunt that’ll involve walks of around 7.5 miles in Bristol centre.

However … I did have an excuse to do some driving (read – hiding in the car with the air con) to visit some of the outlying Gromits.

There’s Pickles McPrickles over in Southmead. I just noticed that the poses of the Gromits are different. Bit tricky to find this one.

A quick hop over to the big open space of Blaise Castle :

I think there was more Castle too somewhere but I was parked in an awkward spot and needed to hustle !

Peek A Boo ! And a need to hide the little girl who was in shot. Gotta hide that from the internet due to the weird people.

(Bums of people retreating from shot are fine !)

A hop over to Thornbury where I found a book shop … I didn’t see much of my favoured scifi in there so I moved swiftly on. I had some time … but not that much. And the rumbly belly was telling me to go eat too.

A very green Honeysuckle Rose keeping an eye on Thornbury’s High Street.

Last one ! This one is an extremely colourful Toto residing for now in Winterbourne.

I’m at 11 now out of 67, with most of them in the city centre. More to come !

After Toto, the plan was to head back into almost the centre to what’s become my favoured cinema over at Avonmeads. It’s a pretty dead cinema (was just me plus 3 stranger people) which means minimal interruptions.

The film ? The latest Mission Impossible. These films just keep getting better and better. They are silly action movies but pull it off with great style. I thoroughly enjoyed this one. Recommended !

Yey ! Thank you KoS 🙂

Heya Sleepy! Really enjoyed reading about Tash's adventures! (I've been keeping up with her selfies in guild chat! XD

I’ve been enjoying my time in Azeroth since coming back into World of Warcraft.

I’ve switched servers again to join a guild run by the lovely Katherine Of Sky. Well, she doesn’t really run it, more like being the Queen of the guild while the Guild Master type stuff is done by another couple of players. I’ve been enjoying having that guild chat going again while I descend into that power levelling focus I get myself into.

The guild is called Chasing Rainbows and there’s Tashmetu, my shaman, enjoying the new tabard. It has a rainbow on it ! Oh and I have a hat. Hats are awesome.

Tash’s story started on an island. Except it’s not an island …

Big turtle ! While you play through the story of that zone, you can see the turtle’s flippers going up and down in the background. Good stuff.

There have been other escapades so far, like spraying a Mosshide fella with something that made him irresistable.

Curse that sudden yet inevitable betrayal. That line worked better in Firefly though.

It was an excellent disguise though. Oh, the shaman runs around as a puppy too.

At least, most of the time as a puppy. For this character, the playstyle tends to be to run around as the Ghost Wolf, dash up to the mobs and then … Suddenly Shaman ! WHACK. Here seen admiring the lady in green.

And later, on a mission. Tash determined to get the dwarf his ale before the head dissipates.

Oh and Tash’s Guide To Not Allowing Fish To Escape : Catch it with rod, hit it with the hammer.

It’s not all work though. Here we come back to that dancing figure of the first picture … Heroes gotta let loose and have some fun too sometimes.

Auction House dance party. Good times.

It’s been very enjoyable coming back in to play with the Chasing Rainbows guild. You can find out more by having a peek at Katherine Of Sky’s videos (link to the right). She’s been doing a series of very short videos on pet battles. Well worth a peek.

Oh and I appear to have booked a week off work just as the new expansion hits. A complete coincidence of course … One target is to get my boosted maximum level character through all of the previous expansion’s zones before then. I have been enjoying the shaman more though. There’s a kind of story that unfolds as you go through, rather than the BANG max level of the boosted character. The lower levels are simpler too, it feels like there’s a lot going on to try and keep up with at the highest levels.

Laptops and temptation ?

I nearly bought one tonight. I’m very curious to know what readers think of the Asus laptops. That’s the stand out favourite for me at the moment. The one at the local pooter store has been discounted to £750, whereas I could buy a marginally better one online for £700.

Temptation is real …

But I resisted tonight. The Mall run was successful :

Chinos acquired – for Gromit Hunting and wear while it’s so hot (Britain is melting). My current jeans were too thick and stifling for comfortable long distance walking.
Potion of Brain Freezing – lush.

PS Addon. Don’t give the Bitdefender people any money (They’re an antivirus company). You will never hear the end of it … I just got another begging email from them today asking me to buy their latest product despite me deleting my account there and unsubscribing my email from them.

Haha. Not Stargate Atlantis, although the Wraiths in that were a fairly decent (if over melodramatic) enemy.

Nah. Two more books completed, Wraith Squadron by Aaron Allston and something I picked up called Classic Ships. I enjoyed both of them and the Classic Ships book was a nice little in between one before I dive into the next Wraith Squadron book.

What is Wraith Squadron ?

It’s a book that I feel is very definitely inspired by the X Wing games and the successors that were so excellent for their time on the PC.

They’re from the first age of space games on the PC and the X Wing series had massive competition from games like Wing Commander (never played) and later Freespace (own but too busy with Tie Fighter). The screenshot above is from X Wing Alliance, which was a fairly late entry in the series, almost the last game actually.

The systems from the games are interwoven into the series of XWing books. It doesn’t restrict the books at all, it somewhat adds to them as the game mechanics give them a skeleton to build up good space combat action sequences. But the stories aren’t all about that.

Whereas the Rogue Squadron books were about a squadron of elite pilots, Wraith Squadron is about a far more interesting set of misfit characters who are on their last chances before losing their chance to fly space fighters. And it’s not just about the space combat, the characters are brought together for their covert intrusion skills.

It all makes for a quite packed book where you really don’t know where it’s going to be going next. And that’s just the plot. It’s jammed full of character interaction too. The characters grow throughout the book. They change in more obvious ways than is usual for a book, at least the books I’ve been reading lately. Oh and the author has huge amounts of fun with his characters as well, with a few running jokes going through the story and relentless humour brought out when you’re least expecting it.

If you understand Star Wars, you will definitely enjoy this book. If you’re coming into it without reading too much of the old Star Wars Expanded Universe (the one that’s been written out now!) then I think you’d enjoy it as well.

One thing about Wraith Squadron is those characters … Outside of a couple of the regulars, they are all unknown. Which means no plot armour …. (Plot armour is when you have a major character like Luke, Leia, Han who has to stay around for future books, they won’t be dying). And no plot armour and the style of this particular series means that death can happen at any time to the characters involved.

I like that. It adds in a certain uncertainty that adds a lot of interest to the book for me. In fact, one particular superbly dramatic scene had remained in my memory from my last reading which must be many, many years ago.

Next up is the second Wraith Squadron book, Iron Fist.

I quite enjoyed racing through Book 25 yesterday evening as well. It was Classic Ships, which I picked up thinking it would have lots of lovely pictures in (it does). A short book of just 123 pages, it goes from Tall Ships, to working ships, to ocean liners and gives you a few words about each.

It’s curious to see how the ship designs changed over the years. I was especially curious about the low, thin and very long designs of the tall ships and the earlier steam driven ships. It feels like we started with clean lines, went all bumpy around the two World Wars and now we’re back to cleaner lines again.

An enjoyable read.

In other news …

Tap is still winning. I get the feeling it needs the old adaptor and its pipe chopped off and a new fitting applied. That’s a job for a professional plumber.
Me ? I am super tired but I’ve booked a week off work in 3 weeks. If it gets cooler then that’ll help. The heat wipes me out. This weekend will be chilling out with a few domestics to do.
And more healing too. Almost there.

And reading ! Around streams and Warcraft that is. Never go adventuring without a great looking hat.

That’s Tashmetu, Shaman in Training.

Short one tonight cos I’m behind on these book posts again !

Book 23 was Between Planets by Robert Heinlein, not one of his best. Not quite as bad as what Farnham’s Freehold turned out to be (a great premise but went in a really bad and highly racist direction). But nowhere near the standard of some of his other books like Starship Troopers, Time Enough For Love and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. Oh and Friday too. Friday is an exceptional roller coaster of a book, may have to read that one again.

This one follows young Don Harvey as he escapes Earth just at the …. spoilers redacted … Ok. Less spoilers. The story is about attempting to get between Earth and Mars, to reach his parents …. while ending up in other areas of the solar system.

The books dates somewhat, as a book written in 1951 is missing much of the innovation that followed. That rarely matters in a Heinlein book though, he writes exceptional scifi about characters, political systems and the somewhat shady arms of enforcement (not necessary legal enforcement) that back up what the political systems are attempting to achieve.

One consistent factor in Heinlein books is that his characters have to survive by either application of force or they have to evade force being applied to them. And often his characters are on the wrong end of Who Has The Bigger Stick.

That’s definitely the case in this one where our Don has to escape Earth mostly on his own resources and across the solar system definitely by his own initiative.

A bit of a slog this one, even for a 170 page story. I wouldn’t recommend it but do check out the books above, plus a few more in the Lazarus Long sequences and the multiverse sequence. The Cat Who Walked Through Walls may well find itself in my reading list soon.

Oh … the reason why I’m somewhat squeezing out this post is because I’ve already read Book 24. But that’s one for another day.

Taps ?

Not that kind of tap.

I’ve been doing the plumbing again … I think the mains water pressure has gone up over the weekend as a consequence to them fixing something and I believe that’s too much for one of my old taps. It has been dripping …

I have the replacement tap and know how to fix it but. The new pipes are the wrong size ! And I can’t use the old pipes because they’re brazed into the old tap !

Grr.

It has defeated me tonight but I shall return anew. With different pipes. I’ve left things in a state where there are no drips so the old taps will be good for a few more days. Water pressure is a bit low though.

And it’s still too warm ! Also humid. Hopefully it’ll cool down soon but after doing a little walk to Arnos Vale cemetary on Friday for another Gromit viewing :

That’s number 6 for me, Dias De Las Perros. Oh … after realising that my jeans are a little too heavy a material to go walking long distance in. Will have to investigate options before embarking on the very long walks.

Film was good too. I saw Skyscraper as the only person in the showing (Avonmeads is like that and it’s why I keep going back there). I’d sum it up as enjoyable garbage. Dwayne Johnson does have a habit of making highly enjoyable films to watch. Sure, the plotline and background is complete garbage … but they’re fun to sit through and they cheer you up.

Mindless fun if you will and it set me up well for the weekend.