Welcome to my Web space!

This space will be updated every so often. Various musings, and notable things that have gone one in my life. Some kayaking, a bit of mountain biking, a few astronomical items, maybe some car stuff. There may be the odd rant or two!

A lovely little telescope, resurrection and refit.

I answered an ad on one of the astronomy forums I regularly peruse, where someone was getting rid of a badly water-damaged telescope. I figured it would make a nice project for myself so why not reply and see how much it was going to cost me. A mate of mine picked up the telescope from the owner, and warned me that it appeared to be in relatively bad condition, so I was a little apprehensive. When I collected the scope and paraphernalia from my friend, I recognised the scope as a Celestron CPC800 – a Schmidt-Cassegrain design with 8″ …

A little retro PC work and upgrades

Last summer, I used my big box of PC bits’n’bobs to build myself a few retro gaming PCs, each genre with hot hardware for its time. I wasn’t restricting myself to being time-specific with the hardware available during the time at all, I just wanted to build myself some machines that ran the software of a particular type very well. The DOS/Win3.11 machine is a Dell desktop with a P3-600 and 64Mb of ram, a tiny ancient 2.1Gb harddisk, a Matrox G400MAx graphics card, and an Audician32 soundcard with a great wavetable board on it from (). There’s a lovely …

Euro trip 2018

Here’s my little Euro road trip from early summer 2018: Statistics: 19 days 7 countries (France, Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Italy, Slovenia) 4300 km driven. 17 border crossings or customs areas. 5 days of kayaking. 1 night slept in car. 1 night slept in hotel. 3 nights slept on a floor. 5 nights spent under canvas. €154 in tolls (approx), including Swiss and Austrian vignettes About 6 fills of diesel or so. The idea behind the trip was simple enough. That I would drive over to Slovenia with the 3 kayaks of myself, Dave, and John; with any camping gear …

“Of” is not a verb.

Note to internet people that speak English – the word “of” is not a verb. Phrases such as “should of”, “could of”, and “must of” are all simply incorrect.. Those errors are understandable from kids or those with English as a second or third language, but it’s inexcusable from mainstream websites or media outlets. Please proofread your writings more thoroughly.

Good bye appendix!

So, I got some abdominal pain like trapped wind on Thursday evening. No elevated temperature, just discomfort. I went to my bed to give my but a chance to stabilise. It didn’t improve, and the pain got worse, so I drove myself to A&E at 2am.. The rest of that night was spent on a trolley in the new emergency department in the Regional. Interestingly, the emergency department was not that busy, for 2am on a weekend night! The usual suspects must have been taking it easy on the drunken shenanigans.. The receptionist was quite amused when I was able …

Goodbye MR2

So, the red 2-seater Japanese sports car has left my possession. It had been sitting awaiting bodywork repair to replace areas eaten by the dreaded tinworm, and was not going to be back on the road in the near future. The tinworm had caused a failed NCT, the first NCT it failed since I bought it some 8 or 9 years ago. I had it stored out at my parents and one of the neighbours there decided they liked the look and wanted a project car, so they gave me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Still doesn’t come anywhere near …

Old School games

Something I’ve wanted to do for quite a while, was to get the ability to play all of the older games I wanted to from my Wii and my PS2, as well as the Amiga. For kicks this evening, I set up a few new emulators of old machines and I have been playing the classic PS2 games, fun Wii games , and I’ve got all of the classic Amiga games working on the original hardware and the fantastic Amigakit emulator as well. Nostalgia overloads :)

Happy 21st Birthday to Quake

Quake turned 21 years old today. This brought me back to playing the game in the evenings in UL, after coming home from co-op. It was certainly a lot of fun playing against people on the east coast of the US as an LPB.. I have actually played this game through to completion a few times, and I have purchased it at least twice. And, because some of my classmates in college were all players on the international tournament scene, there were more than a few stories from this game! Plus, I ended up getting an early user ID on …

Systemd stupidity – or why Poettering is an idiot

Yes I work as a Unix admin, and I’m getting so sick of “systemd”, that complete ball of crap that Poettering has foisted upon the Linux community. His poor quality of work has singlehandedly caused the most problems I’ve had to face in my day-to-day work in the past year, through his shoddy code, his abysmal system design and his complete lack of knowledge on how to do things the Linux way. Things that systemd breaks, in no particular order, and I’ll update this as I see them: The use of binary log files breaks the simplicity of administration with …

Alps trip, quick notes

Alps 2017. An interesting 3 weeks, 2 of which were “interesting” in the Chinese Curse meaning of the word.. Photos to be added at another point. Personal goals and observations from my time away. Climbed Col d’Izoard on the road bike, from Briancon. 2 days after the Col opened for the summer. Highlight of my trip. About 3hr to climb to the top. Many stops, but achieved the goal. Longest distance I’ve personally driven in any 24hr to date: 1144km from leaving Alberto’s campsite 08.30 Sunday to Cote de Nacre shopping centre in Caen on the Monday morning. Longest distance …