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!

PC update – new hardware in the main desktop

I got my hands on a Xeon E5-1680V2 processor last week. This is about the best CPU that I could get for my motherboard, and it’s an overclocking monster. Comfortable at 4.7Ghz at <80 degrees, currently at 4.6 and staying under 75 after extended benchmarks. Adding to this the fact that I finally jumped 4 generation of graphics cards by updating to a Zotac 2080 Amp MAXX card, gaming and GPU computations are now impressive. All games at max details at 1980×1200 (none of that tiny HD resolution) now are pretty much stable at 60 FPS, and oh *so* pretty. …

Ooh toys..

Protected: Will it be soon time to move onward from my employer of ~8 years? Wait and see..

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

More retro PC updates

So, the Optiplex 960 bios does not boot with a Xeon e5450 chip, and had I done my homework on that, I would have been able to find that out. However, I sourced an Asus P5KE motherboard with 8Gb of DDR2-1066 and a Q9550 chip in it for a decently low price, to further my retro PC ideas. The Core2-Quad q9550 dropped straight into that Optiplex, making that a quad core 2.83 instead of the dual 3.0 it had been. Now I can install XP-32bit on that and get the mid-Naughties retrobox up and running properly. The Xeon e5450 works …

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 …