New Year's Eve

The week between Christmas Eve and today has flown by (funny how the time goes quicker when you're on holiday)

Still very cold - outside temperature -1.1 degrees centigrade.

Christmas Eve

Its that time of year again.  No more work till next year :).

Go to town for any last minute ideas for presents, then call into the pub for a couple of real ales.

Looking forward to plenty of eating and drinking

Also use the time to catch up listening to the latest CD's in the collection not had a chance to give a good play yet. 

Current outside temperature 5.7 degrees centigrade.

Christmas

It'll soon be the nice long Christmas break. Two more days at work, then thats it till the 5th January.
Looking forward to plenty of eating, drinking, and catching up listening to some CD's.
Got stocked up with plenty of good ales to sample. :)
As usual plenty of rubbish on the TV. Think they save all the %$£% for Christmas.
Anyway it'll be nice not to have to be up early for a week or so.

Mary Had A Little Lamb (Alternative Versions)

Mary had a little lamb,
Her father shot it dead.
Now it goes to school with her,
Between two chunks of bread.

Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white and wispy.
Then it caught Foot and Mouth Disease,
and now it's black and crispy.

Mary had a little lamb.
It ran into a pylon.
10,000 volts went up its arse,
and turned its wool to nylon.

Funny

Click on the image to see the animation.

Error Message

Never seen this error on windows XP. Must be part of Vista :)
Current outside temperature = -0.3 Degrees Centigrade. i.e bloody cold :)

Successful Operation

The CD player section of the Midi HiFi underwent open-case surgery this morning.
A good blast from the can of compressed air, and all is working again.
The cleaning CD was run to give the laser a good clean, and the covers replaced.
Every thing now working again.

Poorly Hi Fi

Why O' Why does my Hi Fi system decide it wont play CDs just before every Christmas.
I know exactly what the trouble is, the laser needs a clean with my can of compressed air.
(It wont run the cleaning disk)
Good job I'm confident taking the covers off to look at it as we dont have anywhere in town that would do a repair for a reasonable price anymore. Plus it does it on a regular basis, think its because the 3 x cd changer drawers dont have a good dust seal. Somthing to look at when I decide to change it.

Its now raining, Just got back from town.
Actually, just got back from the pub. Had a couple of pints of Acorn Yorkshire Pride. (Very Nice.)
Brewery Website

Temperature outside is 5.0 degrees Centigrade. Still got 2 days left on the weekend.

Long Weekend

Got to use up the last of the holidays, so a nice 3 day weekend starts here. Just 2 more full weeks before winding down for Christmas. Well ready for it. Usually take advantage of a nice long break to chill,relax and catch up on listening to the new cds I've bought over the last few months.
Always seem to get more listening time in over Christmas than other times in the year.

Personal nomination for the best Christmas song ever.

Fairytale Of New York - By the much missed Kirsty Macoll & the Pogues.

Keep watchning this space for my personal top 10 albums I've bought this year.

Current outside temperature, 2.9 degrees Centigrade. Not bothered , dont have to get up for work in the morning.

Snow Snow - What Snow?

While parts of the country are basking under a blanket of white, we had a very thin dusting about 7-45 am just as I was getting towards work. Did'nt stay long either. More forcast for Thursday :)

2.0 degrees Centigrade outside at the moment, but still dropping. Looks like another frozen car in the morning.

Cold November Afternoon

Twas a fine foggy day in septober,
The rain was bucketing down.
So I picked up some buckets,
And flogged em outright,
To the council for half-a-crown.

Been a cold , raw foggy day today. Temperature is only just now above freezing (0.1 degree C) and its still foggy outside.
Think its going to be a cold night tonight.

Friday Night Again

I sit here ,writing this blog on a cold (1.7 degrees C outside) and foggy Friday Night.
Expect the temperature will have dropped to almost freezing by the time I venture out to the pub for a few real ales. Still its nice and warm in the shack at the moment.
Currently listening to the new album by Dido, only took a week to get round to playing it. I like it, certainly going to be one of my favourite albums of the year.
Check back at the end of December or early January 2009 for my top 10 albums added to the collection this year.

Though had other albums longer that I've not got round to playing yet as well.

MKARS-80 Transceiver Project

The soldering Iron was warmed up this morning.
Bag 1 of components opened and tipped into a tray, and then the deed was done, the first compenent soldered to the board.

4 hours and another 97 components later, the first bag is completed.

Winter Is Here (At Least For Today)

Woke up to a dusting of snow and ice. Supposed to turn mild and wet as the day goes on.
Temperature dropped to -1.4 °C during the night (1:52am). Its now just creeping above freezing.

Found On A Bottle Of Beer

Upton Snodsbury,
Peopleton and Crowle.
Wyre Piddle,
North Piddle,
and Piddle in the Hole.

Bert Ford Rides Again

During my visit to the Leicester Rally, I purchased a remote weather station.

Displays inside/outside temperature & humidity along with pressure.

The outside indicator uses a wireless sensor. I have finally got round to installing it outside at long last. At the moment its suffering from an occasional loss of signal. Repositioning the display seems to cure it, so I might have to move the sensor a bit closer. Its supposed to work up to 100 metres away.

At the time of posting this entry the current outside temperature is 11.8 degrees Centigrade.

The time is linked to an atomic time server so is always accurate.

It also has a min/max function for the parameters, but this is not displayed under normal usage, but selected by one of the buttons on the front.

Trick Or Treat

Halloween, its dark outside and its cold too. Once I get my outside thermometer sensor for the weather station fitted up I'll know just how cold it is. :) (Or how warm it is in the summer).

Still not had time to start soldering the bits into the circuit board for my QRP rig, have to dig out some fine solder too.

Leicester Rally

Yesterday, was the annual trip to the 37th Leicester Radio Rally (Though its actually at Donnington Park exihibition centre).

A few "goodies" were purchased, inculding a wireless weather station with a remote sensor for temperature / humidity and a lovely QRP 80M SSB transciever kit. This will no doubt take quite a few hours to assemble but it will be a nice radio once completed.

That will most likely be the last time the rally is held there as the centre is due to be demolished to build the new grandstand ready for the British GP moving to Donnington in 2010. This has been about the 10th time the rally has been here since moving from Granby Halls in Leicester.

Leicester Rally Web Site

Upload Gold

Given the file upload system on my website a full test. 10 files uploaded from a remote site.

Main Security Login - Works.
Upload Page Password System - Works.
File Upload - Works.
Email Notification - Works.
File Download - Works.
Remote Files Delete, Once Dowloaded To PC - Works

System is ready to go live.

Photography

Added some information about my the equipment I've used over the years. A few photos of the equipment are also dotted about the page.

Stagnation

Think my site development has started to slow down again.
Must get on with adding more pages.

Upload Image Test

Thought I'd try a test upload of a photo to my blog.

This was taken a few years ago in the Devonshire Arms - Hartington, a village in Derbyshire.

All seems to be working.

Web Calendar II

The web calendar application is installed and working.
Currently access is only from the development page, untill I've fully configured it.

Web Calender

Currently uploading the files for an online calender to my web server, uploads are a bit sluggish tonight though and files keep timing out, don't think I'm going to get it set up tonight.

Search Engines

After adding a selection of "META" tags to the home page on my web site, I'm starting to get a few hits from all over the world.

The hits mapping widget on here is showing interest from various places.

Checking the web statistics on my web hosts control panel shows hits from various countries on my website as well.
Also I can check what users were searching for when pointed to my page, and this will allow me to refine the "META" tags.

Wiki Wiki Web II

All change.

Uninstalled the original wiki, found problems with configuration.

Have now installed a different one - tikiwiki

http://www.tikiwiki.org

Administration seems easier and for an initial learning exercise that must be a good thing.
It will be made public in a few days. Meanwhile It can be accessed from the development site if you have been given access.

Wiki Wiki Web

Have succsesfully installed a Wiki on my site. (php Wiki version 1.3) using the install scripts from my webhosts control panel.

Its too late now tonight to do anything else with it, so I'll leave it till the morning to have a playand see what it can do. Also check for updates from the sourceforge site.

File Uploads

My Website now has a secure upload area for transfering small files to my server.
It has control over what file types can be uploaded, and also on the file size.
The latter is controlled by the size of the area allocated to the user, nomally 1024 kbyte.

The program itself is username/password protected and the link from the home page also has password protecion

Another nice touch is it emails me whenever a file is uploaded.

Anyone who knows me and would like upload privileges email me and I'll set up an account for you.

Long Weekend

Time for a nice long 4 day weekend.
Ready for a rest from work, hopefully get some of the things I've been wanting to finish off on the computer done as well.

Chatroom II

It works, just tried it over the internet. Login and everything are working.
I'm impressed. Some of the commercial scripts for chatrooms cost an arm & a leg and dont look as good as this one.
The new version looks even better, but its still an alpha release so I'll wait a bit before trying that one.

Chatroom

The website development continues.
Latest addition is a chat room with private room and offline message facilities.
All seems to be working, but not tried it in anger yet.
Again, this works on an SQL database on my server.

Try it, you might like it :)

Browser Wars

Just installed Google Chrome on the laptop. Its a new internet browser, from Google :)

Been hearing a lot of good things about it. Its fast and lightweight.

Looks good on first impresions, so I'll give it a try.

Guest Book

Just finished changing the guest book on the website.

The new on doesn't have any annoying adverts and its still free. This one runs on my own hosted web space, under php and SQL data base.
Transferred all the entries over with out any problem.

(This time I was glad not many people had signed the book yet).

Then I saw they were all posted today.
Found the dates are stored in the SQL database, so have to be changed by editing that. Also they are stored in Unix Time (A 10 digit number that relates to the date and time).
A quick google found on on-line converter, enter the new dates and the guest book was back as it should be.

Bulletin Board II

Downloaded and installed the latest version of phpBB
Now running Version 3.0.2 Even just after installing I can see it is a major improvement.
Won't bother converting the old one, only had a couple of test posts, just start with a clean sheet on this one.

Bulletin Board

Installed a bulletin board on the web site.
Looked at both yabb and php. Over all found php worked better. Currently running v2.023. This is the one set up for automatic install from my web host.

Will now look at upgrading to the current version3 from php web site.

All seems to be working ok, set up a few groups, wait and see if I get any posts in them.

It's Saturday

The upgrades to the website are progressing at a steady rate. Current area of attention is the music section.
Its looking like its going to be a cool and damp weekend. Hopefully get quite a bit done on the site anyway.

Just ordered the 4 X relay board for the PIC development system. Should be here by Monday or Tuesday. Just coded a simple test program for it using flowcode. Single relay selection from the numeric keypad, or all 4 on or off.
Simulation runs ok so now test it on the board using LED board on Port C in place of the relay board.

Folkwaves

Its official, summers over for the year :(
Its another wet evening. Anyway, sat listening to folkwaves on the radio. Two hours of good music.

Must see if I can tweek the css codes for this blog site and set it just as I want it to look.

Second Post

Another dull grey summer Sunday morning.
Added another software application to the download page.
Next job is to get some photos of electronics projects uploaded to the electronics pages.

First Post

This is the first post in this new blogger site