Al’s WebLog

Given the density of distilleries on Islay (and the closeness of Jura) it seemed silly not to take the bike with me when I was up there last week. I guess you could say its like munro bagging, but with distilleries. All in all it was about 130miles of riding, on road, but the big ‘ol Maxxis were handy given the general lack of road quality! I’m pleased to say the 456 was great and survived its first proper trip (and only its 3rd, and 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th rides) perfectly

My trusty Santa Cruz Heckler is almost 5 years old. Its seen a few changes in that time, primarily a change from a DUC32 to a Pike, but on the whole its been a great bike I enjoy riding. About a year ago I flirted with a Chameleon frame instead, but for various reasons, primarily trying to make it do to many things, I just didn’t get on with it, so it went and the Heckler stuck around. Since then I’ve been pondering a new Heckler, looking out for something else with a bouncy back end and generally thinking that actually the Heckler is great so why change it.

Fresh out of the box, looking quite lovely in blue. The new 456.

So then, why is it that there is a new On-One 456 frame sat next to me as I type this? Well, itchy feet really. Bob swapped her Yeti DJ for a Cotic Soul a month or so back and it got me thinking about trying a hard tail again. I’d been following Brant Richards’ new ventures too, and his Blue Pig made a lot of sense, and if it wasn’t for it not being available and being twice the price of the 456 (£55 cheaper these days than when I last looked is the 456! Cracking value!) I’d have had one of them. But, at 125 quid and just coming back into stock, I kinda half impulse, half plan purchased the 456. At the price if it doesn’t work it won’t break the bank. At 5.8lbs it won’t save me much weight, but that’s not the plan. The plan is to try something new, have a new riding experience, get back to more XC riding… we’ll see. Hopefully she’ll be built up by the weekend (just swapping everything over from the Heckler) and I can take her for a spin.

When the hard disk in your cheapy PBR appears to play up, most people, I suspect, would select teh format option and hope for the best. Oddly, I’m not most people So, armed with some info from a random website I cracked open my Digihome PVR80 and pulled out the misbehaving disk. As the disk is ext2 I figured I’d hock i up to my Linux box, so I stuck the liberated drive into a USB2 caddy and connected it to the box. Two partitions on the disk, one small (~200MB) which seems to have some indexing file on, and one large (~78GB) which should have the data on. I say should, because despite my best efforts with e2fsck and e2salvage the partition just will not mount. xxd show the data is there and the inodes in about the right places, but nope, nothing works. So, I install the ext2 extention for my mac and plug the drive in, cue Mac crashing in a new and interesting way…

Weird crash screen when ext2 drive connected

At this point I kind of figured the drive was fubar and I should just call it a day. But then I remembered that random link and it mentioning DiskInternal’s Linux Reader, so I fired up my Netbook, installed the software and connected the drive. Success!

The files for the videos are stored one directory per show, with the data in 188MB chucks of .trp file. VLC wouldn’t play them, so I downloaded a trial of iSkySift Video Converter for my Mac and pointed it at two .trp files that I’d pulled off the disk so far (copying the .trp files takes ages, I assume that the Linux Reader software isn’t slow and its rather that the disk is knackered, but its taking about 30mins per 188MB file to copy them). The results were good, taking about 20mins per .trp file to convert to mpeg4 for the AppleTV, so I bought license.

As of now I’ve recovered 38.2GB of trp files from the disk and it’ll take about 3 days to convert them all to mpeg4… but I have them Now to try reformatting the disk and hoping thr PVR works once more.

An evening of little updates is quite rewarding. Things like sorting the cert on my IMAP server so it’s not expired and now works properly on my iPhone, plus moving this here blog to WP 2.7(.1). You’d think as a techie type I’d keep my own box up to date..

The little Advent 4211 is chugging along nicely. Its never going to be a day-to-day usable machine, but for a small, light, portable thingie its fine. I chucked another gigabyte of RAM in it ‘cos it was 8quid, can’t say I have noticed any difference to be honest. Maybe I will if I Hackintosh it, which I am tempted to do at some point.

The trackpad has been made usable by a new driver I found on some forum somewhere, that enables you to disable tap-to-click. I still do not like the one button for two buttons thing and I see that someone has hacked it into two butons now which is cool. I’m not sure I can be arsed to replace the trackpad itself with an aftermarket Synaptics one, though it is tempting.

Overall, I’m quite happy with it (but I need tethering for my iPhone to go with it…)

So it’s the second Sunday in November and I have just been eating Xmas (there is no Christ left in it these days) pudding and brandy butter. True enough I am usually the first to lambast the ever earlier starting of the commercial festive period, but as this was in the name of charity, I felt I had to partake in the testing of the pudding. I may well end but burning in my own damnation now…

So I joined the masses and now have a Jesus phone. It’s more toy than phone really. We’ll see how it goes.

Quite how I’m not sure, but I passed my motorcycle test yesterday (DAS, Direct Access) with only 1 minor. Scarily I can now go and ride any motorcycle I want on a public road. Thankfully for my own safety and that of others I was quite scared enough on a Suzuki GS500 at 70mph and I have no desire to own a sports bike. Indeed, I’m not sure why I need a motorbike at all, as I work at home and you can’t stick a mountain bike on a motorbike… Still, its good fun

I’d been thinking about getting a “netbook” since the original Asus 701 was released, but having tried that there was no way my fat fingers were going to manage using it. The whole market has expanded recently and I tried the Merida thingie (another MSI Wind clone)  in Sainsburys the other day and it seemed pretty good. Sadly though, it had no bluetooth so I didn’t buy it. Looking online threw up that PC World sold the Advent 4211, same thing but with bluetooth and a higher spec webcam, for 20quid less – 70quid less than the equivalent MSI Wind. I happened to be driving past a PC World on Wednesday afternoon so I stopped in and bought one (that experience is worth a posting of its own…).

I have no idea what the ULCPC bit means but it comes with XP, which works much like XP does. Its been bastardised by “The Tech Guys” but I’ve not really seen how other than the restore partition and the pointless Advent manual that is for desktop PCs and so was swiftly deleted.

The hardware itself is pretty nice. Its a full spec MSI Wind (bluetooth, 802.11n, Atom 1.6Ghz, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, 10.1 LED screen) but with Advent written on the hood and in silver and black. The first thing that I noticed though, and so have others by the looks of Google, is that the trackpad sucks. You can not disable tap clicking (which I always do on laptops ‘cos I hate it) and consequently I keep mis-clicking and often find the curser darting about. The buttons too are a but poor, smal and  because its one bar, pivoted in the middle, hard to click. Its better with time, but I feel a mod is needed.

Otherwise the little netbook rocks. Its pretty nippy for general internet browsing and Putty work (which is all I do when out and about). The bluetooth talks to my N95 so I can dial-up with 3G. The battery (a titchy 2200mA thing) seems to last for about 2 hours and the charger is pretty small for carrying about too. The keyboard, though small, is quite usable and is better after a few days use (the , . and / keys are really to small, but hey). The screen is gorgeous and despite being small is really nice to use.

If I was picking fault, aside from the trackpad, I’d say it is weghted badly so tends to rock back when the screen is open and that the power cord connector could be higher up the side (sit the 4211 on your lap and you find it pushing the cord up, which isn’t good for it).

I may stick Ubuntu on it too, but to be honest XP is behaving pretty well for me. All in all, I’m pretty pleased thus far with Advent 4211 and hopefully time will be favourable to it. We’ll see.

I have decided that anyone using IE6 is a ludite and doesn’t deserve to be able to enjoy things as I mean them to be seen As such i have decided to not bother putting in hacks to make IE6 work with transparent PNGs. Sorry IE6 user, whoever you are. I also need to go play with WordPress 2.6 I suppose too.