David Morris - brassedoff.net

No, it’s not a green or environmental post. It’s a techie post. I’ve been exchanging tweets recently with my ISP over their record bandwidth usage lately. The cause of these records? Tennis. Well, indirectly, tennis. In actual fact, BBC iPlayer. The Murray quarter final match yesterday afternoon accounted for a massize 25% of Plusnet’s bandwidth at something like 1.8Gb/s. It’s probably a good job they brought another 155Mb pipe on recently.

There’s a lot of discussion going off in the press at the moment about who should pay. Some advocate pushing charges back to the content provider, but they’re arguing that they’ve paid their whack in getting their server farm connected to the Internet in the first place with the necessary high capacity pipes.

As we look more to Internet delivered services, this argument is going to rumble on and on and users like thee ‘n’ me are going to want to make sure we’re using an ISP that can make the necessary investments in bandwidth to ensure consistent delivery of service. The situation is only going to get worse. Virgin will sell you a 50Mb fibre connection to home. Plusnet and others are trialling or have already rolled out ADSL2+ with up to 20Mb on copper.

Is, therefore, the current charging model the right one moving forward? Commentators more skilled than me will probably be having that argument for years to come. In the meantime, I’ll be catching up with TopGear from the weekend tonight on iPlayer and I hope there’s no tennis on to pinch the bandwidth!

We decided to cook breakfast al-fresco again this morning. Daniel’s been experimenting taking video with his digital camera, and yesterday we were playing about with iVideo on my Macbook. Putting the three together, I decided to have a go at editing and uploading a video direct in to YouTube from iMovie.

The corresponding work of video art is here.

Ok, it’s been over a month since I last blogged and this is only a quick update, but this article on the BBC Magazine site struck a chord with me. Sorry it’s a bit morbid.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8106747.stm

Cycling in to work this morning, two  things noted to ring Sheffield StreetForce about.

First, just off the Parkway roundabout on the Darnall side, a dirty great pothold that’s appeared in the last few days, aout 10cm deep, pretty much on the line I’d take around and off the roundabout. It’s of a size that if hit by a cyclist, would probably unseat them.

Secondly, in Attercliffe, a lorry has shed a load of small steel turnings on the road. These are the sort that really rip in to bike tyres.

Sheffield was supposed to have a large amount of money for road repairs, and several roads have been resurfaced recently, but many of the roads I have to cycle on regularly as part of my commute to and from work are in an absolutely disgraceful state of repair. They’re bad enough for car drivers - my Mini Cooper S rattles and bangs over them, but try them on a push bike if you really want to get closer to nature.

Last week, I was riding my mountain bike to work. It’s got hydraulically damped front forks (hard tail) and it’s noticeably more comfortable over some of the roads than my hybrid commuting bike is. I’ll stick with the commuting bike though because it’s got a pannier rack and full mudguards.

Horses for courses I suppose, but if the roads get much worse, it might prompt a rethink.

Despite the weather being pretty dire this weekend, I decided to go out for a walk yesterday afternoon. It’s the Canal Festival next week and I reckoned there might be a few boats moving up to Kiveton.

There wasn’t an awful lot of traffic, but I managed to pick the best spell of weather over the weekend. It was raining before I went, and it tipped it down as I drove home, but whilst I was out, the sun shone. Something about shining on the righteous?

Needless to say, I’d got my camera with me and put it to good use. There’s a selection of the photos I took here. There are a couple in that set from last year, but the majority are from yesterday.

I’ve been struggling for a while with my Macbook, trying to get TimeMachine backups working to my home-built Linux NAS. I’d got AFP working on the NAS, I’d gone through the motions of creating a sparsebundle on the local Mac and moving it on to the NAS. I’d done the

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

…and it still didn’t work. After digging around the blogosphere, I found a post which suggested that the first backup might have to be done over wired LAN rather than wireless. I’d already read that the MAC address in the sparsebundle file had to be the primary MAC address on the machine (i.e. the ethernet MAC address), so I suppose there was a modicum of sense in there. Hopefully, once the first backup has completed, the Macbook will know what the TimeMachine file is called and know where to find it.

Currently therefore, my Macbook is sat on my desk shifting 22.5GB of data to my NAS. Fortunately, there’s 600+GB free on there!

Bank Holiday Weekend. the usual drill is to avoid the tourist hotspots and find something local to do. This weekend was no exception. Fortunately, there’s usually something going off around Sheffield. Today was the first meeting of the BRISCA stock car racing at Owlerton Stadium in Sheffield (promoted by Startrax). Also home to the speedway and dog racing, it’s a tight shale track meaning plenty of thrills and spills for the spectators (and I daresay a few for the drivers as well). As well as Formula 1 stocks, we had Mini stocks and UK modified (whatever they are). I think the modifieds have something like 1100cc motorbike engines in them. Not as exciting from a spectator point of view as the big lads, but they don’t half shift!

The image was one I grabbed on my Blackberry and sent to Twitter so it’s not particularly brilliant quality; I didn’t take the big camera for a change.

There’s also a race meet next Sunday, starting at noon. I can heartily recommend it. We won’t be there. We’re off to Center Parcs for the weekend. It’s going to be a new experience for us because it’s the first time we;ve taken Pebble the Wonder Dog along with us.

On the subject of homebrew, I started off two Youngs fruit wine kits on Saturday - one apple and one Black cherry. The apple reviews better than the black cherry, but I’ll report back my findings in three to four weeksn when they’re as ready for drinking as they’re likely to get in this house!

Vandals have been playing nicely over the last week or so at Pebley Reservoir. They’ve jammed the draw-off valve for the reservoir in the open position. Consequently, most of the water has run out in to Harthill Reservoir immediately below. Seeing as that’s full, the overspill has to run in to the canal at Kiveton.

Whilst Harthill can support the canal for several weeks and British Waterways reckon the repairs will be effected by the end of April (or early May by now I’d guess), unless we get some serious rain to fill up Pebley, it could end up being a curtailed cruising season especially on the higher reaches of the canal above Turnerwood. (Sorry about the first photo!)

I decided to cycle to work today. I’m quite pleased with myself as a consequence. It’s a round trip of 22 miles which took roughly an hour each way. Certainly not as quick as in the car, but probably quicker that public transport and I didn’t (much) contribute to traffic problems!

My route in took me on the Trans-Pennine trail towards Sothall from Killamarsh, then into Beighton, again on the TPT.

Once clear of Beighton, I picked up another stretch of the TPT across Woodhouse Wetlands a large flat area through which the Rover Rother runs. It was this area that was flooded in 2007 when the flood regulator at Woodhouse Mill was closed to hold back the flood waters from causing more damage to Catcliffe. Cycling through now, you’d never tell though. This trail finishes, for my purposes, at the B6200 (formerly A57) at Fence. From there, it’s all road work, to Handsworth, through Darnall and finishing in Attercliffe. Ideal weather conditions today, and a trip I’ll probably be making a few times throughout the course of the Spring and Summer.

Not much to write about other than the fact we’ve had a great weekend.

It started off pretty badly with the prospect of spending the weekend car juggling because a week after its service, the clutch on Mrs Woolforbrain’s car gave up the ghost after 112,000 miles. I’d limped it to the garage last Thursday and ended up cycling all the way home (that’s a different and equally pleasant story), and wasn’t expecting seeing it back for a week because the garage was fuly booked. This is a local indie garage, not a main dealer. The main dealer wanted £560 for the replacement; our local indie was going to be around £250. No contest really.

Anyway, around noon on Saturday, my mobile chirped. It was the garage owner saying the car was done. One of his guys had stopped until 9pm the previous night to get the job done. Above and beyond the call of duty?! So, we were back to being a two car family.

Today, with the sun shining, Daniel and myself paid a visit to the leisure centre in Staveley for a swim. It’s been a few weeks since we last went. I was able to enroll Daniel in the free swimming for U16s programme which Chesterfield have bought in to. NE Derbyshire are also in this scheme, but strangely not Liberal Democrat-run Sheffield. Not that it matters much because we generally only swim at Staveley anyway!

This afternoon, we’ve been out to our favourite ice cream farm at Bothamsall - Thaymar. It’s not the first time we’ve been. It’s a long way to go for an ice cream, but it is nice! I had a double cone - elderlower / gooseberry and mint chocolate chip. Caroline had the elderflower and gooseberry and wild cherry and the young master had a couple of chocolate and toffee-related choices.

When we got back, we hit the garden again. We’ve planted lettuce and mange tout this weekend, and last weekend, I planted a load of onions. Caroline’s also planted some potatoes in planters and we’ve been discussing where to put tomatoes and chillis. It’s going to be a nice harvest if we get the weather.

Back to school for Daniel tomorrow and a busy week for me. I’ve got a meeting with the new Scimitars owners on Wednesday to discuss the web site, a canal festival meeting on Thursday, a band concert on Friday, boating on Saturday (trips for local dignitaries to mark the unveiling of some new interpretation plaques at Kiveton and a trip there and back for Dan’s scout troup), a day off on Sunday and boating again on Monday as we take the boat back home.

No doubt there’ll be ample opportunity for photographs. Watch this space.

On a different issue, I’m still loving the new Macbook. I’m getting to the stage of finding my way around it now, helped in no small part by Chuck Toporek’s Mac OS X Leopard Pocket Guide (O’Reilly).