David Morris – brassedoff.net

I’d promised to take Daniel to York to visit the National Railway Museum yesterday, so we persuaded Caroline to drop us off in the centre of Sheffield at the railway station so we could let the train take the strain. I must admin, the new departure board at Sheffield really looks the business.We headed for the Virgin through service to York from platform two which arrived more or less on time. It’s funny when trains arrive that passengers seem to come out of the woodwork, and this was no exception. TO cut a long story short, the train was full beyond capacity and we couldn’t find a seat. Daniel, when offered the chance of standing all the way to York declined, so before the train left Sheffield, we were back on the platform. There was a slow to Adwick leaving in around 20 minutes – a two car unit, so we took that to Doncaster. that was pretty full as well.

When we got to Doncaster, there was a 40 minute delay before the next Virgin service that would get us to York which was probably the one after the one we got off from Sheffield. Alternatively, there was a GNER service three minutes later. Seeing as we hadn’t travelled on a GNER service before, we decided to take that (our ticket was ‘any permitted route’).

I was a bit disappointed that it was a 125 set rather than electric because I’d never traveller on an electrically hauled service before, but I hid my disappointment :-)

I did get a couple of pictures whilst at Doncaster. There was a Freightliner Class 66 on a long container train…
…and a newly painted DRS Class 37 outside the works…

When we got to York and off the back of the station to to Museum, my heart fell when I saw the tell-tale yellow posters. We’d only hit on a Thomas Day and the museum was snided. Daniel’s starting to grow out of Thomas now. The number of people heading down into the old goods yard where the Royal Train collection is was a fair indication that most of the Tank Engine action was likely to be down there, so after paying a quick, err, comfort break, we headed back for the Great Hall and spent a couple of hours mosying around there. We called in at The Works to see Flying Scotsman. I was surprised to see it in pieces – boiler off, wheels off, cab off, tender possibly in the museum proper, presumably undergoing a major overhault to get it ready for the summer.

The trip home was less eventful. We got on a Virgin Voyager at York with loads of spare seats and had a pleasant trip back. From Sheffield, we walked up to the tram stop above the station and got the tram back to Halfway. It was the newly repainted tram looking very smart in red / orange and blue and it sort of rounded the day off nicely.

We also went to the Arena to see if the Steelers could overcome a three goal deficit after the first leg of the Knockout Cup semi against Cardiff. It was a bit of a nailbiter. Sheffield scored three, Cardiff got one, Sheffield equalised again, Cardiff scored a second and Sheffield levelled it again (on aggregate) and by the time 60 minutes had elapsed, we were equal and in to penalties. A tense finish, but Steelers finished up 2-1 on penalties, Lehman practically taking out the last Cardiff penalty taker. It turned out to be an exciting game enjoyed by me, Daniel and Mark who joined us at the last minute.

On the Gardencam page, I’d mentioned about wanting to capture a daily set of jpegs from the camera and convert them to a video to give a ‘day in the life of…’ movie.Several people including Robert Shilston suggested using mencoder, part of the MPlayer project. I got MPlayer installed on my SuSE box (that’s another story altogether), and went through the motions of getting mencoder to create the video. If you look at the Gardencam page, you’ll see I’m using a DLink DCS-900 network camera.

Numerous people were successfully doing the same thing I wanted to do, but whenever I did it, all I got was a repeating version of the first frame with some weird artefacts at the top of the video. I’d dug around in several places, but been unable to find anyone else with the same problem until last night. After Robert emailed me asking how I was getting on, I decided to have a look on the mencoder support mailing list. About five pages down, I came across a guy with the same problem, and get this, using almost the same camera. He was using the wireless version, but I was prepared to bet that the web server firmware was the same on both cameras.

Taking his suggestion, I processed all the time-lapse jpegs through ImageMagick’s convert utility, using a little shell script to move them into a different directory. Running mencoder on the new directory and lo and behold, a fully working video.

Apparently, this was fixed in a CVS version of mencoder, but I thought I’d document this just in case anyone else encounters the same problem.

Thanks to Robert and everyone else who put forwarded suggestions.

I bought a new TV card for my Linux box yesterday – a Hauppauge Nova-T PCI DVB card. (For the acronym-averse, that means it’s capable of receiving digital terrestrial broadcasts). I really wanted it for the better range of radio stations available on digital compared with analogue FM and as such, it was destinated to replace the old WinTV card that I’ve been using for years.I assumed that the Linux setup would be a breeze. How wrong I was.SuSE take a lot of the mpeg video, mp3, and other associated stuff out of their distribution to avoid potential copyright issues. The problem then becomes where to get all the bits from. Fortunately, it’s a bit easier than obtaining XBox binaries :-)Several postings point to The Jem Report as a good source of information for “uncrippling” OpenSuse 10.0, and I’d concur. Jem Matzen’s guide just about hits all the necessary bits needed to get a system up and working. So, now, I’ve get my DVB card working, and happily recording stuff for the Winter Olympics from Italy.