David Morris – brassedoff.net

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!