We’re taking off for a bit more than a couple of weeks, heading down to Valencia in the car to look up a cousin of mine and do some sightseeing in France and Spain at the same time. Depending on whether we find convenient free access to WLANs while we are traveling, we may or may not be posting here in the intervening time. See you soon, however!
Palisades at the side of the pond
The last couple of years, we’ve had problems during heavy rain that our pond overflows into the neighbour’s garden downhill from us. Obviously they weren’t terribly pleased to have their large wooden shed occasionally under water, and as the side of the pond is held back by wooden palisades which have been in place since the house was built about 20 years ago, we were quite worried that they might be rotting and that one day our pond might end up completely in their garden.
In the photo above you can see the pipe we connected to a heavy-duty pump to keep the pond under control when it rained a lot – it looks as if we’re pumping into the neighbour’s garden; which we are, but the pipe goes straight into an underground stream and doesn’t flood their garden.
Read the rest of this entry »I have been tearing my hair out, fighting technology, at home this last week.
Firstly, I have been trying to get a decent wireless LAN connection from the office to the cellar. The problem here is that the floors in our house are made of reinforced concrete (and, I suspect so are at least some of the cellar walls). We also have stairs in the stairwell which have metal trays containing large tiles. The result is, that the signal is fairly weak when it arrives in the cellar room where we want to use it.
Adding a repeater on the ground floor only makes a marginal improvement. I bought a couple of PowerLAN converters from MSI, which allow you to treat the electric wiring in the house as an ethernet cable, but each floor seems to be on different electrical phase, which means that although I get a great signal from any power socket to any other socket on one floor, we don’t get any signal at all between sockets on different floors. Grr!
For the moment that project (being driven by the desire to get a Squeezebox Duet working in the cellar) is on hold while I scratch my head. It is not helped by the fact that at the moment, the user forums for the Sqeezebox Duet indicate that the controller loses the WLAN signal at irregular intervals…
The other problem area is Mac OS X 10.5.2 – I had been happily experimenting with using Apple’s Time Machine to ensure completely up to date backups (in addition to making a full backup using Retrospect every two weeks). And it was working very well, I even used it to restore some accidently deleted data. But a couple of days ago my Mac Mini started having a kernel panic every time that Time Machine started running. Some searching on MacFixit quickly threw up the probable cause – a corrupt sparse image containing the Mac Mini’s backups on the Time Machine drive. And sure enough, repairing the image using Disk Utility shows a great number of errors, starting with these ones:
Unfortunately, technology has also defeated me here – after running most of the night, the Disk Utility crashed while fixing the errors and now crashes every time it tries to continue processing the file. I will have to wait for Apple to fix this one, or delete my backups and start again.
Update (2008-05-15):
I discovered I could mount the partially repaired sparse image and then deleted the last backup made by Time Machine. After doing this, Time Machine is working again. I’ll feel much more secure, however, if Apple issues a fix to the problem to stop it happening again.
At last, after the recent snow, it has warmed up and some of the foreign birds have arrived from warmer climes. These ducks arrived today and are making themselves useful eating the duckweed in our pond.
The view this morning at 7:20. It has been snowing most of the night, and the forecast is for more to come today. It should warm up a bit tomorrow, so I hope the winter might have gone after the weekend!
Ruth is in the UK at the moment for a few days, so these pictures are mainly to show her how much snow (and sleet and hail) we have had since she left on Sunday!
And it was good job she flew into Heathrow and not London City (with its short runway surrounded by water and buildings), me thinks:
(YouTube Link via vowe dot net)
We visited a friend in Rostock from Thursday until today. It is a really lovely town – it has been nicely renovated since the reunification in the early 1990’s and is a very pleasant place to live. The historical building style uses bricks very effectively – and many of the modern buildings in the town center are also brick-built and blend in with the traditional buildings, as you can see in the case of the building on the left below.
One of the trademarks of Rostock is Warnemünde Lighthouse on the promenade (below), built in 1897. Next to it you can see on the left, a model of the sun, which is part of a scale representation of the solar system, which stretches about 6 km down the beach and includes plaques for each planet, showing the planet to the same scale and at the scale distance from the sun.
Last week we had a bill from a company for over 1500 Euro for the use of a small (approx. 120×80 pixel) image that they claim they own the copyright for. We’ve engaged a lawyer specialized on IP (intellectual property) rights to defend our corner. IP disputes are NOT covered by legal insurance (Rechtsschutzversicherung) in Germany, by the way. No insurance company will cover it because of the potential size of the risk.
The use of the picture was not on this site, but I’ve taken the invoice as a sign that I need to be more careful than I have been about using images from, for example, news sites when I link to a story that I comment on here. I can’t afford unsolicited 4-figure invoices and the associated legal fees. I’ve removed some pictures taken from other sites that I have linked to, and removed a few postings altogether.
This is amazingly good value for money. I bought a Fujitsu Siemens SnapScan S510M this week.
The scanner is small, as you can see in the photo, where it is sitting next to the Mac Mini. When it’s not in use, it’s even smaller as the sheet feeder and the paper tray for the scanned documents both fold up flush with the body of the scanner. Folding it up switches it off, conversely unfolding it switches it back on.
It scans 18 pages / minute, double-sided at 300 pixels/inch, cost me 377 Euro and generates documents in JPEG or PDF format. It comes with Abbyy Fineprint, which means that you can perform OCR (optical character recognition) on the scanned documents as part of the scan workflow.
The really beautiful thing is that the software for the scanner automatically recognizes whether documents are in color or black and white and switches to the appropriate scanning mode automatically, and also recognizes whether paper is printed on one or both sides. Blank sides can be automatically deleted from the scanned document.
On my limited experience and experimenting of the last couple of days, I can only say that I wish I’d bought this a long time ago – it saves so much time compared to scanning manually (using a Canon Lide 80) or using a Brother multi-function scanner/printer/fax, which could only handle single-sided documents and was much slower than the ScanSnap.
If you don’t have a Mac, you can still enjoy the advantages of the ScanSnap – there is a model available without an “M” at the end of the name which is designed to work PCs. In fact, the PC model is somewhat cheaper, and can be upgraded free of charge to work with the Mac by following these steps.
We went for a walk down the hill this afternoon. The road was blocked and this was the scene on at the side of the road.