I’ve had a bit of a rubbish weekend from a model flying point of view, it seems every time I go to fly events are conspiring to stop me. Firstly on Friday I managed to get some time in the afternoon to pop up to Bratton Camp, I was delayed by discovering a car fire on the way, then reporting it to the fire brigade and having to wait around until they turned up so I could give them a statement. Then I had to return home because I’d forgotten to take the pram out of the car, gah! When I finally got up to the hill I discovered 8 (!) paragliders in the air at once. When there are 1 or 2 of them up there, I’m happy to fly alongside them and aim for the gaps, but with so many up there at once I didn’t want to take the chance.

On Saturday morning I popped up the hill again nice and early, only to be greeted by what I think is the thickest fog I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t see the other side of the road from the car park! Oh well, maybe Sunday will be better.

The video below is of the Paraglider’s who were monopolising the hill on Friday afternoon.

[]({{ “/uploads/2013/02/url.jpeg” | prepend: site.baseurl }})Its been a while since I posted anything about the aquarium, I bought it in January of 2012, so we’ve had it for over a year. I’ve no idea how that year went so quick! We have a good mix of fish in there now, the four original Zebra Danios are still with us, joined bya pair of orange Mollys, a pair of black Mollys and a single orange and a white one. In addition the Siamese Fighting Fish is still doing well.  I have noticed of late that with 11 fish in the tank it needs cleaning more regularly than it used to. Speaking to a couple of experienced fish keepers I know they both recommended upgrading the in-tank filter which was supplied with the original starter kit, and if buying a new filter then it was wise to go with an external one, rather than an internal one like we have.

After visiting a couple of local fish shops I settled on a Fluval 206 external filter which is capable of filtering a tank of 200 litres. This is far more than I need for our little 50l tank, but I hope to get a bigger tank after we move so this should future proof me somewhat.

I seem to have a inherent disklike of Debian and the feeling appears to be mutual. It never makes my life easy. Just this morning I needed to install it on a Dell R210 rather than our usual Centos builds. The server is 15 odd miles away, so I took my standard route of PXE installing. After downloading the netboot.tar.gz and dropping the right files in place on my netboot server, I booted the R210 and began the install. Only a couple of screens in I was presented with this most unhelpful message. So I have to drive 30 miles to plug a usb stick into this machine to continue? That isn’t acceptable imho.

In my case it was the non free firmware for the Broadcom ethernet cards in the machine, I needed this package.

Turns out there is a fix. You just need to download the missing .deb, cpio it and cat it into the end of the initrd:

% mkdir /tmp/firmware
% cd /tmp/firmware
% wget http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/f/firmware-nonfree/firmware-bnx2_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb</a>
% cd /tmp
% find firmware | cpio -o | gzip -c > firmware.cpio.gz

Now cat the resultant firmware.cpio.gz onto the end of the existing initrd.gz, which for me was in /tftpboot/debian-installer/amd64/initrd.gz. So I ran this:

% cat /tmp/firmware.cpio.gz >> /tfpboot/debian-installer/amd64/initrd.gz

That will overwrite the initrd.gz without warning, so might want to take a backup of it first.

Sometime earlier last year we were given a Zoomster Racer (Broken link ~~http://www.inspirationalgroup.co.uk/inspirational-nurseries/active-play/ride-ons-/zoomster-racer/~~), like the one you see in the picture on the left. Our toddler absolutely adores it and scoots all round the house with it. There is a little box under the seat to put toys in which is obviously always full!  One day my wife suggested making him a little trailer for it so he could carry more toys around with him. The company who make it don’t seem to make a trailer, but it does have a convenient hole cut in the base board at the back, which would make it easy to attach a trailer.  Hmm, this sounds like a plan then!

I pondered what shape to make it and how to construct it for a while and then settled on the following. I took it apart - thankfully it was all screwed together - and traced the bottom and one of the side panels onto some card to use as templates. I clearly didn’t need the bits sticking up for the handles, therefore I just mirrored the side panel about its middle, so the front and the back were identical, and the same as the curve on the front of the Zoomster itself. Then I would simply get the base and the sides cut out and sort out some end bits.  You can see the card templates over on the right. Next I took them to the friendly guys in my local wood merchant, Thomerson in Crouch End. Between us we selected a nice bit of 1" thick ply for the base and some 10mm MDF for the top structure.  The guy in the shop had the idea of cutting notches in the sides and the end bits so they sort of slot together, which made things strong, and because he cut these out on his saw, much easier for me!

The two pics above show the component parts of the top and the base. The small bit above the base in the lower picture is what I’d come up with as a connector. I planned to cut two holes in this, one at each end, then using some 1" diameter dowel and some wooden cupboard door handles fashion a couple of connectors. A picture will explain it easier than I can explain it! The first pic is of the removable connector to allow him to detach the trailer from the Zoomster, as you can see I just glued the handle onto a short length of dowel. In the second pic you can see I did the same for the trailer end, but trapped the connector in place by glueing another handle on the bottom. Sorted!

Returning home I started off by gluing the four bits of the top, clamping them to ensure a good bond.

I gave this all a couple of coats of undercoat, and a couple of a nice shiny grey topcoat which I had lying around (ok, ok, it was left over from painting the front door!).

Last bit of prep was to give the base a few coats of varnish, to save me the time of waiting for one side to dry and then doing the other, I simply hung it from a nearby washing line and did it all at once. I ended up giving it four coats to ensure a good tough finish.

With the addition of some carstors from eBay, and a few screws to hold the top to the base I was finished. We even found some Thomas stickers on eBay to jazz it up a bit.

And that was it done, it was filled to the brim with Thomas trains almost immediately and has remained that way and attached to the Zoomster ever since!

I recently found an old map of the Heathrow area on Wikipedia. It shows the area as it was in the 1930’s, when the aiport was known as the Great West Aerodrome.  You can drag the slider to fade in the current map, which I nabbed from Open Street map. Producing that was the very limit of my CSS/JS knowledge, so sadly you can’t pan around it like you can with normal online maps!

You can see the maps here.

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I’m going to experiment with writing flight logs.  This will probably evolve over time as I think of things I’d like to capture.

Today I went out with the Blade 450, put four batteries through it in the snow (!). Despite being 1-2C outside the batteries performed well, giving 6 mins each and when returning home and checking they were all showing 35-40% left in them.

Mostly I was practising hovering, moving to side on hovering. I’ve wound the expo up to 40% on Aileron and Elevator, seems to help me with keeping it stable. Doing circuits I find it seems to get away with me as I turn it around to come back long the edge of the circuit, gaining speed which I have difficulty bleeding off.  Good session though!

Cell balance was as follows:

<th>
  V Max-Min
</th>

<td>
  0.03
</td>

<td>
  0.02
</td>

<td>
  0.09
</td>

<td>
  0.011
</td>

Trying out the parallel charge lead for the first time, I find one of the connectors is duff, most likely my soldering at the join. A shame I didn’t know this before I wrapped it all in heat shrink!

Back in September we spent a lovely week Glamping down in Devon at the wonderful Wood Life. They have 8 acres of woodland in the middle of a big field near the village of Kenn (Broken link ~~https://maps.google.co.uk/?ll=50.657297,-3.526182&spn=0.017711,0.045447&t=h&z=15~~). The main feature of the camp is the big (10 x 5 meter) Albion Canvas (Broken link http://www.albioncanvas.co.uk/) safari tent, which has a nice wood burner and a couple of bedrooms with proper beds! There is a gas hob and a sink with running water, which takes some of the pain of camping away, as well as a big dinning table and a sofa in a lounge area. Outside there is a toilet and shower hut, the shower being gravity fed from a tank up in the trees and heated by a small wood burning boiler.  In the middle there is a nice camp fire with logs for seating and for the kids there is a tree house, see-saw and a massive swing, hung from one of the trees. We had a great time down there, but having to light a fire in the mornings to warm the place up was a bit of a shell shock when you come from a nice house with central heating!

Below is a panorama I took of the camp which you should be able to move about with your mouse, you can see all the bits of the camp from there.

So in the UK to sell a house you need a EPC, this is a little certificate that takes some bloke 10 mins to produce, im not kidding the guy was in and out of my house in less than that. The charge seems to be anywhere from £40 right up to £100! The only bit that ends up on the property details is this bit:

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Which I doubt anybody looks at, I’m certainly not going to pass up the house of my dreams because some dude in 10 minutes considered it to be a G. And I can probably guess that single glazing and gaps around the external doors aren’t the best at keeping the warmth in.

The full version that nobody ever sees contains some useful info like that shown below. Seriously who needs this shit.

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So using the bottom estimates and assuming the savings are correct that is 38.7 years and I’m in profit, or using the top estimates that is 75.9 years and I’m quids in.

YEAH MAN, I WANT SOME OF THAT SHIT

I’ll write a cheque for 40k - Come 2088 I’ll be fucking laughing, oh yeah.

[]({{ “/uploads/2013/01/8033050444_c7cf5eb26a_o.jpg” | prepend: site.baseurl }})Back in September, Jenny won a free trip around the Yeo Valley farm. They produce a wide range of  organic dairy products, including butter, milk and a range of tasty yoghurt’s and they were inviting people to come and have a look around. We didn’t really know what to expect to be honest, but were pleasantly surprised by what we found. They have recently converted an old hotel in Blagdon down in Somerset, into a lovely office and visitor centre (Broken link ~~https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=yeo+valley+visitor+centre&hl=en&ll=51.324373,-2.721809&spn=0.002273,0.005681&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&safe=images&hq=yeo+valley+visitor+centre&hnear=London,+United+Kingdom&t=h&z=18~~), this is where we met up. Then we were taken by bus up the lanes to one of their farms, where they took us on a guided tour around some of the fields, explaining the organic process and how they look after the cattle.  We ended the day with a look around one of the milk facilities. Below is a track of the walk around the farm.

So, on our last day in Wiltshire for 2012, I had the morning to myself and lovely blue skies. Off up to Bratton Camp (Broken link https://maps.google.co.uk/?ll=51.26358,-2.147141&spn=0.015441,0.038581&t=h&z=15) I went, only to find the wind wasn’t really in the right direction and it was averaging 20mph at the lip of the hill, peaking to 28mph while I was there. Bit too windy for my Phoenix or the Weasel! So I figured I’d kill some time picking up a few Geocaches on my way back home. I map all of the Geocaches I find here, but below you can see the ones I picked up on Sunday.