Monday, October 29, 2012

October 28th

Vic was at an SPCA thing, so I wasted the day playing Warcraft, tinkering with the case for the Raspberry Pi and cutting the grass.

When she got back, we watched the ho-hum race from Phillip Island.  At least the poison dwarf crashed, throwing away his best chance of a MotoGP world championship (assuming Lorenzo crashed out a race, of course) yet.

October 27th

I played some Warcraft in the morning and got my Death Kniggit up to level 87.

We went out and got some supplies for the van house battery project, and had lunch, then went home and tinkered around with that for a while.

In the late afternoon, I went to the airfield and took the Flightstar out for a few circuits.  We were using 33 for some reason (it was calm, so we should have been using 15), and the high point of the day was an experimental jet arriving in the circuit - he called 12 miles out, and was 5 miles out by the time I'd flown the length of the runway :o)

I'm not sure, but from the circuit, it looked like one of these.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

October 24th

Just screwing around on the Google, I found that Tilly is on street view :o)

October 22nd

After threatening to rain all day yesterday, if finally rained today - almost 1" according to the weather station.  And the side of the house didn't flood, which is good news.

Monday, October 22, 2012

October 21st

I did a little hacking with stuff in the garage, then we watched the (spoilers - shortened) MotoGP race from Sepang.

We went and had a late lunch / early dinner with Vince, then came home and carried on doing little things and playing Warcraft.  I got my Death Kniggit up to level 86.

October 20th

It's been 3,000 miles again already, so I changed the oil on the Jeep.  Other than overfilling the empty oil bottles with the used oil, I managed to do it without making too much mess.

I played a little Warcraft, getting my Death Kniggit up to level 86, and Dave and I ran through Ahn'Qiraj like it was nothing :o)

I did a little fiddling with the case for the Raspberry Pi, but was limited by using cordless tools - the 7.2v battery on my little reciprocating saw doesn't last very long at all.

In the evening, we went and picked up some parts I need, and looked at the new iPods Touch and Nano.  There are a pile of things that I'm playing with in my head at the moment, but my MP3 player is going to need replacing pretty soon, as the screen's blank more often than it's showing anything.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

October 17th

Vic went to Autozone in the morning, to see what the state of the van's battery is.  It's dead, Jim.  It's OK, I'm not going to replace it just yet, as I have a cunning plan.

In the evening we watched The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, an excellent character drama.

October 16th

Tilly and I were part way through our evening constitutional when Vic drove past on her way home - at this point Tilly decided she wanted to ride in the Jeep, so we got a ride home.  Silly girl.

After Tilly'd had her supper, we went out and dropped the van's battery at Autozone.  As expected, it was too low to test, so they were going to leave it on their honking great charger to see if they could get it to 12 volts.

October 14th

We watched Felix Baumgartner's jump, then we went to lunch with Vince.  We dinked about the house for a while, then went to dinner with Fred and Marsha, who are just back from their Pacific Northwest trip with their fifth wheel.

Sunday, October 14, 2012

October 13th

I figured that this weekend's for trying to get done some tasks that have been hanging around for a while, so I got the fridge back in the van, only to discover that the stereo's stopped working.  It's unrelated - I think it's a battery problem, as the auxiliary battery is below 12 volts.  Of course, I swapped in the CD changer that will one day, maybe, get into the Jeep (I need to figure out where to put it) and that didn't work either, so I'm pretty sure that the problem's not the stereo itself.  Hopefully some time on charge will fix that.

I cut some polycarbonate sheet into blocks to (hopefully) make the case for the Raspberry Pi.  Of course, then I got paged for work, and spent some time looking into a problem at a customer site.

I spent some quality time trying to cover the filler on the Wallace and Gromit kit.  I've put many layers of paint over it with the airbrush, but it's almost like it sucks up paint.  We'll see how awful it looks when it's dried.

In the evening, we watched the new Snow White movie, where, as expected, the CGI out-acted Kristen Stewart.

Friday, October 12, 2012

October 11th

Rather than watch the Vice-presidential debate (which sounds like it was a ways more interesting than I'd expected), we watched "The Avengers" and really enjoyed it.

October 10th

I got up ridonculously early and rode to San Francisco to spend the day in the office.  Looking at the weather, I think that any more trips this year will be in the van :o)

October 9th

In Warcraft, I managed to get my warrior to level 90.  Now it's just a continuing quest for better gear :o)

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

October 8th

I've been playing with the Raspberry Pi, and it looks like the OS I have doesn't like to run the WView software.  I'm thinking I'll look at a prebuilt OS package that seems to work, but it wants a 16Gb card, and I only have 32Gb and 8Gb cards.  Hopefully I can install it on a 32Gb memory stick, then shrink it to 8Gb and dd it to a new card, but that sounds like a lot of work.  We'll see.

October 7th

Vic was at Barktoberfest, so I pottered around at home for a while before throwing Tilly in the van and heading to the airfield to pick up some junk.  We stopped by the wasteland outside the airfield and I threw the Aerobie for her until she hid under the van to stop me throwing it any more, then we drove down the new I-65 Lincoln bypass to see Vic at the show.

After we got tired / bored, we headed home so Tilly could sleep while I cut the grass.

In the evening we met Vince for dinner.

October 6th

Vic was getting herself ready for an SPCA event, so I wasted the day playing Warcraft, getting my warrior up to level 89 :o)

I played with making a case for the Raspberry Pi, but lost interest when the wood I was working with cracked through.

Friday, October 5, 2012

October 4th

So, I started playing with the Raspberry Pi with a different 8Gb card, and it installed and booted just fine.  The root partition extend was quick and painless, and then the thing worked with the Edimax Wifi dongle straight out of the box - no extra software required.  Of course, this was fun to configure as there are 2 USB ports, so I was having to switch off between the mouse and keyboard and WiFi dongle.  Now it's all set up so I can just plug it in and SSH to it over my network.  I've installed Apache and PHP, and the next step is to get the WView software compiled to run on Wheezy.  Joy :o)

Thursday, October 4, 2012

October 3rd

I started playing with the Raspberry Pi again, formatting and rebuilding the SD card before booting the thing up.  After several tries, it's still throwing card errors from time to time, so I'm going to try again with another SD card - sadly the faster cards (this one is class 8, and the other one I'm going to try is a class 10) have been reported as causing problems, and I don't have anything slower at the moment.

October 2nd

Dad brought me over a Raspberry Pi, so I started playing with it.  Hooked up to a USB charger and keyboard, and an HDMI link into a monitor, I tried booting it up from an 8GB SD card I'd installed Wheezy on.  Now, the documentation shows that Wheezy is designed for a 4Gb card, so I'd expanded that to fill the card, which seemed like a good idea until the thing couldn't build a swap partition.  Doh.

I rebuilt the card (formatting it in my camera, as Windows only sees the ~60Mb boot partition), and didn't expand it.  I figured I'd expand it once I'd got the thing running.  One of the options in the first boot script is to expand the root partition to fill the card.  Doy.  I did that (it took ages on the ARM processor), then remounted the card on my Linux box to copy the WiFi card drivers and suchlike to it.  It then threw a card error when rebooting in the Pi.  Doy.  I assumed that this was due to Ubuntu's odd thing where it doesn't sync the card when you write to it, but when it bloody well feels like it.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

October 1st

A new month, so here are the stats:

Power billed
Power generated