| ||||||
| I think the best bit of the DWCon for me was either the Hedgehog party, where there was much dancing like a total loon, or the main hall teardown, where there wasn't, though there were Misfortune Cookies. Next time what I mostly want to be doing is More. Not going to program items, but the behind-the-scenes useful stuff. I like being useful and I love seeing the way that a bunch of random people can turn up and suddenly do Something Amazing, and do it WELL. Yes, there are some experienced people directing everything, but for the most part, the only thing the people have in common is their love of Discworld. It's the same thing that I loved about doing the Lego house, where some of the most useful people were a vet, two nurses and a driving instructor. I can't think of much more satisfying than being able to sit back and go "This is a splendid thing, and *we* did it." More and more I'm coming to believe that a passion for what you're doing, and love for the people you're doing it for, can go further towards Pulling It Off than training and experience, at least in a certain proportion of those involved. Yes, you need competent people in charge, but if you can't get volunteers to help you, then whatever it is probably isn't worth doing. | ||||||
comments: see the 11 things said or say something yourself   |
Random Wibblings
|
|||||||||||
August 31st, 2010
June 19th, 2010
| ||||||
| So, you're thinking of buying a Sat-Nav? I suggest you don't get a Garmin. If you live near London or have cause to go to the far side of London ever, I would revise this to FFS don't even THINK about Garmin. A piece of paper with instructions on is more useful. I have had no cause to contact TomTom tech support, as the unit just worked pretty much as I expected it to, but Garmin tech support are masters of answering questions you didn't ask and not answering the ones you did. Now, on to the unit itself. I don't like reviewing units without comparison, and in this case I don't have to. I have the Nuvi1300T (the T stands for Traffic), which in Halfords right now will set you back £140. I also have (because we thought it had been nicked at college but then it turned out to have fallen out of my pocket and burrowed into a pile of stuff) the TomTom One with IQ Routes. This will set you back £130, but you could then also have the one with traffic for the same price, though in-store prices may vary. When I bought the Nuvi, the TomTom without traffic was exactly the same price as the Garmin, but they've both recently been reduced. I don't have the traffic on the TomTom, so I can't comment on that, but I've had problems with the one on the Garmin. Sometimes it seems to work, sometimes it doesn't. Tech support advised me I have to mount the aeriel away from the unit along the bottom or side of my windscreen, away from metal panels, which makes me wonder what on earth they think cars are made of. I drive an austin mini, there's not much 'away' from anything. Because of this, I still find myself stuck in crawling traffic at times. At others, it does do something - it re-plans in truly bone-headed ways, without any notification it's done so. You know that 'recalculating' it yells at you when you don't go the way it told you? Yeah, it doesn't do that. The reason I advise people who need to get around near London not to get one is this: If it sees a delay on the M25, *it will send you straight through central London*. For those who have never had the misfortune of crossing central London by car, I direct you to the TopGear episode in which, I believe, the car was beaten by Public Transport, a bicycle and a boat. I've heard it said that the average speed of traffic in central london hasn't improved since Victorian times when everyone was on horses, and that seems to be about right. But only if the horses were walking everywhere. There are very few cases in which crossing central London is going to be quicker than taking the orbital, and it's much more stressful than the motorway. I've broken down on a slip road to the M25 and been run off the road by an X5 where there was no hard shoulder and that was *still* less stressful than crossing Central London. Maybe if the car had actually been on fire London might have seemed preferable. If you've never done it, imagine that you're driving through a town where all the pedestrians grew up playing Frogger and the other drivers playing Crazy Taxi. You know how certain people tell you to drive as though everyone else is out to get you? Well in London, that might well be true. The main problem I have with the way the traffic system works is this: It doesn't tell you it's doing anything. So, you plan your route and look at it, and yes, it's going M6, M40, M25, A3, nice and sensible, and so you're free to concentrate on not having your Honda Accord turned into a Honda Accordion by a left-hand-drive truck that can't see you or a right-hand-drive one that thinks there's a gap between two other trucks which is actually you. Except you get out of the way of the twat in an Audi who was sat 6" off your bumper because you were *only* doing 80 in the middle lane, and suddenly you realise you're on the M1, and when you stop at the services to find out what's going on, the planned route turns out to now be straight through Kensington and Chelsea. No problem, you think, I'll ignore it and take M25... except the slip road to get on is shut because it's 2am and they're practicing putting out cones or something. Guess what happened to me, go on. Anyway, tired as I was by this point, I decided to follow the bastard thing because I was far too tired to try to follow directions given to me by SMS of how to find Hangar Lane. It's 2am, how bad can the traffic be, eh? Pretty bad, as it happens. It's not the quantity of it, it's the fact that everyone drives like a complete lunatic - U-turns in the middle of the road, sudden lane changes and of course no indicators (or if there are, they're going the wrong way), people who jump red lights when you're waiting to turn right meaning you get beeped at by the taxi behind who presumably thinks you should have tried to ram them or something, and, of course, all the pedestrians are drunk. I had to ignore a left-turn and have the unit re-plan in Clapham because there was a man sat in the road crying. Even in the middle of the night crossing london took me bloody ages. I can't see a 5-minute delay on the M25 as a problem compared to that, frankly. The IQ Routes from TomTom prevents this nonsense. It works by recording where you - and other drivers who have the IQ units - drive, and how fast you go on those roads at which times, and thereby works out average speeds at different times of day. If, therefore, it knows that you're going to do 4mph across central London but there's a route twice as long on which you can do an average of 30mph, it should send you that way. I don't have definite proof that it does so, but it definitely made a few changes to my daily commute over time. There is one problem with this, however - it means that for those of us who don't break speed limits, the time estimates are always low, especially on roads such as the M6 toll and M40 where people habitually do 80 in the inside lane. This is no problem - I just add on a bit to account for that. I have to add on time to allow for stops at the services anyway. Admittedly, if the Garmin plans a route local to me - say going from Bolton to Leigh - then it's usually spot-on with its timings. I recently did a run from Bolton to Birmingham, and arrived *exactly* when it initially predicted I would. It even got me to a town-centre car park without too much hassle. However, for me, this just doesn't make up for the other issues. Plus, if you're, say, going on the M60 at rush-hour, it won't have taken the inevitable delays into account, so you have to make your own guesses anyway. The main problem I have with the Garmin, however, is its avoidances. They're rubbish. I've covered the awful traffic avoidance, and yes, alright, I could just turn that off. It'll avoid motorways, congestion charging and toll roads, ferries, car-share lanes and unpaved roads, and from what I can tell it does manage to avoid these. It's set to avoid U-turns as well, but it seems to have decided this one is optional, or maybe it thinks they don't count at certain junctions, as it has a tendency to tell me to do so when I've been unable or unwilling to follow its instructions and have made it re-plan. The TomTom can be set to ask you what you want it to do every journey, or you can set it to always avoid motorways, plan fastest/shortest routes, plan walking routes, bike routes, or limit your speed. It also has a setting for 'If the traffic changes, what do you want me to do: change, ask, or don't change'. It has the same set-up for toll roads, ferries and car-pool lanes. But then, here's the thing that *really* sets it apart from the Garmin: I tell it to plan its way from my house to a location in Wigan, and it tells me to go up Grimeford Lane. This road is a twisty country lane of the sort that's brilliant fun in the daylight, but, in a low car it's a killer at night, as the headlights of oncoming cars completely blind you and so you have to guess where in the inky blackness the road, stone walls and trees are. So, if it's night-time you don't want to go that way. With the Garmin, your only option is to set a Via point which means you don't go that way - which sort of requires that you know where you're going already, in which case, why would you be using the sat-nav? On the TomTom, however, you tap the map, click 'Find Alternative' and then you have options: Calculate Alternative, Avoid Roadblock, Travel Via.. Recalculate Route, Avoid part of Route. Tap 'avoid part' and scroll to grimeford lane, click on it, and now it'll send you along Manchester Road instead. Clicking 'Calculate Alternative' does much the same thing, but it's a bit hit-and-miss as to what it actually avoids, but it could be handy if, say, you just wanted the machine to give you some choices about how to get somewhere if you've got bored. Once you've had this feature, anything without it seems basically useless. Tech support tell me that no Garmin unit has it, and there are no plans to introduce it. It's not just the ability to avoid certain roads, it's just plain CONTROL of where you're going. I don't like going to London on the M1, I do like the M40. If the TomTom planned a route via the M1, I could tell it not to be so silly, and it would go away and try again. There's no way to do that on the Garmin. I could, perhaps, tell it that I really really wanted it to go via a services on the M40, but I'm not sure I'd trust it not to send me down the M1, onto the M25 and then back up the M40 to get there. Another thing I don't like about the Garmin is that its 'you're speeding' noise is so quiet compared to the other noises it makes that in my car, I can't hear it. I happen to know that my speedo is rather... optimistic. If I go past one of those roadside displays of your speed with my speedo bang on 30, it'll give 26-28. The satnavs generally agree with those roadside displays. When the machine says I'm doing 70, the car thinks it's doing 80. It's also, due to positioning, a lot easier for me to see the satnav speedo as the steering wheel is never in the way. No, my wheel is not adjustable. It's a shame Garmin's interface is so woefully lacking, because sometimes the routes it plans are great - the first time it took me to my parents' place, it calculated a route off the A3 and through Mitcham which was much more pleasant to drive than the one via Morden that the TomTom uses. Unfortunately, it's never calculated that route again. Another thing is that its mapping, around Coventry at least, seems to be better. The TomTom has lost the satellites under underpasses and so caused me to go one turning too far, tried to get me to make a right turn onto a dual carriageway I couldn't because not only was it no-right-turn from where I was but there was a large central reservation with several mature trees on it. There's a couple of housing estates where it panics because it thinks you've come off the road - which presumably used to be rather further to the left and had no roundabouts, has a couple of roads which seem to have been planned but never built, and also gets very confused in the general vicinity of the Ricoh Arena so that it will sometimes try to make you drive through the Asda car-park. The Garmin, on the other hand, seems to have an accurate map of Coventry and hasn't got lost at that underpass off the ring-road yet. But maybe that's at least partially because I have more idea where I should be going now. It's still planned some bloody stupid routes to get out - I was heading off along the A46 I think it is, to get to the M40, and it spent the entire time along that road telling me to come off and go back the other way. Basically, I don't want to have to argue with my satnav on a regular basis. I want control of where it's sending me, so that if it's doing something daft, I can make it change its mind. I don't want to have to take my eyes of what other drivers are doing - I want nice, clear, voice commands, and maybe to flick my eyes left to see exactly which lane I should be in. I don't want to be reduced to shouting "NO!" at it and following road-signs which I know are taking me by a long way round. That, finally, is another way the TomTom is superior to the Garmin - the lane information. If you're coming off the motorway, the Garmin will tell you what lane you need to be in to get off, but it won't tell you until you *are* off which way you're going at the inevitable roundabout so you can get immediately into the correct lane. It will say "take the exit left and then enter roundabout" whereas the TomTom will say something like 'Take the slip road and then keep right' or 'Take the exit and then at the roundabout, take the third exit.' It will also, when you need to be in a particular lane, give you a nice big clear full-screen display of what lane to be in. The Garmin restricts this information to a little icon the top left hand corner - the tomtom gives the icon view at first, as pre-warning, but that full-screen display is handy. The Garmin's screen itself is bigger, and its pronounciation of road names can be good for a giggle, but that doesn't make up for its other shortcomings either. I sold my TomTom to my housemate when it turned up after I'd bought the Garmin. Earlier today I offered to buy the TomTom back and throw in the Garmin. He didn't want it, as he's been using a Binatone Carrera, which cost him the princely sum of £49.99, and the sat-nav on his Motorola phone, which are both apparently also far superior to the Garmin. He says he's not been using the TomTom, as he was waiting for me to ask for it back. | ||||||
| comments: see the 6 things said or say something yourself |
November 23rd, 2009
| ||||||
| Right, so situation is this: I want to install a buttload of OSen and do virtualisation and play with AD and Exchange and all that. Pol wants to play with MOSS. Board has 4 SATA data connectors, 2 in use as a RAID mirror (disconnected while farting about cause it's where the files live) PSU has 2 SATA power connectors Primary drive and DVD are therefore PATA, primary drive is only 300GB. Original OS is on an 80GB also removed. DVD drive isn't a writer System memory is only 2GB I want to install multiple OSen and generally fart about 1TB SATA drives cost about the same as 500GB IDE drives. BIOS seems to not be accessible with a USB keyboard, despite letting you GO into the BIOS. I do not have a PS/2 keyboard here so I can't see if those connectors are RAID-only or not. I have just got my Christmas money in. I could get: PS/2 keyboard 2x molex-to-SATA power doohickeys 2x SATA data cables A PATA DVD-RW 2x2GB RAM 2x1TG Seagate Barracuda SATA from Scan for £233 I could go the whole hog and have 4x2GB RAM in that lot for £313 So... what do I do people? Also! I want the natively-installed OSes to all have access to my current RAID data, but I don't want the virtualised OSes to have access. Can I do that? | ||||||
| comments: see the 2 things said or say something yourself |
July 3rd, 2009
| ||||||||
MINE! GLEE! MINE! | ||||||||
| comments: see the 33 things said or say something yourself |
May 28th, 2009
| ||||||
| Do we have a classicist in the house? For my essay, I'm wondering if "gallus" in latin had the same connotations as "cock" does in English. | ||||||
| comments: see the 8 things said or say something yourself |
February 28th, 2009
| ||||||
| Notes on today: 16) Hunter was late. Had it been anyone else, I would have thought "Oh, there's traffic, or perhaps they are lost." However, as this is Hunter, I thought "Freak marshmallow accident." As it happens, his sat-nav had gone "Ah, there's two roads with that name in the Bolton area. Let's go to both... oh and Preson, let's go there... good lord, when did that get pedestrianised?" 15) My car did not have any oil in it. My screenwash appears to be filled with Gloy. Sorting out that wobble in the gears is not the easy job Pol suggested it would be, but I would really quite like it done, because that wasn't 2nd, it was neutral. I do not want to do anything that involves going underneath my car because the place I usually park it is made of sharp rocks, though, so I'll have to put up with it for a month or so. When I go see the man with the car-lifting machine, he can fit that thing that makes the reverse lights go as well. 14) It is easier, when out and about in the general vicinity of Bolton, with no idea where the hell you actually are, to stick the satnav on and go back to the house for a wee and a cuppa than it would be to find anything else. 13) There are now parts of the Bolton area I know in terms of Bastard Roundabout and Oh Those Bloody Lights, as well as The Bus Comes Down Here. There are still big gaps of Here Be Dragons between them, even when I repeatedly drive between them. 12) That miserable blonde in the Discovery who tailgaited me all along a stretch of 40mph road and overtook me *just* as I slowed down because it was becoming a 30 is going to get a speeding ticket because there's a camera there. 11) If you are waiting slightly behind and to the left of someone who is going to reverse out of a parking space because you want to nab it, it sort of helps if you don't sit too close for them to comfortably reverse their no-power-steering car to their left, because there is not only no room to reverse to the right, but because the car park is *one way* and that would leave them pointing the wrong way to make their escape. It also helps if you notice that they have L plates on and are waving at you to carry on, please, and get the fuck out of the way, because they would really like to do this manoever without the added pressure of probably taking off the front of your car. However, if you do not do so straight away, it would be really really nice if you did not then decide to drive past them *just as they go fuck it and start to reverse anyway*. 10) 30mph when I'm driving feels a lot faster than when 30mph when Hunter is driving. 30mph when Pol is driving is, however, faster than when I'm driving. In reality they are all 27mph, I know this, because the blinky sign told me. 9) Yes, I missed that right turn Hunter was shouting at me to take. Firstly, this is because I didn't have time to stop before it by the time he mentioned it, and secondly, because he meant the Other Right turn about 50 yards further on, on the left. 8) That is not a right turn. That is a fucking college. Fine, OK, I've indicated I'm going in there, I'll go. Bloody hell I hope my driving instructor has more idea where he's going because the way between the entrance and exit said "buses only". 7) You can't do an Emergency Stop that way in a car without ABS, as what happens is a big skid. Doing it the way I was subsequently shown, however, really really wouldn't work in a car with ABS. 6) I like Hunter's phone as a satnav about as much as I like mine. It decided to send me up a farm track. Do phones commune with the car and ask them where they're at home or do phone satnavs just like lumpy roads? My car was bought from a farm, and Pol's phone sent the landy up a cobble-and-mud track then back onto the road we'd come off... 5) Hunter is a git, and said no, I would not be going the other way and making the satnav recalculate, and as he was putting me through a mock driving test at the time, I had to go that way. I'm sure some of those potholes were bigger than the car. 4) Hunter thinks I will pass my driving test. 3) I am at Hunter's. On a whim, I bought a train ticket Coventry > Blackrod and Followed Him Home. 2) Oh fucking hell, he's got an *electric* ukelele. Huntbro is in trouble. 1) Actually, he's getting better, he's playing Captain Tractor and making Twit dance. | ||||||
| comments: see the 2 things said or say something yourself |
January 2nd, 2009
| ||||||
| Oh yes - while I think of it, in case anyone hasn't noticed yet, it is now All Harper's Fault. Dom's done his duty, and if CraigD really wants to be at fault, he can have next year, but in 2009 it's All Harper's Fault. And Alex's, but it's always Alex's fault. | ||||||
| comments: see the 3 things said or say something yourself |
November 25th, 2008
| ||||||
| It's interwebs conspiracy time, people! Can I please ask that, whatever your actual feelings about the man, you bung in a vote or six for Mr Clarkson in Heat's weird celebrity crush poll here? As I said before, it's already been won by Hammond and May, and we'd like to make it a hat-trick. Do it to show the silly mag the power of the interwebs! | ||||||
| comments: see the 5 things said or say something yourself |
November 11th, 2008
| ||||||
| Moved to now, and made public. Please take a look. http://www.gurkhajustice.org.uk/ http://www.helpforheroes.org.uk/ http://www.poppy.org.uk/ | ||||||
| comments: see the 1 things said or say something yourself |
November 5th, 2008
| ||||||
| I'm doing this again because I forgot to make the post public. In 2006 Richard Hammond was Heat Magazine's Weird Celebrity Crush. In 2007 it was James May. Clearly, this is a conspiracy of Top Gear fans. Well, we're at it again. Please, ladies vote Clarkson this year. Poll is at http://www.ionmx.com/FormServer/?F=B05A Yes, I think we will be doing it for the Stig next year... | ||||||
| comments: see the 2 things said or say something yourself |
Random Wibblings
|
|||||||||||
