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Laptop for Lowri

I’m on the lookout for a laptop for Lowri Davies at the moment. She is a student here, currently on industrial year, and a Kayaker -she’s not bad at it either – European womens freestyle champion as well as being British champion. She’s been selected for the British Universities Expedition this year, which is to the Altai Mountains – called the Four Borders Expedition

Lowri has asked me if I can provide a laptop for them to blog whilst on expedition, as their last one died whilst she was in Uganda, and they’ve gone and spent all the money already.

I’ve managed to scrounge a palmtop machine which could be used for blogging as long as they provide memory cards, and can find ways to connect it to upload the data on a regular basis, but it would be really nice to be able to provide her with some form of Panasonic Toughbook, as those things are supposed to be indestructible.

Is anyone out there willing to chip in a tenner or more towards one of these refurbished models? (I’m looking at the CF27 of £200 at the moment, plus a wireless network card and some more RAM) At the very least it’ll enable us to jealously watch her progress as they work their way around the rivers of Mongolia and the surrounding region.
Toughbook at SterlingXS

If there is enough interest I’ll put up a paypal address for you to contribute to, and we’ll buy one for her.

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Charlie and Ewan are off again!

Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman are off on a bike trip of a lifetime again – this time it’s the Long Way Down from John O’Groats to Capetown.

Good luck guys, I’m looking forward to another great TV series from this one.

I’ve just booked my GSX in for it’s MOT, so it’s ready for a bit of a trip later on this summer, but I’ve still not decided where… Never mind – I set out for a 2000 mile trip last year with only a weeks planning, and that went great (apart from the camera dying)

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Stupid Security

I’ve written before about my dislike for certain countries ideas about security, and I picked up a link to Stupid Security blog from Joe.

I started reading about Peter Kaiser’s experiences dating back to 2003 when he got refused entry to the USA. This guy is a UN aid worker, holding three passports, on his way to Chair a meeting about aid at the UN, and was refused entry.
Mark Shuttleworth also has a tale of how he now gets detained every time he enters the USA

I’ve had one or two brushes with immigration in the past, once being detained for a while re-entering Singapore from Malaysia, and once re-entering the UK from Dubai – “You have a beard, are you a Muslim convert” – ooh that makes me feel so confident in the security of our country if that is the line of questioning of British Immigration officials.

Standing in line for immigration entering the USA a few months ago, I felt somewhat nervous. Fortunately, there was no problem other than the obligitary hour long wait, which almost caused me to miss my connecting flight. Oh, and the over zealous security on the way out of the country. It wasn’t actually much quicker getting back into the UK when my flight landed – at least they get one right in the USA – if you’re a citizen you’re given priority at immigration. When I landed, everyone went through together, which resulted in very long lines and waits as it appeared that half the desks weren’t manned most of the time as well.

This guy had a real problem when he came back into the UK, mind you he did appear not to have all the paperwork that he should have in place.

Yes, I am off travelling again later this week, but this time I’m only off a short distance to the Isle of Man, and I’m taking the ferry – some of my colleagues suggested that I might fly, but apart from the nastiness that causes in the upper atmosphere, I think the ferry will be more enjoyable, and I get to take my car to somewhere with no national speed limit.

Of course, I should be taking the bike, but due to double booking with the Corris Railway training weekend, I will be away from home for a reasonable time, and will have to be taking railway related paraphernalia, plus I don’t really trust the weather at this time of the year.

I did start the bike over the weekend, after a couple of months it needed the battery charging – yes I know I’m a fair weather biker, but hey, I can be so why not? I still need to do a service on it, and then it’ll be ready to get back on the road regularly for the summer.

Enough brain dump for now.

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TomTom as a Bluetooth GPS

I was chatting with Steve Kingston earlier today, and it came up that he had managed to hack his TomTom Go to deliver NMEA GPS data through bluetooth to his Mac laptop. I’ve currently got 2 GPS receivers in the car – one in the TomTom for directions, and the second wired to a serial port on the laptop for when I’m wardriving and doing other GPS related stuff on the laptop.

I was only thinking the other day how much nicer it would be to be able to connect to the TomTom through bluetooth, 1. it would get rid of a gadget in the car, and 2. it would get rid of the cable connection to the laptop.

So I took a look at Steve’s post and Roberto Piola’s site and managed to get it working. The only gripe I have is that when you use the TomTom in Bluetooth GPS mode, you lose all the route finding functionality – basically you just get a black screen with a few status lines. You can’t have everything at once, and I’ll take a look at some of the scripts and see if it’s possible to run this in the background while the navigation continues. Oh, and the fact that you have to hard-reset to get out of the application – just leaves a little to be desired.

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Chicago and Indianapolis trip

album391/DSC_2140.jpg
I’ve just been to visit a student doing his placement in Indianapolis in the US at the end of last week, and I had a really good time.

Apart from the Spiderman 3 trailer, I also got to visit the Indianapolis Speedway,
as well as the 103rd floor on the Sears Tower, the bar on the 95th floor of the John Hancock Tower, album391/DSC_2214.jpgWrigley Field,
Millennium Park, Navy Pier, as well as riding on the ‘L’ train. We also managed to visit the Voodoo lounge in the Redfish restaurant and listen to some pretty cool R&B as well as looking around the water tower.

Phew, now that I write it down, I did do quite a lot, with only 2 days in Indianapolis, and less than 24 hours in Chicago.

album391/DSC_2234.jpg

The whole gallery of 195 photos are here for you to look at, some of them are parts of panoramas that I’m going to stitch together and put up later.

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Student visit

album367/AlicePit.jpg

I’ve just done my first industrial year visit, and I got a real doozie. I had to visit r0n1n, who is spending the year at CERN in Switzerland.

So whilst there I had a tour of some of the facilities on and off site, including ATLAS, ALICE and The Globe of Science and Innovation

As I was travelling light, I only took my 50mm F1.8 with me, which equates to a 75mm on the D70, so I had to take multiple photographs and then stitch them together with DoubleTake

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Homeland Security

The US Dept of Homeland Security put together its wonderful threat level avisory system as a result of the undeniably horrific attacks 5 years ago.

As a result, we’re not allowed to take drinks onto planes, we are forced to use plastic cutlery, unless we’re in first class, and a tee shirt is a security risk!

Now, call me a radical thinker, but doesn’t this mean that the terrorists have actually won, they’ve managed to take away a lot of our freedom, certainly in air travel, but are you really going to die as a result of terrorism?

Some of the nice folks over at Wired News have put together a nice survey of the things that threaten ongoing life in the 11 year period 1995 to 2005 and have come up with the following nice little graphic – it really puts things into perspective – especially the fact that being shot by law enforcement is more likely to kill you than terrorism…

S E V E R E
Driving off the road: 254,419
Falling: 146,542
Accidental poisoning: 140,327
H I G H
Dying from work: 59,730
Walking down the street: 52,000.
Accidentally drowning: 38,302
E L E V A T E D
Killed by the flu: 19,415
Dying from a hernia: 16,742
G U A R D E D
Accidental firing of a gun: 8,536
Electrocution: 5,171
L O W
Being shot by law enforcement: 3,949
Terrorism: 3147
Carbon monoxide in products: 1,554
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Fun with Google Earth

I got my GPS reciever back today, and in the car on the way home I thought that I’d put it to use, so a bit of wardriving with Kismac was in order. It appears to have been seriously updated since I last used it – you can now save the points directly to a file to load into Google Earth. Just with the PowerBook sat on the passenger seat, no external aerial it still managed to pick up a lot of access points, so I’ll take a different route through town tomorrow, and extend the survey – maybe when it’s a bit more complete I’ll actually upload it and share it with all of you out there in Aberystwyth.

I’ve also been mapping some of the places I visited in France, mainly where I took photos and such, and I’ll upload those when I’m done with them – I’m not sure if I can be bothered to map the whole route, but I’ve got all the overnight stops and that gives you a pretty good idea of how far I travelled.

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France Photos

Well, I have finally got up all of the photos that I managed to take whilst in France. 2006france/DSC_1241.jpg (Click on the picture and it takes you to one of the photos in the album – there are about 90 photos there.)

Some are badly exposed because of the problems with the exposure mechanism in the D70, which is about to be posted off to Nikon UK for free repair.
I will write more about the trip later.