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Nikon customer service are stars.

I sent the D70 off about two weeks ago to Nikon, and it took them a week or so to check it into the system. They told me that it would be probably five or six weeks before I would see it again. True I wasn’t being charged for the repair, even though the camera is out of warranty, but six weeks seemed to be an inordinately long time to be without my DSLR. :’-(

So how suprised was I when the neighbours came over tonight with a parcel conaining my Nikon, completely repaired. 😀
A quick couple of shots, and it turns on again, and responds to the controls again instantly, and the shots that I took are perfectly exposed.

Off to look at a boat with Dad tomorrow – so I’ll be able to take some photos. (P)

Happy 🙂

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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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Murphy’s law

Well, I go off to France on the bike for a week, and what do you know, we have a thunderstorm, a power cut, and although I upgraded the server so that it comes up clean after a power cut, I forgot to set the BIOS to power on when power returns, so the server was offline for pretty much the whole of my trip.
I got back to Aberystwyth earlier today, and have just been in to switch the machine back on, and have remembered to change that BIOS setting and save it to CMOS so that it should come back up automatically again in the future.

Now I can upload some of the photos I managed to take with the D70 before it came down with the dreaded “flashing green light of death” – a support call to Nikon customer services is in order first thing Monday morning for a return authorisation.

I almost thought that I’d have no photos, as the CF card reader that we have at home doesn’t appear to work very happily with MacOS, and it corrupted all the photos that it brought across, so I ended up having to import them on Suzy’s windows laptop and put them onto the file server, and get them across to the Mac that way.

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Upgrade of server

That was a traumatic few hours – I have just upgraded the little old server that provides all these pages to a nice new shiny Ubuntu LAMP distribution. It was previously running a very old distro of RedHat, with apache 1 and very old MySQL and PHP, and the time had come to move to a new infrastructure – not least because Claire, who is developing the museum database had said that she would not do any more work on it until I upgraded to a version of MySQL that actually supported relational integrity.

Well I’ve done that now, and she has no excuse, and neither do I in the future, as Ubuntu is very easy to keep up to date.

If you do find anything that is not quite working as it should, then please let me know and I’ll try to fix it. It should be fairly transparent to the average user though – but it does leave me in a better position to upgrade WordPress and Gallery at some time in the near(ish) future.

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Museum updates

I’ve been a bit busy on the museum over the last couple of days – I took the CBM 4032 apart, and cleaned and serviced the keyboard, and now all the keys work most of the time. I then proceeded to type in a copy of TIC TAC ARITH in Basic, and saved it to tape, so I now have at least one program that works on it. I’ve also managed to convert some .prg files to .wav files, so next time I remember to bring in my dummy cassette adapter, I’ll be able to test out space invaders on the PET, and that’ll bring back soe real memories.

I also managed to locate the speakers and 3D glasses with emitter for the SGI Octane, so I now have to find where the 3D rendering software is on the machine. (H)

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New addition to the Museum

I now have an SGI Octane dual 300MHz processor workstation, complete with original SGI monitor, keyboard and mouse – no speakers though, or 3D glasses 🙁
museum/DSC00007.jpg

I’m slowly getting to grips with administering it, and have managed to get it running some of the demo programs as can be seen from the photo. I think it would be better with a little more RAM, so ebay here we come…

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Yellow Chairs

This sounds like a more sociable alternative to warchalking – you place a Yellow chair outside your house and invite others to sit on it to share your wireless network.
This is an interesting art project, its worth reading the background story
The person who set this up appears to have found that theiir network became too slow to continue with the fully open service, but it does offer some interesting insights into social interaction.
There is another article about this on http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/

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Scrapheap take 2

Some of you will know about the Scrapheap Challenge application that a team of 3 of us put in a couple of months ago, we got through to the final hurdle before the series – the production company wanted us, but Channel 4 apparently didn’t, and chose a different team over us.

Well, we’re trying again, this time for the Scrapheap Challenge Roadshow, and in some ways it’s easier as we do the build in Aberystwyth, and don’t have to take a number of weeks out of our lives here in order to film for the show.

We started the build on Wednesday afternoon and evening, and then had half a day of filming yesterday (Thursday), and it all went very well. I’m not actually on the 3 man team this time, but am quite involved with the team, doing a fair amount of the design and build along with Ian, and we’re due to take our creation down to Beaulieu in a couple of weeks.