My PDA arrived

Well my PDA arrived this Friday and I have been playing with it since I got home.

I have got email and MSN Messenger working with the FON wireless router and if all goes well, then this post should have been sent from my PDA.

Categories: Personal_ Tech_

FONBasic 0.6.5

I know I said in my previous post about FON Social WiFi that I wasn't going to upgrade again until I saw a v1.0 but what can I say, I'm a geek and I just had to revisit the firmware on the router again.

So I have now installed FONBasic 0.6.5 and that seems to be stable, although I did see my Instant Messenger client disconnect MSN users with a low level communications error once so it might be that there are issues with disconnection of open ports which aren't active.

I might just go crazy and upgrade to FONBasic 0.6.6 when I have some spare time to see if the problems I had previously were due to a bad flash or something like that. I can always downgrade again.

Categories: Personal_ Tech_

Technorati Tags: FON, Wireless, Router, 0.6.5

eBay Bid Success

I have finally won a bid on eBay for a WiFi Enabled PDA. I paid £155 which seems to be the going rate for secondhand WiFi enabled PDAs regardless of model.

The PDA is a Dell Axim x51.

Hopefully this will turn up within the next few days and then I can start playing with it.

Categories: Personal_ Tech_

Great Western Trains use Terrorism as excuse to remove cycles.

According to thisisexeter.co.uk, staff at the St Davids station in Exeter have been removing bicycles because they represent a bomb threat.

Their strategy to deal with all these bombs? To cut through the locks with bolt croppers and move them inside the station right next to customer services. Also, if they are really concerned about terrorist bombs, what are they doing about all those cars which drop people off at the station everyday.

Why can't train companies just be honest, they hate cyclists and only tolerate them because they are required to by government.

Categories: Personal_ Cycling_

Snobby Women in a Merc

I went to Tesco's last night and parked in the center of a parking bay. As I was coming out a women in a Mercedes SL320 trying to reverse into the parking spot next to me, and a right mess of the job she was making of it too.

The SL320 is a small car, it can't be any bigger than a polo so how can you fail to park it between 2 lines designed to take trucks?

She had 2 go's at parking that I could see and came very close to my bike on the first attempt, she eventually ended up about a foot inside my parking bay and couldn't open the door fully because she was too close to my bike.

We cross paths as I walk back to the bike and she walks into the shop and she says "becareful of my car, I don't what you to drop you bike on it". grrrrr

Maybe she was being sarcastic knowing that I had seen her abissmal attempt at parking but I didn't detect any hint of humour in her voice. I think she was actually worried that I was going to stratch her car when I pull out in a straight line out of my parking bay.

Friends and Family have heard me say it many times and I'm going to say it again here. If you can't drive a car, then don't buy one. If you don't have the skill to manavour a car at 5 mph then you should not be on the road doing 70 mph.

Categories: Personal_ Biking_

Walking in the Peak District

Yesterday I went walking in the Peak District with the Ramblers, I had a great ride up there there was hardly any traffic which meant I was just able to cruise along at the speed limit rather than match what ever speed the traffic happens to be doing which I prefer.

In fact the only traffic I saw was about 100 bikers from a club called the Blue Knights who I tagged along with for about a 1 mile but they were only doing about 65 so in the end I pasted them, they were stretched out for about 1.5 miles, there were bikers from Scotland, England, France and Germany. I later found out that all the Blue Knights currently serving or retired police - hence the Blue I guess.

I arrived far to early so I drove around for a bit then watched went to find the car park and watched some movies on my iPod while I waited for the others to turn up.

I love the landscape of the Peak District, I think it's my favourite National Park in terms of how it looks although I think I prefer Dartmoor for the actually walking it offers.

When the rest of the Ramblers had turned up, we set off on what was suppose to be a 7 mile walk but ended up being 10 miles - although we didn't actually get lost every often and only had to backtrack once so I'm not sure where those extra 3 miles came from. It was very hot, especially on some of the climbs and I think the heat slowed us all down a lot, I think we averaged 2 mph following what was large a flat track.

The ride home was quite as good, lots of traffic and stiffling under by jacket but still enjoyable.

Categories: Personal_ Biking_ Walking_

Hot and Humid Cycle Ride

Today I cycled into Cambridge with Matt, we were both looking for Biking Clothes, me because most of my clothes are really designed for Spring and Autumn use and Matt because he's doing he's CBT in a few weeks time.

The weather was hot with periods of rain which really raised the humidity because the moment the rain hit the roads it's started evaporating off again which made for an uncomfortable ride home.

I also managed to get a puncture just outside Cambridge, isn't it typical that the one trip where I didn't have my tool kit with me was the one I get a puncture on, in last 8 months or so I seem to keep getting punctures because my existing tyres were so worn down.

I keep meaning to get them replaced but kept forgetting to order them on Wiggle, so we walked the last 2 miles or so to Ben Haywards and I brought a set of Marathon Plus with the Kevlar band which should stop most punctures, and a set of Slime filled Inner Tubes so that even if I do get a puncture the inner tube should be self sealing.

I managed to buy myself a set of summer biking gloves with some Carbon Fiber Knuckle Protectors which should be a lot cooler.

Despite the temperature and the rain, it was great ride.

Category: Personal_ Cycling_

Pillion Insurance

I have just sorted out some Pillion Insurance for my bike. Now I'm sure that when I first took out my Insurance a full 4 months ago the Pillion Insurance was something like £80 extra but speaking to the nice lady at Bennetts today, they is no extra premium to pay, just a £20 admin fee.

Where did the extra risk of having a passenger on board go? Have those 4 months of riding so reduced my risk of an accident that they think the extra costs involved is too negliable to count? Not that I'm complaining of course, I'm just really surprised, thats all.

Now, I just need to find someone stupid enough to go on the back of a bike with me.

Categories: Personal_ Biking_

Car Rental and Bike Service

My sister will be making a brief appearance in St Neots on the 4th Aug as she heads through to Standstead Airpot and the Taxi was going to cost her a fortune so I've booked a car rental for the friday she is coming down and booked my bike in for it's 4000 miles service.

Nothing like killing 3 birds with one stone.

Hell, I might go to the pub with some friends and kill 4 birds with one stone.

Categories: Personal_

eBay Bid

Yesterday I made an offer for a iPAQ H5500 PDA on ebay.

I have offered £100.00 but so far the seller hasn't responded to the offer. I think £100.00 is a fair price since I've seen similar kit going for £108 at the end of an auction. The £155 he's asking for is a bit of a joke for a used PDA.

The seller has to make a decision with the next 34 hours so I should know for sure by tomorrow morning. It's all very exciting.

Categories: Personal_

FON Wireless Router

A few weeks ago I signed up with FON to get a cheap wireless router, unlike many on the FON Community Boards, my router turned up altough it did have a 2 pronged european plus I was able to get an adapter quite easily.

Once I had registered the router I was then asked by the FON website to upgrade to FONBasic 0.6.6 which failed and turned the router into a rather ugly paper weight.

I eventually got the router working again by installing OpenWRT and then installing the FONBasic firmware. I then found out that the FONBasic software disabled the private encrypted Wireless port which was enabled when I first got the router. I was also having a lot of difficulties with maintaining connections to the internet long enough to download podcasts or play games.

I have now downgraded the firmware to FONAdvanced 0.6.0 which does not seem to be an officially supported version any more but it is much more stable. I don't intend to upgrade the firmware again until the v1.0 and on condition that v1.0 has got multiple SSIDs reenabled.

It's a shame because the idea of FON is great, but the company behind it got greedy and have tried to do far far far too much with too few employees, FON should have restricted the number of routers that they were sending out, they should have employeed people to work on their Customer Support email address and most of all, they should have tested the firmware before releasing to the general public.

I know there are some people on the FON Community Board who argue that since FON firmware is Beta, we should have expected some problems but a public beta should not be so flakey that most of it's users are downgrading to unsupport versions of the firmware because it's both more stable and has better features.

Categories: Personal_ Tech_

Technorati Tags: Wireless, Router, FON

Speed Dating

I went Speed Dating last night, it was the second time I've been speeding date, both times with the same company but I have to say that I was left a little underwhelmed this time.

There were only 9 ladies there, compared to about 18 last time I went and the ratio of men to women was way off, with about 5 more men than there were ladies which meant that I spent a lot of the time sitting to off to one side talking to other blokes which really wasn't what I had paid for.

I'm not saying I didn't find some of the women at the event interesting, but I didn't find anyone with similar interests to me in terms of hobbies other than the usual "I like going to the cinema" which I think gets used as a general catchall past time to find some sort of common ground between two people.

To try to extend the evening, the event organisers gave us 4 minutes with each person instead of the usual 3 minutes, but even with 4 minutes per table (actually it was more like 6 minutes because some people were very slow to move on) the whole event was finished by 21:30.

I've still got to enter my marks for the event on the website and once the ladies have done the same I will be able to see if I have any matches.

Categories: Personal_

Norwich and Great Yarmouth

Yesterday I went to Norwich to see my sister, Jenni.

Her boyfriend, Matt, is a biker so we went out together and I followed him along the backroads to Great Yarmouth, the sun was shining - a lot - and the roads were twisty. It was a great ride.

The only problem I had was with a little old lady who was in a car behind me as we reach the outskirts of Great Yarmouth. She had great big thick glasses on but I don't think it helped. Matt was stuck behind a car which didn't seem able to maintain it's speed very constantly and everytime we slowed down the batty old dear came very close to ramming me on at least 4 occassions. I was so happy when we pulled in for petrol, let her ram someone else instead.

When we arrived in Great Yarmouth we parked up on the path next to the leisure center alone with just about every other biker in Norfolk (they must be drawn to Great Yarmouth like flies to one of those fly zapping machines) and brought an Ice Cream which we then eat on a pier watching the Chav's jump over the edge and looking at the sand sculptures.

On the way home we travelled a little bit faster, but of course didn't break any speed limits.

In the evening the three of us went to a Thai restaurant called Thailand (not the most original name I'll grant you) which was expensive but very very nice, well worth the price.

All in all, a great visit, although sleeping on the couch was once again a bit of torture, made worst this visit by the heat.

Categories: Peronsal_ Biking_

A new beginning - Again

OK, this is the 3rd time I have setup a blog because what I want to get from the blog keeps changing.

I still want to use it as a way of recording snippets of information which might be interesting to me in the future, but I also want to use it to keep a journal of things I'm doing which friends and family can use to see what I'm doing.

I also found that having a seperate blog for each topic that I'm interested in probably did make it easy for other people to find topics that they are interested in but I found it too difficult to manage but I have found out that you can subscribe to an XML feed of a Google Blog Search which gives me the option of putting the subscribe link of category searching on the blog.

Biggest downside is that I still haven't found a way of adding Technorati Tags from Yahoo Webmail which means that I still need to edit posts after I have emailed them to the blog. I never intended to tag every post I make but there are some which definately deserve to be tagged so other people can find them.

Categories: Notes_