The event is now one of the largest of its kind in the UK. It’s very well organised and staffed. I had feared a long wait for registration but they were entirely on top of things.There were marshals at almost every junction round the route, controlling the traffic with enormous red flags and pointing us cyclists in the right direction. Well done to all of them.

The weather was just about ideal: overcast and cool with a refreshing shower near the end. I gather that last year it was a stifling 30 degrees!

I think that was when I said: “Ow!” and other simple terms of exclamation. I promptly re-assumed an upright posture and proceeded to a) apologise for hitting her car with my face and b) insist that I was perfectly capable of going on my merry way despite the new hole in my forehead, the blood dripping from my eyebrow and the jaunty angle at which my right shifter now hung from the drops which no longer pointed quite the same way as the forks.

Fortunately the motorist whose evening I was doing a good job of ruining was far too together to listen to my blathering. So while I inspected the front of her car and ran through my denial checklist again, she bundled the bike and then me into said car and off we went to find a professional who knows what to do about an unexpected hole in the head.

Cutting a long A&E story short, I ended up with two layers of deep sutures followed by seven ‘ordinary’ stitches ontop. Oh and a bit of glue aswell. That’ll teach me to slow down on the bends, hopefully.

Actually it’s not really Meccano but an Action Stations – Optima from http://www.supertrampdirect.co.uk. Not only a British manufacturer but in Devon too, so that’s local produce for us. I have to say I’m very satisfied by the quality of the parts. The plastic mouldings are to a high standard as is the slide. The sewn parts are also very strongly made. Packaging and instructions nicely done too.

There’s nothing difficult about assembling this kit, though it does take quite a while! It’s a good thing that Super Tramp include two very adequate ratchet spanners because there’s a whole lot of bolts to fit — but this is the price for a very solid structure.

I’d have no fear of half a dozen screaming urchins dangling off this frame without doing it any harm whatsoever. I’d be standing at the other end of the garden though.

This is just what I’ve been after. Now I might be able to estimate how many miles I’ve ridden since New Bike.

So PC revival procedures began. As per my instructions, Dad took the covers off the back and left the PC ontop of the Esse (other stoves are available) for a few days. No joy. Popped into a low, fan-assisted oven for a day. No joy. Wafted a hair dryer over it for I don’t know how long. No joy. Sent it to Lenovo who declared it in need of a new motherboard and hard drive. Zero joy there.

So eventually this ‘dead’ PC came to me: can I get the data off the drive? Well, I thought it was worth a final go at drying it out, so I removed all the panels, DVD drive, hard drive, battery and keyboard, popped it onto the back of the Aga and waited. After a day, no joy, but after two days, deep joy: it boots! So it just goes to show: an Aga dries the laptop parts that other stoves can’t reach.

Steve’s PC Liquid Spill Recovery Procedure

1. Panic. Immediately put your finger on the power button and keep it there. While you’re doing that, rip the charger lead out if it’s connected. And while you’re doing that, invert the PC to limit the ingress of the liquid into the PC’s innards. At this point the PC should be off, unpowered, dripping and probably upside down.
2. Take the battery out.
3. Remove everything that you can including drives, keyboard and panels. You want to enable as much air flow as possible. With the lid half open, pop the PC onto the Aga on its edge so that the hot air can flow up past all the apertures, taking the moisture with it. If you haven’t got an Aga, get one — they’re brilliant. Failing that, choose your preferred stove or other hot, dry place.
4. Relax. Now you will have to do some waiting, up to maybe three weeks. You won’t be able to resist trying to power up after a day or so. When nothing happens, don’t despair, just keep waiting.

Point-to-Point wireless Ethernet bridges operating in the 2.5, 4.5, 5.4 and 5.8 GHz bands at speeds up to 300 Mbps.

Today I started a new job at Motorola in Ashburton. I’ll be working on the embedded software for point-to-point fixed wireless products like this one. It’s an all-in-one antenna, radio tranceiver and digital platform that lives up a mast or on the side of a building, with a singe CAT5e cable connection to carry data and provide power. A pair of these units can form a transparent, wireless ethernet bridge at up to 300Mbps data throughput even without line of sight, and across huge distances. For more information about Motorola point-to-point wireless bridges see the PTP web site.

But before making any changes, I needed to be able to monitor the effects, so I thought this Muinin plug-in was in order. This plugin monitors the upstream and downstream bit-rates of my ZyXEL Prestige P-660HWP-D1 ADSL modem. I’m sure it’ll work with any Prestige modem. Here is an example plot.

Munin graph of modem bitrates from zyxel_prestige_adsl_chandata plugin

You can get the script here: http://ccgi.ambrosia.plus.com/debian/zyxel_prestige_adsl_chandata. See the documentation therein for set-up instructions.

You can see the bitrate drop twice during Friday evening. On Saturday morning I moved the modem from an extension socket to the master socket. Initial indications were that I had improved the downstream bitrate significantly. However by the evening you can see that it subsequently dropped back to a rate slightly lower than at the same time 24 hours earlier.

The new project hasn’t even named the successor to TWiki yet, so for now it’s being called nextwiki and is hosted at http://nextwiki.org/. Let’s wish the project every success in developing what I expect will be an even better wiki than ever.

Here’s my attempt at a photograph of the effect. There are some prettier ones at http://www.lumis.com/pictures/Moon_Ring/.

Moon Rings over Horrabridge