tenthofjune

I had just gone out of the front door this afternoon when I heard an aircraft approaching - nothing surprising, we get a few planes and helicopters flying around here, but as I turned around to look I was treated to the rarely seen sight of a Lancaster bomber (PA474) flying over at low level. (There are only two remaining flying Lancasters in the world, the other is in Canada). According to this page it must have been doing a fly past at Crosby and was on its way home to Lincolnshire.

After moving to Leopard, my Canon LIDE 60 scanner was not working, however when I tried to reinstall the driver it just hangs. I found the solution however on the Throwable Blog where you can get links to a download to uninstall the old driver and install a new copy of the LIDE driver.

According to the Register, Data Robotics’ Drobo storage device has finally got something any serious storage device should’ve had from the start - Firewire, and its FW800 too. It finally makes sense to buy one of these.

If you’re still unsure as to whether the PC Brigade have finally lost the plot, then read this article in the Telegraph - I thought it was a joke, but April Fool was 3 months ago.

I have added some photos taken today of the Blackrod Scarecrow Festival to our photo gallery.

I have a couple of external firewire hard drives, including two LaCie d2 drives, one of which is a 160GB. Recently however, it started acting up: while being accessed it would click as though it had been powered down and not respond. The only way to recover from this was to cycle the power. It was not time related nor was it related to a particular part of the disk.

Realising that the drive was on its way out, I managed to move everything off the drive onto another before it died completely.

Then, rather than throwing it out, I opened up the case and found that the drive itself was a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (ATA) i.e. a standard PATA IDE 3.5″ Hard Drive. I did a bit of googling an decided to replace it with a 320GB drive. I bought a 320GB Western Digital WD3200AAKB Caviar SE16, 7200rpm, 16MB cache, 8.9ms drive from Scan for 44 quid, so I now have a replacement external drive with twice the capacity for only the cost of the hard drive.

Don’t forget to set the hard drive jumpers to be ‘Master’.

Apparently Richard Leese has now done a u-turn and decided that a full referendum across Manchester should be held for the Congestion Tax.

What he really means is that there is a serious chance that the Bolton referendum would go against him and mean the CONgestion charge would be killed, so he thinks he’ll stand a better chance if he goes for a full referendum.

It was Horwich Carnival Races yesterday. Although the weather wasn’t as good as previous years, it did at least stay dry. I didn’t have time to catch all the races, but here’s a few pictures from the 3:15 women’s cycle race.

 

 

Here’s a suggestion for how the congestion charge zones should really look.

Well apparently, we’ve had a miserable rain-drenched bank holiday weekend - that is, if you believe the southern centric ‘there’s nothing north of Watford’ UK media.

Not so - we’ve had glorious weather on all three days up here in the North West of England.