tenthofjune

Google Street View Camera in Bolton

Ian — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:52:21 +0000

On my way to work this morning, I spotted the Google Street View camera car parked up on the A666 Bolton Road in Kearsley. Unfortunately I couldn’t pull over to take a pic, but this is what it looks like.

Another Two Bite the Dust

Ian — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 20:47:25 +0000

I was disappointed today to see yet another country road lost to the nanny-state council tactics of reducing speed limits unnecessarily. In this case the B5203 Blindfoot Road and Mossborough Road (between The East Lancs Road and Rainford) has been reduced from national speed limit (i.e. 60mph) to 40mph.

This is a farce - this is not an urban area, it is a country lane. When I was training for my Advanced Driving Test, this was a favourite road used by group observers to test driving skills, but councils and government aren’t interested in driving skills any more, they’d rather just make you crawl everywhere instead “because we know what’s best for you”.

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I then turned onto the A570 Rainford bypass towards Ormskirk. For those who do not know this road, it is a high quality dual carriageway road, but St.Helens Council have seen it fit to reduce to 60mph. It’s obvious that the council is responsible - as soon as you cross into West Lancashire, you cross back into common sense and the road becomes de-restricted again.

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You have to wonder how long it will be before the whole country is one big 30mph zone.

Lancaster over Horwich

Ian — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 15:44:45 +0000

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.

Re-installing Canon Scanner after moving to Leopard

Ian — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:25:30 +0000

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.

Drobo finally gets Firewire

Ian — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:44:23 +0000

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.

Proof that the UK has gone PC mad

Ian — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:33:33 +0000

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.

Blackrod Scarecrow Festival 2008

Ian — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:43:25 +0000

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

Replacing the Hard Drive in a LaCie d2

Ian — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 12:34:09 +0000

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’.

Dick Leese bottles Bolton vote

Ian — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:40:21 +0000

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.

Horwich Carnival Races 2008

Ian — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:01:23 +0000

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.