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.
The 2009 festival is taking place on 4th/5th July. (I am getting a lot of search engine hits on this post as, for some reason, there is no official website for the festival)
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.
We’re off up to Glasgow next month. Since we’re going without the children we thought we’d try going by train instead, that was until we saw the price.
By car it is a 400 mile round trip which, even with current silly diesel prices at £1.20/litre, would cost around £45.
By comparison, the cost of a two return so-called ‘saver’ rail tickets is £120! Note that this is not some last minute booking here, the trip is over a month away and the cheapest ‘advance saver’ available is £120.
It’s a no-brainer – the car wins hands down. When you add the cost of taxis to and from Glasgow Station, it means that we could drive to Glasgow and back three times and still be cheaper.
Britax have been making child car seats for as long as I can remember, and I have always pronounced it “Brit-axe” as in British. After all, didn’t they used to have a Union Flag as part of their logo?
According to the Dictionary of Trade Name Origins, the name does in fact come from a contraction of ‘British Accessories’.
However, if you call their customer helpline, they answer as “Brytax”? Has it always been this way or is it because they are now German owned and want to lose the British connection?