tenthofjune

You’ve got to hand it to the British Government: they introduced legislation that a child seat is now required for all children up to the age of 12. We only have two children, but I’ve noticed that after you’ve installed two child seats into our ‘family sized’ estate car, there is no room left for another adult, let alone another car seat. Anyone with more than two children therefore needs a larger vehicle, but is then taxed at a higher rate by a government who forced them into that purchase in the first place.

Either one part of the government doesn’t know what the other half is doing, or it is brilliant scheme to raise taxes. My guess is the former.

The Horwich Morris Men performed their annual parade around Horwich today to celebrate St.George’s Day, but thanks to the sad compensation-led state of our legal system, Police will no longer organise rolling roadblocks, so roads must be closed ‘for safety reasons’.

Horwich Morris Men make their way down Church Street from the Brown Cow

Fortunately, rather than canceling the event, the organisers decided to continue but stick to the pavements.

According to the Bolton News, teams who were due to take part included: Wrigley Head, Mossley and Saddleworth morris men, Ripon City and the Britannia Coconut Dancers, from Bacup.

Saddleworth Morris Men performing outside the Bridge Inn

There’s a new classic rock station starting in Manchester – 106.1 Rock Radio. The good news is that it is currently in test broadcast, so it’s playing classic rock back to back without any adverts. Unfortunately, that luxury will end on 5th May at 6pm when the station officially launches.

It’s coming up to renewal time for TomTom Traffic, and I’m wondering whether to bother.

My journey to work involves a motorway and a number of A roads. Depending on traffic, the first part of my journey (on the A6 to the motorway) can take me 20-25 minutes (6 minutes without congestion). That is a considerable delay, yet TomTom Traffic has never flagged it. Similarly, delays on the A666 are never reported.

The only delays that do get a mention are on the M61, but even then the information is next to useless: regardless of the actual amount of traffic or delay, TomTom Traffic will always report the same delay over the same fixed length of motorway i.e. between junctions. These figures are:

The traffic could be stationary or just slower than normal but TomTom Traffic cannot differentiate, so the reported delays have little use.

On longer journeys I’ve often been in the middle of a traffic jam before TomTom warns about it, or the location of delays or roadworks are often several miles out. Considering TomTom Traffic is supposed to use the same source as keepmoving.co.uk, the two sets of information rarely tie up.

While reading Specifier Review, I came across this advert for Surespan:

Surespan accesses fine wine
A jersey home owner can now access their wine cellar via their kitchen thanks to a specially designed hatch manufactured and supplied by Surespan. Designed with a recessed lid to accommodate the matching the matching stone floor, it is virtually unnoticeable when closed and operates electronically to reveal a hidden wine cellar.

Great, I want one!!

Just one small point – I don’t have a cellar and neither do most people in the UK.

In an era when builders seem to want to cram as many houses as possible on to a plot of land (no doubt encouraged by local councils, eager to maximise the number of council tax payers), most houses with garages have never seen a car; they are instead used as extra storage rooms to make up for the lack of space in today’s houses, or even converted into another living room. Why then, is it not part of the building regulations or planning controls that all new houses should be built with cellars? Straight away, you have a ready made laundry room, work room and extra storage, all for the same amount of land usage as now.

You could even put your car in the garage. Wouldn’t that be a novelty?

I noticed this morning that something had been uploading data overnight. I saw that the Mozy Backup status icon showed it was still running, however, when I checked the status (see below), I was surprised to see that it had decided to try and back up 435GB of data! It is only supposed to back up around 9.3GB of data, so what the hell made it decide to to do that?

Unfortunately, I was unable to find out, because whenever I tried to run the Mozy config, it just sat there and locked up. I had to force-quit it, but something was still hammering the processor. A quick look using ipulse showed it was a process named ‘MozyBackup’. I killed it, but immediately it fired up again. Repeatedly killing it resulted in the same firing up. It was almost behaving like some kind of malware. I ended up rebooting, but it started hammering the processor again, so for the time being, I have had to uninstall Mozy.

Mozy for Mac is currently at 0.9.3.1 and Mozy recently asked its users whether Mozy for Mac was ready for being called version 1. I think this sort of episode shows that they have some way to go.

Update

Following Dan’s Comment below, I have now re-installed Mozy, and he is looking at the log files amongst others to diagnose the problem. I will post back here with the outcome.

We’ve all had the usual email from the likes of Amazon, getting you to buy some associated kit, but I recently got this one after buying some Canon printer paper. It proudly starts with “We hope you’ve been enjoying your recent purchase, and thought you might like to see a few accessories and service plans that will help you make the most of it.”

Nothing surprising there, but it’s all back to front, basically saying: “We notice you bought some paper, would you like a printer to print onto that paper”. Why would I be buying the paper if I didn’t have the printer in the first place?

I think Amazon need to tweak the programming that produces these emails.

Update: April 2009

Amazon really don’t know what the Canon printer paper is; they’ve just sent me an email recommending that awful film “Mamma Mia” again because I purchased Canon printer paper:

I’m posting this in case it might help someone whose condenser tumble dryer has stopped working. Our seven year old Crusader* dryer developed a fault whereby it would run for a few minutes or seconds then stop. The water tank was not full and pressing and holding the start button would make it run, so this ruled out any safety cut-out (such as overtemp or door interlock) from being faulty.

There is a relay (Schrack part number RM505730) which latches in when the dryer starts. It was this that kept dropping out on its own.

The relay being the cause was reinforced by this forum post on a white goods site, so I ordered a replacement from RS (210-6661) and this fixed the problem, so for the sake of eight quid, we have a working dryer once more.

* Crusader is Comet’s own brand name and the dryer was identical to a Hotpoint and Zanussi model at the time of purchase, apart from the cosmetic front cover.

IMPORTANT: Do not attempt a repair (or even open the cover) unless you are competent to do so. IF IN DOUBT CONSULT A QUALIFIED PERSON. This information is posted entirely ‘as is’ for those who are curious. Your fault may not be related.

Further to my last post, I now have email confirmation from Photobox that they have removed ftp upload capability (despite still accepting logins on the ftp server and having instructions on ftp uploads on the help section):

…to be honest i’m not to sure when or why it was stopped.
I think its something to do with the new uploader software.

I will look into the FTP servers openness and have the information from the website. [Ed:I presume the word ‘removed’ is missing here]

again my apologies for the inconvenience.

FTP capability was one of the benefits of Photobox. I don’t want to have to install Photobox’s own upload software, I have a perfectly capable one of my own – it’s called a standard ftp client. When I have tried their software in the past it is slow and clunky, whereas I can just type ‘mput *.JPG’ at the ftp command line.

I wonder how many others have suddenly found this not to be working without warning.

So what does something to do with the new uploader software mean? Come on Photobox, I understand that some people like to have their hand held with an uploader applet, but why stop others from using ftp as well?

Photobox’s ftp upload service seems to be screwed again. It still lets you upload files, but whereas it normally creates a directory named ‘ftp uploads – dd_mm_yyyy’, it is not doing this and simply dumps the files in the root area, which does not appear in ‘My Albums’ and cannot be deleted either. These files also do not get logged in the photobox ‘uploads log’ .

A few hours later, the files in the root area disappear, presumably cleared out by some automatic script, but do not get moved into a sub folder as they should.

The same thing happened last November and was reported to Photobox, but took several days to get sorted.

Update (11/3)

I have just received a reply from Photobox:

Thanks for your email.
I’m afraid that we no longer offer uploads via FTP

What!!?? Since when? When did that happen? Why wasn’t I warned about this?

Strange then that their help pages still detail how to upload using ftp, even detailing which software to use. *

Also why is the ftp server (ftp.photobox.co.uk) still live and accepting logins?

It would appear that either: Photobox have pulled ftp uploads without warning, without closing down the server and without removing the associated webpages, in which case they are incompetent, or the email came from someone who doesn’t understand what ftp is. I’m hoping it is the latter.

* although they wrongly say that Mac users need to download a client when Mac OS X already has a perfectly workable ftp client built in.