distraction politics

 Anything to create wriggle room.

Yay. 4000 miles = my Platinum target...Achieved.

 
Well, I wasn't sure at the half year point whether I'd make it this year, when I was 700 miles behind the pace after our holiday in Switzerland. However, I seem to have managed to catch up, as can be seen from the attached Strava graph. 4002.3 miles and it is still November. 

I have a sneaking feeling that December will be largely bike free, but perhaps mince pie heavy. Thats what I pushed through November and managed to finish just slightly ahead of the target. I'll award myself 'Platinum' again this year. 

Since I've been using Garmin to monitor my progress, many years ago, I've clocked 43,295.8 miles and 374,528 feet of elevation gain. My longest ride was 100.4 miles and my biggest climb is 546 feet, although I think I've done some longer ones, but the system doesn't always record everything. 

Now I need to work out a different set of targets for 2024, maybe using some form of interval and I have a secret wish to go back into using Sufferfest for some of the time. Maybe I'll come up with some kind of hybrid target. 

Anyway, my lightweight Fizik saddle is very worn now, although my (much heavier) Brooks leather saddle looks almost 'box fresh' even after bearing the brunt of the miles.

Whoops Apocalypse

Do we get what we deserve? 

• The current situation with several major wars (Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan ) to name a few examples.  
• A leadership unable to run the country, yet with an indeterminate opposition and a wild-eyed spanner thrower.
• So many examples of corruption and incompetence in government that it is almost futile to keep lists.
• Ill-balanced and uncaring sector relief (food banks, charities to support essential services, the mainly ignored north)
• Continued fat-cat troughing of everything.

The old TV show Whoops Apocalypse and the story of containment theory exemplified by General Sir John Hackett predicted situations like this from as far back as the 1980s.

EV Electric car charging times

I get asked by people how long it takes to recharge my electric car. There's three main modes.

Here’s a breakdown of the charging methods and approximately how long each take to fully charge from a low battery:

• Level 1 AC (240V ordinary mains outlet at home): 20+ hours.  No, I have never used this mode, but carry the charger as a 'just in case' provision. I believe they are called 'granny chargers'.
• AC Level 2 (Third party chargers/Tesla chargers/Tesla 'home charger'): 8-12 hours - Like I have installed on the outside of the house. I have a Tesla Wall Charger which will reliably charge my car to 'full' or 80-90% overnight. It's usual practice to charge to 80-90% and it easily does this on off-peak electricity. A full charge to 90% (303 miles) costs about £5.60 and to full 335 miles is around £6.50. 
•  Level 3 DCFC (Tesla Supercharger): 15-25 minutes. It depends on the charge and whether the car next door is sharing the same supply. I can get to 80% in about 15 minutes or 30 minutes if I'm sharing the power supply. It will cost more though, maybe £15-20 to fill up.

When I started using the car, I was often travelling around the country and therefore using the Superchargers. When I'm at home (which is about 60-70% of my charging now - with over a year of usage) then I've almost always got a 'full tank'. And no visits to service stations. 

Despite what people say, there is only one main plug type in general use throughout the UK and Europe (cars since around 2019 have been fitted with it). It's the CCS plug and is a standard Euro-spec connector that combines two DC pins arranged below a Type 2 connector, allowing for fast charging. Like in my picture above.

Nanowrimo, now at around 10k words

I was at the Glorious Arthouse in Exeter on Sunday for the NaNoWriMo writers get-together. I arrived a few minutes late and had to squeeze a chair into what was a very crowded space. 

The discipline of the event was 20 minutes writing and then 20 minutes chatting, repeated several times. I was working out some next plot moves so my writing was very limited. 

I reckon about 300 words, which I typed into Evernote on my iPhone. Of course it appeared as if by magic on my Mac and I could drop it into Scrivener when I returned home. 

 Among our chats was the one about Planners and Pantsers. I'm more like a 'by the seat of my pantser' rather than one with the whole story mapped out. I think the characters have a chance to do their own things which can still lead to some surreal moments. 

Another discussion was about Fantasy vs Reality. I know I've written about Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and similar and even have some super-beings in a couple of novels, but I can't bring myself to use 'with a single bound they were free' magic-wand type lines. The fantasy magic can wait for a children's story. 

And that's how I find myself in Corsica, by way of Vasil Nevski Military University, Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria.

..or is it?

 I can't help wondering whether that last Beatles song made using Neural Mix or whatever, is really 'the last track', given the emergence of AI. 

I've seen it more with Taylor Swift and other slightly more modern artists, where a song doesn't get made and so some fans have a go instead.

Click the pic.

Tweetdeck redux

About time I managed to get tweetdeck running again. Now I need to fine tune it.

Calm before storm along the river

Good for those tranquil moments. Sit and watch the water.

Hot chocolate as good as in Vienna

Camelot Castle. Round table extra.

Splashing about near Padstow

 Sometimes it's about tasting the fresh air and waves.

Tintagel from Arthur's Castle.

‘The island of Tyntagel’ – which was connected to the mainland by a narrow land bridge.

In May 1233 the younger brother of Henry III, Richard, Earl of Cornwall (1209–72), exchanged three of his manors for a small parcel of land on the north Cornish coast.

Richard proceeded to build a castle here, with an outer bailey on the cliff tops of the mainland and an inner ward with a great hall and chambers on the headland. But as castles went, this was a fairly small and unimpressive creation, and its location made it next to useless. What attracted the earl to Tintagel was something else, something literary: a reference in a text written in the previous century, the History of the Kings of Britain, by the cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth. Arthur mania is born.

Recollect: Uther Pendragon, is driven mad with lust for Ygerna, the wife of one of his barons, Gorlois of Cornwall. Gorlois prudently removes his wife to an impregnable stronghold on the coast, the castle of Tintagel, but then rather less prudently withdraws to another fortress nearby. The pursuing Uther and his men inspect Ygerna’s refuge and realise that no ordinary attack can succeed:

The castle is built high above the sea, which surrounds it on all sides, and there is no way in except that offered by a narrow isthmus of rock. Three armed soldiers could hold it against you, even if you stood there with the whole kingdom of Britain at your side.

At this point in the story, Merlin proposes a supernatural remedy: by means of a magic potion, he transforms Uther into the exact likeness of Ygerna’s absent husband. The ruse is entirely successful. The guards of Tintagel allow him into the castle, and Ygerna takes him into her bed.

That night she conceived Arthur, the most famous of men, who subsequently won great renown by his outstanding bravery.

iMac to Mac Studio

My  27inch iMac is around 12 years old and still works quite well. 

I only need to reboot it every six months or so and the main functions still work fine. However, it has a case of creeping obsolescence. I usually like that Mac systems will go to a certain point and then stop accepting the next twiddles and updates. It means the systems stay stable and run well, although some of the whizzier new things won't ever work. 

By contrast my Windows systems would last about 3 years after which point they would have so many new features that they progressively ground to a halt. Drivers? Registry? All of that kind of stuff. And yes I knew how to rescue-edit the registry back in the day.

Now I've been faced with the inevitable decision to update my entire desktop system. 

I know...Desktops! Sounds a bit like land-lines. We are supposed to be able to do everything on a smartphone nowadays. That's okay for consumers, but not the case for creators. We still need keyboards and BIG screens.

So I took the plunge and ran MacOS Migration Assistant, with a new pristine machine connected to my trusty iMac with a piece of ethernet cable and then with another ethernet connected by an old thunderbolt back to the main network. 

I managed to get about 133MB/s from this which still meant that transferring 3,300,000 or so files took over  a day.  If I'd been more thoughtful I'd have found an old Thunderbolt to new Thunderbolt cable but the Ethernet Cat 8 seemed to work fine. No checkpointing so it was a huge act of faith that it would all work.

And yes, it did. 

At around 3 in the morning of day two I checked the machines which confirmed they had run to completion. I fired up the replacement machine and was pleased to see my entire desktop and directories of apps had transferred across. I was genuinely impressed. Most stuff just worked straight away.

Then a few tweaks because of a Wacom tablet error and the need to reinstate Dropbox - which took about 2 minutes. I was worried about Microsoft Office - no need to be and my extensive Adobe collection which have been progressively freezing as un-updateable. 

I seemed to have a tragic amount of emails but the new system blasted through re-indexing them so quickly that I just assume I can still find anything.

Now, everything is back and I get to use the AI capabilities as well. I've an ever increasing collection of AI instances now and spent a few minutes speccing the new machine to have enough neural network processing. Like we used to do with c[us, then memory, then disks, then graphics.

Anyhoo. It all seems to work. So far! And the still respectable iMac can go into the music room.