PupCam

Afternoon (although it's still pre-munch) All! We invariably provide our neighbours with their "Correct Bin to Put Out" Indicator. It's nice to be able to give a little something back to the community 🤣 ION Just had a quick thrash on the RD over to see Dave, an old model flying friend who lives a few miles away. Boy was it windy!!! Lucky it was only about 4 or 5 miles each way. If it had been further I would have turned round, come home, put the bike away and gone in the car. Me a fair weather biker? Too right! Anyway, it was nice to catch up with Dave. I first met him at RAF Scampton many, many years ago. We both happened to attend a RAFMAA Warbird meeting and were flying our respective large WW1 models; I was flying my 1/4 scale Pup and he was flying a near 1/4 scale Nieuport. We got chatting and were most amused when it turned out we lived so close to each other. Had a quick call to the Bear yesterday. Hmmm. That blessed dog! I'll continue to keep an eye. I'm off up the smoke tomorrow for an echocardiogram. Although apparently running to an amended (read that as restricted) time table hopefully the trains will be OK. When the service works it's very good indeed. When it isn't the alternatives are, well, really there aren't any sensible alternatives. I won't be going on a series of buses, I definitely won't be driving and my personal helicopter is being serviced. TTFN

Evening. I've just spent a couple of hours re-watching the first two episodes of the wonderful, original James Burke Connections programme. If only modern documentaries could be as interesting or as good. Mr Google reminded me of Mr Burke's knowledge web; a multi-layered web of mind maps that attempts to map some of those key connections he explored. It is of course an impossible task to map all of the links associated with them (or even a very tiny fraction of them) but a very interesting way of passing some time and either increasing or refreshing one's knowledge of some exceedingly disparate topics! Anyway, if you are bored with the telly a meander through here might throw up a couple of interesting nuggets. If you want to watch some of the programmes the first 6 can be found here - I haven't found an online source of all series and all of the programmes within them yet, a job for another day. Then, when I've exhausted James, I suppose it will be time to re-visit Tim Hunkin's "Secret Life Of The ....." series (but that's easy as a YouTube search will reveal). Night All!

Morning! It makes me smile when, as many do, I am addressed as "Young Man" particularly as I've now become a drain on the Department for Work & Pensions as well as the GE's pension scheme. Perhaps they are nervous of addressing me as "Hey, short, fat, bald bloke" which is technically more accurate? 🤣 ION Dark, dull, slightly moist here. Now, what to do? Unfortunately all the Get Up and Go! got up and went sometime ago and I CRBA to do much at all which is a criminal waste of time. Maybe acupofdoubleespresso will do the trick? Watch-out heart, caffeine on the way. TTFN

Sorry Chimpy. I forgot to say nice photograph in my earlier post. Watchout, you'll get hooked ...

Afternoon! A good Christmas Day was had and for the first time the tables have been turned; we were invited to Oldest Junior Puppers for Christmas* dinner so not a lot to do other than play with the Junior Junior Puppers and scoff 😀. It was the first time Junior Puppers had done a "really big meal" and I have to say he made a pretty fine job of it. We could get to like being waited on. * Thank heavens, no turkey was involved 😀😀 This morning we had another climb up Pegsdon hill with Ms Junior Puppers and very nice it was too. A noisy young family at the start who were insistent on spotting, assessing and counting cow pats was all that was needed to turn the climb from my usual sedate meander into a medium cardio exercise. It took about 400 metres distance plus a good few meters of vertical climb to get a suitable clearance between "Us" and "Them" but we did it. I'm sure the cardio bit it must have been good for me. As the holiday period seems to have provoked a rash of humour, here goes .... Well, it made me smile as it became today's ear-worm whilst pushing the Fairy Tale of New York back into the darkest corners of my mind. TTFN

Seems like I was caught leaving Pure Triumph at Woburn yesterday 😀 I have to say the little RD200 is lovely to ride now I've got to the bottom of a couple of little issues but I'd forgotten how much you have to really use the gearbox on small two strokes. Oh yes, and it really doesn't like the combination of middle age weight and a head wind! 🤣 Alan

But watch out for casting numbers .... I found a lovely, looked like NOS crankcase casting with the right casting number for my '39 250. Trouble is they used the same basic castings for both side & overhead valve engines in some cases. Same casting, different machining! Which reminds me, I really must start disposing of all my spare cases and cranks now the 250 is up and running and seems reliable. Got to try and recover some of the cost of all those bits! Alan

Afternoon I must say, those air molecules are still moving at a tremendously high rate of knots! Other than that it is a quiet, dull Christmas eve in Puppershire. I've been wrestling with some astronomy image capture software - I'm trying to get it installed on the old laptop that goes outside in the garden along with the 'scope. It is meant to appear as a self-extracting zip file but actually appears as a bog standard zip. No bother, I'll just extract it manually (it doesn't and isn't meant to "install" as a proper windows program) but the trouble is that the compressed .gz library files don't get extracted. No bother, I'll just extract each and everyone manually .... And when you have, the application then starts and asks for some configuration info. Once it's got it it just says thanks, goodbye and I'm off with not a trace to be seen! Shame, by all accounts it's a very good tool. A query and, because it's that time of year, Season's Greetings have been sent to the developer. I await a reply with interest. Of course, it's all academic anyway because I can't remember when I last saw a lovely clear, crisp night with no wind. I suppose it could be summarized in a corrupted version of an old HHGTTG phrase as "Mostly pointless". I feel I need to do something physical. Perhaps a blow round the village before darkness falls would be in order? TTFN

Afternoon. With the exception of the over-active air molecule movement that has been a feature recently, today has been very clement. A message on one of my WhatsApp groups suggested a trip over to Woburn Triumph for coffee and banter. Well, it would have been rude not to so an RD thrash was thrashed. The coffee was a long time coming but then again, the little notice in the cafe window states they don't do fast food so please be patient. So we were 🤣 After putting the world to rights and admiring some rather fine machinery it was time for home .... Anyway, it looks like it will only be a white Christmas if we drop a bag of flour! TTFNQ

Evening All Main thing to report is that I've managed to track down a certain Bear, who has been rather low profile of late, to his lair. Unfortunately that big black dog has been baring its teeth and growling a lot but hopefully he'll have the better of it once the next few days are past. In the meantime I'll keep an eye out 👍 I hope @tigerburnie and other ER's who have been MIA for a while now are all OK 🤞 ION I attended a most interesting lecture at the Shuttleworth Collection today given by Dodge Bailey, formerly the Collection's Chief Pilot. It fell to him to get the beautiful DH88 Comet flying from Old Warden after the initial first flight from and back into OW some years previously ended in a minor disaster when the "not-very-strong" starboard undercarriage collapsed on landing. The DH88 was designed for one thing and one thing only; to win the 1934 MacRobertson Air Race to Australia and minor details such as getting off of and back onto the ground safely were largely ignored. As Dodge said; "That little detail was left for the pilot to sort out". The lecture provided an interesting insight into some of the technicalities & characteristics of the aeroplane, some of the analytical work done by a couple of PhD students at Cranfield on the undercarriage and the aeroplane's aerodynamics and some of the practicalities of operating it safely accompanied by some nice pilot's eye view cockpit videos of all of the critical stages of flight (that's most of it then!) A superbly efficient aeroplane, tricky to get on and off the ground and one that is ready to bite and bite hard if you get anywhere close to the edge of its envelope. Oh yes and utterly beautiful from all angles whether it's on the ground or in the air. The 1.5 hour lecture was free to attend and was absolutely packed. It was great to experience some of the "old Shuttleworth atmosphere" (which would have been helped greatly by not having to pay ~£20 just to pass the entry gate) now sanity has returned to the admission policy. An interesting way to spend an hour or so on a wet & windy Thursday morning was I thought worthy of a reasonably large donation of the folding stuff into the SVAS* collection bucket. I do hope many of the other 80-100 attendees thought so too. * Shuttleworth Veteran Aeroplane Society ....... effectively the Collection's "Friends of" organisation that primarily raises funds to support the Collection. TTFN

Well as someone who has only been involved in highly technical engineering for over 45 years including in the disciplines of Systems, Mechanical, Structures, Electronics, Software, Aerodynamics, Computing, Operational Analysis (and some other stuff I won't mention here) together with some of the related rocket science associated with them (oh yes and granted a couple of patents to boot), I realise I am still but merely an ill informed beginner in the field . However, you may have noticed that I along with many others on here have not been duped by the Trumpian propaganda that shouts "The answer is Lithium battery powered cars now what's the question?" Well that was an extremely crass way of expressing it. This engineer & technical person (and I suspect very many others) at least resents being described as being duped by Trumparian propaganda. Well don't (my emphasis). ION Do you know? I really can't be bothered ...... I'm going outside, I could be sometime. If I'm not back beforehand, Season's Greetings and Best Wishes to you all. Alan

Many, many years ago just after I'd become a real member of staff at the GE one of my contemporary colleagues always used to state that his aim was to die owing a £1M, a lot of money in those days (come to think of it it's still quite a lot of money). I was extremely puzzled (aka naive) at the time and suggested that surely he meant to say that he had a £1M when he died. He pointed out the futility of having a lot of money when you were dead and the fun to be had with other people's money. If it weren't for my moral compass I could see a lot going for his idea 🤣

Morning! Easy, come back Friday morning. Going down was a nightmare as the M1 appeared to be closed from J13 to J10 and solid, black on Traffic England. It took an HOUR for us to use the alternative route (A6) and get from one side of Luton to the other. It was strange (and rather nice) when we finally managed to get on at J10. Look in the rear view mirror and there was absolutely nothing at all to see! My emphasis but that statement nails it. Yes, EV's are a solution (they have been for ~100 years in various forms) but they aren't, certainly in their present battery form, the UNIVERSAL solution that the muppets would have us believe because neither the vehicle themselves, their use-cycles or the infrastructure to support them are suitable. Shades of the tragic accident to Concorde all those years ago. Not that I'm comparing that fabulous, iconic aeroplane with Musk's electric driving box! Keep the heat on Bear, it's only money and you can't take it with you. Nothing more miserable than being persistently cold and/or hungry. So I suggest; heating on, a big bowl of curly fries all finished off with a big hunk of LDC as you consider Templot Plan #284B. It's a bimble if the journey has no specified destination or purpose, a chug if "you are going somewhere for something". While we are on the subject, a chug maybe in the offing for tomorrow for breakfast although the destination is still TBD. Of course, if the vehicle is a mere youngster (say ~50 years old) and capable of a bit of speed then both a bimble and a chug can become a thrash. I disagree and would suggest that the distinction is very clear; petrol and diesel are merely fuels and will not combust on their own unless something else provides the conditions for them to do so (elevated temperature above flash points, sparks etc). Lithium batteries in particular are very susceptible to spontaneous combustion due to latent damage whether that be from actual physical damage, damage through use brought about through incorrect charging/discharging or their own degradation through use. I've got a little test for us. I'll go and stick a screwdriver through the side of a tank of diesel, you can stick a screw driver into the side of a Lithium battery. Good luck .... Of course, once a vehicle is on fire the other combustible material in it cares not a jot as to "where the flame came from that set fire to it" so it is entirely irrelevant IMVHO. Another excellent and spot on statement @jamie92208. This is the reason why the various "early scrappage" schemes are a total nonsense and a cynical person such as myself would suggest that they are intended to a) keep the manufactures and the economy going and b) mislead the unthinking into believing they are saving the planet. They are not, the carbon cost has already been spent and in most cases the actual benefit in energy reduction in use (i.e. the difference between old and new) will never outweigh the carbon cost of the completely new item. Yes, scrap and re-cycle when the item is truly at end of life but don't try justifying your (that's the Royal your not you Jamie!) new car by claiming you are saving the planet when there is plenty of life left in the old one. I'll jump off my soapbox now. ION The quiet before the storm. Junior Puppers and the Junior Junior Puppers are coming over later for dinner. I believe Santa maybe parading down the road after nightfall on the back of an old farm trailer later so that will cause much excitement and a sudden loss of all my loose change when a yellow bucket gets shoved through the front door by on e of Santa's helpers. I had an invitation to go on a chug over to Hitchin this morning. I declined because it doesn't look very inspiring out there today. Perhaps I'll do some more fiddling with Jupiter. TTFN

Evening All Just back from a few days at the southern end of the A3 where a good deal of UP ©ChrisF has been indulged in. Nothing else to report at this time. Over & out.

You've got to love the sound of an 08 getting to grips with its load but be careful, the anti-noisests will be out to protest at such revelations. Psst - I can do you a nice little handcontroller for DCC++ EX with a built in digital model that will turn the compressor and exhausters on and off and a whole lot of other stuff automatically without you having to press F6, Shift F15 or whatever. Be nice to build it into the decoder itself but that's a skill several mountains away for me! 🤣 ION Seems like the embedded Arduino is in good shape and doing its job. 6.5 years of battery left 😀 TTFNQ

Soggy Morning! My main concern is the Pacemaker. If I go all funny I'll know what to blame! ION I've been trying to rationalise all my back-up drives; making sure I've got duplicates of everything important (blimey HOW MANY! photos are in the photos folder), and the same with docs and vids and then theres the "Special Interest" folders to sort which seem to grow exponentially with all the various astrophoto processing apps that I've been using lately. I've been reviewing each astro video or sequence of images and weeding out as much of the stuff as possible whilst not chucking away anything that with improving processing skills might yield something of interest later on. I've been quite savage with the "intermediate workings" stuff on the basis of I can't necessarily work out what it is and as long as I've got the source material I can probably get better results now next time. Whilst ploughing through long forgotten folders I came across these 3 photos. They may be of interest to @Barry O if no one else as they are from some of my very early aerial photography experiments. A cheap (£17 IIRC), automatic camera from Dixons, strapped to the side of a large trainer type R/C aircraft with a servo operating the shutter release. Flown from the Bragbury End sports field which was owned and operated as the GE Sports & Social club until it was seen as an unnecessary expense and extravagance and disposed of making the all of the sections including the model flying section homeless*. They were taken around 1996 I believe. Those experiments then led onto downlinking live video, way before it became common place with the drones of today, and culminated in live "In cockpit views" with a pan and tilt video system in a 1/4 scale Sopwith Pup at first followed by a 1/3 scale version. Imagery from which was used in a BBC documentary marking the Centenary of WW1 and a the 50th anniversary of a previous WW1 documentary that featured surviving (at the time) pilots. Hence the soubriquet PupCam. * We went on to bigger and much better things as an independent club, re-branded as the Knebworth Model Flying Club using a field belonging to the Knebworth estate. There's still a very, very, very long way to go with the process and I really must come up with a "proper" back-up regime (and no, the answer is not the Cloud before anyone mentions it). I went for another nice little run on the RD yesterday but unfortunately by the time the shopping had been done I'd missed the best of the weather. By the time I got out it was decidedly dreary but good fun nevertheless. Question for @polybear : Does Templot support designs for Brio train sets? Asking for a friend grandson. This afternoon sees an appointment at the hospital when they rest the "Giant Polo connected to a laptop" on my chest and start talking to the embedded Arduino. Hopefully all will be good and the batteries will be in a good state of charge 🤞 TTFN

Morning All! Having been doing a twice daily BP diary for some years now whenever I see two numbers on a display like that the immediate association is with BP. My first thought when I saw this was boy are they in trouble! Fortunately a second look revealed the units of measurement and thus a rapid revaluation of what it represented 🤣 That's an interesting one. I've never considered myself (well, since I became an independent adult thinker) as having (a?) faith but I like to think that I have at least a reasonable morale compass. It is of course for others alone to decide whether that is actually the case or not but please go easy on me! Conversely, one thing I am particularly intolerant of is the view held by very many that because A believes in THIS or B believes in THAT they must by definition be good people. No, the association with any one particular group of "us" or "them" does not automatically bestow goodness on an individual and I'm sure we could all come up with a very long list of examples* where this is clearly not the case. On the other hand I like to think that there are very, very many people without "faith", myself included, who are essentially good people. Or are all such people actually mad, evil, sadistic, axe wielding murderers? Maybe I should take a look at myself in a new light? 🤔 * But we won't for fear of moving into territory that we are not at liberty to discuss here. ION Junior Puppers made a Facetime video call to us early this morning to see if we were going to join them watching the Santa steam special pass through St Evenage or Hitchin. As we were still in bed at the time we declined the kind invitation 🤣 Another day of unspecified pottering with perhaps a degree of hunkering down is in order I think. TTFN

I can only assume that the different functional arrangement of the new petrol tap did it but I don't really know. Looks like the weather might have put paid to the plans for the Sunday morning bimble or thrash 🙄 I'm reminded of the wonderful Spike Milligan epitaph 🤣 TTFN

Afternoon! Which is precisely what the masking wearing by the masses was intended to do here. But so many of the people I know had the misguided view that putting a piece of toilet paper with a couple of strings attached over their oral and nasal orifices was going to save them from Covid. No it wasn't, not by a long way. What it was going to do (and all it could really) was to catch a significant proportion of potentially contagious material ejected at high speed from the wearer. The wearer's protection came from everyone else wearing such masks. Unfortunately us cynical old engineering types would generally think such a dream is, well, just a dream! The squadron of pigs can be seen being fuelled and readied for flight as we speak. At a "certain place" the chap responsible (at one point) for running "Lessons Learned" type activities announced that he no longer called them that and re-named them as "Lessons Identified" because, as he said, we never actually learn the lessons. I found his acknowledgment of that fact refreshingly honest. He didn't stay long .... It was suggested the specialist cardio nurses on a number of occasions that I could usefully increase the dosage of one of my non-cardio medicines on an occasional as-and-when-needed basis. Unfortunately to do so involves a discussion with the GP. Well, that's unlikely to happen anytime soon and I asked the nurse if she could include the review & increase the dose in the list of GP Actions in the notes. Unfortunately not, demarcation and all that, being non-cardio they can only "suggest" it in the general notes. I believe there is an over the counter version and I must get myself down to the pharmacy and have a word. In this instance I would willing cough-up (surprisingly literal that statement) what in this case would be a token amount of my pensioner budget to get the additional safety net as it would only be required once in a blue moon and the drug is "cheap", unlike Neil's, by the looks of it anyway. I'm with SWMBO on that! I adore large churches, cathedrals etc not because they are "places of worship" but because they tend to be beautiful and in many cases stunning pieces of architecture with an atmosphere so heavy you can almost cut it with a knife. Everyone is, or at least should be, free to believe & trust in whatever they like just so long that that belief does not materially harm the well being (in all senses of the word) of others. There's been quite a lot of discussion lately about "us" and "them" type groupings and the damage they can/do cause. I might venture to suggest that that some of the largest "us" and "them" gangs might be associated with various such beliefs. I'd best stop there. ION A good degree of unspecified pottering (Chris_f ©) today including a little more data collection for the Life Book. Also a trip into Hitchin for a number of errands and a quick thrash on the RD which was most enjoyable during the early morning sunshine. A bonus was that all fuel pipes remained completely full of fuel. Glory be! I've been re-processing some of the most recent Jupiter data again. I even managed a diffraction artefact (spiky cross) on the moon with this. This sort of detail seems to be about the best I can get but I don't know if I could/should expect better with my specific equipment with better technique and/or better conditions or whether this really is approaching the limit for such "modest" equipment? Anyway, it's fun way to spend a wet afternoon and by all accounts there'll be an opportunity to do some more over the weekend. Looks like it's time for me to getamoveonwiththedinner. Apparently a G & T has been poured in order to assist this process 😀 TTFN

And Puppers wheels out his long playing, broken record once again .... The answer isn't always the F............ Internet! The quicker those in-charge realise, the better it will be. Yes, I know, a lost cause but I don't care it's still wrong (just like the idea of the universal battery powered electric car but that's a different rant). Alan

Which reminds me of the time mother-in-law was walking through Bovingdon (Hertfordshire) many years ago and was asked for directions to the Tank Museum ... The instructions should have gone something like; Go back to Hemel, down the A41 to Kings Langley, get on the M25, off at the M3 and aim for Dorset. Bovington is a long way from Hertfordshire! 🤣

Soggy Morning All I suspect that's Ramsey in Cambridgeshire .. A man not easily fooled! Although it appears that the IoM did have a Nationwide in Douglas. Note the tense 🤔 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_International Brekkie & drugs time. Back later. TTFN

And on a different theme completely .... I see St Ives harbour has a giant white rabbit visiting and it's not even the 1st of the month 🤔 Perhaps Rick can nip over and investigate? 🤣 Night All

What is this "Auto" of which you speak? 🤣 ..... but how much did they cost* and how much use did you get out of them? 🤔 * You don't get owt for nowt after all

As I quite like living (I'm sure my end will come far sooner than desired anyway) I think that that would have given me the will to bank elsewhere. No doubt our attempts to stem the march to "do everything online/on the App" is futile but at least we've got the morale high ground. As I may have mentioned once or twice IT IS WRONG TO DISCRIMINATE AGAINST THOSE THAT CAN'T OR WON'T DO EVERYTHING ONLINE and in other areas of life apparently any form of discrimination is wrong and quite rightly so. Alan