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I’m having a real problem with time at the moment. Playing around learning to programme PIC microcontrollers to do really interesting things like flash little lights has made me have to think about time in a different way, and it’s one that my brain is struggling with a bit!

These little chips chug along at about 1 million operations a second (can be a lot more or less, but that’s what I’m using at the moment), and the programs you write are made up of an instruction generally taking just one of those operating cycles. And you have to program to account for each individual cycle. A bit different to the normal PC coding I do!

The trouble comes from trying to deal with just how many things that the chips can and do do in the time that it takes for anything to be useful in the human world, like flashing a light at a speed that we can see, and what to do with that extra chip time.

So a lot of time is spent just doing nothing, at least when trying to work in human reference time frames. Seems like a real waste of time, but just a reminder how our view of the world is based on our perception of time.

I was looking at my web sever logs today and noticed that somehow someone had ended up at this blog by searching for paua pattie recipe. I thought that that was a bit odd until I dug a bit deeper and found that those 3 words were indeed used in various places on the post earlier this year about the NZ wine and food festival. Not all in the same place, which is why I normally first try to search with the phrase in speechmarks, but they were all there.

I suspect they ended up a bit disappointed with that result! Hope they managed to track down a good recipe though!

If there is such a thing. Can’t say I’m a big fan of them anyway. Give me fresh oysters with lemon and pepper, or some big, fat green lip muscles anyday!

Well, instead of doing all the things I should have been doing, like writing overdue emails and hanging out the washing, I’ve added a new feature to this blog thing.

If you look down the bottom of the right hand side bar you’ll see a summary of the books I’m reading or have stacked up on the shelf waiting to read.

I haven’t got all the related pages looking quite as I’d like them to yet, but it’s good enough for now. Changing other people’s code is always fun. It’s all done with a nifty plug-in to the blog software I found on the net called now-reading, which means I can stop work on doing the same thing!

The plug-in even runs off to get images and information from Amazon based on the ISBN code, so I don’t have to do any digging around. All good.

When I was looking around the other weekend for games to fill in an hour or two I came across FreeCiv. It’s a free version of the Civilization strategy games, and got a bit hooked. Unfortunately it was just a bit hard for me to see what was going on, and finding help and up to date guidance was a bit hit and miss.

So I ordered a copy of the latest commercial version, version IV, of the game. Cheap, from Amazon.

It does look a lot nicer, and has a lot more bells and whistles then FreeCiv, which is in no way surprising. FreeCiv seems very close in game play, but if I’m going to be staring at a game for as long as I suspect I will be with this, then I do want pretty!

The game itself is a strategy game where you have to grow a civilization (strangely enough) by carefully using resources, building military units, using diplomacy etc. Just like the real world. Kind of. You can play multiplayer over the net too, but I suspect I’ll be just playing the computer for a while until I get the hang of it all.

When a game comes with a 224 page manual, and it’s all in English, then you know things are a bit complicated! But I like that. Should keep me going though the winter, anyway!

I finally gave in and upgraded my main Windows XP box to a bigger, faster system disk. When I first put that box together I thought that I was going to have heaps of space on a 15 odd Gig drive, and so I made the main system partition only 6 Gig big, and made another couple of partitions for data and other programmes.

Mistake. BIG mistake! HUGE!

I have no idea what fills up all the space, as I make sure I clean it out of all the stuff I can, but it’s always getting close to the limit now, and I think that disk is getting a bit old anyway, so both to be safe and to give me more room I thought I’d upgrade to something a bit bigger. Like another 250Gig drive. Just a small difference in space!

I thought that this could be a bit of a pain in the butt to do, as Windows seems to be a bit fussy about where things are etc, but in the end it was a breeze! I used a “live-cd” (a whole operating system that boots and runs off a cd) of gparted, which is a small Linux system soley geared towards disk partitioning actions. This meant I just had to copy the partitions across to the new drive, resize them, change the disks over in the box, removing the old one, reboot a couple of times, and hey-presto! New disk works fine!

And for a bonus, a fun bit of this was using a small business card CD for the first time. I’d been left a few but never really found a use for them, but the whole gparted image fits easily on one. I don’t think I’ll start carrying it around with me in my wallet, but it’s definitely part of my PC toolbox now.

A bit of a relief that it went fine, but also a bit of a bugger on a long weekend! How to fill in the rest of it!? I guess I’ll just have to break something just to fix it…. or spend the time pampering the other half – now that sounds like a plan! (Hmmmm. I think someone added something during the proof reading process….)

It’s been pretty grotty out this weekend, so we’ve pretty much stayed in and tried to entertain ourselves. Not that easy! So I thought I’d dig around and try to find a couple of new computer games for the Linux to spend a few hours on.

Got a really nice surprise when I did though! Someone has made a multiplayer version of Scotland Yard for the PC called London Law! We used to play it all the time as kids, and it was nice to have another go at it, all without having to worry about where the counters were, etc. It seems to play absolutely the same as in my memory too.

The game is set up as a client/server game. One computer acts as a server, and others can connect as a client. In theory they can be anywehere as long as there is an internet connection. And it runs on all sorts of systems with a little bit of work setting things up. Windows, Linux, OS X, etc, etc.

The current version needs at least 2 people to play, but it looks like there is AI support being developed for future versions.

Kept us entertained for a couple of hours anyway!

Sometimes it’s nice to get your handy dirty, without getting them actually dirty. Tonight was “put new bits in a PC” night. Always a fun and rewarding time. As long as I’m home alone when I’m doing stuff like that! Being interrupted when things aren’t going well, and I’m trying to remember where 4 different cables are meant to go does not go down well!

I’d finally got sick of running out of space on my Linux desktop box, as I’d re-used an older small drive in there while I was “just playing” with Linux a while ago when I built that box. Now that that machine gets turned on far more often than the windows box, I thought I’d better add some more space. (By shifting the home directory to a new drive, for anyone geeky enoughto understand that!) But I thought I’d add it in a removable drawer so I can rip it out easily and…. Do something with it, I guess! Not that much harder than adding a normal drive, but a bit more fiddly.

And while I was planning to do all that I thought I’d fix the case fan that used to start up so loudly that you could hear it from downstairs. As sure sign that something is really not right! But I think that I could be on the start of a big long slippery slope because of that. The only fan that size that my usual supplier (i.e. the one that generally has enough is stock that I can get things delivered the next day and just get on with it) was one that had cute blue lights in it that make a nice glow up the wall now.

I know there is really no need for all sorts of lights in a PC, but I reckon they have to go faster if they have lights. A bit like a racing stripe on a car!

Luckily today everything went fine, the patient lived, and the box ended up better, faster (I wish), and more prurdy than before!

And, like usual when delving into the belly of a beast, I came away with a sense of satisfaction. And relief!

You’d think that a running live written commentary of a sports event would probably be quite boring, but the BBC news site manages to make the commentary as interesting as the game. Take some of the bits from today’s cricket game:

1539: Pietersen isn’t bothered tea is imminent and slaps Kaneria over his head for six. The crowd rumble their approval, like 17,000 Sid Jameses who have just clapped eyes on Barbara Windsor’s behind. Players go off for energy drinks. Pietersen is 82, Bell is nine.

1700: Inzamam looks like he’s got the hump. He’s got the air of a man who has trodden in some dog’s business on the way to his daughter’s wedding. Three from the over and players take drinks.

1715: Umar is retained and still bowling liquorice all-sorts. England are happy to milk him tenderly rather than yank his udders off and take four singles from the over.

And so on! But this isn’t a one of today, they do this all the time! Even if I’ve no interest in the game I’ve started scanning the live coverage when I’m bored just for a laugh. Superb that they don’t take themselves seriously. I hope they keep it up!

Yippee! Look what arrived for me today! A whole heap of electronic bits and pieces to play with from Digikey. I love the Digikey catalogue. I don’t understand what half the bits are, but it’s still fun to pour through the 1200 or so pages.

Now I just have to work out what to do with it all, and how they all can work together to do interesting things. Like flash a light, and tell me what the temperature is and vital things like that. But it’s going to be a fun winter! Just have to wait for summer to finish first, I guess. Unless we’ve already had it, that is.

Yes, though it’s taken a while, the sorting of the photos of the trip is finally finished and they are up at the usual place (if you don’t know, or can’t remember, where that is, send me an email…) Well, I say finished, but we haven’t bothered yet to do any cropping, straightning or touchups yet, but I’m sure you’ll cope….

We’ve even put together a guide which is here to tell you what we did and what you’re looking at. It might be worth keeping a copy of that page open and handy while you’re going through them. Just note, if you’re the first to look at a photo it might take a while to open as the poor liitle underpowered server here tries to resize it so you can see it…. You can either just wait for them, or come back later when we will have hopefully have gone through them all and it should be faster.

Anyway, enjoy! And we have lots more if you really need to be bored! Let us know if there are any you really like too, just so we know which are the really good ones.