Back for another go at the following:
400m front crawl warm-up
25 x 50m front crawl, target time 54s, rest interval 21s
200m front crawl swim down
Felt better today and the pool was near empty so I just got on with it. Times for the individual reps weren’t particularly quick, with lots slower than 50s, but I still made them all.
USRPT distance this year: 36,250m
Total distance this year: 77,200m
if I’d been this cyclist. From my dashcam for the trip to take my son to his swim training this afternoon, “white van man” clearly couldn’t wait until it was safe to overtake and instead just pushed this cyclist right to the edge of the road leaving very little space alongside.
Can it really have been necessary to overtake right then. He’s on my side of the road, leaving nowhere near enough space alongside the cyclist and all to overtake perhaps ten seconds earlier when there must have been half a mile of empty road behind me giving more than enough space to perform a safe and considerate overtake.
Perhaps I should go back to 1080p so the number plates of these vehicles are clearer and drivers can be held to account for such idiotic manoeuvres.
It’s irritating that I neglected to take photos of this though there are plenty of videos on YouTube. I was expecting a bucketful of problems installing the hardwire kit for my dashcam, but actually it turned out to be quite simple.
The first step was to pull away the door seal where it passes the ends of the dash and up along the liner up the side of the windscreen. They dash has a section that clips on at either end which needs to be removed to give access to the fusebox. I’ve seen people using all sorts to remove this, but in my case I was able to remove it with my fingers. The glove compartment also needs dropping down which can be done by squeezing together the top of both sides and allowing the glove box to drop downwards.
Then it’s just a question of running the power cable from the camera mount into the headlining, down the windscreen pillar and into the space behind the glove box through the spaces exposed by removing the end of the dash.
I found that the earth terminal of the hardwire kit didn’t fit onto the recommended bolt, so I used a different one, sandwiching the connector between the head of the bolt and a washer.
After that it was just a case of plugging in the fuse box link. On the Fiesta there doesn’t appear to be any labelling, but after some contemplation I worked out that the fuses go from bottom left to right, followed by each of the rows above in turn. I think I picked on the circuit for the wipers and rear window demister as my power source in the end.
All that done it was merely necessary to turn the ignition on to check that the camera fired up, which it did perfectly.
For reasons too long-winded to be interesting, we have two phone lines that are delivered over a single copper pair from the exchange. This is achieved by the magic of a DACS unit which effectively multiplexes two voice lines over one physical line. The way this is done means that the line is no use for ADSL, for example, but it’s fine for voice-only lines. However, because it’s been a requirement that all new connections can support an ADSL link, they’re no longer installed (so the Openreach engineers tell me).
For several years we’ve had an intermittent fault on the lines supplied from the DACS resulting in them becoming noisy to the point of unusability — we’d get no dial tone or calls dropping for example. Try to explain the situation to a BT call centre person however and you’re deep into a rabbit hole. They have absolutely no idea what a DACS is any more and the scripts they work from have no way of handling it. In our case the lines leave the DACS unit at our end (which is on the outside wall of the house) on separate cables and take completely separate paths to different parts of the property, yet when I call to report a fault that occurs on both lines at the same time the response is always to assume that the reason must be something we have changed on our side of the master socket. Pointing out that the lines are independent after the DACS seems most likely to elicit the response that I shouldn’t have put this weird DACS thing on the line and perhaps I should try removing it.
You’d hope (in vain, it seems) that BT would at least tell their fault systems people about hardware that was still in use but uncommon so they could deal with customers properly rather than driving them to distraction.
As it happens this time I reported a fault it was eventually referred to a group of engineers who actually really understand how things work after a few times around the same loop. It took him perhaps ten minutes at the most to diagnose the fault, a further five up a ladder at one of our nearby poles to remake the circuits and we were done. As a consequence of the work he also had to remake the circuit for the our ADSL line and as a result our ADSL link has increased in speed from “glacial” to “snail’s pace” which I count as a pretty good outcome. It’s hardly overwhelmingly impressive that it took so many visits to tie the problem down however.
I didn’t need to wait long for this, then…
Taking a different route to the swimming pool because of road closures I reached a section of road with a 60mph limit and began to accelerate when this appeared on the road ahead:
The driver of the telehandler is just visible in front of his vehicle in the field gateway, taking his time opening the gate. The Landrover behind, towing a long trailer, has pulled into position behind the telehandler and stopped, blocking the entire road. It’s not at all unexpected that people would be approaching the speed limit on that section of road, so what on earth the second driver thought he was doing I really can’t imagine. Surely it would have made more sense to pull over at the side of the road and wait until the gateway was clear? At least there would then have been space for cars to pass, quite probably in both directions.
I’ve had a few drivers pull particularly bizarre stunts on me of late, not to mention having had to dive into the hedge because a car has come around a blind bend in the middle of the road once or twice, so I decided I’d get a dashcam for my car with a view to fitting a second to my wife’s car if I got on with it.
For no particularly quantifiable reason other than that it wasn’t hideously expensive I bought the NextBase 312GW with a permanent wiring kit. The 412GW perhaps looks nicer and has a larger display, but actually I wanted something that would be fairly unobtrusive when fitted to the windscreen, so smaller was a bit more desirable in this case.
First impressions are that it’s very neat for the price and being removable from the mount is quite handy. It’s easy to use and the recording of speed and GPS data on the videos is good. I’ve not investigated the still mode or anything like that because I probably won’t use it that way. I also liked the fact that it is possible to turn off the “NEXTBASE” logo that appears on the top left of the screen.
I’ve tried running the camera in 1080p and 720p modes and I felt that the 1080p contains more visible compression artefacts than 720p. Here’s a 1080p image:
To me the “stripe” down the centre of the road looks quite “blocky”. In this 720p frame the entire image looks better to my way of thinking:
For the time being therefore I’ve left it in 720p mode.
Small niggles are that it’s a bit awkward to get the SD card in properly with fingers like mine (and some of the documentation says that 32GB is the maximum size whereas elsewhere it says 128GB) and that the “mass storage” mode which I assume should allow videos to be pull straight onto a PC just as they would from a USB stick wasn’t stable and kept disconnecting.
I checked the firmware version which was R04.0. On the website there’s an update to R04.4 that I downloaded, but despite following the instructions I just couldn’t get the camera to update. I opened communications with their support team, but as it happens the failure worked in my favour. In reading more about the upgrade from various forums it turns out that later versions of the firmware have removed the ability to turn off the logo on the videos. It is possible to get firmware without the logo however, but support only provide it on a case-by-case basis.
I downloaded the new R04.6 firmware (without the logo) and still couldn’t upgrade, so had to start experimenting. I discovered that formatting the SD card on the camera itself, on Linux or on MacOS and then copying the files on just didn’t work. In the end I had to do a full format on Windows 7 and copy the files on from that, at which point the upgrade worked first time. I have no idea what the difference should be as they all seem to be compatible with each other, but clearly the camera doesn’t like it.
The upgrade also seemed to get the mass storage mode to work properly which is good news.
Now I just need to get the wiring harness fitted to the car and use it for a bit.
Having checked the tracking accuracy of my Star Adventurer already, I wanted to make sure the polar scope was correctly aligned before trusting it to location the pole using Polaris. There are a couple of things to worry about for this: first that the polar scope is concentric with the RA axis and second that it is in the correct rotational alignment with the setting circles.
The first should be easy to test but can be a bit of a pain to sort out. I set the mount up during the day and adjusted it so the cross of the reticle was over a distant object. Rotating the RA axis should leave the cross over the same spot. When I first tried this I took some photos at different positions:
There’s clearly a slight “wander” there, but I wasn’t happy that it was due to misalignment of the polar scope. I took off the counterweight bar and repeated the test, this time finding that the cross did indeed stay in the same position. Clearly the weight of the counterweight bar does induce some flex in the mount. I think that means that balance is going to be quite important when it comes to putting actual kit on the mount.
The good news of course is that no adjustment is required there so I don’t have to play with the three adjustment grub screws at the eyepiece end of the polar scope.
That done, the next step is to check the rotational alignment of the polar scope. Years ago I read that Polaris transits the northern celestial pole at midnight on 1st November every year (at the prime meridian). So if the index ring is aligned with a zero offset on the inner scale on the date ring, then the RA axis rotated so the rings have 1st November aligned with midnight then the polar scope should have midnight and 6 o’clock in a vertical line.
I’ve never questioned this initial piece of information, so I thought I should just confirm it this time around. It doesn’t seem to match the results from Stellarium. Here is the position of Polaris at midnight on 1st November this year:
At transit it should be on the orange 0 degrees line. Clicking on Polaris or using “Find” to locate it gives a lot of information in the top left of the screen including the “hour angle”, which should be 00h00m00.0s at transit. In fact it’s 15 minutes out. Quite possibly that’s within the margin of error of the mount design, but I thought I might as well get it right, so advancing a few days I found that midnight on 5th November is very close:
And again checking the hour angle it’s 17 seconds out which I think I can live with 🙂
So back at the mount I set the index ring to zero offset, rotated the RA axis so the rings read midnight on November 5th and looked through the polar scope expecting 12 to be at the top and 6 vertically underneath it.
No such luck. I reckon it’s between ten and fifteen degrees out 🙁
The next step then is to find some convenient vertical edge to line the polar scope up against. Surrounded by the natural world as my house is, there aren’t too many handy verticals. Even the walls of my house are not vertical. Fortunately I found a door that was sufficiently far away to focus on and rotated the RA axis to get the polar scope to coincide with that:
Without moving that I then turned the date ring to read midnight on 5th November:
And finally loosened the locking grub screw on the index ring and moved the index to be at the zero degree meridian offset mark:
(Apologies for the quality of these last two photos. I turned off the flash as it was making the dials almost impossible to read.)
Locking the grub screw up again the job is complete.
As I’m a few degrees west of Greenwich I shan’t use the index ring at this setting when I actually want to use the mount. I’ll rotate the date right a little to give the right offset. Then rotate the entire RA axis to show the correct time and date. That should account for the fact that being a bit rural and backward, the stars are ten minutes late getting here 🙂
I’ve been meaning to get back out to the beer shack for a while but there have been so many other things going on of late that time has escaped me. This bank holiday weekend however I put aside a day when I was definitely going to brew. I didn’t have any specific plans regarding what I was going to make, so I ended up just throwing some stuff together out of ingredients I had left over. In the end I finished up with something along the lines of:
8.5kg pale malt
140g caramalt
310g Special B
120g crystal malt
These all went into the mill:
which took a fair bit of effort to grind my way though. Looked ok once done though.
I underlet my mash tun, feeding the water in through the same valve that I use to run off the wort when the mash is complete:
I then spent a happy hour and a half doing other jobs before returning to sparge and run off the wort:
For the boil I used a combination of Target and Progress hops for bittering and late addition, finally running off about 35 litres of wort, a little darker than I expected but we’ll see how it looks after fermentation.
Once chilled I transferred the wort to the fermentation vessel in my heated cabinet together with a hefty shovel of Phoenix hops for aroma and a batch of S-04 yeast that I’d kicked off in a light DME solution twelve hours previously:
No idea how it will turn out, but a quick check on the hydrometer suggests that it could be quite strong.
Given the OG figure and that it was brewed on the first May bank holiday, I think I shall call this one “M’aidez”.
My first attempt at my usual set with a reduced target time:
400m front crawl warm-up
25 x 50m front crawl, target time 54s, rest interval 21s
200m front crawl swim down
Today turned out to be something of a mess. A couple of times I was delayed by other swimmers and then about five reps from the end two new swimmers got into the pool and decided they were going to swim up and down the lane line I was using (no lane ropes or anything today). Quite why they decided to do that when there were only five people in the pool and plenty of room elsewhere (and when I was clearly the fastest swimmer in the water at the time) I really have no idea.
Anyhow, I managed all the reps in under 54 seconds, but I don’t feel I can claim it as a great success because my rest intervals were fairly messed up. I’ll do it properly again next time.
USRPT distance this year: 35,000m
Total distance this year: 75,350m
In line with “the new regime” I didn’t do a USRPT set today, but instead spent the entire session working on my tumble turns. I’ll go back to USRPT tomorrow and try to build in what I’m practising. The most significant problem I have in executing the turn at the moment is probably that I’m quite weak when my left arm takes the last stroke. But there are other things that need working on too, such as timing of the last breath and not getting messed up if it can’t happen when I want it to. Being able to turn in the shallow end confidently wouldn’t go amiss, either.
I envisage working on this for a while. I don’t think a single session is sufficient practice to improve it, but I need to separate it from the USRPT work so I can focus on the exact details rather than also worrying about getting back to the wall in time.
USRPT distance this year: 33,750m
Total distance this year: 73,500m
