Week of 6th October, 2014

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Monday, 6th October

A trip to the Westfield centre today, via the shops in Ealing, to check out various things. Notably, I wanted a folding 13 amp to Figure-8 mains lead. I've got fed up with the amount of space the standard UK13 amp mains plug takes in my rucksack. I could have got it cheaper from Amazon, but instant gratification trumps a couple of pounds saved. And on limited experience to date, it works. It's nowhere near as rugged as the full-fat version, but it serves the purpose. If you get one yourself - and that only makes sense if you're wandering about UK with a suitable mains adaptor in your bag - you want to be careful, due to the relative fragility. I recommend pushing it into the socket with a finger over the earth pin (no danger there, the pin is plastic) to reduce stress,since some UK mains sockets are a little tight.

While I was out, I thought to check out Three's data contract deals. I need to reactivate my 3 dongle, which, until now, has used 12 month, 12GB PAYG SIMs. I could have sworn that 3 had a 30-day rolling contract offer, with unlimited data, similar to the voice SIM I have in the Nexus 4. Not so, there are 1GB/month, 10GB/month and 250MB/month deals, all with 10.2 pence/MB overage charges. So it looks like the 12GB, 12 month, PAYG route is still the best.

Which reminds me, must unlock that 3-branded Huawei E156G dongle.

While I was out, I got trapped in the country-wide outage that 3 suffered. The symptom was plenty of signal, but no connectivity, with DNS errors. All came good by about 3 p.m. or so.

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Tuesday, 7th October

Another shopping trip, plus a reconnaissance to find out about disabled parking at Paddington Station, ahead of our steam excursion to Ludlow at the end of next month.

And parking is available. Not very convenient, but available. UKP10 per 24 hours, and about a 1km walk from the car park to the main station concourse. Not good for disabled, although we will have a wheelchair for Mum. In the alternative, of course, we could park in Ealing, for free, and travel to Paddington on a service train, to meet our excursion charter. I'll leave that choice up to Jane.

Since I was in Central London, I looked around some of the shops. Nothing of any great interest, but a nice outing none-the-less.

And the BBC have broken the downloadable file of  "New Tricks 1108" (that's series 11, episode 8) on iPlayer. Of course, that file plays perfectly well in a web browser, where it is supposed to be viewed, but get-iplayer chokes on it, with an error message (from ffmpeg) on the lines of  "Discontinuous, non-monotonic timecode in file", leaving me with a .flv-wrapped file, rather than the .mp4 I should get. But at least the resolution is right.

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Wednesday, 8th October

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Thursday, 9th October

Last 2 days of this fortnight, and the last 12 shifts for a while. Nothing much to be said there, it's the usual formula.

But at home, Jane and the family took Mum out for a birthday dinner. The big day (she's now 94) was yesterday.

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Friday, 10th October

I was prevailed upon this afternoon to connect up the $ky box to the network, to permit Katy's use of the Catch-Up TV functions that $ky+HD boxen have - which seem to include BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 4oD, and a selection of $ky-bundled channels. Haven't tried it, and probably won't, but I suspect that e.g. 4oD content would be DVD-able via this route. This all appears to work via direct download to the $ky box, not streaming.

The connection was accomplished by dropping the long blue Cat6 cable down from the stairwell switch. Of course, it was necessary to derig it after Katy had finished... or there would have been earache from Jane. Must invest in a wifi-to-ethernet bridge, ideally USB-powered - the $ky+ box has a USB port for external storage media (read-only, I suspect) Or maybe there's no software support for it... the manual is unclear on the point.

While I was in Ealing, enquiring about Mum's finances, ahead of the pending re-pebbledashing of her house, I dropped into my local 3 store, and bought a data SIM for the 3 dongle - the 10GB/month deal. And there's an option to cap usage so that you don't pay overage charges - unlikely in my use, but better safe than sorry, especially when it's a free service. And after the usual wait for the network to become aware of the new SIM, it works. So unlocking the dongle becomes a lot less necessary.

But before that, Postie delivered a box... the HDMIPi 7 inch display kit. No time to do more than check the box contents (all present and correct, as far as I can tell) but I need to assemble the kit of parts.

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Saturday, 11th October

While Jane and Katy are out making arrangements for a Rainbows trip to Kew Gardens, I can start assembling the HDMIPi - and, in parallel with that, doing some more TV archiving - all non-BBC material. 4 hours of material, in 3 items, done, for 2% space released.

And the HDMIPi display works - at least it powers up, and I can select inputs. I don't have a Pi ready to connect to it, at present, but soon... 

And doing the assembly, prompted by a howto video, showed up how poor wifi coverage is downstairs at the back of the house. I think I need another AP, probably in the hall. Maybe just put the Linksys back, although it would be good to start upgrading the internal network to GigE.

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Sunday, 12th October

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