London City Airport

Many people may not realise that there is an airport in the heart of London. Well not quite in Piccadilly, but close by in East London, North Woolwich to be exact. It is of course London City Airport. The airport website claims it is only 22 minutes from London City by the Docklands Light Railway from Bank station. It is certainly much closer than Heathrow and Gatwick.

London City Airport caters mainly to the business market and flights go to many cities throughout North/Western Europe and Britain. Having only a 1508 metre runway generally only small regional and business aircraft are allowed in out. The one exception is Brittish Airways service to JFK (as in John F Kennedy airport in New York) using specially configured Airbus A318s. The flight reaches JFK via a stop for fuel and US Customs pre clearance in Shannon Ireland. The most common aircraft using the airport include the Fokker 50, Bombardier Dash 8 and Avro RJ/BAe 146 series.

The video above shows the spectacular approach Following the Thames over the West End, London City and Docklands. This video is a time lapse showing a typical period of 90 minutes at the airport.

Un Deletable Icons (Boring geek post)

So you have an icon on your desktop that can't be deleted. An example of this is the "My Bluetooth Places" which set up camp on my desktop of my netbook after using bluetooth to get some photos from my phone. I didn't want it there and it had no delete option when I right clicked it. Dragging it into the recyling bin yielded no results. Dragging it anywhere else just created deletable clones. The hive mother was still undeletable. What to do?

For Windows XP I did this.

Right click your desktop >> go to Properties >> select the desktop tab >> under the general tab click customize desktop >> under Desktop Cleanup click the Clean Desktop Now button >> click Next.

Now appears a list of desktop icons. Give a tick to all the ones you want to delete and then click Next and Finish.

Now all the icons you want to delete will be in a folder called unused desktop icons. Delete this folder from the desktop and any problem icons will be gone.

I am a twit

I have finally started adding the posts from my trip to Queensland, only 4 weeks late... So far I've added days 2-4 out of 8. All the posts are backdated to the day the actual day.

I have also added a couple of gadgets to the sidebar. The first one is a Geocaching summary, which has links to my Geocaching profile and my number of hides and finds. I've been Geocaching on and off for 7 years and have only ever found 74 caches in that time. Others who started at about the same time as I did have become addicted and logged thousands of cache finds. I feel like a bit of a failure as a Geocacher, but I still enjoy the occasional cache hunt.

For some reason I was bored at work today and signed up to Twitter. So far I haven't bothered looking for anyone to follow other than D0ctor Karl. I actually wouldn't have a clue if any of my friends are on twitter or not. I have until now avoided facebook, and although not the same I am attracted the anonymity and lack of complication of Twitter. I remember when I first heard of twitter I was going to sign up, but for some reason didn't. That was about 3 years ago or something, and now it seems the thing to do, so I did. Whether I have anything valuable to tweet remains to be seen. I have added a Twitter gadget to the sidebar.

Green for the company

The company I work for has recently gone "green", they created a series of "webinars" for staff on climate change and various other environmental issues. A further part of this drive has been to change all the screen savers on company computers to be a blank screen, and to encourage people to turn screens and computers off overnight. I admit that I used to leave my computer on overnight and just turn the screen off, at weekends I used to turn it off. Now it gets turned off every night. I think most people do turn their machines off every night, except if they need to run a process overnight, which in my area does happen quite frequently.

Soon all PCs are to be replaced with laptops, or so I gather from the questionnaire that was circulated recently. Sure they are more energy efficient, but I actually chose a desktop. The current desktops we have seem to struggle (well mine does) and I doubt a laptop will be much better. I suspect I will get one anyway due to the companies one size fits all IT policy. Either way it doesn't bother me.

The thing is, I see so many things wrong in my workplace in terms of energy wastage (and wastage in general) it's not funny. The building I work in heats up too much, in both Winter and Summer. There is something seriously wrong with the air conditioning and no matter how many times they fix it, it never gets any better. Being a modern (probably mid-late 1990s) glass and concrete building I suspect it is not properly insulated or ventilated either. On our floor we have large floor to ceiling windows facing north and west, which are definitely tinted, but I'm not sure if they are double glazed. Either way, it gets really hot and bright in the warmer part of the year. The only covering are some flimsy Venetian blinds to that have very poor insulating properties. What would make the biggest difference in my opinion is better insulating blinds and the ability to open windows for some natural ventilation.

As for water wastage, we have toilet cisterns that continually run even though a plumber has been in to change the washers and things. Some kind person printed out some signs telling us how to flush them so they don't run. Of course these instructions don't work, and I usually end up fiddling around until it stops. Most people just walk out without checking. On one occasion I resorted to turning off in one of the cubicles. Soon enough our sign writter had put a sign up saying there was no water and that a plumber was on the way. I think I went too far, but surely the tap is the first thing you would check if there is no water?

Really the whole building needs better maintenance, and even renovation as it is quite poorly designed.

A practical use for LEGO

LEGO Mindstorms that is.

Flushing the toilet...




Less practical, but really cool is using an iPhone and web app to control a LEGO robot.

The Rimmer Experience

Today I bought a 250gb external hard drive. Lately I've decided to name all my computers and drives after things and characters in red dwarf, so I decided Kryten would be a good name. My computer is called Red Dwarf and I have a flash drive called Starbug. So while looking for an icon to use for the new drive I got a little distracted in the sea of all things Red Dwarf. In fact I stumbled over something I had completely forgotten about. The Rimmer Experience, which takes place in the 7th season of the show, when Rimmer travels away from Red Dwarf as Ace Rimmer (fellows, smoke me a kipper I'll be back for breakfast.). I'm much more familiar with the first 4 seasons, anything after that I've only seen once or twice.

The Rimmer Experience

I would embed the video, but BBC Worldwide has disabled the embedding feature. There are others but this is the fullest version I could find).

Links:

• The Official Red Dwarf Website
• Red Dwarf - Wikipedia
• List of Red Dwarf Episodes - Wikipedia
• Red Dwarf sound bytes

Now if you don't mind, I've got some skutters to attend to....

If you've got this far you've done well. if you liked the Rimmer experience you'll love tongue tied. I have a vague recollection that I made a post about tongue tied some time in the past, but it was before I started tagging posts so it's a bit hard to find right now. Go look it up on You Tube.

And after all that I still haven't found a decent Kryten icon to use...

Game On

Yesterday I went to Game On at ACMI (for some reason I wrote ACME the first time...). It was fantastic. I saw a lot of games I haven't seen for years, and lots of others that I've never seen first hand like Nintendo's epic failure, the Virtual Boy. Most landmark games were included, but of course there were a lot that could have been included but weren't because there is simply not enough room. As the person I went with remarked, "where is World of Warcraft?", which is probably one of the most iconic current games.

The best part is the fact that almost everything is playable, from the early arcade game Space Wars, classics like Pac Man, Donkey Kong and Galaga, the glory days of the 8 bit consoles and PC's in the '80s, through to the Nintendo Wii. I would have liked to have tried out the PC game Portal (which is included in the "Orange Box" I talked about a few posts ago), but it was being hogged by a hooded figure who was playing for at least an hour while we were there. Definitely not in the spirit of the game.

While not for everyone, I think most people could appreciate the exhibition. It could even change the perception that video and computer games are just for kids. Having said that I want to take my neice and nephew, as I think they'd love it. Especially after showing them my Gameboy Pocket a few weeks ago. I got them to turn it on, and after about 10 seconds one of them asked "when does the light come on?". They were a bit perturbed when I told them it doesn't have a light in it and that you need to play in a bright part of the room. They are used to their modern Nintendo DS with backlit dual screens. I think I could show them a thing or two at Game On.

My advice is if you are thinking of going, go early, especially on weekends. We got there just after opening at 10, but by the time we left at 12 it was really packed.

Greener pastures

I know how boring, another computer post. I promise this is the last computer post I will make for a long time (unless something goes horribly wrong).

I have given up on the 8800 GT dream, I have since found out that there are ways to make it work, but I can't be bothered any more. So today I went and bought a cheap little 256 MB nvidia 8400 GS from ASUS for $52 (in case you were wondering that's a photo of it at the top of this post). Maybe I am easily pleased, but I'm impressed with it. I tried it out on MSTS, and I can now run it at full detail levels for the first time ever. I tried out Far Cry too, which runs pretty well at moderate resolution and detail. It certainly beats the integrated graphics I've been used to until now.

As you can see by the games I've tested so far I'm not much of a gamer, which is why I think this card will do fine. One other game I am interested in is the oddly named (yet totally obvious when you see it on the shelf in the shop) The Orange Box, which is really a compilation of games. I have heard good things about it, and know a few people who have it, so I want to play too. This card will run it fine.

I would never have thought such a cheap video card could perform so well if it weren't for the videos I found on You Tube. Most of the videos were of people playing games supposedly running on this card, I believed them, and I think it paid off. I have come to realise that You Tube could be a big help in purchasing decisions from now on. Of course some of the videos were a bit painful to sit through, but I usually go to another when boredom starts to kick in. I'm starting to really like You Tube actually

Roadblocked on the Boulevard of Crappy Motherboards and Incompatible Video Cards

So I fronted up to MSY on Friday after work and bought a generic (actually xpert vision) branded 512mb nvidia 8800gt for the low low price of $240. When I got home I realised that the 350 watt power supply in my computer wouldn't cut it. So on Saturday I went to CPL to pick up a nice new Coolermaster extreme 500 watt power supply.

When I got home I installed the power supply and tested it, everything worked fine. Then I installed the video card and changed the BIOS to use the PCIe slot instead of the onboard video card. When I powered it up I got nothing. I checked the BIOS settings and again nothing.

After checking the internet my worst fears were realised, my crappy motherboard does not support the latest video cards. The question is what to do now. Do I replace the motherboard or just buy a cheaper, older video card?

At this stage I am leaning towards the later, as I don't really feel like ripping the guts out of my computer. I would be willing to spend up to about $100 on a cheaper video card, something like a Radeon 2400 or 2600, I'm not sure about the nvidia 8600, or the 9600 in terms of compatibility I doubt it. Actually thinking about it, if I could sell the 8800 I could buy a new motherboard and cheaper video card with the proceeds and not be out of pocket at all (much).

Anyone want to buy a new in opened box xpert vision 8800GT 512 MB video card? $200 sounds pretty reasonable to me.

The time is nigh

...for a new video card.

When I got my new computer I mentioned getting a video card to replace the not so good graphics it came with. Until today I thought I would get an Nvidia 8800GT when the prices get pretty reasonable.

Well, today I did my weekly check of prices at MSY (the website is really crap but this is the place to go to get computer hardware, plus it's around the corner from work) to find that you can get a generic branded 8800 card for about $260 and a Gigabyte branded one for $290, which to me is pretty reasonable. What I also discovered was that the new 9600GT has been introduced. Going by price (about $240) it would sits between the 8600 (which it is a direct replacement of) and the 8800. Reading a review it would seem to be right in the sweet spot for me. The 9600 is based on the 8800s technology, but has some features and processing power missing, but it's cheaper, and better than an 8600. Sounds good to me.

Whether I get one or not is another issue. Thinking about going on Monday after work if I can wait, otherwise it's off to a swapmeet this weekend.

Computer Updates

About a month ago I made a post about my laptop not receiving Windows updates. I haven't done anything about it since. Until today when I came up with an article that simply solved it. What was it? Turn off the windows firewall and then hit "look for udates".

So easy.

After the updates install and the computer restarts turn the firewall back on, and it should work from then on. So far so good.

Lesson learned.

No updates for me

My laptop doesn't like updates, Windows Update has been broken for about 5 weeks and has been reporting an 8024402c error. I've Googled it but I just can't seem to find any fixes. Windows Defender can't even get updates because of the error. I don't know if to reload windows or what, at the moment I just don't care.

Classic Mac

So I found this article on a Mac emulator and followed the instructions and voilla. The above is the result. I ended up using a different ROM to the one suggested, which didn't work (use google to find a different ROM). You do need a 68K or PowerPC Mac to extract the Mac OS disk images too. Not sure why I needed to do this, probably just to see if I could.

I found the original link to this on portableapps.com when I was checking out what I could put on my new USB flash drive (a post about my old USB Flash drive). It's a SanDisk Cruzer micro (with skins!) 2GB, I would have looked harder for a 4GB drive, but I was in Officeworks and the price was right. Officeworks is one of my favourite stores, I could spend hours looking at all the stuff in there. It's a bit like the office version of Bunnings.