Snow snow quick quick snow

Well, I don't know about you but I am just about fed up with this English snow. Never enough for a proper day of snow sports, and with no drags or the like you cannot go skiing. Roll on the skiing season in France is all I can say.

What has been funny over the last few weeks is how few cars I have seen with snow chains. We have known about this snow for ages, had a bad taster a few weeks back and still refuse to take sensible precautions. When I was a lad (cue Hovis music) we prepared for the winter, with Dad changing the car tyres for winter tyres with studs in, throwing a couple of bags of sand in the boot to weigh down the back axle and a spade to dig us out of trouble. These days no one carries anything, or so I thought until today.

You see, a few weeks back I bought snow chains for the Disco, and was waiting for a wheel nut adaptor to arrive. I found out today my supplier was not going to get them in stock until the New Year, so with a new batch of snow on the way, I started ringing round. Well, either no one had any left ("sold the last one this morning mate" was a familiar story) or the 'phones were on divert as they were so busy. No option for it - jump in the car and track them down. Well, to cut a long story short I found some adaptors in Tunbridge Wells, but the point of the story is that the queues outside of the specialist snow chains shops I visited were enormous - one must have cleared over £2,500 in walk-in business whilst I was waiting. So hopefully more people will be able to get around in the latest batch of snow and not end up clogging up the roads in ill-prepared cars.

Rant over!

Logitech Harmony 1100

Last weekend, the old faithfull Philips Pronto RU950 programmable remote decided to go to meet its maker. One of the kids had managed to dent the touchscreen, meaning the resitive layers were permanently touching, so a new screen is needed. Okay, not a big problem, until Philips tell you that they have none in stock and MAY be making some in January next year if there is demand, otherwise they will wait. Not much good for an AV system having to wait four months plus...

So, after a friendly visit back to Sevenoaks Sound and Vision who built the system for me in the first place, I emerged the proud owner of a new Logitech Harmony 1100 programmable remote. Now, I could have had the latest Philips but I could not see the need to spend £800 on a remote control.

Having had the Logitech for a few days, I can honestly say it is pretty good. It is chalk and cheese compared to the Pronto to program, in the the Pronto allows a huge amount of flexibility in graphics and programming, and the Logitech is all on-line wizards. That said, the Logitech is up and running in a fraction of the time it took me to get the Pronto working as I wanted it. However, the Logitech software is pretty inflexible, and does not allow the user to add IR discrete codes for any device, which is a pain as it only repeats the keys on the remote. Great for simple systems, but when you have audio / video scalers and the like with many nested functions, it makes it a little difficult to get exactly what you want. Hopefully Tech Support can help as apparently they can add codes to keys if you ask them as they have better software than that available to the consumer, but it will only be applied to your remote and not available to the wider public. Go figure?

So, after the first few days I think I can say that the Logitech Harmony 1100 is a good piece of kit, it does what it says on the box very well and for most casual users will be 110% or more of what they need. It looks very stylish, fits in with a modern decor and if you are happy with touch screen remotes, fits well in the hand and is very ergonomic in use.

First Carp Two Nighter

Hmmm, overnight carp fishing.

You either love it or hate it and having not slept under any form of canvas for probably twenty five years I thought it was about time I bit the bullet and put a couple of nights in. Also, I have promised to take my son, James, fishing overnight so thought I could kill two birds with one stone and test drive a session. Now, by test drive I mean make sure that I can remember how to set up a bivvy (a posh tent) and all the other bits and bobs.

So, come the August Bank Holiday weekend, yours truly decides that he should get down to the lake around 8pm, giving enough time to set up camp and get the rods out before dark. I reckoned without a warm muggy evening and rain. Sweating like the proverbial, and then doused by steady drizzel, I finally had the shop set up around 9:30pm. Only problem was I was a little damp! Okay, clothes can dry out overnight. Which left me a little short of clothes for the first night, but the sleeping bag was way better than I remembered from my youth and the bed chair was awesome (I will post a review of some of my kit in the next few blogs).

The lake is located near to the M25, and I was amazed that the steady hum of traffic never seemed to abate all night. Where on earth are all these poeple going at all hours? Okay, so a lot is freight (love the French system for trucks at weekend by the way but that is another whole story) but what is the rest? Shift workers? Tourists?

Well, I unfortunately didn't catch any carp (no one else did wither which saved face somewhat), but I did catch nine lovely bream up to about 6lbs in weight. I also managed to plumb up a new swim, finding a whole bunch of features, and felt well pleased with myself. I even got a bite a 3:00am which had me scurrying about the lakeside in my boxer shorts (not a pretty sight - thank heavens it was dark!) so christened the night bite club as well.

Coming away, I am convinced that I took way too much gear (kitchen sinks come to mind) so next time I will trim down what I take. Some of my existing gear is a bit too heavy duty, some optional, but for the most part I am very pleased with what I have put together over the last twelve months for this trip. Some items as I say will be reviewed in future blogs as stand alone entries. I also have some thoughts around other tackle items I want to use, either buying ready mades or thinking of other ways of making things happen. Alas, after my father passed away ten plus years ago, I have lost the use of a workshop with lathes and mills, so may have to find another way of making my own (I made my own lightweight aluminium banksticks about thirty years ago with Dad's help and they are still around somewhere. If only I had made them in stainless steel I could have conquered the market well in advance of the Solar and Matrix boys...).

That's it for now. Keep an eye out for a few tackle reviews and further thoughts from the trip.

Cheers

Viking

iPhone 4

Wow - it has been a while since I last blogged - very lazy or very busy.

Well, I have managed to bust my old phone, so jumped into the brave new world of smartphones and swallowed the Mr Jobs hype and bought an iPhone. Long and short after a few hours is that this is one awesome piece of kit. I already have an iPod Touch, but this goes that one step further.

I am playing round with some apps at the moment, but am really loving the barcode scanner (which lets you scan a barcode with the camera and then comes back with the internet pricing from a range of sources - great for those supposed bargains we always see) and a guitar tuner.

I will try and report back soon

Oh, and the Warhammer 40K is going strong - just built a Shadowsword for James and am putting the finishing touches to my Land Raider etc

DVD jukebox

I have finally given up the ghost on the mountains of DVDs littering the house, and wanted to find some way to get them into storage without losing the ability to play them. I have looked at commercial DV jukeboxes (ouch - seriously expensive) and could of course just stream them from the PC - but then I have to have the PC on all the time, consuming energy etc just in case I want to watch a DVD. I thought about building a media PC, but know that if it isn't quiet I would be seriously miffed and don't really want a piece of kit that big in the living room.

After about six months of searching, I found what I wanted - the Popcorn Hour. Now, this is a great little box that you buy from the US that is little bigger than a hard disc caddy. It hooks up to a PC and can play back almost all fomrs of media. Okay, so no biggies so far except that it can play back ISO files in the raw - so no need to mount a DVD file first. Can you see where this is going? It is HD compliant and can take any reasonable size hard disc, so I can put say 1TB of DVD ISOs on the hard drive and watch my movies from there. Excellent.

Now, the user interface that comes with the Popcorn Hour is a little clunky. This thing works in Linux - a completely foreign language to me - literally and metaphorically - but it is not to some very very nice people who have built the most fantastic front end for the Popcorn Hour (and indeed other so called Networked Media Tanks). This gives you a fantastic custom built front end with the look and feel of something costing a lot of money. The software is very user friendly - it is called My Lil Movie Jukebox - and has an avid fan base and user forum. Look it up. Try the demo - it is way cool.

So, I bought the Popcorn Hour, put in the hard disc and got to encoding DVDs. So far I have removed about 100 DVDs from the shelves in the study, consigning them to the loft. The Popcorn Hour lives under the TV, is programmed into the universal remote and is just brilliant. Okay, it is NOT a consumer device per se (no plug and play Western Digital here) and you need a little bit of patience and the willingness to read the forum, but you get something that it worth its weight in gold to the avid AV enthusiast without a big budget.

For those wondering, the software I have used for DVD to ISO files is Slysoft AnyDVD, the movie database is managed by Movie Collector and you also need a neat little driver for the PC to enable it to read the Linux drives as if they were a PC drive.

Sonos Whole House Music Player

I have been thinking for a while about how to get our music streamed around the house without ripping up all the floorboards etc and went into our local Sevenoaks HiFi for advice. They showed me the Sonos system and I was blown away to put it mildly!

The Sonos uses your existing music files and streams them wirelessly around your house to a series of Zoneplayers. The Zoneplayer can be amplified (so you just plug in speakers to make it work), un-amplified (so you plug it into an existing audio set up), or even better a one stop box much like a Bose box that has speakers and all. One mains plug and you are up and running.

You can pay about £200 for the dedicated Sonos controller, but what really swung it for me is the App to run the thing which I can put on any Touch or iPhone - brilliant!

Setting it up was a breeze - you plug one Zoneplayer into your computer router, and wire up the others where you want them around the house. After loading the software onto your computer, you point the Sonos software at your music and away you go.

The neat part of it is also that you can keep you music on a NAS and it will play it from there, so no need to have the main PC running in the house, just the NAS. It is also format free, so will play iTunes, Widows or whatever.