Trying to stop the computer sucking up too much data

We're on board again, and it's good to be back. In the morning I have two main jobs to tackle: replacing the spin-on diesel filter; and having a look at the motor brushes on the washing machine.

I must try to remember to pre-fill the new filter with diesel before putting it on - I'm hoping doing that will minimise the need to bleed the fuel path. I'm a bit scared of loosening off the injector feed pipes.

Jan will probably stick around while I'm doing that so she can re-familiarise herself with Jubilee (I hope she notices the freshly blacked stove).

I have been delving into the "control panel" of this (wretched) Windows 8 laptop to try to cut down on its data use from the internet. We have a pay as you go MiFi thingummy which has served us very well in the past. 1GB of data easily lasted the 30 day time limit. Since getting this (wretched) Windows 8 computer, though, our data use has rocketed. I've managed to disable automatic updates and told the machine not to display animations on web pages. I've also disabled pictures*, which might be a step too far. I think the real killer has been Facebook which Jan uses.

Now I'm trying to keep a log of our data use each day: on our "3" 3GB data sim card there's apparently 2845MB remaining (although the figure hasn't changed for the past hour). To keep within the limit we mustn't exceed about 34MB per day when the card is new. Our present card expires on 25th August, so we can use as much as 69MB per day. Woohoo! (No videos though.)

*Update... I've had to re-enable pictures so as to be able to read the Captcha images when commenting on other blogs. Also, blogs are much more interesting when there are pictures - and I'm aware that this post falls down on that count. Sorry.

Blacking done; a revelation at Foxton; and a photo at last

Today was the day when the newly cleaned hull and baseplate would be covered in nice black sticky stuff (Rytex). Two coats were applied to the hull sides and one to the baseplate. I had thought that we would have had to be off the boat during the process, but we had to move only when the boat was raised for the underneath to be done. We'd been ready to go at 0900, but stayed on to supply Dean with coffee (I had one too). I put the topcoat on the front doors where I'd primed and undercoated: they look much better now.

When Dean was ready to lift the boat we hung around just long enough to take a couple of photos of him blacking the baseplate, then we cycled off down the towpath to Foxton Junction. Here we sat on a bench and ate our sandwiches in the sunshine. I sampled a half of Bridge 61 at Bridge 61 (near Bridge 61); Jan had an ice cream. Then the revelation.

I went into the shop next to the pub, and found a treasure trove of boaty bits and pieces. There was a large array of painted canalware and souvenirs, there were books, maps, guides, waterproof clothing, rope, windlasses, mooring pins, mooring rings, hammers - hang on, did I say mooring rings? Yes, there were even mooring rings of the type people attach to their end-of-garden mooring. And a selection of oil filters, shackles, screws and all sorts of more esoteric items.

Stop press: I've managed to upload a photo! Jan showed me how she has discovered how to get photos from her camera into the computer, and the "edit" function includes a resizing option. This is just what I wanted. Now there's no need to download an external resizing program. The photo is Jan took of Jubilee being lifted out yesterday.

See how green it is below the waterline! Tomorrow I should be able to get my photos into this computer, and then I'll be able to do proper blog posts.

Back to the story of today. After managing not to buy anything in the shop, we made an exploration by bike of Foxton village. There are some rather nice houses! We looked round the church and checked out the two pubs not at Foxton Junction, the Black Horse and the Shoulder of Mutton. The latter does Chinese food, with a menu as extensive as any Chinese restaurant. The Black Horse does more traditional pub food.

We had a few things to buy from a larger town, so I cycled to Market Harborough while Jan cycled back along the towpath to Debdale Wharf. Back at the boat Jan cooked another gammon joint for tea, then we went for a walk through the fields of oilseed rape to the Black Horse where we enjoyed a drink and a game of darts(!) We walked back along the towpath in the failing light to spend our last night up in the air. We should be dropped back in the water tomorrow morning.

Stonking!

A day without going anywhere. Not by boat, that is. It's been another fine, sunny day, although with a slightly chilly breeze. It was still warm enough for shorts, though.

We walked/cycled into Market Harborough (Jan walked; I cycled) for shopping/looking round. I also scraped, sanded and primed the bare patches on the wooden front doors. Topcoat tomorrow, probably. The waste from the sink in the bathroom suffers from poor flow, as the hose has a slight droop between the connection under the sink and the hole in the panelling it goes through. Stale, smelly water tends to collect here; the smell is often noticeable in the bathroom. I disconnected the hose and blew hard down it to clear the blockage. Perhaps a better solution would be to fit a bottle trap to prevent the smells coming up. Or else I might be able to elongate the hole in the panelling to run the hose in a continuous downwards direction. I also gave the Thetford loo a good clean with antibacterial foam spray and a lot of rubbing. It smells much sweeter now!

I persuaded Jan to accompany me on a short cycle ride: we went round Woodlands Road, the road with all the mansions which back onto the canal as it does its gentle hairpin approach to Union Wharf. Not one of the houses there sported a "For Sale" sign.

Speaking of houses, on our cruise in to Market Harborough we spotted one largish dwelling with canal frontage which did have a "For Sale" sign. We looked it up today, and saw that the asking price was £250,000. Then we looked more closely at the details, and discovered that it was prefabricated from asbestos! And it appears to be next door to a "park homes"/travellers' site. Perhaps someone with a lot of money will buy it, demolish the house and build a few more houses on the 3/4 acre site. It would still be next to the park homes, though.

So, what's "stonking", I hear you ask?

Our meal this evening, that's what. Last night's Wetherspoon's was good, but tonight we went to "Indian Zest" in St. Mary's Road, an Indian/Nepalese restaurant. Jan's Modu Murg was very tasty, made with parsnip crisps (not exclusively). I had Ghurkali Lamb Curry, a Nepalese dish with exactly the right amount of heat, and a heavenly taste. We shall eat there again, I'm sure.

Before writing this tonight we discovered that we'd run out of data on our mobile broadband. This is something we'd not managed to do before, always running out of days before running out of data. Perhaps we do a lot more browsing than we did in the past. Still, I don't know how we managed to use a gigabyte of data in six days, especially as we are careful not to look at moving pictures. I topped up with another ten quid -let's hope this can last the rest of our cruise. (I wonder if it's automatic updates on the computer? The "3" website mentioned something about turning these off. I'll investigate ...)

3GB sim card ordered

Following Nev's post about pre-loaded "3" sim cards I've ordered one from Amazon. I hope i) it arrives before we go on Shadow and ii) I can get it to work with the laptop. The laptop will be expecting the original sim carded dongle, so I don't know how the My Three page will cope.


I won't know unless I try, and if either it doesn't arrive in time, or I can't work out how to connect to the internet with it, I'll just have to buy another £10 top-up.

We haven't yet invested in a Mi-fi thingumajig - is it possible to connect two laptops together with a network cable so the one without a dongle can still connect to the internet?

Accepting Safari upgrade means my Hotmail now works again

On my elderly Apple iMac G5 I've been struggling for years with Hotmail. I could read messages, sometimes, but it wouldn't allow me to send or forward messages. Rather frustrating, as you can imagine. For the last two or three years I've had to use the slow PC laptop, or wait until I was at work.

Also, my computer really didn't like the recent changes to Blogger. On selecting my blog it appeared without the bar at the top, so there was no "New Post" to click on. In order to create a new post I've been having to click on all sorts of things to make it work.

But a few minutes ago the icon indicating a software update started bouncing, so I clicked on it and selected an update to Safari, my computer's browser. I can't remember this ever having been updated before, and this was the reason for internetty things failing to work as they should. I was dreading the mandatory restart. Would anything work again? Would I be able to post to this blog?

Well, Safari now comes up with a funny "preview" window thing, and the tabs look slightly different - but - Hooray! Hotmail now seems to work again! I can actually send a message! And my blog has come up looking like it should, so I can easily create a new post!

To celebrate, here's a derelict warehouse by the Grand Union Canal in Wolverton. The sun shone through from the other side at the instant I snapped the photo, so I've played with the image a little.

This is what it looked like before I tweaked it in iPhoto.

Here it is again, without the blinding sun.

My online life, such as it is, is going to be a lot easier now.

Trying to make a website

I've got myself involved with the business of trying to get a website for our church. I'm part of a small committee looking into what's available and how much it would cost, etc. We had our first meeting yesterday where we talked about what should be on the website and who might design one for us.

Saturday's Times contained a four-page pull-out on programming in HTML so I thought I'd give it a go.

My previous experience of programming was in Basic on a BBC Microcomputer (and on s Sinclair ZX Spectrum before that!), but this was the first time I'd attempted HTML.

Once I'd worked out how to get the right ending on the file name - extension, yes, that's what you call it - I managed to get something to work when I opened it in the Safari browser. That was very satisfying, even though all I'd really done was copy out the program from the newspaper! What I couldn't get to work, though, were the CSS and JavaScript elements to work. I tried it on the (PC) laptop too, but with even less success.

Somehow I don't think I'll be creating the church's website myself!

The future of the waterways - Waterways World's webchat

I found myself at a computer at half-past-six this evening, and looked up the webchat hosted by Waterways World on their website home page. From Andrew Denny's comments on Granny Buttons I was expecting to have to go through a complicated registration procedure, but it was all very simple.

Kick-off is officially 6.30pm, but you might like to come on a few minutes early to do any registering, tweaking, adjusting your trousers, etc.

No registration required, nor rearrangement of any article of clothing. Just enter words in a box, give yourself a name, and press the "send" button.

Being there at the beginning I thought if I fired off a question it would stand a good chance of getting on. I put in a fairly naff question about a possible extra source of funding (although the theme was revisited later in the debate) to which Simon Salem, British Waterways's Marketing Director replied. Well, sort of.



I had to leave the online debate shortly after this, and read through the archived chat later, from where I grabbed these screen images.

Other bloggers who asked questions were Andrew Denny (of course) and Captain Ahab. There may have been others.

The webchat, moderated by WW's editor Richard Fairhurst and featuring BW's chairman Tony Hales as well as the aforementioned Simon Salem, was live for one and a half hours, and judged itself to be a success.

I think I know why my computer is slow

No usual canal-related post today: I need to clear some stuff from the hard drive of my Mac. Quite a lot of stuff, actually. Here's why:

Internal hard disk:

Capacity: 232.76 GB

Available: 740.98 MB

Yes, I have used up 99.7% of the storage!

Sitting next to the computer is an external hard disc drive onto which I need to transfer videos and photos. I've been reluctant to do this as I'm not a computer whizz, and I'm slightly worried that storing data on the external drive only - with no back-up - is risky. The trouble is that it takes a long time organising and labelling photos etc., and making back-up copies onto (say) CD takes even longer.

Until now it's been easy to find photos on iPhoto as the thumbnail view is as large as you want to make it, and it scrolls effortlessly. Putting the photos into folders on the external drive takes them away from iPhoto, and the thumbnail images are minute. But I'll have to do it, and then delete (aaargh) the files from iPhoto on the computer's built-in hard drive.

In two hours I have managed to free up 200 MB of space. That's a thousandth of what I need to clear. At this rate, working on it for 40 hours a week, it'll take a year to do it! I hope I speed up!

When I bought my camera I thought lots of megapixels was a good thing. Yes, if you don't mind your storage space filling up quickly. My photos take about 4.5 MB each and I now have over 10,000. Hmmm.

Timelapse, computers, the passage of time and Hotmail problems

Perhaps it's the passage of time, but I find that I have to relearn things I do infrequently on the computer. I have managed to upload some more timelapse footage onto YouTube, but I'd (temporarily) forgotten how to export it. All done now, and, as I have a few more timelapse sequences up my sleeve, it should be quicker next time.



With the excitement of getting on board again, after a long period of no boating, I didn't get the timelapse camera up and running until a little way into our recent trip along the Llangollen Canal.

I don't know why the first few seconds are so "blocky" - the original doesn't look like that. It runs for 1'11", and is somewhat smoother than my last lot of timelapse sequences as I reduced the interval between images to 5 seconds. (Compare with this, when it gets going.)

Future uploads will include Chirk and Pontcysyllte Aqueducts.

Speaking of computers, I'm having a terrible time at the moment with Hotmail on my Mac. Hotmail no longer seems to work properly with my browser, Safari. I can't reply to messages, nor compose new messages. When I log in to Hotmail it suggest I "upgrade" to Safari 5, but I've read on discussion forums of people having severe problems and wanting to "downgrade" back to Safari 4. Now before you say "you don't want Hotmail, you want to get gmail (or somesuch)" I'd like to point out that it would be very disruptive to change my e-mail address. Hotmail has worked fine for me up to now. "Change your browser then", you might say. But I'm used to Safari, I know its ways, and I don't want to have to start all over again with another system. And, Carl, yes, I did try Camino for a while, but Safari, for me, was better.

Another image from Braunston 2010; Mac difficulties

Here's a photo of some of the colours of the cut.

Entirely unconnected, the other day I responded to a prompt which came up on my screen which suggested I reset my Safari (the internet browser I use on my Mac) settings. So I did. Big mistake. Before, all text was the right size; and, when I hovered the pointer over a link, the link's destination would appear at the bottom of the screen. Now the text is minute, and links' destinations don't appear. I've been through Safari Preferences, but can't find how to make the destinations reappear. As far as the text size is concerned, I've tried changing font sizes but to no advantage. When I "preview" this post, the text is too big; back in "edit" I can barely see it.