A little bit of fabrication work had to be done to get this to fit.  Some brackets had to be made up, the RHS foot peg and rear brake lever had to be repositioned slightly, and the control regulator had to be moved.

The end effect is perfect though  Still a few more little bits to do, biggest of which are the forward controls, but we are nearly there!

So what? Why the Isle of Skye?  Whats so special?

Well this is the view from the bottom of the driveway…

Click on it for the full version, be warned, its 19263 x 2426.  I’ve made the full res version available on flickr, but please do let me know if you use it anywhere.  I might get a 6ft wide print made up to hang in my room.

I really do love the Isle of Skye  The panoramic above was shot on the 2009 trip up there, didn’t shoot much else.  The 2008 set are on flickr though.

As always, please feel free to post a comment, or come and talk to me on twitter.

• Yamaha XVS 650 dragstar owners manual download – PDF (9.46 Mb)
• Yamaha XVS 1100 dragstar workshop manual download – PDF (6.95 Mb)

The workshop manual applies pretty closely for both the 650 and the 1100 – other than some obvious internal engine bits.

Hopefully by this weekend I’ll have the turndown exhausts fitted to mine – expect many pics

PS: If you find this download useful, please post a comment, or come talk to me on twitter.

Here are the results;

My favourites, which I have enhanced and processed using Aperture;

This post is a little on the ranty side, but there is a solution at the bottom

I really really really hate voicemail, I can’t even begin to find the words to describe how much I hate voicemail.  To me, voicemail is one of those technological advancements that should have remained in the last century, let alone the last decade.  Its an old solution to a common problem that still exists today.

This little extract from the Dilbert cartoons should explain part of how the whole “voicemail experience” makes me feel;

(All rights reserved Scott Adams, Dilbert.com)

This really does happen to me, people call me up and either;

1.  Leave long messages – which are better off conveyed in email.

2.  Leave short messages telling me that they’ve sent me an email or to check my email and call them back.

3.  Normal people leave short messages with their details and ask me to call them back.

Ok, so now you’re thinking leaving a short message can’t be a bad thing, and thats surely the point of voicemail… well its not.  Perhaps it used to be, but thats no longer the case.  There are much better ways to convey the information that I have missed your call and need to give you a call back – yep, a text message.  One would also be able to read the sms message and process the information in a much shorter time frame than dialing into voicemail and listening to the message.  Inefficient and stupid, simple as.

So i’ve tried a number of different things over the years;

1.  Turn off voicemail completely – only to get people whine that “oh, I tried to leave you a message but there was no voicemail”… thanks for informing me of what I already knew… yes, I turned my voicemail off, yes it was on purpose, and yes, if it was important enough, you’d have found SOME OTHER WAY to get the message to me.

2.  Explicit asking people to leave a “SHORT MESSAGE” – this worked initially, but people soon reverted back to leaving long messages.

I had pretty much given up trying to find a solution.  Then one day, salvation came, unexpectedly.  I was calling a customer and they were busy, but instead of getting asked to leave a voicemail message (which I don’t tend to do either!) a little recording started to play “this person cannot take your call, please try again later or send a text message”, on repeat.

Finally, there was a solution out there!  The bad news is that its a setting/option provided by their network operator.  A facility which my provider, Orange, does not.

No matter, I found another way.  This works on Orange, it may be different for your service provider.  Using AT&T’s text to speech demo I created this wav file recording “The person you are calling cannot take your call, please try again later or send a text message”.

Then within the Orange voicemail, there is the option for an “extended absence” greeting, now the major difference between this and a normal greeting is that you can opt to not accept voicemail messages while your extended absence greeting is active.  So using a pair of headphones right infront of the mic pickup on my mobile and some careful timing; now whenever someone calls and I am otherwise occupied they hear the synthised voice of Crystal, asking them to try again later or send a text.

Win   Finally!

Download the wav file: here

Or create your own: here

PS: Yes I know Google Voice would be the other solution to this problem, but its not available outside of the US, and I doubt they will bring the service to the UK, not for a while anyway.

I’m waiting to invest in a 2000mm telescope that has a Nikon camera mount, then i’ll be able to take some more detailed shots and of other astronomical objects.

Above was taken just before the “blue moon” eclipse on the 31st Dec.  Annoyingly and upsettingly a cloud covered the moon after this and blocked my view of the moon for the rest of the night

This was taken on the night of the 1st Jan I believe, the moon was really low in the sky making it look bloodshot.

I’ll return to my usual petrol head techie posts soon – honest

So, while looking around the shed for a hammer (all 3 of my hammers seem to have grown legs – don’t ask!), I came across an old flash gun that I picked up many many years ago from eBay for a few quid.

(Yes I know its a rubbish photo, taken using my phone)

After excitedly fitting it to my camera, I decided that its “intelligence” was very limited, and I mean VERY limited!  There was also no way to point it upwards – so out came the cardboard, scissors and sticky tape.

Ta da   I’ve set it to full power manual mode, the camera can only tell it when to trigger, but at least its brighter than the standard flash, and its firing light upwards.

Here is an early test shot, taken indoors, my desk lamp was the only source of light in the room.

(Isn’t this just a lovely little espresso cup – recent present from the better half)

Ok the shot is blurry, but the result I’m looking for is the gauge and quality of the light, which is spot on (for a cheap little flash gun and some cardboard).

(Odd box of cables and bits I need to put in the shed)

Again the only source of light in the room other than the flash gun is my desk lamp.  I’m somewhat pleased with the result

Naturally, give it a few months and I’ll be blogging about how this setup was rubbish and I invested in an SB-600   Then again, this “natural” hardware progression is the better way to go in my opinion.  Fudge/Bodge it until you know how to use the tools, then get good tools.

It took me a little while to realize that the best way to keep the camera stable was to lay down on the driveway! My tripod won’t support the weight of the 80-200mm lens.

Was made by combining;

What do you think?

Post a comment or tweet me.

I’m currently ill with a whole host of things, and looking at a computer screen for long periods of time makes me ill – so I decided to undertake a fairly simple bit of modding.

I took the wii apart, and to my annoyance found this;

Zoomed in;

Yep, it looks like Nintendo have dumped a whole load of “black stuff” around the very chip that I need to attach the wii-clip to.

Very annoying!  It looks like I’m going to have to use the soft mod technique unless I can find a way around this.  I’ve asked the wii-clip makers for their comments.

There is a MASSIVE amount of choice, and its a good way to find new music you haven’t listened to before. Accounts are free and you can create multiple stations, for example I have seeded a station using Craig Armstrong, and called the station “Chilled Work”. So when I am at the office, I have my little Pandora Player sitting on the desktop playing some nice mellowed out tracks.

Now, although Pandora is a web based service, I have thrown a VERY BASIC (I must stress at how basic it is!) application together. You will need to have the flash plugin installed – but if you’ve been using the web service you’ll already have that. If you don’t have the .NET 2.0 framework, the installer will grab what it needs and install those files too.

Once installed, the application sits in the middle of your screen, just leave it up behind your other windows, this way you don’t have to have a web browser open all the time. I know most of us actually have a browser open all the time, but this prevents you from accidentally leaving the pandora site, and thus stopping your music.

Get the install files from here. Its a tiny 259Kb in size. If you have any comments (other than “this is really basic” – I’ve already covered that) or would like me to add specific features to it, just post a comment

PS: Won’t work on 64bit OS, as Adobe don’t support 64bit Internet Explorer.

• I am currently ranked 13th in the UK (was 6th before I stopped).
• I am currently ranked 189th in the world (was 62nd before I stopped).

I stopped participating in April of 2006.

• Profile stats
• UK position

Maybe at some point I’ll get fired up an contribute again, who knows.

These will join the rest of the home cinema setup at some point (most probably over the weekend) when I am home during the day to do some loud testing.

PS: Yes, thats 3 amps, the Samson and Wharfedale work on powering my 3 subs – I like my bass

Well since then I blog irratically and post files and photos from time to time – today just seems to be a day for updating things.  I know people read this site as there are the odd comments from both people I know and people I dont.  I just looked at the site stats/traffic, I didnt expect to get “this many” visitors: 918 unique visitors last month – for a personal blog type site I dont think this is bad traffic.

 

Click for the full view.

In short this is a specifically designed distribution of Linux focused around security and pentesting.

Knoppix-STD is a customized distribution of the Knoppix Live Linux CD. Boot to the CD and you have Knoppix-STD. That would include Linux kernel 2.4.20, KDE 3.1, incredible hardware detection and hundreds of applications. Boot without the CD and you return to your original operating system. Aside from borrowing power, peripherals and some RAM, Knoppix-STD doesn’t touch the host computer.

Read more and download the ISO from here.

Rosetta@Home UK #6, and still climbing \o/

At this rate I am heading for the UK #4 spot, currently world #65 heading for #33.  I have a few more tricks up my sleeve, I should be able to get back on track for the UK #3 spot.

• My Stats

Right now I can get back to focusing on business, and doing some revision.

 

• UK position: 27th (stats)
• World position: 286th (stats)

Link to profile stats.

Things have come a long way since then, with SETI having come and gone, now we have BOINC, I wont go into too much detail, but its a great platform for distributed computing.

Two days ago I setup BOINC on the Rosetta@Home project which aims to predict and design protein structures and protein-protein and protein-ligand interactions. This has already and will continue to aid scientists in developing new cures and medications in the future.

At the time of writting there are 49,754 users registered to the project, who are downloading work units, processing them and sending them back.

In two days of running on this project;

• I am ranked 2813th in the world.
• I have moved up 30,666 positions in the past day.
• I am ranked 214th in the UK.

You can view my live stats here.

My prediction is that by next weekend I will be in the top 5 of the UK rankings, however I doubt I will move higher than 4th in the UK as there are 3 others who process more units a day than I do.