Yak & Natter

We were on the beach last night, and the tide was a long way out. Further out than I’d seen it for a long time, and as a result we could get
close (1280×1024 image) to the West Pier. There was an artist out at work, creating circles of various sizes in the sand. Why? Don’t know. Why not.

Others were out cockling. We think. Well, they were digging holes in the sand. And yes, that’s right, sand. There is sand out there.

I was having a browse around iPod Hacks over lunch and spotted a couple of Shuffle protectors – the Griffin iVault (a bit hard core for me) and Wrappers (my favourite is sunflower). Currently I don’t have a cover for my shuffle, although we do have an eVo iSkin for our main iPod.

We’ve recently come across the Freebord – it looks like an interesting design, and the videos make it look like a really close match to snowboarding in style. We haven’t invested in one yet, but it is pretty tempting.

So, we’ve seen our last real snow (I think) for the season, and finished with a great long
weekend in Chatel one of the resorts in the Portes Du Soleil area. We were really lucky and snow fell the day we
travelled and on our first day on the slopes and refreshed some otherwise struggling pistes. We spent one day in the Linga and Pré-la-Joux areas (a great, if low-visibility day), another day in the Lindaret area of Avoriaz (our favourite area when we were there at New Year) and our final half day in Super Chatel (limited terrain but great for practicing riding switch). Perversely enough, this was amongst the best snow we’ve had in any of our three trips this season despite it being almost the end of season.

It would be cool to have a
secret tunnel to the beach from our house.

What’s the difference between Wikipedia and h2g2? Reading up on the thinking behind the creation of h2g2 makes it sounds
rather more exciting than those behind Wikipedia (even though someone has provided a mobile interface for Wikipedia now).

Of course you can lookup the Wikipedia entry for h2g2, and visa versa. But only h2g2 has an entry comparing both.

Cathy T was kind enough to pass on the URL for 10×10. It’s not without it’s problems, but it’s cute. Much cuter than that thing I did a while back.

Due to a combination of a small hardware failure and a large amount of user error, I ended up in a situation where our home server RAID5 disk array was hosed and our backup disk was failing to respond. It was looking like we’d have to go back to month old CD backups… but it didn’t turn out that way. So thanks to:

• GND – I bought the server from these people over three years ago at Dave‘s suggestion. Turned out to be good advice. There was something about the Linux set up I didn’t understand. I dropped them an email, and a few days later I received a phone call from a technical guy, full of knowledge of how my machine was set up, and that helped me work out how to get the machine back. Great customer service.
• TestDisk – let’s say, hypothetically, while installing an operating system on one set of disks, you’d managed to corrupt the partition table of a different, and perfectly good, set of disk. Once you get past the “where did my data go?” shock, what do you do? Use TestDisk to fix the problem.

BTW, if you decide to have an off-site back up disk in your car, check the disk tolerance before you leave the disk in a car park in Heathrow during double-digit negative temperatures. At one point I looked into professional data recovery services to get the data off this disk. We didn’t need the service in the end, but Data Recovery UK were fast and friendly and quoted me £85 to perform an initial investigation on this 120G IDE backup drive. It’d then cost £350 – £900 to recover the data. Which I thought was fair enough, assuming you value the data.