Author: wessexen

Its that time of year again, where one of my cars goes for the dreaded MOT. Naturally, it fails (well bound to), but I’ve checked the status online and this is a very interesting thing about the car. For the record, its a Renault Espace MK3, at last look, around one of 374 left on the road.. well, the variant I have anyway (Renault Espace Mk3 Privilege 2.2 DCi – and yes its a diesel.), I have another which is different (Renault Espace Mk3 Privilege V6 Auto – Petrol) but this blog post talks about some of the oddities which isn’t down to the garage, MOT or manufacturer, but how complex cars in general are getting.

In November, the V6 Espace went for its MOT, I think it failed on a few items, but they were fixed. One it should of failed on, but didn’t is the SRS light. Now this IS why I wrote the blog post. These Espaces have early electronic dashboards and very interesting ones especially for its age. It sits in the centre of the car so your kids (if I had any) and your wife (if I had even a girlfriend, its just me) can see what the car is doing or when I had a girlfriend, fiddle with the radio and she loved hogging the radio while they can see that you are taking the speed limit with a pinch of salt. 70mph? Plus the new VAT rate! Thats beside the point. I do as much as possible try to keep to the limits mainly because I don’t want to loose my licence of have a smack, I’m trying to look after my old girls.

The DCi Espace funny enough, passed as well on that part, but going through the history, I noticed this:
“Supplementary Restraint System warning lamp does not illuminate”

Now, to remember all car warning lamp combos is a bit hard, especially on the fly when you test hundreds of cars every week. The correct operation is:

• If the lamp illuminates followed by the word “Service”, fail.
• If the lamp isn’t lit and the dashboard then shows “OK” after the glow plug light, pass.

But, the MOT manual throws a good one:

From this link: http://www.ukmot.com/manual/5.4/Supplementary-Restraint-Systems-(SRS)

“Method of inspection:

….

2. Turn on the ignition and check the presence and operation of any Supplementary Restraint System SRS malfunction indictor lamps MIL.”

So, work that one out. The MIL works and it also doesn’t. I know one garage who is familiar with these vehicles and follows the rule correctly (it doesn’t help that the guy is an ex Renault Master Technician.) and it proves you can have a car nearly unique but doesn’t follow the rules. In that case, you are in the position I mentioned, “Do I pass or fail it? The manual says this, but it does that.” The problem is that cars are now really complex and that means so does testing them.

 

 

TECHIE WARNING: This article uses a lot of jargon, so if you aren’t sure, ask questions or if you aren’t interested, read on.

And it comes with a little pitfall if you don’t know computers that well. Mine was a slight issue which the operating system I was using, which is called Ubuntu Mate. I went from an AMD computer to a Raspberry Pi as I thought my AMD system which is by the way, an AMD A4-5000 based system, with 2 2.5″ hard drives, an ATI Radeon 240 graphics card and 16GB of ram, shoved in a case that hooks on to the back of a monitor.

I changed because I didn’t want the distractions when having important stuff to do, like using eBay to sell stuff or my applications I’m suppose to be doing. The Raspberry Pi, or more correctly, Raspberry Pi 2 as a fully fledged desktop computer made sense. Add a Sony monitor, DVI to HDMI cable, USB keyboard and mouse, USB wifi device and a 16GB Transflash card with Ubuntu Mate and you have a perfectly working computer that actually isn’t half bad. Except one problem, too many programs slow the computer down. It took me a while to find out and the problem is actually a simple fix. Now, I strongly recommend if you are going to use the Pi as a general purpose computer, follow this. For me, I went to Applications > System Tools > MATE System Monitor then watched the RAM usage. The Pi has 16x less RAM than my AMD system. (32x than another system I own). So, its a little wonder when I used my Pi for a few tasks, it ran out of RAM. Its a surprisingly simple fix – create a swap partition.

A Swap what?

Whats swap? Simple, its like RAM  or memory. I assume you know the difference between Memory (Temporary) and storage (permanent). Memory isn’t where your files live. Thats a hard drives job. The Hard drive, in the case of my Pi, lives on a small Transflash card which when I remove any power to it, my files stay there no matter what happens.
Memory or RAM is different, its temporary use, this blog was made in RAM which if I was to unplug my Pi, everything will be lost and I have to start again which is very annoying. But RAM is very fast temporary access, which is often very limited because it is expensive. Storage is much slower but you can buy more of it. So what do you do when you run out of RAM? The computer just simply stops without a swap partition. Lets say you have 512mb of RAM (temporary space). Your operating system will probably take around 100mb of that and an email client about 60mb, web browsing will consume 250mb and add a game which takes up another 130mb and then the computer goes “well, what do I do with the rest of the 28mb I need? I have no space!” and then crawls or locks up completely.

A swap file or partition more like in this case, the Operating System goes “Oh, I got some space to use. Its slow, so I’ll put the oldest/least used files in there”. And then the computer doesn’t crash. The computer basically thinks it has more RAM than it actually does. It sounds great but there are at least 2 problems:

1. For flash based drives, you’ll eventually wear out the drive far quicker with a swap file than normal read and writes. Its not a problem as it used to be as the drives themselves are often rated at 1m write cycles and unlimited read cycles. Besides at £10 per 16GB transflash drive, why worry?
2. Its slower to access despite my Pi has a Class 10 card.

But we still need it more. Or don’t use the humble £35 Pi as a desktop. (Which by the way, is a silent desktop!)

To do this, open your favorite terminal, on Ubuntu Mate, it can be found under
Applications > System Tools > MATE Terminal.

You’ll see a text screen, get your password ready for this and you won’t see what you typed, you will need it. Type first “Sudo apt-get update”. Once that finishes, type “Sudo apt-get install gparted”. You are installing a partition editor, what does it do? Allocates disk space across a disk for different uses.

Then type “Sudo gparted”, you should see a partition editor. You should see a button saying “New”, click this,  then under the partition type which is probably “ext4” by default, select “swap”. Set the size to either 1024 or 2048 (up to you), create it, then right click on the new swap partition as its called (the red outlined bit) and select “swapon”. Close, restart and it should be fixed. You can also resize your existing stuff to take up a bit more space if your drive is rather large.

Now check with the “System Monitor” to see if it gives you the size of the swap partition and notice a huge improvement in speed.

 

That should be all you need. No I don’t have any screenshots sadly. 🙁

One of my facebook buddies posted his typical Southern commute which is pretty much like mine. First your train gets delayed for no reason, then cancelled, then the next service does a platform dance, so you don’t know where its going with the Customer Information System (known as DARWIN for some reason). One really interesting one that might interest anyone is when I was at Guildford on the 9th June 2016, heavy rain and thunderstorms were forecast and while going through one train, I heard this:

“We are sorry to announce that the 18:13 Southern service from London Victoria has been delayed due to the condition of the platform surface. We are very sorry for the delay to your journey.”

And the return working was:

“We are sorry to announce that the 18:22 Southern service to London Victoria has been delayed due to flooding. We are very sorry for the delay to your journey.”

And you thought you heard it all!

Its that time of year and now I’m upgrading my phone (again) to a newer model which makes me wonder what can I do with it? The purpose of this blog is to think of the unusual and more obvious ways to dispose of your old phone. iPhones are slightly different due to their limitations, but no doubt you might find this blog useful. I use Android phones so lets look at them.

The obvious!

• Flog it! – So you got your shiny new phone for way over the odds you should of paid for it, your old one is quivering and upset. So you decide now is the time to part company. Besides, that eBay buyer may pay over the odds for it or may decided to offer a cut price. Ether way, you are looking at recouperating your costs. A big tip, do your research first on your make and model of phone as putting in a random price may mean you will be stick with it for a while.
• Keeping it as a spare – It sits in a drawer gathering dust for a few years and brought out when you need it, its great when that brand new LG G5 you had (like I have now) gets nicked on the railway station when you aren’t looking.
• Give it away – Someone is going to like it one way or another, perhaps a friend or a relative, but maybe they have phones and don’t like it either.
• Recycle it – the screens cracked, its been dropped 14 million times (because you didn’t think about putting it in a case – let alone a drop proof one.) and you listed it, no one wants it, but Mazuma (other recycling sites are available!) offered a decent price, so your phone is better off as scrap due to its value, end of the matter.

 

But, did you know that an iPhone or even android phone can have a lot of uses? What about other projects? You’d be surprised about their power. With a bit of software tweaking, phones can do a lot more than you think. Better still, you don’t need a sim card to operate a phone, most of which you can do already but with the addition of having a phone with a spare battery, you won’t have to worry about running out of battery power.

• GPS companion – Your new phone you prefer to keep its battery fresh as you don’t have a charger yet, not an issue, your old phone makes a great GPS device and with software updates, you can use it to navigate everywhere, plus your new phone doesn’t drain its battery as quickly. It’s particularly problematic when you have a newer phone with a USB type C connector. Free maps are available if you didn’t know already and can help you go everywhere.
• Remote Desktop Client – On some phones, you can buy a USB keyboard for the job and this turns it into a rather good Remote Desktop Connection client which means you can use the phone to connect to a computer somewhere else, you will need to do a few tweaks however to get it to work, but the joys are endless and certaintly allows you to leave the laptop at home. I did this with an old HTC touch Diamond pro 2.
• FTP Server – So you have a lot of files and you want a device that you can store your data on and not have to worry about it. Phones are good at this because they have a battery, so when the power goes out, the downtime is minimised. Soon as the power is restored, you should have your FTP server on in minutes.
• Web server – see above but someone once did this on a Compaq iPAQ and the results were interesting, but again, always on and back up UPS.
• DVR camera or any sort of camera –  Most android phones have cameras, so why not use it as a way of recording evidence in a court of law? You’ve had a smash, you have a DVR camera in your car to tell you who the culprits were. Most also have 2 cameras which also does both front and back which should help the courts and insurance companies give a bigger picture of the accident.
• Fully fledged desktop computer – Again, the phones have the capability and with the right sim card, you can even use it as a networked computer to browse the internet if you haven’t got one already. A few cables (MHL cable for example), the right monitor (with HDMI ports) and a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, you actually have a fully fledged desktop. When Superbook comes out, which is a laptop shell for a phone (others are available), you even can use the same old phone as a permanent laptop.
• Music player – One I never thought of, but its possible to use a phone as an iPod like device and one person I met did indeed use her old phone as a music player, the battery life should be pretty good because you won’t have a sim or wifi to worry about.
• MID or Mobile Internet Device – Great for walking around surfing the web on wifi if you are very cautious about not wanting to use your data, you won’t need much as the software is already on the phone.
• Spare parts – Very useful if you have a job lot of phones with different faults, if you know how to take a phone apart and put it back together, you can use your old phone to put together several new ones.

So, upgrading your phone? Here is 9 unusual ways to use a phone for a different purpose. Notice that I’ve not put tutorials in, because tutorials A) would take a lot of time and B) would take up a lot of space. The idea is to give you an idea of flexibility. There are many more ways you can use a phone and a lot I’ve mentioned you can already do on your own phone with or without a sim card, but the idea is to use the old phone instead of the new phone. There are many many more ways as well, like a dedicated 3G modem for your laptop,  a phone for dodgy people, etc. If you think out the box, you can think of different ideas.

 

 

NO ITS NOT. I’ll explain in detail about my take on it and I’ll give my responses and some better and I believe more cost effective ideas.

(Awaiting image)

I got this through sometime this week, where I live (Fishbourne Village – on the outskirts of Chichester) are planning a 20mph zone which sounds like a good idea. Now, I’m a pedestrian, train user (I LOVE to use my free travel pass), cyclist and car driver and I’m apposing to the 20mph scheme. Now the very nature  of having traffic suddenly slow down to 20mph sounds appealing you would think, especially when I walk or cycle around. Firstly, lets point out a few things, firstly, who keeps to speed limits anyway? Secondly, why does everyone prefer to park in side roads or on pavements in Salt Hill Road rather than on Salt Hill Road? The answer relates to the first question, traffic is going way too fast already! I hear it all the time, I see it all the time and a 20mph is not going to fix that. In fact, it will probably make matters far worse.

Even so, has anyone actually driven in a 20mph zone? I don’t suppose those that support the campaign have and it comes down to one big problem and that is your concerntration will drift. At slow speed, drifting concerntration because you are going soo slow your mind can’t cope with it is one point because its bored at travelling at that speed as nothing is happening. Therefore, you may end up taking risks and that increases the likelyhood of an accident and in my non academic self (shame on me – but really, I don’t know where to start for this argument) because of figures that are distorted by various factors, here is one small snippet of an argument that seems to support my view that accidents DO increase on 20mph road.

https://www.goldsmithwilliams.co.uk/news/accidents-increase-on-20mph-roads

Another search on a less crediable website shows this article from the “The Press” based in York and it seems to match some of my arguments:

http://www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/9874263.Accidents____may_be_more_likely____on_20mph_zones/ (Which was posted in August 2012, I looked at this in August 2016)

One key point to highlight:

“The reduced limits could be lulling pedestrians into a false sense of security, so they take less care” (Quote from the article above).

But if a driver is alert, then yes, the idea of a 20(mph) zone then works. That just requires education. Then if we educate drivers properly, we wouldn’t need a 20mph zone in the first place.

Besides, it WON’T fix a big problem, I can see 20 zones working on side streets where they are 30, however, the fact they lead to a dead end and has more obstacles than the CBT test course, you are most likely doing 20mph in the first place, so whats the point? To force that driver going too fast for the conditions? Well the law is against that, its called “driving without due care and attention”. No matter how much you try to slow that driver down, no matter how much you restrict the speed limit, they will not listen.

 

For the amount of money put into a scheme of reducing the speed limit by putting up signs that say 20, lets look into other traffic calming measures that work, lets look at stopping Salt Hill Road becoming a rat run first – that is happening because Chichester is soo badly clogged with traffic and Fishbourne roundabout is soo dangerous, lets look at that first. Once we looked into that and fixed that problem, the issue then might go away. A good start would be chicanes and where would be a good idea to add a chicane? How about outside Fishbourne station? How about a few parking spots to encourage more train usage? Instant obstacle guaranteed to slow down the traffic, add a meter and you might even make money from it. Create a box junction beside the parking bays and done. You can sort out a traffic problem by forcing the traffic to slow down, all this without adding a speed limit. What about creating pinch points? Short cycle lanes? Or how about even more interesting, SPECS? Not only would these slow motorists down, but for those that don’t, you make money from them. Therefore offsetting their installation costs.