Now its Happy new year (onwards to 2026)
Its that time again, onto 2026 and I already have some “new years resolutions” (targets). I have a nice easy one, go to the office at work more. Yeah, 2 days at home I didn’t particularly enjoy, in fact, 3 days in some cases. However, as there is some engineering projects affecting me next year, I might find that 3 days at home or 50% in the office over 2 weeks will be the norm (and we have gone for more hybrid working where I work, not less). For me, what has happened this year? Well, a lot actually, some…
Breaking my site… again!
I mentioned about this in my previous blog post, but yes, again, I broke my site again!Its the contact me form again. I had issues in the past with the site going off line randomly and I’ve been trying to sort that since June or July (yeah, none of that stuff please? You know, the month numbers?) 2025, I can’t remember which, but the site kept going off line, disabled multiple plugins and my site host started a new server, still kept going offline but a lot less than before, so I kept disabling more and more plug-ins. The previous…
For all my readers – Happy Christmas!!
Ok, short but sweet blog, well ok, a little longer as now I have 4 1/2 days off work (YAY!) and a pile of stuff to do at home (Boo) and places to go in the new year, I.e. hunting Avanti West Coast services on the Settle to Carlisle line (opens in a new window, leaves the site) – which unlike last time as I could do it for free with my box card, will cost me a pretty penny, still with PRIV rate and it looks like with all the engineering work going on, I may sample some new…
Battle of the beats (Local radio station)
With an unexpected surprise.I’ve not mentioned it for a while, but decided to play “Battle of the Beats” on a local radio station and I’ve taken part in it about 10 times. Usually, it ends up with my arse getting whipped. I started playing it for the first time this year, just for a bit of fun. The radio station is known as “V2 Radio”, you can listen on DAB if you have one of those radios and on the south coast or online. https://www.v2radio.co.uk). Super friendly radio station and a lot of what is advertised is mainly around West…
Review: Pritom L8 (or B8)
This is quite a long post, but I thought I’ll give it my thoughts in the hope it will help someone. (image quality is pretty poor, I had the blind down because the day was a bit hot and my office faces south!)I’ll start by saying that I hope this review is useful to someone as they are sold on AliExpress where I find some of my interesting equipment, I’ll also tell you what I think. My reasons for purchasing is related to a new position I took up in my own council as previously mentioned, to separate my data…
“Trust your instincts” I was taught.
How many times do you hear “if you see something not quite right, contact the BTP on the text number, see it, say it, sorted”.I travel on the railways a lot and I have an eye for detail which does have some advantages, because you get to know what’s right and what is wrong. Plus I interact with the rail staff and occasionally, passengers. When you travel on the same line, day in, day out, thousands of times, you get a feel for things that don’t look right. Today, I came across that problem. I’m writing this, because I would…
Knocking my site off line, Part 2 – It’s Back!!
God, 2 weeks have been a real problem for this site! You may of noticed, I ‘ve had a lot of problems with this site, from Internal Server 500 errors (caused by running out of memory, not storage or bandwidth) to actually disappearing all together! I’ll explain. I’m probably the oldest client on Cadence networks, this site is probably the oldest on their server and unfortunately, servers do have a limit to how long they can run before they give up. Thats the spoiler alert. So what happened?Simple, it got old, but to get there, I had a number of…
Did you know? (Trainz)
That the Trainz forum is now 25 years old today? They went live on the 01/08/2000 to promote what was Trainz Community Edition. I joined the forums on the 14/08/2000 looking for a train simulator that was more engaging than what I was using, that’s when I discovered after many hours of trawling through search engines (I can’t remember which one I used, Yahoo maybe? Google wasn’t on the horizon). For those in Trainz, if you noticed, my KUID author number (Koolthingz Unique IDentification) is actually a very low 30051. Yep, that low. Auran as it was back then, had…
Mini PC’s are fun!
Even better in an environment that bans computers. Understablable for safety but sometimes? I came across this YouTube clip: Not mine I have to say, but, I looked at it and I thought “Hold my Pepsi one minute, there’s smaller still!”I don’t own a GPD Pocket PC sadly, I’ve always wanted one but never had the cash to buy one new or used. The Pocket 3 or 4 is on my wish list, but still.I owned a OQO Model 01 (which is 5.5”, that was tiny and slow!), I still own a OQO model 2 but not the much more…