Cars & Driving, Life

South

Usually, when we’re on holiday, we’re wanting to come home at the end of our time. We miss our cats and our house, and on this trip, I miss Indian takeaways ;-).

However, we both felt that we could have managed more time. I don’t think I could permanently live in a place as isolated, but the peace was nice (and in fact, the crowds around Durness at one point felt uncomfortable).

However, we had a pre-booked overnight stop somewhere nice on the way back, so back on the road.

An uneventful journey back towards and on the A9 saw us conveniently near Blair Atholl at lunchtime and a drop into the Bothy Bar at the Blair Atholl hotel got us lunch. Onwards got us to Callander, a town we’ve driven through, but never stopped, and a very nice hotel indeed as a close to our holiday and a treat for a special occasion by around 3:30pm. (241 miles, 5:26, unknown mpg)

Thackray House Hotel: a historic building in Scottish Baronial style.
A nice hotel

Callander was nice. We’d stayed up the road in Killin before now, but never here. We had a short hobble around the town before dinner, a drink in the lovely bar, and settling in to our suite for the evening (we’d got a complimentary upgrade!).

A positively lovely breakfast saw us back on the road around 9:30 with a brief refuelling stop just up the road, and clearly something was wrong: a bank holiday weekend, and a easy journey back (4:56, 312 miles, 54.5 mpg. Back to our kitties.

Cars & Driving, Life, Retrospective

What We Did On Our Holidays

So, having got there, what did we do?

Many miles, for a start. The whole trip was over 1300 miles, averaging around 53mpg. Considering there was a lot of single track, and a reasonable bit of ‘spirited’ driving, that’s pretty good.

We finally closed the loop we’d started back in 2008 by going round through Durness and Tongue to Bettyhill, meaning we’ve now done the NC500, even if it took us 18 years to do so.

We also visited the most northwest point, Cape Wrath, which took 2 attempts, a very small ferry, and 22 miles along a very bumpy track in a minibus.

We drove about, looked at scenery. We had a few meals out at some varying hotels, and mostly, we relaxed.

Scenery was stunning, roads were quiet (and the Leon proved to be great in sport mode for a bit of fun), and there was a very pleasant lack of crowds. The NC500 campervans were a slight pain some of the time, but not much (we were strategically based just off the route) and the high diesel cost and NC500 inflation meant this wasn’t a cheap holiday, but it was a nice one.

Cars & Driving, Life, Retrospective

North

We’ve been away. Scotland, a long way north.

We’ve done a long way north before, of course, a good long time ago. Oddly enough, diesel had gone up in price a lot that time we drove hundreds of miles too, though 2008 prices would seem cheap now.

This time, we were heading west, eventually, but highland roads meant that Mr Google directed us up the A9 Road of Death just past Inverness, then west. But wait! I’m getting ahead of myself, we’ve got a long way to go yet!

We left at a sociable 09:30, and got on the M6T and M6. A quick stop at Tebay, and onwards on the M6, M74, M73, M80, M9 and A9. No serious traffic until we reach Perth, and even then, only a few minutes, and we reach Stanley and our overnight stop.

5:24 driving time, 335 miles, 52.8 mpg.

We went for a hobble down to Stanley Mills before tea, a place we’d been completely unaware of, had an evening meal and settled in to our room for the evening.

Stanley Mills: it's a collection of large, 19th century mill buildings that have been restored.
Stanley Mills

The next day: breakfast and back on the road. A brief stop for fuel, then onwards on the A9. The “Road of Death” is much tamed now: there’s much more dual carriageway, fewer hazardous junctions, and average speed cameras. We pass Inverness, and before too long turn off.

The roads get smaller, and at one point we have a over 40 mile stretch of thankfully quiet single-track road. We’re lucky though: there’s not much NC500 on our route.

We reach Kinlochbervie and our holiday let after another long drive: 4:20, 201 miles, 58.2 mpg, no hold-ups.

The place is beautiful and peaceful: just the sound of flowing water, sheep, and birdsong. There’s a big fishing harbour, but that’s out of sight.

A view of a loch and hillside
The view from our cottage

Apart from said harbour, there’s a hotel, a hardware shop/filling station (with one petrol/diesel pump), 2 cafes, and a Spar shop. That’s about your lot, facitities-wise. As it was, the hotel was OK for a bar meal, the one cafe we tried was excellent, and the Spar was well-stocked, which is a good thing.

The cottage itself was warm (it might have been May, but it’s a good bit cooler up there), a decent size, comfortable, and unexpectedly had a decent Internet connection, and it proved to be a great base.

Computers

Windows 11

Part of the ongoing updating of things at work has been shifting to Windows 11 as a desktop OS, and now that the rest of the organisation is done, it was time to attend to my own laptop.

For the last 8-9 years I’ve had a Lenovo T470s, and it’s been nothing less than superb: one new keyboard thanks to me spilling tea on it, a tiny bit of screen delamination, and other than that it’s played a key part in keeping the infrastructure going. It’s been dropped onto concrete, balanced in precarious places in server rooms, carried around exhibitions, bounced about the boot of my car. It’s run Windows 10 all that time, with the occasional boot into Ubuntu.

It’s been replaced by a T14, and Windows 11. As a team we pushed for Lenovo: despite the claims that build quality isn’t what it was, it’s clearly better than the other tier 1 supplier (Dell) under consideration, and a world away from the no-name we were asked to look at.

I wasn’t looking forward to the change: The start button is in the wrong place, cut and paste have been moved, show desktop is in the wrong place too. All survivable, but years of muscle-memory is hard to change: despite the proper programmers mocking me for not using CTRl-C CTRL-V, there’s situations when the GUI and mouse work. The times when I’d had to support a Win11 machine a user was using had irritated me.

One thing I just had to do was remove the AI components and just generally remove some of the tat, and I found this did the task without too much bother.

A week in, and my deep hatred of 11 is subsiding: it works well enough once you turn off the tat. One nice thing: the new “terminal” shell accepts some bash commands, so all that problem of typing ls in a cmd shell is gone šŸ™‚

audio, Computers, Technology

Home Baked

A question on a Facebook group triggered this: someone asked about the Brennan B3. Is it hifi? Is it worth the nearly Ā£800 price tag?

I’ll leave the latter to your judgement, but the Brennan devices have interested me for a while.

They’re a combined CD ripper and hard-disk music player, nicely packaged and with an easy to use interface. The advertising seems to be aimed at the older generation (well, the kids all stream now…), and at replacing your CD collection and old player with one box and adding a bit of convenience.

This is something I’ve been doing for a while with a Rasperry Pi and Moode, RuneAudio, Raudio or Volumio software: all similar concepts of a modified Linux distribution for playing media.

Can you see where this is going yet?

The Brennan box is unashamedly and openly the same thing, tidied up as a consumer appliance. The latest B3 unit is the most complete: it takes a Raspberry Pi, a hard drive, a CD drive, and a DAC and class D amplifier, puts them in a nice case with a nice display, and glues it all together with some software.

That software is freely downloadable if you’re so inclined, and if you write the image to a SD card you can mount it and poke about.

It looks to be based on Ubuntu 32 bit, and uses lighttpd to serve pages, and omxplayer to play media.

So: is it hifi?

I suppose, for certain definitions of hifi. It’s not high-end, but then that isn’t the target market.

Is it worth nearly Ā£800?

Not for me. I’ll stick with the homebrew solution. But some people love them, and at the end of the day it’s a supported consumer product and the manufacturer is upfront and honest about it. You decide.

I’ve got a certain admiration for it: it’s a clever, well-executed idea, and it’s not like using a Raspberry Pi as the basis of a product is unusual.

General

The Heat Is On

A couple of years ago, because I’m old and my feet/legs are continually cold, my other half bought me a Dreamcatcher electric throw, so I can sit there like an old man with a blanket over me, but it’s heated. Then she bought another for herself (and, also for friends and family).

They’re great. We use them regularly, and during the work on the house last year when doors were open and the heating was off, they were a lifesaver.

Then one broke, then the other one broke.

Both the same- the controller (PET-CON-2 or PS7G-H/L) was completely dead. Checking the mains fuse revealed nothing.

A quick search on the Internet revealed you could buy a controller, for Ā£20, but it also revealed this Youtube video from Brian J Wright.

Now, the video does the thing I hate about Youtube instructional videos; there’s a lot of talking to get to the point, but to be fair, it does tell you the fix, Brian clearly knows what to look for.

There’s a 102 degree C, 2A thermal fuse, closely nestled under a plastic cover, between two resistors, and sure enough, it was open circuit.

In the picture below, the fuse is the white component just below the slide switch, between 2 resistors.

The circuit board from the controller
The controller board: the thermal fuse is the white component just below the slide switch.

A quick purchase on Amazon of some tri-wing screwdrivers and a pack of thermal fuses, and some careful work with a soldering iron (obviously, overheating thermal fuses would be bad!) and we both have heat again, for less than the cost of one new controller (and I have some screwdrivers for the next annoying bit of electrical or electronic kit), and there’s a bit less e-waste.

I strongly suspect the failure was caused by allowing the controller to sit under the throw itself.

[edit]
The one blanket failed again, and blew the fuse again. Connecting the other controller gave an error display. Subsequent investigation showed something has come adrift inside the blanket and there’s a coil of heater element jammed in one corner, so that one is scrap. I’ll re-repair the controller so we have a spare.

[edit 2]
The other blanket developed a fault too :-(. I wonder if this was the cause of the fuse popping?

Cars & Driving, Life, Technology

Updated

At work, we’ve been busy.

We’ve been bringing some infrastructure up to date: an elderly VMWare install was migrated to Nutanix– because since Broadcom bought VMWare, pricing just got stupid, a legacy application with its roots in the 1990s, running on a very old Server 2003 box finally got retired, and at this point, we could start to address issues like a Windows Active Directory also running on Server 2003 that literally couldn’t be altered until the legacy application was retired.

The legacy application also meant an old desktop OS: it literally wouldn’t work on Windows 10 or 11, and was unsupported (but did work) on Windows 8.1. This meant old hardware for the users- in some cases purchased secondhand.

So, first of all, a Windows 2016 domain controller was introduced, this being the newest that was still compatible with the 2003 functional level and servers. This had been tried before, but the legacy server promptly shat itself: the mistake was patching the new server. Backing it out, then rebuilding it unpatched worked just fine.

Services were migrated- DNS, DHCP, RADIUS. The 2003 servers were removed, more services migrated from the 2008 Domain controller. A second 2016 DC came in, the 2008 server was removed, and finally, we get to raise functional level and remove the need for SMBv1 (an easily exploitable protocol). We might still have unsupported OSs, but at least now we can use supported ones on the network!

Now we were in a decent place to deliver new hardware to users, users that have been justifiably clamouring for workstations from this decade, which is why, last week, I found myself waiting for my non-driving colleague near a flyover in South Birmingham at 05:40 in the morning (and why I’d found myself at another colleague’s house at 06:00 just before Christmas) with a boot full of Thinkpads and a long commute ahead of us.

It’s your job to keep me awake!

This time, the target was an office south of the M25 in Surrey, so it was on to the M42 and M40, a short trip round the M25, and then the A3.

It never ceases to amaze me that in places, once you leave the M25, things can look almost semi-rural, and this was the case here: we drove through Ripley and it felt almost villagey, though admittedly a village with a Bentley Dealer.

We found ourselves onsite by 08:20, and after a quick drink got underway: all done by 14:20, which was a result, and then it’s just a return journey. I drop off my colleague, and drive home with a bootfull of antique computers, encountering the only really bad traffic of the entire journey at the top of the M5 as per normal.

There remains much to be done: Exchange has to be brought up to date (kind of) and there’s new Citrix to build. Some of my colleagues still have bootfulls of Thinkpads to dole out elsewhere in the UK, but at least we have a significant chunk done.

music

2025 in Music

Last year, I posted my listening for 2024, so now it’s time for 2025:

My Listenbrainz stats for 2025
An overview of my listening in 2025

Again, my top artist was Nightwish, and top track was, this time, Sleeping Sun. Italian goth-rockers Lacuna Coil dropped into 2nd place, followed by Canada’s The Birthday Massacre.

A screenshot of my most listened songs
Favourite Songs 2025
a screenshot of my most listened artists in 2025
Favourite Artists 2025

Something went wrong with my portable listening data this year šŸ™ , so you have a reasonable snapshot of home listening, skewed towards workday listening.

Full data here.

Life

Twenty Two

Another year, huh?

Another year I’ll be glad to see the back of to be totally honest, and another year of blogging, despite the fact it’s now deeply unfashionable and no-one does it any more.

This year has featured no human deaths in immediate family, but one feline as my nephew cat Salem went missing, presumed dead. His brother Soup remains with us, and my two remain healthy despite dental issues in the last year. Our own health and that of friends and family presents challenges, as does life in general, but we’re still here, and we have achieved things.

Surviving, for a start, but also (for my other half) reaching a huge achievement that I might get round to mentioning here at some point, but I’ll be consulting her first.

There have been other positives: friends, family, and cats, mostly, but we’ve also finally done some house refurbishment which will continue into 2026.

Work continues to be OK, and this year we’ve made huge leaps forward with some very old infrastructure headed for the skip as we drag things into this decade.

The country is still fucked, of course. The current Labour government have been slowly improving some things: some public services have improved, for instance, but to me it seems that they’re just not different enough from the others, but this is probably an attempt to appeal to the racists and avoid losing votes to Reform. Thankfully, of course, [sarcasm]the great British public could never get sucked in to vote for something so utterly broken as Reform[/sarcasm].

2025- off you fuck, and good riddance, mostly.
2026- *[sigh]* Whatever.

We’re in the closing hours of 2025, and I’m sat with a cat snoozing by the radiator, and a wife snoozing on the sofa, so things could be worse.

Very slight uptick on the song front this year: The Birthday Massacre’s Last Goodbye is still not cheery, but maybe wistfully slightly positive, and a bit poppy:

There’s a place we can find with no direction
Every choice is stitched in the patternā€…weā€…sew in time
Fromā€…the start to the end, weā€…define between
In the nothing, there is something we can never see
There’s a place we can go if you just stay close to me

Life

Christmas

It’s Christmas morning. I’m sat with headphones (because my bluetooth speaker seems to have died, and firing up the AV system is inconsiderate when one’s other half is in bed) playing From Spirits and Ghosts.

Work finished on Dec 23, happily with me working at home that day after a very busy few months, but Christmas Eve was busy: turkey collection (as normal, by 8am), dropping cards with one family branch, and then assisting in sorting out a family member who had a hastily-arranged move of care home (more of this another time, perhaps), followed by a good friend visiting to exchange gifts, then the traditional curry and Muppet Christmas Carol.

I’m now sitting watching the light levels increase (thank $deity, we made it past another shortest day) while the cats snooze or batter each other, alternating as they see fit. We’ll be seeing more family later, with yet another variation on cooking Christmas dinner: I am in charge of turkey and bits of pig, my wonderful nibling is in charge of other bits. I’m finally feeling a little festive.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Papa's got a brand new Pig Blog