Hi, and welcome to BMH Online, my little corner on/at/in Neocities [joined 16 June 2020]. I typically list on this page things in my life to share right now. Then, every so often, I add something new to the top of the list, and then eventually file the old stuff away. There are also various sections to explore. Here goes...

  • [1 December 2024] This year's Advent Calendar is here:

Brian's Creative Countdown to Christmas 2024

  • [22 November 2024] I spotted this for sale on ebay this week:

Almost complete in box (no backplate) and in near pristine condition... for £15... except for leaking capacitors. Well it arrived today... and around 1hr and 15 capacitors later and it's working. The CPU was unknown but turned out to be an Althon XP 2400+, I could have hoped for a 3000+ but no. I'm chuffed it went so smoothly; yesterday I tried to swap a USB lead from one faulty Microsoft Intelii mouse to another in the hope of getting one working... but no. Oh well; I can't win them all.

  • [11 November 2024] Yesterday evening I saw the Moon with a halo, similar to this:


Not my photo

I tried to photograph it myself but the halo couldn't be seen in the resulting image (and I think it was wider than the one above), even if I fiddled with the contrast in GIMP. I queried the topic of a halo'd Moon with ChatGPT which you can read here*. It told me a couple of pieces of nonsense: 1) The Moon is up more than the Sun, and 2) that our eyes are less sensitive at night. It's "slips" like these that make me wonder about the accuracy/correctness of other stuff it spouts that I would otherwise assume to be correct, just like when an author makes a few typos I wonder about the accuracy of stated claims.

*I've let my logging of Conversations with A.I. slip...

Later that evening the Moon, a waxing gibbous Moon (66%), was set to pass (visually) close to Saturn in the constellation of Aquarius (although I didn't get to see this for myself because a) sleeping, and 2) cloudy). I've taken to using Stellarium to track the phases of the moon each month and sometimes use ChatGPT to entertain me with what astrology might say about such things. You can read this occasion here.

I wonder about the accuracy of Stellarium because it doesn't match what Moonphases.org (recently visually upated) states (although I don't claim that that is the accurate one) and sometimes when I observe something in the software it doesn't match what it had previously shown; the above is a case in point as a previous look at the point in time the Moon and Saturn were closer.

  • Speaking of the stars, I've now powered up another computer (NOLAN) to participate in Einstein@home. Be sure to check out that section.

  • [04 November 2024] We had a family gathering at the weekend due to it being my brother's birthday. I'm not one for going out, but considering there was more than 10 of us, it makes sense to find somewhere to eat out, even if that does cost over £200... I personally begrudge the expense on the grounds of, for what it cost for my meal this was half a week's worth of groceries.

There was some excitement to start the evening off... some old guy who was evidently over the limit, managed to reverse his Mercedes* into a parked car behind... twice. But the highlight was my other brother running over to stop the guy from leaving the carpark. 1) The guy shouldn't have been driving (his son then took over), but 2) To just drive off after bumping someone's car... I thought about it afterwards and if I ever bump someone's car (and I have admittedly given one a gentle nudge before) I'm pretty sure I would likely drive off if I thought no harm was done... and there were no witnesses. On this occasion there was an audible "crunch" and a crowd of us nearby to witness it. But I thought highly of my brother for his stance that if someone bumped our cars we'd be thankful for their honesty in coming forward - someone actually did this with him on one occasion and left their details with regards to covering costs. I think I'm quite good at considering other people's feelings, but perhaps in regards to "doing the right thing" in such situations as these, I'm probably less upstanding if I think I can get away with not being.

*It being a Mercedes driver I think this was relevant and the situation irked me somewhat more since the guy surely wasn't short of money. All of my previous cars (and my bike) cost me £280-£1,000, I wonder about the fairness of causing damage to someone's £xx,000 vehicle with mine, and/or them being fussy about repairs which could cost more than I earn in a year.

  • [02 November 2024] This week I was helping a client to set up a new iPad and switch from a faulty* iPhone to an Android phone.


(not actual phones)

Things didn't go all that smoothly; the transfer/setup to/of the new iPad resulted in the spinny-round-thing spinning round endlessly with no indication of actual progress (I despise these unhelpful signs of progress). Powering the whole thing down after an hour-or-so of this, and switching it back on got things actually moving.

The iPhone had seemingly developed a fault with the Home button; sometimes it wouldn't recognise presses (I noticed it didn't feel right), or it would think it was being pressed when it wasn't and would cause all sorts of confusing behaviour. I recommended switching to an Android phone to save them £200+. I don't use a smartphone myself but every time I help others set them up I'm bewildered by how much crap is on them; all the stuff and options and settings pinging about is so overwhelming that I couldn't even begin to explain things - I'm further deterred from getting my own smartphone because of this, but I might relent one day. I think this is made worse on Android phones because not only do you have the Google operating system wanting to control and do things, but also the manufacturer's own suite of things vying for the same (in this case Honor). If this was a new desktop computer I'd be uninstalling anything I deemed unnecessary, but here on these phones it seems that one wrong turn in this regard will leave things f*ck'd up because of how intertwined everything is. Beyond this, everything feels sketchy and a cyber-security nightmare.

One thing I'd failed to consider when switching my client from iPhone to Android was their Contacts list. Looking online I found a few methods for transferring this but I ultimately hit a dead-end. Logging into their iCloud account from within the web browser on their new phone (in order to download the Contacts file) failed to show 'Contacts' as an app, even though it had a list of recovery data pertaining to Contacts. Perhaps the instructions were out-of-date and Apple no longer allows you to download this file (my sister said she encountered a similar issue when doing her own switch). In the end I had to tell my client she would need to spend some time working her way through her 100-long list of clients and manually input them into her new phone.

Why is it that modern tech. seems to be intent on screwing over the user?

[EDIT] The vCard contact file thing was accessible once the Chrome browser was switched into Desktop mode...

  • [01 November 2024] I did my usual routine yesterday of dressing up a little (Creepy Butler is pretty easy for me to pull off I think), carving a pumpkin, lighting some candles and the woodburner, and cooking all manner of things upon the latter. I finished reading the book of ghost stories I'd begun last (2023) October, and then read for a while from my Kindle, before turning in for the night.

  • [27 October 2024] November is almost here; I'm ever conscious of my lack of updates and somewhat akin to last year, I'm getting anxious about December, since I had been doing 'Advent Calendars' here on my Neocities site for the past few years and to go from next-to-no-updates to updating daily for the calendar instils a fair bit of worry, although as always, it's an ideal opportunity to get on top of things, even if those daily updates seemingly end up being minor or trivial.

  • I've noticed that with many things, the less I do them the more difficult it is to do them; like the whole 'getting back into the swing of things'. I try and figure out what the hurdles or barriers are (sometimes mental, sometimes otherwise), and change things up to overcome them; in the case of this website maybe I need to shake things up a bit and set things on a new path so it becomes more inline with whatever I do each day/week, and easier to do this (this Log, for example, requires me to upload two pages in the correct order in order to best comply with Neocities 'Feed'. Another issue is that the menu to the left is supposed to represent mostly current things, but it ends up out-of-date. Then, with the approaching Advent season, I think... I may as well wait until then to do any such changes (or at least upload them)! #sandbagging

  • [September 2024] Greetings all. I've been somewhat lax with working on this website; I've been working on a few other things like home DIY and a bit of car tinkering. Some things I could have documented here, but I just couldn't get into doing that for whatever reason.

  • Anyway, I had a fun-packed weekend. On Saturday I generally (try to) have my short run in the morning, then a little while later go out on my bike for an hour or so, and then later I do a workout with my neighbour, lifting weights etc. plus walking with his dog after. I'm not one for looking like a bodybuilder, but I'm enjoying the progress I feel. This weekend though there was a community walk arranged so I avoided my morning run (still did the bike ride) and then took part in that; around 5 miles in all, with, I think, a good portion of the village turned out, mums at least it seemed, all ages, dogs too. It was a super nice day also; the weather is always a gamble here. It was somewhat amusing to be among the first few to finish although I thought it was a little anti-social of the people leading the way to not slow down to keep us more together as a group, there was even a "pace car" to keep us safe and warn motorists, but this was made somewhat redundant due to the half-a-mile gap that formed. I joked at the end when a comment was made about how it was just "a stroll" for me (people know I ride my bike or go running), I said we could go round again and catch the others up. I was half-joking, only because I had more activities lined up the next day.

  • The Sunday involved driving for an hour-and-a-half through misty Wales to meet my brother who had signed us up to go down into some mines, tunnels and caves... for 5 hours. We had to harness up and were shown how to clip in to the ropes throughout the system. We got to climb up cave walls, zip-wire across vast holes you couldn't see the bottom of, and wade through streams as deep as our wellies; an adult's playground. We were only a small group of six, with two guides, and only one guy struggled with his fears, but got better throughout and had some good encouragement from the guide. I tend to lose my patience with such people, but it wasn't too bad. I don't have any photos from our adventure as it wasn't really practical to be taking pictures (it's a shame we weren't given at least some opportunities to do this), but here are some pictures from the website which show some of the things we did:

I found a map online of the whole system (way more than what we had access too), but I can't follow it to see where we went:

  • [02 August 2024] Greetings! I broke VirtualBox on my Ubuntu machine with KDE Plasma desktop environment, which meant I couldn't log into my usual Windows XP environment (that I'd set up some six weeks earlier), to update this website. I could have used another computer, but...

Anyway(1), I couldn't fix VirtualBox, I think it broke when I did some updates (manually), which is ironic because a day or some prior to that I had written a blog post about the whole CrowdStrike thing affecting Windows and how automatic updates are a PITA... I generally stick to security updates, because, you know, if it aint broke, don't update it...

Anyway(2), since I had ended up preferring the KDE desktop environment I elected to install Kubuntu this time around (I'd had Ubuntu on my machine since 16.0). I was able to export my XP Virtual Machine setup, and import it into a fresh install of VirtualBox, and that went smoothly. The only issue I had, which was doing my head in for a while and threatened the whole setup, was, I couldn't get Kubuntu to mount an external hard drive with all the stuff on I needed.

"An error occurred while accessing... the system responded: The requested operation has failed: Error mounting ... wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on... missing codepage or helper program, or other error"

I hopped from forum to forum in search of a solution, and while other people have such issues mounting external hard drives on Linux, I didn't find a set of instructions convincing enough and in the end I managed to sort the problem myself: In Disks, after no change with choosing the option to check the disk for problems, which said all was fine (and indeed the drive worked on other systems), I chose the Fix problems option, and then I could finally mount the drive as normal.

So now I'm in the process of reinstalling everything, but in doing this I'm reminded of my Windows 98 days where every so often I had to just relent and reinstall everything to get things running smoothly again... and then I end up with a nice fresh system. My files, like the rest of my stuff, have become somewhat disorganised so I'm trying to implement ways to counter this.

  • In other news, last weekend I drove 150 miles to a classic car show. It was a great day; free to enter and exhibit, and among the 200-or-so other cars, there were two other Capri's; one a recent barn find and really only driving there because, like mine, it is 40 years old and MOT except, and another in white sporting a bodykit. It was nice to chat to the owners and others at the show.

  • [02 July 2024] Welcome to July! I added a few things here at the end of May and during June but I failed to finalise and upload them, mainly because they were quite long and waffly. I've addressed that now by finishing them and compacting them into a "Read more..." links, so you can read, well, more if you want.

Yesterday I finally sold my car (not the cool one but the one that has been plaguing me since I got it), and I downgraded my computer.

After the money for the car was handed over and I transferred ownership, I casually/politely asked the guy what he was planning on doing with the car (the powered steering had stopped working as I had stated in the listing)... he said he's putting it in for its MOT (the UK's checkup that confirms a vehicle's roadworthiness). I pretty much face-palmed - it's not going to pass an MOT due to the powered steering not working... Oh well, he'll figure that out in time. Selling the car was particularly hellish; it took months - I had it first listed on ebay which cost me money, then I relented and logged into Facebook to list it there (I don't otherwise use Facebook), and also Gumtree; I had to remember to log in each day and respond to annoying messages of "Still available?" with "Yes" only to either hear nothing more or be offered half of what I was asking for it (regardless of how much I listed it for). Some other guy showed a keen interest but then vanished without a courteous "I'm not interested." I also took it to webuyanycar (with the help of my neighbour's car transporter - that was actually fun) who, on their website offered anywhere between £225-£500, only to then spend an hour logging it in to their system to end up offering me £120 (less than scrap value) - I was not impressed having wasted 3 hours of mine and my neighbour's day. Oh well, I'm glad it's gone now and I can focus on looking after the Capri.

The computer downgrade came about after I bought, as I do, a "cheap old computer off ebay".

I mainly bought it for the Antec case, which I intended to resell, but then I realised that the computer within was on-par with my main computer, if we discount the graphics card and amount of RAM, but beyond this the power-usage was super-low in comparison - I'm keen to keep within what my solar system can provide on a day-to-day basis, at least during the summer months. My computer is an i7 2600K on an ASRock mainboard, whereas this replacement has a lower TDP i5 3470 on some Intel board. It also has a basic graphics card that has 2GB of memory, which surprised me. In addition to the slightly lower powered CPU I think the mainboard is less power-hungry too so the system can trundle along on 45W. I've also swapped my 22" screen for a 19" one I had spare that uses half the power; it's less real-estate but feels adequate. I'm only going to notice the lacking performance when I try to edit videos (which I don't do often), or if I try to go in Second Life (something I'm still trying to avoid). Since I've been happily using Linux for the past month it was straightforward enough to just swap the SSD over to the other system - the trickiest part was mounting the 2.5" drive in a case that didn't have any mounting points for it. I could do with swapping the CPU cooler for something less stock, but it's pretty quiet without GPU fans.

[Click here for January-June]

- BMH Online -