BA Falcon Ute Oil Change

We had some leftover oil and decided to do a oil change in the ute.

Supercheap auto to get the oil filer and a second trip to buy the removal tool.

Oil 10W30
Oil Volume = 6.5L Although I can't easily find a reference.
Oil Filter = Ryco Z9

Got a bit of Dan and dad time together.  Dan helped very competently.
First step was to find and remove the oil drain bolt.

We then drained it into a plastic container.

Note just drove the ute onto a couple of wooden blocks so there was enough room (just) to work.

A trip to Supercheap to buy the oil filter then back again to get the "socket"

A Christmas present from Henry

Package received.
Carefully examined.
'present from Henry Thomson'
Cut open.
Placed under the tree.
Lights on for complete experience.
Retrieved from tree.
Opened.
Inspected.
Consumed.
And that's that....

Backing Up

I have data spread over various hard drives and occasionally one fails.

I think what I would like is two USB external drives in some kind of soft raid configuration such that if I write to one then the data ends up on the other.  I would like the copying process to not slow down the computer so it needs to only happen when the computer is not busy. 

Most of the time neither hard drive would be plugged in so maybe this is not so feasible.  Maybe I just want to plug the two drives in and have one mirrored to the other.

Hmm

OK so I have two drives.  One has data and the other is blank.
I will try SyncbackSE Turns out my licence which was purchased in 2006 is not valid and I am offerred an upgrade.  Lets try evaluation first.

Family Bike Ride

We had a traditional family bike ride.

The timing was approximately
10:15 Depart Oxley
10:45 Arr Archibald St
11:15 Depart Archibald St
12:00 Arr Newfarm park
12:14 Finished climbing trees
12:30 Lunch, Fizbee, Soccer.
  1:50 Depart Newfarm Park
  2:10 Waiting under the cliffs near the new pub.
  2:50 Arr Archibald St
  3:30 Depart Archibald
   
It was very hot and afterwards Marcus came with me and jemma and Dan went with Megan and after a bit of confusion we managed to make it to the konings for a swim.

Post Christmas Bike Maintenance

The last few mornings Chris has been going bike riding with some of the guys from Toowong.

He posted "Hit 82km[/h]s, down one of the hills. Very scary.

Chris came over with his bike to do some maintenance.  The first problem was that during today's ride he had heard a click for each rotation of the pedals.  The non cog side of the pedals is removed using a 10mm Allen key. The pedal crank had an indication that it was a left hand thread and we struggled a bit trying to undo it the wrong way.  Eventually ignored the makings and tried to undo it normally and off it came.  Rotating the bearings with our fingers confirmed that the non chain side indeed was running rough.

Off to 99 bikes at Indooroopilly. Behind the counter is Kai.  We buy 4 tubes and 1 for Dan's BMX. I get diddled and end up paying for the lot.  For the bearing we need to go two doors down to the bike mechanic.  He kindly pulls the bearing and pus a new one in and presses it home.  On the way out we meet Dave Carter who was riding with Chris.

Dan took the tube and put it in very quickly and competently.

Post Christmas Dogs

In keeping with the Christmas spirit

Dogs

Family Monopoly

Marcus, Chris, Dan & Jemma.  Playing monopoly.  I was fearful that this would result in a fight and people storming off in a huff.

Christmas Day 2018

Bit of an emotional time for me.  First Christmas since the demise of the marriage.  I guess I am a bit conservative and things like Christmas remind me of what 'should have been'.

8-9:15 - Church.  Blog

After church, my duty was to get the baked vegies on.  Marcus, Dan & Jemma all pitched in to peel Potatoes, Sweet potatoes, onions, carrots and pumpkin.
10:00am the potatoes were put in the oven.  Fan forced at 180C.
Marcus was keen to spice them up and had Jemma sprinkle some salt over them and then they cut some coriander.
11:00am and the tray with the onions, pumpkin, sweet potato went in.
After a while we decided the potatoes were cooked and took them out for a while.

In hindsight I think potatoes should only go on half an hour before.

Megan had a beautiful roast beef in the slow cooker.
I had bought prawns.
Jemma produced some beautiful cheese and biscuit platters.

Chris had been riding and Ian and Fay arrived and we all sat down to over eat.

After entree and main course was done we decamped for the lounge. 


We had been engaged to do "secret Santa" presents.  The theme was "recycled or home made".  To me this was great as it allowed the non artisans to engage in their familiar Christmas habits and buy something [recycled] It also meant we were right in there with the politically correct themes of the day.

We sat in a circle with the presents appropriately arranged, per tradition, under the tree.  Someone was designated as santas helper and retrieved the first present and handed it to it's addressee.  The recipient opened their present and we all marveled at it.  Then they took on the elf mantle and selected the next present.

I was a bit stressed by the whole thing.  It would have been much easier to just buy a $30 piece of junk.  I ended up made a photo book for Dan using photos mainly from this blog. details here. I was a bit concerned because it was the smallest present.  However it went across well. 

Anyone think this looks like Henry.

It's actually Dan :)

Christmas Church

Church was organised by Megan, Loraine and ...
I found it quite stressful but I don't know how much of that thinking was emotion associated with the demise of the marriage.

Dan and I watched as the young girl filled the cup between her and the boy in red with white glue.  I was figuring it would soon be knocked over but this was not to be.

Making a Photo Story with PowerPoint

We did the Secret Santa thing this year and The rules were
Second hand or Home Made.

I decided to make a book of photos for Dan

I went through my blog and a few other hard drives looking for pictures containing Dan.

Then I thought about how to combine them.  I tried GIMP but that was just too fiddly.  You cant easily resize and crop the way you can in word.

I tried power point and discovered you can save your slide show as a set of JPEGs.  Great!.

But now how to select resolution.

One is supposed to be able to set slide size in this dialog.

It does not seem to be consistent.

This web site says that PP operates at 96dpi
I wanted to do 6 x 4 inch photos because I could do them quickly.
Wanted to do 600 dpi output because Harvey Norman advised their photo printer was that resolution.
So I figured 6 x 600 = 3600.
The web site above indicated I could enter px as a unit.
So I tried to enter 3600px and that automatically changed to 76.2cm when I clicked out of the box.  I set the Y resolution the same way and exported some slides only to find they were 2880 x 1920 which is 480 dpi.

I tried a few other numbers and it did not seem consistent.  I was not even sure it was linear.  Gave up on trying to hit 600dpi and just took jpegs that looked reasonable and printed them and made up the book.

Then decided should try and work out the formula.
At this stage I was not even sure it was linear.  If Microsoft had made it, in my view, illogical in and inconsistent, then there was no guarantee it was even linear.
I took to just entering a size in cm and exporting the jpegs and looking at the size.
Plotted a graph

Interesting that the y intercept calculates to be negative.









Anyway then knowing m and C rearranged for X as a function of Y (the dpi) and entered those numbers and got the desired result.

  

Marcus trip up for Christmas

Monday morning (Christmas eve) drove out to the airport to collect Marcus.  I was a bit early having misjudged the time.  Thought He'd given me NSW times.  Bought a coffee at maccas while I waited.  Looked at Flight Radar and was somewhat concerned to see them turn back.  Turned out just a loop to kill time.  Brisbane looked a bit busy.

First row in a single

First tentative row in a single.

My personal challenge for this Christmas is to row a single scull.

Fear of tipping over and becoming a hazard to shipping motivated me to ask Peter Hays to shadow me in the tinnie. Melissa ably carried the boat hook. My fear isn't of tipping over but a very poor strength for weight ratio may mean a tip over degenerates to an exhausting and soul destroying swim if I fail to be be able to get back in.

The tip over is inevitable and will occur deliberately soon but I figured I'd like to get a few strokes in first.

I learned an interesting thing. After relaxing and getting going Peter suggested to try to row straight. I observed that if I watched the very back of the boat that as I rowed it would kick from side to side through the stroke. So even though my average course was straight it was made up of lots of little zigzags. Gotta slow the boat. I'm assuming I pull harder on one oar than the other at certain parts of the stroke or lean a bit. Anyway it was interesting to observe and a good focus point to try to rectify.

Good bye Water Rocket

Given to Lee who has a 7yo.

I think the O rings were 17x1.6mm

Schroeder valve from supercheap.
Conduit from bunnings.

Note the bit the Schroeder valve goes into comes from bunnings ready to go.