A trip to Zooparc Beauval

Yesterday saw some cloud cover at last! It was still in the late 20's though.

So we decided to goto Beauval Zooparc near St.Aignan in France. The sun was out but it was quite breezy, which was nice given the last week of relentless heat. So it was 2 against 1 on the roof going down, as I owned the car I decided to veto the other votes and put it down. In hindsight an error of judgement.

Catherine did nothing but moan the entire way, so in the end I relented and put the roof up. Of course to counter this I whacked the air con to its lowest and on full blast.

A toll free 90 minutes later we were heading into the zoo car park, I had to cruise in with roof down as it was sunny and bloody hot, so it went down to park.

In went to pay, 66€ to get in. Now I'm all for charging a fair price, but 66€ is a bit strong. Never less I paid and went in, oh my lord we had the chosen the one day when 6000 oiks were there on some sort of mass organised day out. It was chocca with people, and everyone had the same destination in mind, the giant pandas enclosure.

Well we headed that way as Catherine wouldn't shut up about going there, well what can I say.... Boring! One of them was asleep, the other just sat there chomping bamboo.. Am I missing something, what's so exciting about this?

Anyway, the zoo is fantastic if you have never visited before. I highly recommend it.

 

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Its a Dogs Life!

This is Carly, she is fed up of the heat in France, there is a fan out of sight on the left hand side, she obviously liked trying to keep cool.

 

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21.5" iMac 2010 - SSD Replacing Superdrive Upgrade Part 1

Ok, so its been on the cards for sometime now. The iMac I got back in April just had to have the SSD treatment, it couldn't be held back any longer.

The challenge of putting the drive in is not for the faint of heart, and I saw this as a personal challenge to ignore those who worry and to just get on with it.

Now for those of you who know nothing about iMac disassembly then I can tell you it is quite unwieldy to review Youtube videos explaining how to do it, each one just that little bit different from the other!

Tools are required for the job, here are my tool choices.

SSD

SSD Bracket (as I am replacing my Superdrive with an SSD, leaving the internal SATA HDD in place) i bought this from Amazon

T10 Torx screwdriver

Philips Screwdriver

Suction cups

Air duster

Disposable gloves to keep marks off screen and glass

Microfibre cloth

Tweezers of some kind

Ok so the first thing you need to do is remove the front glass panel, its a piece of cake and you really don't need to buy a set of suckers if you have lets say a sat nag window sucker for your car. I bought the above set for £7 from www.screwfix.co.uk as they were available over the counter, they did the job but were really way to powerful for the job. Like cracking a hazelnut with a sledgehammer, never less it worked!

The screen is only held on with magnets, and once you have pulled it away a bit you can easily remove the glass panel.

Make sure you put the glass panel down somewhere safe, and protected from being scratched.

There are 4 T10 torx screws each side to undo, a total of 8. They are very obvious so I haven't detailed them in the picture here. There are millions of guides if you are too blind to see the 8 screws in front of your very eyes ;-)

Ok when you remove the panel there are several cables to detach, make a note of where they are (again this is all covered in a million other guides).

Ok now we can see the internals of the iMac, as you can see it is very easy to replace the internal HDD with another model if needed at this point, but I am just installing an SSD in place of the Superdrive on the left.

To remove the SuperDrive you will need to lift up the metal foil along its front edge first.

Carefully detach the thermal sensor pad from rear of the SuperDrive.

Remove the 4 screws holding SuperDrive in place.

Lift it out and detach the Slim ATA connector… this is where my problem arose originally as I hadn't purchased the SSD caddy at this point. A standard SSD will have a SATA connector on it that is 21 pins, and the iMac uses slim SATA which is 15 pins! So you need a caddy or a fancy cable convertor (which are very hard to source without waiting for something from the US of A!).

Below you can see the slim SATA connector in all its glory, and then pictured with my SSD, as you can see no fit!!!

So this is where Part 1 finishes, as I have to do this all again now I have the caddy.

Putting the iMac back together is no more tricky than taking it apart, the most important thing is to make sure you use the air spray and micro fibre cloth to keep dust off the screen etc. I had no issues doing mine at all, and there is no dust under the glass.

Part 2 coming very soon…..

New Blog software on iPad

Today I am trying out some new software called Blogsy on the iPad platform.

Adding photos is its biggest attraction but it couldn't be any less friendly.

Why can't I just drag and drop a photo in without having to upload it? Good old Windows Live Writer let's you do it so why can't this app. You have to put them on Flickr or Picassa first, so writing an offline article with picture is pretty hard!

In fact uploading is no mean feat either!

 

Closure for 2011 League

Hats off to David for winning yet again on the fish count for the year. We certainly didn't go fishing as much during the last 12 months, but when we did Dave put it more effort than me and Neilboy combined.

So hats off to Dave for winning again!!

No doubt he will retain his title again this year!

Dave wins the league with a total of 23 fish caught! Well done once again.

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White Vans

OK, first of all I don't want everyone who drives a commercial van to be tainted by my comments on here, but there really are some dicks who drive vans on the M4.
But seriously the idiots that tear down the M4 on the outside lane at 90mph is beyond belief. Firstly they don't have the ability to stop like a car! So they shouldnt be speeding to start with, then let's not forgot to add any load they may have (be it human or goods) which adds to thr minimum braking distance required.
So that aside, the biggest thing is the fact they are driving quite often a vehicle that is plastered with logos and phone numbers of the company they work for!
Well if you drive like that I can tell you now that the motorists on the M4 are going to start naming and shaming, along with contacting your company too.
Some of the regular offenders are
Tytherington
McBain
Blaze
You have been warned, next time you are tailgating a motorist in your mobile death traps think will they report me, but more importantly can I stop in time?
Only last Wednesday 2 vans collided behind me, I thought the first would hit my car but he swerved into the central reservation instead after which the next van hit him! Tailgating, just deserts!
Here's a shot off the motorway traffic cameras after they had moved to the hard shoulder!

JEFF LIKES CHOCOLATE SAUSAGE

Today had the best laugh in ages as a fellow friend and colleague made the ultimate snafu…

Let me set the scenario…

It’s lunchtime and the queue for the canteen (can’t really say restaurant as there is little resemblance in food and/or service!).

Anyway it was sausage and mash today, choice of 3 sausages (Pork & Apple/Pork & Leek/Cumberland). You can have one of each of whatever you want, point to remember here is NEVER have the Cumberland's as they taste like Harpic cleaner!

Jeffers went for the non-cumberlands medley with mustard mash and peas, topped off by the very tasty onion gravy. No hang on, he’s picked up the wrong gravy boat… it’s chocolate sauce!

Brilliant, laughed my arse off! The miserable sod removed the evidence before I had a chance to take a shot, and for the record it didn’t go!