Keppelena, Part Two

[haiqu]

Started a "small" job today and it looks like it will require about three days of work. I started digging at the roof above the head, figuring that where there's fungus there must be water getting in. I'm going to need to replace a large section of timber up there. Guess the cement work will have to wait.

Getting pretty windy here tonight, one of my hefty solar panels just flipped over and landed on the other one. No damage done but I suppose it might be wise to bolt them down tomorrow.

I dug out the Software Defined Radio transmitter in an attempt to get it running for the first time in a few years. Cobbled up all the cabling and fiddled with software for about an hour before I remembered that it needs an external powered speaker, which is in storage. D'oh! The software will need fixing, I hacked the hell out of it to get the FunCube dongle to work and now the SDR-1000 code is all messed up. Grateful I remembered to install Delphi 7 on the laptop.

[redbopeep]

oh, my! It sounds like you're having the sort of day I detest. Tomorrow can only be better

When hubby and I are headed down that path you've had today, we try very hard to laugh but sometimes it's rough.

Fair winds,

[haiqu]

Actually it started raining yesterday right after I posted that, and after the stormiest night I've had aboard yet I'm still waiting for it to stop. Very grateful I bought that canvas trailer cover, it saved me from being flooded out.

I'd laugh but Del's picking me up to go to Newcastle (and then NZ) on Monday or Tuesday. Gonna be tight to get this repair done.

[delatbabel]

Tuesday, late in the day. I have a couple of meetings in the city to get through first.

[haiqu]

Thanks Del, that should make life much easier. I did manage to get a long enough window without rain today to effect some repairs, and will fill and glass over them tomorrow. Should be ready to go as planned.

Got to say that working with this epoxy glue is an interesting experience, it's like candied honey only thicker and stickier.

[haiqu]

Oh, and for anyone who was mystified by my reference to the FUNcube dongle above, it's a USB stick that tunes the FUNcube amateur satellite. Launch went off on 21 November and all is working well. FUNcube-1 is now known officially as Oscar-Amsat-73.

Welcome to the FUNcube Web Site

South African ham ZS1LS took the cupie doll by announcing first reception at 0737 on Thursday, a mere 27 minutes after launch from Yasny, Russia. In a very nice twist, the UK's first amateur educational satellite was launched to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who.

The dongle was the first device to utilize the Elonics TV chip as a general-purpose sofware defined radio. The chip was later made famous when hackers discovered that a $20.00 TV stick available from Hong Kong could also be used in this manner. Coverage is guaranteed to be 64-1700MHz with a small gap around 1100MHz. In practice they tend to work from 52MHz to about 1900MHz.

A very useful device indeed for radio hacking, I bought Ver:1.1 S/N:1833 way back when they started becoming available reliably.

The new FUNcube dongle Pro+ is the latest, and a complete redesign including saw filters for the ham bands. Its coverage includes all bands from 136kHz through to 23cm (officially 150kHz to 260MHz and then 410MHz to 2.1GHz!)

http://www.funcubedongle.com

[haiqu]

Further timber inserts and paste filler applied. This is going to be a real quickie repair. I'll sand it with the orbital tomorrow, apply one final filler layer to take up any low spots, then glass over the whole area.

[haiqu]

What a day. Didn't sleep at all last night, got up dazed at 8am and started to check systems before leaving for NZ. Had some trouble with the solar charging system which was fixed within an hour, but it seemed my mojo wasn't working at all.

Next I checked the spare laptop, to find the battery dead flat. Put it on charge but it wouldn't take any juice. Put the same battery in the day-to-day laptop and it started to fill. All good. Once charged I exchanged batteries again and the spare refused to boot. It was giving me a 1-3-3-1 POST code, saying that either the memory or main board were faulty. Oh great.

So, and this is where I really screwed the pooch, I took the memory out of the good unit to test the spare. Didn't fix it, but the regular unit now failed as well. It looked for a while as if I was going to NZ without a computer, which would have been a disaster.

So then I remembered the fibreglass job. Sanded and glassed the roof patch then came back to the problem. I had both laptops apart about three times, and if you've ever done that you'll know it's a nightmare job. I gave up and lay down to rest my aching back. And then a possibility hit me.

I hadn't tested the day-to-day unit with the memory from the spare. So up I got and swapped them and ... well, here I am.

[looks skyward] No more surprises please, I need a rest.

[haiqu]

Well if anyone was listening to yesterday's final plea for mercy, they simply laughed and ignored it. The next time I tried to boot up I was greeted by the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. I won't go into the details, but apparently I had a malicious virus on the main laptop, a dead motherboard on the spare and a corrupt HDD on the spare also, due to my fiddling about.

Fortunately for me there were two major things in my favour:

1. I always install working programs on the second HDD
2. I had a full backup of the primary drive, albeit dated April.

Restored the system only onto the drive with the virus, but it just went into circular boot mode and wouldn't then do a full restore. So, did a full restore onto the primary from the spare machine, cloned it, then reinstalled the very few new bits added since April, such as upgrades of Java and whatnot.

All good now.

The situation does give pause to consider the matter of relying on computers for navigation though. Two PC failures simultaneously, what are the odds? Well, since I've been a computer engineer for 35 years, I can say that they're astronomical; which means of course that I've seen it a few times in my travels. I doubt that the average computer user would have recovered from this mess, especially with the pressure of needing it for survival added in.

On the other hand, you're very unlikely to pick up a random virus while sailing and unconnected to the internet.

[redbopeep]

Originally Posted by haiqu

On the other hand, you're very unlikely to pick up a random virus while sailing and unconnected to the internet.

You'd do fine crossing oceans, but the minute you'd get into a cruisers' internet cafe, that's where the virus might ambush you.

Glad you've recovered things. Which OS was it that you use, btw?

[haiqu]

Originally Posted by redbopeep

You'd do fine crossing oceans, but the minute you'd get into a cruisers' internet cafe, that's where the virus might ambush you.

Yeah, there is that I suppose.

Glad you've recovered things. Which OS was it that you use, btw?

Win XP SP3. I'd use something more secure but it's the only OS that runs many of my software tools for embedded programming. :-/

I'm aboard Chiara Stella in Newcastle tonight, prepping up starts tomorrow!!

[steve_h]

Good luck with the trip.

Hope to hear all about it

[bfloyd4445]

Originally Posted by haiqu

Yeah, there is that I suppose.

Win XP SP3. I'd use something more secure but it's the only OS that runs many of my software tools for embedded programming. :-/

I'm aboard Chiara Stella in Newcastle tonight, prepping up starts tomorrow!!

xp was so buggy. windows seven is really sweet compared to xp I'm surprised your tools don't have versions that will work with 7

[haiqu]

Originally Posted by bfloyd4445

xp was so buggy. windows seven is really sweet compared to xp I'm surprised your tools don't have versions that will work with 7

I stopped believing "the next version is better" marketing crap at Win95.

Main issue is performance, later versions are always much slower due to the additional overhead to support hardware and "features" I don't use. The correct operating system is usually the one available at the time the hardware was built.

[bfloyd4445]

Originally Posted by haiqu

I stopped believing "the next version is better" marketing crap at Win95.

Main issue is performance, later versions are always much slower due to the additional overhead to support hardware and "features" I don't use. The correct operating system is usually the one available at the time the hardware was built.

well what you say is true. But I still use lots of old hardware and use the original software for the most part with windows 7. I like large screens and find touch screens very handy when my hands are full doing other things. Instead of having to use a mouse then click I just touch and walla, its done no mouse needed. That is nice

Anyway, wishing everyone a great thanksgiving. I'll be giving thanks to all that have helped me survive the past year, many in the forums. Thanks, and God bless all

[haiqu]

Clambered back aboard Keppelena yesterday at around 1:00pm and haven't done much except catch up on sleep since then. Two months away but I've been so busy that it seems more like six months. My electronic antifoul experiment seems to have failed and the barnacles are back again, but otherwise nothing much has changed.

I had only been back on Australian soil for a few hours when my phone rang, an SMS asking me to contact QLD Maritime. Shenoa had been rescued from a creek near the mooring and they tell me the chain was tangled so badly it wouldn't have held. They straightened it out before repositioning her, and I promised to get my brother down there to install a swivel in the anchor chain.

Of course that might be difficult, he was supposed to check on Shenoa in late November when she grounded in the mud and he hasn't been there yet. There's always a "good excuse" but the fact is it could have ended badly and I need to set her up so that intervention isn't necessary. Sadly, it is becoming obvious that I can't rely on him in an emergency.

[Auzzee]

In fairness, non yotties often fail to appreciate the need for vigilance regarding unattended yachts. If the handbrake is on and the ignition is off it is expected to fare as well as all the other yachts at anchor.

I'm glad there was no major problem. But one must waggle the finger for neglecting to put a big swivel between anchor and chain.

One of the best boating books in the world is produced by the Queensland Government. The Small Ships Manual (about 450 pages) is generally available from chandleries and from the Qld Govt direct. It will give you all the guff about safe anchoring etc.
Cheers.

PS take a gander at the low to the northeast of NZ today (1st Feb 2014)
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current....44,-27.48,369

[haiqu]

In all honesty I hadn't even considered a swivel, being a relative noob. But as soon as they told me the problem I saw the need for it.

My brother has a tinny, and also hires a houseboat annually, so he should know better than to ignore serious issues as they arise. It's always "I was too busy with work" as he stares at computer games for several hours a day. *sigh*

[AussieBruce]

Amazing isn't it. Computers were going to give us so much free time that we would only need to work minimal hours to get the same work done. BUT NOW, the way things have gone we have more demand for more & more output. Also, spending so much time on PC's, lappies, & the like, we have become so familiar with them that we prefer to spend our liesure time with them as well. Reminds me of the song "Sad World".
Anyway, that said, & me at my tablet (sigh), Auzzee, that web site is amazing for a yachty.... Question; How do you differentiate between the winds & the currents??? (or is that a 'tablet' hiccup).

[Auzzee]

That's winds only Bruce. I don't want to hijack Haiqu's topic. Have a look at this link for both wind and separate current animation. http://www.cruiserlog.com/forums/f12/pacific-8218.html