Category: Uncategorized

Powermonkey Experiment

Well, this may seem quite odd, but doing a wee bit of an experiment with my Powermonkey. Going to try and power my mobile using only solar power. Not too sure how it will go. Sort of cheating a little bit, the powermonkey had about 75% charge and my mobile had about 50% charge, but all the same…

So day one, I didn’t get a lot of sun today, but the powermonkey is still around 50% charge, hopefully I’ll get a bit more tomorrow… I’ve tried to work out a way to strap it to my bag while I’m walking, but it’s hard to get a good angle with the ‘sun’, and with such low intensities it seems to be really important to get it pointing the right direction.

I’ll try and get some pics of the monkey when I’m using it… I’ve found it works really well in the kitchen… Hopefully it’ll work better when the sun comes out a bit more, and we do have a bit of a lack of daylight at the minute…

Phone still has about 3/4 charge, so I should be OK for tomorrow…

Does anyone have any hints or tips while I’m using the powermonkey?

My main worry is the phone I’m using, its an HTC Touch Diamond, and it is a little power hungry… And well, the battery in the phone is 1800mAh, where the solarslave only provides 200mAh, so I need to be storing up at least 9 hours of full blast sunlight per day, which we don’t get at this time of year, as my phone battery doesn’t really last that long, but hey, it’ll be worth a try… Going to hang the solarslave from the window, try and get a few rays before I leave for uni…

Stupid Cable

Having some problems with my internet connection… Basically it’s just dead slow… I think there might be a close neighbour draining the bandwidth, pissing me off a little I must say… I was using my dongle for a while, but I get very limited 3G coverage in the flat… Quite strange really, would expect being so high, and near the city, to get great coverage, but no… It does work pretty well around queens, but I don’t need it in Queens, we have wifi over most of the campus!

Anyway, did everyone have an interesting and eventful Friday evening? I was working, and we had a couple of really friendly police pop in to keep an eye on the place, apparantly they got a complaint about the kids outside, and they had been sent to make sure it didn’t get too rough… Poor guys got a fair bit of abuse hurled at them, and at one point we had two bottles thrown at the shop, which smashed everywhere… Great! Think they were glad to have a bit of heat though, was really really cold outside.

Anyway it’s getting late, and I can’t be bothered struggling along with 2Mbps broadband, so I’ll perhaps update later, or in the morning, once I’ve calmed down a bit!

ATM Robberies

Following the recent robbery on Saturday morning of the ATM at the Bank of Ireland in Crossmaglen, I’ve heard a number of people complaining about the police response…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8463600.stm

I gotta say, you can’t man every police station in NI, full time, that just wouldn’t work, it would cost too much, and I doubt we’d have enough officers to do it anyway…  And even if the station was manned, it would probably only be a small night guard of 2 or 3 men.  It’s hardly fair to expect them to run up to a group of robbers, with a digger, tractor, and various other vehicles, without knowing what kind of weapons they might be carrying, and confront them.  That’s just NOT a good idea?  If anything it’ll aggravate the situation, and probably result in the officers getting hurt.  At the end of the day it’s only a job, I wouldn’t expect them to ‘act the hero’ or anything like that…  And well, an injured police officer is going to cause more hassle when it comes to stopping the robbers, as the other officers will have to tend to his/her injuries, before continuing to pursue the criminals…

It’s sort of a similar situation to those dissidents carrying out the illegal checkpoint in South Armagh early last year.  What was the point of the squad car, with two guys, probably only armed with 9mm pistols, going into the checkpoint to arrest the guys, who were all carrying things like Klashnikov rifles and H&K MP5s…  It’s pretty obvious (to me anyway) that it would just end up in a blood bath…

The banks, and LINK are trying their best to avoid more of these robberies being carried out, example through putting less cash in the machines, trying to vary the time of replenishing them more…  But it still doesn’t exactly take a genius to sit near the ATM, waiting for Securicor/Brinks to come along and fill it…

Anyway that’s my wee rant over…

Another day over

Well that was another day over. Was working this evening. Nothing terribly exciting, just had to fill in an accident form with a girl from last week. Exciting! Oh and pack out an order, fun stuff.

Just lying in bed, can’t imagine I’ll be awake for much longer. New laptop charger should arrive before 1pm tomorrow. Thankfully I wasn’t without it for long. It’s funny how much you miss something like that when you don’t have it!

Sorted out the PHP post size/upload size earlier, so I should be able to upload bigger files than before, like high res pics and stuff… Nothing terribly exciting but hey. Didn’t actually realise it was only set to 2M until earlier when I tried to upload that video.

Did anyone hear the radio programme ‘Callsign GI3GGY’ on Radio Ulster at half 1 on Sunday? Really interesting story about ‘Jimmy’ who lives outside ‘Derry. Available for a while on iPlayer at: http://bit.ly/5EhnaJ, enjoy!

Anyway I’m away to sleep, see you all later!

Poor laptop

It hasn’t been the laptops weekend. First of all it got a virus, and now I’ve broken the power adapter! Pants. Not a lot I can do. New one ordered and should be here tomorrow morning, yay.

Anyway, new dishwasher arrived, just enjoyed my porridge, and having a lovely cup of coffee, watching the end of ‘This Morning’. There’s a couple on, the guy sleep talks, and his wife/gf has recorded his outbursts, some of them were hilarious!

Working again tonight! But then I’m off until Friday yay! We’re doing this product of the week thing, in an attempt to upsell, and increase the basket spend. It’s usually silly wee things like biscuits, sweets, buns. This week it’s Mr Kipling Viennese Whirls, a bargain at 89p, so why not head down to your local SPAR and buy a couple? They really are delicious. I think you’ll get the picture? We’re meant to upsell these. Funny thing is, if people think they’re going to get something out of it they really do upsell well…

The main problem with it is that you need all the staff to be upselling, and we don’t gave everyone doing it… Ah well!

Better go and study a bit more, bye!