The Jaguar National Rally was held in South Australia this year. Sunday 15th April had most of the entrants displaying their cars at the amazing National Motor Museum in Birdwood. As is my wont, camera on the ready, and off we go. I got pictures of *most* of the cars, but the weather wasn't very co-operative and I had to take pictures between showers.
I also took advantage of one of the newest additions to the museum, and so got some pictures of the AMAZING Bugatti Veyron. Also look for the XJ13.. it is just brilliant. Enjoy!
2018 Jaguar National Rally - Display Day - 8th April 2018
8th April 2018, and the Austin 7 Club held a FunKhana on Houghton Oval. Events included Delivering a rolled up newspaper into a tyre, catching balls, driving around in circles maintaining tension on a string, and describing a 360 circle with a cardboard box over your head (see the pictures!)
Austin 7 Club Funkhana – 8th April 2018
The South Australian Vintage and Veteran Car Club hosted a free display of some fabulous vehicles in the Adelaide Parklands. I popped along and took a few pictures – Enjoy!
We have arrived home from another holiday - The United Kingdom this time..
Lot of photos at : United Kingdom 2017
And I managed to squeeze in a few Car Museums that rev-heads might like :-
I recently picked up a few Fujitsu D2607 RAID Controllers (cheap off eBay!) to replace the Rocket RAID controller in my NAS, which I have come to distrust as it has at times been a little flaky (plus, they have never provided a single firmware update, and support if asking anything is non-existent). The Fujitsus use the popular and well-thought-of LSI Controller chips.
As I really like ZFS on Linux I really had no need for the RAID functionality on the cards, and in fact found the RAID BIOS (and the need to configure each drive as a separate Virtual Drive in order to be presented to Linux) to be a real PITA. My testing showed that replacing a drive in the inevitable event of a drive failure would almost certainly result in loss of the whole array. Not really what I was looking for.
So I did a bit of research, and found that the usual approach for these (and other LSI based cards) is to flash a different BIOS onto them with the intention of turning the cards into a simple (non-RAID) controller.
A bunch more research, downloaded some files, and fairly quickly rendered my first D2607 inoperable! This is looking good so far! So, whole lot more searching, some experimentation, and some conclusions reached. There is a LOT of information out there about LSI cards, and how to flash them, and most of it is just plain WRONG, which became quite apparent when I finally found a method that worked.
Many thanks to "Jonny" who posted in This Forum Thread with a solid set of instructions on how to do it. You can go over there, or read further on here, where I'll tell you exactly what worked for me. Once I'd recovered my first failed attempt, my second and third cards were flashed within 10 minutes or so, no errors. And they work beautifully, just as I had hoped!
What You'll Need
Preparation
Getting it down and dirty!
If any command fails, reboot and start that step again.
Your RAID card is now blank.
Yeehah! Your card is now flashed. If your card is a 4i, you can probably stop here. If it's an 8i (2 SAS ports) then at this stage probably only the top port works, and you'll only be able to access 4 Hard Drives.
Check the drives are available, you should be all good to go!
I headed out with camera again, this time to the Classic Adelaide..
Enjoy 🙂
Dani bought me a new DSLR for my birthday, and I've gone crazy taking pictures 🙂
Check out the recent holiday to Europe, including visits to the 2 Ferrari Museums in Modena, and the Schlumpf Collection in Mulhouse (France).
I also took some pictures while they were setting up for the 2016 Classic Adelaide.
Here's a small ( but annoying) problem which has arisen a few times for me, and it always takes me a while to either figure it out or find somebody else who has..
Opening a new Tab in Google Chrome suddenly defaults my location to Google.uae instead of google.com.au.
The solution is simple - try this..
Right-click in the URL bar, and select "Manage Search Engines"
In the top box, you'll see the currently available Search Engines.
Most likely your default Search Engine will be some variant of Google.
Select a Different search engine (any one!) and make it your default by clicking on the "Make Default" button on the right of the selected engine.
Now, delete the Google entry with the delete button, far right of the line.
Scroll right to the bottom of the search engine page, where you'll see these input boxes.
Enter a description (Google) in the first.
Enter your choice of google country (eg google.com.au) in the second.
And paste this into the third : http://www.google.com/search?{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}sourceid=chrome&ie={inputEncoding}&q=%s
When you press Enter, your entry will disappear, and put itself up in the alphabetical list of "Other Search Engines". Locate it, and click on the "Make Default" button.
This will move it to the top Search Engine box as your default, and fix your problem!
If you haven't then the chances are that you will soon enough, possibly the hard way.
Ransomware is big business, and a major risk and potential expense to everybody who uses a Windows Computer.
Ransomware is a program that will encrypt every file on your hard drive with a secret, personalised password which is known only to the people who wrote the program.
Ransomware usually finds its' way onto a victim's computer (or computers) by way of an email opened by an unsuspecting user.
The emails can sometimes be crude and easily picked as a spam-type message, but the ransomers are constantly getting more professional, and emails seen recently have looked 100% authentic – even directing users to a legitimate looking website address to collect their own little “bomb” instead of attaching the payload.
Unfortunately, the software is constantly being developed and additional weaknesses exploited. For example, a recent variant can make it's way to you via files shared to you on Dropbox.
The program attacks ALL types of data files – word processing documents, spreadsheets, powerpoints – even all your photos! The program will look for files all over your hard drive(s), any attached USB or Network device (like a NAS), even your cloud storage like Dropbox or Drive.
Your files will be encrypted, often even the filenames and extensions are changed. You will be unable to open or read any of your files unless you take corrective action – read on.
You have three (practical) choices.
You do have some options here, at least BEFORE you get attacked.
Finally, if you subscribe to a Spam filtering service, forward any suspicious emails to them – it may save somebody else who isn't as aware as you are now!
Whilst I'm generally really impressed with the quality and function of Gigabyte Motherboards, I've now encountered the same issue with 3 separate ones - an i5 and two i7's, running Windows or Linux.
The issue is that you shut down the computer, everything goes off.. then starts right back up again!
This appears to be a very common problem, a simple google search will come up with many hits and numerous victims of this. Nobody (that I've found) has hit on a solution yet, and suggestions usually end up with - replace the Motherboard!
This should not be necessary in my experience, as I have the solution. Read on, fair audience!
This technique has worked numerous times for me now, please let me know if it works for you!
I haven't detailed the exact steps within BIOS, as motherboards vary slightly according to the model - you'll have to go hunt for yourself.
I added a new photo album - a bit special, this one really, Mark's Hondas.
It also made me realise that the is the first time I've taken any photos of cars/bikes this. Must try harder!
I've added quite a few new Webcams to the Cameras Page.
There are some amazing wildlife ones on the African countries, best viewed when it is night-time there as the animals come out to eat and drink after dark!
On the Menu Bar to the right of Blog you will see an Icon.
That Icon toggles between Light and Dark Modes.
Enjoy!
Dave
Welcome to the New Site!
There is lots of stuff to explore here, I'll highlight parts every now and again!
Come back soon!
Dave