zeBoss, Author at Dave Winfield

I'm running through one of my cars tidying some bits and pieces up.

I dropped the wheels off to clean the calipers and suspension, and didn't realise just how bad they were. It doesn't look like they've EVER been cleaned Covered in grime and dirt, really ground in and built up.

This is a job for the pressure washer, methinks!

So I hit one of the wheels with the water, which took off the top layer of dirt, but barely touched the ground-in stuff - the wheel was still black!

Next, I mixed up a bucket of Hot Water with a big scoop of washing powder (Omo, if you really care)

10-15 minutes with a soft brush and the soapy water, and a quick rinse showed a MASSIVE improvement, I couldn't believe it.

A second scrub off, and left the soapy water on there for a half hour to soak in.

Then I hit it with the pressure cleaner again, and WOW! They're obviously not new wheels, but they certainly are clean old ones.

I'll seal with a paint sealer as a final step.
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I found a great little plugin this week.

Titled "WordPress Backup to Dropbox" is free, with a couple of "premium" addons if you want to zip up your backups or receive email notification on success or failure.

It initially backs up all designated folders, and then on a schedule you determine it runs an incremental backup daily, weekly etc.

Support seems a little lax, as I encountered a problem which other users had also come across, but there was evidently no solution.

The problem was that the plugin stopped backing up after a change to the configuration - in my case I simply requested that the backups were saved in a named sub-folder.

The solution turned out to be quite simple, de-activate and delete the plugin completely, clear any cached files, and re-install - designating the correct sub-folder BEFORE attempting a backup.

Cruisy!

westbeachtrust

After years of providing a first class environment for the residents of West Beach, the West Beach Trust has moved under new management, which appears to have a completely self-serving, empire building agenda.

Issue 1:
The beautiful public golf course has been decimated by the development of a new Baseball facility (I'll come back to that!)
The Golf Course is now only 15 holes, and the layout is incredibly confusing, to the point that the once heavily used course is now virtually abandoned, and golfists are staying away in droves.
Various fairways have been allowed to fall into neglect, grass is dying off, and the weeds are taking over. The groundsmen would never allow this to happen unless they have been ordered to, they do a brilliant job usually.
At what point does the public golf course become an unviable venture, and re-purposed as something else completely?

Issue 2:
Much of the wetlands has been lost to a new artificially surfaced soccer stadium, and car parking to try and appease local residents, who are often unable to park outside their own houses.
The whole facility has been extremely ill considered in it's location, visibility in and out of the area is atrocious, and IMO it is only a matter of time until somebody (probably a child) is run over in the area by a speeding car.

Issue 3:
The new Baseball facility.
The South Australian government provided $1 million in 2011-12 to upgrade facilities to include a "multi-purpose grass playing field".
The trust has used this PUBLIC money to build a dedicated baseball facility with an ENORMOUS number of high powered lights (think Football Park!), cutting heavily into the public golf course, and restricting access to huge tracts of lands for local residents, who previously used the area for exercising, often with their pets. There is already a baseball facility on Tapleys Hill Road not 2km away - What the hell do we need this for?

Issue 4:
Traffic.
The Charles Sturt Council is preparing to spend a significant amount of money to apply a band-aid to the traffic issues caused by the Trust's ill-advised developments, which have obviously been commenced without liason between the two parties.
At the end of the day, the local residents are getting screwed over by all of this, NONE of which was made public before work commenced.

Issue 5:
The Woolshed.
What a joke this is. Why is this not-that-old (anyone know when it was built?) structure so poorly maintained that it has been condemned as unsafe? Why is the facility still unfenced and secured if it is unsafe?
You've really dropped the ball here, Trust..

The Big Issue:
The West Beach Trust.
From the Annual Report - Click Here to view)
Why is the Trust being viewed as a Business that needs to grow? The trust was created to benefit the residents, not the Board and its' poor excuse for a chairperson.

We need to take a long hard look at the Trust, and remove the current incompetent management. Let's get somebody in charge who actually cares about the area and understands why the trust was created in the first place.

Very unusual sunset at West Beach last night..

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A couple of weeks ago I invested a massive $12 in a very cool gadget called an SDR (go look it up!)

I initially set up a piece of free software called Visual Radio, but have since added the output from my SDR to a growing network..

See plane.watch, scroll over to Adelaide, and watch the planes come and go from Adelaide Airport in real time!

For quite a while now, I've had a personal Weather Station running.

With the availability of low-cost solutions with a PC interface, I recently updated and put my Station on-line.

The page is updated every 5 minutes 24/7, and has a comprehensive history also.

Click Here to check it out!

The site also automatically updates a page on Wunderground

I had a few pictures sent to me this week - that I just had to share 🙂

And one Non-doggy one..

We stumbled across this lot while we were out walking the dogs this morning..

Surprisingly enough, it was the Golden Retriever Club (which, like most clubs, I have studiously avoided!)

Seemed a nice bunch of people, apart from the obligatory crabby old bitch who got pissed off that my dog looked at her dog, and was obviously not trained properly.

The dogs had a great time, which was the main thing, and the whole bunch was surprisingly subdued for a pack of Goldens 🙂

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After quite a few years of upgrading the same old PC, I decided to buy a new one..

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Running a 6-core i7 processor with 32GB of RAM and a 256GB Solid State Drive.

It runs quite well 🙂

The biggest performance improvement, though, was to dump Windows for the stunningly elegant Linux Mint.

It took me probably half the time to get the thing set up than it would have with windows, and I am absolutely delighted..

Duval Street