I’ve had three hard disk failures this week, one 500GB SATA from Western Digital and two old IDE’s from Fujitsu and Hitachi (OK, so these two were over 6 years old). But the 500GB is the second WD disk to fail on me in 2 years .. time to move me thinks so ordered a NAS .. lets see what comes inside that one.

Bad lay lines in my neighbourhood possibly? ho hum ..

So, a week into this “iPad” thing .. having great fun with it and although some reviewers in the media have labelled it “pointless” I disagree .. lots of capabilities with the AppStore offers and I am very close to ditching my 2.6kg Lenovo T60p for this .. it even tempts me away from my Samsun NC10 net book which itself weighs in at 1.3kg. At 0.7kgs, the iPad wins .. even though it is technically (from a computing platform and performance point of view) a smartphone without the phone.

Applications I use daily to wean me off my Windows laptops are:

+  Flight Control HD (the 3D level is bonkers) – ATC without the risk of loss of life
+  Harbour Master – like Flight Control but with boats)
+  Twitterific – tweet away with a clean UI
+  Ocado – for grocery orders and deliveries in the UK
+  Goodreader – reads most file formats and allows WiFi transfers of files to the iPad avoiding the dreaded USB cable and the appallingly bad user experience that is iTunes (for me anyway)
+  ebay – buy junk from anywhere
+  BBC News & BBC iPlayer (UK only, sorry)
+  The Financial Times
+  epicurious for recipes and food ideas
+  Amazon Kindle
+  LinkedIn – to track all the headhunters that call me every week !
+  XE currency converter – for all my foreign wedges held in Swiss bank accounts

Its getting very close to being a laptop-off and iPad-on kind of existence .. if only I could get on the VPN pilot(s) at work – they are always oversubscribed, then I could take it work too.

Have fun!

So .. various options to try and get these two working together ..  not easy and straight forward.

Option 1: Pay for AWESync which looks very nice (didn’t try it yet)

Option 2: Try open source stuff, like “ncal2gcal” but this is only one way – Notes to Google.

It worked on a few repeating anniversaries then didn’t –then hangs with the dots and letter “I”s progress indicators frozen.

Option 3: Try another open source project, “LNGoogleCalSync” but this barfed first time with a Windows environment variable “path” error .. so added the directory I use “c:\Notes\” to the Windows XP path variable and tried again .. wow, worked.

Only limitations are that it’s still one way and also limited to minus 7 and plus 60 days either side of ‘today’ .. but, hey, it works. For complete functionality go to Option 1 above.

So, 10 mins and it worked .. now the wife and the O2 Joggler can keep track of my movements. Nice.

Left, Notes 8.5, right Google Cal:

So, got the Joggler today .. very happy as it is a very sexy device, all black and shiny!  Below is a list of things I’d like to do if my wife lets me …

1. Install some apps from O2 app store .. such as Google maps and YouTube -  DONE (took about 5 mins)
2. Figure out how to get other internet radio – the installed app is for UK customers only and allows a limited set of stations
3. Install BBC iPlayer via Flash
4. Get Xplane on it from Mac OS
5. Get a way of getting various PFD, ND and FMC offerings onto this as a additional instrcment panel .. this at £50 is cheaper than Saitek panels but also a lot more fiddly to get working .. need a Linux client for the FMC if I can find one out there.
6. Get Android on it (see comments below)

Plenty of  very clever people (a lot more than me I might add) are hacking away and I am awaiting the “official” hacker community release of Android and also Windows XP.

Useful links:

Joggler wiki
wikipad from ubuntu uk
some from hotukdeals

With custom cut table (with cut-out notches for the cables) I now have a table set low enough for the yoke and throttle to be comfortable yet not that low so as to catch my knee everytime I move close. Its hung off the wall like a shelf with a few extra mountings to hold the weight of the 28” screen.

The problem with yokes is: do you keep them there or constantly move them away when not in use. Well, as the “work” side of the office is opposite and has a dedicated table-top, I can keep the yoke and throttle connected and mounted permanently. All I do is throw a dust sheet over it to keep it free of cat hairs.

A couple of new shelves hold the sound system, speakers, lights and the History of Flight 100 years teddy. On screen is a Boeing 767-300 from Simmer’s Sky (Overland in Japan).

Tested the other night .. worked with FS9 but for some reason as yet to be determined not with FSX. Screen shot below shows the display running on a Samsung NC-10 web-book mini laptop under the 28” simulator screen with an FS9 PSS Dash 8-300 (from the game Airline Pilot).

Set-up was simple .. FS9 machine (A) has the server code installed to communicate FS9 offsets to the OGS client running on the laptop (B). FSUIPC is not used as I am mean and don’t want to pay for it while testing this set-up – I am using IOCP which is free. FSX machine and laptop talk over WiFi. OGS client laptop has OGS code installed

Really cool stuff .. check-out the code – took 5 mins to set-up. Can’t wait for the FMC to be released.

Figure 1. OGS look & feel (from cockpitware’s website)

I have now added a second modular PSU to the dual Opteron 165 simulator rig – making it a smidgen over 1kW (Hiper 580 + new Corsair 450). The Hiper is primary (as it was there first) and drives the Corsair at start-up via dual PSU coupling I found in my kit box (must be from the Hiper, but not sure). There are instructions on the interweb on how to make or where to buy these from – but a very handy little cable.