Hung and drawn

The Gorse Fox and Silver Vixen had a quiet evening. Urban-Cub was staying with Cousteau-Cub and Ellie was at Pistol Pete’s. We settled down to binge-watch the last 5 or 6 episodes of Bosch series 6. What excellent TV that is. Now we have to wait for Series 7 and who knows when that will be filmed and released.

There was only one real task for this morning. The Gorse Fox had to finish fitting the pull-out baskets in the cupboard. Fortunately, he had the knack based on yesterday’s experience. It still took quite a while to finish and clear up, but then the Silver Vixen had to take over and reload the cupboards. That took her ages and the Gorse Fox is sure it will take a while to get used to the fact that the cupboards have swapped contents and the shelves have been reloaded differently.

This afternoon the Gorse Fox returned briefly to the video editing, starting on a 1992 family holiday in Cornwall. The first rough cut has been done, but there’s a lot of work still to complete.

Basket Case

The Silver Vixen has had a bee in her bonnet regarding the accessibility of "stuff" in the kitchen cupboards. The solution adopted by Two Hats was to install pull-out wire baskets. The bee became focussed on the wire baskets. These were originally ordered pre-lockdown and were the wrong size so returned and re-ordered as the lockdown commenced. Eventually they have arrived and as Ellie was to be with Pistol Pete and Urban-Cub was going to spend time with Cousteau-Cub this weekend, it seemed like the ideal opportunity to install said baskets.

The food cupboard was emptied and spread over the kitchen. The doors removed and then the existing shelves. The existing shelves were cut down to become a central partition within the erstwhile double cupboard. After a great deal of effort, the central partition was installed and the runners for the first basket were fixed. The Gorse Fox grabbed the wire basket. It didn't fit. He consulted with Two Hats. It still didn't fit. He consulted with the Silver Vixen. It still didn't fit.

The solution to the problems was to switch cupboards. Two Hats, in an identical house, has two cupboards like ours. One slightly larger, one slightly smaller. We too have a similar pair. The difference is the position of the larger of two cupboards. For us it is in the middle of a run, for them it is on the end. It was the cupboard on the end we were trying to address. The solution was to re-purpose the two cupboards. Crockery would move to the end cupboard, food would move to the middle, larger cupboard.

The Gorse Fox dismantled the small cupboard and re-installed shelves (taken from, and cut-down from the larger cupboard). Then he re-installed the partition in the larger central cupboard. The process of installing the runners began again. The first attempt didn't fit, but the Gorse Fox realised the central partition had slipped during installation and was the problem. The runners were removed and the central partition refitted. Runner installed again, and wire baskets finally fixed. It has taken him about six hours but he has finished four of these baskets. The other two can wait until tomorrow (assuming the Gorse Fox can even move by then).

Desert South West

Ellie slept through the night, without incident. At about 7:15 this morning she woke and was happy to come downstairs with Grandad (as long as he showed Fireman Sam on the TV). He obliged.

Urban-Cub was back by mid-morning and while Ellie was delighted to see here, she turned defiant later in the morning. Defiant to the point that the Gorse Fox had to step in and tell her that it was time she behaved and showed some respect to he mother. The Gorse Fox suspects that the shock did the trick as she has been fine for most of the rest of the day.

The Gorse Fox managed to complete two further videos today. Both from our holiday in Arizona in 1990. The first covered trips to Tucson, the the Old Tucson studios, and through the Superstition Mountains and along the Apache Trail. The second was our trip to Sedona, through Oak Creek Canyon, and on to the Grand Canyon. It may be 30 years ago, but the memories came flooding back... particularly the bit where the Gorse Fox commented on the views of the Painted Desert in Utah, and how long it must have taken to paint it. At this point Urban-Cub chimed in and asked who actually did the painting.

Mid-afternoon, we went along to to Sales Suite for the development. We were moving to the next stage of the purchase process and Urban-Cub needed to be shown all of the nitty-gritty details of the house. It took well over an hour, but we left feeling well-informed and under no illusions regarding what she would get for her money.

Karma

The Gorse Fox was presented with a conundrum. The Silver Vixen had been to the farm shop for some dry food for Jasper. When she got in the car to return, the Dash Cam played its start-up chime, then continued to chime all the way home. Could the Gorse Fox fix it?

Firstly, he thanked his lucky stars that he didn't tease Old Bill about the problems he had been having with the Dash Cam on the Mercedes. (Karma could be a bit of a devil). Then he set about trying to find a solution. The first problem was to find out how the camera actually fitted in the car. It turns out that it is held in place by an immensely strong magnet. Then he had to download the latest firmware update and find out how to apply it.

It didn't seem to make much difference what he did; as soon as he powered up the chiming would start and it wouldn't do anything else. Eventually, he found a tiny recess that said "Reset". A paperclip was applied. The chiming stopped. The SD Card was removed and reformatted on the Mac and the firmware update moved onto the empty disk. Power was disconnected then reconnected. The firmware update was applied and everything started to behave as it should.

Urban-Cub is at work today, so G-Force are on duty until the morning.

Stay Alert

It's been a fabulously hot day. The Gorse Fox had opened up the house first thing and has managed to keep a few through-drafts and some rooms have remained cool, thank goodness.

Urban-Cub and Ellie went off to see the Princess and her family today, leaving the Gorse Fox and Silver Vixen to fend for themselves. The Silver Vixen had her Zoom Pilates this morning and the Gorse Fox used the time to work on a couple of videos from a holiday in Arizona in 1990.

Now, perhaps the Gorse Fox should explain that today is Tinkerbell's birthday. In the spirit of neighbourliness we had agreed to meet at a suitable distance for a cup of tea in their garden. Knowing how worried she has been during the pandemic of disease transmission, the Gorse Fox though it only fair to take suitable precautions when we wandered over this afternoon.

He doesn't consider this overkill, bearing in mind he had just been to Sainsbury's, and it is only fair that he is cautious when visiting after so long.

It did make it very difficult to chat, drink tea, and eat the chocolate biscuits that we had taken with us.

We did have a lovely afternoon chatting sociably for the first time in months and covering every subject from COVID-19 to 5-star accommodation on the Isle of Wight and everything in between.

 

Biking

Urban-Cub had arranged for a friend to come and visit, that meant that the Silver Vixen and Gorse Fox were double-teaming on Ellie for much of the day. Even though she had woken up in a bit of a strop, she was actually very good as we kept her occupied with one thing or another.

This afternoon, the Gorse Fox took her out for a ride on her bike. The Gorse Fox had a strap attached to the handlebars to keep her close by and in the end it turned out useful for carrying the bike. Her technique for riding a bike is to sit on the seat and push down with one foot, and back pedal with the other. Then she pushes down with the same foot again. She will end up with one leg with well-developed muscles and the other quite normal. As it happens, this technique is not ever so efficient and after the first 50 yards she got off and walked, leaving the Gorse Fox to carry the bike.

The Gorse Fox had taken the gimbal with him and had the iPhone set for video. He was very impressed with the stability of the image he was capturing (bearing in mind he had the iPhone on the gimbal in one hand and the bike in the other). He also used the face tracking feature so that the phone swivelled automatically to keep Ellie in the picture as she moved around. He's very pleased with the DJI Osmo 3 gimbal but really can't claim to be completely au fait with all it's features and functions. He will clearly have to get a lot more practise.

Cracking on

It's been another lovely day. The Gorse Fox has taken a couple of opportunities to go out and sit in the garden. It's just too nice to stay inside.

After some early morning chores - vacuuming, then steam cleaning the floors, the Gorse Fox returned to study. The first task was to consolidated the naming convention that he has evolved for all of the videos. This meant going back and renaming quite a few of the oldest ones and then reseeding the Plex Media Server. Once done, he powered through several more videos. One, from 1999, was taken in Tenerife when the Gorse Fox first bought his digital video camera. Being a new toy, this featured dozens and dozens of clips of various lengths. Each had to be reviewed and either rejected or the best best selected for inclusion. It took ages. The finished article, however, is pretty good.

On a related note, the Gorse Fox has just found out that you can trim video using the Mac's built-in Quicktime Player. This is useful for some of the old videos that were transferred to DVD and, in some cases, had huge amounts of dead air at the end. It's much quicker using this method that using one of the video editors. 

Urban-Cub is back in LA this afternoon sorting out the various who-takes-what decisions for the house before bringing Ellie back. The Gorse Fox suspects it is quite stressful, but it has to be done.

Masks

The Gorse Fox did pop across to Sainsbury's for some commodities missing from our Ocado order. Was please to see far more people wearing masks than of late. What was noticeable was that far more men were wearing masks than women. No idea why there was such a marked difference, but the Gorse Fox thinks that as lockdown releases, the use of masks becomes more important. The virus has not gone away. It is just not spreading so quickly because of the precautions taken. As these precautions are released, we have to be careful that we don't allow it to become rampant once more.

Fathers' Day

It has been a lovely Fathers' Day. The early morning rain soon dried up and the sun came out. We were able to spend most of the afternoon in the garden, with glass of wine, chatting. Urban-Cub and Cousteau-Cub were both here and made a fuss of the Gorse Fox.

We chatted about our joint memories and also about the Gorse Fox's memories of his Dad. It made the day very special.

Back to the videos

The Gorse Fox has returned to the huge backlog of videos. He picked a year at random. He decided that year would be finished off. And hour or so later, 2003 was put to bed. All raw footage had be reviewed and processed.

He picked another year. 2002 was under the microscope and by the end of the day it was cleared. The Gorse Fox was surprised, however, that a holiday in Tenerife that November had spawned nearly 90 minutes of raw footage. Several hours later it had been whittled down to 13 minutes with soundtrack from Santana.

Progress is slow, but there is a credible oeuvre of family video building up, with some 62 separate films in the library, ranging from a few minutes to about 40 minutes. There is still so much to do, though.

Pushing It

Like most 3 year-olds, Ellie is starting to push her limits. In a few moments of defiance this morning she excelled herself. Urban-cub had explained to her, repeatedly, that she would not open a sachet of new paints. Ellie had shouted and demanded they be opened. Urban-cub held her ground under the onslaught. In the end Urban-cub said "Ellie, I'm fed up with saying No to you and you ignoring me". Bright as a button, Ellie replied "Well, don't say No to me then".

The Gorse Fox was over by the cooker preparing his porridge and with his back to action. He started to giggle, and ended up crying with laughter (while trying not to be seen by Ellie and thus encouraging her).

Oh well, she's spending the rest of the weekend with Pistol Pete.

Threading needles

It has been a day. The has tucked by at a rate of 60 seconds per minute and 60 minutes per hour. This is a fairly typical distribution, as it happens.

Urban-Cub had various administrative tasks to get through regarding the sale of the house and the changing of various accounts. The Silver Vixen pottered for a while, then sat down at the sewing machine to finish a dress that she had been making for Ellie.

The Gorse Fox returned to the study. An old video from 2003 was recut and filed before he put on his apron and headed for the stove. It was time to make up a batch of curry sauce. Some would get used tonight, and the rest would be batched up and frozen. It took a while to get things underway. The Silver Vixen was using one section of the kitchen surface, and Urban-Cub was using another bit for Ellie's lunch. The Gorse Fox couldn't be his usual expansive self. Once the sauce was done, he returned to study.

A video of a holiday to Tenerife in 2003 started to take shape. That's when the phone rang. Was it Virgin offering the Gorse Fox his refund? Nope. Was it VIP Attractions offering the Gorse Fox his refund? Nope. It was Urban-Cub. She had gone along to see Cousteau-Cub and the Coventry Hobbit and help the Coventry Hobbit collect a sofa bed from a seller in Barnham. The problem was that it was so big and heavy that they couldn't get it into the house and up the stairs.

The Gorse Fox pulled his pants on over his tights, donned his cape, and leapt into action. By the time he had got to Chichester the Coventry Hobbit had removed the bed mechanism from the sofa. Despite this we had an absolute nightmare trying to thread the sofa through the door and then up the stairs and into the target bedroom. Once it was finally in the right room, we then had to reinstall the bed frame mechanism. This, again, proved to be an absolute devil of a job. A little bit of logic, a lot of brute force, and and some sheer luck finally came together and so did the sofa bed. What was it about threading a camel through the eye of a needle? Hopefully, this will be the last of Cousteau-Cub's brilliant online furniture buys.

Excitement

A day full of excitement. This morning Urban-Cub had to go back to LA for the formal valuation of her old house. The results are already in, the document has been sent to the right agency, and they have confirmed everything is good to go.

The Gorse Fox got chatting with Old Bill (from a resettable distance, of course). He is looking at getting a new laptop. A few weeks ago he was considering a Lenovo, but now he is seriously contemplating making the life-affirming switch to Apple and getting a MacBook. The Gorse Fox could only encourage such a move.

This afternoon we all went in to Chichester. The Silver Vixen wanted to look for some fabric for a dress for Ellie, Ellie wanted to tag along, and Urban-Cub was bullied into joining us by Ellie. The Gorse Fox had an appointment at the chiropodist. Despite an amber warning for thunderstorms and lightning, it remained dry and pleasantly warm. The Gorse Fox was impressed that all of shops he looked in were taking the use of hand sanitiser and of masks very seriously. Even walking down the streets, most people had masks round their necks ready to don on entry to a shop.

After 87 days of lockdown and with such an exciting day behind him, the Gorse Fox may have to lie down with a cucumber eye-mask for the evening.

ATM

The Gorse Fox actually went to an ATM to get some cash. First time since the end of February.

Editing Suite

The Silver Vixen had her usual Zoom-based Pilates this morning. Urban-Cub too Ellie out and they met up with friends down by the beach. (She also managed to collect a parking ticket, so wasn't best pleased).

The Gorse Fox retired to the editing suite. He was a man on a mission. Videos for 2003 in Nerja, 2004 in Fowey, 2018 in Jamaica, and 2019 in Jamaica have all been created and filed in the Plex Media Server. It's really beginning to look quite impressive. The best part is that it can be accessed from any of our TVs, our tablets, and our phones.

Currently there are 58 family videos in the library, but there is plenty more raw footage to create more.

TV Pundit

In keeping with the comments made about the Bosch Series 5, the Gorse Fox thinks it only fair to comment on another excellent bit of TV. Over the past three nights there has been a documentary-drama recounting the events surrounding the Salisbury novichok attack. It is rare that the Gorse Fox gets enthused enough to even watch one of these genre of programmes, but was immensely glad that he did. This was excellent TV by any measure.

Corporate dreams

The Gorse Fox was disturbed by his dreams last night. He had, ostensibly, been asked to go into Oxford to review their requirements and set up their whole archiving and backup strategy for historical documents and Council documents. Now, this maybe something he feels passionate about, but he really doesn't need to take on the Dreaming Spires.

Alert, alert, alert

The Gorse Fox is getting concerned Urban-Cub and the Silver Vixen have been discussing paint colours and wallpaper patterns. This is unlikely to end well.

Talking of things that do not end well, the Gorse Fox saw a comment that you can download Lotus Symphony and use it to access old Lotus files. The Windows laptop was retrieved from under the desk. Power was switched on. The usual Windows updates were applied and then the Gorse Fox was able to download Symphony. Finally, it burst into life. The Gorse Fox accessed the NAS to find some of the old ".SAM" files created by Amipro which was subsumed into WordPro which was eventually part of Symphony. Nada. Niet. It wouldn't even open the files let alone convert them to something of use. That was an hour or two wasted.

The Gorse Fox finished off a video of a holiday from 2008. This was a trip, with Urban-Cub, to Nerja in Andalucia. It was only a week, but it was a lovely holiday. He's now started to work on a video from 2004 when the Gorse Fox and Silver Vixen went down to Fowey for her birthday.

Bish, Bash, Bosch

We just finished the last episode of Series 5 of "Bosch" on Amazon Prime last night. Like all of the previous series, it was absolutely superb. It was well crafted, true to the spirit of the Michael Connelly books, and cracked along at a sensible pace that allowed the various side stories to develop alongside the main theme.

We have series 6 lined up, but have to decide whether to wait a while so we don't overdose or to go for the fully leaded immersion / binge.

Epcot and MGM

No the Gorse Fox has not been out on his travels. It is lockdown, after all!

Today has seen a first "rough cut" video edit done for out day at Epcot Center and another day at Disney MGM back in 1989. Both require a lot more work, but the bones of each of the videos are there. There's work to do on the audio levels, on fades, and on continuity, but the first cut is done.

While the Gorse Fox was busy in "the editing suite" the Silver Vixen, Urban-Cub and Ellie went to the shops for some stuff for Ellie. She came home with some "dressing up" clothes and had to give grandpa a fashion show.

Urban-Cub managed to find a bargain for Cousteau-Cub and the Coventry Hobbit. It was a small Flymo styled lawn mower. This will be ideal for their small patch of lawn and at £25 was quite a bargain. She went and collected it from the seller in Bognor and whizzed it across to Chichester for them.

Who is that masked stranger?

It's been a relaxing day. A leisurely breakfast was followed by a return to the study. Several of the videos that the Gorse Fox reviewed yesterday were candidates for some further tweaking. In the end three videos were recast and rendered. This took the whole morning.

The Gorse Fox headed across to Sainsbury's. There were several items that Ocado couldn't provide this week, and it was time to restock. In his ongoing count of masked strangers the Gorse Fox observed one other shopper and one member of staff wearing face masks. 

The afternoon saw a first rough-cut of a video from our day at Disney's Magic Kingdom, in Florida back in 1989. This will need some serious review and further editing as it is still nearly 30 minutes long and hasn't yet had any work done on the audio track. It did, however, bring back some lovely memories of when Cousteau-Cub and Urban-Cub were little.

Pan and zoom

It's been a fruitful day. Several videos have been reviewed and the Gorse Fox has noted where refinements are required. On top of that, yesterday's video of Thailand has been re-edited as many of the effects, automatically applied by iMovie, turned out to be sub-optimal. (A picture of the Silver Vixen that pans from her feet to her chin is not really ideal. A few minutes with YouTube and the Gorse ox saw how to pan and zoom in DaVinci Resolve. The original photos were edited into the timeline and the pan/zoom effects re-applied. Voila! We now have a sensible clip. Watching the video this evening, we have realised that further work is needed on the soundtrack. That can wait until tomorrow.

The Gorse fox has also created two new videos. One told the story of the family when they joined the Gorse Fox in Poughkeepsie in August 1991. The other was the video of our day trip from Poughkeepsie to New York. What is poignant is that most of the clip features the World Trade Center.

Unfortunately, the rest of that holiday didn't get recorded. The Gorse Fox had problems with the video camera and failed to record our trip along the New York State Thruway to Buffalo and across into Canada. Our trip to Toronto, our day at Niagara, our day at Canada's Wonderland, our flight round Toronto with Agent Mulder, our trip around Lake Ontario to Montreal and down into Vermont, our visit to the Trapp Family Lodge and to Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream factory, our journey through New Hampshire and stay in Boston, and eventually the trip back through Rhode Island, and Connecticut on the way to JFK for our flight home. 

On a separate note, Cousteau-cub and the Coventry Hobbit arrived late in the afternoon. They wanted to borrow the Karcher jet spray so that they could clean their patio and paving. They should have some messy fun with that!

Saved for posterity

The Gorse Fox was up first, as usual, but today he had a mission. He was heading across to Durrington to collect the batch of DVD's that had been created from the old Video8 tapes. He timed this to perfection. A very clear run through Chichester and Arundel, but as he approached Durrington on the A27 he could see blue flashing lights up ahead. The road was closed but the Gorse Fox was able to take a different route to avoid the trouble. By the time he had picked up the DVDs and headed back, the A27 was queued way back from the closure. As he said, the Gorse Fox had timed it to perfection.

Back home he started the task of ripping the DVDs down onto the hard drives, while running up and down to play with Ellie and her Play Dough.

This afternoon he returned to DaVinci Resolve and the video from Thailand in 2013. The tasks were firstly to clean up the audio track. This was achieved by using one of the supplied Noise Reduction plug-ins and a lot of experimentation. Secondly, the Gorse Fox had to add some suitable background music. This was less of a problem, but still tool some careful manipulation.

Ellie has just been collected by Pistol Pete. She will be staying with him for the weekend. All of a sudden the house seems very quiet.

More of the same

(Blogger has changed the input screen... the Gorse Fox doesn't expect it will make any difference to the quality of his content, but it's always nice to see that there is still some development under way).

In terms of what we've been up to, the Silver Vixen has been busy with her sewing. She's preparing to make some outfits for Ellie. The Gorse Fox has been in the study working on the videos. Those he made yesterday need soundtracks, and one needed to have some further rise merged in with the master. The most time consuming part was getting the right soundtracks.

Once that was finished, he started on the video for our 2013 trip to Thailand. Again, the basic selection of images (from a collection of over 3200 photos) took quite a while, but then he had a large chunk of video to merge in. In terms of the visual content, the film is about right. The audio, however, has a long way to go. The problem with video taken near the beach is that there is a huge amount of wind noise. This needs to be filtered out (if possible) so that we can hear the voices.

Late in the afternoon the Gorse Fox heard from The Cine Film Factory. The tapes he dropped off last week have now been processed. Funds were exchanged and the Gorse Fox has arranged to collect the DVD masters in the morning. The Gorse Fox probably said this last week, but again, he cannot stress enough how important it is to process your old Video 8 and Super 8 video tapes. The compound from which they were made is degrading rapidly and you cannot assume that any images or memories you have stored on them will last too much long.

We heard from Cousteau-Cub just after dinner. She confirmed that her broadband has been switched on and that it is very fast. That's good news as it will make life a lot easier for her. 

Scam

The Gorse Fox has just received the HMRC scam call...

"This is to inform you that a fraud case is registered in your name. You must press..."

The Gorse Fox hung up and blocked the caller.

Breaking the cycle

Just to break the cycle, there was no movement on any outstanding refunds today. The Gorse Fox shakes his head in amazement.

Urban-Cub got back from work mid-morning and Ellie has been her shadow ever since. The Silver Vixen locked herself in the lounge for her Zoom Pilates session throughout the morning. The Gorse Fox wonders if we can play football over Zoom? At least it would be non-contact.

The Gorse Fox , you will be astonished to hear, spent his spare time working on further videos. He cracked through quite a few, in terms of rough-cut. They will need further work and some audio tracks when he gets back to the iMac. (He should explain that his study has been in use all day by Cousteau-Cub who needed to work but hasn't yet got broadband switched on in the new house, though it is due today.

Keeping count, as he has been, he only noticed one other shopper in Sainsbury's wearing a face mask.

Refunds, another episode

The Gorse Fox was checking the accounts this morning. In fact, he checks them most mornings. He was delighted to find that a refund had been credited to his account for some pull-out kitchen baskets that were the wrong size and had to be returned. This happened back in March just as the lockdown set in. The store has only just started trading again, so the Gorse Fox phoned them. They looked up the details and said they would get onto it. Two working days later the refund is in the bank. If only Virgin were as efficient.

Urban-cub had to go into work today. She dropped Ellie off with Cousteau-cub and the Coventry Hobbit. The Gorse Fox went along to collect her in time for dinner.

Much of the rest of the day was spent creating or editing family videos to add to the Plex Server. Several more have been tucked away today: Madeira, Falmouth, a couple of picnics, and he is in the middle of preparing one for the 2015 trip to Thailand. He may not finish it tonight but should tuck it away tomorrow if not.

Refunds Series 27, Episode 23

The Gorse Fox has actually lost count of the number of interactions he has attempted with Virgin regarding the refund for our Jamaica trip. It occurred to him that it is now six weeks since he chose to have a refund rather than rely on the voucher he was offered. In that time he has sent them several messages and just received stock answers. He hadn't even had confirmation that his refund was somewhere in their queue.

Enough was enough. It was time to at least get some acknowledgement.

He started:

"It is now a biblical 40 days and 40 nights since you contacted me regarding my holiday (ref:xxxxxxx). Your email included a voucher, but I chose to take a full refund and filled in the online form accordingly. The emails said "We'll call you back to process the cancellation and organise your refund." but I still have not heard anything."

He received the usual canned answer.

He switched from iMessage to WhatsApp:

"On April 28th you cancelled my holiday xxxxxxx and I requested a refund. It is now 6 weeks and I haven't even received an acknowledgement that this is in process. If I do not hear from you I will have to initiate a chargeback on my credit card."

He received the canned response almost immediately, but was prepared for this, and volleyed back:

"A canned response is not acceptable. I want a clear acknowledgement that my refund is in process."

Lo and behold! The bots obviously passed this on to a human and the Gorse Fox got a response. 

"Hi I can see from our system that a refund has been requested for you, at this time I cannot give you an exact date when this will be with you. As we are dealing with and exceptionally … difficult times… longer than usual… blah blah"

Is the Gorse Fox happy? No. But he does, at least, have an acknowledgement that his refund is in their system.

Gone fishing

Urban-cub is not having a good day. She went out this morning and forgot her purse, only realising as she approached Rustington. She's lost her ankle bracelet and on returning home she dropped her car keys down the drain.

This called for an imaginative solution. The problem is that it is a very deep drain. Magnets were clearly going to be the answer. It was at this point, however, that the Gorse Fox had to take the Silver Vixen into Chichester for her appointment at the hospital.

When we got back, the Gorse Fox and Two Hats teamed up and used some gaffer tape to attach 5 neodymium magnets to the end of a very long bamboo pole. The pole was plunged into the murky depths and slowly moved around. Suddenly it felt heavier. The pole was raised and the keys nestled at the end. It took a bit of cleaning up, but everything is now sorted.

Refunds, encore

The Gorse Fox has just sent, yet another, message to Virgin Holidays:

It is now a biblical 40 days and 40 nights since you contacted me regarding my holiday (ref:xxxxxx). Your email included a voucher, but I chose to take a full refund and filled in the online form accordingly. The emails said "We'll call you back to process the cancellation and organise your refund." but I still have not heard anything.

This is getting tiresome.

Mouse

The Gorse Fox thought that the forecast was for rain. In fact we have had lovely sunshine throughout the day, so far. Indeed we have been sitting out in the garden this afternoon, making the most of it. Having said that, it is clouding over now, and there are dark clouds gathering.

As the Gorse Fox has been editing his videos over the last few days he has had problems with the sensitivity of his wireless mouse. At first he put it down to a low battery. He changed it. Then he wondered if the old mouse-mat was getting a bit gungy. He ordered a new one. Today he wondered if it was the mouse itself. He swapped the mouse with another. The problem went away. It was the damned rodent. New mouse is on order.

Several more videos have been processed today. More importantly, the Gorse Fox has set up the Silver Vixen as a user of the Plex Server so she can now get to all the material. It's all set on her iPad, but the iPhone can wait until later.

Still going

The Gorse Fox is still going. He had no idea how much raw video footage he had. He started the day by wondering if there was some way to easily embed the videos in his private (Wordpress) blog. Certainly, it should be possible, but as far as using a player within Wordpress to play a video served by Plex, seems beyond the wit of the Gorse Fox at present. Then he thought about Plan B. What about linking directly to the NAS and playing it? It should be easy enough, but at this point, he still hasn't cracked it. What he doesn't want to do is to upload the videos as media into his Wordpress server and thus duplicate the storage. This will have to sit on the back burner for now.

Giving up, he returned to DaVinci Resolve and the task of editing individual videos from the huge forest of raw footage. Three more videos have been completed for events in 1990 and 1991.

Meanwhile, downstairs the Gorse Fox can hear the Silver Vixen's sewing machine or overlocker humming away as she works on new outfit for Ellie.

Masks

The Gorse Fox observed in Sainsbury's that, other than him, only two people were wearing masks. People are getting complacent.

Editing

The morning was spent on domestic chores and shopping. Late morning Urban-cub took Ellie across to LA to spend the weekend with Pistol Pete. The Silver Vixen returned to her sewing and the Gorse Fox to his computers.

With the newly transcoded DVDs ripped into the iMac, the Gorse Fox was able to complete three separate projects. That is now 40 family videos he has tucked away in the Plex server. He also had the opportunity to test whether he could access this media when outside the house. He was delighted to find that he could.

Video 8

In the late 1980s and through most of the 1990s the Gorse Fox had a video camera that recorded on Video 8 tapes. These were great at the time, but even though he has captured most of them, the quality of the images was poor. The Gorse Fox decided that enough was enough. These tapes contain significant family stories: holidays in Florida, in Arizona, in Poughkeepsie, in Toronto; days out at Waddesdon Manor, at the Vyne, in Boulogne; and family get togethers such as Christmas.

He read an article last year saying that the compound used for the Video 8 and Super 8 tapes was suspect and that they were deteriorating at an alarming rate. Many snapped as soon as they were played, others had a type of mould that destroyed the images. This needed to be addressed. The Gorse Fox found a small independent company in Durrington that would process these tapes and convert the to DVD. He had sent them two tapes to start with. He had the opportunity to collect the finished DVDs today (and deposit a load more tapes for processing).  The guy that runs the place said how difficult it had been and the first few machines he tried to use wouldn't't extract the images, only the audio. Finally, one of his big professional decks was able to get the image and record to DVD.

The Gorse Fox has had the opportunity to rip the DVDs into his compute and look at the finished article. Boy oh boy! The quality is fantastic. In fact he thinks it is better than the images projected from the tape originally (using the camera). Now, he has the challenge of editing the hours of original film into sensible video films... but at least the images are saved for posterity.

The Gorse Fox recommends that if you have any old Video 8 or Super 8 tapes tucked away in your cupboards, and the content has value to you or you family, the get it transferred to a medium that will not deteriorate.

The Gorse Fox does not advertise, but he does recommend places and services that he has found to be of genuine value. The Gorse Fox strongly recommends: The Cine Film Factory; Email: transfer@cinefilmfactory.co.uk

To be fair

The VIP Meet & Greet service referred to in yesterday's post, to be fair, got back to the Gorse Fox. They have realised their duplication of requests and asked for the Gorse Fox to provide contact numbers so that they can call and arrange the refund.

Numbers have been sent along with a reminder that we are 5 hours ahead of them - the last thing the Gorse Fox wants is a call coming in at 10:30 at night!

Now he awaits the call... and some contact from Virgin Holidays.

Moving

Today has been a big day. Cousteau-Cub and the Coventry Hobbit have moved in to their new home. Urban-Cub and Ellie were up early and headed across to Chichester to help with the move. There was van to pick up, and furniture to collect from various hide holes and suppliers. The Gorse Fox has no doubt the day was "full on".

The Gorse Fox and the Silver Vixen stayed at home... available if required, but still conscious of social distancing. The Silver Vixen spent the morning with her ladies on Zoom doing their collective Pilates session.

The Gorse Fox, meanwhile, returned to the huge pool of unprocessed video he has squirrelled away. That basically consumed the day. Several more videos have been crafted from the original clips and holidays from 2001 and 2002 are suitably documented.

Refund

It can be quite a hassle dealing with refund requests. Our vacation in Jamaica, in addition the the Virgin Holidays package, had a number of ancillary services booked around it. One by one, refunds were requested back at the beginning of the pandemic. Acknowledgements were received, and in most cases the refunds have occurred. Two, however, are outstanding. One from Virgin Holidays, and one from the VIP Meet & Greet service. This latter one has proved puzzling. Back in March they acknowledged our claim, and said that the refund would take between 60 and 90 days. A bit slow, but in the circumstances, acceptable. Overnight the Gorse Fox has received a further acknowledgement from them, offering several options, for for word the same as that received in March. The Gorse Fox responded that he had answered their email 68 days ago and they had acknowledged its receipt and promised the refund in 60-90 days... The Gorse Fox is concerned that they are trying to reset the clock. We wait.

It's been a relatively uneventful day. The Silver Vixen has been pottering with the flowers, Urban-Cub has been looking after Ellie, and the Gorse Fox has redeveloped an old video from our trip to Barcelona in 2005 and curated a new one from our trip to Seville in 2008.

Fiesta time

Well after so many days that tend to blend into each other, there was a bit of a change today. Urban-Cub had to go up to work and won't be back until tomorrow and Ellie was collected at lunchtime by Pistol Pete and will spend the afternoon with him.

With Urban-Cub at work, we moved the Silver Vixen's car and the Gorse Fox gave it a good wash to remove the accumulated dust of the last few weeks. He also fired up the Fiesta. It took two or three goes, but the engine fired and he reversed out of the garage for the first time in about 10 weeks. There was method to the madness. He had contacted the chappie in Worthing who does the video transcoding and he was able to accept a couple of tapes. The Gorse Fox arranged to drop them in during the early afternoon, and decided to take the fiesta to give it a bit of a run. There were no problems. It ran as sweet as a bell and the Gorse Fox even managed to get up to 49.9 mpg out of it, despite the effort the alternator was probably having to put in to get the battery fully charged again.

Ellie will be be back after tea, and G-Force will be in charge over night.

Metadata

The data that describes a file or a video, but isn't part of the content as such, is called metadata. Today the Gorse Fox has been going back through old family videos adding the metadata. Particular items that he wants to get right are the date of the recording and the cast of people featured. This has taken a while, but is now all but complete.

With this tucked away, the Gorse Fox started on some new videos. He has video clips stretching back 31 years and has probably only processed about 15% of them. Today he has worked through a few more.

Meanwhile, downstairs the Silver Vixen has been finishing some masks and Urban-Cub and Ellie went out to spend the afternoon at Mewsbrook Park in LA.

Shopping Online

It is the nature of doing your grocery shopping online that there are, on occasions, substitutions and even items that are totally out of stock. Today was such a case. Some tortilla wraps that the Gorse Fox had ordered weren't available so they substituted another type. The delivery driver checked that we were happy with the substitution - which we were. All was well. The driver then turned an said:

There were 43 items missing on my last delivery. All of it was hard liquor, and ten bottles of it was Sambuca.

Clearly someone is planning a party, is struggling with lockdown, or has a very serious problem. The Gorse Fox's bottle of wine each week seems rather pathetic.

Soffit so good

A chap was meant to come and clean the soffits and gutters today. Old Bill had arranged it. First he would do theirs, then Two Hats', and finally ours. He didn't turn up. Old Bill is not amused, and unless he has a letter from Boris, he'll be told where to stick it if he finally replies to the messages that have been left for him

A budding Spielberg

It has been another glorious day. Certainly the weather has helped keep people sane during this long lockdown.

Urban-Cub took Ellie out to meet up (at a suitable distance) with Cousteau-Cub this afternoon. The Silver Vixen is sat at her sewing machine, and the Gorse Fox is up in his study. The day has been spent sorting through digital copies of old video tapes to determine whether the originals need to be re-captured, or whether the quality is sufficient to work with. Several have not made the grade and the Gorse Fox has written to the chappie in Worthing who can do this transcode to see if he is still in business and able to help.

Meanwhile, he has also been looking for a quick and dirty method for making quick videos, where complex editing isn't required. Needless to say, on the Mac this is built in with the iMovie app. Better still this works both on the iMac, the MacBook and the oPad and iPhone. The Gorse Fox has rattled off a couple of quick videos this afternoon as an experiment and is very pleased with the results.

Digital Filing

Someone asked a question on Facebook this morning. It revolved around how to store files for genealogy. The Gorse Fox couldn't resist and responded:...

Storage of digital document is important. The first things to consider (for anything you stare one your computer):

1. How important is the data
2. How volatile is the data (how frequently does it change)
3. Do you need to keep old versions if it does change
4. What is the impact of losing it

This should help you decide on a backup strategy. My strategy varies according to the answers above. In the most extreme case, I have 

• Hourly backups to one external drive
• Daily backups to another (mirrored) external drive
• Daily backups to the Cloud (so there is an off-site copy)
• Weekly backups to a further drive
• Monthly backups to a drive stored up in our loft.

What me, paranoid? Yes! I spent 43 years in the IT industry and have seen too many cases of critical data being lost.

Now having said that… how do you store the data? I think it is important to come up with a naming scheme. This will help, longer-term, in finding the files. A scheme (which I have been using successfully since the mid-1980s) names files as follows:

YYYYMMDD-x (Source) Subject

The first part, YYYYMMDD, is obviously the date of the document in a sortable format.
The  -x is a suffix that could be:

• I - invoice
• N - Notification
• S - Statement
• etc…. (Make up your own scheme)

The (Source) identifies where the document came from:

• (Nat West)
• (Public Records Office)
• (Berkeley Homes)

And finally the subject of the document:

• Annual Water Statement
• Marriage Certificate 
• etc

Finally, these files are stored in a folder structure that helps me go straight to the correct place in the file system:

• /Genealogy
• /Documents and Letters/
• /Documents and Letters/Bank
• /Documents and Letters/Tax
• /Documents and Letters/Utilities

I hope this helps

Who is that masked stranger

The Gorse Fox has been out to Sainsbury's and observed how few people were wearing masks compared to a fortnight ago. They also seemed far more cavalier in terms of social distancing with the store. It's a shame that people are becoming a little blasé after all this time. It's not as if the risk has gone.

Just Checking

It was nice to get an email from Amazon. We hadn't had a delivery yesterday and they were just checking that we were all right.

Stoned

The Silver Vixen and Urban-cub have had bees in their collective bonnets regarding the build-up of blanket weed in the rill. The Gorse Fox clears it every few weeks, but the cobbles have become slimy and stained over the past few years.

This afternoon it was clearly time to address this. Large receptacles were found and, stone by stone, all the cobbles were removed and stored.

The plan is, apparently, to bleach them and re-use them. The Gorse Fox pointed out that this was a problem as the wastewater needed to be disposed of carefully. Certainly nowhere in the garden is available. We would have to use the drains at the front of the house... but the containers full of cobbles are too heavy to move easily, and will be even heavier when filled with water.

Once cleaned and the water has been filtered out of the rill and the rill cleaned, we will replace everything and add some treatment to the water to try and keep the water clear. Fingers crossed.

Cleaning

The Gorse Fox has had a domestic day. It started with half an hour of quality time with the Ocado online shopping list and then the overflow list for Sainsbury's. While this was underway, Cousteau-cub turned up with Tyson (he dog). Urban-cub and Ellie then took Tyson out for a walk, then took him back to Cousteau-cub's house. Meanwhile, she made the most of our technology up in the study.

The Silver Vixen used the Karcher window washer on the Orangery windows (latterly with some "assistance" from Ellie), while the Gorse Fox got stuck-in to an oven-cleaning exercise. Fortunately, one of the ovens can do a self-clean or a short steam-clean. The Gorse Fox made the most of the steam clean, which seemed to do a pretty good job. The other oven was still quite warm so that cleaned up fairly well with just soap and water. As usual, it was the racks that held out the most resistance, but they were no match for the Gorse Fox's persistence.

Urban-cub is suffering from heat-rash, and it's making her feel pretty rough as it feels like millions of under-skin pin-pricks. She is sheltering in the cool of the lounge and raising Amazon for possible creams, sprays, and other cures.

Just Hanging

The Gorse Fox has had a fairly uneventful day. (You might ask yourself if he ever has anything different. He is retired, he doesn’t care).

Cousteau-Cub arrived first thing and set up her equipment in the study. The Gorse Fox thinks she quite likes the space, the comfortable chair, and the reliable internet service.

The Gorse Fox played with Ellie during the morning while everyone else was doing their various ablutions. Urban-Cub also had some conference calls and had agreed to collect the Coventry Hobbit and take him to work as his knee was giving him problems.

The Silver Vixen has managed to cut out a couple more masks this afternoon while the Gorse Fox was going through a couple of boxes of old video tapes so that he could check which ones still needed to be captured and transcoded. Unfortunately, it has revealed several tapes which have no descriptions written on the covers... the question is “is there any content? Or are they just empty, unused tapes?”

BT

With a level of incompetence that only BT seem to be able to manage, Cousteau-cub has had to decamp and come here to work in the Gorse Fox's study. It seems that asking them to set up a line transfer for a house move is still the most intractable problem in the Universe.

"Please arrange the new service to begin on 3rd June."

"Ok. That'll be the 29th June" came the response a few days later.

"No, 3rd June, please"

"Ok. That'll be 10th June" came the reply.

"Oh, and by the way, our internet keeps dropping"

"Sorry, we can't look at that. Your account is locked for 24 hours while we process the house move for a day you didn't want".

In the end, she phoned the Gorse Fox in despair. The only sensible solution was for her to work here in the study - socially distanced from the rest of us.

Chasing bugs (that don't exist)

Another gorgeous day here in the South.

For the Gorse Fox, most of the day has been spent in the study. It all started with a plan to scan through some old video and split it into relevant components. The software said that a new version was available and invited him to download it. He did. That's where the problem started.

He reopened the software and went to his media library to suck in the video... but it wasn't there in the list. He looked elsewhere. It was nowhere to be found. He re-installed the software. Same result. He checked the file locations (after all, he has been moving things around). No, the files were there. So it continued until he noticed (after several hours) that the particular files were in a different video format. Moulds it be that format wasn't recognised? He transcoded one file and looked again. There it was. Doh!

The Gorse Fox has now embarked on an exercise to transcode all of the old video format clips and files into a format supported by DaVinci Resolve.

As a byproduct of this, he has realised that a number of videos he thought he had already edited, clearly haven't been.

Return from a Parallel Universe

It’s a Bank Holiday. The Gorse Fox mentions this in case it has slipped your notice. After all, with all but essential workers essentially in temporary retirement, for most it is just another day.

The Gorse Fox spent some time this morning looking at a plugin extension for an IDE (Integrated Development Environment). This particular plugin understands the syntax and format of Rexx and provides nice highlighting of the code and quickly shows any errors in your code. Very impressive.

The Gorse Fox has also found a bit of code called MetaDoctor which allows him to add metadata to the family videos. This includes chapter, people who are featured, and so forth. This is really good and greatly enhances the function that is available through the Plex server. It now means that we can watch a family video and skip straight to a given part of the film, as identified by the chapters.

After lunch we all headed for the garden to enjoy a quiet time in the sun. Again, Cousteau-Cub came round to use the garden. Not quite the spirit of lockdown, but if she wears a Dominic Cummings mask nobody will worry. To be fair, she does maintain her distance and as both she and the Silver Vixen are fairly vulnerable we do have to be sensible about things.

In a parallel universe, tonight would be our last full night in Jamaica before checking out and flying home tomorrow. At least, in real life, the weather has been excellent back here at home.

Film

It was, yet another, glorious day. The Silver Vixen continues to work on some face masks and now only has a couple more to do. Urban-Cub made the most of the sunny weather and sat out in the garden with her music (through earphones).

The Gorse Fox returned to the video he had completed yesterday. He wasn't totally happy with the way it had turned out. He re-opened the project and went through from the beginning. Some different transitions were spliced in between clips, and the old audio track was removed and the music was reselected and merged into the video. It took quite a long time to get right, but the Gorse Fox is much happier with the finished result.

The Gorse Fox then went and sat in the garden. Not quite with Urban-Cub, as she loves to be in the sun, whilst the Gorse Fox like to sit in the shade. He took the mobile phone gimbal with him. Watch so much video over the last couple of days has made him even more conscious that the quality is very much a factor of the camera operator, far more than the quality of the camera itself. He had to reacqaint himself with the operation of the device and its features, but in the end he was fairly happy that he had it mastered (at least until next needs it, when no doubt, he'll have to go through the whole process again).

Cousteau-Cub joined us for a while (suitably distanced) in the back garden. Having a basement studio flat with no outside space means she is pretty much confined. Now that they have a car she was able to get out.

Post Production

It has been a bright but very windy day. One of the Acers in the garden was blown over (in its pot) and had to be moved to a more sheltered spot until the wind dies down.

Urban-cub took Ellie across to stay with Pistol Pete for a few days then came back to make the most of the sunny weather and crashed out in the garden (in the aforementioned sheltered spot). The Silver Vixen returned to her sewing machine. She is working on the last couple of masks now. These two are spares for when ours are in the wash.

The Gorse Fox retired to the study and completed his project with the backups. We now have an analysis of the volatility and value of the various file clusters, and a cascading schedule of backups that is appropriate to each cluster. In extreme cases, the data cascades hourly to Time Machine, daily to level 1 (which is mirrored) and the Cloud, weekly to level 2, and monthly to level 3.

The Gorse Fox then settled down to a few hours of video editing. The focus of this exercise was old cone-film that had been digitised and recorded snippets of life at our home in Cockfosters in the 1960s and some clips of holidays down in West Wittering with the Gorse Fox's cousins. The first cut of this is complete but hasn't yet been screened so may need a little further manipulation.

The Gorse Fox then got side-tracked by another set of clips. These too had been digitised versions of old cine films. These stretched back into the 1950s and included his grandparents on holiday with their friends in Italy, some weddings (including that of the Gorse Fox's parents), and some further clips from Sunday morning cocktail parties, and holidays in Kent and in Canada. The film quality is dreadful, and the camera work was enough to make you sea-sick, at times. To be fair, though, people in those days didn't realise the limitations of the equipment nor the concept of steady and slow camera movement.

Cousteau-cub and the Coventry Hobbit turned up late in the afternoon. Again, they had been out for a long walk and stopped by on their way back. We sat at socially responsible distances in the garden until it got a bit chilly when we moved into the Orangery and scattered ourselves around the periphery.

Cheek!

It was another nice day. It was quite windy but pleasantly warm. When the domestic chores were out of the way, the Gorse Fox retired to the study to continue the rationalisation and documentation of his various backups. This was well under way when a plaintiff cry wafted up the stairs from the Silver Vixen.

"Should LastPass be sending me messages about attempted logins?"

The Gorse Fox dropped everything. "No! It shouldn't"

The next hour or so was spent trying to determine what was going on, and whether there was a concerted attempt to hack into our system was underway. What a cheek! The one portal we have that is open to the network is Plex Remote Access. That was immediately shutdown. The Gorse Fox then started analysing everything that was running on all our systems. Was there some Malware in the system? He was stumped.

In the end he removed the sharing features from the Silver Vixen's LastPass account and then changed the password. He logged back in to the MacBook, the iPhone, and the iPad. All of them connected without incident. No further messages were received. The sharing features were reconnected and all is well in the land.

After lunch there was the obligatory trip to Sainsbury's for items that Ocado hadn't got, and to select something for Sunday's lunch.

Once back, he returned to the study and the rationalisation of backups. He has freed up tens of Gigabytes of space so far, and has a much clearer hierarchy of backups in plan. There's still work to do, but it is pretty neat.

The nice man from Amazon turned up with some magic "nano" tape. This tape is "slipless, double-sided adhesive, reusable and washable, traceless and  when it gets dirty, you can wash it with water and dry it to regain its stickiness". The Gorse Fox is very impressed. It is currently holding several of the Raspberry Pis in position on the desk... and they aren't going anywhere!

Stoned

The local children have been painting stones and leaving them in a long line by the lake. The head of the line is a snake's head and all of the painted stones make up the body.

Ellie has been busy (under the supervision of Urban-Cub, who, in turn, was under the supervision of the Silver Vixen) and has painted and varnished two stones to add to the snake. Once they were dry we all took a walk round to the lake, examined the display, and then added Ellie's stones to end.

It's a lovely whimsical little idea for the kids.

Pegboard

It is another fabulous day. The weather is gorgeous, and the temperature is in the mid 20s. Urban-Cub and Ellie are making the most of the garden while the Silver Vixen was completing the Ocado list for the Gorse Fox to enter online.

The Gorse Fox had a brain wave overnight. What if he used some spare peg-board to secure the Raspberry Pis and their cables in his study. (They have a habit of moving around because they are so light and the cable can get caught and drag them). After the early morning chores the Gorse Fox retired to garage to retrieve said peg-board, clean it up and take it to the study. Five minutes later he realised it wasn't a brain wave. In fact it was barely a ripple. Not only was it an ugly solution, it was also impractical. Everything was taken back to the garage.

While feeling "handy" the Gorse Fox also attacked the door handle in the "en suite". It has developed a "ping". When he gets up in the night, trying hard not to disturb anyone, he grabs the handle and as the lever descends there is an audibly "ping". It drives him mad. It hasn't yet woken the Silver Vixen, but he's sure it will. Anyway, after some fiddling about and some generous use of silicone WD40 he can report that the door handle has gone back to gather and no longer "pings". It clunks. Doh!

As Ellie was having some "quiet time" this afternoon, the Gorse Fox has been back up in the study. He is starting the task of updating the documentation for his backups. (It's all very well having backups, but it helps if you know what they are and where they are stored... the frequency with which they are taken and how to recover the information if needed). Now, you won't be surprised that the Gorse Fox knows all this, but he does like to get it written down somewhere, to save hunting around.

Reorg

It has been a very successful day. The Gorse Fox had received some new shelf supports from Amazon last night. While the Silver Vixen did her Zoom Pilates, Urban-Cub and Ellie helped the Gorse Fox do a fairly major reorganisation of his study. This included putting up the new shelves, recabling, and labelling. It did take all morning and the early part of the afternoon, but the outcome is most satisfactory. The Gorse Fox even managed to get some spilled printer ink off of the keys on his keyboard.

There are a few holes that need to be filled. These are the remnants of the old shelf support system. This will get done another day. Today's focus was getting everything working again.

Maestro, the music

After various domestic chores, and a bit of play with Ellie, and a walk to the post office with a parcel containing Betty and Barney Rubble's face masks, the Gorse Fox decided to expand his Plex library a bit further. He has now copied his music library to Plex... and as he writes, the Plex server is staring to organise the information.

Apparently this can link with Alexa and with the Sonos, but the Gorse Fox will limit this exercise to one thing at a time. At the moment he knows it will me easily accessible from the various Plex clients we have round the house (TVs, tablets, and phones).

Lordy, lordy.

They don't learn, do they?

The Gorse Fox received a text message"

HSBC: A new payee was added to your account on 19/05/20. Please confirm or cancel this request via (website address).

This is the second such text like this. He didn't respond to the first one, and won't respond to this. It's a scam. How does the Gorse Fox know? Well, the fact that he doesn't have any HSBC accounts is the biggest clue.

You would think...

It's been a lovely day. Wall to wall blue skies and very pleasant temperatures. Urban-Cub and Ellie have spent much of the day in the garden. The Silver Vixen finished off a couple more facemasks for Betty and Barney Rubble. That's it now, other than doing a second mask for herself and the Gorse Fox, he believes she is finished.

The Gorse Fox has been fiddling. He started by updating some documentation but was irritated by how slow the access was to his old NAS drives from "Condor". Now, this isn't new. They seem to have been slow for a long time and appear to be getting worse. He decided to do some research. It turns out that the Apple routines for accessing a remote disk (afp) are not really as good as some of the alternatives. In fact they have deprecated the code. You would think their own code would be the best way of access on their systems, but no. It seems that Samba/SMB is quicker.

This triggered a couple of hours of testing alternatives and checking backups were still functioning. As it stands he is now using Samba and the disk access seems a lot quicker. He still needs to work out how to automount the drives on startup... but that's a challenge for another day.

this afternoon the Coventry Hobbit popped in and Urban-Cub went with him to collect a bed frame that Cousteau-Cub had bought online. It's tucked away in Urban-Cub's storage unit until the Coventry Hobbit and Cousteau-Cub move into their new house at the beginning of June.

Street Photography

One of the neighbours on the development set herself a bit of a lockdown project. The idea was to go round the development and record the pictures that people had put up in their windows, and record the people and family groups from across the estate (who were willing to pose). Urban-Cub and Ellie were captured on this, and our front window was featured because of the pictures we had displayed. The finished article was very good. The Gorse Fox suggested she submit it to the West Sussex Archive as they had been asking for people to donate diaries and pictures of their "lock-in".

Yesterday, the lady knocked and asked for permission to include our pictures as she wanted to submit to the Archive. We got chatting. She and her husband were ever so interesting. She is a self defined "amateur street photographer" and makes no pretence of anything other than her amateur status. Her husband is a product designer, working from home. He and the Gorse Fox got talking about the challenges of data management, backup, and RAID configurations, and the use of CAD/CAM software. She and the Silver Vixen talked about making masks and the fact that her husband had just come up with a new design that should make mask construction significantly simpler. This should be release in the next few weeks.

We clearly hit it off and resolved to get together once the lock-down is lifted.

And cut!

The Gorse Fox has spent much of the day at the computer (go on, tell him you are surprised). This, however, was a bit of a change. He spent several hours working on some old video that had been put together by The Bishop. He had some clunky old technology that played cine film onto a screen that was being captured by a computer. The whole process was both complicated, and very inaccurate. The Gorse Fox decided to resist the captured data and see if he could tidy up the output.

It's funny how quickly you forget. Considering that The Gorse Fox spent a lot of time earlier this year working wit the Ca Vinci video editing suite, he had forgotten how to use it when he fired it up. The first task today was to go back to YouTube and  refresh his memory on the basics. (Fortunately, he doesn't need any of the more esoteric editing features or techniques). Finally, he was ready to start editing and after a couple of false starts he has now created a new version (a reboot?) of the original. He's quite pleased with the outcome.

There are several more videos to analyse and to edit, but with the current lockdown, there's no real hurry.

Recognition

The Gorse Fox has received some recognition. He received an email from Amazon:

"You're receiving this email because you are purchasing on Amazon in large amounts. Are you purchasing for business? If so, Amazon Business may be of interest. Amazon Business is a no-cost upgrade that gives businesses access to downloadable VAT invoices, quantity discounts, business pricing and more.
Key features include:

• Wholesale prices and bulk discounts

• Easy VAT invoice management

• Payment on net 30-day terms*

Upgrade now and join the millions of businesses around the world who use Amazon Business to purchase for work."

The local delivery driver has asked about getting his own parking space.

Labels

It has been another very successful day for the Gorse Fox. He escaped to the study to look at the current method he employs for getting tags/labels from blogposts to the private blog on "peregrine". This was always clunky and somewhat of a bodge. The new code he prepared a few weeks ago which manages the transfer of blog-posts themselves, also carries the tags as part of the payload (the original Google-API based system did not). With some judicious changes to his existing code he was able to fork relevant tags/labels into a small holding file. This holding file is then processed by the original tag-merge program he had written several years back. Et Voila! It all works.

The Gorse Fox thinks that, bar some daily monitoring, all of the work is now finished on the Raspberry Pis. Next little project will probably be some more video editing.

The Silver Vixen is enjoying time on her sewing machine. She's now making some masks for herself (having made them for the rest of the family). In fact, as Urban-Cub has gone to meet Cousteau-Cub (in the open, of course) she has taken Cousteau-Cub's mask(s) along with her.

Rubbing it in

Google seems intent on rubbing our noses in it. As the Gorse Fox sits here reading the news, an alert pops up. It's Google Photos with a "Rediscover this day" message showing pictures of a previous trip to Jamaica. Just shut up! We know it's lovely, and we know we are not there.

Media, Accident and Emergency

There has been a report from the media that there is significant concern at the drop in numbers attending the A&E Departments in the hospitals. Needless to say, they are trying to make an issue out of this when actually it is totally expected by anyone with more than three brain cells.

Why aren't people going to A&E? Is it because they are afraid of getting Coronavirus or of overloading the NHS?

NO!

It's because we are on lockdown.

• There's fewer cars on the roads; so fewer accidents.
• There's no sport; so no sports injuries.
• There are no pubs open; so fewer (no) drunken fights.
• There are no clubs open; so fewer (no) drunken fights.
• People can't get about easily; so there are fewer drug deals.

The Gorse Fox despairs of our media.

A Plan Comes Together

Urban-Cub took Ellie across to stay with Pistol Pete for the weekend. For the moment the Silver Vixen and Gorse Fox are enjoying a certain degree of tranquility as she potters away on here sewing machine and the Gorse Fox taps away on the keyboard.

Today he has rebuilt "peregrine" from the ground up. All of the hassle of lat week's rebuild of "tawnyowl" paid off as today's exercise could not have gone more smoothly. The server for the private blog is now nestling back in the man-cave, fully up to date, and apparently working as required. The Gorse Fox will, obviously, monitor it over then next few days, but does not foresee any issues.

Five Miles High

The Gorse Fox woke up this morning and remembered he wasn't in a Gatwick Hotel. As he writes this blog post he also remembers he is not whizzing along at nearly 500 miles an hour, five miles above the Atlantic. It's a good job he bought a bottle of rum in Sainsbury's so that he can pretend to be in Jamaica.

Much of the morning was spent playing with Ellie and then the Gorse Fox retired to the study. He managed to complete the automatic mounting and monitoring of the NAS drives on "barnowl" and the automatic emailing of reminders from "tawnyowl".

This afternoon, there was a trip to Sainsbury's. The Gorse Fox observed that the adjustments that the Silver Vixen had made to his mask, worked well. He also noticed far more people were wearing masks, but they were being more cavalier with regards to social distancing.

Back home the Gorse Fox started to prepare for the complete rebuild of his production system for the private blog. This runs on "peregrine" and is currently flagging up warnings of some back level software (though it is still working flawlessly). As many of the changes are in the security coverage, he feels it is time for an upgrade, particularly as the whole process is so fresh in his mind, and so meticulously documented. The various configuration scripts have been updated. A new microSD has been loaded with the latest Raspbian distribution, and a new USB stick has been ordered to replace the current one. (this means that the old one can be archived away until the Gorse Fox is happy that everything is working properly).

Parallel Dimension

The day started much as usual. Then it dawned on the Gorse Fox that, in a parallel dimension, where COVID-19 isn't ravaging the planet, the Gorse Fox and Silver Vixen would be heading up to Gatwick today. We would stay at an airport hotel and then, tomorrow, fly off to Jamaica for a couple of weeks. There are times that inter-dimensional transport to alternate universes seems quite appealing.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the Silver Vixen had her Zoom Pilates session this morning, Urban-Cub had several conference calls and went to post a parcel with Ellie, only to find that particular type of parcel cannot be returned through that Post Office. The Gorse Fox continued to plug away at the "tawnyowl" and "barnowl" to ensure everything was working as he wanted. This was important as mounting the NAS devices via "/etc/fstab" proved problematic on this lates release. In the end he developed a script that could run as service and be controlled by "systemd". It took a while to get right, but it now works. What he does need to do is refine it so it runs regularly, but at, say, hourly intervals.

On another note, the Gorse Fox ran the RexxCPS routine yesterday to measure the speed of Rexx on "barnowl". It was very impressive and reported 1858751 Rexx clauses per second

Tonight we will be experimenting with a version of Butter Chicken, using coconut milk instead of cream. The Gorse Fox is intrigued to know how this will turn out.

You've Got Mail

Another interesting day. The Gorse Fox spent much of the morning sorting out some household chores, but once they were finished he left the Silver Vixen downstairs working on some face masks while he returned to the study.

The first task was to rationalise the filing of the various DVD and video images so that they made more sense when shown in the Plex menus. He also fired up another of the TVs downstairs and linked it into Plex. This is beginning to look rather good. While this was going on, the Gorse Fox returned to his documentation and brought it up-to-date with all of the "barn owl" installation instructions.

There were several further items that needed tidying up. One was to re-install the mail system on "tawnyowl". This proved to be more troublesome than it should have, but it turns out that the components that the Gorse Fox had used previously have been deprecated and there is a new set of programs top install. That has now been done and the mailing seems to work. There's a bit more testing to do, but it is looking ok.

A bit comPLEX

A huge amount of today has been spent in the study. Urban-Cub had a number of large documents that needed to be scanned and saved,  and there were some that needed printing. Alongside this the Gorse Fox notched that the location of his local copy of Google Drive was incorrect and it took a while to get that sorted out.

He popped out, late morning, to collect a prescription for the Silver Vixen. It didn't take long, but he was a little irritated by the brusque, almost rude, approach from the assistant in the pharmacy. I'm sure that if she had access to a cattle prod, she would have felt a lot better.

At lunchtime the nice man from Amazon arrived with two nice parcels. A new Raspberry Pi Model 4B with $GB of memory and a new 22 inch HDMI-enabled computer monitor. These were soon assembled and powered up and the new "barn owl" was hatched. The first thing he did was to run the Rexx performance measure and sent the results to MFC. The rest of the afternoon was spent installing the Plex Media Server on "barn owl" and cajoling it into life. It now seems to be working and the Gorse Fox will experiment further this evening. Certainly he has managed to play video on both iPhone and iPad, but hasn't yet tried the big TV.

The Bishop

It is some 9 years now since the Bishop passed away. The Bishop was twin brother of the Gorse Fox's dad. Before the Bishop died, however, he had spent a lot of time going through old cine films and photos and transferring them to CD/DVD along with some commentary where appropriate. (This was particularly interesting where he discusses the time that he and the Gorse Fox's dad joined, and served in the Royal Navy). The Gorse Fox woke up last night and wondered where on earth this was. He knew he had a copy somewhere, but had no idea where.

With the new Raspberry Pi on order (and a monitor), he realised he needed a bit more space in his study. This, predominantly, was a problem because the Gorse Fox is an accidental proponent of the "messy desk" concept. He has now spent the morning tidying up and, lo and behold, has found the missing DVD. Taking no chances, he has immediately ripped it down onto his media library. It will need some editing and touching up, but at least we have it.

Oh yes, and the study is now much tidier than it was, but the Gorse Fox thinks he must consider some further shelving once the lockdown is over, and possibly a control panel on which to mount the network switch.

Oops

Well it looks like the Gorse Fox has just, accidentally, ordered another Raspberry Pi. This one will be known as "barnowl" but is unlikely to arrive before Monday evening.

Cracked

The Gorse Fox has assuredly cracked it! Everything is now working as planned and designed and his documentation is correct. He is very pleased. He has even managed to get several niggling issues sorted out with several other machines.

At the moment, he is experimenting with Plex, a media server. It's installed on "eagle" as an experiment, but if it proves useful, the Gorse Fox will get a further Raspberry Pi as the long term Plex Server. He suspects this will make access to the various family videos and films a lot more straightforward than it is at present. (And it will make another interesting project).

The Silver Vixen has been making some more face masks for when we leave the confines of home. She's made a couple for Ellie. It will be interesting to see how she get on with them.

Other than that... all is quiet on the Southern Front.

On a roll

It's been a lovely day. The sun has shone and there isn't even a hint of a cloud in the sky. Urban-cub had stayed up at Gatwick overnight but was home with us soon after nine. Ellie had slept until 8, so was still sorting herself out when Urban-cub got in. She was off to spend the weekend with Pistol Pete so there was some packing to do before she left.

The Gorse Fox retired to the study. Though the rebuild of "tawnyowl" was essentially complete, there was some tidying up to do. The most important item was to move "/var" off of the SDCard and onto a separate USB stick. This prolongs the life of the SDCard because most of the writes go to "/var"; it also means that you can have a very large device to host your database and blogging software. The process was a little time-consuming but it went smoothly and left the Gorse Fox with a warm feeling of satisfaction. There are a couple of further tweaks that he needs to complete before he can declare "tawnyowl" finished, but they can wait for another day.

The Gorse Fox has spent much of the afternoon sitting in the garden. He's been chatting, online, with Agent Mulder. We have been discussing when it might be appropriate to rearrange the Jamaica trip (which was due to start this coming Thursday). Our current suggestion is that we might consider September or October '21. Before we make any decisions, however, we would need a degree of confidence that the current pandemic is under control and we have some immunity.

It's quite noisy outside at present. Clearly, there are several celebrations underway for VE 75.

It is fairly obvious that the idea of social distancing has been widely ignored for the sake of a party. The Gorse Fox understands, but does not condone.

VE was a very significant day, even if the War in the Far East was still prosecuted for a few more months. The freedoms we have today are because of the bravery and the sacrifices of that "hero" generation. All we are being asked to do is to sit on our sofas, but apparently, this is too much for the pathetic morons who think the rules do not apply to them yet their very existence and freedom of choice is a gift of that "hero" generation.

Re-chuffed

Well, in a somewhat bitty day, the Gorse Fox can conclude that he is chuffed again. This time the clean rebuild went smoothly. This gives him confidence that when it comes time to upgrade "peregrine" he can do it with a degree of confidence and a set of instructions that work!

In other matters, Urban-cub went into work. Though furloughed, Gatwick have realised that they allowed the only person who understood their stores department to leave. As Urban-cub has some experience from a previous job, they asked if she could come in and provide some guidance and consultancy to regain control of the department. She leapt at the chance to get a mental challenge, so headed up to the Airport for a long 12-hour shift.

G-Force were back in charge of Ellie.

She was very good and actually asked for some "quiet time" after lunch (which suit us just fine). After that, she got all dressed up in her "Dora the Explorer" mode to take a walk with us around the lake. This, as usual, featured hurling food at the ducks and watching as they scrabbled over it. Once our stack of duck food was exhausted, she led as we walked all the way around, then up by "her" school (as she insists on calling it) and back round to our house.

Not so chuffed

What a frustrating day! The new SDCard on which the Gorse Fox was going to rerun all of yesterday's install scripts seems to have some errors. He has reformatted it several times and got verification errors when copying the image to the card. Then, finally, he got a clean image and started to install. This, however, hit further problems. He is starting again, again.

We did make the most of the nice weather this morning. The Gorse Fox, Urban-Cub and Ellie walked to Sainsbury's for some of the bits we couldn't get from Ocado. The Gorse Fox wore the facemark that the Silver Vixen had made. We clearly need a little tweaking, as the mask kept slipping (except when he wanted to use Face-Id on the iPhone.

While we were out, the Silver Vixen made the most of the time on a Zoom call with her Pilates crew and teacher. Two and half hours later they were still at it... though it's not clear if any Pilates took place!

Feeling chuffed

The Gorse Fox is feeling rather chuffed.

As is usual, he checked the various accounts this morning. All was as expected, at first. Then he got to the Premium Bonds and found that both he and the Silver Vixen had won this month. Not a lot, but yet another win. (We do seem to win something, between us, very month). Then he moved on to check Barclaycard (ever since he had a rogue transaction on a credit card a couple of years ago, he checks them daily). He was confused there were a number of unexpected transactions in the bagging area! At first he was concerned. Then it dawned on him that they were payments to the account, not from the account. The little bell rang in his addled mind. Barclaycard had refunded the money for the FlyBe airline tickets we had booked for Edinburgh. That's not a bad start to the day.

Most of the morning was spent doing a few household chores and keeping Ellie amused. She had been under the weather, but a dose of Ibuprofen seemed to pick her up and she was her normal self for a few hours.

This afternoon the Gorse Fox returned to the "tawnyowl" rebuild. In a rare moment of clarity he cracked the last couple of issues and the system is now running again perfectly. What a relief! Now, possibly stupidly, he's going to start the whole process again from scratch to see if he can get it to run through without any problems at all and ensure that the documentation matches the final process. That, however, can wait for another day.

Reserved

Biffa turned up at the crack of 9 o'clock with our new garden waste bin. Later during the morning the Gorse Fox went round all the little hiding places where bags of clippings were stored and emptied them into the bin. It will be nice to get rid of them and make a little space in the back of the garage again. Once the tip is reopened there is plenty more that can be disposed of... but most wouldn't glass as green waste.

The lady from Berkeley Homes knocked. She would be in the office and Urban-Cub could go along and complete the formal paperwork for the reservation of her new home. The Gorse Fox went along with her and kept an ear open for any 'gotchas'. It was a good thing he did as their scanner and copier wasn't working so the Gorse Fox had to step in and make all the copies that were required.

Much of the afternoon has been spent working on the "tawnyowl" rebuild. Though not yet finished, he has (at last) got to grips with a couple of the outstanding issues. It's not quite finished, but he suspects that he is on the home straight. It turns out (as it so often does with UNIX systems) that most of the problems have stemmed from a) permissions, b) changes in the database security, and c) changes in the format of the distribution package which created a superfluous high level directory that was mucking things up. However, that's it for today. He will get back to it tomorrow.

Not built in a day

It is clear that, like Rome, "tawnyowl" was not to be built in a day! The Gorse Fox has just started the third attempts to rebuild it from a clean image today. The problem he is hitting is several hours into the rebuild but is significant enough to screw things up. He wants to get the process working cleanly and without incident so that when it is time, and it soon will be, for "peregrine" to be rebuilt, the whole thing goes without incident.

Unlocking lockdown

The Gorse Fox notes that his security camera is providing clear evidence that people are beginning to move about much more. When first installed he might see 5 alerts between 8pm and 8am. Now that number has at least doubled, if not trebled, and most of the increase is between 8pm and midnight. If he can be bothered, he might get round to plotting a graph. Then again...

Got it

The Gorse Fox is delighted to report that, on checking all of the overnight backups, the fix that he developed yesterday has solved the problem of the hibernating disks. No, as each backup job wakes up it runs a small script to go and look at the disk and then waits for 10 seconds to make sure it has "spun up". Then the backup kicks in as usual.

Now he can return to other matters such as the "tawnyowl' rebuild and what to do, longer term, about media storage and streaming.

Study

It's been a lovely day. The sun has shone and the temperature has been a mild but comfortable mid-teen. The Silver Vixen has spent much of the day working on some protective masks. Several early versions didn't work, but after test fitting against the Gorse Fox, several times, she got the fitting right and we now have a perfectly functional protective mask.

The Gorse Fox spent the day working on the new NAS and the backup system. Overnight tests had shown that the new NAS's ability to hibernate the disks created a problem and the backup system couldn't identify the potential target devices. After some thought the Gorse Fox came up with a solution that effectively woke the disks just before the backup process was due to kick-in. We will see, overnight, whether this does the job.

Much of the rest of the study-time was spent cleaning up the new build for "tawnyowl". This is because we managed to introduce an error in the build script (somewhere) and need to re-run several build steps

Progress

The day started with Jasper using the Gorse Fox as a trampoline at 6:30. The Gorse Fox decided that was silly and ignored hime for 45 minutes and then made his way quietly downstairs. He didn't make his customary coffee as the machine is so loud it may have disturbed the various sleeping beauties upstairs and the Gorse Fox decided they all needed their rest.

Once everyone was up and about and fed, Urban-Cub and Ellie joined the Gorse Fox on a walk to Sainsbury's. More cat food was needed along with other essentials such as chocolate and wine. While we were in the store the heavens opened and it was still raining when we finished our shopping. It's only rain. So we tucked Ellie into the buggy and raised the rain cover and headed home. By halfway the rain had stopped and the sun was out. Overall it had been a pleasant couple of hours.

The Gorse Fox picked up some lovely looking hot dog sausages (Dino's) and some rolls. That was lunch sorted for the three of us, but the Silver Vixen (not a fan of hot dogs) declined the offer and munched on something healthy. (Talking of health, the Gorse Fox weighed himself this week for the first time since lockdown. He was expecting bad news, but was actually exactly the same weight as last time he checked before lockdown).

The afternoon has been spent back with the Synology NAS. Further reorganisation has taken place, and files have been flying back and forth round the network. The Gorse Fox thinks he has the basic structure right, but being cautious he wants to check everything out of=ver the next few days before he starts deleting information from the old NAS devices. He is still debating a few design decisions but may well leave one of the existing NAS devices as the master source for the various Raspberry Pi projects and coding projects. The rest of the device will probably be used as the target for Apple Time Machine backups. Like all design decisions, there are pros and cons and the Gorse Fox will (of course) document it all along with the reasoning.