Gold Vespa

After what seems like an iternity the Gold V is finally back on the road. The start to its long hiatus was when after 11000 Km of faithfull service the top end needle roller exploded. The result was not pretty to the piston, bore or rotary pad. The quickest way to get it back on the road was to fit a new engine. The V now has a 2004 Balladonna engine fitted with a 166 Molossi kit, Sito+ exhaust and 24e carb. This setup is rumored to put out over 12 hp at the rear wheel. The spec for a standard P150 is 8 hp at the flywheel. The new engine makes for quite an exiting ride and I am still getting used to it.

Moped Run in Hokitika around lake Kaniere 17/7/10

Last year was our first outing to lake Kaniere. This year my Father, Gary and I will be joined by Kurt. Hopefully will will take a few photos and get them up on the site. It is all pretty agricultural over there. The highlight last year was a motorbike with a fully operational log burner, It was a shame it only lasted about 5km before the engine blew up.

MythTv and New Server

We recently bought an HDHomeRun Freeview tuner box so that we could record some programs of Freeview for Rosa and Grace to watch. The main driver for this was that there was no product available that could easily store its output to an ethernet mounted storage device. We now have somthing usable but it has come with a few headaches. The backend software we use for sceduling and storing the recordings is MythTv.
The size of the recordings are huge, about 1.3 Gb per half hour. This was far to much for a generation 1 Xbox to be able to play as a frontend. This required all recordings to be transcoded to a more manageble size that the Xbox could play. Unfortunatley the old server was not up to the job requiring about 1 hour to transcode a half hour program. A new dual core server was built that can transcode about 4 time faster. One of the best features is being able to schedule recordings via the web. A replacement for the Xbox and a Tv worthy of the HD recordings is desirable.

Webcam
The webcam is finnaly running again, It is currently looking out towards the Airport but really needs to be placed in a better location

Beer
There is nothing being brewed at the moment so we are only monitoring the ambiant tempereture of the garage.

Pictures
Hope to get some photos of the Lake Kaniere moped run soon.