Life of Mike – My blog aka what goes on in the world of Mike Mussard

More Scotland

Another trip is over

So I left home at 6:13am on Friday 24th of May and returned back at 12:32pm on Sunday 16th of June.

Whisky/Fèis Ìle

The first part of my trip was very whisky related. The trip proper started with meeting up with some of the pirate gang at Tebay services. No drinking other than diet coke at that stage.

Glasgow

The Pot still

After parking up it was time for a wee dram (or two… or maybe more). So off to The Pot still we headed and started to reform the gang who met up at Tebay and grow it with others who’d left at different times or come via plane rather than car. Beer and whisky were drunk, it was all rather good.

SMWS

As this was a whisky themed trip where else to book for dinner other than the Scotch Malt Whisky Society? Damn the food was good, and the drams were rather good too.

I did buy a bottle here, but it didn’t survive the trip in a good way in that it was shared with others.

Sadly had to have an fairly early night as was on driving to our boat pickup the next day.

Islay and Jura

(Including getting there)

Getting there (Saturday)

We left Glasgow at 6:15am on Saturday and did a rather painful tour of the roadworks at first. I’d given Patrick a lift. Patrick does not approve of a place being called “Kill Patrick”

We dropped our luggage off at the pier we were being picked up from and then drove three cars to the Kennacraig Ferry terminal and got the last two spaces (this was one of those luck was on our side days, the plan was always to take the third car back to the starting pier)

Anyway it as a great site to see the MV Honeydew at the pier when we fist pulled up there. We stayed out their way whilst they deboarded the previous week’s guests. I’d learn to the last trip the captain is a big fan of tunnocks teacakes so had taken some with me for his wheel house supplies.

Then it was a wee boat ride over to Port Ellen. Followed by a walk to Lagavulin and the trip had begun. A few pints may have been had in the Ardview on the way back to the boat.

Sunday

The boat took us round to Bruichladdich for the Rock’ndaal. Good whisky, good tunes and a good time. I found the bands last year easier to “dance” to, but it was all good fun.

Monday

A leisurely rise then boat trip back to Port Ellen. A trip to the Rum distillery and then tried an evening trip to the Ramsay hall for the whisky nosing and Ceilidh. I sadly can’t cope in Ramsay hall when it’s busy it just gets way too warm for me, and I ended up sitting outside.

Tuesday

A pleasant day at Laphroaig distillery. Really appreciated the shuttle service that they run and especially the staff member from Bowmore who heard about the queues of people waiting so drove over to help with the shuttle service.

Wednesday

This was a Bowmore day, we got the bus to and from Port Ellen for this. We did a extra tasting (well three of us did) here. All rather a pleasant day, quite a brutal sea breeze, but all rather fun.

Thursday

We took the boat over to Jura. Damn it was windy when we got there. I had to hold onto my hat walking down the pier to get to the pub. We went to the pub and the shop. We met a man for the distillery he recommended and purchased for us all a sherry cask jura. This became my dram of the trip.

Friday

This was actual Jura day. This became my distillery of the trip. I loved the smallness of it all, (less people get to this one as unless you happen to have a boat travel can be a pain)

Also helped by the band the Rollin’ Drones. I didn’t know bag pipes could be played in this way until then. Shame we had to miss the last set to get the boat back, but it sounds like the wind blew over a tent once we’ve left.

In the evening in anchored in the sea near Ardbeg we tried a deck Ceilidh, this was more like a bumper car experience. I did try and join in till my asthmatic lungs said no more.

Saturday

Due to a lack of taxis and how much stuff we had to be carted to the ferry terminal for the people departing the boat moved back to Port Ellen. So we could all get the bus to Ardbeg if we were staying. Hence we got the bus.

The circus theme was a bit of fun, but it would have been better if they opened on time.

Sunday

Off the boat and on a ferry via a gang plank that is a pain when you’re lugging your lugage.

Follow my a nice curry back in Glasgow.

Monday

Breakfast in Glasgow then off up to Port Gordon for me to stay with a friend and do a week of remote working.

Summary

Jura was defiantly my highlight this year, both for their open day and an extremely affordable nice dram in the sherry cask as £40 per bottle.

Plus if Rollin’ drones are ever in London might just have to go and see them.

The MV Honeydew was as awesome as ever. If I can make my above water lungs behave then one day I’d love to join them for diving, but for now I’ll just tell all my diving friends about them.

Remote work

Not much to say here, other than it was nice to see seals on the beach at lunchtime. Don’t get that in London!

Tough Mudder Scotland

I did my volunteer shifts 126,127 and 128. I got midge bites all over, thank fudge for antihistamine.

I saw one of the nicest people get his 100x headband at the weekend.

I got to charge my car right next to the castle before driving home.

North Coast 500

Thoughts

So I’ve now finished my North Coast 500 (NC500) adventure. I’d allowed myself three days with the option to extend into four if needed. It took me two days. I’m glad I did this in a car before probably changing to driving a van (camper van) next year, as it made the driving more fun. On one or two of the boring bits it was good to be able to get my foot down.

I currently drive electric and didn’t have range anxiety on the trip. But would say to anyone doing this trip in an EV to get a Charge Place Scotland RFID card, it makes life so much easier.

I made the decision to do my trip anti-clockwise from Inverness my main reason for this was the smaller single track roads come later on this way. I think this was a good choice.

Weather

I was very lucky with the weather. Today I drove from Fort William to Glasgow (another road I highly recommend). There was snow on the hills and falling as I drove. I’m not sure the mountain road I used on what ended up as my day two would have been sensible (and possibly not even open today)

My trip

Day 1 (Inverness to Lochinver)

So I started with a nice full charge of the car from the Inverness Supercharger. Getting out of Inverness was very slightly tedious and boring, but once that was done it felt like my trip had truly begun. It’s worth noting there are a lot of 20 mile per hour speed limits in towns and villages along the route, it can seem slow, but it makes sense. The locals I did chat to along the way all seemed to like the route and the money it obviously brings into communities along it. I had heard stories of some people not liking it as it brings too much traffic, but this wasn’t a problem with my before Easter trip. I do wonder if it gets much busier in school holidays.

I made it to John O’Groats in 3 hours 7 minutes (thanks TeslaFi for keeping the details for me) perfectly timed for an early lunch.

I was very pleasantly surprised to find some Osprey DC (or high speed) chargers in the John O’Groats carpark. So had a quick top up there before continuing on my journey.

Then after a further 4 hours 6 minutes I was in Lochinver. I was planning to find a campsite, but discovered the leisure centre allowed camper vans to stay a tenner a night so asked if I could treat my car as a camper. And went for that option.

Lochinver has both slow and fast chargers in the community hall carpark, so again a very easy place to get the car as well as myself fed.

Day 2 (Lochinver to Inverness)

If I had to choose a day to do again it would be day 2! Some proper hairpin bends. (Video 2)

There was also loads of single track road with passing places. It makes for quite the change from London driving where nearly everyone is being nice to everyone else. Of course I did meet one idiot on the trip who wanted to pass 20 meters after the passing place on his side rather than wait in the passing place, but in general the driving standards and consideration of others was very good.

On day two my first drive was to Lochcarron, where I had some lunch and as there was a slow charger as I wanted a break from driving to, I did top up here too. Then it was on to Achnasheen which I’d aimed for a the Charge Place Scotland app promised me a fast charger, which I did find and use.

Then it was back into Inverness, and even then back to the Inverness Tesla super chargers for a top up.

Stats

Start	End	Distance	kWh
Inverness	John O’Groats	131 miles	34.7 kWh
John O’Groats	Lochinver	151 miles	41.1 kWh
Lochinver	Lochcarron	172 miles	47.9 kWh
Lochcarron	Achnasheen	21 miles	6.6 kWh
Achnasheen	Inverness	44 miles	11.9 kWh

So back to my A to Z

So my covid excuse has run out, so it’s back to making an A to Z of places in the United Kingdom to visit.

Think the rules are staying about the same, but the list may be chosen before they get visited.

One difference is this time I’m going to visit them with a parter in crime. Oz who I used to work with has nagged me into getting back to my list post covid.

I’ll publish a list once we agreed on the first few, remembering to count visits need to be in order so we’re starting back at A!

Not starting this week though as I’ve escaped to Whisky heaven aka Islay, Scotland.

I fixed the BBQ lights

What?

So over our BBQ we have some LED strip, the controller and the power supply I was using for this had both gone pop. Maybe something to do with the outdoors. The power supply actually hides in the shed and the controller is with the lights on the underside of the roof of a bus stop type gazebo over the bbq.

First rip out the old stuff

First job was easy and I forgot to take any photos, but the wire I was using had a few joins in and so my plan was replace the wire as well as the power supply and the controller.

Ali Express

As much as I love hue lighting stuff for the amount of use the bbq gets it just wasn’t cost viable to buy a £88 outdoor light strip when my costings come to this list using Ali express

LED Strip (Not actually replaced this time) – £4.48
Controller Box – £2.19
Wire (slight estimate as I used less than half of what i ordered) – £10
Old laptop PSU (I found a spare) – £0 (or £8 for similar off eBay)

It didn’t work at first

Turns out that it was supplied with no battery in the remote, but at these prices can I really complain? I think not, so some 2025s are on the way from Amazon. I’ve also ordered some sticky pads so I can replace my not so great loop of gaffa tape trying to hold the controller in place.

What I’d really like to do next is put one high temperature thermocouple in each BBQ and get some semi large 7 segment displays set up. So without having to look at the analog gauge on the front of the BBQ you can see how it’s doing if you’re sitting at the main outside table.

Alarm Improvement

So I’ve been doing a bit more home automation improving over the last few days. What I now have is a automation running on my iPhone at 02:02 am. This automation sends to my Home Assistant setup the time of the morning alarm minus 30 minutes if one is set or a fake time of ’07:24′ if it is not set. Thanks to wltd.org for the info I needed to get this set up

As I use the “Wake Up” alarm on the iPhone it only lets you chose multiples of 5 mins, hence being able to use a fake time rather than having to send another variable to say if the alarm is set or not.

Once home assistant hits the time that it’s been sent it starts a 30 minute fade up on my hue lights meaning I should always have a light room by the time my alarm goes off.

Of course this won’t work if my alarm is set before 02:32, but that’s so rare I can cope with that. An early rise would tend to be around 4am if I had a long drive to an event or something.

Once the alarm triggers I have another shortcut that runs on my iPhone if by battery in my iPhone is above 80 percent it turns the lights on full. (Exactly how the fade up already has them). However if the battery is less than (or equal to) 80 percent it turns the lighting red, the idea being I know I’ve not charged it properly.

Then the not charging has become a lot less of an issue since Apple moved to the MagSafe chargers for the iPhone. Then occasionally I do still forget to put my phone on charge and this gives me enough time to fix it a bit before I need to do anything.

More geek time

I used another one of my ESP32 devices this time as an output. Took me a while to get it working though as I was putting the text of the screen.

Refresh rates

Excuse the photo not looking wonderful, but the refresh rate of the display isn’t working well with the iPhone camera. However I’m very happy I can now have a display that gets data over WIFI. I’m still trying to work out the definitions of pressure changes the Met Office use.

I need to try and get a graph on the display to or at least a symbol showing the trend.

Hardware

I really should try and mount the display in a box, rather than have all these lose devices with wires lying about, but what do I really want on a display I can see before I turn the computer on.

Power

What’s really useful is how many random USB ports that provide power exist in the world these days. My barometer is leeching power from the printer and my display is using the Sky Q box to get power.

I’ve been geeking again

I read about ESP32 devices and home assistant and couldn’t quite believe how many options there are to use them with external devices to get both inputs and outputs home automation wise. I’ve been wanting my own air pressure monitoring ever since the news reports that you could see an effect on air pressure when a volcano went off. So yesterday after dinner I got to work.

Parts

What’s nice is there’s only two real parts to this set up. An ESP32 module and a BME280. Okay plus 4 wires and a wee bit of solder. I exclude home assistant and it’s hardware as that’s running anyway.

Time

It took me about 10 minutes to solder the four wires between the two modules. Then probably about an hour to install ESPHome on my PC and configure the ESP32 device using that. Then about another hour finding the custom gauge card to use in home assistant.

Sadly I also found some of my other graphs not working as I like so got them all fixed whilst I was at it. I added two air pressure graphs daily and weekly. Sadly they are not interesting enough to share yet as air pressure has been steady so just a straight line.

Next steps

I want to add some code so I can get a rising or falling indicator next to the air pressure then use that and current pressure with a bit of a look up tables to give a line of text as a weather prediction.

When ordering my parts I also ordered a few more ESP32 devices and an OLED display and a TFT display as I want to also play with using small displays as extra home assistant outputs.

I’m also interested in some of the other devices to attach to these modules getting air quality as tracked data sounds fun, and my gazebo lighting system in the garden is sick and driving LED strips is an output option. Also for BBQ season a thermocouple and temperature display for the BBQ sounds good. So many ideas!

Bonus

The BME280 also measures temperature and humidity. This means I now have two devices doing that in my room. The other also has a UV sensor and being the ginger that I am plan to get that outside for real UV data this summer.

The oven has gone pop

I don’t believe it

I hope my guess diagnosis is right, but if you turn the main oven on it neither gets hot or increases the household electricity consumption. I’ve guessed at the element.

It could be worse

It at least had the decency to not wait till Christmas Day to do this or do half the Christmas dinner then die. It also means I now have plans C and D in my head.

Plan D

Does anyone know how long it takes to BBQ a roast dinner? We are lucky that we have a BBQ wide enough you could cook with indirect heat in there. Also being the gadget nerd that I am I of course have a meat thermometer.

Network connected USB

Why

So my car records the last 60 minutes from multiple cameras to a USB stick if you plug one in. I want to do something more long term like take a snapshot every 5 mins when driving. Sowhen COVID eventually goes away I can get a time lapse for each road trip I do. I’ll probably have it generate automatically, but needing to have a sanity you may publish check from me.

Hardware

I was doing some reading and I came across the TeslaUSB project on reading about this I discovered that the Pi Zero and Pi 4 can be used as USB gadgets. (It’s all to do with how the USB is set up on the boards that only these options will work). So I got a Raspberry Pi 4 and m.2 SSD drive and an enclosure for it.

Software

First I put Raspberry Pi OS Lite onto my Pi my sdcard then added the ssh flag file so I could workout it’s IP and connect to it over a wired network connection, from that connection I set the Pi up for the home wifi and then gave that a static IP address in the router’s interface.

Next I added my m.2 USB enclosure to the Pi and got that mounted as /data then added to fstab as I always want my data drive mounted.

Loop devices

Damn I learnt a lot about how not to do it here. To create a file system in a file is really easy, but to get it so both Windows and Linux accept the same file system is where I really struggled.

sudo fallocate -l 100GB /data/piusb.bin
sudo mkdosfs /data/piusb.bin -F 32 -I

From fstab I have this mounted readonly so I can get my data off to process on a read write file system without confusing the car as it should have sole access to a USB stick that is plugged into it.

/data/piusb.bin /mnt/usb_share vfat auto,user,ro,umask=000,offset=1048576 0 0

We present the same file to the USB gadget in rc.local (lazy start up script)

/bin/sleep 5
/sbin/modprobe g_mass_storage file=/data/piusb.bin stall=0

As the car is expecting a device with partition table and partition we don’t need to worry about the offset for that, but without working out what the offset should be I couldn’t see the data on the read only filesystem so couldn’t copy it off.

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo fdisk -lu /data/piusb.bin
Disk /data/piusb.bin: 32 GiB, 34359738368 bytes, 67108864 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xfe02295c

Device           Boot Start      End  Sectors Size Id Type
/data/piusb.bin1       2048 67108863 67106816  32G  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

And 2048 x 512 = 1,048,576 which is the number you might recognise from the fstab line offset.

I did consider pulling the video off to process on a device not in the car, but I’m not going to add a access point just for the car and transfers happen at about 300 KB/s so I think it makes more sense to make my time lapse images in the car then upload the images for rejoining to a video outside the car.

What else could I do with this

Some equipment writes it’s log or image files to USB. By using the same approach (probably with a better wifi connection that in a glovebox in a metal cage of a car). It would be possible to get data off this kind of device and onto machines able to process it faster.

Gout?

Oh f*%#

Is how I can describe waking up on Thursday morning. If I touched my big toe on my right foot then I wanted to scream and I just couldn’t put a sock on and my toe wouldn’t move if I moved the others it was stuck frozen solid.

So I went along to open surgery at my GP practice who queried gout and then due to my asthma / blood pressure medicines chose to put me on a drug that comes with a warning “DRUG TOXICITY WARNING: High doses of Colchicine can result in drug toxicity.” It then goes on to say you can’t start a second course for three days. I also got told to stay off the ibuprofen with my asthma. The doctor did say when she first saw me that the blood tests for Urate (Uric Acid) normally peak six weeks after an attack. So when they got the blood test results back and called me about them she was able to say that all the numbers were normal (including Urate being normal, but on the high side of normal) which made me glad nothing else was seeming to be wrong with me.

I’m very lucky with my doctors being able to go to open surgery and get seen the same day makes me glad I have the GPs I do. I was even more pleasantly surprised when I got called about my blood test results and didn’t need to phone up myself.

Is it getting better?

Well I can move my big toe a whole millimetre now, but I really needed a hair cut so off to the hairdressers I went with sandals and a sock just on my good (left) foot. Yes I felt and looked stupid, but there was no way I could get a sock on and not scream the house down and my sandals seem to just miss the sore area, but even so I was so glad to get home and get the damn think off my right foot.

As you do when you’ve been told what a problem most likely is I was looking up diet advice on the internet and found this about whisky.

What’s really annoying is I had to cancel too personal training type gym sessions as I couldn’t go to work due to the toe and it’s still not moving 🙁

I just want it to work again

So my various internet reading suggests a typical attack lasts between three and ten days. So if Thursday was day one, then Saturday (today) is day three and there’s now starting to be hope it will bugger off and i can stop building towel mountains to try to help.

I really can’t moan too much, as it’s not the end of the world it’s just a bit of pain and inconvenience, but alas not something I was planning for.

Doesn’t help my mood that this weekend should have been the start of the F1 season, and I’ve been looking forward to that to have coronavirus take that away from us. That said I think the comment that explains it best is if anyone of these measures saves just one life it will have all been worth it, but at the same time it is also fair to accept these enforced changes of plan aren’t the best for everyone’s mental health and we should take extra special care to look after each other.