Things to do in and around Dorking
- Leith Hill owned by the National Trust
- Dorking Halls for Live Events & Cinema
- A visit to the last remaining Pilgrim Father’s house in West Street, it belonged to William Mullins who sailed to New Foundland in 1620 and has been recently re-opened as an antiques shop
- England’s largest vineyard in England, Denbies Wine Estate
- Pubs to drink in, The Cricketers, The Prince Of Wales, The Star and more I’m sure
- Day trips to London and the surrounding area
Why Dorking, well we are visiting Dorking in the next couple of days
Business leaders, including Sir Richard Branson, have criticised ministers for not doing enough to avoid a potential oil crunch and are calling on the next government to take action.
Full Article from the BBC here
Quote from Gifford Pinchot:
“The first step toward a sustainable sense of success is taking pride in the value of our contributions to others rather than taking pride in the value of our possessions. By extension this means striving for quality in the use of whatever power we have rather than working to get more power over others as an end in itself. In this view, profit and wealth may help us to contribute, but they do not themselves constitute business success.
If we went to the grave with riches gained by gutting the pension fund, or selling pesticides we know cause more harm than the insects they control, would we count our business lives successful? On the other hand, what if we stewarded a small company that repeatedly introduced more ecological ways of doing things? Maybe other larger players who quickly copied the ecological innovations gained much of the material reward. If we barely made ends meet, but clearly made the world a better place, is that a success?”
If you need to write some code within your wordpress blog as I had over on dev.basshead.info you will what the code to show as text and not get rendered. So I installed this plugin code-markup.php and for installing and instructions then go here.
“Code Markup is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to include program code samples in your posts. You can even include HTML markup in the code sample; Code Markup magically knows which characters should be displayed as code and which should be rendered as HTML.”
Over the weekend I got around to completing the build of the shuttle bare bone unit that I brought a few weeks. .
The final build parts are listed below showing the cost for the complete build.
- Shuttle XPC Glamour Series SN68SG2 – no CPU – Barebones £162.38
- Kingston 2GB 800MHz/PC2-6400 Memory Unbuffered Non-ECC CL6 1.8V £28.68
- Samsung EcoGreen F2 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 32MB Cache – OEM £48.96
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ 2.9GHz Socket AM2 512KBx2 L2 Cache OEM Processor £43.47
- Total Base Unit Cost £283.49
- Additional Extra
- Logitech Pro 2000 Wireless 2.4Ghz Keyboard With USB Receiver – OEM £18.77
- Monitor (Not yet purchased)
- Total System Cost £302.26
I had to add a keyboard as the shuttle only does USB for keyboard and mice, so it was time to go wireless for the keyboard & mice (which was brought a few months ago).
The build it’s self was very easy as the provided instructions were clear and made it so you understood what was what. It most of took only 45 mins to build the unit max. The most tricky part was putting the processor in as you have to remove the ICE cooling unit
then insert the processor and glue it to the ICE cooling unit. Again the instructions provided explained this very well. The DVD drive was transferred across from my old PC, and of course I’m keeping all the old components from it just in case.
Now here came the scary part, the first power up. So I inserted the ubuntu 9.10 CD that I burnt and waited, great the first menu came up and I selected “try with out installing” option to make sure all was ok before install. So off I went to the kitchen for a cup of tea and on my return noted that the screen was “mode not support”!!! mm some kind of graphic’s problem. So after a second go and no luck I was starting to get worried a bit. So back to 9.04 from CD, and great it let me try it without installing. So I installed 9.04, had to activate the Nvidia proprietary drivers after install and then straight upgrade to 9.10. Job done and all working. When I get another 2GB of ram I will move across to 64 bit, but in the mean time I’m staying with 32 bit.
Overall it was very easy to build and I think having the barebone unit helped keep it simple. No real problem installing Ubuntu apart from my 9.10 that let me down. (Could have been the disc?). So it’s now goodbye to my old AMD Duron 1.2ghz with 486mb of ram, happydays.
So if you would like a unit built that is no bigger than your average shoe box (roughly), then let me know.
Over the last three weeks we have walked to the top of the three highest peaks in Yorkshire.
The first peak we walked was pen y ghent on a cloudy day. 
The top of the peak was clear at the start but once we got closer the cloud came in, which was nice and at the same time the three peaks cyclo-cross event was taking place. It seemed that a lot of the riders were pushing the bike to the top and riding down, but a lot were walking down as well. Would have been easier with a mountain bike in my view.
The following weekend it was the turn of Whernside, which is the highest peak. On arrival it appeared that something was going on as a lot people were around. It was those trainspotter types as the newest train to hit the british rail network was coming across, yes it was the A1 Steam.
The UK is still pushing the steam train vibe. It was a nice day and we took the hard route up as everyone else was coming down. But it was worth it for the great views from the top and the nice but long walk down.
Now for the final peak, which was Ingleborough. We walked this last year, as the pictures show but we had to complete the three peaks to close this chapter off. It has one of the steepest section that does require some scrambling up and seems tougher coming down. 
It was also very windy on top, so it was a quick visit to the trig point and down to get out of the wind.
All three took around 3 to 4.5 hours doing a loop walk, so get your OS map and walk it.
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