What a busy weekend. My friend Pete (probably reading this on an RSS feed no doubt) came over to visit and so Friday evening ended with a mixture of Indian and Chinese grub. Pete then suggested that a suitable activity for Saturday morning might be a nice walk around the hills behind the village – a suggestion he may be living to regret. That was all the incentive I needed, and I kitted myself out with full mountain gear – overkill for sure but I haven’t used it in over 12 months so it needed an airing. Now you’ll need to check out the map for this bit to make sense:
We walked out of the village (failing to find the quicker exit straight in to the fields) and back towards the park. My intention was to find the trig point on top of Ton-mawr, marked at 319 metres in the map. Once we got just past the fort and along-side the forest we started to look for a way in – there must be a path to the trig point somewhere cuz it can’t possibly be inaccessible can it? Anyway, there was a path on the map running North of the trig point and I hoped that would have a footpath bearing south once we were on it. But, it looks like this search will have to wait until winter. The path was so overgrown, like over waist height for me (ankle height for Pete) so we carried on and went around the hill instead. It was a nice walk, 7.6 miles so a good walk-up for a planned trip up Snowdon again in couple of weeks. And I got to test out the compass on my fancy “Pro Trek” watch for the first time, very useful for a quick bearing… But back to the trig point. Once back home I did a bit of research… Should have done that before really but never mind. You can see from the Google Maps photo that there are three paths carved in to the forest, so I located the 1:25k scale map of the same area and you can see three white lines in the same shape. Not paths as such, but non-wooded areas that can only be seen on the larger scale map.
Hmm, the trig point lies right along one of these “paths” apparantly. I may go back later this week to investigate as I have the week off work, but even zooming in as close as possible reveals very little. There are a couple of white dots I suspect may be the trig point but my biggest task will be fighting my way through the clearings! I must find it… I need to visit my nearest trig point! Yes. I am sad, now you don’t need to point that out in my comments section!
Right… other news. Poppy is sick, and has tested the water resistant qualities of the laminate in the hall, Joseph is doing okay and feeding and growing and crying and feeding lots more. And I have a Java exam tomorrow so will get back to my revision.
Mmm, vibratory. I imported mine from Hong Kong early in the year before they were available over here and it was a good purchase – they are on sale now over here for a lot more than I paid.
My birthday present… built in compass, barometer, thermometer, altimeter, auto-light, solar panel, tidal/moon phase, radio controlled time updates. And it tells the time too.
The hub of my home cinema featuring HDMI upscaling from any video source and producing the best all-round sound I’ve ever heard from a TV.. before this toy I always had an issue with previous sound systems where the vocals whilst watching a film were too quite.. you’d pump the volume up then suddenly there’s an explosion or car horn on screen causing the real world floor to crack under increased dB.. no more is this an issue!
I’ve only had it a couple of weeks but so far I’m very impressed. Quiet and light on the power, it’s made the constant hum from the server in my study go away. It has loads of features I’ve yet to explore and there’ll be a blog update soon on that I hope.
This year’s winner.. allowing me to ditch Sky+ and watch and record high definition telly without a subscription. All hail Freesat+. As a further update to my previous review, copying files off the internal hard drive is easy (minimal fiddling required to deal with the .ts file format) but BBC-HD content is protected and can’t currently be (easily) copied. I would offer a link here so as you can go and buy one, but they are in such short supply and high demand at the moment that there’s really no point. Comet and Argos are the best bets if you wanted to try but you would be better off waiting a couple of months.
