Taumuon

Photos are up of our trip to Croatia at www.taumuon.co.uk/gallery.

We visited the island where Marijana's mum grew up, Vis - the scenery was spectacular; we stayed in a family house in a village in the hills. Being away from any light pollution was great - I've never seen so many stars in the sky! Vis used to be a military base; tourists weren't allowed to visit so it is very unspoilt. Unfortunately, our visit was cut short by car troubles but we'll be back as soo as we can make it there!

We also spent a couple of days on a visit to Bosnia and Herzegovina - we took a bus to stay with Ivana and family in Mostar, thank you very much for your hospitality :) We then went out to take photos of Mostar at night - the photos came out a bit wonky - I can't be bothered to carry a tripod around so for night shots I usually just find something to hold my camera steady against, but there wasn't anything convenient around. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it - it had nothing to do with the home-distilled rakija and local wine I had with dinner before heading out, not at all!

Speaking of food and drink, as ever, the food I had was delicious! Ivana's mum cooked savoury doughnuts with cured meats on the first night, and veal and mushrooms wrapped in pancakes covered in cream in the second night. Delicious! The food was more rich in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Dalmatia the food is much more mediterranean - lighter, sea food and vegetables, though lots of cured meats and cheeses etc (salivates). In Sarajevo, we ate Ćevapčići and burek, and I think it might have almost, just almost, been too much meat for me in one day!

Yeah, Sarajevo - we took the train there, ewhich was much better for taking photos - I get frustrated travelling on a bus or car as photos through the windows are always rubbish, and on the train I could just hang out of the window! This is especially frustrating on the coastal bus - the dalmatian coast is spectacular, but not through grimy bus windows! Anyway, enough diversion... Sarajevo was very interesting, similar to Mostar in that it feels a lot more Eastern than anywhere in Croatia, with the mosques, kebabs, carpet sellers etc. it could be Turkey, but the main streets are similar to Central Europe (Austrian influenced).

It's sad though to see how run down it felt compared to Zagreb, due to the war. In the former Yugoslavia Sarajevo was one of the main cities, a melting pot of different cultures and had a large alternative scene, for instance it had lots of alternative bands who were enjoyed throughout the region. Now, there are reminders of the war thoughout the city - on the town in the main streets, there are blotches of red paint which show were grenades landed, and on the wall adjacent there are plaques showing who died in that blast. In spite of that, it does have an exciting feeling, maybe it's just that mixture of Eastern and Western influences...

Otherwise, we just spent two weeks swimming in the glorious Adriatic sea, relaxing and soaking up the sunshine :)

Photos are now on the gallery of our trip to Rome - needless to say we had an amazing time (we stayed at the Sunrise Hotel, a bit out of town, but still really convenient on the buses). Getting around was easy - we picked up a bus route map for €2.50 from a tourist office, and had no problems asking anyone if we were lost; everyone we met was really friendly (Mare was gossiping away in Italian with some women on the bus).

It's a stereotype, but it's true, that the traffic in Rome is absolutely mental (and I thought that Split was bad!!) On the last day we found a cafe to crash in showing the Croatia-Austria game. The views from the top of St. Peter's (the Vatican) were immense, climbing up the crooked steps were worth the view. We ensured that we threw a coin each into the Trevi Fountain, to book our trip back :)

Apart from recovering from our trip, we went down to the Cadogan Arms in Chelsea on Friday watching the Croatia-Turkey game with a load of other Croatia supporters. A shame about the score, but it was a great atmosphere none-the-less (some pics from the pub in 2004 - it looked pretty much the same! I was actually in Croatia in 2004 when that game was on, and everyone treated me superbly)

I thought I'd blog about my experiences freeing a seized quill stem, as while researching on the internet on how to free it there were a few potential solutions listed, but no-one seemed to say definitively which of the kookier methods worked for them.

I bought a second hand bike off a work colleague a few years ago, and found out later that the stem was frozen (an aluminium stem in a steel steerer tube). I've put up with it for a while, even though the bike position didn't suit me, but I finally got around to sorting it as I want to take more advantage of the good weather - it was 13 miles each way to commute to my last job and I was managing to do it roughly once a week last year, but my new job's looking further away, and I want to try to do it more often so I want to get my position sorted. More importantly, I was prompted by the headset needing servicing.

I've tried off and on for the last couple of years to free the stem, without much success, saturating the stem in WD40 etc. A couple of weeks ago I managed to free the bottom quill wedge by backing out the stem bolt and hammering it using an allan key (using a big wrench - if you've got a hammer then all you see is nails, and if you don't have a hammer anything that comes to hand'll do). This freed the wedge, but not the stem. I didn't feel confident cycling without the wedge being fastened, even though it was jammed, as I didn't trust Sod's or Murphys's law from freeing at a dangerous moment, so I had to spend an hour trying to hold the wedge in position with an old spoke fiddling to get the bolt to attach again.

There were a number of solutions listed to free a quill stem, including soaking it in penetrating oil, freezing it, using household ammonia, or coke to free the stem. I didn't really try twisting the stem out via grabbing the front wheel whilst securing the handlebars, as I read that it was more likely to twist the forks out of alignment than actually free the stem.

I got some "Shock and Unlock" from Halfords, which doubled as trying the penetrating fluid solution, and the freezing solution - I applied to either side of the stem (i.e. from below and above) for a week, then filled the stem with a large quantity of this solution, to ensure that it would have had the cooling effect, and then leathered the living hell out of the stem with a hammer, from above, below, and every other angle, to no effect.

I didn't fancy using household ammonia, as messing with chemicals doesn't really appeal to me, and I haven't got anywhere safe I could do it without poisoning the neighbour's cats. The coke method seemed not worth bothering with - apparently the aluminium oxide is dissolved by alkalis (hence the ammonia), and as coke is acidic this wouldn't apply. I'm not a chemist though (as you can tell ;-)) but I really didn't see it working, and I didn't fancy paying the Coca Cola corporation just to turn my bike into a sugary sticky mess (if I was interested in this, apparently lime juice is more acidic than coca cola, but the claims are that it's the electrolytic effect of coke that works - it'd be great if anyone lets me know if that actually worked for them).

I followed the advice in this thread and decided to cut it out. I hacksawed the stem off about 5mm above the steerer, which was the easy job. Then I had to cut a slot down the length of the stem. This was initially tricky, as the hacksaw blade only just fit into the inner diameter of the stem, I had to take it easy from the top to get a good angle to get the slot cut. Some threads say how delicately they took it, but I just wrapped the top of a hacksaw blade in duck tape, and went at it.

The aluminium is a lot softer than steel, and it's obvious when you're through, so I didn't pansy around. It took around 4 hours to cut through though, solidly going at it (spread over two evenings). I did badly blister and cut up my nancy-boy office worker hands, so if you're concerned about that kind of thing it might be worth getting some gloves or taking it easier...

I had to cut a slot totally through one side of the stem, and cut almost entire through the other side of the stem, to allow it to flex enough. I gradually bent the stem in on itself by pinching the top with a pair of mole grips, spraying the "shock and unlock" down as I went. Finally, I grabbed the top of the stem in the jaws of some mole grips, put the front wheel back on to give myself something to turn against, and bugger me, was I surprised when it turned slightly! I gritted my teeth and managed to twist the old stem out :)

I got myself a quill stem to ahead adapter but it refused to go down the steerer tube. Before I could fit it I needed to polish the remaining crap out of the steerer tube using some wet and dry.

Dijana and Ivana came to visit for a few days last weekend, and we kept ourselves busy...

We went to see the Lord of the Rings musical in London on Friday night, and it was very very cool! The effects were amazing, and it was all very cleverly done.

On Saturday we went to (near enough) my hometown of Ironbridge, and the Blists Hill museum. It's years and years since I went to the open air museum, and it brought back memories.

On the Sunday we went to Windsor Castle. I didn't really know much about Windsor but was surprised by how nice the town was... Mare was really impressed by Queen Mary's dolls house in the castle (photography wasn't allowed unfortunately).

Photos are up on the gallery.

We spent Easter at our friend George's in Düsseldorf, and made it on a day trip to Cologne. It was absolutely freezing cold, but we kept ourselves warm drinking the local beer :)

Cologne was great, we went to a Chocolate museum (we somehow missed the Eau de Cologne museum!)

The pictures are up, as ever, on the gallery.

I was best man at my brother's wedding a couple of weeks ago, and obviously had a great day, our sister made the trip from Spain and everything went really well.

Mare was proud of her nibbly cakes, and I enjoyed eating them, so it would be rude not to put a picture up!

We just got back from a long weekend in Zagreb, and the photos as ever are up on the gallery. We stayed at Ivanas (she was a very good host, as always, thank you! We're returning the favour in England soon though :-) )

I went out for a long weekend, but as Mare had accrued more holiday than me she spent a week out there (and got to do stuff like go to the theatre - things that she can't usually do when I'm with her). She visited a couple of exhibitions, including the painter Mark Chagall (who I'd never heard of!)

We had a great time, the weather was surprisingly warm and sunny (though it was cold for Mare at the start of the week - she was there for the Snow Queen ski races, and saw many politicians and celebrities in the town).

We went to the Zlatni Medo (golden bear) pub - they have their own microbrewery. Last time we were in Zagreb we went, but I overdid it eating delicious sausages, this time I concentrated on the beer :) I sampled all of the beers - Crna Kraljica is very good, but my favourite was the GRIČKA VJEŠTICA, it went down very well! Mare is not a big lager drinker, but she did enjoy the zlatni medo...

We ventured outside of Zagreb; it's not every day that you get to visit the birthplace of a communist dictator. We stopped off briefly in the town of Klanjec, to visit the museum of renowned Croatian sculptor Antun Augustincic. We visisted the village where Marshal Tito was born, and it's setup just as it was in the olden days, with examples of rural life and customs. It was very peaceful, fascinating, and in beautiful surroundings. Not far away we visited a castle, again very interesting.

We finished off by eating at a restaurant serving traditional cuisine in the style of Hrvatsko Zagorje (the part of Croatia west of Zagreb, and close to the Slovenian border), very different to the Dalmatian style of food I've been used to so far. I gorged myself silly on homemade cheese, bread, followed by exceptional country style mushroom soup, and -then- venison goulash. I did feel guitly afterwards though, just outside the restaurant were the brother and sister deers!!! Marijana was then trying to make me feel guity to point out how cute the bambis were (but my stomach beat my head).

Sadly the time went too quickly, but we managed to squeeze in another trip to town in the morning, where we made it to the antique market in the Britanski Trg (British Square). We then sat around drinking coffees enjoying the last rays of sunshine before we had to return to rainy England.

While we were in Croatia, I noticed that Marijana's friends had IPTV installed in their apartment, and I found it really impressive, the quality was top notch with no visible artifacts at all.

It's not that I watch much TV nowadays, but the situation in the UK seems to be years behind.

Freeview is slowly being switched on, but for us to benefit with the current feeble signal levels we got a quote of £150 to install a new roof mounted aerial. NTL/Virgin Media were unwilling to install cable, despite the fact that our next door have it, as apparently a surveyor says that we're too far back from the street (though not having Virgin Media installed is probably not a bad thing).

Instead we've moved to Sky, and obviously the picture's fine, but some of the frustrations of the Sky monopoly are apparent (some of them peculiar to my setup).

I have a 19" CRT monitor which is perfectly usable as a TV monitor, and helps to cut down on space taken up. I've got a cheap BT878 tuner card to convert the picture. This works OK, the tv quality isn't bad whilst watching, but faint red and green diagonal bands can be occasionally seen (though dscaler does seem to remove these). These bands do become much worse when recording though, making the playback unwatchable.

There are a couple of solutions which work - which would give a better picture watching and recording, but I'm loathe to spend the money as a moderately-powerful PC should function fine as a PVR without the extra expense (and boxes cluttering up the space).

The tv tuner card does have s-video input which would improve the quality, but Sky don't output s-video (they output either composite, or RGB over SCART. Apparently there are some old Grundig digiboxes that do have s-video output, which I could get off ebay, but they're supposedly not too reliable anyway).

Converting the RGB signal to s-video is do-able with an adapter for about £70, which doesn't seem worth it (I could just get Sky+), or there is a TV card available which accepts an RGB signal (the sweetspot), but it's even more expensive at over £120, and definitely not worth the money.

As media centres are becoming more and more popular, I don't understand why there aren't any other tuner cards that take an RGB input.

Sky+ does have s-video output, it's that defeats the point (if I had Sky+, I'd be unlikely to want to use my PC as a PVR, though it would give a better picture when watching).

It would be nice to be able to take the satellite input directly into a DVB-S PCI card, but Sky don't let anyone else use their NDS VideoGuard decryption (apparently there does exist a card, but will be useless if Sky change the format).

A separate alternative would be to just buy a HDD recorder, or even a DVD recorder, but it's just the annoyance at what's on the market preventing me from having an easily archivable/streamable media centre on the cheap.

The system's a mess. In part, this would be helped by having RGB Tv Tuners, but with hi-def digital inputs becoming more popular, there's less motivation for this.

In case anyone was wondering why I hadn't blogged in a while, I didn't die! I've been busy - I started a new job last week and prior to that I was busy completing projects at the old one.

Anyway, we spent Christmas and New Years in Croatia, but I didn't go crazy taking photos this time. Instead, there are a few photos from when I was a traitor to England, by going to watch Croatia .v. England at Wembley :)

(Oh, while I'm mentioning the gallery, can any picasa users let me know how easy it is to use - I switched to using JAlbum simply because I can drag and drop a folder into an application and have it automatically resize the photos and generate a website, ready to drag into an FTP program. How much faff is it to resize and upload a set of pics in picasa?)

The other thing is that I've moved all geeky/programming stuff into another blog: Taumuon Jabuka (I would have moved all general geeky stuff, but this blog would've been empty then ;) )

Well, it's probably obvious from the photo where we were ;) We spent 5 very nice days in Paris a couple of weeks ago, and utterly tired ourselves out through an immense amount of walking.

Photos would have been up earlier, but Ana and Dado were visiting us for a few days following, and have been busy doing other stuff, excuses excuses.

We both really enjoyed Paris; it has an elegance about it, and feels less rushed than, say, London, and strangely, has a feeling of a very very large village! There's the obvious cuisine and fashion difference, but it's hard to put my finger on why I like Paris so much especially.

It definitely wasn't a relaxing week though, in retrospect we tried to squeeze too much in (we had a 4 day Paris Pass, which meant that we had queue-free access to the majority of attractions).

We were there (coincidentally) on the weekend of the England-France Rugby semi-final, and everyone was good-natured with us (though I did play on my Welsh heritage at the airport, and Mare had no problems with her Croatian passport). P.S. the facilities at Orly airport are dire, and we were amused with some of the English rugby supporters in that respect. Though, we can't say that much, as we flew from not much more than a shed in someone's back garden, oops, that's Coventry airport.

Eating steak and chips, with red wine everyday, was something I could all too easily become accustomed to, but Mare was scared that her steak would get up off the plate and start walking around (medium cooked apparently in French means still breathing ;) ). Parisiens didn't speak English much, which I found surprising, as a few years ago whilst trying to speak French in the Alps whilst snowboarding, everyone would reply straight away in English. This time, I was forced to speak French in quite a few situations, which I was happy to find I could still do (actually better than before, I think making a tit of myself speaking Croatian in many situations means that I've lost lots of my inhibitions) - especially as I was forced to buy new insoles for my shoes due to the amount of walking (the first couple of days were rough though, I kept having to pause to stop myself answering in Croatian, Mare caught me a couple of days...)

I've never believed in stereotypes, but it was nice to see that the French are so much better dressed than the British, and had half-eaten baguettes permanently attached to their arms. We stayed in the Hotel Moulin Vert in Montparnasse, it wasn't too expensive, was clean, with friendly staff, and had everything we needed (included breakfast in bed every day).

The highlights were the view of Paris at night, including the Eiffel Tower, from the Montparnasse tower (and we were lucky to first see the Eiffel Tower at night as it was sparkling, we didn't know in advance that it sparkles on the hour). The musee d'Orsay was impressive, along with the Louvre (though it was far too big to appreciate properly). Galeries La Foyette is worth popping in (even as a non-shopper, as the dome is really impressive; I can't even avoid the shops when I'm on holiday ;) ). Mare was quite happy to test that the credit card works the same in France!

Versaille was OK, but not too critical to see on a short visit (despite what various guidebooks say), the gardens are really impressive, but if you don't have time to spend a long relaxed day there it's not really justified visiting. We did enjoy the train journey though (and despite the stereotype of the French always striking, they did reinforce the stereotype that travelling on any public transport system in Europe shows just how backwards things are in the UK).

Notre Dame at night was breathtaking, as was most of Paris, and in the mostpart it felt absolutely safe walking around at night, and very romantic (as was walking from the Concorde along the Champs Elysee towards the Arc de Triomphe, and actually, most of Paris in the autumn!!).

A bientot!