I won a 'Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games' prize pack

I have been watching a little bit of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics over the last few days and it reminded me that back in November 2009 I won a really cool prize pack from Vooks , Australia’s leading Nintendo Wii & DS information, news & game reviews site.

Here is the link to the original competition and here is the page with the ‘Winners’ announcement… I am ‘Ross B’ and my prize winning suggestion was to have Beach Volleyball at the Winter Olympics.

Daniel Vuckovic, who runs the site, is very friendly and really knows his Nintendo stuff, go check out Vooks.net or visit the Vooks fan page on FaceBook if you have a Nintendo Wii, DS or DSi…

A pair of Mesh Potato Beta units

Over the weekend, I unboxed a pair of Mesh Potato Beta units (MP01) that I recently received from David Rowe and the Village Telco initiative.

From David’s site:

The Mesh Potato is a 802.11bg mesh router with a single FXS port. Adjacent mesh potatoes automatically form a peer-peer network, relaying telephone calls without land lines or cell phone towers. The Mesh Potato is designed using open hardware and software and is part of the Village Telco project.

Unfortunately, one of the units seems to have a firmware bug, and as such I was unable to create a mesh network with them, but I did get the working one hooked up and giving a dial-tone.  I’ve received a few helpful hints and tips from David and Elektra on how to access the internals and re-flash the firmware  via the village-telco-dev mailing list, and sometime soon I’ll try again.

I also created a Flickr set of photos of my Mesh Potato Beta experiments so far.

I’ll keep you posted regarding how the Beta testing goes…

UPDATE @23:32: I just made my first Mesh Potato phone call to Elektra in Germany… it worked very well… one minor, temporary breakup, possibly related to the FreiFunk mesh at the other end… audio quality was generally very clear and good with only minor compression artifacts (Dalek style) occasionally…

rossbennetts.com is now hosted on this Mac mini server

After much mucking about, I finally got my new Mac mini server up and running and doing everything I used to do with Ubuntu (and more and more easily). Thanks to Kevin Leah for his very simple yet comprehensive how-to entitled Running WordPress on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Server and of course, thanks to Matt & the WordPress crew for making the installation of WordPress such a breeze.

Now if only I can maintain my vow to write blog posts more often…

Armidale Wool Expo 2009

On Sunday morning I wandered down the hill to the flood plain that is Armidale’s Creeklands where the New England Wool Expo 2009 was being held.I’d never been to a Wool Expo before and was not quite sure what to expect. It was quite interesting even though I’m not a sheep farmer nor a knitter, and I enjoyed taking these photographs.The New England Yard Dog Chamionships were being held while I was there. Amazingly well trained dogs. I don’t think my old hound could ride on the sheep’s back like that these days.There was also a dog jumping demonstration going on. It looks like this dog’s owner knows how to levitate. I wonder if that gives the dog an unfair advantage. ^^Many rural Australians live far from cities, towns and major population centres thus it is not practical nor technically possible to get xDSL or cable  internet in their location. To get online in those areas, a number of ISPs are offering satellite broadband. A few years ago when I was looking into satellite internet it was only available to consumers as a satellite downlink and you needed a dial-up modem and a phone line for the uplink. These days the satellite link is two way with speeds up to 1024kbps down/512kbps up from SkyMesh.Supposedly with active8me unleashed speeds of up to 4Mbps down can be achieved. I wonder how well an IP video conference would work via satellite? Do you use satellite broadband?Somebody called Mike from Guyra seemed to be offerring to connect people’s home computers to the Optus 3g HSPA network via Exetel. I never found Mike to ask him questions, but I grabbed his flyer. Apparently he can get 3.4Mbps and three bars of service up to 32km from a phone tower by using one of the above outdoor directional yagi antennae.I stumbled into the UNE Inter-College Shearing Challenge at one stage.Cleaning up the fleece.And packing it into a big bail. The team from Robb College won the challenge that I watched. Have you ever shorn a sheep?There was a big drop of vampire bait walking around, trying to lure people into donating blood for the Australian Red Cross Blood Service. Wool Expo cosplay!
In Australia you won’t get paid to donate blood like in some countries. It is purely voluntary. You do get a popper before and a milkshake and a biscuit when you are finished. I donate every ~10 weeks. Do you give blood?The Armidale and New England regions used to be prime finewool Merino country about 20 years ago. I don’t seem to see too many sheep around these days, perhaps it is not as profitable as it used to be.These cute little lambs had been born on the first night of the Expo and someone was running a competition to name them.The Alpaca has become more prominent in this area of late. I thought they were kind of cute from a distance, but up close they appeared a little grumpy. I’d probably be a bit grumpy too if I had been in a small pen for 3 days with packs of strange people all gawking at me.This little white fellow looks sleepy.My supervisor from work was there too, Dr. Lynda Creedy. She is a spinner.And this is her wheel.And some of the end product.Around the corner was an electric spinning wheel. I felt that it looked a little steampunk, but I might be pushing it a bit. Needs more brass. The Armidale Spinners & Weavers also had a hand-cranked wheel.And a little old lady making lace.Every farm needs a big red tractor.Can anyone tell me what on earth this machine does?I will leave you with some blurry shots I took of the gorgeous local models during The Australian Wool Fashion Awards parade that was held at noon. My poor little Sony CyberShot doesn’t seem to like low-light situations. Do you think a monopod would help?

I’ll have to move them inside near a sunny window soon, before the first frosts hit.

Do you have any plants which need to be moved around in different seasons to keep them happy where you live?