What's New

What's New!

15 June 2008

Fixed the weather computer! Weather information is now back on-line.

04 June 2008

Things go from bad to worse!

Something happened to the power at home during the afternoon of 3rd June. Despite the UPS, when the power went it took one of the computers too. The machine which gets the weather data from the loft, converts it to a suitable format, then uploads it to the web site.

Until we can either repair or replace this machine, weather information will not be available on the web site. Watch this space for further details

18 May 2008

Yet again we have lost one of the sensors of the weather station.

Again, we seem to have lost the wind speed. I guess it's most likely to be the connectors having rusted again -- but this time the length of wire left coming out of the sensors (which is short -- hence the need for the screw connectors in the first place) will cause a further problem because there is not much left to use to make repairs.

With luck, however, we will be able to get something done over half-term (week commencing 26th May 2008). Watch this space for more information.

17 May 2008

Added some more pictures to the gallery on Apple's web site (more cat snaps and the dedication of the Salcombe lifeboat -- have a look at the RNLI pages for their press information):

	click here for the gallery front page;
	click here to subscribe to the gallery as an RSS feed -- and be notified automatically when we post new content;

16 April 2008

Final euchre scores for the season

Uploaded the weather data for March

	in Access 2003 format
	in Access 97 format and
	as an Excel spreadsheet.

March's weather data in graphic format:

	Air Temperature,
	Wind Direction,
	Average Wind Speed,
	Wind Speed (with gusts),
	Atmospheric Pressure,
	Relative Humidity,
	Hours of Sunshine.

05 April 2008

	Euchre scores updated
	March's weather is on the way...

15 March 2008

Euchre scores updated

09 March 2008

Euchre scores updated to include the February matches for which I have the scores

Added some more pictures to the gallery on Apple's web site:

	click here for the gallery front page;
	click here to subscribe to the gallery as an RSS feed -- and be notified automatically when we post new content;

Weather data from 2006 archived -- the earlier archives are:

	2000
	2001
	2002
	2003
	2004
	2005

Uploaded the weather data for February

	in Access 2003 format
	in Access 97 format and
	as an Excel spreadsheet.

February's weather data in graphic format:

	Air Temperature,
	Wind Direction,
	Average Wind Speed,
	Wind Speed (with gusts),
	Atmospheric Pressure,
	Relative Humidity,
	Hours of Sunshine.

Uploaded the weather data for January

	in Access 2003 format
	in Access 97 format and
	as an Excel spreadsheet.

January's weather data in graphic format:

	Air Temperature,
	Wind Direction,
	Average Wind Speed,
	Wind Speed (with gusts),
	Atmospheric Pressure,
	Relative Humidity,
	Hours of Sunshine.

30 January 2008

A whole lot of euchre scores updated (up to 29th January 2008)

01 January 2008

Caught up with the backlog at last!

Web statistics from the logs for 2007 show:

	217,684 hits between 01/01/07 and 31/12/07 (an average of 596 per day);
	61,839 visitors (an average of 169 per day) in the same period.
	The figures for 2006 were: 184,171 hits and 33,545 visitors.
	Our most popular pages are still home, the weather and this page.

Euchre scores updated to include 11th December's league match (against the Legion)

Uploaded the weather data for December

	in Access 2003 format
	in Access 97 format and
	as an Excel spreadsheet.

December's weather data in graphic format:

	Air Temperature,
	Wind Direction,
	Average Wind Speed,
	Wind Speed (with gusts),
	Atmospheric Pressure,
	Relative Humidity,
	Hours of Sunshine.

Uploaded the weather data for November

	in Access 2003 format
	in Access 97 format and
	as an Excel spreadsheet.

November's weather data in graphic format:

	Air Temperature,
	Wind Direction,
	Average Wind Speed,
	Wind Speed (with gusts),
	Atmospheric Pressure,
	Relative Humidity,
	Hours of Sunshine.

Uploaded the weather data for October

	in Access 2003 format
	in Access 97 format and
	as an Excel spreadsheet.

October's weather data in graphic format:

	Air Temperature,
	Wind Direction,
	Average Wind Speed,
	Wind Speed (with gusts),
	Atmospheric Pressure,
	Relative Humidity,
	Hours of Sunshine.

07 December 2007

Euchre scores updated to include loads of league matches

29 October 2007

Euchre scores updated to include 23rd October's league match

Added some more pictures to the gallery on Apple's web site:

	click here for the gallery front page;
	click here for pictures of Caroline's new cat "Twiglet";
	click here for pictures of Joey and Cyd cuddling in a chair.

Made the target frames for the picture links above "_blank" to allow for the back button not working properly in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Works fine in Apple's Safari of course!

26 October 2007

Euchre scores updated to include 9th and 16th October's league matches.

07 October 2007

Euchre scores updated to include 2nd October league match.

Uploaded the weather data for September

	in Access 2003 format
	in Access 97 format and
	as an Excel spreadsheet.

September's weather data in graphic format:

	Air Temperature,
	Wind Direction,
	Average Wind Speed,
	Wind Speed (with gusts),
	Atmospheric Pressure,
	Relative Humidity,
	Hours of Sunshine.

Uploaded the weather data for August

	in Access 2003 format
	in Access 97 format and
	as an Excel spreadsheet.

August's weather data in graphic format:

	Air Temperature,
	Wind Direction,
	Average Wind Speed,
	Wind Speed (with gusts),
	Atmospheric Pressure,
	Relative Humidity,
	Hours of Sunshine.

27 September 2007

Euchre scores updated to include 25th September league match.

22 September 2007

The new Euchre season started this week. So:

Euchre scores updated to include 18th September league match.

06 September 2007

Added some more pictures to the gallery on Apple's web site:

	click here for the gallery front page;
	click here for pictures of the new windows being installed;
	click here for pictures of the "Black Pearl" (you know, "Pirates of the Caribbean") sailing past.

23 August 2007

First, corrected a bad link or two on our links page.

Those nice people at Apple have been generous to us again. They've increased our web space at mac.com to 10 GBytes so we can put more pictures up there. Better still, they're automatically updated when I update iPhoto on the Mac. Have a look:

	click here for the gallery front page;
	click here for Battle of Britain flight performing over Salcombe (there's video too);
	click here for the Vintage Traction Rally nearby (more video);
	click here for some pictures of the Hummer H3 at the National Association of Police Fleet Managers' show;
	click here to see the flowers Alastair & Carolyn sent us when they went back to NZ.

01 August 2007

Alastair and Carolyn are back in the UK for a short visit to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary; so we took advantage of Al's generosity and got him to help fix the weather station. The air temperature is now registering again although the rainfall is still not right. In a quiet moment we uploaded some more weather data.

Uploaded the weather data for July

	in Access 2003 format
	in Access 97 format and
	as an Excel spreadsheet.

July's weather data in graphic format:

	Air Temperature (you can tell which day we finally fixed the temperature),
	Wind Direction,
	Average Wind Speed,
	Wind Speed (with gusts),
	Atmospheric Pressure,
	Relative Humidity,
	Hours of Sunshine.

25 July 2007

Uploaded the weather data for June

	in Access 2003 format
	in Access 97 format and
	as an Excel spreadsheet.

June's weather data in graphic format:

	Air Temperature (note it was still broken in June),
	Wind Direction,
	Average Wind Speed,
	Wind Speed (with gusts),
	Atmospheric Pressure,
	Relative Humidity,
	Hours of Sunshine.

02 June 2007

We have been asked why the weather archive has not been updated with all those little graphs and the rest. The main reason is that I made the mistake of updating this machine's version of Office to the new one from Microsoft (Office 2007). In short, if you want to create graphs from large tables of data don't use Office 2007!

<DIATRIBE ON>

A simple task which took me less than 20 minutes using Office 2003 turned out to be almost impossible with Office 2007. It used to be easy to take the downloaded raw data and feed it into the program we have to convert it into an Access 97 database. Feed that to Access 2003 and it created both an updated version and an Excel spreadsheet, took two minutes. Use the spreadsheet to create the graphs (about 15 minutes) then copy them to the web server. Not any more!

Try to open an "old" Access database with 2007 and it does nothing. Nope, you've got to create a new database and then import the old one. Only problem is that if you don't want the new database to be in "My Documents", Access 2007 goes off and indexes your directory structure (or rather, that's what it says it's doing). On my machine, that takes over 5 minutes before you can save the new database. Then you can import but then you have to remove the table it created in the blank database. Then you have to save it again to export in the "old" (2003) format.

OK, so once you've done that you can export the Excel spreadsheet without too much trouble. But then there's the graph creation! Selecting some columns is OK but there's now no wizard. So it assumes you want the graph in the current sheet -- you have to agree to this and then move it into a new worksheet afterwards. It also assumes you want a legend but you don't want titles for your axes. I still haven't found out how to label the each axis easily.

In the case of the weather graphs, I usually have to change the axis dimensions because Office assumes stuff about the graphs. For example, relative humidity cannot go over 100% so I set the axis to go from 0 to 100 (Office assumes 0 - 120 for some reason). Under the previous version, you clicked and made the changes, then clicked OK and it changed the graph. The new version? It keeps trying to re-draw the graphs in real time! But it can't (there are obviously too many points) so it just hangs. It also fails to create the rainfall or sunshine hours columnar graphs because (it says) there are too many points -- but good old 2003 can do it! So can 2004 on the Macintosh. This is a step forward?

In short, I gave up and went back to Office 2003. Database, spreadsheet and graphs for March, April and May all created and uploaded in less than two hours.

<DIATRIBE OFF>

Just to annoy us all some more, it seems that we've lost the air temperature sensor for some reason! Probably those cheap and nasty little "chocolate block" connectors that go rusty. Back up the tower sometime real soon (but not this weekend -- thick fog at the moment). That's now air temperature and rainfall that are suspect. Oh well, here's what we do have:

Uploaded the weather data for March

	in Access 2003 format
	in Access 97 format and
	as an Excel spreadsheet.

March's weather data in graphic format:

	Air Temperature,
	Wind Direction,
	Average Wind Speed,
	Wind Speed (with gusts),
	Atmospheric Pressure,
	Relative Humidity,
	Hours of Sunshine.

Uploaded the weather data for April

	in Access 2003 format
	in Access 97 format and
	as an Excel spreadsheet.

April's weather data in graphic format:

	Air Temperature,
	Wind Direction,
	Average Wind Speed,
	Wind Speed (with gusts),
	Atmospheric Pressure,
	Relative Humidity,
	Hours of Sunshine.

Uploaded the weather data for May

	in Access 2003 format
	in Access 97 format and
	as an Excel spreadsheet.

May's weather data in graphic format:

	Air Temperature (see if you can spot when the sensor failed),
	Wind Direction,
	Average Wind Speed,
	Wind Speed (with gusts),
	Atmospheric Pressure,
	Relative Humidity,
	Hours of Sunshine.

09 May 2007

Euchre scores updated to include the final matches of the league season

18 April 2007

Euchre scores updated to include 17th April league match

Uploaded some new pictures from early 2007

	Some sheep in our garden
	the first picture of our new rescue vehicle on a shout
	the Prawle Point Cliff Rescue Company

Uploaded the limited weather data we have for February

	in Access 2007 format
	in Access 2003 format
	in Excel 2007 format
	in Excel 2003 format

February's limited weather data in graphic format:

	Air Temperature,
	Wind Direction,
	Average Wind Speed,
	Wind Speed (with gusts),
	Atmospheric Pressure,
	Relative Humidity and
	Hours of Sunshine.

13 April 2007

Euchre scores updated to include 27th February and 6th, 13th, 27th March and 3rd April league matches.

23 February 2007

	Euchre scores updated to include 6th, 13th and 20th February's matches
	The page of Links to other Sites updated

19 February 2007

Uploaded the weather data for last month (January)

	in Access 2003 format
	in Access 97 format and
	as an Excel spreadsheet.

Last month's weather data in graphic format:

	Air Temperature,
	Wind Direction,
	Average Wind Speed,
	Wind Speed (with gusts),
	Atmospheric Pressure,
	Relative Humidity,
	Daily Rainfall and
	Hours of Sunshine.

05 February 2007

Euchre scores updated to include 30th January's match

21 January 2007

Euchre scores updated to include 9th January's match

18 December 2006

We set up the scaffolding and brought the weather sensor array down. Guess what? Another rusted connector! A bit of soldering and wind speed (and air temperature) should both now be fixed!

Euchre scores were updated to include the 12th December's match.

Uploaded the weather data for the last two months (October & November). Note that we had problems during this period with the wind speed sensor -- some ridiculously high winds measured, then a zero speed until we fixed the connector on 18th December.

October's data:

	in Access 2003 format
	in Access 97 format
	as an Excel spreadsheet

November's data:

	in Access 2003 format
	in Access 97 format
	as an Excel spreadsheet

October's weather data in graphic format:

	Air temperature,
	Wind Direction,
	Average Wind Speed,
	Wind Speed (with gusts),
	Atmospheric Pressure,
	Relative Humidity,
	Daily Rainfall and
	Hours of Sunshine.

November's weather data in graphic format:

	Air Temperature,
	Wind Direction,
	Average Wind Speed,
	Wind Speed (with gusts),
	Atmospheric Pressure,
	Relative Humidity,
	Daily Rainfall and
	Hours of Sunshine.

Uploaded some new pictures from the Summer and Autumn 2006

	Tish's wedding
	the Otter Sanctuary, Butterfly farm and South Devon Railway
	the finished state of Gara Rock
	the nesting birds and their brood
	the finished gates
	wildlife at the big shed
	a picnic
	the finishing of the big shed
	the little shed collapses!

06 December 2006

Euchre scores updated to include 14th, 28th November's and 5th December's matches

13 November 2006

Euchre scores updated to include 7th November's match

02 November 2006

	Euchre scores updated to include 31st October's match
	Tim will soon be taking over the running of the Providence Inn. Added a new link his blog

25 October 2006

Euchre scores updated to include 24th October's match

18 October 2006

Euchre scores updated to include 17th October's match

15 October 2006

Sorry but we've been a little busy and not been able to update the web site as frequently as we would have liked. Worse than that, for some reason August's weather data got well and truly mixed up in the machine in the loft. The only thing we can think of was something that was sent to the machine when we were trying out the first beta of Windows Vista. Unfortunately, we never found out that it was all wrong until after the end-of-month download should have completed -- but failed to do so. Oh well.

The weather system was reset (eventually, after a number of tries) and the data for September was then collected correctly. The wind speed is still a little suspect (it seems to read zero if the wind is from the South, but fine for all other directions -- we think it's the rusting connection block again). We will be taking the whole thing down again for another inspection and repair once the weather brightens enough.

Anyway today's What's New includes:

Updated the Euchre pages to include:

	the new fixture list as an iCalendar file
	the current personal scores in the Kingsbridge League

Uploaded the weather data for last month (September)

in Access 2003 for