December Cycling

Up to 14369.0, ??, 126.1 -- with the odo on my main bike having failed on the last journey home from work for the year, so 19.6 + three commutes, including some long way round + two shopping trips + 4.1, at most being 120-ish miles, or 3340 at year end. There was too much to do in the garden to have spent much time on two wheels over the holiday. But I have fitted a new odo to the main bike and will be counting from 0 rather than making up a number around 4600 for the total miles done so far on that one.

With the likelihood of driving a couple of days most weeks in the coming year, I'm not setting myself any new personal best or even better-than-last-year targets.

Bringing your consumer NAS onto a static IP or non-standard DHCP subnet

Having gone through this again recently, as I upgraded from the Seagate Central I bought a couple of years back to a later and bigger version, a note to self for when I go through the exercise again in a couple of years, to save having to put it together again --

1. This is the Secret Sauce : with a dual-NIC computer (e.g. one that's on the home subnet on WiFi but also has an unused ethernet port) set up Internet Connection Sharing of the WiFi to the ethernet. That makes that PC act as a DHCP server on the default 192.168.0/8 subnet on the ethernet link, which is where we can bootstrap the process.
2. Connect the NAS and the PC to a switch.
3. Now administer the NAS from the PC to configure its network settings to your main home subnet.
4. Do not panic if the NAS admin page tells you the reconfigure has not been saved because contact has been lost with the device.
5. Unplug the NAS from the switch and connect to your router.
6. Now breathe a sigh of relief as you can now see the NAS on the main network, then complete the NAS set-up.

The presence of known vulnerabilities in consumer NAS software means that it is also advisable, after a first firmware update, to close all outbound connections from the device, apart from DNS (which tends to be the protocol used for connection liveness testing), so it doesn't go calling out to any remote access server. You do block all the inbound connections already, don't you?

Yes, this means you can't watch your movies while on holiday, but if that's what you want to do, why ever go anywhere in the first place?

November Cycling

Up to 14,349.4, 4,113.0, 122.0, meaning 20.4 + 71.4 + 12.2 = 104.4 miles, a real collapse as I tried to maximise daylight hours in the garden, and also attend meetings ending at 3pm. That's 3219.6 miles YTD, and maybe 3350 at year end at most, depending on weather.

Winter is coming

The car was telling me it was -4C this morning at a quarter to seven, dipping to -6C in the country lanes, and only recovering to -3C by the time I got to the office. Brrr!

Fixing SMB access in recent Windows 10 updates

One of the updates that came down the wire to the machine I'm running on the insider slow ring in the last few weeks had the effect that trying to access the SMB share on my router gave a message like

\\Remote-Server\Path is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions. etc.

Breaking out Wireshark and comparing a machine still on build 1607 (local account login) with the test machine (MSFT login) showed that the SMB handshake would perform the initial exchange of Session Setup AndX Request, NTLMSSP_NEGOTIATE and Session Setup AndX Response, NTLMSSP_CHALLENGE, Error: STATUS_MORE_PROCESSING_REQUIRED, but the test machine would not then emit a Session Setup AndX Request, NTLMSSP_AUTH, User: Machine\User packet. Further experiment would be needed to tell whether this is because I'm running that machine with a MSFT login rather than a local account, rather than it being an insider build, but in the end, the fix turned out to be going to Control Panel\User Accounts\Credential Manager and creating a new Windows credential just for the Remote-Server address, with username and password sufficient to log on to the share (so for a wide-open read-only share, any username and an empty password will do).

Down Under Comes Up LIVE

Fifty years ago today, due to a launch malfunction of a communications satellite, the BBC ran an opportunistic program with the first live TV broadcast from the UK to the Satellite Tracking Station in Carnarvon, WA. And so I got to appear on live TV.

Me third from left in the front row.

UPDATE: More at honeysucklecreek.net, including a tidied up summary video. I'm on screen about the 3:50 mark.

UPDATE 2: Now in colour, me in the middle with the shadow of the microphone on my chest.

October cycling

Up to 14,329.0, 4,041.6, 109.8, meaning 104.9 + 11.7 = 116.6 miles, a real collapse as I tried to maximise daylight hours in the garden. That's 3115.6 miles YTD, and maybe 3500 at year end, depending on weather. And no late cycle holiday this year, as I had kittens to look after as well.

September Cycling

Up to 14,329.0, 3,936.7, 98.1 and 1.7 off meter, meaning 86.9 + 116.2 + 11.6 + 1.7 = 216.4 (2999.0 YTD, well behind last year) after a month where extremes of heat and wet, and the closing in of the evenings, meant more incentive to drive early to work, and, more importantly, get home early, after a full day's work done. And as the days get shorter, and remembering how draining cycling through last winter was, I suspect I shall drive more, and will probably fall well short of 4000 miles this year.

What I didn't realise until totting the numbers up this evening, was how few miles this month, the Cycle Challenge website having vanished at the end of August, and so no daily logs.

August Cycling

Up to 14,242.1, 3,820.5 and 128.8 off meter, meaning 19.3 + 183.4 + 128.8 = 331.5 miles (2782.6 YTD -- slightly up on last year, with its dreadful summer, but behind the pace for 4200 whole year, even at a steady rate).

I did manage a cycling break over the Bank Holiday weekend, with no worse than a few spots of rain on the Sunday, and glorious weather thereafter. No really long days, 50 miles being the longest, from Framlingham, up Route 1 to Beccles, then Route 31 to a very busy Southwold, a stop for rehydration, and then the last leg to Westleton, taking advantage of the dry weather to use the by-way from Walberswick where I came a cropper a few years ago -- only this time with only sand to worry about.

Town sign

I even managed to do a fair amount of new terrain, like the Route 1 off-road into Halesworth (which ought to have been the first day's destination, but once again there was no room at the inn), then everything north of Brampton on the Monday, then on the homeward leg, crossing the A12 just north of Saxmundham. OTOH, some bits I thought would have been new, near Gt Glemham, I had in fact already covered, even if only once and as recently this spring, taking a long route back from Framlingham to Woodbridge -- but this time the weather was glorious.

A cycling anniversary

Today concludes my second year logging my journeys on the Cambridgeshire Cycle Challenge website, over which span I've logged 1137 (up from 601 = 538) journeys covering 8166 (up from 4204 = 3962) miles; supposedly 1302 kg CO2 saved (ignoring my increased respiration when burning the 147, 556 calories it tells me I have spent doing so) and saving £910.03 on fuel (ignoring the costs of fuelling me or running through consumables like chains).

Those wet spring and summer months are really showing on the numbers, now; as does an increasing dislike of the cycling conditions (= other road users) on any route to the Science Park.

July Cycling

Up to 14,222.8, 3637.1 and 86.5, meaning 4.4 + 288.0 + 64.2 = 356.6 miles (2451.1 YTD -- and slightly behind where I was last year at this time).

The month started better than June had been, so inspiring me to start the month by filling in the wedge at Burwell, but was overall somewhat so-so, despite the real heatwave around the 20th. A week away at the end of the month meant no commuting miles, but just a few shortish rides for pub lunches, on the folding bike, around what became disappointingly wet weather.

Another little MSVC Rust gotcha.

I've now set up VSCode with Rust on three machines -- the first two went without a hitch; the latest simply refused when running cargo install racer to compile kernel32-sys, with a x86/x64 mismatch.

And running dumpbin /headers on the system libraries mentioned in the dump of the failing link command, sure enough the x86 versions were being picked up by default. Now, going in and doing environment surgery started to unblock the system, but I wanted to figure out why this machine was giving problems.

Much scratching of head later, I realised that the first machine I'd run the command in a PowerShell window without running the Visual Studio VSVARS32.BAT, and that on the second, though I had run that environment set-up as part of my PowerShell profile, that one was running WinX/x86.

Moral of the story -- don't run cargo install from a Visual Studio prompt.

Rain brings on the Rust

One thing that the wet weather in recent weeks accomplished was to give me some time to play with Rust again, after a go-round a couple of years back, when it still needed to run in an mingw prompt, the code was full of sigils, and I couldn't get an executable to link against advapi32.dll; then again towards the end of 2014 when I migrated a fork of the rust-windows project to the then-current version.

Last year was a bit of a wash all over, coding for fun being one of the major casualties of the year, so it was pretty much a start anew, to build myself a simple "hello world", porting a simple Win32 program to the new language.

It was reasonably easy to find useful samples and fragments from which to Frankenstein together a working program. What I did not find, however, was any good guide to adding resources to the project using the native (rather than the foreign) tool-chain. So I cast around a bit and hacked this together:

It's hacky, since it builds the .rc file to a .res file that actually calls itself a .lib, so that the cargo tool will add the extensionless name as a .lib to the linker, and the linker, fortunately, ignores the file extension and just looks at the file content. It's also hacky in that it hard-codes the path to a local rc.exe, and works around the fact that that tool does not offer an output directory parameter by tree-walking from the directory where we want to place the output to where the source resides.

I'm sure there must be a better way, but this works. Apart from the fact that a VERSIONINFO compiles OK into the resulting .exe (as can be seen by opening it in Visual Studio), but doesn't show in the file properties. Application icons work just fine, though.

June Cycling

The rainy season that usually wipes out April/May cycling waited until the Late Spring Bank Holiday. This means that the totals for the month are 14218.4/3349.1 + 10.7 off-meter -- meaning 90.4 + 196.2 + 10.7 = 297.3 miles, or 2094.5 YTD, only slightly shy of my 2100 target for the half-year, even so. That is to say, despite logging the fewest miles of any month this year, even February, and 2/3 what I did in the same month last year, I'm still just ahead of last year's total.

May Cycling

Up to 14,126.0, 3152.9 and 16.8, plus 2.8 off-meter meaning 30.6 + 286.7 + 0.0 + 2.8 = 320.1 miles (1797.2 YTD -- so more miles than last May, despite having taken both Bank Holiday weeks off work, thereby removing the commuting baseload, and also ahead in aggregate).

The month started in a blaze of summer, encouraging me out on a long ride to loop around Grafham Water on the far side, where I could see the bluebell woods at their finest; and it remained summer long enough for the first T-shirt commutes to work. It was the end of the month when the weather took a turn for the worse, with no cycling getting done on the wet, cool and windy late holiday week.