Author Archives: admin

Decisions, decisions…

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So, I now have a partially constructed N-gauge model railway.  It is now time to start considering what locomotives and rolling stock to run.  The question is: English or American?

I am leaning towards English (mainly diesel) at the moment.  I like the locomotives more and I can run small consists with some degree of realism (running an American diesel with three box cars just doesn’t look right).  There are other prototypes out there (Japanese is one that comes to mind) but I don’t have much knowledge and experience with them.
A quick tip found out the hard way: I’m sure it has uses but Flex-track is a real pain.  Set-track is much nicer to work with (just a little more expensive).

Thomsons Lake Crakes

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Went to Thomsons Lake last week with Martin Cake for a bit of a look.
With Martin’s expertise we saw all three of the common crakes for the area:

  • Baillon’s Crake (Porzana pusilla);
  • Australian Spotted Crake (Porzana fluminea);
  • Spotless Crake (Porzana tabuensis).
They were all seen in the typha at the southern end within a few metres of each other!
Also seen was a tiger snake and a feral fox (inside the perimeter fence at the northern end of the lake).

Red-eared Firetail

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My first new sighting for the year!

Red-eared Firetail (Stagnopleura oculata) – a small group (about 4) seen at Lesmurdie Falls. I managed to take some photographs but they were for identification only.

Lesmurdie Falls is local to me now – the birding there is quite good. There is still a fair bit of water flowing and most of the (unburnt) vegetation is thick and green. Also seen:

  • Tawny Frogmouth (Podargus strigoides);
  • Splendid Fairy-wren (Malurus splendens);
  • Common Bronzewing (Phaps chalcoptera).

Hot rod 7500

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I have finally finished building (I think) my hot rod Power Mac 7500.  It has:

  • 256MB of RAM (using 4 of the 8 slots in case I find some more 64MB sticks);
  • An IBM 18GB SCSI disk;
  • A PowerLogix PowerForce G3 350/175/512K G3 (Spartan) upgrade card running at 300MHz;
  • A fairly generic USB 1.1 PCI card;
  • An Apple Fast Ethernet 10/100 Base-T PCI card;
  • An iXMicro Ultimate Rez Twin Turbo 128 PCI graphics card;
  • An AppleVision 1710 Display.
Everything else (floppy and CD drive) is stock.  It runs Mac OS 8.6 like lightning.

Playing Chess

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I have started to play chess again (for the first time in many years). I am not very good at it but I am keen to learn and find it intellectually stimulating. At the moment I am playing against the computer but I may play against real people (online) at some point. I purchased some basic chess books as my Christmas present and am slowly working my way through them.

For some reason I have always been intrigued by the game. Grandad and Grandma Howell gave us a really nice wooden set when we were younger (I have it in the shed) and Chris and I would sometimes play games. From memory he would usually beat me…

At the moment I am just playing the version of Chess that ships with Mac OS X. I have installed Deep Green (by Joachim Bondo) on the Newton 2100. I will be having a look at Glaurung as well.

Red-capped Plover

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IMG_3264

Red-capped Plover (Charadrius ruficapillus, Point Walter, WA, Australia).

I stumbled across a pair of Red-capped Plovers while walking to the end of the spit at Point Walter.  I was initially trying to get a better look at the birds further out into the river and didn’t see them until I was 2-3 metres away.