Marcus D. Hanwell's Blog

We got to Malta safe and sound. It was really hot at the airport but got really cold by the time we got to the hotel. When we got here it was like the hotel time forgot - it seems to be stuck about forty years in the past which is why so many old people are here I guess It is nice enough but quite basic for a four star hotel - the Mellieha Bay Hotel.


We went on our first dive today with Aquaventure who are at the beach in our hotel complex. I have been looking forward to going on another dive for a good few months now but I was disappointed I am afraid... It was the shortest dive I have done so far at only 34 minutes, the shallowest at a max depth of 7.6 m and an average of about 4 m. It was also the coldest (15 C) and the one where I had the most air left at the end. I came up with just under 130 bar... There were very few photo opportunities in Slugs Bay too - I will put a few up with this entry though such as the sea slug I found.

It was nice to finally get to use all this new equipment though. My underwater camera enclosure seemed to work well, although the woman who sold it to me just told me I need the fibre optic kit to get rid of back scatter... If she had told me that when I asked at the dive show I would have bought one there and then. Never mind - I will get the best photos I can with what I have available. Even though the water was cold my wet suit kept me warm. Louise gobbled through her air - she only had 80 bar left but she gets a lot more nervous.

We have arranged a car for the next four days (three full days) and have two dives booked on Friday, one on Saturday and one or two on Monday I think. Hopefully I will get a few wreck dives in next week too as well as some caves. I really hope the diving does get better - I think we were spoilt in the Red Sea!


Lousie managed to beat me this morning too - she pasted me at Scrabble whilst we were sat at the side of the pool. Back to the evenings entertainment anyway...

Like Donnie I am also trying to get fit. Towards the end of January we switched from the Virgin gym to Greens in Sheffield due to its more convenient location (closer to where we both work) and the promise of a new place invigorating us (and the fact that none of the staff ever seemed that interested in helping you out at Virgin). I think the convenience has really helped out and we have made it quite regularly, apart from the times when I have been out of Sheffield (and quite often the country) which seems to happen more and more regularly recently.

We have also been trying to eat more healthily and just eat what we want (i.e. leaving the clean plate club). So far it has worked out really well for me having lost four inches off my waist and over two stones in the last three or four months. I am also so much fitter now and on Sunday morning I managed to run 5 km (3 miles) in just over 32 minutes. This is great progress for me as a few months back I struggled to run for 10 minutes without stopping. I am also doing a lot of swimming, spinning and various other bits to tone up and stuff.

I am feeling lots better and am hoping it will really pay off whilst we are on holiday with the scuba diving and snorkelling especially. I have been enjoying running quite a bit too - the mental challenge of running faster and further has been really good fun, setting targets for myself and beating them as well as watching the weight slip off. It hasn't been going quite as well for my wife - she is training to run in the race for life charity 5 km run in June so I am trying to help her train up for that.

We are going to try and do a little running out in Malta to keep fit and help Louise train. Time to try and get some sleep anyway - at best I have four hours of sleep left before we get up and get our plane

Using a slow DSL connection from some airport hotel in Manchester. We are waiting for our flight in the morning to Malta. I have been running around for the last few days trying to make sure I got everything done before we left. I nearly managed to forget my new dive watch! We decided to give Virgin Trains a go too and they sold us a ticket onto some crappy little First train with two carriages. We basically ended up travelling for over 2.5 hours for a journey I could have driven in about an hour in the car!

I don't think we will be bothering with the train to Manchester again. The hotel has been a little boring too - I just want to be off on holiday. So in future we will either drive or get a taxi straight to the airport for our flight unless it is down in a London airport as that is much further away. I have been double checking and I think I have remembered everything else we needed and now I can't sleep...

Can't wait to get to Malta - we have been told by lots of people how nice it is out there. I have taken the O-rings off of all my underwater stuff (apparently it can damage them due to the reduced cabin pressure in the plane) so I really hope they work OK once I put them back together. I think I will test them in the bath at the hotel and again snorkelling before I take them on a real dive. We aren't sure if there is any Internet access at the hotel so tonight could be my last night on the Internet for two weeks!

I am hoping to write a Qt4 based dive log analyser for my new dive computer whilst we are away in C++. I have come up with a rough prototype for it but have been too busy over the last few days. It would be good to be able to download and analyse my dives in Linux - I already have the Suunto USB interface working. If I get something decent together I will try to make a proper release and package it for Gentoo. It would be good to release a useful and unique application to the public.

Anyway I had best try and get some sleep! Need to be up at 3am to get ready and get to our terminal for 4:40am... It could be a couple of weeks cut off from the Internet potentially too

On my recent trip to Baltimore I read my second Discworld novel - Going Postal. I have to say that I enjoyed this book much more than Thud! It is a very clever book and it appealed to me on many levels. I especially enjoyed the Clacks and the parallels my mind drew with areas of modern life and some of the practices of the operators of the Clacks. Moist was a fun character if not a little predictable, all in all a great read in my opinion.

However Dan Brown's Digital Fortress was a big disappointment to me. It was predictable and terminology was used in a clumsy and in some cases incorrect fashion. He made the common mistake of calling crackers hackers and tried to dramatise the breaking down of a firewall in a way that really did not work for me. If he really did consult with ex-NSA agents I fear for the security of the NSA! I thought it might be a fun read but it really wasn't. I may yet read the Da Vinci Code but after reading this book I am in no rush to get it.

So a bit of a mixed bag. I found Dan Brown's writing pretty simplistic with silly amounts of twists at then end that were almost funny but not really. Whereas Going Postal was a really fun book that had me amused all the way though. I have bought Night Watch and Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett - both were recommended by friends.

I also bought The Art of Diving on a friends recommendation as his friend Alex Mustard did all the photography. I have to say the photos are amazing and I can only hope to take pictures approaching that quality whilst I am in Malta. I also bought An Essential Guide to Underwater Photography by Michael Aw and Matthieu Meur when I was at the London Internation Dive Show (Amazon doesn't seem to have this) and got it signed by the author (first book I have ever had signed). Hopefully that will help me to take some nice pictures - I tested out my underwater camera enclosure and strobe yesterday ready for the holiday

I have been really busy recently and so haven't had as much time as I might have liked to work on my PVR. After spending a while working on it lastnight I thought I would write a little about some of my failures. On the whole the solution is working reasonably well, and some of these issues could be related to me using it in 64 bit mode...

The first is the image quality. Whilst playing DVDs I have found that xine works best and has DVD menu support which in my opinion is essential. On the whole the picture is pretty good but in fast moving scenes where large amounts of the background are moving quite quickly the motion becomes noticeably blocky during the motion. This can be really irritating and is not a great advert for the box when friends come around as even a £20 DVD player doesn't seem to suffer from this.

The second is the picture quality from the TV. I never managed to get the composite or svideo connections working - I only ever saw black. So I am using the aerial and the picture is very noticeably more blurry than the same picture just fed straight to the TV. I am guessing this is just the poorer quality of the aerial signal or a hardware limitation. Either way it is not great.

It would also appear that MythTV may have a memory leak as after the client had been running for a few weeks the system was out of memory. It would seem this leak is pretty slow though and so I am not sure how best to track it. This system has 1 GB of RAM so may be that helps give it a lot more time. The final issue I have not gotten to the bottom of is freezing after watching the TV for a while through MythTV.

All in all it is not a bad solution, but it is certainly not a plug in and go solution. I wish I had just got myself a cheap DVD player as I just don't have the spare time right now. Hopefully this post will be seen as an honest appraisal of how things are working right now with my MythTV box. Your mileage may well vary and you may have a lot more time to tinker. My wife isn't all that impressed and quite honestly I don't know that I am...

Well I thought I would create a new category for scuba diving as I will hopefully get the chance to write about it fairly regularly. Louise and I drove down to London on Friday and stayed at the Novotel just next to the Excel exhibition centre in the docklands. We managed to find it fairly easily in the end although the drivers seem to drive more psychotically the closer we got to London...

We decided to go to the first day on Saturday 1 April and had bought our tickets about a month ago. We got there just before opening on Saturday morning to see Jean-Michel Cousteau opening the show. We also saw him a few times during the weekend at our hotel. Once we got on our mission began... Enter all the competitions going on the off chance of winning something cool and find everything on our list.

The first thing we found were our wet suits. We had done our research and had decided on a wet suit system that would be suitable for UK diving in the summer as well as places like the Red Sea. I got an Oceanic Shadow system which I was very pleased with. Full 5 mm semi dry wet suit, 5 mm shortie to go over it in cold conditions or on its own in warm conditions. It also came with a hood. Louise tried on about five wet suits I think and in the end chose a Body Glove wet suit system - it was a better fit for her but now we don't get to look really sad on holiday with matching wet suits!

After we got those we took them back to our room in the hotel and went back in for more shopping. I got my underwater camera enclosure and strobe for my Fuji F10 and found the Cressi Sub Matrix mask I wanted too. Then we went over to SDS (local dive shop) to look at their dive computers and other bits. They were probably the most helpful and I took quite a while deciding between the bulky Uwatec Aladin Tec and the compact Suunto Mosquito. In the end I decided upon the Suunto after flirting with the idea of getting a Stinger... Also got some split fin Tusa Xpert Zoom fins, some nice boots, an interface for my dive computer and a really nice Tusa snorkel from them.

By this point we were starting to feel tired and took our bags back to the room and broke for lunch. We had got most of the stuff on our list now. I found a nice titanium dive knife, and then we got some bits from a few other shops and a dive bag to take all this stuff on holiday with us as well as a mesh bag for the beach/boat. Quite a bit poorer but happy with our haul we made our way back to the room just before it all finished at 17:30.

After irritating Louise for a while checking out all my new stuff she made me go for some dinner with her. The buffet at the hotel was very nice as was the wine we ordered to go with our meal. I just can't wait to try out all my new stuff now! Two weeks until we leave for Malta, although I have already tested out the free diving features of my dive computer at the gym... And we both tried on all our gear on Sunday night together to make sure it all fitted together OK and seemed complete. I need to test the underwater enclosures for leaks before we leave too.