“Jolyon’s at No.10” in Cardiff is everything that’s wrong with ‘boutique hotels’.

There, I’ve said it. Apologies if this sounds like a splenetic, unwarranted rant… and, honestly, it’s not aimed directly at Jolyon’s… the stay itself was fine (other than a few issues as noted later) and the staff were good and attentive. This is aimed more generally at the concept of a boutique hotel, but it just so happens that it was my stay at Jolyon’s that prompted this. Perhaps if they didn’t advertise as being boutique, I wouldn’t be referencing them. But they do, so here we are.

In August 2017 I climbed the West peak of Mt. Elbrus via the South approach. Elbrus is the highest point on the European Continent standing at 5642m and represents the European component of the 7 Summits - a challenge to climb the highest peaks on all 7 continents. It sits in the Caucasus Mountains in Russia and is a stone’s throw from the border with Georgia.

Here’s a quick summary of my experience.

Our tour was organised by Adventure Peaks. We traveled from the UK via Gatwick in to Moscow Sheremevo and then onwards to Mineralnye Vody (MRV). At MRV, we were met by the local travel company who arranged our onward travel via minibus in to the Baksan Valley, which formed our base for the trip.

Just encountered a fun little issue when trying to move something from a local MySQL server to a ‘Prod’ server. The difference in architecture being that dev MySQL was running on OSX whereas the ‘Prod’ MySQL was running on Linux (debian).

The issue was that a lot of my queries/views/procedures were failing on the Linux box due to non-existence of tables. (When they definitely existed.)

The problem was how different operating systems treat case sensitivity in tables. In short, on Windows and OSX table names are case insensitive. In Linux and other Unix based platforms, they are case sensitive.

Last week I posted about the setup of a RPI / Mono. Having played with a little, I’ve ultimately abandoned that line of approach.

This is not directly a reflection on Mono - no doubt the team behind that have done an incredible job of developing a platform well beyond the original intentions of the .NET framework. My main issue was that the application I’d written in a true WinDev environment didn’t just move over to the RPI / Mono environment, thus my dev cycle was broken.

Update: if you’re just looking to build a simple LAMP server on a Pi, then there is an updated version of this guide which installs more up to date versions of e.g., PHP, here.

For reasons I won’t go into, I have an unnecessarily complicated set of requirements:

• Dev environment is Windows 10 + Visual Studio 2015 running as a virtual machine inside VMWare Fusion on Max OSX 10.11.6
• Target application is .NET 4.5.2 running on a Raspberry Pi 3 under Mono
• App must write data to MySQL db

This is my first time working with Mono. It’s actually relatively straight-forward to setup, but there were one or two hoops I jumped through, so I figure this may be helpful. You could choose to use VSCode on your Mac if you didn’t want to go down the Windows dev VM route.

TL;DR

The main issue I encountered is the latest MySQL Connector for .NET that you get using NuGET doesn’t seem to work in Mono. The trick was to install an early version (6.4.6 to be exact) and once I did this, all seemed to work OK. Have not got much further yet, so not yet sure what other issues I will encounter.

This assumes you have a completely fresh copy of Raspbian latest. If you haven’t, follow a guide here. I used Etcher for the first time and was very impressed as it worked perfectly.

I am using the -Lite (no UI) version so may have had to do extra stuff that the full fat version didn’t require. I also configured Apache/PHP etc. so I could have phpmyadmin running.

This review is written from the perspective of being a first holiday park holiday and similarly the first at a Eurocamp. Our party was two adults and two young children (3 and 1).

The booking experience with Eurocamp was good - they’ve invested a lot in their website which makes it super easy to book. There was a slight snafu with some extras which needed to be resolved directly with them, but all in all was a hassle-free experience. Eurocamp were great at sending all the required documents well in advance and in terms of everything been set for what we’d booked, it was all done properly. So full marks there.

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Have been looking for a small surface planer and edge jointer for some time and although there a few things out there, some of the cheaper models (e.g,. Silverline) I was a bit suspicious of. If you’re trying to make things flat and square, then you really need the machine itself to be of a suitable quality in order to do that otherwise you’re probably better off not bothering. Many of the cheaper models looked a bit plastic-y and flimsy, until I stumbled across this one.

I previously wrote about trying to figure out why the Led/Laser switch on my Bosch PCM-8S didn’t work. I determined the switch was faulty.

After a bit of a hunt, I found the part here: http://www.powertoolspares.com/tool/bosch/spares-and-accessories-for-slide-mitre-saw-pcm-8-s/3603l02070/spares/ - looks like a good resource. £6 for the switch seemed reasonable - but £10 for postage, didn’t. It’s not uncommon to encounter this sort of thing living in the Channel Islands, it nevertheless it’s irritating.

So before coughing up the £16 for the new part, I figured I’d see if there was anything to be done to rescue the existing switch. I previously thought it was a sealed unit, but after a bit of prying with a mini flathead screwdriver - turns out it’s not. And, much like everything else on this saw, it was all gunked up with crap. And after cleaning it up, and reassembling, hey presto, the switch is working again. Result.

A year or so ago I picked up a secondhand Bosch PCM-8S compound mitre saw for my workshop. Handy little saw, handles most things I need to do. One thing I accepted at the time was the built in Led lights and laser didn’t work. Didn’t think much of it given that most of it was chock full of sawdust.

Today though, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to find out if it was fixable. I’m not going to list in detail everything I did, but needless to say I started in the wrong place and ultimately found the issue in the last place I looked (and last place I expected):

I’m a big fan of .NET console applications. They’re a really quick way of getting something functional up and running fast without wasting loads of effort on user interfaces. (Hey, I’m a developer, OK… not a designer. Function over form and all that.)

I also make heavy use of the built-in app.config / settings functionality so that I can control functionality at runtime. One thing I wanted to do recently was to output the configured settings to the console window so that I could eyeball all was well before going ahead.