Nina's Blog - Wednesday 18th September 2024

@ninalanyon I'm pleased you have your car back!

That's a lovely tranquil spot.

@ArishMell Me too. And pleasantly surprised that Tesla prioritised my car because it was completely disabled. The fault meant that the 12 V battery was not being charged so the guy with the rescue lorry had to attach an external 12 V supply to get the systems powered up enough to release the parking brakes because the car had disabled everything except the ability to open the doors.

That spot is tranquil now. Thirty years ago it was under the approach to the runway of the national airport at Fornebu (closed in 1998). That's two or three kilometres north-ish (behind the camera). So every half an hour or so an aeroplane in the A300 size class would thunder overhead on its way down. Didn't stop us walking there, picnicking, paddling, swimming in the fjord, etc.

@ninalanyon That's good that they soon found the fault and repaired it.

Though I am not impressed by the designers of any car making the handbrake be electrically-operated. That over-complication is poor engineering.

Did they move the airport because it was being encroached on by residential areas or simply because it was no longer large enough?

There has been a lot of waffle over the years about London "needing" a fourth airport, but this seems to have died away. Perhaps this is on grounds of cost and lack of suitable land; but perhaps now also on grounds of increasingly questionable "need" for, sustainability of and environmental damage from, ever-increasing large-scale air traffic overall.

Boris Johnson even suggested, I think when he was Mayor of London, building the airport on an artificial island in the Thames Estuary. Without pondering the potential effects of the tidal waterway adjusting itself to cope with such gross interference, but I don't suppose Mr. Johnson knows much about Physical Geography and Geomorphology.

Anyway, these days people would wonder about future sea-level rise making such an aerodrome un-useable unless it is a good few metres high.

@ArishMell The electrically operated parking brake is a necessity in a car with this degree of automation. It is used actively by the car to enable hill starts without risk of rolling back. It is also applied automatically when the driver leaves the driving seat if the car is stationary, this eliminates the risk that one forgets to engage the brakes.

Electrically operated parking brakes are not a Tesla innovation, they have existed for a long time on luxury vehicles, though often not with the same degree of automation.

As for Fornebu, yes it was too small and of course the wealthy people who lived nearby wanted peace and quiet. The site is now a suburb of Oslo filled with modern blocks of flats and lots of high tech businesses. The control tower and a few associated buildings have been preserved and one of my favourite cafes is there.

The replacement airport, Gardermoen, now has passenger numbers vastly more than Fornebu could support. Gardermoen had 2.5 million passengers in August alone. 25 million in 2023. The annual figure is roughly five times the population of the country.

What London needs is to be less important. A new airport or perhaps just expansion of existing airports should happen in the North, if necessary.

@ninalanyon All that complexity is all very well until something goes wrong and you cannot manually over-ride it, as you may need do in some situations.

I think you did once post some photos of Fornebu control-tower and its cafeteria.

Most likely the call for yet more airport capacity around London was from the airlines, but encouraged by a myth that the only "industries" that matter are the "service" ones - money-traders mainly, who tend to cluster around capital cities.

Placing a new, major airport in the North of England won't necessarily help that part of the land, especially as a lot of "international" airports' use is simply as long-distance staging-points. I fear that it would, as HS2 may if ever built fully, merely push London's commuter-belt even further outwards.

It's possible that a lot of intra-country flights for many countries will become a thing of the past, provided alternatives exist, but that provision is the problem. The alternatives have not only to exist but if necessary be enhanced. France had already stopped internal flights where train services are a suitable alternative. HS2 might have taken a lot of English internal trade from the airlines, but do people really need fly between London and Leeds or Newcastle? Rarely, I suggest.

What I think many people don't see is that although the fastest trains from, say London to Edinburgh (roughly 400 miles) take about 4 hours while the flight takes about 1 hour; the latter is in-air time and ignores all the time spent on the ground between city-centre and being physically in the air, each end of the trip.

@ArishMell The only situation that I can think of where it would be useful to manually override the electrically operated parking brake would be in just the situation I had where the car is immobilised because of a flat 12 V battery. But I regard that as someone else's problem and the person who comes out to cart the car away can deal with it. In this particular case he said he had done it on a number of occasions before.

@ArishMell Yes I did post some pictures of Fornebu. In case anyone is interested here are a few of them

The interior of the Cafe Caravelle

And yours truly enjoying a snack

@ninalanyon Thankyou! The sculpture and the photo of you are new.

@ArishMell No, they aren't. :-)

The one with the control tower in the background is from https://similarworlds.com/social/blogs/5009592-Ninas-Blog-Wednesday-15th-May-2024

The picture of me and the cafe interior are from https://similarworlds.com/social/blogs/4807436-Ninas-Blog-Wednesday-6th-September-2023

@ninalanyon Oh, sorry - I'd remembered the interior scene but not the artwork. new to me, perhaps.

@ArishMell Could be new to you. I really don't expect everyone to obsessively read my posts, much less remember them all.

I don't remember when I post pictures either but I do have a catalogue of my pictures on my laptop with most of them tagged with keywords describing the place so I can find out when I took them and where. Then I can search through my profile on SW to find a post for that day or the day after. That's partly why I always date my posts.

@ninalanyon My photos are in their own folders with at least the month and year.

When Mickeysoft changed my PC from WIN-10 to 11, without my permission, the damage included mangling my photograph archiving, which took me ages to rebuild. They had just bunged the whole lot in one directory rather immaturely called "Pictures". I had to create a new directory and folder structure under a different name for my photographs. The system refuses to place its name in the normal directory list, but I made a screen short-cut for it.

Worse, a lot of photographs had vanished before I could copy them (WIN-12 bars access to my extension drives), and I suspect a connection.

Also, they had created a very strange image collection in its BING / MSN link, holding a random selection of my photographs copied without asking or citing, mixed with odd things that might have been company trade-marks.

I think the interfering So-and-Sos in Seattle had been trying to place all my files on its so-called "Cloud", i.e. MS' own server, without asking me; and made a mess of it.

It seems the answer will be to buy an extension hard-drive that will work on both WIN-7 and WIN-12, to be compatible with my main and spare, off-line PCs; and keep all my data on separate units including CDs.

@ArishMell Time to switch to Linux!

@ninalanyon I have considered it but I do not know enough about operating-systems and changing them to risk it; and I do not know if Linux would handle my third-party software and some of my Excel work.

@ArishMell Just running Linux is simple. It's probably easier than installing Windows these days. The version I use can be installed on a small (4 GB) USB memory stick so that you can try it out before installing it on the computer

But if you use specific Windows programs then it gets more complicated because most of them will not run on Linux. In particular Excel and the rest of the MS Office package will not run. For many purposes there are equivalent programs but many are not direct equivalents and will often mean learning a new set of commands, menus, etc.

What might be best in your case is to institute a strict backup and archiving policy. Back up absolutely everything to an external disk often, keep several generations.

Which reminds me that I should run my backup routine too!

@ninalanyon Thank you - yes, you are right. I must be more careful about backing everything up. I do have a lot of copies of many files but am not regular in doing so.

The problem with Open Office or similar is not having to learn the new ways to do the same thing, but whether it can handle my existing files.

I have two non-MS CAD programmes and I very much doubt that anything that complicated will run on anything but the MS Windows for which those were written. Nor would my photo-faffing software though it's probably too "old" even for Windows now.

@ArishMell Open Office, or Libre Office will open most simple Excel and Word files but the speak a different macro language so and automation works in a different and incompatible way I'm afraid. And you are probably right about the CAD programs although there are plenty of CAD programs that do work on Linux. There is also a fair amount of photo related software freely available for Linux; whether it would work for you depends on what features you actually need though. To catalogue my pictures I use XnView (https://www.xnview.com/en/) which is in fact platform independent. I rarely manipulate my pictures beyond cropping and the occasional contrast enhancement so it is plenty good enough for me and makes adding keywords easy.

@ninalanyon Thank you. I think the worst problem with spreadsheets and documents might be incompatibility if I need send or receive any e-posted ones.

I found that several years ago even within Microsoft, with the system translating some into .xlsx and .docx types difficult or impossible to open properly if at all, and locked against any further editing as I needed. The same can happen with .pdf files... unless you pay expensive subscriptions for some third-party or Microsoft-owned translation-software publisher.

I rarely modify any of my photos, and then only if needed specifically. Normally this is limited to cropping them, occasionally altering the brightness or contrast, and very rarely changing a copy to monochrome. I did have a good photo-editor whose functions included outline-generation I thought might be useful, but even if I still have the source CD I doubt it would run on WIN-7 and later.

Nor do I catalogue them beyond title and folder, and that doesn't need any indexing software.

There are two problems with going to Linux then finding a suitable functional programme is compatibility with existing files, and having to learn a completely new application! There are standard files theoretically allowing this but they are likely to remove most of the formatting, in either direction.

@ArishMell For simple spreadsheets and word processor documents without macros Libre Office is actually compatible with more Microsoft formats than Microsoft's own software and can save to those formats as well. Libre Office also works on Windows so you can try it out before taking the plunge into Linux:

@ninalanyon Thankyou.Perhaps I will!