Playing Tourist

It's my last evening in London. After my meetings of the day wrapped up, I decided that I needed to play a little bit more tourist.

I headed over to Kings Cross and track 9 3/4, but the line was long and I didn't want to wait, so I photographed some trains instead.

With that out of the way, I decided to head on the Circle line down to Tower Hill station and visit the Tower bridge. Spectacular, windy, and cold.

I was baffled when I walked on the bridge approach alongside the Tower, and noticed a group of foxes playing on the grass next to the Tower walls.

These are real foxes, though it's hard to photograph them at night with a smart phone.

Tower Bridge approach

Center span

The illumination of the bridge is very effective

Did I mention it was cold?

 

City and Tower

Science Museum: Lots of cool stuff

There's lots of other cool stuff at the museum. A functioning model of a 19th century industrial workshop.

Printing presses. At least one looked like it was well maintained and should be functional.

A large space travel exhibit, including the moon lander.

A section on materials, where I found this sword made from Damascus steel. The Wikipedia article has a short section on new research pointing at nano tubes as an explanation for why these swords were so sharp and sturdy.

A large exhibition on all kinds of watches from small pocket watches all the way up to the clockwork installed in 1392 at the Wells Cathedral, which was refurbished in the 1600's for more accuracy ... and still works.

There is a section on agriculture, explaining various types of plows.

A large hall on the history of flight. We're standing below a Harrier fighter, a plane that fascinated me when I was a kid.

There is Babbage's Difference Engine, a predecessor of the modern computer, built to the original plans with Victorian technology in 1991.

While I don't believe that the floppy disks are still readable, the Information Age hall has a copy of Windows 1.0 (and 3.1 as well).

The Information Age hall was interesting in that it combined the various kinds of communication over time (telegraph, radio, telephone, computers, TV) into a coherent story. Here is a Marconi transmitter from the 1920's.

Funny enough, there is a Google Street View trike, too.

The museum was bristling with school kids on excursion going through work sheets, listening to docents, or their teachers. I somewhat rushed through the museum (today's a work day after all), but still spent a couple hours here. Very interesting and fun start of the day.

Science Museum: Faster Steam

 

Stephenson's Rocket, the winner of the Railhill Trials for the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in 1829 and grandmother of modern steam locomotives is at the museum, too. It is in somewhat sorry condition, obviously the rods and half of the fire box are missing.

Nevertheless it's really cool to see design features taken for granted in later designs: a pair of driving wheels, multiple steam tubes in the boiler, blastpipes, horizontal cylinders directly connected to the driving wheels, ...

The Rocket rightfully has a choice spot in the hall. Near it is a slightly more modern locomotive, built at Crewe Works in 1845 (I think) for the Liverpool & Manchester Railroad.

Science Museum: Old Steam

This morning I took the opportunity to visit the Science Museum in Kensington. After breakfast I took the Tube over to South Kensington station, arrived much earlier than I expected, and hung out at Imperial College for a little while until the museum opened. I felt sorry for the various students that had exams today ...

The collection of the Science Museum is incredibly diverse. Following my interests, I started off looking for steam machines, stationary and mobile.

They have several replica and original steam machines, including the remains the first Trevithick's steam locomotive. The under carriage of this locomotive is missing. Just imagine it were to sit on wheels.

"Puffing Billy", built in 1813, is one of the first steam locomotives. I took some time to walk around this engine and figure out how it worked. It's in reasonably well restored state, too.

Puffing Billy is a geared locomotive, which surprised me at first.

Dinner in Chinatown

No, I don't know these people, but those pants are all the rage I hear.
We had excellent Sichuan food tonight at Barshu Restaurant. Recommended.

Evening Walk

After a long day in the office, I decided to do a walk to air out my head before heading to bed. The office is not far from Buckingham Palace so I walked that general direction, and enjoyed the rather empty sidewalks in the evening.

I'm getting tripped up at every intersection and pedestrian light, to think carefully about from which direction cars will come ... and then catch myself looking left before I enter the street even though I just convinced myself that cars would come from the right.

London Arrival

I made it to Heathrow after a very uneventful flight. That's a good thing. Since I'm staying near Victoria Station I decided to take the Tube. Note to self: When coming from the airport take Piccadilly Line all the way to Hammersmith, THEN transfer to the District Line on the same platform.

Transferring to the District Line on the same platform at Acton Town only looks good until you realize that this is a branch of the District line, train frequency is lower, the trains go much slower than the parallel Piccadilly Line trains, and to top it all off, you need to transfer from one District Line train to another District Line train at Earl's Court anyways.

The only good thing about my trip choice was that all transfers were on the same platform and I didn't have to lug my suitcases up and down stairs until I got to Victoria Station.

The lobby at The Grosvenor Hotel is very nice. The hotels is right next to Victoria Station.

The hallways are appropriately adorned with railroad-themed photography. Very nice.

After Fish & Chips with minted potatoes at the St. Georges Tavern and a little bit of walking through the neighborhood, jetlag hit in full force and I fell asleep over my book, only to wake up at 3am Monday morning

SFO - LHR

The various projects won't see much action in the next couple weeks. Time for some business travel...

... at least both Pascal and me got the flats in our respective bikes fixed.

Bearded Dragons: Terrarium final Grout coat

We finished up the Grouting. Now we need to wait a couple of days for the grout to set completely. Once that's done and the grout is fully hardened, we can carefully sand the bumps and edges with a sanding sponge.

Bearded Dragons: Geek Out!

This is complete overkill, but it's fun, so I'll do it anyways. I came across www.raspiviv.com, a Web site that shows how to set up humidity and temperature monitoring for a vivarium, along with controlling lights or misters. The author, Nathan Bensing, is into tropical frogs, but the concepts work just as well for a Bearded Dragon terrarium. A Raspberry Pi was quickly organized, Nathan supplied sensors and relay boards, and today -- between working on the terrarium with Pascal -- I went through the tutorial to start setting things up.

Along the way I routed an Ethernet drop into Pascal's bedroom and hooked up the Raspberry Pi. The software install is now done and we're going to try and test the sensors tomorrow.

As an aside ... I knew the Raspberry Pi is tiny, and slow. I wouldn't want to use it as a desktop system regularly, but it's definitely functional, and perfectly fine to run headless. I could have gone the Arduino route as well, but a fully functional Linux felt more natural to me, so there.

Bearded Dragons: Grouting

[ Bearded Dragons posts ]

We use sanded tile grout to give the styrofoam a very hard shell. So far the sanded grout hasn't developed any cracks. I'm hoping it stays that way. In above photo the base coat has been applied. The point of this coat is primarily to cover up the styrofoam all around and to make the whole thing a bit more rigid. The grout is mixed to the consistency of yogurt. It needs to go into all crevices and gaps. We mostly applied it with a brush.

Next up is a thicker layer of grout on all the walking surfaces. The idea here is to protect the structure from the claws of the bearded dragons. We mix the grout a bit thicker to roughly the consistency of sour cream.

We mostly use a spatula and wooden paint stir sticks to apply the grout.

The edges will get a thicker coat when the whole thing gets tipped over for the second coat of the rear wall. The rear wall's initial cover turned out to be a bit too thin and it's easy to rub off the grout, as can be seen near the basking spot in the photo below.

Happy New Year!

New Year's greetings from Emsingen in the beautiful Welztal.