Technically Stressed

Well it's been one of 'THOSE' weeks technically speaking!

Finally we've got the Mikuni Central Heating back on line after purchasing a new Electronics Box for a staggering £300. I could probably have made one for £10.
My advice to anyone thinking of buying diesel central heating is to steer well clear of Mikuni. The unit was only purchased in 2006 and although it worked perfectly well after I fitted it for the first year, it's been nothing but trouble ever since! Good job we have the Kabola to fall back on plus shoreline hook-up!
On another technical note my attempts to have our on-board weather station linked to this blog showing up to date weather information, similar to the picture above, have been somewhat thwarted by difficulties with Windows Vista. If you've read the previous post you will know that the station will only link to a computer by Serial Port. Our on-board system is brand new and only supports USB connection. So firstly I purchased a Serial Port/USB adaptor which when connected only crashed the computer. Secondly I installed a Serial Port PCI Card and have literally spent the first half of the week trying to configure it. Plug and Play my arse!! Still not to be defeated I continue my attemps to get the damn thing working.
Wish me luck....

Weather Aboard!

Ahoy everyone and a Happy New Year to you all! It's a good while since our last post, in fact we haven't done much on the blog since our return from France.

Hope your Christmas and New Year were as pleasant as ours. We spent our Christmas in a lovely wooden chalet in Wales as has become our routine now for the past few years, picking my lovely mum up from Liverpool enroute who spent the week with us.
Our New Year was spent for the 3rd year in a row with our dear friends Johnny and Pat, NB-Hoddydod, (now on the French canals). We took Quidditch along the Oxford Canal for the night mooring at bridge 100 a short distance from Braunston. Fireworks at midnight, champagne on the tow path and an excellent meal cooked by Dee, so a good night was had by all. I myself cooked a Full English Breakfast on New Years Day morning which is a tradition of ours, sending Johnny and Pat home deleriously happy!
It's always been a plan of mine to extend my hobbies of meteorology and astronomy and to have an external weather station aboard Quidditch and this Christmas I was granted my wish, thanks to Dee x
Having now set my new La Crosse WS3600 station up with Wind Meter etc via the excellent base station I then proceeded to install the software to my new vista desktop computer. One of the reasons I'd like a weather station aboard is to be able to show live data through this blog, thus having Wigram's Marina's very own weather station. That unfortunaley is when my problems began.
The station comes with a serial port lead for connection to your PC, the problem is that new computers now only use USB leads and not serial ports. No worries I thought so off I trot to Maplins in Banbury and pick up a Serial/USB adaptor. Upon my return I install the driver and reload the software for the station. Success!! But only for a matter of seconds as immediately the computer communicates with the base station I get the dreaded Blue Screen and my PC completely crashes!! Well having trolled the forums and the La Crosse website, which offered no advice whatsoever I eventually got answers to my quest from the excellent MidlandsWeather.Org. Turns out it's known issue as data is currupted when it passes through the USB adaptor. So the next option left now, as Dee bought the unit off eBay and as ever I've thrown the box etc away, is to install a serial port to my computer. So in conclusion I'm awaiting delivery of said item and hopefully we'll have weather aboard Quidditch come midweek!

Happy New Year.

Pictured above:- Tornado over West Midlands taken last year!