Derek Knight’s Blog

We’ve just got back from our holidays. We were away for almost two weeks in the South Island. Of this almost one week was spent cycling the Otago Central Rail Trail. A bit of history:

The Otago Central railway was built to supply the area around Cromwell (close to Queenstown), where gold had been discovered in 1861. By 1907, after 16 years of construction it had reached Clyde. When finished, the railway would have been around 250 km long and ran from Dunedin to Cromwell. Without the railway, it would have taken a few days by stage coach to run supplies that distance. The railway cut that trip down to less than one day. However by 1921 when it finally reached Cromwell, the gold rush was over. The railway continued to be used for supplying the farming industry in Central Otago, transporting wool back to Dunedin and so on. Of course eventually this work was done more efficiently using road transport and the railway became uneconomic. The tracks were torn up in the 1990s, and in 2000 the corridor was opened up as a cycling and walking trail. There’s more information at the rail trail’s official site

From Clyde to Middlemarch is a distance of 150Km and though you can do this on your own, carrying all your stuff, there are a number of tour companies that offer a 3 or 4 day trip. They provide you with bikes, book you in hotels or home stays along the way, carry your bags and provide you with refreshments along the way. We went with Pure Trails NZ. The trail is not too challenging (Pure Trails aims at the older part of the market, and most of their customers are in the 50-60 age group). A day’s cycling typically involves four stages with a coffee or lunch break between and one stage would be 10 or 15Km. Mostly the track is flat, though it does rise from 200 at the start to 800 metres at its highest. This means the first few days are going gradually uphill (remember that trains will not go up an incline of more than about 1 in 30). The last days are mostly downhill. Though, with a prevailing south easterly wind, downhill can be accompanied by a strong headwind.

The scenery in “central” is stunning. The background of the Taieri and the Rock and Pillar ranges as you cross the Maniototo plain is quite beautiful. We were cycling in early spring so the weather was still a bit chilly. In fact the distant peaks had a fresh coating of snow, which added to the beauty. The trail is mostly well away from roads, so the only sounds are your tyres crunching on the gravel and, if you stop to take a photos or just to take in the scenery, there’s just the song of the skylarks, finches and blackbirds and the sound of the occasional stream or river that you’ll cross. In future I would take a bird book; I had difficulties identifying some of the species we saw.

Pure trails offer a number of side trips and we took up all of these: curling, visit to a gold mine and so on (details all on their web-site). We also took the TranzAlpine train from Christchurch to Greymouth and back and, after our cycling trip, the Taieri Gorge railway from Middlemarch to Dunedin, which is the sole remaining section of the old railway. These two on their own are among the best rail journeys in the world.

I really recommend this trip. Pure Trails did a great job, the Otago scenery is beautiful, the exercise is not to strenuous and it’s the first time in about 15 years that I’ve been away from my computer for more than a few days.

I posted a few months ago about the new case I’d treated my PC to. since then I’ve replaced almost everything inside the case. I got the parts from PlayTech here in Auckland. They had really good prices for the parts I wanted and are very close to work, so I could see what I was buying. I usually buy from Ascent, but they didn’t have everything I wanted.

I got:

In fact the only things on my PC that have not been replaced recently are the disk drives - which are about a year old.

I’ve installed Vista Ultimate and got everything going, but I have noticed a few things:

The Vista Edition of the motherboard has a SideShow-like extra screen. In theory this is good idea. It could show you whether you have any emails, or the weather or other gadget-like things. In practice it’s hopeless. ASUS did not implement Sideshow, but used their own mechanism. It’s not compatible with the MS gadgets and ASUS have supplied about 6 of their own applets. It gets worse though. You have to log in as Administrator to even get these to work and I’m not about to keep running my PC as administrator. So that has gone into my spare hardware box until such a time as ASUS get the act together.

The Hauppage card comes with a remote, but that’s not compatible with anything except Hauppage’s own applications. I installed them and had so much grief with them I uninstalled them again. I am now using Windows Media Centre and that works fine, but no remote - that’s also now in my spare harware box.

The motherboard does come with a remote that is worthwhile, I can shut down the PC without having to bend down to press the stop button. This is really a gimmick though since my PC sits under my desk and is easy to get at. I think with hindsight, I would have steered clear of the Vista Edition motherboard.

However there is one big plus with the new set-up. The whole rig can be overclocked, that would be fine if I was into gaming or wanted extreme performance. I don’t need that; I run it on its economy setting with Q-Fan enabled and my PC is completely silent. I mean completely; not even the slightest hum. If I need to I can put it on max power (even using the remote), but at its lowest setting it’s still fast enough for me. Mostly the PC is a server, it’s got IIS and Apache, is running 3 Rails web-sites, 3 Apache ones and 3 IIS ones. It’s also running Cruise Control to do continuous builds of my software. It’s a file server for all my data too and I can watch TV and do bits of development on it.

This problem first happened with RC1 of Vista. I’d press the sleep button (or select Sleep from the Start menu). My PC would go through all its shutdown things, blank the screen and immediately wake up. After a short while the login screen would be displayed, I’d type my password and be back where I started.

I read on the www.tabletquestions.com forum of other people who’d had similar problems and some had referred to a POWERCFG utility. This turned out to the problem on my PC.

I ran this utility (in a Command window, as administrator) with the “–DEVICEQUERY wake-armed” parameters and got a list of hardware devices that would wake the PC up. This showed:

C:\Windows\system32>powercfg -devicequery wake_armed
Standard 101/102-Key or Microsoft Natural PS/2 Keyboard
Microsoft USB Wheel Mouse Optical

So if there was activity on my mouse or keyboard, the system would wake up from sleep. It seems that when going to sleep, there’s enough activity from the mouse to wake the system up. Also I didn’t really want the PC to wake up just because I’d moved the mouse out of the way on my desk. So I disabled the mouse as a wake-up device:

C:\Windows\system32>powercfg -devicedisablewake “Microsoft USB Wheel Mouse Optical”

Now the devicequery request does not show the mouse:

C:\Windows\system32>powercfg -devicequery wake_armed
Standard 101/102-Key or Microsoft Natural PS/2 Keyboard

It could be argued I don’t want the keyboard to wake the PC up either, but my motherboard does support wake from sleep on the keyboard so I might give that a go in the future – at the moment it’s disabled in the BIOS.

Anyway my PC now goes to sleep.

Why write about this now, since the problem happened with RC1 and did not resurface when I installed a full version of Vista. Until yesterday when I replaced the power supply and case. It’s possible that changing the PSU caused Vista to lose its power settings.