For the past few years I've worn Asics Nimbus, and I like them a lot, but the price inflation in the last 12-18 months has been insane. The last pair I bought were about £70, now they're retailing at a mere £150. That's far too expensive.

With a Black Friday offer that went down to £100, and with a 15% off voucher code, £85.

But I also ordered a pair of Saucony Triumphs which I hope will prove to be a cheaper alternative in future.
[...]]]> Or so it was supposed to be, but in reality I bought a new pair of running shoes as Strava has been nagging me that I've run over 900km in my current pair (actually far more as I was using them for some time before signing up to Strava).

For the past few years I've worn Asics Nimbus, and I like them a lot, but the price inflation in the last 12-18 months has been insane. The last pair I bought were about £70, now they're retailing at a mere £150. That's far too expensive.

With a Black Friday offer that went down to £100, and with a 15% off voucher code, £85.

But I also ordered a pair of Saucony Triumphs which I hope will prove to be a cheaper alternative in future.
]]> https://blog.asgaard.co.uk/2016/11/20/plusnet-are-a-mess-packet-loss Sun, 20 Nov 16 14:14:07 +0000 https://blog.asgaard.co.uk/2016/11/20/plusnet-are-a-mess-packet-loss I have 40mb fibre broadband from Plusnet which for well over a year and a half was absolutely fine. Around the start of July I was promised a free upgrade to 55mb which didn't materialise. Instead, the connection began experiencing large amounts of packet loss during daytime and evening, but virtually none between midnight and 7AM.

Despite a very long and active thread on their forums detailing the same issue among a large number of people, when I submitted a fault report they appeared oblivious to any underlying problem and I didn't get anywhere. After several weeks exhausting their very support (which takes up to a week to respond and isn't helpful when it does), I disconnected for a few hours before reconnecting and ended up on a different part of the network, and all was fine again.

Until yesterday...

I noticed that the 55mb upgrade had been switched on at some point, but the reason I noticed this was because I did a speed test when trying to diagnose an unreliable connection. Yes, the[...]]]> I have 40mb fibre broadband from Plusnet which for well over a year and a half was absolutely fine. Around the start of July I was promised a free upgrade to 55mb which didn't materialise. Instead, the connection began experiencing large amounts of packet loss during daytime and evening, but virtually none between midnight and 7AM.

Despite a very long and active thread on their forums detailing the same issue among a large number of people, when I submitted a fault report they appeared oblivious to any underlying problem and I didn't get anywhere. After several weeks exhausting their very support (which takes up to a week to respond and isn't helpful when it does), I disconnected for a few hours before reconnecting and ended up on a different part of the network, and all was fine again.

Until yesterday...

I noticed that the 55mb upgrade had been switched on at some point, but the reason I noticed this was because I did a speed test when trying to diagnose an unreliable connection. Yes, the packet loss is back.

So I disconnected again hoping to end up on a different part of the network, and it sort of worked in that I went from 200.* (or was it 209?) to 146.198.*, but unfortunately 146.198.* is getting around 20% packet loss.

Oh, and since reconnecting, I'm back on 40mb.

]]> https://blog.asgaard.co.uk/2016/11/06/insulation Sun, 06 Nov 16 19:59:06 +0000 https://blog.asgaard.co.uk/2016/11/06/insulation The overnight temperature getting worrying close to freezing, even though it's only the beginning of November, prompted me to take action.

Several layers of bubble wrap will hopefully give the soil an extra degree or two.

So far there's no reason to think they're faring any differently to the plants in the unheated conservatory, which is usually a few degrees warmer, but occasionally shoots up to 30°C for short periods if the sun comes out. Both sets of plants have very noticeably slowed their growth and might halt it entirely soon. Traps on the Venus Fly Traps are dying faster than new ones are growing.

Note the unfortunate wasp that wandered head first into the venus fly trap.[...]]]> The overnight temperature getting worrying close to freezing, even though it's only the beginning of November, prompted me to take action.

Several layers of bubble wrap will hopefully give the soil an extra degree or two.

So far there's no reason to think they're faring any differently to the plants in the unheated conservatory, which is usually a few degrees warmer, but occasionally shoots up to 30°C for short periods if the sun comes out. Both sets of plants have very noticeably slowed their growth and might halt it entirely soon. Traps on the Venus Fly Traps are dying faster than new ones are growing.

Note the unfortunate wasp that wandered head first into the venus fly trap.]]> https://blog.asgaard.co.uk/2016/11/03/the-most-important-feature-of-a-blockchain-is-motivation Thu, 03 Nov 16 20:16:58 +0000 https://blog.asgaard.co.uk/2016/11/03/the-most-important-feature-of-a-blockchain-is-motivation A lot of people have recently become very excited about various imagined applications of The Blockchain, which is what underlies Bitcoin.

The blockchain, in simple words, is a distributed database where nobody adding to it trusts anyone else, but they do, as a whole, trust the collective group of everyone contributing to it.

Something these people are missing is that the blockchain is interesting precisely because of this trust model. The trust model is what makes it able to handle situations that couldn't be handled by a traditional database or even a git repository.

You don't need a blockchain if:

1. You don't need a database, or
2. Nobody but you needs to write to the database, or
3. You trust everyone else who needs to write to the database, or
4. Everyone who needs to write to the database all trust one or more people who can write to the database

The blockchain becomes useful when you have a large number of people who need to write to a database and any one user doesn't trust at least one of [...]]]> A lot of people have recently become very excited about various imagined applications of The Blockchain, which is what underlies Bitcoin.

The blockchain, in simple words, is a distributed database where nobody adding to it trusts anyone else, but they do, as a whole, trust the collective group of everyone contributing to it.

Something these people are missing is that the blockchain is interesting precisely because of this trust model. The trust model is what makes it able to handle situations that couldn't be handled by a traditional database or even a git repository.

You don't need a blockchain if:

1. You don't need a database, or
2. Nobody but you needs to write to the database, or
3. You trust everyone else who needs to write to the database, or
4. Everyone who needs to write to the database all trust one or more people who can write to the database

The blockchain becomes useful when you have a large number of people who need to write to a database and any one user doesn't trust at least one of the other users.

But there's another important component: Your blockchain is useless if you are accepting entries from untrusted users without verifying them, and verification takes time and resources. Bitcoin motivates people to donate their resources because it's tied to a currency so people get some monetary value out of it.

It is difficult to see how smaller and more private blockchains could work while still retaining the properties that makes a blockchain special. Once you strip away those properties, what you have is more like a git repository where you have a chain of transactions which can be verified cryptographically to be in the correct sequence.]]>