Alicatt

Congrats, they grow up fast, make the most of the time you have with them :) They soon make you a grand father :D

Last night on the Around the Verse community video program Zane Bien was waxing lyrical about DCS A-10 through the Oculus Rift DK2 and how he was getting his inspiration from it for designing the HUD and user interface for the ships in Star Citizen. Starting at 15:11 Alicatt

Ahh you bring back memories of a great holiday in Nova Scotia, no diving tho :( I was up north around the Grand Mira River and looking at property to buy as a holiday home, but between the black fly and the mosquitos I shelved the idea! Nice house tho and prices were very good compared with the UK: Victoria Bridge, Grand Mira North. One thing I did notice was that there were a lot of Micmac with the same family name as me :) My deepest dive was around 38m (125ft) and that was diving for scallops too, that was how I funded the petrol for the 85hp outboard for my little boat, for a bag weighing about 40kg I would get around £125 (1995), two of us would do that a couple of times a month, it helped pay mooring fees petrol and air fills.

Lots more pics here https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/with/15775658322 Really enjoyed listening in to the livestream, you can watch the recording here http://new.livestream.com/accounts/362/events/3544091 Tomorrow they are having a Google hangout for more info on what has happened over night.

Nice picture :) Couldn't afford a housing for my camera to take it underwater and the little disposable ones, well after 2m the buttons were permanently depressed so you could not operate the shutter release. Tide Tables were the bible for diving around the coast in northern Scotland, most of the inshore waters were around 10m to 25m then a shelf down to aprox 50m, the majority of the North Sea is quite shallow comparatively. Night Dives: It was a club night dive in Wick Bay, we would be going in at Proudfoot close to the sunken SS Isleford ( http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/site/101904/details/isleford+north+head+wick+bay+north+sea/ ) Going in the surface layer of fresh water from the Wick River brings a layer of brownish peaty water usually only about 25mm thick but when the tide is coming in it can get thicker. Horrible stuff, it's ok going in through and under it but coming back out it coats everything and you really have to wash it all off thoroughly, not just the normal rinsing off of the salt water. We went in about 70m from the boiler of the Isleford and swam towards it which we soon found. Then following my brothers instructions swam towards where the engine should be, along the way I found a brass plaque Drawing of the plaque: Also found some machinery but never found out what it was and never found it again! After the dive I made enquires about the plaque but drew a blank other than the company made catering equipment. On a subsequent night dive I found a 15" or 16" shell, hard to tell with all the barnacles on it, it was a solid shot, but still quite scary when I came across it :) there was a lot of ordinance laying around the bottom so we removed ourselves from the area and called the coastguard about it, the clearance divers came along later that summer and did a controlled explosion of material, man it was loud and sent a dirty plume of water a few hundred feet in the air.

Night diving is fun, make sure you have a compass and be aware if you are diving around a wreck then the iron in it can affect the reading. I loved to drift dive with the tide along the cliff face of the southern side of Sinclair bay, quite invigorating when you want to stop and you are fighting against a 3kt tide. Because of the shape of the bay, the tidal flow along the south side was always in the same direction - out to sea on both ebb and flood- so boat cover was always required. The further north you went the stronger the tide with it reaching an easy 16kt as it flows past John O'Groats, giving you aprox. 15-20 minutes of slack water when you can dive.

Nearest I got to a shark like creature under water was an encounter with a sleeping dogfish which was a little over 3ft long, I swam up behind it and caught it in my hands... It is amazing how flexible they are! I had caught it one hand behind the gills and one round the tail. It wriggled and flexed then tried to bite the hand I had around the tail, it took all my strength to stop it. Then the next question arose - now I have it what do I do with it, my dive buddy was creased up in laughter and his head was in a cloud of bubbles. I managed to "throw" it away from me as I finned backwards and it swam off out towards the mouth of the bay. You can find them resting and sleeping in the kelp and seaweed during the day.

Started diving with a PADI instructor but completed my training with a BSAC club. Used to dive around the north coast of Scotland, lots of interesting sights there both natural and man-made. My first ever dive was with my younger brother who had been diving for a few years, this was in the early 70s. I was given a little talk through on and practice with the scuba gear before jumping into the North Sea - no real training at all :) water was crystal clear and about 10m deep, I was diving in a gully between two fingers of rock jutting out into Wick Bay. Finning down to the bottom I found an old WW2 anti ship mine wedged in a crevice in the rocks, half the side of the mine had rotted away and it was an empty shell with seaweed and barnacles growing on it, you could see the horns of the detonators sticking out from the case but they were all covered in barnacles too. Most worryingly was the lobster creel sitting about half a meter from it, thoughts of what could have happened if a creel had hit the mine and set it off, the small creel-boats would not have stood a chance. It was nearly 20 years later that I had my next opportunity to dive and that was with the PADI instructor, I had enjoyed my first dive and this next dive went flawlessly, we had a few more dives an I started to learn how to do it properly. Dave the PADI instructor moved away from the area and along with a few friends I joined the local sub-aqua club with was affiliated with the British Sub Aqua Club (BSAC) and completed my training as an open water diver. I have dived on a WW1 German Destroyer, the V81, which had been rescued from the scuttling of the German High Seas Fleet in Scapa Flow in 1919 only to founder in bad weather when under tow to Rosyth, she sank a few km north of Wick under the eye of an old Viking stronghold called Lambaborg ( http://www.caithness.org/caithness/castles/lambaborg/ ) I have stood inside the steam turbines of the ship, the low pressure end is over 2m in diameter and the seabed is strewn with impeller blades from the turbines, I do have one memento of that dive, a deck cap from a pipe: The entry in my log book!

A heavier barrel lessens the felt recoil, it is one of the reasons why match target rifles have a much heavier barrel, but not the only reason. Carlos Hathcock, US Marine corps sniper, used a modified M2 as a sniper rifle, firing it in single shot with a locked breech, he made his longest kill at 2500 yds.

If it has wings, an engine, and can fly, then I love it :D Grandson loves the F4U Corsair

I know I'm going back a few years...mid to late 70s :) when I was an engineer working at Grampian Records We used Calrec 1000 series mics in the main, which actual model depended on the characteristics of the performance being recorded. If the performer was particularly sibilant then we would use a Neuman U67 mic as it had better sibilance reduction. But then again in the band I played in we used Shure mics - mainly because we could not afford the Clarecs

It's a lovely aircraft to see flying which I have had the privilege to see a few times at different airshows over the years.

We have a Sherman Firefly as a war memorial here in Hechtel-Eksel, the next town over Leopoldsburg also has one. Hechtel-Eksel: Leopoldsburg:

It was images like that, that put me off getting a projector in 1998 until we got into 1080p, even now if I stand beside my screen I can see the individual pixels, but from the seating position it looks great. I have tried a VR headset a few years ago, it was displaying Microsoft's Flight Sim and it made me feel quite bad, I'm wondering how the Rift would affect me esp. as my eyes are not in alignment.

Been using Track IR since it came out, great device, I'm now using the Track IR 5/pro clip but it still works with the original baseball cap I got with v1

Same here, touch screen tablet laptop and win8/8.1 doesn't have drivers that work with it properly so sticking with Win7 64 10 is the new 8.2 ;)

Arrrg! Pman just went in with a bucket of Nando's sauce... What chickens were those again?

Found another couple of old pictures of bikes I've had BSA M33, it was a bike built to haul a sidecar around, it had the frame from a BSA M21 and the engine from a BSA B33, it was made by BSA in 1955 so is a year older than me :) I got this Suzuki GT380M in 1976 and ran it for more years than I can remember, it had 120,000miles on it when I sold it and it still ran well.

Maybe the site you linked from doesn't allow hot linking? Nice looking bike tho, you can see the pic if you open it in another browser tab

On a lighter note My father on his 350 Cotton during WW2 in Glen Coe Scotland My cousins on their Triumph Tiger Cub My son and myself on my Yamaha R1 I'm in France on my FJR1300

A friend had a TR1 1000cc V twin Yamaha, he bought a nice set of shiny anodised blue handlebars for it and he put them on it. I got a phone call to say the bike wouldn't start and could I come and have a look, which I did. A nice property of anodising is that it is very high resistance to the point of being a good insulator so none of the switches on the handlebar had an earth return. I offered to take a little of the anodising off under the switch so they would make contact and work but my friend said no he didn't want the handlebars marked. I ran a hidden wire to provide an earth return and the bike worked again :) My friend took the bike out for a short run to make sure everything was ok, and he didn't return... I waited about 30minutes or so and went off to look for him. He had stalled the bike turning around to come back spotted the earth wire under the handlebar and ripped it off and so the bike would not start. When we got back to his house I took the handlebars off, cleaned off the anodising in the areas it needed to make contact and put it all back together again. I have many tales just like that about my friend, I was forever hauling him out of trouble. Alas I could not help him on his last day when he got it wrong at high speed into the front of a large 4x4.

Same, when the sun comes out to play my TR5/Pro clip goes haywire, but I am sitting looking out a south facing window here. I went from a TR2 to the TR5 with Pro Clip what a difference :)

Been using an SSD on my laptop since august 2010, it is used daily but not for games, I must get round to putting one in my desktop PC soon :) This PC is on it's last legs now and I'm nursing it a long for a little while longer. When I build my next PC it will have a SSD from the word go.

Bacon? I'll take that on Spek (met pannekoek en stroop) ;)

Oh interesting, just found a place to take the grandson :) and it looks like they have a Mig-21 too