Sailing out of Swanage Bay in a dinghy is always a bit of adventure. Today was from Swanage to Studland beach and back, about a nine mile trip.
The video shows the calmest parts, it was pretty hairy at times out of the sheltered waters. The lesson learned today, get your angles right so you don’t have to tack in the middle of a tidal race.
I had a rather dramatic equipment failure in my RS Vareo during a windy race mid June with my boom snapping in half. It was corroded around mainsheet pulley clip in any case, the kicker was too loose, a gust must have pulled the boom out of the gooseneck, it hit the hull and snapped. Fortunately a safety boat was close by to get me back and the sail was ok.
I borrowed a boom till the new one was sorted out then got back into the groove, with some success; third and fourth in two cup races. The third position race was a really light wind day and valuable lessons were learned about finding clean air and good practice was had of minimising body movements and rudder. Continue reading “June / July 2018 Sailing”
Sometimes you don’t need a CMS and want to keep things as simple as possible. For my use case I wanted sailing club race officers to be able to upload Sailwave race results and display them in the most simple way possible.
To achieve that and ensure isolation from the website’s WordPress CMS I added a subdomain and configured a pretty Apache directory listing. Users now just upload files via FTP.
Assuming your website is running on the Apache web server, you can achieve the same with .htaccess and few tweaks.
See above example here, see the code which you can easily alter to suit on github.
More about this the Apache docs:
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_autoindex.html
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/howto/htaccess.html
If you’re familiar with the world of WordPress you’ll know that the next version of WordPress will ship with a new editor called Gutenberg. You can read all about Gutenberg over here and try it out too.
I confess I’ve been a late adopter till now; sure I’ve experimented with Gutenberg locally but I haven’t used it on a production site, mainly because on the one public site I currently personally manage, I simply didn’t have the time to be concerned with Gutenberg compatibility and also I didn’t want all post types edited with Gutenberg.
I work within WordPress.com VIP at Automattic and today we released a new plugin to help with Gutenberg testing and transition called Ramp.
Ramp basically let’s you control how you enable Gutenberg on your site. From the wordpress.org download page it says. Continue reading “How I’ve started using Gutenberg. Ramp!”
I was fortunate to have a coaching session with Sam Whaley, British Sailing Team member this week. It was an enlightening experience and looking at my notes, I have a lot to work on and practise which is great. Thanks Sam.
I also used my new action camera for the first time, an Akaso EK7000. The recording (clips above) was at 1080p (60FPS), it stored two files; 4.6GB 25 mins, and 3.5GB 21 mins, the battery died after 46 minutes and some condensation appeared on the inside of the waterproof casing. This disappeared quickly on opening the case.
I think it’d make sense to dry the camera on a sunny window sill before using for the first time to clear out any residual moisture. For the money I think it’s fine.
Last week I attended the WordPress.com VIP workshop in Napa and this time took a camera with some zoom to get some pictures of the local wildlife.
I saw some hummingbirds up close last year and was hoping to get better shots this year. I only saw one hummingbird briefly this year but nevertheless saw a variety of species I hadn’t seen before.
Western Bluebird. This pair lived outside my room and I got to know the male’s routine, he didn’t mind me getting up close at all. Continue reading “Birds in Napa”
At last I got out in my RS Vareo again today, the first sail of 2018. 🙂 Relatively light wind, good surfing conditions, good fun beating upwind through the waves and I got the kite up a good few times.
This is at Sandbanks in Poole, Dorset, UK. The wind was unusually blowing from South East making perfect conditions for a few hardcore kite surfers. Too windy for dinghy sailing and with a lee shore not possible to launch anyway 😦
Klaus Harris 