SS Richard Montgomery

I was just surfing the internet and I found some information about what lies off the shore of Southend. It's all pretty worrying especially when you read that it may contain weapons such as mustard gas.

Background Information

Video

World War II Caisson (Mulberry Harbour)

This is a ‘Phoenix’ caisson, its back broken, lying on the West Knock sandbank about 1.8 km off Thorpe Bay. The caisson is a section of temporary ‘Mulberry Harbour’ intended to be used in the Normandy landings following D Day, for the rapid re-supply of troops. The Mulberry Harbours were planned to extend 3.5 km along the coast and extend 1.75 km out to sea. The Mulberry Harbour formed at Arromanches played a crucial role in on the success of the landings. This caisson was being towed from Immingham, on the Humber, to Southsea in the run up to D Day, when it sprang a leak and was brought into the Thames estuary and allowed to sink.

The Mulberry Harbour also gives its name to the Mulberry Restaurant, Roslin Hotel in Thorpe Bay.

My Mother bought a new laptop, so she gave me back the Dell Inspiron 3800. I downloaded Slackware 11.0 and put it on it and even got my wifi (Netgear WAG511) working with the madwifi drivers. I have WPA on it to boot! It's tons better than Windoze.

Here are two pictures of Mandy's second attempt at making me a wallet made from duct-tape. It utilises a couple of rare-earth magnets to close the wallet securely.

This is actually better than my old wallet and that's where the zip came from! This was inspired by an article in Make magazine.

In the next week or so I will make some LED throwies. I have ordered all the stuff needed from the internet. That's the 10mm diffused LEDs, the lithium batteries and the NdFeB Disc Magnets - from China and the UK. I also have a roll of 25mm 3M glass fibre cross-weave tape to secure all the throwie components together. I should have enough stuff to make 50 LED Throwies - however I will probably make something based on the ideas of Max Magnus see here, because I don't really want to pollute the environment with the batteries and the fact that I want to keep them. They look really cool - we had a talk from the Director of Eyebeam OpenLab, NY at the MediaShed and that's what inspired me.

I have finally completed my ftp shell script. What it does is compresses all of Mandy's work files and then encrypts it using my gpg key and then sends (by ftp) it to my ISP server.

As a nice touch I made it a cron job, so that it automatically does all of this at 8:30pm every Sunday. The great thing is that it also sends Mandy an email to report on the success of the operation. This is so cool.

Hooray for Linux!