It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about the 2 way radios in my car. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time (4 days in total!) reworking the entire boot of the car to tidy things up and make them much more presentable!

Here are some photos of the new setup.

There is still a little bit of tidying up of wiring etc - but it’s a very nice setup and leaves HEAPs of boot space available for every day usage.

Ingredients

• 2 cups plain flour
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon pepper
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup cold water
• 1 cup cold milk

Method

1. Sieve flour into a bowl and add salt and pepper.
2. Make a well in the flour and add the eggs.
3. Add water and milk.
4. Beat with a electric beater until smooth.
5. Leave to stand for about 30 minutes.
6. Place a teaspoon of oil into each of 12 muffins pans, place in a preheated oven at 220C and let heat for about 10 minutes.
7. Remove from oven and pour the batter into the pans.

Cook for about 30 minutes or until the puddings have risen and browned slightly.

Recipe notes You may have to add a little extra milk and water if the batter is too thick. It should be like a pikelet batter. The batter can be strained to get rid of any unwanted lumps.

Allan Hall, Berlin September 1, 2009 - 12:00AM

A DRUNK amateur pilot had to be guided to land by a rescue helicopter after he radioed the control tower of his airfield to ask: ‘‘Where the bloody hell have you hidden yourself?’’

The 65-year-old drank a large quantity of beer and wine before flying over the central German state of Thuringia in his Cessna light aircraft on Saturday.

Once airborne, he continued to drink while at the controls. Two hours later he was happy but alcoholically challenged - so much so he was unable to read the instruments telling him where the Schoengleida airfield was.

'’Come on, I know you’re down there,’’ he radioed. ‘‘Where the bloody hell have you hidden yourself?’’

Control tower staff say he also sang a few songs, cracked a mother-in-law joke and told them to ‘‘pull their fingers out as I’ve got a party to go to’’.

Fearing instrument failure, the tower scrambled a rescue helicopter, which homed in on the man in clear-blue skies west of the airport, and gave instructions for the pilot to follow it back.

Officials at Schoengleida said the pilot, who has not been named, managed to make a safe landing.

'’But when the helicopter pilot went over to see him, that was when he got the full force of the alcohol fumes in his face,’’ a spokesman said.

The man wobbled from the cockpit to his car. Airfield authorities alerted police.

He was stopped on the way home, breathalysed, and found to be nearly four times over the legal limit for driving.

Now he has lost his pilot’s licence - and his driving licence.

From The Age.

I’ve been tinkering a lot with Google Maps lately on my Windows Mobile based phone - and it just doesn’t quite have the edge to dislodge TomTom as a navigation platform. There are multiple problems with the way Google Maps is implemented that takes it from navigation solution to a mere playtoy.

1) Route planning. If you’ve ever had much of a play with the Get Directions part of Google Maps, then you know what I mean by this. Google Maps is known to not do this task very well. As an example of this, take a look at this screenshot of it’s awesome route planning skills :)

2) No adaptive route planning. Whenever you drive off the recommended route, the planning doesn’t keep up - this means if a road is closed, or you ignore a stupid plan like the one as an example to point #1 then you are out of luck in having Google Maps re-plan the route for you. Sure, you can manually get it to re-plot things from your current location and start the whole game again, but this is a trivial matter that should be handled automatically!

3) Stupid backlight handling! This is a major point for me. While Google have made a good point and made the software respect the backlight settings that Windows Mobile have been set with (via Start -> Settings -> System -> Backlight), the most useful purpose of Google Maps is rendered useless by having to keep tapping the screen or a button to stop the backlight turning off while attempting to use Google Maps as navigation software!

If these above issues can be fixed in newer versions of Google Maps then TomTom may have some very good competition - as the integration of searching for businesses etc within Google Maps would be VERY hard for TomTom to compete with - but at the moment, I won’t be switching my navigation software to Google Maps any time soon.

Yes, it’s that time of year for a new cycle of the AirServices DAPs.

These are now compiled and available here.