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Archives for October, 2019

Sheshan Forest Park

October 27th, 2019

Shanghai seems almost totally flat but there’s actually two little hills out in the suburbs to the west at a place called Sheshan (佘山). Just take metro line 9 to the station with the same name and then bus number 92 from outside. The “forest park” is nice enough but the main attraction is a Catholic church and observatory on the top of the western hill.

Sheshan Basilica

This basilica has been here since 1924 but there’s been a church of some kind on this site since 1863. I actually came here last October but the building was closed for renovation. This time there was a wedding. Maybe better luck next time…

Sheshan observatory

The observatory was originally built by Jesuit missionaries. There’s an exhibition inside which is worth looking at around, but it’s all in Chinese.

The photos below are a mix of this week’s trip and my original visit last year which I forgot to blog about.

✈️ A380 ✔️

October 19th, 2019

I finally got to fly on an A380 for the first time when I went home last month.
On the way out I got an economy seat upstairs at the front of the plane. More than a little bit excited.

Dubai airport

Would have liked to spend a day or two in Dubai. Maybe next time…

Leaving Dubai

Folkestone

October 19th, 2019

I went to Folkestone with my parents last Saturday. My dad was visiting a model railway exhibition of all things. I don’t think I’ve ever explored the town before. From the news you might expect it to be very run-down, but there a quite a few quaint parts to the old town, and lots of interesting things to look at in the harbour.

The old Folkestone Harbour train station which was recently renovated. Note the signs in French: you could get straight off the train and onto a boat to France.

Lighthouse at the end of Folkestone harbour. You can almost see the white cliffs of Dover in the distance.

Metropole and Grand hotels. There was an interesting info board about their rivalry in the 19th century.

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Android Connectivity Check and NTP in Mainland China

October 13th, 2019

If you’re using an Android phone with LineageOS or similar close-to-stock ROM in mainland China you may have problems with NTP not syncing and every WiFi network being marked as “no internet access”.

By default Android tries to access http://connectivitycheck.android.com/generate_204 to determine if a network has internet access. This is also used for captive portal detection. The android.com domain is completely blocked by the Great Firewall.

The default NTP server is 2.android.pool.ntp.org. At lease some of the servers in this pool are either blocked or have poor connectivity from China.

You could work around this by using a VPN all the time. But it’s actually easy to change these settings, and you only need ADB access, not root.

First change the connectivity check URL to Google’s China holding page.

adb shell settings put global captive_portal_http_url 'http://www.google.cn/generate_204'
adb shell settings put global captive_portal_https_url 'https://www.google.cn/generate_204'

You can use another URL that generates a HTTP 204 response if you don’t want to rely on anything Google.

Next change the NTP server:

adb shell settings put global ntp_server pool.ntp.org

pool.ntp.org should give servers geographically close to you. Alternatively you might like to use cn.pool.ntp.org.

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Lego Submarine

October 11th, 2019

When I was child I had a bit of a thing about building Lego submarines. I think it started after we went on a day out to the soviet submarine in Folkstone, sadly no longer open to the public. Anyway it seems I’ve still got the skillz.

At the front we have the sleeping area for the crew and some missiles. The next room is the on-board dentist because… reasons. Followed by the crew relaxation area and the nuclear reactor / engine room at the rear. Upstairs is the control room.

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Around Willingdon

October 6th, 2019

I went for a short walk on the South Downs near Willingdon with my parents last week.

Going up the steep hill from the village

This isn’t far from where I grew up but I only got into walking long after I moved away from Hastings so I haven’t explored here at all. Hope I can come back one day and do a longer linear walk, to Brighton, say.

Hastings Beach

October 4th, 2019

Back in Hastings at the moment. The weather this week has been rather uninspiring but it did clear up a bit yesterday afternoon and I took some photos on the beach.

Fishing boats

This ferris wheel is relatively new. Never seen it going…

The harbour arm

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Lunar Lander 0.7

October 1st, 2019

I spent a little time recently updating my lunar lander game. Nothing much changed gameplay-wise but I cleaned up the code and build system, and rewrote all the graphics code away from the “legacy” OpenGL fixed-function pipeline. I also fixed a number of small issues and removed the artificial fixed 30fps frame rate.

I’ve made an experimental foray into Flatpak packaging so the game is also available on Flathub! This the most convenient way to install. Either find it in Gnome Software or use the command line:

flatpak install flathub uk.me.doof.Lander

If you want you can also get the source code on GitHub or directly.