Synology Disk Station Network Drive

Synology Diskstation DS211j: My plan for world domination involved gathering all the media taking up oodles of disk space on the computers in the house, including my sons’ vast and growing music and video files, into one place tucked in a corner. There are lots of products that appear to be designed to do exactly what I wanted – but lots of them seem to get very bad reviews notably the nicely designed iomega StorCentre. The Synology drive is currently priced at £265 by Amazon (with two 1T drives installed) and gets much better reviews. Their support and website information is impressive, the actual interface is nice

and crucially the box itself is very quiet. As promised it serves iTunes music perfectly, photos (in spite of IPhoto’s ridiculous system) quite well but movies play just a little too slowly over my network and falter every now and then. The drive can be accessed via a handful of iPhone apps and can be set up as a web server. So far, I recommend this.

Next year’s tour

Despite western Europe having better weather, better food and drink, nice accommodation, languages that I can make myself understood in, and being closer to home I am drawn, for my travels, to those former communist eastern countries. Perhaps they are more slavicly exotic. They are certainly less familiar and harder to understand how things work. No sooner am I home from one motorcycle camping adventure than I am thinking about the next. I have been looking at Ukraine but I think it is too ambitious, certainly too far. Its exciting because it is on the easterly road to Russia and the stans and finally China. Instead I’m starting to look at Hungary and Slovenia to add to a trip that includes Germany, Austria, Czech republic and Slovakia (a country I’ve been wanting to revisit for a while).
The next stop is trip planning.

Gallows Hill to Home

Last day Cumbria to home

This is such a good campsite. Its just a field with some basic facilities and it can only make a small amount of money for its owner but it does a good job. Its on a gentle slope and had a beautiful view over the valley. Chickens scratch around the site and in the next field are sheep and horses. On my two visits its not been crowded and reminds me of the Wee Campsite up in Scotland that was hopeless in terms of noise and disturbance as everyone was packed so close like terraced housing. But in contrast Gallows Hill has so much space. Its also perfectly placed for a journey from the south up to Scotland.

Traveling back home was easy. With earplugs in I sat in the outside lane for much of the journey and thundered back home. Out of curiosity I left the A1 to see what Grantham had to offer, assuming it would be a pretty coaching town like Stamford. If it was I didn’t see it. Tired after just over two hours on the bike I tried to park in a car park there but it was built on such a steep slope that it was impossible to get off the bike and put the bike on its stand (I carry a small block of wood nowadays for these places) so I headed off – without earplugs. Already I can’t believe how I used to ride without them. They make you go faster!

The whole trip was 1400 miles with 33 hours of riding.

So now I’m back home and thinking about the next trip. Lets chose somewhere a little more exotic and somewhere with better weather.

What I ought o learn from this trip: if you are travelling somewhere where wet weather is likely (Scotland, Norway – you get the idea) its really better to book hotels than try to camp.

Suggestions?

Stats:

Miles 204.7Average 58Max 86Riding time 3.5