Thanks to iiNet's latest round of quota increases (read: buying capacity on PPC-1 made us drop our pants data is so cheap now), quota is now a problem again.

Being able to consume 600GB/mo of traffic opens the doors to all kind of silliness that one might not have previously thought practical. And as such, I've found that we once again have the need to schedule our downloads so we don't blow our quota during the peak/offpeak periods:

An hours worth of work with PERL and the iiNet Usage XML API, and the SabNZBD API, I have a tool which updates the download rate of my usenet weirdness.

Instead of a basic schedule which doesn't provide any guarantees your overall usage will be below schedule, this one takes into account your quota, offpeak/onpeak times and remaining data for the month - and sets SabNZBD to throttle so you'll end up hitting your target quota usage perfectly, no matter what everyone else in the household does.

Throw in some other nice bits like upper boundaries (eg: keep 250kB/s free for other traffic), etc - and this script should go down a treat. There are only two features left to implement:

• Better 'buffer-zone' support: Currently the script will target a safe 'buffer' zone, that is - you can tell it you always want 20gb free for other use. The script should back-off the buffer (logarithmic?) at the end of the month to more efficiently use the bandwidth.

• Link Speed awareness: The script uses a hardcoded link size to use for bandwidth reservation. Whilst this is really best implemented with QoS at the border, it's still a nice feature to have - and maybe it should scrape the current link speed from the modem.

In related news, I'm out of storage space. Time to up the ante on the storage project. I've had my Norco 4220 chassis sitting here for about two months waiting for me to buy an X58-based mainboard and Core i7 CPU, as well as some nice fresh new drives to sit on my LSI disk controllers. Which brings me to my final point - I'm not normal. Normal people don't do this kind of thing. Normal people turn on the TV and watch Neighbours.

But you know what? Not being normal rocks.

Quick update on the ginger wine front, I'm having real trouble getting the yeast to do its thing on the wine.

I'm using EC1118 at the recommendation of the fine people over at Brewcraft, but it's been difficult to get it to do anything much past pitching it.

At first I thought it was temperature related, but keeping it insulated and actively heating it during the night hasn't helped any.

Now I'm beginning to think that either the pH of the ginger wine solution is too low, or that the solution is anaerobic because it's so dense... something like that, yeah.

Will have to call the good people at Brewcraft unless anyone has some advice for me?

So I've had my bike for a month now, and I'm pretty happy with it so far. I've ridden approximately 90km on it over six rides, including two commutes.

The plan, if I see it through - is to do four 12km commutes to/from work in a week, and at least one 20+ km ride on the weekend. But I'm not going to kill myself to do it, so we'll see how that goes.

I've got a bit of drama with the gears on the bike though, the chain is slipping pretty regularly some of the time. That's not too uncommon with a new bike, as you wear in the shifter cables they get some slack.

I've taken the bike for its first service (albeit a bit early), and had them tighten up the cable which has helped a lot, but it's still a bit of a problem so more investigation is required.

That aside it's great fun to get out and ride, it's been simply years since I've been for a proper ride and I'm not nearly as shitted afterwards as I thought I would be. Hooray.

Anyway, my short term goal is to crack 100km, which I'm set to do tomorrow when I do my next ride home from work, and also to get up to 20km/hr consistently on all my rides.

I'm keeping track of my rides with Bikemap.net and MyCyclingLog which is useful, but not very accurate when you're going on overpasses/etc and the elevation data is wrong - might be time to find a very cheap second hand GPS or some such, as the iPhone apps I've tried as abysmal.

Most rewarding experience of the week? Riding across this deceptively steep overpass two days in a row without stopping or feeling like I'm about to die.

Hooray.