Having won Pinch&Punch for the month of June by sending Rita an email message at 12.00am, my day was set up for being a good one!. After an early breakfast and some gloating on the phone with Rita, I headed up to the market. After weeks of looking for a beanie, I saw a single beanie on display and bought it immediately – a bargain at 6euro. Rita has also found one in Bern (an ice hockey team beanie with the Bern Bear logo), so now I will have two, just in time for the weather to warm up!

The drier weather seems to have brought out more stall-holders and customers today at the Market.

The river levels have now fallen substantially, as confirmed by the river level monitoring website, showing the levels at Moissaic and three upstream monitoring stations (Ste-Livrade, Montauban and St-Sulpice, in increasing order of distance from Moissac), which are shown to peak earlier than Moissac. Comparing Moissac and Montauban shows that there is about an 8 hour lag between the peak at the two places – a useful statistic for future use.

In checking out the Speedway website for the Live Streaming of the British GP from Cardiff tonight, I found that it could not be received in France, because it was blocked by the UK distributors. I therefore investigated ways in which I might be able to receive it by having the website thinking I was connecting from somewhere other than France (where the Live Streaming would be permitted) via the use of a VPN (Virtual Private Network). VPNs started life as a way for businesses to connect their staff with the their main computer in Head Office when those staff were on the road (I already use a type of VPN, called LogMeIn, to connect with my desktop computer back home when I am on the barge - see here for how I used it a few days ago). However, the use of VPNs has become more popular recently for another purpose - to fool a destination website into thinking it is being accessed from a different location than where the user is actually located. This has become more popular because of the practice of GeoBlocking - restricting access to certain sites to only some geographic areas. This was exactly the problem I was facing - not able to watch a program in France that had originated in the UK. So I Googled some reviews of VPNs for the Mac and found quite a few, with “HideMyAss” being one of the most recommended. So I downloaded and installed the ProVPN software (noting the extra steps to make it run with the Mountain Lion OS), and within the hour I was able to establish a connection via Spain, and then be able to watch the Speedway in Cardiff. This VPN might also enable me to watch the ABC Iview site in Australia, by making it think that I am logging in from Australia.