Isambard Kingdom Brunel was one of the greatest civil engineers the world has ever seen. His genius combined his father’s sense of innovation with a wider grasp of strategic vision which saw him develop not only a comprehensive railway system, but also a network of transatlantic passenger steamers. One of these steamers - the SS Great Britain - has now been restored and opened to the public in her original dry-dock in Bristol, England. In this episode we explore Brunel’s origins, his development of the Great Western Railway and his most famous ship.
1. 2 Responses to “SS Great Britain, Bristol, England” 2. By Alan Friedman Whenever I try to download one of your new episodes from the www, I get the following error notice:
Forbidden You don’t have permission to access /media/APTV_2008-09-02.mp4 on this server.”
Also, when I try to download via iTunes, I get error messages and the episode does not download.
This became a problem about a month or two ago, when the appearance of your web site changed.
Any suggestions? I enjoy your episodes, and find them very educational
3. By admin o Dear Alan, Thanks for the comments. It is true that the site is experiencing quite substantial problems; these all seem to have originated about two months ago when APTV’s web-hosting company decided unilaterally to move the site to a different server. This caused a large number of problems and severely affected the performance of the site.
When I initially started APTV, I didn’t realise how popular it would become, and so opted for a ‘budget’ web-hosting company who seemed to offer everything needed at a low cost. The podcast is now pretty popular, and the server on which it is now hosted is struggling to cope. This is apparently why so many authentication and 403 errors are encountered.
I hope eventually to move the site to a more robust platform, which will also speed up download times, but in the meantime there are a couple of things that may help.
I’ve now moved the latest episode to a different server which may make iTunes downloads a little more reliable, you might also try downloading the WMV version from the ‘downloads’ page.
Finally, if all else fails, the mobile version of APTV is available at m.AncientPlaces and on iTunes as AncientPlaces. As these files are a lot smaller than the HD version, they are a lot quicker to download, and consequently more reliable.
