Farcebook

Author: james

  • Hoarding water for the summer

    Hoarding water for the summer

    I promise that this blog isn’t just a log of my attempt to cover my garden in plastic barrels of water, but it rains a lot in the winter, it doesn’t rain in the summer, I have a water meter and spraying chlorinated water on plants doesn’t seem like a good idea.

    I’ve replaced the small water butt next to my garden shed with a bigger one. The small one was full of some rather horrible smelling brown water. I think this is from the roof garden, but I’d have thought all of that would filter out the fine bits of soil up there by now?

    I managed to find enough bits of random drainpipe lying around to make things neatly flow into the water butt. It’s a bit awkward because there’s two pipes and only one hole in the lid.

    I then half filled the water butt using one of the others. I now have something like 700L of water storage now. Should help in the summer when it stops raining and I need to water things. Also when I water the roof garden and it starts to run out, it’ll go back into the water butt and not be wasted.

    In attempt at containing the mud and helping the lawn grow I’ve given it a good stabbing with a lawn aerator and then covered it in a layer of sand. The ground is full of clay and very sticky. I noticed that when it rains water runs over the surface of the ground instead of soaking in.

    I also put a bag of gravel on the slope behind the shed to control the rain that hits it. I’d like to find a few large stones and put them down too.

    The grass will be fine, it’ll come back. I’m planning on re-seeding it anyway with some grass that copes better in shaded locations.

    Finally I was getting tired of tracking mud into my shed, so found two paving slabs and just put them down as stepping stones. At the moment they’re lying on the surface of the ground. If I like where they are I’ll put them into the ground in a more permanent way.

    A typical British lawn with straggy grass, worm casts and the odd bit of moss.

    A job for warmer and drier weather is to sort out a more neat looking path.

  • Zen and the art of Cross Stitch

    Zen and the art of Cross Stitch

    “What did you do in the cold dark winter of 2022/23?”
    “Oh I took up cross stitch”

    Yeah so my partner likes making crafty things, and she does cross stitch. Although it’s a certain style of it. This isn’t doilies and pretty houses with quotes and nonsense under it. This is slightly more NSFW.

    Look how happy that sloth is!

    I was idly watching her make one and curiosity got the better of me – there was very little to watch on TV – after 30 seconds of explaining I was off making an equally NSFW picture of my own…

    I thnk that crocodile needs to be a logo

    This is a bit like those arty YouTube channels where they try a new skill, fart around for a bit, then try some large project to show off. Sure, there’s a certain amusement from stitching a dainty little creature that’s shouting obscenities but once you’ve done one the fun wears off a bit.

    Then I had a thought. During Christmas I was helping out at a local Christmas activities club, and one of the distraction activities was Hama beads. Those little cylindrical pellets of plastic waste you arrange into a picture, iron and have a wonky looking thing that passes as a bad coaster.

    There’s something quite nice about having to concentrate really hard on such a simple task. Copying a design takes zero effort, but getting adult sausage fingers to manipulate tiny bits of plastic requires conscious efforts. Patiently re-starting because you sneeze and flick your design onto the floor, knowing that’s the only option is also quite relaxing.

    Makes a 100% total opposite difference to trying to think really hard about programming, or teaching kids how to program. There’s nothing to compile, nothing to debug. And unlike drawing, there’s no real skill involved so you can’t do it badly.

    It appears cross stitch is the same, just without the slightly worrying contribution to increased plastic waste. The needle goes in the hole, it doesn’t stab your finger. Maybe you stitch away for half an hour, and realise you started from the wrong hole and now have to patiently unpick it and start over without getting upset and giving up.

    I decided I’d do a loading screen from my favourite ZX Spectrum game Rick Dangerous. Here’s the screen

    If you listen hard, you can still hear the loading… or is that tinitus?

    It’s 256×192 pixels. That’s 49,152 pixels. A cross stitch cross is made from two stitches. It’s a lot of poking a needle through a hole. I’ve got this far after a month.

    Cat for scale, no bananas in the house

    I’ll finish it eventually, it’s a nice alternative to staring at social media. I dipped into Facebook the other day, nothing exciting is going on. I have a new phone, I set up the wrong account in Twitter and just uninstalled the app.

    Take up weird obscure hobbies, the complete opposite to your normal activities. It is quite refreshing.

  • And the Shed Blew Over

    And the Shed Blew Over

    Got a bit of a surprise when I visited the plot yesterday, seems my shed tried to do a Wizard of Oz and take off. Didn’t get very far though…

    After checking for any flattened witches I set about trying to rectify the mess. I’d only gone there to dump some kitchen waste in the compost bin. It’s been raining for the past month so the ground is too soggy to do anything in. Also it’s winter.

    Can confirm, shed is not stood up correctly. Also it’s only gone and blown the bloody doors off. Those things are terrible and always need a good kicking to stay in their tracks at the best of times. Next door’s chickens were warily watching…

    It’s only a light metal shed so fortunately quite easy to stand up again. I even managed to get the drain pipe back in the water butt. Even better, all of this was done without slashing my wrists and face on the insanely sharp metal edging.

    In an attempt at stopping it from happening again I’ve put some plastic boxes on the roof full of water. They were originally stood on the floor full of water, so they might as well be useful. Helps increase my water storage capacity too.

    Yes, at some point in the future I will securely attach the whole thing to the ground somehow.

    Trying to make best of an annoying situation, I then figured the wind was hitting the big flat side of the shed, so moved the compost bins in front of it to give some shelter. It was also a good excuse to turn the contents of the compost bins over and realise thick branches don’t break down very quickly.

    Moving the compost also means I have a more open and regular plot that I can go down and clear with the mower, strimmer, rotavator and a big binbag ready for planting.

    Yeah that’s the next plan. Tidy up. While digging I kept finding bits of rubbish lost in the grass and weeds.

  • New Year’s Resolutions

    The normal gag is to say “1080p” or “4k”, but I think I’ll go for a nice plain VGA. Nothing too ambitious, something I will actually manage to achieve.

    Let’s make the challenge for this year “being more healthy”. I do a lot of sitting down in front of computers, or in front of the telly. I also do a lot of eating of things that are possibly not the best for you. I should probably do less of both.

    In an attempt at making this so easy I can’t fail, I’ve gone and bought a treadmill. It’s in my house, it’s not piled with junk being a bad table. All I have to do is switch it on and be a human hamster.

    I just need something to distract me from the mind-numbing boredom of staring at the wall. I’m not quite invested enough in it yet to pay for one of those game based apps, but before Christmas I was using it while watching YouTube and that seems to work.

    I’ve found I get bored after half an hour though. I can force myself to do an hour, but it’s not fun in the slightest, it is a proper endurance thing – and not an endurance thing physically, it appears I can walk at a brisk 6k/hr with no effort. The endurance is all mental. Its. Just. So. Boring.

    I’m not running on my treadmill though, I like my knees and also it’s upstairs and I don’t want to annoy next door. Treadmills are a bit thuddy when you get going.

    As far as eating better things, I’m making an effort to eat veg at least once a day and to fill myself up on things like beans, potatoes and rice so that when I see the tasty looking chocolate bar in the cupboard I’m less likely to eat it on my way back to the living room.

    I’m not going to count how many calories go in my mouth though, that gets a bit obsessive and you end up filling your phone with apps that just want to sell you subscriptions to health plans. I’ve got a fitbit, I’ll put numbers that it tells me in here occasionally.

  • I bought an Android tablet, it’s alright…

    I bought an Android tablet, it’s alright…

    It’s not amazing, it’s not crap. Android tablets have always been a bit weird, either oddly sized with strange screen resolutions or manky and broken addon software. Or they’re fine but never receive an Android update ever and do strange things like crash if you rotate them.

    My iPad is on its way out. The battery gets to about 50% and then the device just switches off. No low battery warning, it just dies. Yes I’ve rebooted it, yes I’ve farted about in the settings, no nothing works. Also no I’m not going to open it and replace the battery it’ll break the screen.

    Also there’s bits of iOS that are really starting to annoy me every time I try to use the device. The predictive text is nonsense – I remember when this used to just fix spelling, now it looks at grammar and will swap words based on what it thinks you’re typing. And copying and pasting is still garbage. Why can’t I highlight text inside a Facebook Messenger message?

    So I got an Android tablet. It’s a Lenovo P11 or something. It has a real keyboard and a little kickstand. It’s like Lenovo looked at the Surface Pro and thought “we’ll have some of that!”.

    It’s alright. It’s not that fantastic, and the out of box experience was terrible. Like, half the time the Android setup wizard called it a “phone”, and then kept tripping over itself with updates appearing over the wizard, and the wizard trying to redo parts it had already done.

    You know, typical third party Android device behaviour. And I had to uninstall some free games. And try the update to Android 12 three times before it would install it.

    The keyboard is a strange thing. Clipping it on activates “productivity mode” where it all becomes a bit like a Chromebook. There’s a little taskbar and apps go into windows that can be moved around the screen. It’s not bad.

    It has some bizarre quirks though. Android 12 seems to have some wanky “Entertainment Space” that hovers at the side of the screen. And no matter how many times I tell Android to turn this off, it just gets turned right back on every time I rotate the display or detach the keyboard.

    Being used to a Surface Pro, and an iPad with a “smart cover” I’m used to shutting the lid and the device going to sleep.

    Despite this being the official keyboard from Lenovo, with little magnets to hold it shut, closing the keyboard to the screen doesn’t put the device to sleep.

    Do people not use the devices, think about stuff and go “hey, we need to shut the screen off when they close it…” or “my, when we rotate the device with the keyboard attached the wallpaper goes a funny size and the icons get mixed up”?

    But, you know, it was cheaper than an iPad and has a metal case. It’s alright. I managed to fix my website using SSH through it and the lack of an escape key didn’t cause too much of a hassle.