It is a few weeks since I last commented on gardening activity. Vegetable efforts continue and the big success has been the lettuce in pots which we bought as baby plants. These are doing well and provide plenty of leaves via the trusted “Cut and come again” method. You will not in the photo the automatic watering system. This sort of works, but it is leaks somewhat and I can’t get the coverage to be very even. I have some
Replacing the Fiesta’s fuel pump
Regular readers will recall that I have been having problems with the fuel pump on my old Mk 4 Fiesta. Well, whilst I was in the process of fixing the rear brakes it seemed to fail completely. I guess I should be grateful that it always seems to pack in when the car is on the drive! This time the fuse didn’t blow leaving me not entirely sure that the fuel pump was the problem. I spent some time trying
Making a start on my new server
I have decided to begin the process of replacing my venerable AMD Athlon based server which has been running continually since 2006 (99.526% uptime). After a considerable amount of research I settled on the ROCKPro64 because: It comes with 4 GB RAM. Very unusually for a single board computer it has a PCIe slot allowing a SATA card to be added. I would like to attempt to use the Xen hypervisor and the chipset is alleged to be compatible. With
A garden friend
Today, as part of the Golden Age of Horticulture, I was clearing an area at the back of the garden when I met a local resident! I am absolutely delighted to have a toad in the garden as they are well known for eating slugs. I must make sure that I leave some cover for him/her to live in. We don’t have a pond so I’m not sure where any toads might be spawning.
Fiesta rear brakes
Being stuck at home has not only given me more time for gardening, but also to do some long outstanding jobs on the cars. First up are the brake shoes on the Fiesta rear drum brakes. They have never been done before and on the few occasions I checked them they showed only modest wear. This is typical for brake shoes as they wear much more slowly than the pads on disc brakes. I already had a set of shoes
An unexpected discovery
Can I start by stressing that this is not an April Fools joke! Today, as part of the new Golden Age of Horticulture, I made a start on weeding the area under the flowering currants. There were quite a few weeds including some small nettles and a number of brambles. When I dug out one of the larger brambles I as surprised to unearth something man made. I started to dig and it became clear that it was a plastic
A Golden Age of Horticulture
There is no doubt that Covid-19 is a terrible thing, but as always there is a silver lining to be found. Being confined to home everyday, coupled with excellent weather since working from home became mandatory, has allowed me to spend far more time in the garden than is my custom and as a result I feel that we can expect great things from the garden this year. A key task is to remove the numerous piles of branches which
It’s down!
At last! After months of knee breaking effort the new wooden floor is down. It is one continuous area covering the living room, hall and dining room made of 3mm walnut engineered wood. It replaces some truly awful and very badly installed laminate flooring which has been there since we moved in. The planks are all glued down to the concrete floor using slotted underlay. Mostly it went down fairly easily although it was difficult stopping the glue going everywhere.
London Feb 20 Day 1
Day 1 of our short two day trip to London staying once again at the Civil Service Club. Our first disappointment on arrival at the club to drop our bags was that the restaurant no longer opens on Wednesdays. Apparently it is now only open Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I am sure it used to be the case that it was open every day except Sunday and Monday. The bar menu is still available. We opted to spend the afternoon
Camera repaired
A few months ago my camera started to develop an annoying fault whereby the first few shots after switching on were completely black (or at least very significantly underexposed). This became more common until it was nearly impossible to take photos. I checked online and quickly discovered that this is a known problem on Pentax cameras made a few years ago (mine is about four years old). The problem is known as “aperture block” and you can read about it