Polytunnel Chiles

Posted on January 10, 2012 by james

Most years I try to grow a few different varieties of chile in the polytunnel. Jalapenos are always on the list so we can pickle them for use on pizzas, in fajitas and tacos and suchlike. 2011 hasn’t exactly been the best year for vegetables because of the odd weather, but my Jalapenos seem to have done ok (despite the odd bit of munching by slugs or snails):

I’ve left the plants in the polytunnel and unless the winter turns considerably colder through January and February it’s entirely possible the plants will make it through to the spring to start growing again. I look forward to that happening, but I think I’ll be starting off some new plants in the propagator around the start of February, just in case…

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Harlequin ladybirds by the thousand

Posted on January 10, 2012 by james

The Harlequin ladybird appears to be moving into the south west of the UK in huge numbers now, having been fairly rare only five years ago. As the summer ends the adult ladybirds find somewhere to overwinter and apparently produce a pheromone that others Harlequins will follow to join them.

I opened up the door of our tool shed in the autumn and saw all of these (apologies for the poor focus):




 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interesting that there are quite so many of the black variety. I hadn’t understood that they were so common.

However, I have to admit that I find myself in something of a dilemma. I know these ladybirds are a pest and our out-competing our own native ladybird species. On the other hand they have a voracious appetite for bugs and other bests that I really don’t want on my vegetables. I don’t like killing animals purely for doing what comes naturally (killing them to eat is another matter), but would it be a positive contribution to the welfare of our native species if I did just that? (And no, I’m not about to start eating ladybirds 🙂

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Odd cloud effect

Posted on January 10, 2012 by james

I looked out of my office window the other day and saw this:

No idea what caused it. Looks like an aircraft contrail in reverse. Not something I’ve ever noticed before.

Posted in Random | 4 Comments

Google Completely Loses the Plot

Posted on October 11, 2011 by james

Over the last couple of days I’ve been receiving frequent emails containing the tedious witterings of someone I’m barely acquainted with, courtesy of Google+.

I have never told Google I wish to receive email from Google+, so at what point did it become acceptable to allow someone to add my email address to a list of recipients who subsequently receive all their random dribblings every few minutes? And then insist that if I want it to stop, I have to go to their website to get myself off a list I never asked to be on in the first place?

Since Google got so big not to have to care, I guess 🙁

Amazingly, Google seem to think this is The Next Big Thing and that I will be desperate to add my name to their tens of subscribers. Not a chance. I’d rather claw my own eyes out with a rusty fork.

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MythTV/FFmpeg: Part 3

Posted on September 29, 2011 by james

Well, I finally realised that there’s a 0.24 fixes tree for nuvexport that isn’t part of the main MythTV 0.24 fixes tree, so I downloaded that having read on the mailing list that it should work with the MythTV 0.24 fixes FFmpeg.

But no. It doesn’t. 0.24 fixes nuvexport attempts to use options for padding and cropping that are no longer supported by 0.24 fixes FFmpeg.

I was on the point of abandoning FFmpeg and going back to using the transcode option until I discovered that it is no longer supported, so I just had to give things one more try. I installed FFmpeg 0.8.4, ignoring the MythTV version, symlinked it to “mythffmpeg” and installed the latest version of nuvexport from github, ignoring the 0.24 fixes release.

So far that appears to be working.

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MythTV/FFmpeg: Part 2

Posted on September 28, 2011 by james

Enabling mp3 encoding in the bundled version of ffmpeg was merely a case of adding

--enable-libmp3lame

to the configure command for the entire package. nuvexport-xvid now runs to completion.

Unfortunately the output looks all wrong, so I’m back to the drawing board. I suspect my aspect ratio fix.

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Trials and Tribulations with MythTV and FFmpeg

Posted on September 27, 2011 by james

I’m running MythTV 0.24.1 at the moment with quite a few MythBuntu and other front ends. I’m running out of disk for recordings and decided to archive a few off to release some space which I’ve done with previous versions of MythTV fairly regularly. Unfortunately I discovered fairly quickly that asking nuvexport to transcode recordings to my preferred format (XviD) using ffmpeg was badly broken.

MythTV now includes its own copy of ffmpeg in the distribution to try to control some of the rapid changes of command line parameters the ffmpeg team seem to inflict on us with monotonous regularity. I discovered that it didn’t support libxvid out of the box for some reason (perhaps I didn’t have the necessary libraries installed at the time I built it). So, first step was to reconfigure it and rebuild. Only it won’t. The ffmpeg shipped with 0.24.1 looks like it just won’t link when libxvid is enabled.

So, I downloaded the latest git release and tried that. ffmpeg would now build, but doesn’t like that the libraries aren’t quite the same as the 0.24.1 versions, so I ended up rebuilding the entire package from the source, discovering in the process that libxvid wasn’t enabled again…

Eventually it dawned on my that I needed to add the command line switches:

--enable-libxvid --enable-gpl

on the mythTV configure command and this time all was well.

After reinstalling I kicked off nuvexport once more only to discover that it failed yet again, but this time because ffmpeg was being called with a parameter:

setsar=1

which the MythTV version of ffmpeg doesn’t support — it’s a later change to the code. I discovered that the older version of the parameter is:

aspect=1

So I edited /usr/local/share/nuvexport/export/ffmpeg.pm around line 335 to change:

push @filters, "setsar=1";

to

push @filters, "aspect=1";

This fixed the problem entirely and I got a full first encoding pass from nuvexport. Now it just falls over because ffmpeg doesn’t support the mp3 codec. That’s something to look at tomorrow.

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Jupiter and Moons

Posted on September 27, 2011 by james

Since Jupiter is returning to our skies now I thought I’d take advantage of last Thursday’s clear-ish skies to do some imaging practice with my 127 Mak and SPC900. I’ve not been through all the clips I took with my Ultima barlow yet, but this one was the first sequence I took. It’s not a great image, but I like it because during processing I discovered I’d caught three of the Jovian moons as well — Io, Callisto and Europa (Europa is on its own on the right).

Not sure why the bottom left of the planet has been “ground off”. I think it’s a processing artefact. I’ll have another look some time.

Image details:

127 Mak on an EQ3-2, SPC900, 1200 of 2400 frames stacked in Registax 6.

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New Life…

Posted on September 19, 2011 by james

Our chickens are kept in large fenced runs (to keep out the foxes) in the orchard with the trees providing some shade from the fierce heat of the British Summer. The birds are rotated around the pens giving them fresh grass on an irregular basis (ie. when the fierce heat of the British Summer means that the runs currently in use are a complete mudbath).

Almost a month ago one of the hens disappeared. I was forced to assume that she’d roosted high enough in a tree to allow her to fly outside the fence in the morning and had become breakfast for a local fox family. A couple of mornings ago however I found her hiding in the undergrowth. She’d got into one of the unused runs and laid a number of eggs that she’d been sitting on for the last three weeks. Here’s how I found her:

Sadly only two of the eggs had hatched and I assume that one of the chicks didn’t make the trip as I could only find the one, but perhaps given the time of year that’s not such a bad thing. The new one is going to have its work cut out surviving as it is. It probably won’t even be fully feathered and able to keep itself warm until the end of October.

I’m keeping an eye on them and hoping that the next few weeks are mild enough for the chick to survive.

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8GB Memory Upgrade for HP Proliant Microserver

Posted on September 19, 2011 by james

I decided to upgrade the server to 8GB RAM (its default configuration is 1GB). The motherboard has two RAM sockets, so I purchased a pair of 4GB RAM sticks to put in. It’s not a difficult job, only taking ten to fifteen minutes, but it helps to have small fingers.

To fit the RAM it’s necessary to remove the motherboard. It slides out from the bottom of the unit, but it’s a bit fiddly. First thing is to undo the two blue-headed bolts at the front of the board using the key clipped inside the door to allow the board to slide forward a little:

That done it’s possible to remove the two cables routed down the left hand side, including the connector for the disk array (which is awkward if you have large fingers) and the three on the right hand side — two USB headers and the switch/LED connector block:

With those removed the board will slide out a little further allowing the power connector to be removed, and then it will come out completely:

Removal of the old DIMM and replacement with the new ones is straightforward:

And then as it says in all the good Haynes manuals, “reassembly is the reverse of removal”. First slide the board back in and replace the power connector:

Then slide the board in far enough to reconnect all the other cables:

And finally push the board home, do up the blue bolts again, re-seat the cables in the clips and route the power connector cable under the motherboard “handle”:

Boot up the server once more and you’re sorted:

$ ssh root@gamay head /proc/meminfo
root@gamay's password: 
MemTotal:        8051332 kB
MemFree:         7845936 kB
Buffers:           11612 kB
Cached:            64960 kB
SwapCached:            0 kB

Posted in Computing | 2 Comments