Hmmmm: Google

Posted on February 20, 2024 by james

I’ve been redirected to a Google form this morning, meaning I had to log in to Google. I don’t use Google that much, so I was expecting the usual “click on all the photos with a fire hydrant” stuff. After that, “for security” they sent a verification code to the email address associated with my account and I entered that.

Then they asked for my phone number so they could send a message with another verification code. Now that starts to look a bit odd. If they don’t already know my phone number then that’s really providing no security at all. It just looks like a fishing expedition to try to associate an email address with a phone number and potentially to link whatever information they have about one of those with whatever they know about the other.

I don’t think so.

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Driving licence renewal redux

Posted on February 19, 2024 by james

Or “driving licence redux redux”, perhaps 🙂

I posted a few days back out renewing my driving licence and how I can’t do it online because I allowed my passport to expire.

I can renew it at a Post Office, but not my local one. There are two “locally” that provide the service, but they’re both close to a twenty-mile round trip. I know that some Post Offices require an appointment to do the renewal, but how to find out? I’ll phone th.. Oh. No phone numbers on the Post Office website 🙁 Eventually I found the Facebook page for one of the two (in fact my preferred one), so I called it but there was no answer. And then I discovered that it has been up for sale for about ten months because the current owners are retiring. I wonder why no-one wants to buy it? (No I don’t.)

The other has a Facebook page, but the only information on it appears to suggest that their staff can’t spell “stationery”. As far as I can see the only choice I have is to drive there hoping they don’t require an appointment, but if they do then I’ll have to make one, potentially drive home again, and then drive back to actually do the deed.

All this “connected”, “online” stuff is all very well, right up to the point where you don’t fit the often limited model of a “consumer” that whoever specified the system had in their head. Like when my bank changed their online login to use 2FA by sending a text message to your mobile, without actually considering how that was going to work for people who didn’t have mobile coverage. These days Wifi Calling usually has it covered, but at the time that wasn’t a thing. Grrrrr.

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I am job-hunting

Posted on February 19, 2024 by james

Officially now. I have just submitted my first application. And a very strange thing it is to do.

I’ve not actually had to look for work for something like twenty years. In fact I think the last job I applied for was in 2001, because I recall seeing the Twin Towers being destroyed on the news in the Mitsubishi office where I was working. Since then everything I have done has been word-of-mouth.

My situation is somewhat complicated by the fact that moving isn’t an option because we share our home with my in-laws who are close to ninety years old and not in great health. Fortunately many companies are willing to countenance remote working these days and I’m quite used to it, that Mitsubishi job being the only one I’ve had to go to an office for this century. If I’m completely honest there is almost nowhere I’d want to move to anyhow unless it were similarly rural.

So, if someone is looking for a code-writing Linux sysadmin who keeps bees and grows loads of his own vegetables as well as being willing to teach himself pretty much any skill he needs, whether it be welding, tree-felling or butchery, by all means let me know 😀

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Wot no swimming?

Posted on February 19, 2024 by james

Well, no 🙁

My local swimming pool is having a huge amount of work done to make the building more efficient in terms of energy use. I believe that includes entirely replacing the roof. Whilst some of the smaller spaces are not available for periods of a few weeks or a couple of months, the pool is closed for the entire duration of the work which started in mid-November 2023 and is planned to be finished (so who knows?) in mid-July 2024. There is another pool I could go to, but it’s probably a twenty-five mile round trip and would take over an hour. And the pool is stupidly shallow. At the deep end it is 1.5m and at the shallow end if I stop and try to pull my knees up underneath me they hit the floor. It’s so shallow that if I sit on a float on the bottom of the pool at the shallow end my head is sufficiently far out of the water that I can breathe.

But as it happens much of this is moot anyhow, because I don’t have a car right now. Someone drove their tractor out of a blind field entrance and remodelled the side of the car with his front-loader (there’s another story). The insurers wrote the car off and I’ve not yet found a replacement. So I can’t get to the pool anyhow unless I fancy cycling, which I don’t.

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Memory Lane, 19th June 2022: My first ever box joint

Posted on February 19, 2024 by james

I must post about my table saw at some point…

Anyhow, I want to start making more of my own beekeeping kit — ideally as much as possible, and whilst box joints aren’t required they’re a neat way to join timber at a right angle. I watched far too many YouTube, struggled out of a few wood-working rabbit-holes and ended up making a jig based on some of the ideas I’d seen:

As I only had one blade I stuck with a fixed size for the fingers and just got on with the cutting. I can’t deny it was quite tedious, but I got there eventually and the end result on a couple of scrap bits of timber was pretty good.

What has become obvious however is that the fingers are just too thin and take too long to cut — the standard blade is only just over 2mm side. A dado cutter would be the left-pondian solution, but I’ve read that in the UK and Europe there’s a requirement that once the power is cut off a table-saw blade must stop rotating within something like ten seconds and there’s no way something with the mass of a dado cutter would stop that quickly. In fact the arbor just isn’t up to carrying a dado cutter either. So I found the widest-toothed blade that I could (6mm) and ordered one with flat-topped teeth (so the inner part of the joint comes out square).

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I’ll just leave this here…

Posted on February 18, 2024 by james

Written as part of a discussion online this evening about cats not catching mice…

Our cats are really quite good at catching mice. Then bringing them into the house and releasing them. Literally five minutes ago I heard a cat thundering down the corridor upstairs followed by my daughter screeching. One of the cats had caught a mouse and brought it in, taken it upstairs and released it on her bed, which she was in at the time 😀

Fortunately I managed to catch it and put it back outside.

One of our previous cats once brought in a live rat. It managed to climb up the back of the (upright) freezer in our utility room and crawled inside a cardboard tube that had been left on top. Possibly not the best choice from the rat’s point of view. There’s still a ding on one of the wall cupboards where the air rifle pellet came out the other end 😀 I was kind of assuming that a rat body might stop an air rifle pellet. Not at a range of half a metre, apparently.

The most bizarre thing we’ve ever had brought in however was an entire nest full of pheasant chicks that we found under the kitchen table — chicks still alive though obviously there wasn’t really anything we could do for them. I still have no idea how that got through the cat flap.

Back when I was seven or eight years old my parents’ Siamese brought in a grass snake and left its corpse under one of the chairs in the sitting room. That was quite pleasant too.

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Memory Lane, 19th June 2022: Peas and broad beans

Posted on February 18, 2024 by james

Straight out of the plot and ready for the pan, podded broad beans and sugar snap peas. Couldn’t get fresher 🙂

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PSB at last!

Posted on February 18, 2024 by james

My winter brassicas have struggled this season and the PSB is no exception. It has been astonishingly late compared with last Winter when we were eating it in November. Today however there was enough for all five of us to eat, at long last.

I’m a little concerned that some of it is accelerating through “edible” and going straight on to flower. I might have to do a bit more harvesting during the week and keep some in the fridge.

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No dig diary, 18th February 2024

Posted on February 18, 2024 by james

The main goal today was to get the strawberries planted out, which was a bit of a challenge given how much rain had fallen overnight. The ground is absolutely sodden, which was a real shame given that it has been a beautiful day. I was quite comfortable outdoors whilst exercising my right to bare arms 😀 I managed to get the main varieties done however. The alpine ones can wait as they’re not that big yet.

It’s not a great photo because of the position of the Sun (I should have thought to take one earlier), but here they are before I covered them with fleece to try to keep the frost off a little and to hide them from the deer so all the new leaves don’t “disappear”. The alpine strawberries will go in nearest the camera.

Once the strawberries were no longer taking up space in the greenhouse I could sow more seeds. Lots of lettuces today (Reine des Glaces, Lollo Rossa, Red and Green Little Gem, Cos (Lobjoits?), Multigreen 3, Rouge Grenobloise and Webbs Wonderful (which I’m really just using up seed for). All sown in module trays, four seeds to a cell so I can thin them later and half a tray per variety. I also sowed coriander, Romanesco Cauliflower (a big favourite here), salad onions, peas (Champion of England for podding peas and Delikett for sugar snaps), Busy Lizzies, Lobelia and Salvia (the latter for the cutting garden, the former two for my wife’s patio pots). Fortunately three trays of plants needed to come out of the propagator so there was space to put the new ones in. It’s getting a bit like that already with both the propagators and in the greenhouse: one out, one in.

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Memory Lane, 12th June 2022: Compost — it’s hot stuff!

Posted on February 17, 2024 by james

No, really.

These are from two of my compost heaps, one of which had been sitting for a month with nothing added because it was full. As far as I recall the temperature in the second photo had peaked whilst the first was still rising. Not much is going to survive in there. In fact it’s probably a bit too hot, as the thermometer suggests.

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