Swimming, 29th December 2021

Posted on December 29, 2021 by james

My last swim of the year today, and it did not go well 🙁

Not because I’ve over-indulged during the course of the last week (though I shan’t be denying that if accused), but the pool was just way to warm for swimming hard. When I spoke to the lifeguards about it I was told that the heating had stopped altogether over Christmas and when the engineers fixed the problem (I suspect temporarily, as I overheard one talking about new parts being required on his way out) the water temperature had got too high.

It’s a bit of a disappointment to go out on a low note, but I’m now swimming a comfortable five seconds faster for my 50m reps than I was when I first got back into the pool after our last lockdown in April so I think I can end the year feeling that I’ve really made progress.

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The veggie plot at the end of 2021

Posted on December 29, 2021 by james

As I posted a couple of days back, I wanted to take a few photos of the plot as it is now so I can remember where I still need to spread compost once the winter crops are out of the ground, so here they are.

The first two are the new bed and the one next to it, where I still have some leeks, small spring onions and brassicas. And in fact the other side of the spring onions there’s also my outdoor garlic which hasn’t sprouted yet.

Then the next two, with more leeks and spring onions, red chard and various brassicas in one, cabbages, kale and purple sprouting broccoli in the other.

The next two rows are mostly sprouts with a few PSB plants, then leeks, parsnips and some left-over beetroot, though most of the foliage from the parsnips has died back now.

And the final pair, one of which is completely unoccupied for the moment and the other has some more spring onions, a few more beetroot and a mixture of brassicas that I had left over and just stuck in because it seemed better than wasting them.

Finally, a couple of shots of the entire plot from opposite corners…

The damage, mostly due to deer I believe, is quite widespread. First they went for the beetroot leaves

and now this is all that’s left of the red chard

We’ve had one single pick of that this winter 🙁

After they’d run out of red chard, the parsley disappeared

They’ve even browsed off most of my father-in-law’s Alstroemerias!

I’m not sure this is deer though. It could be pigeons, though I’ve not really seen pigeons about that much this winter.

But for the cost I’m tempted to put up a trail camera to see if I can catch exactly what is doing the damage. Perhaps I’ll look into building one using a Raspberry Pi.

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Post-Christmas veggie plot tidy up

Posted on December 27, 2021 by james

Despite filling ten (I think — could be twelve) dumpy bags with fallen leaves, there were still quite a few that had collected on the paths and around the plants in the veggie plot so today I decided to clean them up a bit, partly because they’ll provide a home for pests, but also they stop water drying off the surface of the ground and it’s been very wet here over the last week. I could do with some of it drying out a bit.

I ended up with about four wheelbarrows worth of leaves, one of which went straight into the compost spread on the green stuff that’s been added over Christmas. The rest I’ve piled up to one side and I’ll mix it in with new material over the next few weeks.

After clearing the paths it was quite obvious that the woodchip in some areas had got a bit thin — mud was squelching up around my boots as I walked around. Possibly not a big surprise as I did skimp a little in places last year when I initially ran out of woodchip. Making a poor job of dodging the increasingly heavy raindrops I spread the last of my remaining bagged-up woodchip in the worst areas.

I managed to get that all done before ending up soaked to the skin, but it was a close call 🙂 I did intend to take some photos just to record the areas where I still need to spread compost before planting out next year and to record the damage done by deer, but at that point there was no chance. If the weather is dry tomorrow, I’ll do it then.

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Smokin’ Christmas present

Posted on December 27, 2021 by james

For all sorts of reasons I shan’t go into in this post I’m really not into Christmas, but now the dust is starting to settle I have to share details of a present I received that I’m actually quite excited about:

Yes, it’s a cardboard box 🙂

Well, ok, sort of… It’s a cardboard box (actually a cardboard tube inside a cardboard box) that is intended to function as a cold smoker. I’ve been promising myself I’d build a smoker for years but you know… life… so I’m quite looking forward to having a play with this.

Just visible in the top of the box is the smoke outlet (can’t really call it a chimney) which is just a hole about 20mm in diameter. Opening up the top gives access to three racks sitting on supports formed by pushing in the edges of the inner cardboard tube.

and directly under the bottom rack in that photo you can see a drip tray to catch any gooeyness that falls off the food being smoked.

The real business end of the smoker is behind the flap at the bottom of the box.

It’s a mesh “spiral” intended to be filled with sawdust, basically.

The tea light is used to start the sawdust burning whilst the spiral is outside the smoker, then removed before the smoking sawdust is put into the base of the smoker.

I also received two bags of sawdust to get things under way.

Though as we have quite a few fruit trees as well as beech, oak, ash and sycamore I shall be tempted to experiment with my own sawdust later on.

The smoker box measures about 29cm by 29cm by 54cm which I calculate to be a volume of about 45 litres. The sawdust burner is supposed to be good for volumes of up to 150 litres, so should I wish to in the future I could probably make a larger box up of around 40cm x 40cm x 90cm and still use the same one (there’s a higher capacity one available for larger volumes). That would probably suit some old oven racks that I have lying about (I always knew there was a reason for keeping them :)) and I could put a door in the front rather than having to load and unload the smoker from the top. I have actually been keeping an upright freezer around for the purpose of making a smoker, though that would require the larger burner, but a book that also came with the present suggests that a filing cabinet can work well and I have one of those that I’ve recently removed from my office too! See? This was clearly meant to happen 😀

I think my first experiment will be with some cheese and perhaps a few bulbs of garlic since I have home-grown garlic this year (though we’re getting through it at quite a rate). Smoking meat and fish will be the long-term goal, but I’ll start with the easier stuff first.

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An unexpected ssh “gotcha”

Posted on December 24, 2021 by james

I have a number of ssh keys used for various different purposes where it makes sense not to share the same key across different environments. Up to now that’s worked just fine. Today I added another. Some time later, I tried to log into a local system and without any kind of prompt I got an error saying that there had been too many authentication failures when I know it worked yesterday.

At first I didn’t understand what was going on as I could log in fine from another machine, but after I while I twigged what was happening. The ssh server at the remote end obviously has a limit on the number of failures it will accept when trying to log in. That’s fine and expected. However, when I tried to log in the ssh client process tried each available key in turn. Before it could get to the valid one however, it reached the limit on the number of authentication attempts and the server killed the connection.

I guess there are two obvious workarounds for this. The first is to raise the limit on the number of failed login attempts for the ssh server, but that seems a fairly crap way out of the hole. Short of any other bright ideas, my favoured option is to edit my personal ssh configuration file and force the IdentityFile option to use the key I want.

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Raspberry vodka

Posted on December 24, 2021 by james

As I mentioned a few days back, I had some vodka left over from making sloe vodka. A bit of a dig around in the freezer turned up a load of raspberries, and raspberry vodka was so popular last time I made it that it seemed like a good plan again. My recipe was:

  • 150g raspberries
  • 170g granulated sugar
  • 70cl vodka

It’s really just a case of dumping them all in the same container and shaking each day until the sugar has all dissolved, much the same as sloe vodka. After three months or so, strain off the liquid and bottle it. If you have enough, hide a few bottles where no-one else will look otherwise you’ll be beating them off with a stick.

Mine’s already progressing well.

The raspberries actually did pretty well this year and I have quite a few more in the freezer. It’s now quite tempting to buy enough vodka to fill up that demijohn and perhaps another as well.

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Now I’m getting somewhere!

Posted on December 23, 2021 by james

As I posted yesterday, the kwh_accumulator process in emoncms requires Redis to be available. Fortunately there’s a Docker image for that and it was just a case of pulling the image and starting it. I came up with a systemd unit configuration once I’d checked it was running:

[Unit]
Description=Redis Container
After=docker.service
Requires=docker.service

[Service]
TimeoutStartSec=0
Restart=always
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker stop redis
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker rm redis
ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/docker pull redis
ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker run --rm -t -p 6379:6379 redis

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

and then it was just a case of

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start docker-redis

to get it all going.

I was fairly sure I had my emoncms Docker image pretty much where I wanted it at this point, so I produced another systemd config to start it as well:

[Unit]
Description=emoncms Container
After=docker.service
After=docker-redis.service
Requires=docker.service
Requires=docker-redis.service

[Service]
TimeoutStartSec=0
Restart=always
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker stop emoncms
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker rm emoncms
ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker run --rm -t -p 80:80 -v /var/lib/emoncms:/var/opt/emoncms emoncms

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Happily that also appeared to work first time using

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start docker-emoncms

I cleared out all of my existing configuration and re-entered it, restarted my script that publishes the data from the RFXcom unit to MQTT and within seconds had data appearing in the emoncms feeds!

I’m very pleased to have got this far. Now I want to go back and submit a few pull requests for various bits of emoncms to resolve the occasional problem and add the supervisord functionality, but first I’ve just discovered that I used the wrong script to grab data from MQTT and push it into emoncms (there are two, near-identical, and I chose the wrong one!), so I need to update my image to use the correct one.

There’s more I want to look at with emoncms, but before I can do that I think I need a bit of data to play with, so I’ll probably let things run for a few days and come back to it next week.

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Piano progress after two weeks

Posted on December 23, 2021 by james

It feels much longer than two weeks. I wonder what that suggests? 🙂

I’ve been practising for about an hour each evening (I skipped one when I had to do a 550-mile round-trip to pick up my son from university). Generally I’m quite pleased with how I’ve progressed. I’m finding that I can now play the early pieces in both the Faber Adult Piano Adventures and Alfred’s Basic Adult Piano Course books fairly easily now. Yesterday however I did have terrible trouble with “Ode to Joy” from Faber pp.24-25 where I just couldn’t get my right hand to play the correct notes in the third section for some reason. The rest I could do fine. By comparison I was particularly amazed that the fourth section where both hands are playing the same notes an octave apart (and therefore fingers are working in opposite orders) came very easily.

I have to admit that I’ve been a bit lazy about working through the theory sections of either book. I remember a certain amount of music theory from dabbling with instruments in my childhood (though that was a few years ago now), but I really should go back and check I’ve not missed anything as I’ve noticed an odd notation such as “1 on _?” appearing in the Faber book.

As time has gone on I’m finding I prefer working with the books than YouTube, though there are occasionally helpful videos there. I’ve mostly abandoned Andrew Furmanczyk, but I may stick with Bill Hilton for a while yet. My preference just be a reflection of the fact that I’m used to learning from books, I guess.

Of the two books I’m perhaps starting to prefer Faber, though I think perhaps doing the exercises in Alfred might help focus me on the theory a bit better. Another reason I’ve passed over those is possibly that I just wouldn’t write in a book. What I might do is photocopy the pages of exercises and do them on the copies.

One thing I’ve started doing this week is turning on the metronome feature of my keyboard. I’m finding it quite useful in terms of keeping to the correct rhythm, though I found it very hard to get used to at first and I swear it speeds up when I set it to 3/4 time rather than 4/4 😀

Watching a few videos of progress at one month from YouTube it’s hard to believe I’ll be anywhere close to most of them in another two weeks. It’ll be interesting to find out 🙂

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Swimming, 23rd December 2021

Posted on December 23, 2021 by james

Last swim before Christmas and for undetermined reasons it was a very tough one. I really wasn’t on the pace I had yesterday and it took some time to get there. Certainly it wasn’t for lack of trying. My arms were shaking when I got out of the pool at the end of the session and I could definitely feel the tiredness in my lats.

My son, meanwhile, racked up 2.2km in easy 200’s and then 100’s with plenty of time to spare and showing everyone else up in the process, despite not having swum the entire time he was at university last term. It’s quite sickening really 🙂

I now have six days off as the next session that works for me isn’t until next Wednesday. That’s going to be an “interesting” session.

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My first foray into sloe cordial

Posted on December 23, 2021 by james

I’ve never tried this before, but with about 1kg of sloes left over after I’d made the sloe vodka it seemed worth a try. It’s really quite straightforward to do, too. I used:

  • 1kg sloes
  • 1 litre water
  • juice of 1 lemon
  • granulated sugar (amount to be determined)

Initially I put the sloes (still frozen in my case), water and lemon juice into a pan and simmered them for five to ten minutes, then took them off the heat and mashed the sloes up with a potato masher. Back on the heat I simmered them for about another ten minutes.

The next step is to strain the mixture. I used a jelly bag, but I imagine a sieve with some muslin inside or something similar would do the job. I left mine to drip for several hours until there was nothing obviously still to come, but I didn’t squeeze the sloes to get the very last of the juice out in case doing so made the cordial cloudy.

I measured the volume of juice, returned it to a saucepan and added 80g of sugar per 100ml of juice, bringing it up to a simmer whilst stirring in the sugar to dissolve it. Once it had all dissolved I poured the juice into sterilised bottles, though as long as the temperature is above 60°C and the bottles are safe from cracking I imagine the heat of the juice itself will sterilise them — they just need to be turned upside down for a few seconds once closed to make sure all of the inside of the bottle gets hot.

This was enough to make about three pints of cordial, perhaps a shade less.

First thoughts having tasted it are that the flavour isn’t as strong as I expected. I might be tempted to use more sloes or less water next time. Also for my taste it’s a bit too sweet (I don’t have a particularly sweet tooth). I will probably drop the amount of sugar down to somewhere around 60g per 100ml for the next batch.

It’s definitely one to make again though, and I’d quite happily make far more given sufficient quantities of sloes (not really a problem around here — there’s more blackthorn than you can shake a hairy stick at around the neighbourhood. In fact, if I had three or four kilos of fruit available I might well try a few different combinations of sloes, water and sugar to see what people preferred.

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