After a water check and finding only an elevated phosphate (promotes algae, so chemically removed). The shop declared the tank safe for a couple of fish.
So 2 common clowns later and a slightly cleaner tank, here’s the latest update (from a few days ago as a plugin seemed to be broken).
I did notice when I added the coral that it appeared to be attached to a closed oyster and thought nothing more of it. A few times the coral (a sun coral) fell over and required me to move rocks and wedge it in tighter.
today I spotted why it was falling over!
the Oyster was alive 
now it couldn’t open as it was wedged under the live rock, hopefully after a swift move it can now function as it should. A quick call to the shop and it appears it is a bonus member of my cleanup crew, a filter feeder.
As always click on the image above to see a few more images.
Been a busy week, started with guests arriving from NL in the shape of Matthijs and Leonie. Along with the usual walks we moved the home network to a new router, a xen box. After a few initial hiccups that now appears to be working well with 3 vhosts handling needs (thanks to Matthijs for the final configuration and wouer for the earlier work).
Today we went to visit the distillery in Kilbeggan, you can see the image gallery by clicking on the image below.
A few purchases had to be made
and
Matthijs and Leonie also bought a few bottles
Tomorrow I collect the new car in the morning, probably a visit to Bushmills afterwards and also the fish shop to get the new tanks water checked. Roll on the weekend
The moral high ground was hard earned today, thankfully umbrellas shielded the Da and I from the worst of it although our legs were well and truly soaked.
Our dedication earned us a lovely sunset and its associated rainbow and two new ships passing close by.
if you click on the image you can see two panoramas taken at the beginning and end of the walk. Sadly the one with the sunset and rainbow messed up a little :/
Still it was a lovely start to the year.
In a strangely pre emptive move I decided to roast a fresh batch of coffee beans before stock ran out. The second bag Da and gail got me for my birthday was Peruvian Mountain Heights from S.D. Bells so this was the logical choice. I took some photographs and a couple of videos to show the process and results in a bit more detail than previous attempts.
Some points of interest, the roast was for 1lb or 16ozs, and after the roast the beans weighed 12.5ozs, also the beans expand as they lose moisture, this can be seen in the two images below.
as always clicking on either image will load the full gallery showing the process in more detail.
Three videos below show the stages:
beginning the roast:
first crack:
second crack:
You can hear the difference in the sound of first and second crack, once you hear second crack it is not that long until the beans will catch fire so timing is critical at this point.
Finally the beans are placed in sealed bags to degas and will stay there for 24hrs.
Just a quick note to show off a cunning present,
Whisky stones, ice cubes that don’t water down the whiskey! wooohoo. Plus some whiskey to taste with it’s good to be me .
As always click on the image to see the full gallery
I have for a while been running the weather site software on a laptop powered on 24/7. I have now switched the station to a usb port on my Qnap and installed pywws to format the data and upload to the web server.
This saves a small amount of power and tidies my desk up some more (yeah right). The webcam is moved to a second ip cam which uses only a lil power compared to the laptop.
Next I need to tidy the loft setup so I can grab an image of it
HP came through fast with the recovery disks for the 2540p, sadly they got it wrong and sent windows 7 home premium 64bit :/ one phone call later and two days wait and the proper disks arrived. The memory upgrade arrived the same day so that worked out nicely.
Nothing is ever truly smooth but two days later and the laptop is setup with windows 7 pro 64bit the way I wanted. Memory is up to 6 gigs and office and all other apps are installed and the disk imaged (just in case).
The more I use it the more I like this little notebook, having the optical drive onboard is handy and the service by HP on a 2nd hand pc is excellent.
Of particular note are the quick on applications Quicklook and Quickweb, handy apps that load in a few seconds to access outlook files and the web for browsing.
Stay tuned for more updates.
Coffee vanishes fast when its as tasty as the roasts the Behmor produces
Today I roasted 1lb of Colombian medellin Excelso, this was recommended as a good bean to take to 2nd crack by Mr Bell himself and I am impressed with initial results. This was also my first 1lb roast.
Previously second crack has been at close to the end of the cycle so to allow a bit more flexibility in the roast I used 220v instead of 240v for timings, this allowed second crack to start 4mins before the end. Success.
Its now sealed to allow degassing. I look forward to tomorrows tasting
Having sold my thinkpads I needed to get a new laptop/notebook. The field was narrowed to the newer thinkpads and HP’s elitebook 2540p.
After some research and trawling on ebay I picked up a 2540p with the low voltage core i7 cpu for less than half price but with 30 months warranty remaining. Sadly the seller had wiped the drive and done a fresh install of windows 7 wiping out the recovery partition, thankfully they are shipping an image of the original recovery partition of windows 7 pro 32bit.
While waiting their reply I had called HP support to ask about sourcing recovery disks (expecting to pay for the priviledge), I was surprised to hear they would be shipped FOC and even better I was given the choice of 32 or 64 bit, 64bit is on the way.
After another visit to Ebay a 4gb sodimm was procurred for less than £20. I may have to wait a few days but I will have a nice factory fresh install of windows 7 pro 64bit and 6gb of ram.
On to the laptop itself.
Only slight larger than the X60 its depth does allow a dvd writer to be squeezed in. The Mg chassis and Al cladding is very nice and business like with no bling, the screen is matt and while not as nice as the X60 at 1200×800 it has slightly more real estate and allows camera and light to be added.
The keyboard is ‘chiclet’ style and again while not in the thinkpad league is also spill resistant and has a ‘nipple’ pointer and trackpad, both with their own buttons. Personally I would be able to type as fast on either, I have also read that proper typists can achieve the same speed on the elitebook as on the thinkpad.
I think more updates will be required as I get used to it but for now it seems like a lot of laptop for the money (after removing what I sold the two thinkpads for it costs me £360).
feel free to click on any of the above images to see the full gallery.
