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It’s been a while since I updated you on the chilli plantation. I’m sure you’re all waiting with bated breath…

Well, I left the little ones at work while we went on holiday. Not a good move when it’s a hot office, and the Easter break! Apparently there was only shrivelled up things when the crew got back to work. But they managed to revive some, and they have managed to stay alive so far. But not growing too fast since. Although I’ve come to suspect that they really don’t like the little peat pots they are in, for some reason.

The two plants that I left at home, as I had no room left to take them to work, surprisingly, have started to flourish. I don’t get it, but I’m happy about it! The ones in the white pot in the photos are the ones left at home, the 2 little ones are the ones that had a holiday at work while we did.

This weekend’s job is to repot them all. The big ones need a bit more room already, and I want to see if some of the little ones decide to take off in a bigger pot. We’ll see.

Tonight was the first chance I got to play with my new toys. I got iButton and 1Wire starter kits from Dallas-Maxim and have been itching to see if they all work. And they seem to!

What is all this stuff? It’s little chips and button thingees that can be put on a very simple network that can do things like measure temperature etc. And eventually, if I can find, remember, or learn enough electronics, control things as well. They can also act as electronic keys too. One small step on the home automation highway.

The first “experiment” will be to see if I can get things sorted out enough to be able to record temperatures from around the house and get the web server to print out nice little graphs of it all. Shouldn’t be too hard, I hope. Not much in the way of other electronics or fancy software required. I’ll post a link when I finally get it all working.

Now that it’s all nice and warm outside, that may be longer than I had originally planned though…

A couple of weeks holiday, and another public holiday when we got back was enough to get me to the end this superb series.

I have one big problem with it though. There are no more books! The way it’s written makes it something that you feel should just go on and on like Eastenders or something. And that is in part, I think, due to the way it ends. In some big trilogies, absolutely everything seems to get resolved and explained away etc, but in this series just enough does. Even right up to the end, even though there is a climax, or reckoning, if you want to see it as that, you get the feeling that life will go on and there is more coming in life for all the characters.

Now I just have to wait for a year or two to forget enough about it all to read it again….

Just an update for those waiting for the photos of the splendid Egypt holiday we’ve just been on…

We took 1,129 pictures, and have 60 from the friends we were with too. Of them, we have managed so far to weed out 34 that are just rubbish, 135 that we have better versions of, and 16 that we really like.

So that leaves 1,004 to go! 10% done then. But we’ll get there. One day soon, I hope. It just doesn’t help that we can only manage to last about half an hour a time before one or other of us gets sick of it all.
We’ll keep you updated on progress!

I figure if you’re going to be weather forecaster, you should try to forecast the weather. I love the quote from the forecasters in this article on the BBC news to do with the current drought.

“According to the Met Office, there are equal chances of dry, normal or wet weather for the south of England over the next few months.”

Thanks! I think.

The time has come tomorrow to say goodbye to some of the chilli plants. They’ve finally got to the stage that they are big enough to leave the house and make their way in the big wide world. And we really don’t have enough room for them all.

Luckily there seems no end to the households that want one, and it’s good to know they will go to good homes.

Packing them up to move house was a pain, but I hope it will be worth it.

The hardest part is working out which of them to keep!

What a difference a week makes. After being so happy last week that one little plant had popped it’s head up, now I’ve got a chilli forest on the go! Yippee! And as an added bonus, the other type of chilli seeds have decided to start popping up too, just when I’d written them off completely. Now I just have to work out when to upgrade them into larger pots…

Looks like my thumbs may have a little green in them after all! Some of the chilli seeds have poked their heads up in the last couple of days. I was expecting either no action for a long while, or no action at all, after reading a few sites that suggested that the seeds need a very high temperature, and often a long time to germinate. But I’m not complaining!

New toys are always fun! The latest is a small media viewer that I scored off ebay for a really good price. I’ve had my eye on one for a while, but they were always going for more then I was willing to pay. But then one popped up with not much interest in it, and I got it for a lot less than some of the same units that had auctions finishing just before and after this one. Odd, but I’m not complaining!

The unit is a Hauppauge MVP, which is a tiny little box that gets plugged into the network, and can be used to output movies, pictures and music to a TV. I’m using it to be able to watch the programmes that we’ve recorded on the MythTV  superbox up in the bedroom.  A much better idea than trying to sneak a proper PC in there.

It downloads an operating system that has been built to connect to MythTV, MVPMC , from a server and away we go. The technical stuff around getting it to work is on this page .  

Well, it’s been a bit of an agricultural weekend. The state of the twigs and weeds in the pots out the front door just got too much to bear, and so we finally decided to sort it. New plants all round, including quite a few bulbs, some red flowery things, a couple of herbs, and some other stuff that will hopefully be blue flowers in the end. I know that the herbs are Rosemary and Thyme, but the others are a bit of a mystery at this stage. You can tell that I really know my plants, huh?

But the big excitement was planting chilli seeds! Ring of Fire and Habanero variants. I suspect that it’s not too hard to work out what the heat value of them might be! So I have a seed tray full of seeds, and now I just have to wait and see if any of them sprout. Please, please, please! I let you know how they get on.