Time for an update on what’s been goin’ on lately since we installed the tank.  Well, it ended up just under half full from all the rain that came down soon after we installed the tank.  Today, it was supposed to rain and it didn’t although the BOM is still promising some chance of rain tommorow..Fingers crossed though I’m enjoying the sun!

I made a video summarising everything since the tank was installed. It was supposed to be quick but ended up nearly 9 minutes somehow (soz)..  I got inspiration from the handsome Thomas R who is a very nice man indeed since he gave me some ideas for how to irrigate my stuff.  The no-dig garden was built in an afternoon, and a particularly hot one at that, a few days before christmas, and so that I don’t have to carry watering cans of water over to the garden myself it seemed a very good idea to visit Mr Bunning for some extra “plumbing”.

Enjoy..happy new year!

I’ve only got one downpipe flowing into it at present but we’ve got another planned soon.  The one that is connected gets the runoff from the entire patio area outside which isnt too bad for starters - it filled up the tank about 1/3 during the heavy rain we had last weekend!  The patio area is about the size of the area in the first pic (with Phil cuttin’ wood) again.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

These are strong-looking PVC bladder tanks similar to the ones you can buy that fit under your house (and if you so choose, your car), but at less than half the price of a similar sized plastic one.  I went with a slimline one and found it very convenient to throw in the back of the car (no waiting or extra charge for delivery!) and put it together in about an hour. The tank comes with everything - a tap, pipes and little connector things, so its pretty good value. It would have been nicer to buy something that was made in Australia (good old China came to the rescue) but at least it’s cheap.  

I decided to put the tank in the corner of the patio area because it’s space we wouldn’t use otherwise and it’s in a good spot to pick rain off the gutters. It also means that most of the tank will be under shade during the day which should extend its longevity even with the shade cover in place. Directly above is a gutter from the patio to the garage that’ll be really easy to turn around and aim into the tank.  

The tank comes with a few different ways of plumbing water into it which is kind of nice. It’s got two holes on one end near the top where you can plumb water in and an overflow. It also has three holes in the top that are covered with mesh so you can pretty much aim a downpipe in their general direction and the water will flow down through the shade cover and into the tank via these holes.  

We’re going to build a timber support frame for the tank to raise it off the ground also. This is mostly important from a gravitational point of view to connect a hose or just to fit a bucket underneath.  I actually have a no-dig garden planned for a concrete area out the front in the near future, so I’m going to copy Thomas’s idea and connect some poly pipe from the tank going along the fence into some strategically placed drippers!

Another thing I didn’t consider much at all at first was how dirty the gutters get.  Along with the runoff from the patio I’m planning on blocking a downpipe and taking water from another that both take runoff from about 2/3 of the roof of the house. Since this is only water for the garden I wasn’t too concerned about putting in a first flush system - but with the shade cover and grille in place to stop larger items getting in it would still be nice to avoid getting lots of silt and junk in the tank for the long run.  So I spent about two hours in the evening last night clearing them out and this morning started putting up some spare gutter guard I had lying around.  I have to get some more actually. Can I be bothered? No.  The only advantage putting it in really though is just to keep the gutters clear in the long term.. but this will stop things rotting down and turning into the aforementioned silt and junk that could fit through the grille!

Couple more shots.. The tank nearly in place (it’s just going to be lifted a foot or two with its wooden foot), and the 2 1/2 m of gutter mesh I installed on the patio. Unfortunately, I still have about 5.5m to go, and it’s a pain in the ass to install so I might just leave it.

 

I’ve caught the gardening bug. I think it started when I thought it was high time to finally clean out all the dead plants and mess in the garden, or when Laura’s brother in law dismantled his pergola and had a big gap in his back yard left, surrounded by brick, and I suggested turning it into a vege garden.

Any rate, moving on a couple of months.  He’s installed a 5000L water tank, I’ve donated a (now very healthy) worm farm and I’m usually over there with him once a weekend doing a bit of whatever needs to be done… Because the pergola area is now a huge vege patch!  Currently growing over there:  Tomatoes, cauliflower, pumpkin, corn, lettuces, carrots, broccoli, silverbeet, oregano, capsicum, onions, cucumber and probably one or two other things.

We don’t have much space here but nevertheless I’ve cleaned up the gardens and planted some seedlings and seeds. Here’s the result:

This is a coriander plant that was the size of the basil plant next to it a month ago. Down the bottom is a little chilli plant that’s starting to fruit one or two chillis.

This is a bunch of spouted seeds. We have.. Oregano, silverbeet, tomatoes, carrots..

Next to the seedlings are a few containers I’ve turned into makeshift vege grower things. In them are watermelon, silverbeet and brocolli seedlings that I raised from seeds. Now have to be patient and wait for them to grow..

This is the back area of the house which I just tidied up after a LONG time, put in some greywater diversion hoses (you can probably see them hanging off the white pipe) and then some nice red mulch.

What’s next? Installing a 2500L-ish water tank and building a bigger area on some concrete to lay down some mushroom compost and plant MORE veges!!

Already I’m using RTM tenfold, although I’m using tags and smartlists less and Lists more - just because it’s easier and Idon’t have that many cross-contextual to-do’s I guess

- their published market is “the masses”. WTF? The consumer and business markets have been completely saturated for years, at least here in oz. Who’s gonna want to “upgrade” to a machine that will have to first overcome the stigma of being slower, less reliable and expandible plus pay subscription fees?

- purchase of their computers required. Sure, they’re cheap(ish). But google and you will see that the current market trend is toward notebooks. In the low end and portability market, the Netbooks like the Asus eee-PC are killing it. TechNovus have no netbook range yet.

- the low end market that this is mostly targetted at is going to be the type that have a cheap 250mb/month Dodo internet plan. Given the recommended Internet speed of 1mbps for the TechNovus product, I can see gran’s overage fee at the end of the month being horrendous. Bandwidth is not ubiquitous enough yet for always-connected everyday computing. Not to mention grandmas stress levels after she gets knocked off her Internet connection the 7th time in a row. How will the average Indian user be affected?

- hardware is no more green than a laptop. My work issued Dell Latitude pulls 25W while being charged, approx 3W more than the TechNovus Navigator (and I assume the Published figures do not factor in a monitor!) A Netbook running an Atom cpu would eat this cloud computer alive in the greenwash stakes and still be connectable to an external monitor if required.

- Having worked as a sales engineer for a large SaaS web conferencing company I am very familiar with the concerns any business, hell even individual, holds over their data security and integrity. TechNovus better have a way to mitigate these concerns from day 1 or they will never penetrate any business market. By the way, forcing users to store data on a USB key won’t cut it. It’s cumbersome, insecure and prone to fail. Customers might as well buy used hardware and install Linux themselves. At least their fast hard drives can be used for data!

- more $0.02 on saas. It is absolutely wonderful for collaborative applications like web conferencing, presence, IM, unified communications and stuff like that. Most web 2.0 apps you know and love out there are collaborative apps. Many more you didn’t think would be collaborative in fact definitly are. They rely on user interactivity to thrive. Delivering standard office apps in an ASP model is a dumb idea. It’s boring, unsexy and has been done to death one way or another over the past 25 years. Just leave it to a monolith in Redmond and do something innovative!

- tell me again why I should pay $20 or whatever a month to use software I can download gratis? Linux, openoffice. They’re being offered. if Steve Ballmer is to be believed we’ll all be running office in the cloud in a year anyway. Good luck competing with MS!

No doubt I’ll think of more compelling arguments against this product but for now it’s 1amand it’s a school night

Forget Remote Buddy - this is WAY cooler! After having a good little play with the native iPhone remote control that lets you control iTunes on a Mac/PC over a wifi connection from your Jesus Phone, I got a bit teared up remembering the days I had my TV and stereo connected to a Mac Mini.  I’m a bit of an audiophile so have a half decent stereo - and after I replaced my Mac mini with a PS3 (hey, GTA4 is cool) I missed being able to EASILY control music (streaming through the PS3 is NOT fun) and have it come through some decent speakers (iMac speakers are not decent speakers).

Enter an 802.11n Airport Express and the problem goes away.  I set up the Airport, hooked its audio out up to a spare optical input on the Denon AVR, selected the Airtunes speakers in iTunes on the iMac, and started up the iPhone remote. Seconds later I was listening to lossless audio through my preferred speakers, sitting on the couch selecting my preferred music with the TV off and iPhone in hand!  So fun

Even better I can once again stream my DTS encoded audio back to the stereo. The Mac mini (with iTunes) did it (when it felt like it) and the PS3 does something funky to the bitstream to stop the AVR deciphering it.

All in all…a fantastic, affordable solution that works reliably and took less time to set up than it did to write this blog entry!  I’m impressed, Apple… (If only you could fix up the iPhone firmware to work this well)

I’ve been doing some internal spiritual reflection lately that I want to share on here when I have some time to type out my thoughts.  My gut feelings about the world we live in, while skewed now and then, have lately been that there is massive change in the way we live, work and play coming. To some it may be positive, to others it will crush them with negativity and cause many people to become broken. If you begin to think I’m a crack smoking hippie talking who’s going to start quoting Nostradamus scripture, dont worry, I’m not, just bear with me. =)

One thing I tried to do was “get the most” out of my relatively crappy Canon A530… Have a look at the Photos tab above, I am uploading a bunch of them to Te Facebook albums as I speak (all starting with NZ2008) There are many that were taken with Laura’s low-end Nikon point and shoot, and Jem’s Samsung P&S too.  There were also several others that were way too grainy because I thought I was the f’ing man by putting the ISO levels way up to compensate for lack of light and more that were taken with slow shutter speeds and no tripod…which I’m not gonna upload.

Obligatory tasters:

Last year I was determined to install some insulation in my roof but never got around to it. See my house is only 5 years old but for some reason the wog-guy-next-door-that-built-all-6-of-these-units-and-seems-very-dodgy completely skipped installing any form of goddamn insulation in the walls or ceilings of these damn places.

Isn’t that illegal? Yeah I thought so too.

Anyway, it seemed like a job to get my father in law to be (hopefully? hmm!) to help me out with so we did the Bunnings thing and came back with 5 bales of R3.5 insulation batt things to stick in the roof upstairs, since it always seems to be cold up there.

Those things seriously irritate my skin!  I was wearing a dust mask, glasses, a jumper and jeans and gloves and sweet Jesus and mother mary I was itching like a bad case of the crabs.  The bad news is that we only got about 1/2 of it done - because of the ducts that the energy-sucking central heating / evap cooling in the roof getting in the way.  So next weekend is “finish off weekend” where we get to contort our bodies into small spaces they aren’t supposed to go to get our friendly-looking but dermatitically challenging wads of fluff into every nook and cranny!

Next post, I’m going to bitch about why I dislike my neighbor.  Hope he doesnt read my blog!