Recently a small piece of the door seal on our washer dryer came out in the wash. It was small but enough to mean water on the kitchen floor so it needed replacing.
The solution seemed simple. Order a replacement seal. Fitting it however was a problem. Read more
That probably won’t be what you want though. For example our recent adoption from a recently deceased friend was developing a fascination for clawing at the carpets and rugs. Min decided that we should get a scratching post. I thought a scratching post was, well, a post, but Min had other ideas so we now own this 4 foot tall thing: Note the absence of a cat in that photo. I joked with Min when Read more
We got my mum a new bed recently. Turns out the cat was rather fond of the old mattress 🙂 Read more
It seems that our new government is digging its heels in and the rest of the EU (probably Germany) isn’t happy. So let me put the scenario into perspective. Ireland cannot borrow from the market at the moment, we are apparently going to stay a free market capitalist country, so we will be getting money from there again. What we need is money from the EU/IMF in the interim to get us through the mess Read more
I needed to get some new surdo beaters for the SRFC Ultras. Unfortunately these are about €15 to buy. So I decided to try and make some rather than buy them. After a couple of iterations I came up with a beater that seems to work well. The challenge is to come up with a beater that sounds right when hit hard. I had a proper beater to compare to and also a nice big Read more
So after about 7 weeks fermenting its nearly time to bottle the elderberry wine. It’s cleared and I’ve added some fermentation stopper. I’ll chuck in a campden tablet and bottle it on Sunday hopefully. Tasting it tonight its clear that its going to need to mellow a bit. Well, a lot. I might try a bottle after 6 months, but this stuff might not be drinkable for years! Still, once this is in bottles I Read more
I have some data that I need to come up with a way to graph. I’m using the Light Pollution from Thüringer Landessternwarte, Tautenburg, Germany and our friends at Kuffner-Observatory, Vienna, Austria. I have this unit hooked up to take a reading every second. It records the temperature, and data from three light meters, one designed to capture low levels of light which is of interest to us for light pollution (plotted logarithmically below). Anyway Read more
Woke up to a garden full of the little fellas today. Plenty around the estate too. Not a great photo but you get the main features. I noticed the local mistle thrush getting very worked up about them suddenly appearing on its turf! More info from Birdwatch Ireland. Read more
TED: Derek Sivers: Keep your goals to yourself This video from TEDGlobal 2010 confirms something I have always felt. The warm fuzzy feelings you get when you tell people what you are going to do, gets interpreted by your brain as a reward for doing it, or at least for making steps towards your goal. You have done nothing, but your mind feels it has made some progress. I suspect we’ve all been here. I Read more
Here’s what the arch looks like today: Under those 8 inches of snow you would see a roof. The roof itself is made from a red ‘coroline’ bituminous sheet from B&Q. It supported by the frame that you could see in the previous blog post; the support isn’t designed to hold much weight but it seems to be doing ok with the snow. And overall has a bit of a chinese feel to it. The Read more