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I planted out all the fruit trees and vines today. There's two types of apple, Dwarf Dorsett Golden and Dwarf Tropical Sweet, two types of plum, Maiposa and Narabeen, and two types of passionfruit, the familiar Black and one called Sunshine Special. They all came from Daleys Fruit Tree Nursery up in Kyogle.
You may be concerned that I've put them so close together. This is intentional, as I'm following the Backyard Orchard Culture idea, where you grow fruit trees much closer together than normal, and the trees compete with each other. This, and aggressive pruning, keeps the tree sizes manageable. In a small inner city backyard, this is the only way to go really. It also means I get some cross pollination and more varities. We'll see how it goes.
Also in amongst the apple trees and passionfruit is a Comfrey Bocking 14 from Digger's Club. This plant apparently digs deep and pulls up trace minerals from the sub-surface, making it a valuable compost and mulch crop.
The garden is really starting to take shape. Two nice garden beds, the fruit is in. I get the feeling we're nearing the end of Winter and in the next few weeks, the weather will really turn. Then this garden is going to go nuts! I can't wait to get the Spring plantings in, though we're still waiting to harvest broad beans, brocolli, silverbeet, kale, parsnips and brussels.
10 Aug 2008 17:44 [category: /house] #
Michael Davies reckons I was whinging when I gave a method for people to filter out Twitter and other annoying crap from their feed from Planet Linux Australia. WTF? I gave a method for people to not have to read what they don't want to. Whinging is complaining without offering a solution -- you'll note I didn't demand the annoying crap be removed from the Planet.
Think before you post. The world is listening. Sage words indeed.
What this really brings up is what the purpose of a Planet is. In the past the shadowy PLA cabal have removed stuff silently. So what's the policy? Must it be geek only? So does that mean no mountain biking, home schooling, trouble with kids, politics? Or is it just that whoever it is that does the censoring didn't like my politics?
10 Jul 2008 13:07 [category: /geek] #
The chemists' lobby group says banning the sale of cough medicine for children under two is "an insult to many parents". No, what's insulting is selling something that doesn't work, even in adults. Worse, unlike a placebo, these medicines contain drugs that can actually be quite dangerous.
Parents finding that their kids need something foul-tasting to resolve a persistent cough would be advised to find something vile but harmless. I wouldn't expect such advice from your local chemist though.
10 Apr 2008 13:24 [category: /politix] #
I, like many others amongst you, have to run the bloated abomination that is Microsoft Outlook at work. It's been quite annoying, as I've really got used to my personal Google Calendar being synced to my phone via Goosync, which has been a real productivity improvement for me. However my work calendar has been left on the desktop, or I could get it logging into the Outlook web access thing from home, but hardly as portable as my phone.
Enter Google Calendar Sync, just released it seems. This periodically syncs your Outlook calendar with Google Calendar. So now my work calendar is on my phone. Brilliant!
One niggle for me is that there's no option to configure which Google Calendar it syncs with, just using your primary calendar. This is annoying as I'd like to separate my work calendar out, so I don't end up with personal items cluttering my work calendar at work, and I can show/hide the work calendar when I'm not interested in work.
Still, as usual I'm sure Google will be responsive to feature requests and that feature will come sooner or later.
10 Mar 2008 11:53 [category: /geek] #
Wow, the postbox outside Central Station gets fast delivery. I popped the DVD we watched on Saturday night into its Quickflix envelope and dropped it into the postbox yesterday. Quickflix have just emailed me saying they received it. Wow!
The film itself was Blood Simple, the Coen brothers' first film, which I've been trying to get for years. Brilliant film, with many of their hallmarks already in there, including the fat private dick driving a Volkswagon Beetle that popped up in The Big Lebowski.
We also went along to see Erskineville Stories on Saturday night. Shown on a big screen in Erskineville Park, it featured a bunch of old timers telling their stories about Erskineville. It's one of my favourite parts of Sydney, and we would have bought a house there if the prices hadn't been so ridiculous. The stories were great, with lots of humour and interesting tales of this suburbs' past as working class housing.
My grandmother was born in the slums of Forest Lodge and grey up in slummy Annandale, now two of Sydney's more expensive inner city suburbs. I always enjoyed hearing her stories of growing up through the Depression, with periodic epidemics, crowded housing and grinding poverty. As soon as she and my grandfather were able, they moved to the then-outskirts of Sydney to the garden suburb of Concord West. Last year we sold her house for nearly a million dollars!
10 Mar 2008 10:51 [category: /film] #
John Birmingham, one of my favourite writers, writes about the proposed Internet censorship laws.
Chips, why don't you go back to your big new office, stop messing around with my inalienable right to download as much hot, hot action as I can take, and instead get on with building that broadband network you promised us.
So I can watch even more porn.
10 Jan 2008 11:24 [category: /geek] #
I found this helpful page with a nice recipe for email address validation in JavaScript. Unfortunately the regular expression doesn't allow for email addresses with a plus sign in the front part, for example foo+bar@argle.com. These kinds of email addresses are perfectly valid and are used by many to implement disposable email addresses (though I'd recommend Sneakemail myself).
So here's my amended regular expression for validating email addresses. Have I missed anything?
^\w(?:\w|-|\.|\+(?!\.|@))*@\w(?:\w|-|\.(?!\.))*\.\w{2,3}
Before you use this, you might want to read my follow up post with comments from a number of people on the unsuitability of this pattern.
