Down on the Farmy Farm

Here’s an update on how things are faring on the Farmy Farm, or as it’s also known, the back garden.

My attempt at herb garden wasn’t entirely successful and I’ve come to conclusion that the more delicate herbs such as corriander aren’t worth bothering with. I’m also Sarto report that my homegrown basil didn’t last too long either and the shop-bought plant is also struggling. My homegrown thyme is barely keeping it’s head above soil in contrast to the shop-bought specimen which is riotous.

I’ve finally picked my first two spring onions which seem to have been on the go since March and the pepper plants in the greenhouse are shadows of the crop this time last year.

All is not gloomy however: the first courgette has been cut and tasted fine, even though it was headlong on it’s way to being a marrow. More courgettes are forming now although I’ve had to remove one plant from pot as it’s sucking up food and water from the others. The cucumbers too are sprouting fruit and should be ready soon.

The strawberry plants we got at the end of the season last year survived winter and provided a small crop of fruit back in June. I’ve realised that just because a planter has nine holes you shouldn’t fill them all with plants. The ones I didn’t remove are sprouting runners and some are taking root already so next year I’ll have few plants per plant.

The aubergines are growing well, but no sign of amy fruit yet, whilst both blueberry plants are in fruit. The seedlings of the third batch of salad have just poked through the soil.

The real success story has been the potatoes: I ordered a patio growing kit which consisted of 10 seed potatoes and 3 heavy duty polythene bags. Following the instructions, I put 3 potatoes in 2 of the bags and 4 in the last bag and topped up regularly with compost. The foilage went a bit ‘triffid’ and took over the garden so it was a relief to get a fair piece of garden real estate back when I lifted the first 2 bags a week or so ago. Unlike John Wyndham’s pesky plants though, they didn’t stomp off round the garden and try and eat the dog.

So whilst I may be far from self sufficient, I am at least learning that if you want cheap potatoes then three plastic bags and £20 of compost is not the way to get them.

Filed under: Gardening

iPhone 3.0 unstable?

After the shenanigans with Quickoffice crashing and losing a load of my musings earlier today, the WordPress app appears to have gone and done the same thing. As soon as I published the piece on Quickoffice it emptied my Local Drafts folder not only of the draft Quickoffice post but also the half finished post on my recent gardening results.

While I suppose it’s not statisically impossible for two apps on the same platform to be buggy and unstable, is there am underlying cause? Could it be the Cupertino Boys have rushed another release? After all, iPhone 3.1 has been seeded to developers already…

Filed under: Apple , 3.0, 3.1, iPhone, Quickoffice, Wordpress

The Quickoffice and the Deadoffice

Of all the apps I’ve waited to appear for the iPhone, the ones I was most keen to try were the office apps. It sounds a bit sad I know but as I recently posted on the Macworld website comments, sometimes you gain by having less. As computer and Internet use at my employer is heavily monitored the facility to create and edit personal documents without having to go near the company network would be useful and possibly job-saving.

So when Quickoffice surfaced for the iPhone I was cheerily optimistic that my personal documentation-creation tendancies would be well-served. The iPhone has bred and astounding number of third-party apps in the relatively short time it’s been around. I’d tried a few of the other document creation and editing apps available. Most were pretty competent but nearly all were hampered the relativity clumsy way they handled document transfer to a computer. The prefered method was to enable to wifi on the phone then point your conputer’s web browser to the iPhone’s IP address and use the app’s built-in server to copy files to and from the computer. In truth this operation wasn’t quite as inelegant as they sound, WriteRoom for example, and others, made a decent go of it.

Quickoffice on the other hand, whilst it can use this method can also access your MobileMe iDisk, Apple’s paid-for online storage facility, which offers the option of automatically synchronising files from the online iDisk to a mirror iDisk on your computer. You don’t have to have the mirror, you can simply drag and drop files straight to online version, but it makes life a little easier if you choose to sync.

I first came across Quickoffice afew years ago when it was installed by default on a new Nokia N70. Whilst I appreciated the efforts in getting MS Office documents onto a mobile platform that wasn’t powered by Windows, I really couldn’t see the point of doing it on device like an N70 which had a standard phone-sized screen and numerical keypad. It just wasn’t practical to try and edit that report or proposal using a phone keypad. I had the same feeling about Adobe’s Acrobat Reader for the Symbian OS. Whilst I’m sure they were perfectly serviceable on larger screened Symbian and other OS devices, they were next to useless on the N70’s 1.8″ screen.

The iPhone version of Quickoffice then looked like being my new favourite app. As I’ve mentioned, I had tried WriteRoom and I’d also downloaded Mariner Calc, which I had previously encountered in it’s full-sized incarnation on the Mac. Quickoffice then brought all these things together in one app.

A little while ago I had to go abroad to work and was faced with lugging the company’s Neolithic laptop around with me. Then I reasoned that as none of the spreadsheets and reports I had to write were that sensitive I should be able to use Quickoffice. I emailed the blank templates across to my computer, synced them to the iDisk and all was set.

When I returned to the office I simply emailed the files from my phone to my work email address, did a final bit of formatting and sent them to whom it may concern, job done.

Today I decided to use Quickoffice to compose a short article for a newsletter. Although I’d used it in anger while working abroad, the edits only lasted a few minutes as I added more details. Writing the newsletter article meant I had to use the app for a longer period, half an hour or more. Unfortunately that half hour or so seemed to throw up some of Quickoffice’s flaws. Whilst it automatically saved my document regularly, it crashed twice. After restarting ot recovered my piece bar the last few words and all was well. Ten minutes later, it crashed again and this time all was not well. The piece had gone with no sign of it locally on the iPhone or on the iDisk. Now I’m well aware of the importance of regularly and manually saving work, but you know how it is, sometimes it’s a case of do as I say not as I do.

Unfortunately it’s hard to know where to lay the blame for the crashes. Have Apple done something to the latest release of iPhone software which has compromised in turn Quickoffice? Or have Quickoffice’s developers not fully tested their app against the new OS?

However good a piece of software appears to be, however innovative it’s features, if it can’t last the course it’s ultimately not worth having. Because many online vendors have ratings systems for the products they sell it’s no possible to get a good idea of how a product performs before you buy it (or at least how many people read the instructions) and it appears I’m not the only one experiencing issue with this software. We’ll see if Quickoffice improves with the next release of iPhone OS or the next app update.

Filed under: Apple , Apple, iPhone, IT, Quickoffice, technology

Farmer Gareth’s farmy farm

Last year I had some success at growing food in the back garden. The garden consists of about a third paving, a third gravel and a third decking, with a small flower bed. Not exactly an urban oasis then, as a result almost everything was grown in trays, pots and planters. I say almost because we have  a rosemary plant in the flower bed which appears to be almost indestructible and regularly provides garnish for all sorts of roasts. It’s so successfull, I’ve take to chopping large bits off to use as air freshener in place of those god-awful plug-in things.

As an aside on those air fresheners, I work in the ship repair industry and we were recently using an epoxy-based sealant for a hull fitting which had all kinds of scary health warning symbols on the packet; you know the kind of thing, crosses, skulls, dead fish, etc. I’ve been somewhat concerned to find the same warning symbols on the plug-in air freshener currently fragrancing the house.

Anyway, back to the garden: Last year I planted a wide variety of fruits, vegetables and herbs and whilst some plants were successful, others were far from so. To begin with, here’s what I sowed: runner beans, aubergines, garlic, cucumbers, tomatoes, chillies, peppers, mint, thyme and rocket.

The beans and cucumbers were put in long pots like window boxes, everything else was sowed in pots except the tomatoes which are a tumbler variety and went in hanging baskets.

So lessons learned then: the beans, aubergines and the herbs were, er… less than successful. The other crops all faired well, but suffered from my enthusiasm in overplanting. So the plan this year is to plant less seeds with the intention of giving the plants that do make it more of chance to grow bigger. I should point out that I’m using homemade compost, I have a heap full of the stuff!

So we’ll se what this year brings, hopefully some late summer barbeques with exlcusively homegrown salad.

Filed under: Environment, Gardening, Sowing

Neil Young on iPods, iTunes and digital music

Came across a post on the Macworld website today. Apparently Neil Young has been voicing his displeasure at the current state of digital music, with Apple’s products getting a special mention. You can read his comments on the Fortune blog, but the essence of it is that we should all be listening to music in the highest possible quality on the highest possible quality medium and not on mp3 players. Er, sorry Neil but most mp3 players, iPods included, can play a variety of formats, including lossless. Apparently Neil is a bit of a ‘technologist’ and plans to release his back catalogue on Blu-ray for maximum quality. So he’ll be removing all his tracks from that horrid iTunes store where they are available in that awful mp3 format, right? Er. No.

A song is an idea, a concept, not a physical construct. Music’s soul is in the playing and the listening, if you want to appreciate music fully then listen to it live. If you can’t listen to it live, then you’ve already lost the majority of the atmosphere and emotion that piece will create for you, in which case it doesn’t matter if it’s on a vinyl disc or an iPod. Personally I’ll stick with my Bose and my iPod.

As for Neil Young, I’m with Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Filed under: Media , Apple, iPod, iTunes, music

Budget Days! Happy Days!

(This post was originally posted in April 2008 on an alternative website)

I often wonder why the media get themselves so worked up about Budget Day with all that in-depth analysis and all those ‘what it means for you’ featurettes. In the world of rolling twenty-four hour news coverage, Budget Day coverage is airliner-crash tv but where no-one is seriously injured. Horror! Taxes go up! Terror! The price of beer goes up! Good News! Pensioners and kiddies will be better off! It’s like watching the scenes of the fuel tanks going up in fireball that’ll singe your eyebrows off at five miles and then watching the scene of a small child miraculously being pulled from the wreckage. But with numbers.

But this is an airliner crash where the plane lands on someone particularly bad, like bin Laden or Mugabe… or the real threat to Truth, Freedom And Civilisation As We Know It: 4×4 owners! Oh the horror of it! All those evil 4×4 drivers trundling around the countryside squashing endangered badgers and mowing down almost-extinct water-voles, all while belching toxic gases and nuclear radiation from their exhausts, sucking down 30 gallons of unrefined crude oil per mile.

Yeah.

Right.

I’ll declare my interests here: I don’t have a 4×4, and most days, I ride a mountain bike to work. I recycle religiously, we turn the heating off when it’s not needed. We have low-energy lamps throughout the house, we have an energy-efficient boiler. I buy locally or UK-produced food, organic if possible, whenever we can. We compost our garden and vegetable waste and reuse it to grow vegetables and herbs. I even drink local real ales! And yet I have my Dark Side… Not only are we a two-car household… yes it’s true… but worse still… one of those cars is… is…. a turbo-diesel! The shame! Oh I’m sorry! I meant to say one of those cars is American with a big V8 in it.

Ok, sarcasm over with, here’s the rub: Firstly, my car is a 15 years old Pontiac Trans Am with a 5.7 litre V8. It produces about 300bhp and has a 4-speed automatic transmission. Driving purely around town, I’ve worked out using figures from the petrol pump and the mileage on the odometer that it gets about 18 miles to the gallon. On motorways or dual carriageway journeys, using the same method, it currently gets around 27 miles to the gallon. Now as I mentioned above, I usually ride a mountain bike to work unless I’ve had to park the car somewhere overnight where I can’t leave it during in the day, or I’m giving my wife a lift to work as well, or like last Monday, when it would actually be dangerous to ride the bike because of really bad weather, or I just haven’t used the car for a couple of weeks and I just want to give it a run. I live about 2.5 miles from work, 4.5 miles if I take the scenic route (which I usually do in the car because the short route is full of other cars and half-empty buses). Consequently, I usually use the Pontiac for long journeys or uncongested routes or ‘off-peak’ which keeps the fuel economy honest. I do this because I bought the car to enjoy driving it, not sit stationary staring at someone else’s rear lights. And because I drive occasionally rather than daily, I cover an annual mileage of about 3500 miles per year.

Here’s an radical concept: What if my Trans Am is ‘greener’ than most other cars? What if that were true? Wouldn’t that be kick in the behind for the Chancellor? And the Government? Not to mention the mayor of London – or as it also known, La-La Land. I’m sorry for those of you in London but I will not be lectured to on environmental issues by people who choose to live and work inside the M25. That place has as much to do with real life as the Klingon homeworld or the Death Star. i.e. Not Much.

Ok, I promise, no more sarcasm. Back to my thread. The best selling car in the UK is the Ford Focus and has been since it was introduced back in 1999. Now suppose, and after a couple of hours internet searching I can’t confirm this, but suppose the best selling version of the Ford Focus is 1.6 litre petrol. It probably isn’t but as I said, I can’t confirm what is. A test by the UK magazine Autocar – a magazine not exactly world-renowned for being a bunch of ranting half-wits – averaged 33.4mpg out of such a car, and I’ll assume that ‘average’ implies somewhere between the worst mileage they achieved and the best. Now lets compare that with the worst figues I’ve ever had from my Trans Am: 15mpg or so around town in the winter. Now that isn’t very scientific, I’m not comparing like-for-like, but it serves the point I have to make, as you’ll see. Incidentally, on a track covering 40 miles flat out, Autocar got just over 16mpg from their Focus.

Now, as I stated above my annual mileage is about 3500 miles. I have to keep an eye on this because I’m only insured to cover a maximum of 5000 miles per year. Also incidentally this has been my average personal mileage since I started driving. Getting average annual mileage numbers for UK drivers isn’t as straight-forward as you might think. I found a range of figures from a range of sources, varying from 6800 to 9000 miles per year, which in all honesty surprised me because I thought it was more than that, around 10,000 to 12,000 mile per year. Anyway, one figure which cropped up more than once was 8000 miles per year, so I’ll use that.

 

Using my Pontiac’s worst figures, I’m using just under twice the fuel that an average car would use. Or looked at another way my worst figures are equivalent to an average car on average mileage covering about 7000 miles per year. Now lets assume that my 3500 miles per year is covered entirely around town, or urban if you prefer. Now let’s invoke my worst fuel economy of 15mpg. that equates to 233.33(and so on) gallons of fuel used per year. Now let’s take the ‘average’ Focus with its average annual mileage of 8000 miles per year and its average fuel economy of 33.4mpg. That equates to 239.52 gallons of fuel used per year. And don’t forget, I’ve biased my fuel economy figures in favour of the Focus.

 

As I mentioned above, the other car in our household is a turbo-diesel, a Ford Focus C-MAX as it happens. Using the figures produced by its on-board computer, the best mileage we’ve achieved in that car so far is 50 mpg over a 172 mile journey. Travelling exactly the same route in the Trans Am, and experiencing similar traffic congestion, I achieved 27 mpg (at the pump. No onboard computer widget!). Now based on the annual mileage, that still means the Trans Am comes out better than the C-MAX, as the C-MAX does in fact cover about 8000 miles per year.

 

Now before you all start posting all the flaws in my theory, of which there are many I know, I’ll get to the point: Staggeringly it appears that if you use a car less, it uses less fuel, and therefore emits less emissions. Even more staggeringly, if you use a car with large engine a lot less than a car with an average engine, the car with the average engine will end up using more fuel. I’m more than willing to compare average mileages and fuel-economy with a real, live, Focus owner, which may end up with me realising the unpleasant truth that my car – shock, and yea, horror, uses more fuel than a car with a smaller engine. But hey, it’s a risk I’m willing to take if it causes a few myths to be busted. Apologies for the poor English there. I should point out at this stage that I am in no way associated with any 4×4 manufacturer, nor with Ford Motor Company, nor with Pontiac or GM, nor with Autocar magazine.

Now here’s another radical concept: If you believe the hype, 4×4s and gas-guzzling luxury cars are destroying the planet. Next time you’re sitting in a traffic jam, count the number of luxury cars and 4×4s you can see. Then count the number of nice sensible average cars you can see.

Now who’s destroying the planet?

Filed under: Environment , cars, tax

Wales win the Triple Crown…

Well, the men in red have done it, the 2008 RBS Six Nations Triple Crown has been won by Wales in a frankly, slow-paced game at Croke Park in Dublin. Neither Wales nor Ireland looked like taking full control of the game, and things where still touch-and-go in the last 5 minutes.

So while the Welsh walk away with the first silverware of the tournament, an honorary wooden spoon has to go the BBC for their exclusive and increasingly amateurish coverage of what is the Northern Hemisphere’s premier rugby tournament.

Now it’s been known for a while that certain presenters are pretty poor – John Inverdale forgot which tournament he was at in the build up to the England v France game – but the standard of commentary and ‘analysis’ is also starting deteriorate. The 15 minutes of build-up to today’s Wales v Ireland for example was blighted by an in-depth analysis of why the Welsh team walked onto the pitch still wearing their coats. Fascinating! Who cares? I certainly don’t, I want to see the team roasters, hear the anthems and get on with watching the match. I couldn’t care less if Ryan Jones et al, came out in nuns wimples and tutus! Ok, I might be a bit worried and it would make playing the game difficult, but ultimately it makes little or no difference.

The BBC’s new sports signing Gabby Logan has made it abundantly clear in this tournament that she either doesn’t know the first thing about rugby, or else simply doesn’t care, hence it isn’t surprising she started discussing the Welsh attire. What annoys me is that Keith Wood and Jonathan Davies, two knowledgeable ex-players and respected commentators, went along with it.

None of this however is even in the same league of irritation as the well known wine critic and occasional ranting idiot Brian Moore. On several occasions in his commentary on the England v France match, he descended into the kind of ranting you expect to see in your local pub. Now I’ve nothing against people getting excited when their team plays well or plays poorly, indeed, I starting yelling so loudly I scare the dog and my wife kicks me out into the garden until I calm down. The difference is I’m not commentating to an international audience. Moore may well feel agrieved that his team (England) aren’t playing to their potential but as viewers, we are expecting Moore to tell us why they aren’t playing well.

And finally, the crowning achievement, so far this tournament, of uninformed and even biased commentary: Austin Healey at the end of the England v France game (the third round in the five round tournament) excitingly announcing that the England v Ireland match on the last weekend would be the decider. Well at the time Ireland were second in the table… behind Wales, who had won all three of their matches. England by contrast were fourth having only won two matches – and struggled in both victories – and lost one.

As another ex-player Healey should know better than anyone that you never count your chickens before they’ve hatched, especially with six matches still to play. How anyone could not just discount but totally ignore the only side to have won all their matches as contenders for the title is something only he can answer.

Perhaps standards will improve on the final weekend.

Filed under: Uncategorized , BBC, broadcasting, Rugby, sport, Wales