Andy's starting a new venture involving various preserves. It hasn't officially been launched yet, but here are a couple of preview photos:

I've posted an ad for a room to rent in my house. Here are a couple of the pictures I took for the advert:

Really I need to take some photos of the room itself!

In Ubuntu I installed the H.264 and MPEG-4AAC decoders in the belief that this is legal since the UK doesn't recognize software patents. Despite searching, I couldn't confirm this, so I've decided not to use them. It's difficult to uninstall the codecs so I'm simply going to not install …

The latest news in the vine saga is that I've planted all three vines against the wall:

The two on the left (Alastair Reynolds and Iain Banks) are a black grape (vitis cabernet sauvignon bp), and the one on the right (Peter Watts) is a white grape (vitis chardonnay g …

The other Saturday there was off-road karting for a stag day. I got a lift to the karting with two geo-caching devotees, and they stopped off by the Severn Estuary to find a cache.

I took a photo of the karting track just as we were about to leave. I …

I helped my dad clear out his garage before he moved house. We found a pentagonal box that I'd made for him and my mother when I was about 13. We used it as the family's laundry box for years.

Father has recently shaved his beard off. He's growing it …

Ben sent me a BBC article that contained the following paragraph:

Spread Networks has been building one such fibre-optic connection, shaving three microseconds off the 825-mile (1327km) trading journey between Chicago and New York.

I thought it's got to be 3 milliseconds, not microseconds. Doing some sea[]{#goog_2120667989}[]{#goog_2120667990}rching …

I'm reading Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space series in a bit of a random order. I've just finished Chasm City. As I read, I find myself thinking that the characters are humans in an unusual setting. Whereas I think that our future is that we'll become less human. Our brains haven't …

Now and again I make an edit to Wikipedia and Wiktionary, which makes me eligible to vote in the Image Filter Referendum. I read the debate that's going on, but I don't really have strong views. I suppose I don't really see the need for an image filter. I'm sort …

On Saturday I went to the garden centre in Bath and bought a grape vine which I took home on the train.

Here's where it's going to go.

First I've got to get to grips with the double Guyot method.