Silicon Bog

Author: silicon

  • A hawk flaps its wings…

    The latest efforts from the US to move us smoothly into WW3 have disturbing knock-on effects around the world, some very close to the bog in fact. The dystopian world in which we now live, where the massively inept Boris Johnson provides the British interface to the world, has seen escalations in tension between the US and Russia to the point where Trump’s administration announced very tough sanctions against some of Russia’s finest oligarchs last week.

    One of those great self-made men, tirelessly working for the common good, is Oleg Deripaska. His company took ownership of a massive alumina processing plant, which lies on the Shannon river between the house on the bog and Limerick over 10 years ago. It employs loads of people around the area (I think nearly 500), and we know quite a few of them.

    The plant takes in bauxite, processes it into alumina using lovely chemicals that definitely do no harm to anyone (I think caustic soda is an excellent exfoliating cream), then ships it out to be made into aluminium. Which customers in the US might not be able to buy anymore (and the US suppliers of caustic soda may be blocked too). I mean, they might not be able to pronounce the word ‘aluminium’ correctly, but still… [side note: aluminum was one of the names Sir Humphry Davy tried out before the One True version was settled on by everyone except the US and Canada].

    Anyway – eek.

    The featured image definitely isn’t a shot of someone having poured petrol over dead knotweed, then throwing a lit match at it. All of those Mythbusters-type things claiming that throwing a lit cigarette at some petrol wouldn’t do what it does in films… feel free to come to my ‘lab’ (insurance and fee permitting).

  • Additional bathroom heating options (or lack of)

    So the radiator in the bathroom wasn’t really cutting it compared to the heating in the rest of the house. We could make good use of a remote-controlled, wall-mounted forced air heater above the bathroom door to take the shock out of the room following showers, etc. I’d seen quite a few suitable candidates last year, but we weren’t ready to think about fitting anything else at the time.

    Enter Lot 20. This directive is designed to remove inefficient technologies and reduce the energy used by products that heat our homes, and has meant that a lot of old-school (very basic and inefficient) fan heaters can’t be manufactured for sale in the UK or the rest of the EU after 1st January 2018. I wholeheartedly embrace the concept of this, if not the current situation it leaves me in. I can’t get anything to fit my exact requirements now, until companies adapt their designs to comply. They’ve had quite a while to do so, but apparently not long enough yet. If I can find one that was made before 1st January, I can still legally buy it and fit it – I’m guessing that these things are like gold dust now.

    So the hunt for a heater continues, and at least when I do find one, it’ll almost certainly be wifi-enabled (whether I like it or not). When the robots finally take over everything, at least I’ll have had a few years of being able to heat the bathroom for a few minutes before I got out of bed. A price worth paying, I’m sure.

    Update: heater found and retrieved (pictured)

  • Who let the dogs out? Pretty much everyone…

    The security cameras aren’t getting a heavy workout of late, beyond dogs roaming from ‘next door’. Every now and then I’ll call them via the camera’s speaker capability, whereupon they run like hell. Hours of fun.

    I’ve added a new feature to the blog’s sidebar: you can see the current indoor and outdoor temperatures. I wanted to write a WordPress plugin just to see how easy it was, and there you go… it was straightforward, even if the company I bought the sensors from have an appalling setup for retrieving the data.

    When the simplest way of getting at the info was to do an HTTP POST with my phone’s ID and parse the response, you know you’ve gone badly wrong.

  • It’s so easy from above / you can really see it all…

    Ben Folds lyric there, just for a change.

    The Google maps satellite view of the bog got updated this year – it’s now several years on from the previous version, and shows signs that we’ve done stuff.  I think the picture is from around this time last year – there’s only one chimney pot on the roof now, so it tallies ok.

  • Bread and avalanches

    Ireland’s being going bread-mad – apparently it’s the thing to be worried about running out of in the treacherous weather.  There have been articles devoted to baking your own, memes on the internet, etc.

    Actually, shortly after I wrote that I went shopping in a major supermarket in England… guess what?  Bread stripped from shelves there too:

    Anyway, I noticed we had a mini-avalanche of snow from the roof of the bog house today, captured on the security camera above the front door as it all slid down…

    Roof before:

    Roof after:

     

    Action video:

     

     

  • The silicon bit – what happened?

    So this blog has been about almost everything apart from technology.  Due to the various Bad Things that needed putting right, the opportunities to gadget-up the bog house have been few and far between.

    Clearly the best gadgets are the dehumidifiers: they allowed us to survive with only minor disease during our stay.

    The next best are probably the security cameras, so at least we could see who was coming and going, doing weird stuff while we weren’t there.  Quite a few unexpected visitors added interest, but a bunch of that is going to remain unwritten for now, for various reasons.

    When we were over in January, I connected up a couple of temperature and humidity sensors that I could monitor remotely – one inside, one out.  The numbers don’t make for pleasant reading at the moment, but at least it’s slightly warmer inside than out.

    I also installed a remote mains switch that uses a mobile network for receiving and responding to commands.  I added this because I noticed that the security cameras would go missing from the network for a few days at a time, and came to the conclusion that the mobile broadband router was probably down during those periods.

    Since my temperature and humidity sensors are on that network too, I could test if the problem was with the camera system or the internet connectivity in general… if the broadband router goes down now, I simply send a text to my mains switch, which resets it.  “Have you tried switching it off and on again?”

    A bunch of these devices are on a UPS, which provides battery backup in the event of a general mains failure.  Again, the temperature and humidity sensors aren’t, so if they’re dead but I’ve still got cameras and internet, it’s safe(ish) to say that the mains has been lost for a while at least.

    Actually, last time we were over I put another security camera from a different vendor up to see how it behaved.  Seems ok so far, although to the best of my knowledge nobody has actually passed by it yet (unless it’s proper rubbish).

    I have done some other safeguarding, but I think that’s probably enough for now… wait for my “killer guard robot” post in the future…

     

  • Lahinch sunset

    Lahinch sunset

    On the journey back from Doolin we detoured via Lahinch (a nearby holiday town) in time to catch the sunset.  I visited it back in 2003 on my first trip to Ireland, and it hasn’t lost any of its charm.

  • Doolin writers’ weekend

    Just back from a fantastic weekend of drinking and listening to people talk about writing.  If I’m honest, the writing part was peripheral to some of the other activities for me, although I found ‘s workshop on essay-writing particularly interesting.

    The Ginko walk on Sunday morning was breathtaking in every sense… after a mightily ambitious 9am start, we walked in silence for the first part of the route around the cliffs in Doolin, and stopped along the way to write and share reflections on the moment.  Doolin in north Clare has stunning views all around it, and the day’s unseasonably beautiful weather added to the experience.  Some photos below… I did do a bit of writing as we went around, but don’t think it’s ready for release yet.

  • August and everything after

    Well… September, technically, but that wouldn’t match the title of one of my favourite albums.

    That break in posting makes my previous efforts at neglect look like mere blips.

    Quick summary of what’s happened since my previous properly-posted-at-the-actual-time entry, from a seasonal perspective:

    • Summer.  Well, it actually didn’t happen, but the space reserved for it passed anyway.  Thankfully we had a break in Portugal and Spain to remind ourselves how lovely sunshine was.
    • Autumn.  Rain.
    • Winter – in-progress.  Cold rain, snow.

    I’m try to back-fill what I didn’t bother to post over the past few months – if I’m honest there wasn’t a whole heap of good news to report, but could have been worse, I suppose.

    The Bongo is very sick again.  It pretty much gave up and has let itself go a lot – I looked inside it the other week and at least mould spores are making good use of it.

    The house is doing pretty well.  Flooring still intact, tiling complete.

    Progress will magically appear over the next few days, but logged against the date at which the events actually happened, rather than when I bothered to document it.

  • Have I tiled you lately?

    Apologies to Van the Man.

    The bathroom was the last room to get sorted out.  First the flooring tiles, building on the levelling work done at the start of November:

    Next, the wall tiles:

    Finally, grouted:

    It should be noted that most of the wall tiling was put in place by V, who (like me) had grown massively impatient at the rate of progress.  I pitched the idea of her setting up as a business called “Bonnie Tiler” but she didn’t seem keen…  Just checked, and that’s been done quite a lot of times already (a particularly pun-tastic article in the Harrogate Advertiser being the most obvious).  They stooped pretty low using song titles littered in among the text of the story – a cheap trick that you wouldn’t catch me employing.