Signs of Spring at Low Sizergh Barn

Posted on 2012-04-06 by Daniel Belasco Rogers

Still no luck convincing the family that a wet trump around some two-thousand-year-old stone circles is what Easter should be all about. Instead of this we made a trip to Low Sizergh Barn. As this is an organic farm, there was a great biodiversity to be had in the field boundaries and woodland.

Blackthorn

Blackthorn in hedge at Low Sizergh Barn


Thought this was the magickal Hawthorn or May at first as in “Don’t cast a clout till May be out” which is what my Granny used to say, but that is later and the flowers emerge after the leaves. This one has to be Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa).
Wood Anemone

Wood Anemone


These Wood Anemones (Anemone nemorosa) are a little battered by rain which makes them a bit hard to identify in the photo but not in real life.
Violets

Violets

Common Dog-Violet (Viola riviniana)
Unidentified Plant

I feel like I should know this one but I don't - it's all over the woods and hedgerows here at the moment


UPDATE after Rachel’s comment (see below): Dog’s Mercury Mercurialis perennis
Lords And Ladies

Lords And Ladies or Cuckoo Pint or Arum maculatum


Lesser Celandine

Lesser Celandine or Ranunculus ficaria


Unidentified Broomrape

Unidentified Broomrape


I got very excited by the next discovery, hanging out damply in some woodland we past. At first I thought that it was some flower left over from last year because it looked so bleached and dead but on closer inspection, I’m pretty sure it is some sort of Broomrape (Orobanche). I’ve always wanted to find one of these fascinating plants that above-ground, consist just of an inflorescence and totally lacking in green chlorophyll, extracts all it needs from its host, being a parasite. This leads to all sorts of varieties, each variety bound to a single host. Looking quickly on the Internet, I was unable to identify this beautiful, white, ghostly variety and I’m not entirely sure what it was parasitising, there were a number of candidates as you can see below.
UPDATE after Rachel’s comment (see below): It is in the Orobanche family (Orobanchaceae) but a different genus – Rachel, who works at Low Sizergh Barn and should know, identifies this as Common Toothwort (Lathraea squamaria), which as she says, is parasitic on the Hazel in their woodland.
Unidentified Broomrape Context

Unidentified Broomrape Context


I was introduced to Ransoms or Wild Garlic (Allium ursinum) in the woods of Treptower Park and Plänterwald by our friend the Homeopath Thomas Bochmann and he gave me the hint to make a pesto out of the garlicky young leaves before they set flower early in the season and don’t taste as delicate. Ruby has collected some with me before but doesn’t remember but was a very enthusiastic gatherer.
Ruby Gathering Ransoms

Ruby Gathering Ransoms


She ate so much she got a green tongue, much to her delight.
Ruby Rasoms Tongue

Ruby Rasoms Tongue


Ransoms Flowering

Ransoms Flowering

Posted in Diary, Walking | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

In Arnside

Posted on 2012-04-05 by Daniel Belasco Rogers

Drive To Arnside

Drive To Arnside as rendered by Qgis


We drove up to Arnside yesterday in Mum’s car. Despite weather warnings to the contrary, the drive proceeded uneventfully. Once freed from the strictures of driving, I took a quick evening walk up the Knot at the back of the garden and woodland of where we’re staying, with friends of Soph’s family. The photo below is an attempt to give an impression of what its like to do downward-facing dog on the knot which was part of the sun salutation I performed out of the sheer joy of being up there on such a lovely evening.
Downward Facing Dog Arnside Knot

Downward Facing Dog Arnside Knot


In the next few days, I’m determined to get out to Aubrey Burl’s favourite stone circle, Swinside as well as Long Meg and Her Daughters, spurred on by ‘A Little History of Astro-Archaeology’ my Dad lent me before we came up. More soon.

Posted in Diary, GPS, Walking | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Pen Plotter Replacement Pen DIY III

Posted on 2012-03-30 by Daniel Belasco Rogers
Pen Plotter Prototype II

Pen Plotter Prototype II

This is the start of the prototype II – as you can see I knocked the pen bit out so that I’m left with the barrel with the flange in the right place (this is so much cheaper and easier than buying silicone and polyurethane and casting it all). Now all I have to do (famous last words) is install the appropriately cut brass rods inside this empty barrel so that the refill sits in the position shown in this photo. This will have to wait now, however until I can get back into the studio in May as we’re away in England and I’m in Belgium until the end of April.

More to follow then

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Pen Plotter Replacement Pen DIY II

Posted on 2012-03-30 by Daniel Belasco Rogers

As promised, here’s an update about making our old pen plotter sustainable in terms of pen supplies by using archival ink provided by the Lamy M22 refill:

Pen Plotter Prototype 1

Pen Plotter Prototype 1

At the top of the image you can see prototype I, which sometimes works. The problem is the washer I’m using to emulate the flange on the pen (see the earlier post). I have tried this in a couple of positions on the barrel but it still seems to mess up when the holding mechanism comes to pick up the pen from the carousel and when it tries to put it back. Bad.

I was quite proud, however of what I achieved – the refill is spring-loaded into a couple of brass rods (annotated with internal and external measurements in the picture) which have been cut so that the smaller guides the nib-end of the refill and the larger guides the barrel. I found the brass rod in Conrads here in Berlin. The white pvc rod came from Bauhaus, the DIY shop, not the Weimar Republik school. The spring itself is from a normal biro and I cut the helpful adapter you get with the small M22 refills to a good length to fit into my pen barrel. I used masking tape to wrap round the brass rod to the right diameter to fit snugly inside the white tube and secured it in place with epoxy.

Like I said, the pen holder itself works well, it’s just the washer that is causing problems. Firstly it is slightly too big in its internal measurement to fit snugly on the barrel of the white tube and secondly, because it is rubber (I think it’s an old tap washer) it isn’t exactly flat. It seems that this flange of the pen is the bit that needs to be accurate. Even though the white tube is 0.5mm wider than the pen, this doesn’t seem to cause problems but the flange position and dimension has less tolerance.

I am now considering a new tack: making a (silicone? polyurethane?) mould of the existing pens and casting (polyurethane? polyester?) the brass rods into these. I might also try drilling the gubbins out of an existing pen and housing my brass rods in this. Or knocking it out with the larger brass rod *update* this works!

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Adventures with the My Book World Edition (Whitelight) NAS harddrive

Posted on 2012-03-30 by Daniel Belasco Rogers

Recently, I’ve been obsessing about the network here at home, now we have our own connection to the Internet and router (in the last flat, we shared this via an Ethernet cable that came from our neighbour’s flat).

I wasn’t really aware, but when I successfully bid for a 1TB My Book World Edition (MBWE) on eBay recently, I was doing a good thing, in terms of being able to hack (augment) the firmware, just like the good old Cisco Systems NSLU2 (slug). In fact, the Optware distribution mechanism that allows you to install lots of great stuff on both was developed for the slug first and is now available on many different devices. So happy day!

This is my path to getting nfs up and running so that all the computers on our home network that want to can connect to and write to the nas (the MBWE). By default, the way the MBWE sets up nfs by default, allows all users to read the drive only and not write to it.

  • I enabled ssh in the normal web gui that is part of the pre-installed firmware. You need this to perform the hacks below. If this isn’t available to you as a gui option, consult this site for the solution.
  • While in the web gui, enable the nfs service. Leave the asterisk in the allow ip addresses box (this allows access from all ip addresses. You will change this later). Get out of the web gui, you don’t need that patronising, proprietary stuff any more. I want to be able to set up this hardware (that I own) in the way I want, not how the marketing managers at Western Digital think I want.
  • Follow the instructions here to ssh in to the file system of the nas and install Optware (ipkg)
  • Once you’ve got ipkg working and in your PATH, you can install nano as an alternate text editor, which is so much more intuitive than vi, like this:
    /opt/bin/ipkg install nano
  • I got confused at this point by this page on the excellent mybookworld.wikidot.com site, which I think is for a different model of MBWE or at least one that doesn’t let you enable nfs in the web gui. My advice would be that you don’t need most of this page, so treat with caution. You will need to deal with the /etc/exports file on the MBWE though and there is useful advice on the page under ‘Choosing Shares’ about this which takes you a little way further. It explains that you need to change a line of your /etc/exports file to read: /shares/internal/PUBLIC 192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0(rw,sync,insecure,all_squash,anonuid=33,anongid=33). On my nas, I had to adapt this line to point to the right folder which was /nfs/Public. I had to adjust the ip address and netmask to reflect my network settings and lastly I had to adjust the anonuid and anongid values. Again, let the section ‘Choosing Shares’ on the page be your guide.
  • There is a problem with this, however, which took me a while to figure out. The page which helps is here and the last entry is the one that points the way. The problem is that when you shutdown the nas and restart (I think this is a good thing to do for the planet), it overwrites the /etc/exports file with the default. To undo this, you have to set up the script suggested at the bottom of that page.
  • The last problem to solve is that for me at least, this script never ran. I confirmed this by adding a line like touch /tmp/script-ran, starting the nas up and checking for this empty file in the /tmp folder. If there was no ‘script-ran’ file, the script never got to run. I’m not sure if my solution is kosher, but it works. I made a link in /etc/init.d to the startup file at /opt/etc/init.d/S99updconf called something like S81updconf (ln -s /opt/etc/init.d/S99updconf S81updconf). What’s important to realise is that the scripts in the etc/init.d are run in numerical order if they start with a capital S. You want to wait until the nfs daemon has been started (on my system this is S80nfsd) – hence S81 at the beginning of the link.
  • Lastly, when you confirm that the MBWE is copying over /etc/exports with the new one, go ahead and alter your fstab with a line like the following: ipaddr.of.nas.server:/DataVolume/Public /nfs nfs rw,hard,intr 0 0

All done, now every machine you add that fstab line to should connect to the nas when it starts up. One of the things I really appreciate about Linux is that you can get older equipment up and running and doing exactly what you want of it, with the help of a well-informed and open-hearted community, without being bamboozled by all the marketing and gadget fetishism rife in the computer hardware business, which I am unfortunately not immune to.

PS If you run into problems getting fstab to mount the drive, make sure you have nfs-common on the client machine (i.e. the computer you want to connect to the nas from) sudo apt-get install nfs-common

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