I was curious about how long does it take for the Bokashi turn into a full-fledged fertilizer. I dug out one buried Bokashi that I buried 3 months ago and another one 2 months. Below is a video for it:
Conclusion: It’s about 3 months when the Bokashi is fully composted at this time of the year.
I have been challenged by the difficulty of trellising container tomatoes this season. I want to have a trellis that’s easy to assemble and disassemble when the season is over. I don’t want to spend a lot of money and yet not having it too aesthetically challenged. I built a simple trellis system using the leftover 1×2 wood. I called it “puppet” trellis because it looks like a controlling mechanism for a puppet. It worked well when staked in the ground. But for the container gardening, the ground is normally hard cement. I decided to try building the “puppet” trellis with PVC pipes and stake the pipe into an old umbrella base. I recorded a video of my “Puppet” trellis system here:
It’s possible to build the base of the trellis with more PVC pipes. It will be one of my future projects.
I noticed my drip irrigation pipe was leaking a few months back. I was too lazy to fix it but now we are in a middle of severe drought in California, I thought I should take care of it to avoid wasting our precious water. Here I recorded a video on how I fixed it:
Here are the lessons I have learned:
1. 3/4″ PVP pipe is NOT exactly 3/4″, neither are 1/2″ and 1″ pipes or any of the PVC pipes. In fact, the 3/4″ pipe has an outer diameter of 1.05″ and inner diameter of 0.82″. The number represents roughly an average of the inner diameter and outer diameter, depending on what type of PVC pipes (Schedule 40 vs. thicker Schedule 80). See here for the actual measurements.
2. PVC pipes are very inexpensive and easy to put together like Lego blocks. The 10′ 3/4″ PVC pipe cost me just $2.50. This gave me lots of ideas how to use it for other purposes. See future blogs on the other uses of PVC pipes.
Joi Ito strikes a chord with me and the central theme of this blog on how to deal with the complex world we’re living today by “having a compass and know where you’re going” then “focus on being connected, always learning, fully aware, and super present.” Don’t try to predict the future. Experiment, learn and improve continuously. Be a “now-ist.”
This is one of the great TED talk videos:
Lately, I’ve been hearing so much about Chromebooks, I even played with it at Best Buy (thanks to their “Showrooming” ;-). When their prices dropped below $200 for a brand new Acer C720, I decided to get one to play with it. I read all about its limitations and the potentials for the expanded capability after installing Ubuntu through Chroot (Crouton) and dual-boot (ChrUbuntu) methods. I have used Enterprise Linux version at work and would like to try the “client” Linux like Ubuntu for the fun of it. Because I knew I wanted to play with Ubuntu Linux so I decided to buy a used 32GB (vs. standard 16GB) flash storage version from eBay for $169. By the way, 32GB is needed if you want to run ChrUbuntu since a full Ubuntu by itself would probably need 24GB on its own if you plan to keep the Chrome OS as a dual-boot.
Since I received the Chromebook on 6/27/14, I have spent numerous hours playing and hacking it. My impression of Chrome OS is that it’s really for the consumers of digital contents due to its limitations. Here are the pluses and minuses:
Pluses:
1) Fast boot and wake up from sleep (almost instantaneous like a tablet).
2) Excellent browsing experience. The two-finger scrolling and three-finger flipping through the browser tabs are nice. Of course, having a physical keyboard makes a big difference as compared to browsing on an iPad. And the trackpad on Acer C720 works really well with sufficient immunity from accidental palm touchings.
3) Most apps are responsive and fast, thanks to the Intel Haswell Celeron 2955U 1.4 GHz CPU, 2GB DRAM’s and 32GB flash drive.
4) Seamless integration with Chromecast. (More on Chromecast on a later blog).
Minuses:
1) No email clients like Thunderbird except webmails like gmail, which works very well but not good enough for work-related emails.
2) No use of OpenOffices.
3) No IPsec VPN (the one my employer uses)
4) Can’t run Java apps. Java plugins cannot be installed. I sensed some bad blood between Google and Oracle such that Google refused to put Java on Chromebook at the time of this writing.
If you don’t plan to do lots of emails and are mainly browsing the web and run only Chrome Apps, then Chromebook may be the right laptop for you as a supplement to your tablets. Since the #1 and #3 minuses are show stoppers for me, I need to add on Linux to mitigate them. There are two options: Chroot and ChrUbuntu.
I first installed Chroot to enable running Ubuntu along side the Chrome OS in “Developer” mode. This was ideal as I would have the best of the both worlds: Chrome OS and Ubuntu – switching back and forth with simple CTL-ALT strokes. The only problem was that I couldn’t install VPN properly on it – neither Cisco AnyConnect nor OpenConnect. I suspect that the Chrome OS, running in parallel, may be causing conflicts. I gave up on it after 3 days of intensive hacking.
Then I decided that install Ubuntu as a duel-boot partition. I followed the installation directions here. After a couple of hours of downloading and installation, I was able to boot to Ubuntu and installed Cisco AnyConnect VPN. I was now in business.
Then after playing with the Ubuntu on Chromebook, I discovered a few quirks that really got me to wonder why I bothered with Ubuntu.
1. Some system settings don’t work right, like disabling the mouse while typing to avoid cursor movement. I had to type in a command to enable it manually (“/usr/bin/syndaemon -i 1.5 -K d”) and I had a hard time putting in the autostart service.
2. Locale issue: Constant “Locale” warnings popped up when running a shell. I fixed it with this locale tip.
3. Font sizes: I had a hard time fixing the font sizes on Ubuntu. It was either too small or too big.
4. The touchpad no longer works after I accidentally disabled it and wasn’t able to bring back the driver. Sigh! (This was fixed by following the directions in this link).
So at the end, I started to miss and appreciate Microsoft’s Windows 7 or even Windows 8. With Ubuntu on Chromebook, I would be wasting lots of my time fixing some minor Linux issues which seem to pop up here and there, unless I revert it back to the standard Chrome OS Chromebook, which would not do better than an iPad or an Android tablet. Then I looked around and found that for an extra $20~30, I could have bought a cheap full Windows laptop instead!
My conclusion is that, at this time, Chrome OS Chromebook and Ubuntu Chromebook are not ready for prime time. I like the pluses but the minuses are too great for me to ignore. I will most likely be reselling my Chromebook on eBay…
My wife arranged this July 4th Celebration at the Capital Club San Jose with a party of 16 friends and their families – celebration for the independence day of this great country and my birthday. Yes, I was born on July 4th. I was destined to be part of this great country.
There were BBQ buffet dinner, wines – great food and great company. The highlights were the San Jose firework just outside of the balcony that made the evening so wonderful.
Here is a short video introduction of Capital Club, its view and a much condensed version of the 25-minutes firework started at 9:30pm. Hope you enjoy it.
Richard Dawkins is a well known author and atheist. I first read his “God Delusion” book back in spring, 2007. See my review here. I was since impressed by his passion for evolution and debunking of creationism. In his young tender age of 71 now, Richard Dawkins decided to write a memoir about himself and described how he became who he is. There aren’t that many great scientists would venture to write a memoir for himself but Richard Dawkins are no ordinary scientist, his arguments for evolution are all very compelling. I am sure he has pushed many people on the fence over to the side of evolution, myself included.
In this book, he went through his childhood and upbringing and growing up in Africa and various countries around the world. This might have made him a rebel and yet very adaptable to strange places include the one full of right-wing extremists. His move to Berkeley, California, in the 1960’s might have reinforced his rebellion mentality. His eventual tenure at Oxford legitimized his place in science and specifically atheism.
A few takeaways from the book:
Dawkins, as a zoologist, designed lots experiments to understand the animal behavior to determine the natural and nurtured behaviors like chicken’s response to light shone from the top vs from the floor.
A penchant for computer programming: Dawkins was so adept in computer programming, way ahead of his time, such that he designed several programming languages to suit his needs.
We stand on the shoulders of many giants so we can look farther. Dawkins attributes his success to Charles Darwin and a few college advisers and professors.
I need to read the Selfish Gene book. He described many of the details how he arrived at the Selfish Gene book he wrote more than 30 years ago. In essence, the gene or a well evolved gene would propagate in the selfish manner to extend its immortality. Otherwise, they would go extinct. We humans are here because of our human selfish gene.
As a true evolutionist, Dawkins questioned whether he could become who he became without having to lived and evolved through his life environment. I cannot help think that at this moment the world is still evolving and my actions and thoughts may have an impact to the process. And in many ways out of infinite possible ways we all do.
There are so many videos I recommend about Dr. Richard Dawkins’ view:
Militant Atheism.
Why the universe seems so strange
Best of Richard Dawkins Arguments
This book gives me a glimpse of the making of a great scientist. It takes courage, tenacity, and constant questions about the status quo and an appetite for wonder.