A taste of the kind of odd scene you come across around our house:
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APNG is a backwards-compatible extension to the PNG format that handles animation – a modern day, less klunky equivalent of the much abused animated GIF. A pea is a vegetable. Or is it? I am saying no, the pod is a fruit, and the pea itself is a seed. Feel free to argue amongst yourselves.
The above won’t work if you’re using Internet Explorer (stop doing that), and possibly not if you’re one of those Apple types either, though I’m not sure.
Update: I’m told this actually crashes Aurora, Midori and Kazehakase. I can’t help but wonder if that’s exploitable.
For some reason last weekend seemed to be nicer than any we had over the so-called summer, so it was a perfect opportunity to get started on cutting the hedges. I have a crappy electric hedge trimmer that gets stuck on a hawthorn branch every 30 seconds, and I’ve also sliced through the cable three times previously, so it’s all done by hand these days.
Mia had to help out of course, and yes that’s her pictured right, two years old and up a wobbly stepladder with a pair of scissors. And yes, that’s a plaster on her finger, but she didn’t do it with the scissors – that was the day before with the kitchen knife. I guess that when Mia gets to the age where she can use the internet, she might read this blog and then head on over to Wikipedia to find that most other children have ten whole fingers. If so, Mia, however many fingers you have now, that’s how many you were born with and I can produce photoshopped evidence if necessary.
More seriously, I don’t advocate that anyone lets their toddlers use knives and scissors or climb ladders. On the other hand, I don’t recommend that anyone tries to tell me what my toddler should and shouldn’t do when under my close supervision.
Another weekend task was rot-proofing the chicken house, slightly too late but better that than never. Unfortunately, when I bought the ’stuff’ I failed to notice something quite important and at no point during the transaction did the shopkeeper helpfully say “you do know that stuff is bright chuffing orange don’t you sir?” Therefore, due to the shopkeeper’s neglect, we have a glow-in-the-dark chicken house that people will probably use as a landmark when giving directions.
Unfortunately there’s still quite a lot of hedge left to cut (I assume that people who call it trimming have a totally different kind of hedge) but in the meantime I can take pictures that only include the bits that are straight-ish and pretend it’s all like that.
It’s quiet. Almost too quiet. Mia’s gone on holiday without me.
To make matters worse, she took ‘her’ train set. And my wife. And the dog. It’s just me, the chickens and that pesky cat. Oh, and the fish – don’t forget to feed the fish. And the tomatoes, don’t forget to water those. Good thing I decided to write this.
According to Google nobody has ever seen fit to utter the phrase “trains and grapes” on the internet before, so it’s lucky I’m here to put that right. In my defence, the real purpose is a bit of testing of video encoding and embedding. Firstly, Saturday morning fun with Duplo trains:
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Secondly, a more serious use (it’s all relative) of the same setup, namely providing a guided tour of the grapevine:
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The camera shoots the video in MPEG format, so I used Riva FLV Encoder to convert them to the more web-friendly FLV format, and also to reduce the resolution and bitrate a bit. This Wordpress plugin made it easy to embed the videos into the post. Although it was a bit more effort, I much prefer this approach to relying on an external service to encode and host the video as I did here.
Finally sunshine is upon us. This means gardening, and during the week the ability to work in the garden, at least when it’s possible to angle the laptop away from the sun so the screen is still visible. The orchard is a mass of blossom at the moment. The apple tree pictured right is probably the best apple tree in the world. When they’re ready, which will be around mid-September, they’re enormous, deep red, and pink in the middle. The picture below is a close-up of the blossom from the same tree, hacked about with using qtpfsgui to make it look arty farty. For once I’m quite pleased with the results.
Brimham Rocks has been on my list of favourite places for a long time, so it came as a bit of a surprise when I realised we’d never taken Mia there. We’ve put that right more than once recently.
Sadly, a very important member of the family is no longer with us. Apart from the postman, Mika was everybody and everything’s best friend.
Despite the sudden explosion of techy posts on here, life in the real world goes on. The highlight in recent weeks was my sister’s wedding, which was a brilliant day. Mia, in particular, enjoyed it immensely, singing away to herself throughout the service. Afterwards she played the church organ and followed that up with running round and round the outside of the church at high speed with me in tow. You might think that would tire her out, but she later spend a solid four hours on the dancefloor at the reception.
Today we’ve been painting. Mia wasn’t interested in the paper, and preferred to try and paint her own face, the furniture and all the books on the bookshelf. I didn’t let that spoil my fun though, and pictured right is my impressionist masterpiece entitled “Dodgem”. It is quite probably my finest work ever. I’ll be doing a limited run of 100 signed and numbered prints, so send your cash now if you don’t want to miss out. £100 should do, but by all means send more if you’re feeling generous. The highest payers get the lowest numbers.
Earlier in the day, we made a brief excursion to Knaresborough, but Mia wasn’t in the mood for being dragged around for the third day in a row, so we quacked at some ducks and came home for sweetcorn fritters, which Mia refused to touch. She also lobbed her banana across the room, so it was probably the fact that we stuffed her full of satsumas in the car that was the problem. The fritters were very nice though.
This evening, burgers and chips. My basic burger recipe consists of some mince, some oats, an onion, some mushrooms and a beaten egg all mushed up together. The mixture goes in the fridge for a bit, if you can be bothered, and after that you cook them (I like our George Foreman grill thingy for this) until they’re done. I’ve done the chip recipe already of course. Nibby made some stir fried veg to go with it, and Mia wolfed everything down except the green stuff, which she put in a pile under her legs.
Tomorrow I have to actually do some work. Ouch. The only thing that might save me is if the money for the prints all rolls in between now and morning. I doubt Monet had these kind of issues to deal with.
