Archive for May, 2011

11 results.

And more grass

May29
by kevin on May 29, 2011 at 08:02 and modified on May 29, 2011. at 08:05
Posted In: gardening

These are before and after pictures of our vegetable bed #5. The soil we got last year to build this was particularly bad and full of weed and grass seed. Last fall it had overgrown so much we were considering abandoning it, and yet this spring we had so much to grow out that we had no choice and had to clear it.

BEFORE

AFTER

We are also awaiting the delivery of a Lee Valley 7’x100′ deer fence to attach to the 2″x2″ poles you see surrounding the garden.
You are also seeing the brown paper we laid down atop of the old bed, after pulling out most of the weeds and grass, rototilling it and turning over by shovel some of the worst spots. Then we added another 5 yards of new soil mixed in with organic compost. This would give us another 3″ of depth to add to last years.
Tomatos and others will be going in here, once it dries up enough to plant.

Comments Off on And more grass

Grass gets into everything

May24
by kevin on May 24, 2011 at 07:40 and modified on May 24, 2011. at 08:09
Posted In: gardening

More and more the grass is infiltrating everywhere. So this year we started to expand all of the mulch rings around the trees, eliminating more grass that will not need cutting 🙂 and allowing thicker piles of mulch to stop the grass from getting in as well.
So far it looks like it is working well. Next year this mulch ring will get extended again as w ehad not been keeping up to the tree growth over the last few years.
This is undyed, natural cedar mulch from Canadian Tire in 85L bags.
The hostas have really taken off in the last week, going from almost not even above the ground to this.

Comments Off on Grass gets into everything

More raised beds

May24
by kevin on May 24, 2011 at 07:35
Posted In: gardening


These are raised Veg Beds #7 and #8, each approx 8’x3′ or 24ft^2.
Two of the three new beds we put up this year due to too many more types of heritage/heirloom veg plants going in.
The first coarse of 3.5″x5″ mini gardening ties are stood upright, while the remaining top two courses go in flat, giving us about 12″ of height.
Dark brown wrapping paper went in at the bottom (better than weed cloth) to help kill off the grass. It will disintegrate in a few months. And then the garden mix soil was added in. These two beds are for potatos and we will be adding more soil every couple of weeks to hill them as they grow.

Comments Off on More raised beds

Parking Issues

May24
by kevin on May 24, 2011 at 07:30 and modified on March 15, 2013. at 15:29
Posted In: travel


2011 Sometime you get the parking space and sometimes the parking space gets you. This is in “downtown” Yarker on Sunday afternoon where this vehicle ended up stuck on the waterfalls a few days earlier.

It will be interesting to see how it comes out and when.

Comments Off on Parking Issues

Do you know what kind of tree this is?

May23
by kevin on May 23, 2011 at 19:40 and modified on May 27, 2011. at 09:24
Posted In: gardening

Here are closeups of the flowers, leaves and trunk


From the five petal white flower a tentative ID is Gray Dogwood. We’ll need some better images of the leaf though.

Comments Off on Do you know what kind of tree this is?

got Dirt?

May23
by kevin on May 23, 2011 at 19:35
Posted In: gardening

Saturday May 21st our dirt arrives. As mentioned in the past, we live on rock with a little bit of backfill and peat. Not conducive to gardening. So we build raised beds and fill them in with dirt. This year we found a more local source with a good price of $30/yard for good garden mixed soil (dirt and compost and compost). It sure smells like it! In any event, this is what 17 yards of dirt looks like in a pile.

We built three new beds this year, will be topping up all of the others, trying an experimental patch or two and will see most of this pile gone within the week.

Comments Off on got Dirt?

Snowbirds

May23
by kevin on May 23, 2011 at 19:27 and modified on March 15, 2013. at 15:30
Posted In: travel

We were at the Kingston Airport on Friday May 20th, 2011 and noticed the Canadian Forces Snowbirds Demostration Team parked on the tarmac. Just after the local commuter Dash8 came in from Toronto, two military helicopters also came in for a landing. Who would have thought Kingston Airport would be so busy? 🙂

Comments Off on Snowbirds

Wet & cold spring

May13
by kevin on May 13, 2011 at 13:35 and modified on May 14, 2011. at 15:24
Posted In: gardening

And we still haven’t planted most of the garden yet. It has been wet, cold and cloudy. It looks like we may be 4 weeks later than last year already.

The next week should see more garden soil going into the new raised beds and the topping up of some of the older beds.

The greenhouse plants are coming along nicely.

Comments Off on Wet & cold spring

radiojove skypipe issues

May13
by kevin on May 13, 2011 at 13:33 and modified on May 14, 2011. at 15:20
Posted In: astronomy, tech

So, we continued to get strange error messages from the radiojove skypipe installation and thought that it was network file related.
We switched skypipe over to save data locally to it’s small 30gb laptop drive and it seems to have worked. No errors windows popping up since the switch. Of course there are always side effects.
The first was that the data was on an old laptop hard drive and we needed to get it onto the file server so it would be backed up and protected.

A small script copies over any new file or folder & file in the data area up to the file server and it runs once an hour.
Now it appears that some of the images sent up to the website are not transferring properly. That will take some troubleshooting to see why it no longer works.

We did manage to get another confirmation that the system as a whole was working, and that was from a one minute solar burst that was posted to the radiojove email list that upon examination, our system also detected! Yay!

Another issue is to automate the archiving of the data and the images;
what sampling rate to use (we are at 1/second right now);
what generated images to save (ie the 24hour only or those and the 30 minute snapshots)

Comments Off on radiojove skypipe issues

radio skypipe problems

May07
by kevin on May 7, 2011 at 08:05 and modified on May 14, 2011. at 15:16
Posted In: astronomy, tech

The new radiojove radio telescope has been up and running for a few days now. Data is coming in but there is a troubling side effect. The Radio Skypipe II v2.1.17 software runs on the same laptop as the allsky camera CCDSoft software. Every few days the radio skypipe software pops up an error window that says file not found or path not found. The side effect is that it prevents the mouse script from processing properly and starting up the CCDSoft allsky camera software.

We’ve tried changing permissions and ownership on the network linux file server where skypipe saves it data, so perhaps that will fix the problem. Other possiiblities include the laptop disconnecting from the network file share, or the network itself.

Last night was an example of the side effect and failure of the allsky software to start.

Comments Off on radio skypipe problems

Radio Jove operational

May01
by kevin on May 1, 2011 at 07:12 and modified on May 9, 2011. at 21:07
Posted In: astronomy, tech

Our Radio Jove Radio telescope is up and operational. We assembled the final bits of the system on Friday April 29th, just after the Royal Wedding.

It involved accurately measuring the distance between the dual dipole antenna connection and the receiver, located inside the observatory. This turned out to be 16.78m (55′). The RG6 coax with velocity factors in, came out at 17.47m (57.24′) at the next largest 1/2 wavelength increment. The shorter the feedin coax, the less signal loss, so we decided to risk the narrow margin of safety of 1.5 wavelengths instead of going to 2
23.28m (76.36′).

The receiver is situated inside our metal shelled observatory, helping reduce RF interference, has audio speakers attached so we can listen to the live signal, and is connected to a laptop microphone port.
The laptop is maybe 7 years old and runs skypipe v2.1.17, which logs the data, creates graphs and uploads the data to this website.

We tested the system by disconnecting and reconnecting the antenna from the receiver and saw a distinct signal difference.
The most recent strip chart can be found here:



For 2011 the following settings were used for the antenna setup:
Jupiter declination runs from approx -2 to +12 degrees
Elevation angle at transit runs from 45 to 55 degrees at our latitude of 44.25 degrees.
The optimum antenna height for an elevation angle of 40-55 degrees is 4.57m (15′).

For 2012 the settings will be:
Jupiter declination runs from approx +10 to +21 degrees
Elevation angle at transit runs from 55 to 65 degrees at our latitude of 44.25 degrees.
The optimum antenna height for an elevation angle of 40-55 degrees is 3.05m (10′).
So we will have to lower the antenna then.