Aquaponics - Cucumber and baby rockmelon

The title gives it away a bit, but today I thought I found a new wacky variety of cucumber.

It looks like this.

In the background is a regular cucumber. In the foreground  is what I thought was a cucumber.

I picked it and ate a bit. It tasted like the opposite of a cucumber.

Anti-cucumber.

I didn't even realise anti-cucumber was a flavour until today.


But it is.

After I picked it and ate a bit, I figured I should look up my new variety of cucumber, and discovered it's commonly called rock melon. Or perhaps "cantaloupe", dependant upon which oceans your country currently floats.

I probably got the "pick it, and then google it"  bit's back to front. Next time I might look it up first.

So, on the downside, I wasted what looks like may have turned into an excellent fruit.

On the upside, I picked my first rock melon today!

I didn't even know I had them growing.

I remember planting them, but I don't remember seeing them grow.





120 Things in 20 years - Sometimes rocks taste better than rock melon, but cucumber always tastes pretty much like cucumber.
 

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Aquaponics - Artificial pollination

I've been artificially pollinating my cucumber plants for a while now.

I do the hand pollination thing with a small artist paintbrush, because my original - whatever you call cotton on a stick in your part of the world (cotton buds, cotton swabs, etc)- fell to bits, and was really only a stick by the end.

But I've been wondering if picking a handful of male flowers, and dropping into a blender of water, might just give me a pollen shake to spray into the female flowers. Obviously it would depend on the survivability of pollen in a blender. It's just an idea, and although a quick search didn't find it, it may well have been tried.

It might be a really quick and easy method to pollinate things that don't do the thing with the bees for whatever reason.

I suspect the reason my cucumbers are not getting pollinated, is because there don't seem to be any bees. I seem to remember something about bees mysteriously dying out or something.

I have no idea if it will work, but given none of my cucumbers set fruit without my intervention, it should be easy enough to test. I think all I'll need to do is separate two of my four cucumber plants, and spray one with the pollen shake, and leave the other untouched. The two remaining plants I'll keep pollinating by hand because I need the cucumbers.

This experiment will have to wait for a while, because I've hand pollinated all the flowers this week. I'll separate the two test plants, and wait until they stop producing fruit before I start the test. I'll use the delay to see if anyone else is doing it, or if it wont work for some reason.



120 Things in 20 years - It's 6am and I haven't slept yet.

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Thinking - Driving Hollywood style

For years I would cringe every time I saw a driving scene in a movie.

The driver would look away from the road for ages at a time to talk to their passenger.

I always thought it was just poor realism, in much the same way as people in movies get pushed off their feet when they get shot, but now I'm not so sure.

Perhaps the reason people cut me off sometimes is because they actually drive like that. Perhaps the reason some people just drive into intersections when their light has been red for a few minutes, is because they are trying to get their partner to understand something really important. The kind of important that only fifteen seconds of sincere eye contact can truly establish.

Or perhaps they watched some movies where people looked  away from the road for ages, and instead of being a little disappointed at the lack of realism, they just took it on board as the obvious way to drive.

Either way, I want it to stop. In the movies, and anywhere I'm likely to be.




120 Things in 20 years is sounding like a grumpy old dude when thinking about driving Hollywood style.

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Thinking - Six degrees future communication

Those six degrees of separation are really a lot less than six when it comes to communicating with people who are, say, on the same forum as you are, live in the same street, or to people you actually know.

But even when they aren't people you know, six is not so many. From now on, I'm going to just rely on the few degrees of separation for all my communication needs. Booking doctors appointments, airline tickets, ordering pizza, everything.

I've been dealing with the support desk of a net based business trying to find some information, and I think my new method might be substantially more effective than my current approach of filling out thousands of web forms.

It would certainly be more comfortable.

Because there's only a few degrees of separation between me and whoever it is a want to inform,  from now on, I'll  just chat about it casually to someone I meet in the street, and hope the query or order finds itself on the correct desk on the other side of the globe.

As a method of getting a help desk to respond, I cant see it being any worse than my recently tried methods.

I feel better already.




120 Things in 20 years - Going crazy one purchase at a time when thinking about my communication issues.

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Aquaponics - Roots in the media

It's quite possible that this is one of those things that everyone does, but it's so obvious that nobody mentions it.

Perhaps everything is one of those things, but I'd rather hear something twice than never know about it, so I'll say it anyway.

For some time, I've been harvesting things like lettuce, then spending valuable seconds of my life getting the media out of the roots and retuning it to the grow beds. Clay balls get loose a bit more readily than scoria, but roots seem determined to hang onto whatever media they find themselves in.

Don't get me wrong, this is no way an issue because it really is only a few seconds, but I'd rather spend those few irreplaceable seconds doing more important things - eating strawberries, looking at fish, that sort of thing.

But I discovered that if you just snap off the roots and leave them in a bucket, the media falls out all by itself.

Bam! Earth shattering tip right there.

I add an extra step for the worms.

When I pull up a lettuce, the root ball always has a few worms in it. Even in the constant flood grow bed there are worms everywhere. And as much as I'm happy to feed my worms to the fish, I like my worms and like it when they live in my growbed rather than die on the ground. So when I snap off the roots, I lay the ball of roots, and media back on the growbed until the next time I wander past. This allows the worms time to get back into the growbed as their root ball home slowly dries.

The next day (or whenever) I drop the root ball into my root ball bucket, where it dries out and leaves the media behind. After the bucket has seen a few root balls added, or when I get around to it, I return the loose media back to the grow bed, and the dried roots and stems to the compost heap. Once in the compost heap, they sit for eternity. We don't use the stuff.



120 Things in 20 years - Wasting compost from the roots caught up in my aquaponics media.

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Electronics - Inverter repair

An inverter is a useful thing. It takes a stack of electrons from a 12 volt battery, and makes them look like the stuff that comes out of your wall, in my case at 240 volts.

How it does it is anyone's guess.

In my case it doesn't actually do that. In fact all it does, is take a stack of electrons from a 12 volt battery, and turn them into the smell of melting value.

I couldn't understand why a perfectly interesting looking device should fail.

Here it is pictured after it was repaired, but it also looked pretty much like that when it didn't work, but now I've given away the ending to this tale.

I fixed something - a first.

Note the total absence of left over bits - also a first.


Normally, the plan of attack is to open the device up, then put all the left over bits in the bin next to the now slightly more hollow, and slightly lighter device.

But this time was different.

To begin with I already knew why it was making all that melting plastic smell.

It was over heating.

The thing has a fan that is presumably meant to spin around a lot. At least I hope it's meant to spin around a lot. If it isn't meant to, it does now.

Perhaps I just invented something....

To make an artificial breeze, simply take a normal fan, and make it spin.

So...

The point is the fan wasn't spinning. I have a few fans that I've pulled out of junked computers, so I figured I'd just replace it. I can solder a bit now as well, so I figured it should be easy.

There were even some obvious screws to undo.

I used the electric screwdriver my mum bought me as part of a present.

Thanks mums everywhere. It even has a torch built in and you can never own enough torches, even when you will never use them.

I always thought electric screwdrivers were a bit pointless, but it turns out they are excellent. I've just never actually needed one before.

Unlike this project, my last had a few bits left over, and this was where the electric driver was really useful. It turns out there are a zillion screws inside stuff.

Pictured is all the leftover bits not including all the gears and shafts and all kinds of springs and stuff that might come in handy one day.

"What are the chances of any of it coming in handy?", I hear you ask.



But that's what they said about the 200 short lengths of black poly irrigation pipe I still have in the shed.

This thing used to be one of those fax, copier, printer combo devices that wasn't working any more. A friend was throwing it away, and thought my car was as good a place as any to throw it. It turns out there are some good motors and gears inside. I think there were five motors in there. That's them on the right. Maybe six motors. I'm planning on needing some motors, gears, and some shafts for making my solar tracking heliostat. There are also a stack of salvaged components used for tracking the placement of motors. The motor on the bottom right has a spoked arrangement that passes between a censor that detects light, and a light. The shadows cast by the spokes allow the system to track where the print head is. Or so I've read.

So much to learn. So much time. If you just stop watching TV.

Anyway, I've drifted off what pretends to be this post's topic...

Ok, so the fan wasn't spinning.

None of the fans I had would fit exactly, and would have to be trimmed (hacked and snapped with a pair of pliers) until they could be coaxed into duty.

I looked under that foil label and found the exposed end of the shaft.

I thought I'd drop in some oil before I replaced the fan to see if that's all it needed. It was.




The black, and off white cylinder in the front with the brown stain at the base is a capacitor.

I'm guessing it was also the source of the burnt plastic smell.

So that had to go. Luckily I have stacks of different capacitors from pulling apart some stuff, and had a duplicate.

A big component with large nicely spaced pins that proved easy to solder.

The thing went back together with no left over bits, and no spilt coffee added.

I realise this was a very simple repair, but it is something I would have sent to landfill before learning a bit of electronics over these last few months.

Here is a terrible photo of it charging a phone through it's transformer, and maybe a bit of Bigfoot's leg. Who can tell.



A 12v car battery supplying an inverter outputting 240v, then through the iPhone transformer to bring it back down to 5v.

Ok it's slightly inefficient, but the phone was the smallest thing I could take to the car to test it.

I rate this a total success.

Which is nice.




120 Things in 20 years - Bringing me one step closer each day to being able to take down a Terminator. Or repair an inverter. I need to win a 3D printer.

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Thinking - Starbuck

I'm going to try to work the word "**systemically" into more conversations from now on.

Sometimes I marvel at the total awesomeness of the net. As long as I have a net connection, I effectively know everything you humans have ever worked out.

Unless there is a coffee house or a 1978 sifi* TV series, or worse yet, a naughties remake of said 70's TV series with the same name.

Then I'm doomed.

I wanted to know about someone called "Starbuck", and more specifically, I waned to find out what all the fuss was about, and why everyone called everything "Starbuck(s)".

Sometimes it's simply too hard and you have to wade through too much crud.

What I need is either a thing that just adds a few different suffixes to everything, or a special "I want the thing that's probably unpopular" function on google. The suffixes would probably include things like "General", "Sir" or ... well that's all I can think of really.

Just "General", and "Sir".

Perhaps I could just try those two search suffixes on my own without having to change the rest of the world.

I guess it could work.



*120 Things in 20 years - Did you know that if you do a search for sifi, you get a link to "systemically** important financial institution" but scifi gets you something that makes sense? I'm guessing it's actually substantially easier than I report to find the right stuff when thinking about people named "Starbuck" when you can spell.

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