Blog

1 lock 6 miles Farm buildings We headed to Napton to meet my parents and collect the boat - on the way we saw a blackboard advertising a cider sale at the Napton Cidery as they were clearing out their stock ready for their new lines. We got to Calcutt Boats at just the right time and Wild Burdock was ready for us to load up. We unloaded the cars into the boats, got kitted out with life jackets and then had our introduction to the boat and how things worked on it.
As I hadn’t adapted to Central time and still waking up close to UK time I headed out early and drove down to Galveston Island to try and see the local brown pelicans. In Galveston, they get both the brown pelicans, and the invasive white pelicans which have tried to take over. There is a vast length of beach along the island, and it was so peaceful in the early morning, with just the birds (and the bird watchers) about!
This Saturday we had a lovely walk along the coast at Selsey Bill with my parents. We started off heading North up towards Pagham Harbour but made it about half way there and then headed back down to the Lifeboat Inn for lunch. After lunch we headed South round the Bill. It was striking particularly on the way back how different the sea was from the calm sheltered side to the end of the point.
Here are a few of the bees that have visited our garden so far this weekend: Bee from rickymoorhouse on Vimeo.
For a while I’ve been meaning to write up the details of the Raspberry Pi weather station that I have built with my eldest daughter. This project builds on a number of examples I’ve seen across the internet, particularly sensing the weather. This details how our system is put together. Temperature monitoring We took two temperature sensors and mounted them in a garden post with one pushed down to the bottom for soil temperature and one in the cap for the air temperature.
For a while I’ve had a variation on my map of the places I’ve visited - here’s a summary of how my current version is working. The whole site is currently generated by hugo, a static site generator with no server side component. The map is powered by MapBox GL which lets me choose any of the mapbox styles to use for my map. I create a markdown file for each place on the map, with the latitude and longitude in the ‘front matter’ for the post which looks something like this:
hem is a synthetic monitoring tool which monitors HTTP resources on a regular schedule, storing details of the time taken and the reponse code returned. I’ve been using Uptime at work for a while for endpoint monitoring and over the time we’ve been using it made a few tweaks or plugins for it - in particular being able to send metrics from Uptime to Graphite. There were also some more substantial changes we were considering making and we’d built up a number of supporting scripts to populate the checks via the Uptime API when hosts changed.

Over the last few months we’ve started to try and reduce our use of plastics - especially single use plastics. Here are some of the areas where we’ve made changes.