Gravelling the garden

Last year, my girlfriend and I spent 3 days building decking in our garden which I blogged about at the time: The great decking project & Decking finished. It was always the intention to cover the rest of the garden with gravel to match some already there. Unfortunately we didn’t get much summer last year and that combined with me being disorganised meant that the garden remained unfinished for about 9 months.

Finally, as the weather starts to pick up for spring, I got around to arranging delivery of 2 tonnes of gravel.

I paid extra for morning delivery, but hadn’t quiet expected it to be 8.15am on a Saturday. But I guess it was good to get an early start.
I roped in a friend to come help as we had just buckets to ferry the gravel through the garage and out onto the garden. WIth 3 of us it took relatively little time to shift it all. Just a couple of hours, including stopping to have pate on toast for breakfast .

Kat and I got about this far before Steve arrived

And it didn’t really take much longer to complete the job

It makes a big difference to the look of the garden to finally have this finished. Given that we finished pretty early we decided to go out and get some pots and plants. The plan is that we only have plants that either smell nice, or produce something. So herbs, veg, fruit. Plants in our garden have to earn their keep.
We also decided to get our selves a chimnea. I have a hopeful notion of being able to use it to deliver some nice heat over the decking area to help us make use of it later into the evening. Time will tell how effective that proves to be for the moment I have a few ‘curing steps’ to go through before I can try to get a full blown fire going.

The reault of our efforts and shopping spree look pretty good

I really like the effect of lots of different sizes/types/colours of pots. We realised that if we attempted to have any common theme, chances are if we wanted to add to it in the future we’d struggle to match something. This way we plan from the outset that the theme is mistmatched.

I’d like to say that the garden is now finished. But we still have a few things to do, clean up along the other side of the path, get a few more pots and plants. But it does at least now look presentable, so we will have to arrange to have people over.

The cost of all this has not escaped my attention, Even doing the decking ourselves I think we’re looking at about 900 pounds so far. That’s actually not that bad for what we’ve achieved, and spreading out the activity helps spread the cost. From here on we have no single big expenses required though, just a pot+plant here and there, some accessories like seating cushions.

Overall I’m very happy with the results of our labour, now I just have to hope that this year we get a reasonable summer with which to enjoy it.

Decking video

Last night Kat got around to cutting together the time lapse stuff of us building the decking, and we’ve uploaded it to YouTube:

The video worked out really well, however I did discover something odd whilst playing with it. Initially it was my intention to use Cinelerra to edit the video clips together on Linux. I’ve used Cinelerra before and it’s a pretty cool piece of free software, with some amazing capabilities. However, when I took the WMV files that had been generated by the webcam software on a Windows laptop and played them on Linux they looked terrible. The quality was a mess, all kinds of blocking etc. I had to convert them all to MOV to play in Cinelerra, and at first I thought that was the problem. But even playing the source WMV files on my Linux machine looked terrible.

I guess WMV being a proprietary format there is just so much that can be done to do playback, but I was disappointed. I guess that will be a lesson in generating content in proprietary formats, I can’t assume I’ll be able to convert it to something sensible after the fact.

Unless there was something else causing the problem….?

Anyhow it looks ok on YouTube so that’s cool

Decking finished!

Decking project is now complete (well ish). Three days of labouring in the sunshine, which was very hot work but actually really nice in many ways. It’s great to be out of the office, doing something constructive. That said if I never have to sink another metpost in my life, that would be just great by me…. They’re never easy, to be fair on the metpost, it’s more the problem with any random part of garden being suitable for sinking a post 600mm. Basically there was a whole load of concrete exactly where I wanted to sink posts. And not just random bits, one hole required me to go through a good 6 inches of hardened concrete (very stoney). That probably took longer than any other single activity.

One minor hiccup which I am still kicking myself over was failing to actually check the decking timbers were the width they claimed. I knew the lengths would be random sizes at least as long as I’d ordered, but I did all my calculations based on the stated 150mm width, built the whole deck structure and started laying the decking planks only to realise that they weren’t going to cover the whole joist structure….weird… until I measured and found the deck joists were actually only 145mm wide, doh! I really should have measured. It wasn’t a really big deal in the end, one extra board, and some judicious use of the table saw and we were sorted for making up the difference.

The cool thing in the project was that my partner Kat had the idea of using a webcam stuck out of the study window to take time-lapse photos of us working. She’s put a bunch of the coverage on her own blog The Philomathic Kat And I’m sure we’ll both blog about it when we cut together the video. But it looks pretty cool.

When I get around to firing up my laptop, or going upstairs to the mac, I’ll add some pics of the decking project in progress.

Update: finally got around to adding some pictures in progress

The great decking project

I’ve lived in my house for a couple of years now and I’ve always meant to get around to doing something with the garden. I’m not a great gardener, and I have too many other interests to want to spend every weekend mowing the lawn.
I don’t have a very big garden, and it is, or rather was, an uninspiring patch of grass and a gravel area for table and chairs.
I say ‘was’, because this year my girlfriend and I decided it was time to do something with it. My main requirement is low maintenance. So no grass, no fast growing things that require attention.
Realising that I would likely take time to really do anything constructive I figured I’d be destructive and get rid of the grass as soon as possible, so earlier in the year I dug up, churned over, and largely buried, all of the turf. Placing on top a layer of weedbarrier sheeting. This meant that I got to the grass before spring kicked in, whilst it was still manageable. And so for the last couple of months I’ve had a back garden of black sheeting, held down with bits of gravel.

But this weekend, and this coming week we are starting the first major part of the new garden. In the form of decking. I ordered materials at the beginning of this week. and they arrived on Wednesday.

A Huge pile of wood, taking up my garage
Only after it arrived did I start to really look at the slab of concrete (that was under the gravel) that will be under the main part of the decking. And realise that it really isn’t level… in fact it’s quite a way off level. This should provide some challenges for the construction of the joists.
However I am confident that between us, my girlfriend and I will triumph in creating the best decking this house has ever seen…

New toys, and a new project

Today has been a good day for both my geek side and my DIY side.

First the DIY side today took delivery of lots of wood, more specifically decking planks and joists. So I now have a garage full of the materials I require to build a deck in my garden next week (which I have off), so that was cool.

Secondly I also received a new Bluetooth keyboard for use with my Nokia 770. It’s an iGo stowaway Bluetooth keyboard, which I got for about £20 delivered from Amazon, or rather a shop that trades via Amazon.

In the true tradition of such things I’m writing this post using it and my 770 whilst sat in my garden (currently sans decking) making the most of the sunshine.

I’ve read a few other peoples reviews, and I’m not sure I have much to add… but I’m not going to let that stop me, else I’d never blog about anything

Consumability has been on my mind recently, specifically what it takes to be consumable and what it takes to test for it. My first impression of this product was that no one at iGo has even heard of consumability testing….
So in a roughly chronological order his is an account of my first few minutes with this new device.

First annoyance was the packaging, I’m sure there is some really good reason for using heat sealed plastic casings, I suspect it’s cheap. But please stop… I hate having to find a knife to cut into the packaging just to get at my new toy.
OK, so box opened I get out the keyboard and notice a helpful little sticker on the front that shows some pictures about how to open the keyboard. Someone probably thought this was a good consumability type thing to do. Cleverly the sticker wrapped over one side of the keyboard and into the inside, where it showed pictures of how to close it again. Very nice… until you come to remove the sticker, foolishly expecting it to be one of those easy peel things… but no, it is stuck hard. I then spent the next 5 minutes trying to get enough of it off to actually use the keyboard. This did not leave me with a good first impression. Clearly no one at iGo actually tried the finished ‘out of box’ experience because I can’t imagine they would of allowed the sticker to remain on the finished item….
Incidentally before starting to write this I spent another 5 minutes with damp sponge trying to get more off of the front casing, whilst for the moment accepting that some of the keys are left with sticky residue…hmmm.

So having opened it I looked for how to turn it on. I saw no indicator lights and no obvious ‘On’ buttons. A quick scan of the keyboard revealed that Fn-Backspace would do Off… so I figured somewhere there must be an ‘On’ but apparently not. I returned to look at the packaging to find mention of a ‘quick start guide’, which I realised must be hidden between two layers of cardboard at the back of the horrible packaging. I hadn’t noticed this because of the way I had to cut around the package to get the device out had left the cardboard backing held in place.

The quick start guide revealed I needed to put the device in to discoverable mode, with the obvious combination of Ctrl-FnL-FnR (it has a left and right function button of different colours to extend the uses of the keys).

To be fair that was the last usability issue I had that was the fault of the device.
I’d already installed the right software on the 770 and it paired easily and works great. I do still need to figure out how to map certain functions, and in fact if there even is a way to get certain things, such as alt-tab between open applications. But that is just configuring the 770.

All in all having just typed quite a bit I think it’s pretty good. It definitely extends the use of my 770 to allow me to do serious note taking, and proper console work, which was not really possible with just the stylus.
I’m still getting used to the layout, I keep missing shift, and hitting up, then starting to type in the middle of the line above. However, I’m sure I’ll get used to it in time.

Despite its niggles, which are really only one-time problems, I’m very happy. And for 20 quid (haven’t figured out the pound sign yet) I really can’t complain.
If anything my biggest problem is that I might be further convinced that if I just upgrade to an N810……