Nap time project - bandana bib

2012-01-06T23:42:00.000Z

Today's project while le bebe is having his morning nap is a bandana style bib.
Waterproof PUL (same stuff the modern re-usable nappies is made of) backing, absorbent hemp middle, metal popper to close it with, and a great cotton front. My PUL is from Greenbeans, and I use it for anything that needs waterproofing - change mats, bibs, wet bags - has a nice soft side for going against skin.

As my usual model is snoring away in his cot, here it is on Teddy bear. Once le bebe is up I'll try it on and modify as required.

Time: 30 mins to set up, make a pattern and sew.

Nap time project - recycling

2012-01-04T03:33:00.001Z

Today's project while le bebe sleeps is to recycle a formula tin and sauce bottle.

Painted using a couple of test pots for interior paint. Formula tin needed the inside part removed with a tin opener, and holes punched in the base with screwdriver/electric drill to make a planter for herbs. Just needs a later of gravel then potting mix. Also might use the lid and chop a hole in it, then plant in the hole, to minimize water evaporation.

Sauce bottle will be used as a vase.

Time: 10 mins to prep and paint, plus a few hours drying time.

Spring Madness

2011-11-26T01:42:00.000Z

This warm, wet spring means the 'farm' is growing like crazy! Poor K is spending most weekends mowing the last week's growth, and I'm well behind on a whole lot of autum/winter tasks, let alone the Spring ones.

One good side effect of using pea straw as a mulch - heaps of stray pea plants are sprouting!

Used some of our own compost in this garden bed, and lots of our old 'failed' seeds seem to be coming up - will wait until we can work out what they are, then move or cull them :)

More pics on flickr here.

Spring gardening

2011-09-17T23:44:00.001+01:00

We're slowly ramping up our garden capacity at the farm - one sub irrigated raised bed is in, have timber for another, and last years containers are up and running also. On the go currently are: lettuces, peas, broad beans, spinach, lots of herbs, carrots, leeks, beetroot, cabbage and various broccoli.

Yum!

New bag design!

2011-05-31T22:45:00.000+01:00

Finally designed my first 'custom' bag pattern from scratch!
It's a relatively basic square 'tote' bag, with one inside and one outside pocket, and a padded base for extra strength/protection.

Still a few small tweaks needed (more pockets inside for organizing stuff), but it's pretty close to being ready to sell.

Not a lot of progress on my online shop lately either - have been distracted by too many other things (baby showers, a bit of gardening, general laziness!), but it should be launching in the near future. I'm looking for a model to get some shots of my bags with too (no pay, totally unglam!) - anyone interested?

Fix for my php probs!

2011-05-04T00:57:00.000+01:00

After a few weeks of frustration, I've finally fixed up my thumbnail probs on my alternativecontext.com portfolio site - the fix was to do with the default timezone setting.

Thanks to Vamonos Software for the post that lead me to a solution for my prob (tho I did it slightly differently...)

Issue: Images were being generated in the timthumb cache, but not displaying on my site. Was convinced it was to do with caching/headers, I looked in my sites apache error log, and lo and behold I had been getting these errors:

[Sat Apr 30 09:52:05 2011] [error] [client 66.249.72.45] PHP Warning: strtotime() [function.strtotime]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Europe/London' for 'BST/1.0/DST' instead in /var/www/alternativecontext.com/htdocs_3.0/wp-content/themes/ePhoto/timthumb.php on line 526, referer: http://alternativecontext.com/2010/04/30/naked-vets-minature/

The fix was pretty simple - could either set the default.timezone in php.ini, or for me (better as I'm on a server with mutiple sites), add the following to the timthumb.php script in my wordpress theme, as the first line of function show_cache_file($mime_type):

date_default_timezone_set('Europe/London');

Reset my wordpress page cache, and HURRAY, all is fixed!

Autumn is here!

2011-04-14T06:00:00.000+01:00

The 'farm' is changing daily with the onset of autumn. All the oak trees are turning yellow or red, and dropping a LOT of leaves - I can see a lot of raking coming up! The birches have lost their leaves too, and look rather forlorn.

We've also discovered a lot of mushrooms and toadstools - so far we're steering clear, but something is eating the brown ones, so I guess they can't be tooooo poisonous.

Cats are also liking the last of the sunny days...

Timberrrrr!

2011-03-03T00:42:00.000Z

A huge gum tree from our neighbours property decided to 'drop by' and see us during the windy weather on Wednesday.... hope they let us keep the wood, as it'll smell lovely on the fireplace :)

One of the fun joys of living on a lifestyle block! Poor fences are being squashed, and a few large branches of the silver birch will have to come off too, it's not enjoying holding up a whole gum tree's weight!

The bag lady

2011-03-02T03:43:00.002Z

I've recently decided to take some time off from IT, and hang out at our lifestyle property, doing a few small things on my own.

To keep busy when I've got downtime, I've rediscovered sewing! And am putting that skill to use making some bags. Here's the two I've recently completed - both using pretty cheap fabrics, and free patterns from the internet.

The carry all/diaper/nappy bag - designed as a nappy bag (pattern is called 'The Detour Bag'), but great also for hauling lots of stuff about. Only took two or three tries to get the lining in correctly :) Canvas bag with cotton lining and detail. Cheated and used velcro for the main closure - was supposed to use a magnetic snap. Took about four hours all up - cutting all the fabric out took nearly half of that time.

And today I made a little fabric handbag in 2 hours that I'm quite liking - however the pattern didn't mention using interfacing or stiffening on the strap, which in hindsight would be better as it's a little 'flimsy' feeling on the strap. Next time!

More pics on my flickr stream.

Patterns:

Another website about to go live...

2010-08-17T10:10:00.000+01:00

Another website build is about to go out the door... some long hours when I'm doing a full-time contract during the day, but I'm really enjoying getting to grips with Wordpress, and getting back into doing 'public' facing work, rather than the enterprise-y stuff I do during the day (which nobody outside the NZ Govt will ever know about).

Details of the site are on my commercial portfolio site - go take a look. I'll update this post when it goes live.

Using the MyProduct theme from Elegant Themes, graphics from WebTreats ETC, and stock imagery from iStockphoto.

Lomo-tastic

2010-07-10T00:07:00.001+01:00

Finally got around to getting my films from Russia and China developed.
Shot on the antique Lomo 135M I bought in a flea market in Moscow, and a lot of fun trying to interpret the manual!

Cheated a bit, as we used the DSLR as a light meter to work out exposures, but over time I'm hoping to learn a bit better. The Lomo has funny little icons on the focus, apeture and shutterspeed dials that are supposed to help with guessing the correct settings - which don't make much sense anyway! So it's all rather hit an miss.

One cool feature on the 135M is the winding spring, where you can wind it up for ages, and shoot 8 frames in a row without having to wind again. Most of the close up pics are out of focus, so might have to do some experimenting on those.

I have a suspicion the photo lab might have auto-adjusted the colours, as Lomos usually have quite a green/yellow cast, but they still look great! Looking at the cd versions, most have a slightly wonky top edge, looks kinda cool tho.

Rest of the series are on my flickr account here.

Naked Vet Calendar

2010-06-07T04:09:00.001+01:00

In Feburary this year, I worked my biggest assignment so far (in photography anyway!), shooting an entire calendar for the Massey Uni Vet Students. Shot over a weekend, we had a hilarious time, rounding up animals, dodging cow poo and carefully positioning props!

They do a calendar every year, to raise funds for their 'halfway day', to mark half way through their vet degrees. 10% of funds this year are going to Paw Justice also.

I've put a few images up on my portfolio site. Here's one of my favourites - didn't go in the calendar, but has been used on their website. Calendars are available to order on their website for a short time at NZ$16 each (incl. postage - NZ or international). Publicity has been great also - on TVNZ Breakfast show (Paul Henry was rather mean to one of the models!), The Dominion Post, stuff.co.nz and other NZ newspapers and TV shows.

Yet Another Theme change

2010-06-07T03:54:00.005+01:00

Changed the theme on this blog yet again...
Latest theme is called 'Translucence' and came originally from Webtreats as a Wordpress theme, and was converted to a Blogger template by bloggerstyles.com. Thanks!

One day I will get around to creating my own theme, but when you're working full time, and doing paid work 'after hours', it can get a little hard to find that extra 4-5 hours to design and code up a whole theme.

Brew labels

2010-05-29T23:56:00.000+01:00

Just worked on some labels for our own home brew, which should be ready for 'sampling' (yeah right!) in a week or so.

Fonts - both from 1001freefonts.com: Artistamp Medium and Bleeding Cowboys.

New reading

2010-05-29T00:07:00.002+01:00

Found an interesting new blog to read yesterday from Abakas - a testing company in Boston. Lots of interesting Ruby stuff, and just testing in general. I agree with a lot of it, and a lot is stuff I've been thinking about anyway :)

Alternative Context Images - new site

2010-05-02T01:51:00.001+01:00

I've FINALLY set up a new portfolio site for my photography work - at http://alternativecontext.com.

Go check it out :) Using the lovely ePhoto theme, on a wordpress install. Content is still a little thin, but I'll keep uploading over the next week.

Most images are available for sale, just email me for details on pricing and licensing.

Mac OSX Snow Leopard and SMB mounts... more!

2010-04-05T05:20:00.001+01:00

Yet another post on mounting smb shares on Mac OSX...

Now I have a Snow Leopard machine, I had a little hassle getting reconnected to our network drives, and had totally forgotten how to connect multiple shares from one server with different passwords...

The Mac help doesn't help on this (how ironic!), and a bit of googling for the smbmount commands made me remember how to do it :)

Using 'Connect to Server' in Finder (CMD+K), enter your smb share in the format: smb://username:password@servername/sharename
Repeat for each share you have
To make life easier, set your server up with static IP's and edit the file found in /etc/hosts (or create it if there isn't one)
Go to your hard disk in Finder, and the share will be sitting there - drag it into your devices list
To have the drives mount next time you log in, go add them to your login prefs

Easy peasy once you know how, huh :) Does mean your passwords aren't hidden away in the Keychain - anyone have a better method?

Chocolate Chip Sandwich Cookies

2010-03-28T07:14:00.003+01:00

As a birthday present, I was given "A Treasury of New Zealand Baking", a fantastic baking book gathering a stack of traditional and not-so-traditional baking recipes from NZ chefs.

I made my first recipe from the book today - "Classic Chocolate-Chip Cookie Sandwich", and my chief taste tester seems to like them :) Will have to drop a few over to my other taste-tester out in Petone in the next few days. I followed the recipe (which is by Al Brown), almost exactly, just substituting cream for cream fraiche when making the chocolate sauce for the 'glue'.

Assembly line in progress.

The finished product (yum!).

Disappointment...

2010-03-22T05:50:00.003Z

Strangely, for all the good things I have to say about Apple computer products, I'm giving Apple service a big thumbs down.

I have an old(ish) MacBook, that I'm preparing to sell, so hoped to get a small crack in the corner of the top case repaired. For the first time ever, after owning three MacBook/MacBook Pros, two iPhones, and various accessories over about four years, I've needed support from Apple, and found it rather lacking.

I've read hundreds of threads online about people waltzing into Apple Stores, and the Genius Bar replacing top cases free of charge, no matter the age. I went into the Regent St store in London mid last year, and they also said they'll replace it free of charge, but they had a 3-4 week repair wait time as they were full up. So I thought no probs, I'll get it sorted once we're in NZ.

But.... I've taken my MacBook into an Authorized Repair Centre, where I've had nothing but bad service. They won't repair the crack, and refused to call Apple Care themselves to confirm. After spending an hour on the phone with Apple Care myself, I finally got a case raised, where they confirm they'll fix the crack. But... only if I have a receipt proving it's under 3 years old.

And of all the hundreds of receipts we have archived, this is the only receipt I can't find.

I'm really disappointed with the fact Genius Bars in stores can repair things at their own discretion, but in NZ we don't have Genius Bars, or even Apple Stores, so we're stuck with whatever the repair center say. And we have to pay for them to do nothing also....

Apple, I'm still an avid fan, and own an awful lot of your products, but I'm giving the huge thumbs down on the support options available for us poor cousins out in NZ.

Some threads where people have confirmed they've got this fix done:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7011672

http://babygotmac.com/a/macbook-case-cracks-on-wristpad/

AppleInsider article about this issue: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/04/08/apple_addressing_cracks_on_white_macbooks_casings.html

Mac and WEP

2010-03-21T04:48:00.004Z

After a few minutes of frustration, I found out the hard way that Mac devices don't like WEP passwords...

Symptom:

Mac and iPhones will refuse to connect to a Wifi network with WEP encryption enabled, says 'invalid password'

Remedies:

Use a different security scheme (ie WPA2)
Enter the WEP generated key into the password (something long and impossible to remember, usually a random alphanumeric string)
Scream a lot

And don't hassle me for using WEP, we didn't find out that Netgear devices using Wireless Repeating functions only support WEP until after we purchased the first router and tried messing about.... something else to gripe about!.

trading away

2010-02-22T21:58:00.003Z

I've been using Trade Me (NZ's equivalent of eBay) for a whole lot of buying and selling since we've been back - got a lot of furniture from there cheaper than the 2nd hand stores. Being a seasoned eBay'er in the UK, I'm missing a lot of the eBay functionality that I think Trade Me could definitely use...

PayPal integration - in eBay, once your auction is done, all the payments are taken care of in PayPal, and it's all kept linked up with the auction status in eBay, so very easy to see what's going on. Trade Me doesn't allow credit card processing until you've got 50 feedback, which takes a while (see my feedback gripe below), and bank processing is a bit frustrating to work out when there are lots of payments coming in.
Buyers here aren't great at providing feedback - of the 8 auctions I've just finished as a seller, none of the buyers have placed any feedback. Annoyingly, this puts me further and further away from being able to use the credit card payment system... a 'default' feedback of 'good' after say 10 days of the auction closing would be great.
No third party apps for creating and managing auctions - instead everything is lumped into a single 'selling' or 'sold' page on their website. I used GarageSale when trading on eBay to create and manage auctions, which of course integrated with eBay and PayPal so everything moved through a nice workflow and was easy to see what's going on at any time
No HTML or markup in auctions! Again, on eBay I used GarageSale a lot, which had some nice templates for auctions, making it easy to provide lots of info, but in a tidy readable manner, and also host images on other sites.

Apart from those gripes, Trade Me is great for buying and selling. It's driven most of the second hand stores in the Wellington region out of business, but makes for some great bargains for buyers, if you're willing to sit out an auction. I picked up a lovely (slightly infested with borer, but hey!) antique Oak Dresser for a teeny NZ$30 last week, just needed some no-borer spray, and needs a bit of a sand and revarnish.

My tips for sellers:

Photos photos photos! Spend 5 to 10 minutes getting a GOOD photo of your item - move furniture to somewhere uncluttered (against a wall, or outside if there is nowhere else), put small items on a table or on the floor with nothing around them, and get some good light on whatever you are selling, so buyers can actually see it. Get LOTS of photos, and spend the few extra cents to post multiple photos where needed, and a gallery display so the photo shows up in searches. Rotate your images up the right way - I've gotten a sore neck from looking at sideways photos :)
Details... buyers want detail, no matter how boring it is to type in, get as much info as possible in the listing. Has it had borer or treatment for borer? What condition is your item? Links to specifications if you don't want to type 'em in.
Reserves - be realistic on reserves. If you bought it for $1000 new a year ago, it's probably already lost 50% of it's value. Don't moan about what YOU paid for it, as buyers will only pay what it's worth if it's second hand, and not vintage or a premium item.
Answer your email! Be on the computer when your auction ends, and get quickly onto the buyer to finalise payment and delivery/pickup. I've had auctions where it's been DAYS after the scheduled end before a seller emails re pickups etc, and it's almost made me want to cancel the auction. Also answer any questions in a timely manner - it could be the answer that prompts a sale or Buy it Now.

So, happy trading! I'll be posting some more books up over the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for my listings :).

Home, home again!

2010-02-22T21:20:00.006Z

Long time no posts... we arrived back in NZ mid December, and have been flat out sorting somewhere to live, jobs, visiting everyone and generally winding down.

Yeah I haven't finished the blog yet - still need to do entries for Shanghai and Hong Kong some time in the future....

Now we've finished travelling, my posts are going to be much more mundane again, back towards tech, internet, photography and general NZ and Wellington based rants. I expect to lose any readers I had previously, so farewell if you choose to go, and welcome if you're planning on putting up with my rambling.

Xian

2009-12-04T09:33:00.008Z

We took a train out to Xian which is close to the Terracotta Army which we planned on visiting. Xian is a big city and has a few sights worth seeing, like the Bell Tower where we saw a traditional Chinese music performance and the Muslim Quarter with lots of markets, street food and the Great Mosque. The pollution was pretty bad the whole time we were here, and really bad on the day we left.

The Great Mosque, a very Chinese looking mosque

A lady doing some cloth spinning

The outside of the Army museum, you can see the pollution drifting around at the back

Kerry at the Terracotta Army

Rach at the Terracotta Army

A clay dude

Inspection time

A General, maybe

Clay horses pulling stuff

More photos here

Next up Shanghai

Beijing

2009-12-04T09:16:00.005Z

20-28th November

Beijing is a cool place, probably one of the best places we visited in the whole time we've been away. There's plenty of stuff to see and just dealing with the cultural differences keeps you busy enough, mostly it's a bit of laugh but it can also be frustrating. We took in most of the big tourist sights and spent some time just messing about. It was actually the longest time we've spent anywhere in the last 5 months.

A couple of shaggy, tired looking tourists in the Forbidden City

Rach at the Temple of Heaven

Self Portrait on the Great Wall, about an hour later the sky was thick with pollution

Getting down at the Temple of Heaven

The Hutong where we were staying, bikes are the main way of getting shit done in China

More photos on Flickr: here

Next up Xian and the Terracotta Warriors!

Mongolia

2009-12-04T08:57:00.007Z

16 - 18 November

After hitting Ulaan Baatar early in the morning we messed about in town for a while and then headed out to a Ger camp for a couple of days.

Buddhist Monastery in Ulaan Baatar

Sükhbaatar Square, Ulaan Baatar

A Lion, eating a chain

The Ger camp was permanent rather than the usual nomadic camps and was about an hours drive from Ulaan Baatar across some dodgy highways and then snowy fields. It was pretty cold and each Ger has a coal burning stove inside that keeps you warm. Rach went horse riding with the nomads who had setup camp about 1 km away and we visited them in the afternoon.

Rach about to ride satan's offspring

The dogs sleep next to the doors where all the heat escapes

They're not all that tall in Mongolia

The train out of Ulaan Baatar at first was snowy plains and then slowly changed into the barren desert of the Gobi. At the border crossing they lift the entire train off the wheels(with everybody on board) and replace them with the wider gauge for the Chinese tracks.

A Ger camp seen from the train

Desert

Here's us looking weird on the train to Beijing

Goodbye Mongolia

More photos here and here

Next up Beijing