Notices by Yvan (yvan@toot.ale.gd)

Ah... the race between the costs of getting a job and starting work and actually getting paid. 😐

Car costs have been a bit brutal... inclusive of having to simply just buy a 900 quid car to solve the key problem. Spent a bunch of the stupid Volvo with it's serial brake issues... hoping I can get that fixed and then sold. Was supposed to be fitting new front discs this weekend but Eurocarpart fucked up the dispatch of my order.

It's going to be tight for a couple more months at least... I was hoping to catch up on some other stuff I owe, but it'll need to wait.

Also has anyone else noticed payment windows on credit cards have narrowed drastically over the years? I'm pretty sure both of mine used to give me approximately a month after statement... but now Amex isn't even a fortnight, and HSBC is about 3 weeks.

Just wrote the sentence "I've worked* alongside Kat for over 20 years"... yikes... for over 2 decades she's been putting up with my bullshit.

On the topic... anyone hiring a remote role for a good full-stack web developer (PHP, Python, usual front-end crap, phone app dev too, but of Java in that context). UK based, full rights to work in UK, etc. (I expect approximately 1 million Fedi users are seeking full-stack web-dev work based on what I see here lol 🙄)

https://kit.belista.id.au/#skills (full CV available on request tho)

* not directly mind, just alongside in a more literal sense lol...

#GetFediHired

@morph ah, can totally understand! Bad me, luring people in with fluffy animals only to then talk about BBQing them. 😬 Maybe that needed a CW.

Tell you what tho, the food miles for the work BBQs at this place are about as low as they can get... there's maybe about 50 metres between these lamb chops and the BBQ.

@morph 🤣

Ah, yes, it's in a bit of a state as well as being all bent out of shape. It was full of water and fell down metre and a half deep ditch from a rotten pile of pallets. So it has been sat in muddy water for a fair bit of time. Not on our watch mind, that was our previous neighbours who we took on the plot from after they had abandoned it.

@morph allotment bath tub?

Need to decide what to do with this.

First #chillies have graduated from the #HotFridge to the #GrowShelf ... speedy!

I take them out when at least one seedling in a pot has both cotyledons well open. The goal is for one strong seedling per pot. Though I may consider pricking out one of the two to another pot if another pot fails or I want more of that plant.

Here we have:

2x Aji Mango (X8) <-edit
3x Sugar Rush Stripey (X13)
4x Trinidad Perfume (X4)
3x Tangerine Tiger (X12)
3x Chilli Chump Jalapeño (X14)
3x Scotch Bonnet (X5)
3x Madre Veija (X11)

#chilipepper #peppers #growyourown

Next day, EVEN M04R CH1ll13Z!!

Also super-chuffed that my 7 Pot Primos have germinated so soon! These can be a bastard to germinate. Turns out my "abuse" of them leaving on a wet tissue for over a week after the chamomile soak hasn't done any harm. They hadn't sprouted yet when I planted them but they were clearly close. No doubt the 28C of the #HotFridge did the rest, and *boom*... under 2 days later we have 3 or 4 up and out of the soil.

Today's additions to the #GrowShelf:

3x 7 Pot Primo (X1)
3x Kashmiri Mirch (Y3)
3x Candy Cane Chocolate Cherry (Y4)
4x Biquinho Red (Y6)
3x Thunder Mountain Longhorn (Y7)
2x KangStarr StarrLing (Y8)
1x Beaver Dam (Y11)
4x Chilli Chump Piri Piri (Y12)

#chillies #chilipepper #peppers #growyourown

Almost forgot to do a Friday (OK, Saturday early hours) #HotFridge check.

I'm a bit confused as I thought I did a Thursday one, but I don't see a record of it here... I'll do a re-org of the little pots tomorrow and if there's a diff between what's on the grow light shelf and what's documented here I'll fill that in... (as this thread has become my primary record of chilli germination lol).

Just now moved from #HotFridge to #GrowShelf we have:

1x Naga Morich (yay!) - X2 (1 pot)
1x BB Mama - X6 (1 pot)
2x Bishop's Crown - X10 (1 pot)
1x Rocoto Marlene - Y1 (1 pot)
1x KangStarr Sweet QueenHi - Y9 (1 pot)
2x KanStarr Lingria - Y10 (1 pot)
3x Chilli Chump Piri Piri - Y12 (2 post)

#Chillies #Peppers #ChiliPepper #GrowYourOwn

Right, have organised all the little germinated chilli pots so we I can do a proper assessment of the status of things... key question right now is: what is missing? Given I have germinations from both 7 Pot Primo and Naga Morich anything that hasn't germinated yet is very suspect:

X7 - Big Sun Habanero, last 2 seeds of this, some old seed (Feb'21), no surprise, not that important a variety for us tho.

X9 - Orange Drop, last 2 seeds from Fatali Jan'23... I do have some dehydrated chillies from 2023 I could try seed from.

Y5 - Yaki Blue - newest seed, Jan'25, from Chilli Chump... 🤞🏻

Y14 - ZERO Padrons :( - despite it being the variety I planted the most seeds of! These are some of my older seed (Dec'22, not ancient) so perhaps "that follows"... and I need to buy some more seed, pronto!

The biggest problem there is the padrons, I cannot imagine a summer without some padrons on the BBQ. (We barely had any last year, but did manage a handful.)

#chillis #peppers #growyourown

Ah-hah.. have found Thursday's notes on what got moved from #HotFridge to #GrowShelf, they were in some other open Masto tab hidden amongst the many tabs... I didn't note how many pots of each of these, but I can interpolate that from the other data..

3x Rocoto Costa Rica - Y2 (2 pots)
2x Beaver Dam - Y11 (1 pot)
2x Rocoto Marlene - Y1 (1 pot)

They grow up so fast.

This is at about 2 weeks since the first germinations.

Soon I'm going to have to decide which of the double plants I am culling, or transplanting to their own pots.

#chillies #peppers #GrowYourOwn

A key problem with installing software that's more than a couple of years old these days:

1) It's open source software, so the documentation sucks
2) Most search results are 5+ year old content and don't work for the current release

Yes, I know how to do search time controls in search engines. It can help a little, or often just results in no answers at all (which of course isn't necessarily worse than wrong answers, lol.)

In this case the software in question is eJabberd... and I'm wondering if the shit documentation is a deliberate ploy to encourage people to use the attached commercial entity project owner's consultancy or hosting services.

Install #eJabberd they say, it'll be easy they* say!!

We can send messages to each other using #XMPP desktop clients or the converse.js web client I've set up at a URL, but been bashing my head against file/image uploads for a couple of hours now. Was some funky systemd/filesystem protection shit going on and I fixed and now I don't have an error about file permissions... instead the whole thing just silently fails. 🤣

* Nobody really said this, except for the voices in my head... they're always telling me to do stuff, that it'll be easy... they're liars

Whilst it'd be nice to think people just stopping buying Teslas could bring about Musk's downfall I really think he's past that... it'll be other factors that make or break shit for him now. That could be the US managing to reject authoritarianism, or it could be Trump flicking him off like an unwanted booger... and I make no assessment as to whether either of those are likely, or if there are other possibilities, I haven't a clue.... I just don't think Tesla is actually his weak spot and I wouldn't be surprised if he just doesn't give that much of a shit about it anyway... it's yesterday's toy. The fact it is a significant part of his "net worth" is really just a technicality.

Got down the #allotment and caught some of today's rare sunshine... next key infrastructure project is now well underway. New corner posts going in at either end of the border with our new neighbour (not met them yet, they've "broken ground" amongst their weeds though!)

This will just be a basic mesh fence, buried about 300mm into the ground. I like to put in big chunky braced corner posts and then run strainer wires to as the key structure for the fence, we then just put light stakes in down the fence line to staple to and these are easy to replace when they rot out.

I tamp the earth down as tight as I can with the end of a sledgehammer and hopefully that holds them well enough. I generally try to avoid large lumps of concrete on the allotment! Especially having just pulled one out of the front fence post hole. It was huge! More than a standard modern concrete/postcrete bag. Stupid massive lump of concrete with a 75mm2 post in it rotted out at the bottom. Stupidity.

@morph @Chalkllate in the normal grocery shops in the UK you rarely see anything but pretty generic green and red chillies with the look of jalapeño or cayenne varieties about them, sometimes they might venture a scotch bonnet in the bigger cities... and that's about it really. There's a tiny bit more range in good indie South Asian shops - though usually not much more than just Scotch Bonnets, sometimes Habs, and often larger milder pointy pale green and yellows types.

But that's why we grow our own! :) Hopefully over 20 varieties this year for us.

@morph @Chalkllate I hadn't heard of Rocotos at all until I did a Fatalii seeds order a couple of years back... they don't feature much on chilli/pepper YouTube or elsewhere. They're great looking plants too, with their furry leaves... and they seem to grow rather large.

@morph this is some of ours from 2023, baked stuffed with a quinoa and goat cheese mix I think. We didn't get any in 2024 sadly (generally a bad chilli year for us). Fingers crossed for 2025!