…and not far away from my place. I really enjoyed it.
And I’ve used the trip to check if I could harvest Schlehen (Prunus spinosa) this year… looks promising.
That was really a cool bike trip today…
ChitChat
Short notes and ideas that do not really fit into any other category can be found here…
Silberdistel / Silver Thistle in our Garden
Wow. Sometimes nature catches you by surprise. I’ve found a silver thistle (Carlina acaulis) in our garden. One of my favorite flowers. I knew from previous encounters that silver thistles grow around Munich. But I did not expect them in our garden… 🙂
A Smart Home for Birds – Sort of
You’ve probably already seen ‘Smart Nesting Boxes’ for birds with cameras in it – but you’ve probably never seen one with a full weather station on top of it…
A few weeks ago I wanted to test a weather station I purchased as defective. I needed an easily accessible place to test it before mounting it on the roof of my garden house. So as a quick hack I installed it on the pole of one of the nesting boxes in our garden. First tests showed no issues, but I wanted to test it for a few more days. Well… a few days later I noticed a pair of blue tits moved into the box. Bad luck for me as I now have to wait after their breeding (about 4 more weeks) to remove the station. But the good news is: the station works so far without flaws and the birds don’t seem to care about the moving parts above them. 😀
LED Grow Light Station for Chilis and Tomatos
Days are getting longer, and in the afternoons the temperature rises above 10°C… but if I’ve learned a lesson the last two years then that growing chilis and tomatos in our living room (although located on the south side of our house) is still far from enough for these seedlings…
So I’ve taken a few hours and built an LED grow light station for them. 😀
Whoopsie…
I’ve just seen how much time has passed since I’ve updated my website. Time to add a few projects I’ve been working on over the last year…
Got my Hands on a few dozen Fidget Spinners…
Got a few fidget spinners that were sorted out due to defects. Repaired most of them an played a little with them. In the end I did not have any use for a few dozen figet spinners so I donated them to a charity tombola…
But I kept a few of the LED circuits… just because they were blinking… you know…
PONG… I’m online and answering again…
I did not post anything for quite a while… we bought a house and moved into it. This consumed most of my spare time and my ‘hacking capabilities’ during the last few months. But the good news is: I’ve now got a whole room in the cellar which I’m currently turning into a hacker lair / electronics shop without having to care too much about the the WAF.
I just just returned from a business trip to the US and wanted to ‘report back’ with a nightly impression of New York / Manhattan. (Please forgive the low quality as the photo was taken with my smartphone from the airplane window.)
Make Munich
That was a really nice Sunday… 🙂
RANT: Do not misuse spreadsheets for data storage
Using spreadsheet files for data storage and exchange can lead to the
corruption and even loss of information — sometimes without noticing it immediately. I came across this one too often so I could not help but write a rather long post about this topic.
Sharing datasets with other researchers or collaboration partners is a vital part of the knowledge exchange in a community. This might happen in big scale in form of supplementary material along with publications or in small scale within research groups. In this post I do not want to focus on what is actually shared, but how. Because a crucial but commonly underestimated element when sharing datasets with others is the used data format. Continue reading