March-June 2006 | jaycraft.net

rePot

Sun, 18 Jun 2006 19:39:09 -0400

I moved the new avocado shoot into a new pot. It was sharing a larger pot with an older plant (you can see it in the background of the cadoCam shot... That is.. if there's still daylight while you're looking :) I'll have to find a fix for that.). I damaged a few of the fragile roots while digging it out, and I didn't injure it too deeply. We'll see. So far it's still leaning over towards the bit of sunlight that remains for today...

So assuming I didn't kill it, once it matures a bit and grows some leaves I'll put both plants in view of the cam.

Visit the cadoCam™

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 07:32:40 -0400

One of the more exciting reasons to visit jaycraft.net is to watch my new avocado plant grow. Using the wonderful EvoCam by Evological, i decided to put my G4 cube to additional use by attaching an iSight camera to it and pointing it my newly growing avocado plant. Evocam is nice because it lets you capture pictures at any interval and transfer them anywhere via secure ftp. It's also nice enough to assemble handy time lapse movies of any length you desire.

I decided to put the captured frame in a Sandvox pagelet (as you can see on the sidebar). Starting now, the first time lapse movie is available for viewing. Very interesting how much avocado plants reach for light, especially in less than optimal conditions (like sitting next to a bright window but with little overhead light). This is actually the second plant, it's in the same pot and is about a year old. I'll probably move the younger one to its own pot this weekend so it doesn't have to share...

(Disclaimer: I know very little about growing green things, except in plastic containers in my refrigerator...)

Sandvox 1.02 - Format Menu

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 07:52:55 -0400

Sandvox Supports Fonts Now!

Karelia just released an update to Sandvox that includes a new Format menu. This was a big requested feature, and assuming it works fairly well, will allow a much more customized look. You can finally change fonts and justify text... Whoohoo!

Switching to Sandvox

Sun, 04 Jun 2006 02:31:34 -0400

If you're one of the one people visiting my blog, you may notice a few visual changes. I've decided to switch from using Wordpress, which is a server side blogging tool, to Sandvox by Karelia Software, a Mac application that runs, well, on a Mac. I had thought about doing it in the past, and when David Young switched his blog from Movable Type to iWeb , I thought I'd make a similar move.

The advantages of using Sandvox over Wordpress are numerous. Most importantly, I feel like I'll be able to post updates more frequently due to the greater ease of use Sandvox provides. The application still seems to be a work in progress. However, it has tons of potential. I hope they release a 1.02 version soon that fixes some of the bugs with the media inspector and publishing. After that, Karelia can kindly borrow some of iWeb's more versatile text positioning and formating tools :)

The Wasp Who Loved Bass

Fri, 24 Mar 2006 14:12:03 -0500

Ok, so I’ve been blogging up a storm lately. I’ve been making all kinds of entries in that blog in the back of my head. So I decided to continue with something silly.

So I’m sitting at my computer desk, and all of a sudden a nice sized wasp flew over and landed on the fretboard of my fretted SX Jazz Bass which was leaning in my little guitar rack next to the wall. It crawled around on the E string of the first fret, then crawled onto the headstock and hung around there for a while, crawling around one of the tuners. Then BZZT! it rocketed up and bounced off the ceiling, then fell on the floor. A minute or so later, it was crawling on another bass I had in the rack- an Ibanez 5 string. After about 2 minutes of that, it flew past me and landed on the headstock of my fretless SX jazz bass (yes, i have a “thing” for cheap basses… But they’re great for the price.) which was leaning against my keyboard.

Of all of the instruments in the room, the wasp found the three basses (and managed to skip over the couple of guitars and all kinds of other things in the room)… COINCIDENCE?! I wonder what could have attracted it. The light maple color perhaps?

Due to its obvious taste in musical instruments, I couldn’t bring myself to smash the wasp. I kindof pushed it onto my keyboard and put a glass over it. Then i sprung it up into the glass by catapulting it with one of the keys. I put a plastic lid over the bottom of the glass, took it outside, and released it.

Though it will probably sting the snot out of me the next time it sees me outside, I am happy to have been visited by the wasp who loved bass…