asgaard

(Almost) Peat free carnivorous plants

Sun, 03 Sep 17 16:11:02 +0000

I've accidentally conducted a completely unscientific experiment into peat-free carnivorous plant growth over the past 12 months. Unfortunately, 12 months ago I didn't really appreciate that 'peat-free' was significant or controversial so this has unfolded by accident and lacks rigour, but I feel it's still interesting enough to write about.

12 months ago - in August 2016 - I bought this set of three carnivorous plants - a Sundew, Venus Fly Trap and Sarracenia - from Ebay and some compost mix from the same seller. It turns out the compost is 'Thrive', which is notable as it brands itself as a peat-free mix suitable for carnivorous plants. The plants actually claim to have been grown in it via a sticker on the pot which reads "grown peat free using Thrive".

I repotted them all immediately into larger pots, using Thrive. This was unremarkable except I recall the VFT having only a very shallow root system and I wasn't convinced it would survive.

The VFT and the Sarracenia spent winter in an (unheated) conservatory where they underwent around 3 months of dormancy. The Sundew was moved inside and has been growing continually since. In spring, the Sarracenia woke up and started putting up some much larger pitchers. Shortly after, I moved it into a planter outside with a few others. This is where it gets a bit fuzzy - the planter outside is using a peat based mix, but I didn't remove the Thrive from its roots, so around 80% of its roots are still in Thrive. The VFT has had a layer of extra top-soil added because Thrive has a habit of growing bubbly green goo (algae) on the surface, which looks fairly disgusting, but the pot is 99% Thrive. I may have done the same to the Sundew, I don't recall.

The Sundew and the Sarracenia now are virtually unrecognisable. I've highlighted last year's Sarracenia pitchers which you can compare to the original photo at the top. This year's pitchers are around 3x the size. The VFT's growth has been much less dramatic, but it has grown and it looks great. I'm pleased with the colouration, but I'm more pleased that it's lost the slightly 'spindly' appearance it had when I got it.

Overall the results are great and I'll be happy to continue using Thrive for adult plants.

For seeds, however, it's a different story. In late Spring I planted some VFT seeds (also from Ebay) into three pots: 1 large pot of Thrive, 1 small pot of Thrive, and 1 small pot of peat. Unfortunately, there's no competition; the seedlings in the peat mix are doing well and looking like healthy miniature VFTs, but the seedlings in the thrive pots are really struggling to grow traps and look quite yellow. Interestingly, the small pot (pictured below) of Thrive is doing better than the large pot (although still not great).

So overall: Thrive appears to work well for plants, but so far it's not looking great for seeds. Perhaps, as adult plants appear to grow well in it, that they're slow to get going but once they get to a certain size they'll kick into a higher gear. We'll have to wait and see.

I'm quite curious as to why the seedlings are struggling. It's easy to just say "well, it's not peat", but the whole point of peat is that it's nutrient poor, so it feels unsatisfactory to say that the seedlings rely on some special component of peat which is hard to find elsewhere. I wondered if it might have something to do with moisture or heat retention properties, but that's just idle speculation due to the fact the pot size seems to make a difference.

The question of what exactly Thrive is eludes me. I haven't been able to find out online. It looks to be about 50% perlite, which isn't too interesting, and also appears to contain bark chippings, but what the actual meat of it is, I don't know and I'd be very interested to find out.

Update 27/10/2017: Unfortunately, the VFT seedlings in the large Thrive pot have all died and the remaining seedlings in the smaller pot are looking pretty anemic. Meanwhile the seedlings in the peat are looking great and are now large enough to be catching fungus gnats.

Since writing this, some flower stalk cuttings in a small pot of Thrive have started putting up some small traps (after many months of doing nothing), and they are looking quite healthy, but the largest one only has five tiny traps so far. I'm tempted to transplant one into peat.

npm is terrible

Wed, 02 Aug 17 08:49:46 +0000

It's hard for me to believe in the quality of a piece of software that behaves like this:

$ npm install [package]
  npm ERR! Please try running this command again as root/Administrator. 
$ npm install [package]
  (OK)

I'm sure about five years ago npm was a useful and reliable piece of software. Perhaps I remember incorrectly.

I had another tale of npm woe last week when after runing `npm install`, my node_modules/package-name was a symlink to none other than node_modules/package-name. For some reason, downgrading npm to version 3 (from version 5) made it all work properly.

I groaned today when I had to install yarn, yet another package manager, to install something else, but the sooner something sane replaces npm the better.

[...]

Altra Instinct 3.5 thoughts/review

Sun, 16 Jul 17 11:21:54 +0000

I have something called a Morton's Neuroma, which is an enlarged/irritated nerve between my third and fourth metatarsals. It's gradually improving but it's a frustratingly slow process which involved me taking almost 3 months off running.

I usually wear Asics Nimbus, which is a heavy shoe with a 10mm heel. I've had the odd foray into other shoes but I come back to the Nimbus because it fits well in the width, which is 100% important with a neuroma. Most running shoes are very narrow and that's not tolerable for me.

Recently, prompted by the neuroma, I have been making a push to adapt my running form to a more natural style. High cadence (~180 steps per minute), with a mid-foot strike and my feet mostly under my centre of gravity - the latter two driven by the cadence. I'm not convinced the reduced impact force matters to me much, but the fact my centre of gravity always stays over my feet probably does, because it means there's less chance for my supporting foot/leg to do something wrong or become unstable.

Altra caught my eye because they have taken the unprecedented step of designing shoes to be roughly the same shape as human feet. Apparently this is a novel concept in the running footwear industry. Their shoes are fairly wide, the toeboxes are square-ish in contrast to most shoes which are designed for people whose feet have a line of symmetry through their third toe. They are also zero drop, i.e. there is no heel.

So, I bought a pair of the Instinct 3.5s from Northern Runner, whom I'm not getting any commission from but I'm going to advertise anyway because not many places in the UK stock Altra shoes and choice is important.

In the Instinct 3.5 it's recommended to buy a half size up over your usual trainers. This is what I did (11 UK in the Instinct 3.5 vs 10.5 UK in the Nimbus 18), and I agree - the 11 is the right size for me.

The first thing you notice is that the toebox is seriously wide. The second thing you notice is that the mid-foot is actually a bit tight, but I re-laced them (see image) such that the laces don't cross the shoe for the first three holes, which opened up the mid-foot nicely. Overall, with this alternative lacing, the fit is perfect.

So, how do they actually feel?

So far I've only taken them for a single short test run but I'm very pleased. I was worried the zero-drop would completely wreck me after a few hundred metres but I ended up going double the distance I initially intended to and they felt great. With a high cadence the mid-foot strike is both obvious and completely natural. With my ~~Nimbi~~ Nimbuses I always suspected that I was unintentionally excessively plantar-flexing my foot while running high-cadence to accommodate the heel, although I was never really sure. With the Altras I have no doubts; the strike is natural, and quieter.

It does not feel good to heel-strike in these shoes. My form is still such that when I am slowing down in uncertainty, for example approaching a road or a sharp corner, I'll revert to a lower cadence heel strike. It's pretty obvious when this happens in the Altras because it suddenly feels a lot less natural, which is in contrast to the ~~Nimbodes~~ Nimbuses where the huge wad of cushioning under the heel doesn't really alert you.

The next morning my calves were fine; I think that running high cadence in the ~~Nimbes~~ Nimbuses already prepared me.

I will update this post in a few weeks with any further thoughts, but my initial impressions are overwhelmingly positive.

Update 31st July: I've had a few weeks running exclusively in my Altras now and my thoughts are still much the same. I like them a lot. I suspect when I next run in some more traditional shoes they'll feel quite weird.

Sarracenia Leucophylla

Sat, 10 Jun 17 13:56:45 +0000

Sarracenia Leucophylla looking quite majestic:

Unfortunately there is actually a split in the tallest pitcher, which probably occurred during transit/packing/unpacking. But hopefully the great magic ball in the sky will grace us with its presence and we'll get some new pitchers this year.[...]

Dropbox's marketing could use a bit of work

Wed, 24 May 17 19:03:04 +0000

I use Dropbox and I like Dropbox. One of my biggest use cases for it is that I have it syncing photos from my phone to my PC. I find this very convenient. I take a photo and a few seconds later the notification of a new file pops up on my PC. Truly, I am living in the future.

I get 2GB of space with my free Dropbox account and that's not enough to simply take photos and forget about them forever. Every so often, I move them out of Dropbox onto a different directory on my hard disk to free up about 1.8GB of that space.

After I do this, I get an email from Dropbox telling me they've noticed I deleted a lot of files, but that I can restore them for the next 30 days. The next day I get an email asking me to upgrade to Dropbox Plus, presumably because they've correctly noticed I am working around the space limitations.

Here's the thing: I like Dropbox and I wish I had more space, but paying £8/month for 1TB is ridiculous on several levels. Firstly, I have no use for 1TB of space. If I'm paying I don't want the impression that I'm wasting 99% of my money, and that is a very literal 99%: I don't really want or need more than 10GB. Drop it down to 80p a month for 10GB and I'd be more interested.

Secondly, if I want to use Dropbox as long term storage then I don't want to have to rent it monthly because there's the implication that when I stop paying it all disappears, which is hardly what you want from long term storage. There should be an option to pay for two or three years up front so you know the price or other terms aren't going to change over that time.

In conclusion, I'm also syncing to Google Drive which gives me 15GB of space (shared with email).

A one star Google Play review

Sun, 09 Apr 17 20:53:13 +0000

It finally happened: I got a 1 star review on the Google play store.

The review is short and sweet: "Terrible app.. It doesnt work".

Now, I've been developing software for long enough to know that when a user tells me my software is broken, before I can do anything else, I need to find out what they're seeing, how they got to that point, and what they expected to happen instead. Last year I worked on a project which calculated metrics for hospitals. When the customer first saw the report with calculated outputs, we got back the feedback "all wrong", which is, as you can imagine, really unhelpful. Several hours later it transpired that she got confused when entering data about nurses' shifts that crossed midnight, and as a result the shifts she entered were a different length to what she had in her test data. When she put in the right shift durations, the outputs matched what she expected, but not before confidently asserting that the software was wrong.

This app is a crossword/word solving app. You put in your letters, leave the unknowns blank, and it tells you what words will fit. Simple to understand and not a new concept. Electronic devices performing this function have existed since the 90s, and maybe before.

I have analytics data that says that for many users, the app does work. Otherwise they wouldn't keep using it. Digging through the analytics data more, I can also see that the user who left the review used it three times to solve a 4 letter pattern (which I can't see). So I know that the app started, didn't crash, and he was able to input text into the input box and press solve. From this I can deduce that his problem is one of the following things:

Some property of his phone prevented the app from showing the results correctly. This is highly unlikely; although I have not tested on his specific model of phone, there's nothing unusual about it.
He put in some pattern and was frustrated it didn't show the result he expected, because:
- The word is missing from the (very large) dictionary
- He saw some esoteric words and decided it was just printing nonsense
- He can't spell
He misunderstood what the app is supposed to do and expected it to do something else
He has other reasons for leaving this review, for example he is making a competing app.

This is annoying and demonstrates a serious flaw of allowing low quality negative reviews to affect an app's rating, because now I'm motivated to counteract it. As the review doesn't explain the problem, I have no way of constructively improving the app in response, so I am forced to explore non-constructive options.

Up until this point I've refrained from nagging users to leave reviews because I consider that kind of behaviour a bit annoying. However, now I'm thinking of strategies to target long term repeat users (who are presumably satisfied with the app) and invite them to leave reviews. I could go so far as offering them Play Store codes to obtain the paid version of my app for free.

This is extra work for me, it's also unfair user experience for satisfied users, and above all, it's gaming the review system to introduce favourable bias towards me.

I haven't implemented any of this and probably won't, but from the fact I've considered it, we can assert that the rating of an app is not probably correlated to the average user's opinion of it. You could even argue that a poorly rated app is simply one whose developer has not spent much effort gaming the system.

Pinguicula

Sun, 22 Jan 17 20:42:17 +0000

I'm very excited to see my pinguicula Tina flowering.

It took about 12 days to go from the bud in the first picture to a fully open flower as in the second. In the second picture, you can see another flower bud directly behind the stalk.

Even more exciting, my other ping is flowering too! This one is labelled as a Weser but it doesn't look that similar to Wesers on Google Image search so I'm not entirely sure at the moment, but I've only had it a few months. It'll be interesting to see what the flower looks like.

[...]

Avoid SportsShoes.com if you might need to return/exchange items

Thu, 19 Jan 17 14:06:33 +0000

In the past I've had good experiences with SportsShoes.com. I buy most of my running gear there as well as most of my casual shoes.

This time I'm attempting to go through their returns/exchanges process and it's really disappointing as I previously had them marked as a reliable retailer. Ok, the delivery is both slow and expensive, but they are usually hassle free.

I've aggravated something called a Morton's Neuroma in my foot, which prompted me to try to get a pair of wide fit trainers for running.

I ordered a pair of New Balance 2E width shoes on 21st December.

They arrived 23rd December. I tried them on, thought they didn't really feel any wider than my Asics, so I sent them back the same day, requesting the 4E variant as an exchange.

After hearing nothing, I emailed them on Sunday 15th January.

Three days later on Wednesday 18th January I got a fairly bad response telling me my account had been "credited" for the value of the order (minus postage), asking me how I wished to proceed with the credit. I replied three minutes later asking why it had been credited and why they hadn't handled the exchange.

Two hours later I hadn't heard anything so I wrote a longer reply re-stating the item I wanted in exchange, and told them the delay so far had been unreasonable and the reply they'd given me was unsatisfactory hoping that being polite but agitated might get me escalated.

24 hours later... still nothing.

So we are looking at a timescale of over 3 working weeks now.

If I simply request a refund and submit a separate order it means I'll be charged again for delivery, and I'll lose the 15% off discount voucher on the original order.

Compare and contrast to Amazon: I bought something, it was delivered for free but was the wrong size, I sent it back free of charge and had an email confirming the refund before I got home.

Update: After posting a bad review to Feefo and TrustPilot things started moving. I received the exchange on 21st January. They seem to monitor Feefo and TrustPilot and react a bit quicker if you post bad reviews.

Oregon Scientific RAR213HG Weather Station Review

Mon, 02 Jan 17 13:49:41 +0000

The Oregon Scientific RAR213HG is a 'weather station', which comprises a thermometer/humidity sensor on a bluetooth enabled base unit, which can also read from external sensors (one included) so you can monitor the temperature in two places at once. Even better, you can install an app on your phone and see a graph of the last week's temperature via bluetooth

It's a nice idea but a pretty bad execution.

First, before having set up my own sensor, I was confused as to why I was getting a reading on 'channel 2' telling me it was 13°C. As it seemed to correspond to the outdoor temperature, I am left to assume that a neighbour has a sensor and I'm picking theirs up. Naturally, since the use case of other people in close proximity having the same thing seems to be a reality for me, I wondered what would happen if the two sensors were set to the same channel. It turns out this breaks everything and the other user of channel 2 is probably going to have to reset their setup before they can see their readings again.

It's not really an endorsement of your own product that in order for to work correctly it must not be very popular.

Anyway, the sensors can be put onto one of three channels, so I set mine up on channel 1, installed the app (Weather@Home), and got it paired to my phone. The app looks pretty dated, and dare I say amateur, but it was showing me numbers and graphs.

It worked for less than a day. Now the app just says "loading" for a few seconds, then shows me a blank page where I should see a list of sensors. The icons on the base station indicate that it's connected, but there's nothing to see on the app.

I tried installing the app on a tablet and had the same response, which means that the base station itself is handling the bluetooth relationship incorrectly. I could reset the base unit, but that means reconfiguring it by re-scanning for sensors and resetting the time (the app has a setting that supposedly synchronises the base unit's time from the mobile device, but it doesn't work) so it's a bit ridiculous to expect to do that every day - especially as this will reset the temperature log.

The app reviews are mostly 1 star and full of people complaining that it doesn't work, which I agree with.

If it wasn't bad enough that the bluetooth functionality doesn't work, the sensors are embarrassingly unreliable. I can have the base station and the external sensor sat right next to each other, and they might show the same temperature, but they can also be as much as 4°C out. The humidity can be ten percentage points different. The temperature sensor on the main unit seems correct to the nearest centigrade, according to a mercury thermometer, so the external sensor is both inaccurate and unreliable. I can't verify the humidity sensors.

It is surprising to me that this is such a failure, because this is the kind of thing an enthusiastic amateur could put together with a couple of Arduinos.

It's worth noting that the Android app developer address is Oregon Scientific in Hong Kong, so if you think the word 'Oregon' sounds promising, think again.

Good idea, would be much better if it worked.

1/5