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Slugz

So far my little tract of land has yielded about half a dozen edible radishes. Lots of kale** and today, the tiniest little cauliflower ever. I’ve failed to break even with the original cost of the seeds (about 6 of your Earth ‘dollars’ altogether). The slugs are having a field day though. I posted the problem on Facebook, and I’ve been inundated with slug serving suggestions from slug salad to mezcal with a slug in the bottom. I’m going to try putting a tin can of beer in the garden and luring them away to their boozy deaths. Nanny would have just put a dusting of slug pellets down and salted the stragglers to within an inch of their lives. That’s Welsh practicality for you.

Your 0.005 a day
Your 0.005 a day

I went on a nice walk this morning though to take my mind off molluscs and am slowly flooding Flickr with pictures of wintery trees reflected in the Willamette. There was a steam train too, if you’re into that kind of thing. Bloody huge it were. My camera sensor is still giving me gip, I think I’ll have to get it professionally cleaned but I don’t want to be cameraless for 3 days at the weekend, so it’s a good thing that Picasa 3 has a very simple ‘retouch’ button perfect for removing dark areas of dust from your pictures. You only see them in the pictures of sky and water, which is 80% of what I seem to shoot…

** (though I don’t like kale, so it’s purely ornamental. I don’t think I encountered it before coming to the US and I’m not sure it’s available in the Youkay… Anyroad, it was one of the designs I put together for  Nourishing Nutrition’s T-Shirts t’other day, get them while they’re hot… The “I dig beets” is my favourite…)

Friito

Friito

Random photo slider miniproject

In brief:

Look it: 25 random images from my photoblog slideshow

Mind you:

It doesn’t work in Chrome or Safari (and probably others…), some images will break (cos they’re too big to be resized), some are pixelated (cos they were too small), some aren’t cropped well (cos they’re square or portrait), and the idea is you have a fairly large monitor to see them properly in the first place.

Techyish stuff

Not sure if this is of interest to anyone at all but I thought I’d post it anyway… I’m coming up to the 300th photo on my photoblog (and just hit 13,500 on Flickr…) I’d have more on there but it takes 10 minutes or so for each new post and I’ve been wondering for a while if there’s a way to do it with the tim-thumb.php script rather than using WordPress’ in-built resizing tool and custom fields. Anyway, that’s an issue for another day which, using what I learnt today, should be fairly simple.

So I wanted it to slide from one post to the next rather than load a whole new page. I’ve made inroads today.

It uses:

  • jQuery + jFlow for the slider: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/jFlow
  • A new variable for the WP Loop I’d not heard of before: ‘orderby=rand‘
  • substr – a php command that lops a given number of characters off a string (such as the URL of the photo), then concatenates the tim-thumb resizing bit on the end.

post->ID, 'category');
$recent = new WP_Query("showposts=25&orderby=rand"); while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post();?>

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And that is what passes for excitement during the week in Brunswick, Maine.