Chorca's Bloggo

A quick recap of my adventures in gardening...

2020 - Start building some planters and mess around with a few plants, drip irrigation, and grow some pretty tasty things!

2021 - Realize that plants don't live forever, even if they're given a chance. Annuals like to die off and perennials need to get some cold to properly work. Switch up some plants, till under some things, and try the whole container thing again

2022 - Hydroponics! After having realize that plants also don't like their roots getting too hot during the summer, try out some NFTs (Nutrient Film Technique, not the crypto thing!) and dutch buckets! The dutch buckets work well, the NFTs, not so much. Turns out sealing up things not designed to carry water, from leaking water, is difficult.

2023 - Got lazy. After the previous somewhat successes, and a few failures with the hydroponics and learning a lot, I sort of took a year off and let everything disintegrate. Decided to wait til the next season to start working on the next iteration, which leads me into...

2024 - Now! The NFT has been rebuilt, the dutch buckets are on standby, and I've been messing around with new seed starting strategies.

Current setup

So my current desire has moved away from large, difficult-to-maintain plants and moved towards leafy greens. We use more of them, they're delicious, there's plenty of varieties that will tolerate heat, and the NFT is much easier to maintain in it's new configuration.

I've also built an easy way to dispense the nutrient solution I'm using (a 3-part General Hydroponics setup): A set of peristaltic pumps that dispense the solution in the desired recipe and even add the proper amount of water. It's been working great so far, but it really needs a better enclosure and a second revision.

Currently I'm working on starting seeds direct-sow in net cups; an interesting idea. Usually for NFTs, net cups are used to hold either a sort of seed starting medium like rockwool, or a cloning collar that keeps the plant held in position within the net cup until it gets large enough for it's roots to hold onto the cup and NFT trough itself. What I wanted to identify is if it would be possible to direct-sow into the net cups, and instead of starting seeds in a medium like coco coir, moving them to a net cup in a rooting container, and then moving them into the NFT once the roots develop, utilize a two step process of seeding into the medium, and then moving from the growth and rooting area into the NFT quickly after.

Intro

I was recently going through a bunch of my old junk while cleaning up my office. I found my old Casio watch, an F-105. It's a relatively old watch, and this was apparent by the fact that the factory resin band had begun to disintegrate.

I needed to get a new band for it, but found that pretty much the only bands available were the original ones from Casio, and a few pastel colors from a similar set of watches that were only released in Japan.

The Idea

While out at Disney a few days later, I'd noticed some new watch bands that were available. Anyone who knows me, knows Stitch is my favorite Disney character, and so I zeroed right in on these.

Wow, it'd be awesome if I had an Apple watch to put this on! The bit that caught my eye though, was that the band seemed to be a very similar width to the band on my Casio. (The 38-40mm version, at least) I wonder if it would fit between the lugs in my Casio?

The Mod

After some measuring of the lugs and the band through the package (using a cut piece of paper) I deduced that the actual width is about 22mm between the bands, so with some trimming, it might fit. The metal arms were attached with T4 screws, but not having a properly sized driver, I just ended up cutting the arms off with snips. Trimming the band down by 2mm per side and about 3mm down (just past the lug opening) cut the band down to the right size to fit between the lugs on the watch and allowed it to slip between them.

Finished it off with some new 18mm watch pins as the originals had locked up solid, and I have a working watch, with an awesome custom band!

The new blog! Some of you may have seen this site previously, it had a much different CMS that didn't work well with my workflow (being lazy). Due to this I decided to try something different, a bit more 'user-friendly' as it were, and now this is based on Chyrp. I do need to come up with a good theme for it, but for now I'll settle for the default one.

The idea for this is to supplement my Mastodon posts with something a bit more long-form that I can provide updates on larger projects with, and use plenty more embeds for explanations, and hopefully have some semblance of a 'home page' of yesteryear.

I'll see how things work out with this platform, but hopefully it's something I can stick with long-term.

Thanks for viewing!