Recently I repotted Orchids and now they seem to be doing fine. I see evidence of new buds and suspect that they have continued to grow despite my intervention. For months I considered repotting them but I was afraid that it would kill them. I waited until they were between blooms but they’re constantly blooming so that wait was long.
In the end I repotted them when I noticed that a plant was growing and flowering in the air. I found that it seemed to be completely detached from the mother plant. I filled a pot with the wood chips that are meant for orchids, wet them, and then placed the orchid plant within. I did this for several plants and now have four pots with orchids.
In one case the buds that were growing dried up and seem to have died. I spotted new growth though, so I think that they have all survived. If that is the case then orchids are not that difficult to keep. For a while I thought that the orchids were dead because they weren’t flowering or doing anything. Eventually I watered them and they started to grow again.
These orchids are now five years old, or even older than that. Rumours that these plants are fragile are either not true, or my flower keeping habits are right for this type of plant.
And Finally
I set off for one walk but ended up doing another. There is a pond/lake that has formed on a field, and I saw plenty of birds. I decided to walk by the lake/pond/puddle to see what bird life had been attracted. It’s plenty of seagulls.
A few days ago this water was frozen and I could walk across it. Now it is populated with birds, until it dries up.
Minergie is theoretically a fantastic, environmentally friendly way of making a building more energy-efficient, by reducing the need for air conditioning and heating. For three years now I have been playing with and experimenting with minergie. During the first and second heatwaves, I liked to open windows and get fresh air. I found that Minergie means “poor air circulation”. As soon as you close the windows you feel the heat radiate from the walls as if they were sauna stones.
With a classic old building the walls are thick and heat stays out, so you never think about open or closed shutters and other things. With an old-fashioned apartment, you can open the windows on both sides and bask in the summer heat. Old apartments are great in heatwaves because you keep your windows open all day long.
With Minergie the experience is different. They eventually begin to feel like ovens, during a heatwave. This year I am trying a different tact. Closed windows, doors, and blinds. So far the experiment seems to be working well. My idea is to compartmentalize the heat. Each room heats and cools by itself. The bathroom and the spare window have veluxes, and these act as radiators in summer, from heat, coming in as sunlight, but also from radiant heat, from the hot glass from being in the hot summer sun. By isolating the oven rooms they warm up in isolation.
I find that some rooms feel cooler, as a result of this strategy. This is a partial success.
My Frustration with Minergie is two-fold. My first frustration is that unlike air conditioning in a car you can’t blast cold air and cool the cabin to a comfortable temperature if it gets too hot. You need to adapt your habits before the heatwave has even started. The second frustration is that with Minergie you cannot open windows and get fresh air as you could before. If you do open windows you need to do so before the day heats up. You open the windows in an attempt to cool down the building’s superstructure.
Although Minergie was designed to keep buildings warm in winter it was never designed to keep buildings cool during yearly heatwaves. In summer Minergie buildings become heat accumulators and, as neighbours in other apartments open windows, and heat up the superstructure, so the top floors become saunas if people are not careful. According to data from last year, the apartment starts to heat up in April and stays warm until Octobre.
Minergie should go back to the conceptual phase and re-imagine how to cool buildings passively, during heatwaves.
Today is Day Four of Orca in Switzerland and I saw that the Canton in which I live has the most active cases of COVID19 so my motivation both to go to shops and to go for walks has taken a hit. At the same time I don’t know whether it’s COVID 19 that is having this effect or the fact that I walked a theoretical 197.2 kilometres since the start of this month for the March Activity challenge.
All I have to do now to complete the challenge is walk 7.8 kilometres a day for the next ten days and I’m done. Easy goal. I’m impatient for this challenge so that I can return to cycling, no matter whether it’s on the indoor trainer or outdoors.
Exploring The Trail Less Travelled.
Today I went off exploring the trail less traveled. I walked towards an Ingress portal and then I took a right turn and walked along a trail. I could have taken the road and crossed a bridge to get to the portal but the muddy path is an excellent option because it keeps me away from people.
The path wasn’t too muddy but I did have to scramble over a tree that had fallen to the ground and avoid slipping on mud. I captured the portal, full deployed and then I went off exploring.
I love walking along this river because you would never believe that you’re so close to Eysins and Nyon. If you stood quietly you could probably hear both. It’s nice because it’s secluded but it’s also nice because you could imagine children playing by this river on a hot summer’s day.
I walked beyond the waterfall but at this point the path becomes more challenging. I could have gone across and towards Nyon but I chose to go down towards the river. The river, is less full of water than it was a few days ago when the rain was heavy so I could sneak a little further than on previous explorations.
The image above shows a safe bit of cliff but there are moments where you feel that it’s precarious. Erosion is slowly eroding the soil away and trees are falling forward, into the valley. I wouldn’t recommend exploring certain segments on a rainy day.
During the quarantine, the message is to stay away from people. By exploring snickets in forests you achieve this goal easily. No dog walkers, no families on a walk, no one.
Quarantine can be boring, and it can be lonely, especially for those of us living in solitude who still have the fortitude to endure loneliness for society at large. Exploring is a nice way of living in the moment. It’s a way of finding things to write blog posts about, but it’s also something to show others, once solitary people, are once again allowed the company of another human.
Staying Local
During this pandemic, I am trying not to use the car and I use the scooter as little as possible. I try to stay within walking distance for everything. My logic is that by traveling further I would come in contact with more people and I might bring the virus from an infected region to one that was clear of the virus.
At the moment we know which Cantons are affected but we have no idea of whether villages or towns are clean. If we knew that villages or towns were clear of the virus we could go into reverse quarantine. Rather than keeping people isolated, we could keep them insulated. By this, I mean that shops, handshakes, and social life could be restored. Of course, this is unfeasible.
Before I stop writing for today I did see people start to wear masks, and gloves, attempting to isolate themselves from the risk of contagion. I’m still washing my hands, and simply staying home when not on a walk, and washing my hands as soon as I get home.
What is your pandemic footprint. Mine, is just two at this moment in time.
While in Spain for three weeks I was playing with the Xtorm solar Charger. I found that it worked well for the charging of tablets and e-book readers but not mobile phones.
For years I have wanted to play with solar power. I have wanted to buy a solar panel that I could fix to my bag or that I could use to charge devices. I often looked at the price and weight and changed my mind. I don’t want something that adds kilos to my load, especially if I am climbing.
With a small device like the one pictured above you can carry it with you and use it to charge devices. When you drive to the hike or climb, or when you stop for lunch or a drink you can take out this device and start charging your phone, gps, led lights or other devices.
if you want to charge devices to 100 percent then I would recommend charging ipads, ebooks, gps watches and other devices with this device. I found that it’s great for providing a phone with a top up charge but that because of my mobile use patterns it will only provide one full charge per day.
When we hear people speak about solar power we always hear about “How do we store the power we generate so that we can use it when we need it?” and I found a way. When I woke up in the morning I would put the solar charger near a window or outside if there was no chance of rain to charge up to over 75 percent. When it reached this charge I connected the solar charger to a 10,000mah external battery.
It is by using this technique that I have been able to keep my external battery fully charged with no need to plug it in to mains power. In effect it means that I can charge the ipad, the phone or the e-book reader without using mains power.
Strengths
It has a 6000mah battery and can charge two devices at once.
Weaknesses
If I was designing such a device I would ensure that the battery could charge within an 8-12hr window rather than 15. I found that to recharge the internal battery fully it would take two days.
This type of device needs to be rugged. It has to be rain resistant and transport resistant. I want to be able to leave it exposed to the sun without having to worry about the risk of rain. I would also like it to feel solid enough to be fixed to a bag when hiking or climbing. In it’s current configuration I would leave it near the bag when sitting for lunch or when at a climbing wall. I would not fix it to my bag during a via ferrata.
Conclusion
I’m happy with this solar charger. I have found the ideal use case for it and I look forward to experimenting with it over the summer. I think it would benefit from having a battery half the size that could be fully charged in half the time. It now tempts me to get a second larger solar panel to keep the laptop charged over the summer months.
At the moment I am doing a favour that requires me to drive the electric car over a route that takes 25 percent of the car’s battery. This means that for every time I do the favour I have to charge the car for five hours.
About the Drive
The drive from where I charge the car to home takes eight to ten percent but the drive back to charge the car takes up to 15 percent due to traffic, but also due to the climb. This climb means that for every trip to charge I have three hours of waiting. In total I have five and a half hours of waiting around for the car to charge.
Three Times in a Week
If I was charing the car once per week and waiting five hours it wouldn’t bother me, because it’s once per week. This time It’s three times. That’s fifteen hours of waiting around for the car to charge.
Walking, Running, Cycling, Blogging Etc
Of course there are plenty of things that I can do while waiting for the car to charge, like walking, running, cycling or writing this blog post. I can occupy myself and get things done whilst waiting
The Wait for Petroleum
If I think waiting five hours for a car to recharge is long I should try waiting for petrol to be ready. It takes several million years for petroleum to become what it is, and we burn it within seconds in a car. If I take biomass and wait for it to become petrol then my wait will be several million years. In contrast waiting for a solar panel to charge a car is a number of hours.
I Still Like Electric Cars
Although it may sound as though I have fallen out of love with electric cars that is not the case. I don’t feel like waiting for another 10hrs for the car to charge, when the task that I need to do takes seconds. On Friday the favour will be over and then I can use the elctric car more economically, doing the 30 percent drive once per week, rather than three or four times per week. As I said, driving to the shops and back takes less than one percent per trip but it’s rounded up to one percent. This means that instead of burning petrol and polluting I am using a tiny amount of electric energy.
This energy could have come from solar panels, hydroelectric dams or wind power. It’s when you drive up a mountain three times per week, and on the motorway that you deplete the battery.
And Finally
Petrol cars need to be run every so often and mine hasn’t been run for several weeks. It makes sense to run the engine, recharge the battery and ensure that it doesn’t get depleted before I need to jump start the car. By back and forth I wil refresh the battery and the likelihood of being stranded with a dead battery will be lessened. I still care for the environment. I was even toying with the idea of dropping off the petrol car at home, and cycling back for the electric car at another time. If I do that I will tire myself, and with winter coming I could easily regret it.
When Gordon Buchanan was following bears in the United States we watched the resulting documentaries on television. We have seen him a number of times in episodes of countryfile as well. Now he is working on getting footage of wolves in the wild. For this project he is staying out in the wild and following a pack of wolves day after day for weeks. As part of this project he is filming with a broadcast camera and gopro cameras which he fixed on to a “rock crawler”. The Rock crawler is a remote control car with the body removed.
The BBC were working on a documentary about polar bears and for certain shots they created a den for filming purposes. It helped to tell the story but people felt that the purity of that documentary had been tainted. This genre of documentary aims to tell a genuine story with no reconstruction or trickery. Everything has to be genuine.
As we see from the footage above Gordon Buchanan was able to get the camera right up to the den and film the wolf cubs from the mouth of the den. This technology is great for story telling because it provides the camera operator with greater flexibility. He is able to get the camera to where he wants it to be without going there in person. In theory animal behaviour is genuine.
With this technology a greater variety of shots can be achieved, from flying with specific birds to traveling under water with penguins and lounging in a pool with tigers. In essence spy creature cameras allow wildlife filmmakers to get genuine animal interactions without relying on luck. They can make their own luck and the natural history documentary genre benefits.
On one side of the Channel, you have people like Colin Furze building fun machines that have the fatal flaw of having an internal combustion engine. On the other side of the Channel, you have people like Marc Gyver building an electric car with easily bought components. The video below shows the construction process without talking, and without music.
For about 2000 Euros, with bike parts, and the right skills, you can build your own cars. You have four powered bike wheels to power the car, two solar panels on the roof to generate 200W and a charge time of two and a half hours for a range of 20 kilometers and a top speed of 50 km/h. The range is perfect for when you need to do things within a short distance.
Within the video, you see quite a few shots of four people sitting in the car at once. I especially like this because it illustrates that young people are not limited to protests, skipping school and more. With the right skills, they build their own electric car to get around, even if it is on private property where it’s legal.
The project discussed above was uploaded seven months ago and since then he has made a car with a body, indicator lights, a windscreen and more. It looks like the cars you see in old films and cartoons. (Some of the cartoons are old). It is slowly getting closer to being road legal.
What I love about these homemade projects is that they show that self-driven cars still have a future. With electric cars, we can still do small journeys without ecologists being mad with us for combusting fossil fuels.
Electric Car Adventures
If we go off on a tangent of electric cars then you have electric cars like the one above. It’s designed so that you get the pleasure of driving a car, but without the internal combustion engine. There is an entirely new niche of projects to be thought up and programs like The Grand Tour and others could play with these devices.
For years I thought that Top Gear, Motortrend TV, and The Grand Tour were outdated and old fashioned, bound for the video archives of culture. With electric bike technology plenty of new opportunities are being created for electric cars, and in the process for our pleasure.
An interview with the creator.
I love this concept. I love the concept of young people, rather than owning conventional cars like my generation have used, owning or renting devices as we see in the video below. Too often we watch news and current affairs programs about environmentalists and the future and we think we’ll be trapped on trains and in buses with no scheduling freedom. With these machines we preserve the freedom that we’ve been used to for years, but with technology that is sustainable.
The future of exploration is on foot, by bike and for those who want to cover different distances by Swincar. Cycling and walking are great when you’re not in the middle of a heatwave like we’ve experienced for two or three summers. In a heatwave, vehicles like this are nicer. As you’re rolling over earth, grass or stones you’re cooler than if you were on the tarmac. Because you’re outside you have the breeze. I would like to play with one of these.
The Negative side
There are a few concerns with these machines. The first is that they still need to be parked somewhere and these take up as much space as a car. The second concern is that these vehicles can go anywhere but this doesn’t mean that they should. If they go on hiking paths, if they go on slopes, on skip pistes, and in other places then they’re going to come in conflict with other users of the same area.
We see a shot where these vehicles are beside horses, but if you have cycled near horses you’ll be told by the rider to make noise so that horses know you are there.
Off-Roading without the Carbon Footprint.
I enjoyed watching Dirt Every Day and programs like it but I never saw myself as ever trying offroading because of the carbon footprint. I’d rather hike, cycle or climb. I am tempted to play with the electric version. No need to worry about planting a forest after each outing.
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