Since I'm in a grips mood, I decided to try to clean up the grips on Crimson Ghost, my trail bike.
Using the least effort possible.
Did it work?
Well, they're cleaner, but maybe not quite what I'd call clean.
They're also a little bit worn out and chewed up, unrelated to them having just been through the dishwasher, so I'll probably just buy some new ones to replace them soon.
In the meantime, though, they're at least cleaner.
While I wasn't particularly intending to eat the daikon radish I've been growing, I figured it'd be a waste if I didn't at least try one to see if perhaps they'd surprise me with some amazing explosion of home-grown flavour.
With that in mind, I picked two samples that had gone to seed, figuring that they weren't going to grow anymore so there was little harm in pulling them up.
As I suspected, they aren't very big. One of them is at least plausibly radish shaped, despite the worm hole half way down, but that's about the most I can give them.
They cleaned up ok, sort of. But, ugly or not, the real question is: how do they taste?
The answer is: kinda bad. Mostly they taste like dirt, with a little hint of radish. Really they mostly just don't taste like much of anything. And, as I suspected, the texture is just awful, very woody. I suspect that perhaps one of the radishes that hasn't gone to seed might have a better texture, but given this experience I'm not really all that interested in finding out.
On the bright side, this week's batch of par-baked bread turned out quite nice.
I turned the temperature down to 300f and put the loaves in the middle rack, but I'm still getting more browning than I'd like. I think it might just be unavoidable for loaves this size, and it didn't seem to have any negative impact on the twice-baked result last week, so I'm not going to worry about it.
When I rebuilt Blackbirb, one thing I didn't change was the grips. They were the original grips that came on the bike, and for the most part they did their job and weren't overly worn out or damaged.
However, I recently started to feel like they might be a bit on the small size. I could grip them with my fingers and leave a little gap in my palm, or I could grip them with my palm and thumb and leave a little gap with my fingers. Neither position resulted in the grips really filling my hands.
Luckily for me, grips are cheap and easy to swap.
These new grips are quite a bit chunkier than the old ones, as well as being a lock-on style, meaning that rather than the grip being slightly undersized and holding onto the bar by the friction of the rubber, it instead has a collar with a bolt that tightens down and clamps onto the bar. This makes the grips much easier to install and remove, and also makes them much less susceptible to dirt and grime working their way under the grip and compromising that friction fit.
So, it's out with the old grips.
And in with the new.
These are definitely chunkier, and hopefully they'll be grippy and comfortable when I'm riding.
Well, it's not rocket science, at least.
Recently I got curious about using a security camera software package that leverages AI for object detection. To do this, it taps into a Coral accelerator and it just so happened that Tyler had one of the USB ones just kicking around collecting dust, and he leant it to me to try it out.
The Coral USB stick, however, uses USB 3.1 gen 1, for 5Gb/s data transfers. My server, on the other hand, is running on a hand-me-down motherboard from the Core2 Duo epoch, and most certainly does not have any sort of USB3 ports.
So, time to upgrade.
Tyler again managed to come to the rescue here, as he had a spare motherboard laying about. Not a particularly new one, mind you. I mean it was new as in unused, but it's an LGA1151 board which puts it in the 2016-ish era. Still kind of old, but a good decade jump from the previous gubbins.
So that just left me to pick up a CPU, a cooler, some RAM and an extra network card, since my server needs 2 ethernet ports and the card I had been using was PCI (not PCI-E). The new board does not have PCI.
You can read over the parts list if you're interested.
Anyway, the first step before upgrading my server is to put these bits together on the bench to make sure that everything works. I had some minor doubts, as the board might have needed a bios upgrade to be able to work with the CPU I got, and the CPU itself was "refurbished", whatever that means. (I mean it apparently means it comes at a 50% discount, so ok I'll roll that dice).
I borrowed a spare graphics card out of my junk pile for this quick test, and didn't bother hooking up the ethernet card just yet as I had no reason to doubt that it would work just fine.
All the parts seemed to fit together without protest, including the giant AIO water cooler that I got because it was the same price as a regular CPU cooler, and because this server runs in my office all day, and because honestly I just wanted to experiment with a water cooler.
So with that out of the way, the next step is to apply power.
The power supply and monitor were also fished out of my junk pile. It's good to have a junk pile.
But something doesn't seem right, though.
Ah yes, that colour is much faster.
Moving on, it's time to dig the old guts out of the server.
Out with the old.
And in with the new.
So now comes the painful part. I've got to boot up, re-activate my operating system, deal with driver hell, and then...
Wait, no, it's Linux not Windows. I just boot up and it works flawlessly without changing a single damn thing.
So how does the security cam software work? I dunno, I'll install it later and find out then.
Daikon radish is supposed to, if you believe the literature, mature in 2 months. It's been over 2 months now, and my patch looks like this.
It's leafy and green, but that's kind of the end of the good news.
Only the strip down the middle seemed to grow at a decent rate, the stuff around the edges is still quite small. Given that the sunniest spot corresponds to the best growth, I'd say that overall this patch didn't have enough light for these plants, and if I wanted a proper crop I'd have to set up a patch in full sun.
A few radishes did form some decent looking taproots.
But only maybe 4 or 5 out of the whole plot, and even then they're pretty tiny compared to what daikon is supposed to look like.
Mostly the rest of them look like this.
I have a hard time even calling this a taproot.
I might try pulling one or two out of the ground to taste, but there's not really much here to get excited about on that front. That said, the main goal here was to fix some nitrogen in the soil and try to break up the clay a bit with organic matter, and to that end the seeds I bought were ones marketed for that purpose rather than being a cultivar specifically aimed at producing a food-grade crop. I was planning from the start to just leave these in the ground to decompose and enrich the soil.
Anyway, a lot of the plants are going to seed now which basically signals the end of their growth, so it's not like much is going to improve just by waiting longer.
It was a useful experiment at least.
So just outside of my back door, there's an extra paving stone nestled into the mulch.
It looks a little out of place, but I put it there for a good reason.
Yes, rats again. The little shits chewed their way into my drain pipes. This hole was actually quite a bit smaller when I put the paver on top of it, so they're definitely still active.
So, it's time to fix this problem properly.
This is maybe a little excessive for just catching a bit of runoff from a small awning, but I wasn't the one who installed it, so whatever I guess. It's here and it works, and it's gonna get fixed.
And to fix this, I'll be installing some hardware cloth under the grating. So, that means the grating is coming off. Also the dirt is being cleaned out, while I'm in here.
Cutting the hardware cloth to shape was incredibly easy with these offset shears. They're from Midwest Tools, in case you want a pair of your own.
The first piece was a nice easy rectangle, but for the second piece I wanted to feed the end into the pipe a little ways since the rats were chewing on the fitting at the end as well.
Obviously I slid it in further than that, this is just for illustrative purposes.
With that taken care of, we can reinstall the grating on top, trapping the hardware cloth beneath it.
I switched the chewed up grate to be closer to the house so that I'm less likely to step on that part.
Finally, I replaced the landscape fabric with a new piece, since along with having a hole chewed it in, it had also got some UV damage and was breaking down a bit. Then it was just a matter of raking the mulch back into place.
Good as new, and much more rat-proof.
Hmm, I wonder what would be a good tool to cut these zip ties with?
Gonna have to put my thinking cap on.
