Temperature almost got up to 40 today.
The coming afternoons are supposed to be substantially warmer - afternoons possibly venturing into the 60s - but early-morning lows look like 20s. Tomorrow morning, low 20s.
We don't seem to have a lot of rain in the near-term forecast. We need more rain, to fill up the pond! Preferably well before planting season!
I just got around to upgrading the lighting in the plant-starting cabinet, adding 80 Watts of bonus full-spectrum illumination. Now I need to get some seeds in pots (which I meant to do in January).
The chickens are up to 3~5 eggs/day, sometimes with an additional failed egg (fragile or incomplete shell, or no shell at all). Maybe I need to fiddle further with their diet; they're currently on 19% protein pellets that claim to have plenty of shell minerals... but they also get scratch grains and whatever they can forage for, and they don't seem to have any interest in their nice crushed oyster shells.
No duck eggs yet; if the she-duck does start laying eggs, maybe I'll want to try hatching them. (We should probably also buy a few more ducklings this Spring, in the interest of genetic diversity.)
I need to build a stand-alone, 2-holer nest box for those times that the chickens are hanging out in the duck pen (or any other area that doesn't include their coop). I'd been worrying about keeping rain out, but, really, it can live in a sheltered spot, or just be kept on the back deck except when the chickens are out and about on a nice day. Shouldn't take long to throw such a thing together, once other priorities are out of the way.
I installed the new KVM switch today. It woiks! The loaner Windows machine sees the keyboard and mouse - by their own identities, not as emulated devices (I have no idea whether that was one of the problems with the old switch, or if it was just a matter of the USB not switching to port 4, nor, eventually, to port 2).
One toaster project seems to be out of my hair, based on results received Friday evening. Another... I think we've come up with a way to meet a bunch of customer requirements that assume that "a box with software running inside it" means "a general-purpose computer running a general-purpose operating system and connected to the Internet." Blindly applying the standards for such would (1) involve an entirely unreasonable amount of effort not in the original budget, (2) almost certainly fail, and (3) be looking at entirely the wrong things. But, there are certain things that should be examined and tested, and this is a chance to add those things to The Process.
A few weeks late on your starts is not the end of the world if you do get them started now....
Posted by: Rob | Sunday, 18 February 2024 at 07:40