Just a few days ago I wrote about renewing this site due to wanting to get rid of my hosted VM. I had previously built the replacement using GatsbyJS, which I’d read a few things about and it piqued my interest.

However, after seeing Hugo in action and reading more about it I decided, while not too far down the Gatsby rabbit hole, to give this a go… And here we are.

It’s been a while since I posted a new blog post, but I’ve recently decided to scale down my hosting (VM) in favour of attempting to make content a little more static, reducing the overheads required to host.

So here I am with a new site, its very minimal at the minute with a fairly barebones look and feel. However I’m quite pleased that I managed to export posts from my previous Wordpress installation to here for posterity - although some of the formatting has gone a little awry in places. I’ll eventually get to fixing that.

First off, happy new year to everyone!

This new year led to me cooking for several which I always enjoy, don’t often get to cook but when I do I always cook everything from scratch. This year I decided on chicken kebabs with a variety of marinades. One especially went down a storm, Garlic and Lemon, so I thought I’d share.

Other marinades I made were Souvlaki and Chilli tomato

Hi all, been a while since I’ve posted anything, I’ve recently picked up myself a new camera. Got a pre-owned Canon EOS 700D, its been a while since I’ve had an SLR but I quite fancy another go.

So, having a play I thought I’d do a little video showing the greenhouse and aquaponics. 2nd proper year of the aquaponics in its current location, its doing well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIQq6H6sceg

Many moons ago, I used to brew my own beer. Nothing spectacular just a 25l fermentation bucket with a ready made kit. Since we moved house I’ve always had the plan of hiving off a section of the garage dedicated to beer making, the problem with that is my garage has literally been full of stuff. Now that most of the renovation projects are complete (nearly 5 years later) there’s room in the garage and I can now start brewing again.

As part of my interest in aquaponics I’ve always intended to enable some kind of electronic monitoring, various thoughts on what to monitor and how have been in my head for a while. Recently I’ve been wondering if the temperature levels of the water are high enough so this was as good a place as any to start.

An Arduino was my obvious choice to start with, I built various circuits but soon decided that I wouldn’t be running Ethernet anywhere near and that kind of ruled it out with regards to re-using existing kit. I decided to use one of the nodeMCU devices I’m halfway through a project on (I’ll just buy another couple eventually).

Thought I’d post a quick progress report on the aquaponics setup as the build pretty much complete and the growing has commenced. I left the last post where I had a lovely clean tank and had just introduced 20 goldfish. About a week later I introduced a further 20 and I’m happy to say that around 3 weeks on the fish are thriving, initially they seemed to cower in a corner but are making full use of the space.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine and I were sharing YouTube videos around water harvesting, hydro electricity generation and the like. As the usual YouTube journey does, I ended up going off on a tangent and watching a video on aquaponics. I found it really fascinating so started looking deeper and deeper, and finally decided to give it a go. I’d always planned on getting a greenhouse for our new garden and a couple of planter boxes and growing veg but this looked great.

A while ago I bought one of the Maplins weather stations, just for fun really no plans with it. The device came with a pole to which several sensors could be attached: temperature, humitidy, wind speed, wind direction and rain level. The other important bit in the box was the control station, which is a large LCD screen based output for the information which is gathered in the sensors, it also gives an attempt at forecasting. Areas of the screen are pressure sensitive which allows for a touchscreen style interface for changing views etc.