del.icio.us

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking tool. You can post bookmarks there and organize by categories. The cool thing is that you can see others who are bookmarking the same URLs and you can subscribe to people's bookmark lists via RSS feeds. Here are my bookmarks, and the RSS feed.

Poultry Netting

We raise organic meat chickens for our family to eat and to sell to other families. They are easy to raise and take only 8 weeks to get to butchering size. We average about 4lbs birds when they are ready to eat. They spend the first 4 weeks inside under heat lights and the last 4 weeks outside.

We started off last year with the chicks in a plastic kids swimming pool with chicken wire over the top in our garage for the first 4 weeks and then to a fenced in area connected to our wood shed, which we used as a shelter for the birds, for the last 4.

I built a chicken coop for our layers last year, and built in a fenced off section for raising the young meat birds for the first 4 weeks. We have been using this space this year and it proves to be way better than the pool. We then built a chicken tractor for the last 4 weeks. A chicken tractor is a portable fenced in shelter that is half roofed in, that can be moved from section to section of land each day. The idea is the birds get to eat grass and bugs and their chicken shit helps things grow after they have moved on. Ours is 8 x 8 and 2.5 feet tall.

The chicken tractor was working well, but we had to move it a lot, and I was worried since a fox wiped out most of our layers in the middle of the day earlier this year. I had to put a strand of electric wire around the layers permanent run to keep the foxes out. Our batches of birds have gotten bigger, (75 now, 100 coming in August), and with the predator concern, we decided to install some portable fencing. Poultry netting. See how we set it up here.

Feeds

So, I was talking with Karen today about blogs and feeds. I thought I would write up this post to refer anyone to who wants to know about feeds.

I used to keep a list of bookmarks of the many blogs and websites that I keep up with. Each day I would open them, one-by-one, and check out what was new. As this ever growing list of blogs and sites grew, this way of viewing them got harder to maintain without missing some info I would have liked to see.

Then I got into feeds. Almost all blogs and a lot of sites have a feed. It’s usually RSS or Atom – linked with little orange icon with an RSS, Atom or XML on it. It’s a simple way of syndicating information. It just serves up the data. It does not tell you how to display the data the way HTML does.

You see, when you type in a URL in your browser, the web server on the other end sends back some HTML text. The HTML is markup code that tells your browser how the page should look. Put this picture here; put this text there and make it bold; make this bit of text a link to another site; show this Flash movie here; etc. Same with email. I’m an email message for you from this person; here is the message; this is when I was sent.

Feeds are simpler. A feed is markup that just describes the data. Not: Show this here, but: This is about x and it was published on x date and time and written by this person.

The great thing about feeds is that you can use them any way you want. I use a lot of them in a program that is somewhere between email and a browser. I say: I’m interested in this site, so check the feed every, say hour or so, to see if there is anything new. Then it’s up to the application to figure out how to display this information to you – since the feed is just data.

I use FeedDemon, which displays the feeds the same way email looks. New, mark as read, etc. In FeedDemon you can group feeds together into categories – I have ‘Friends & Family’,‘Technology’, etc. Each feed is like its own Inbox in email, so I can scan through and see what’s new and by the topics see if I want to explore further.

Other feed readers do things differently. Bloglines is a web-based reader that you view in a browser. NewsGator integrates with Outlook and displays the feed as if they really were email. There is even an application that will subscribe to feeds of music or video file sharing and download files based on keywords. I like The Simpsons, so it will check the feed and if there is a Simpsons episode available for download it will automatically download it. The possibilities are really endless because feeds have broken content out of just the browser or just email.

Back in 1999, I started playing with XML. XML is a simple way of describing data. Just like feeds. Feeds are just XML. Back in ’99, XML was hyped as the thing. It was going to enable interoperability between any platform that could read and produce text. It has not been until now, 2004, that I have seen XML really start to affect the average internet user. Sure, I’ve used it to solve all sorts of problems throughout the years; but I’m a programmer. I see XML feeds as the beginning of XML actually affecting average folks.

The thing that makes XML feeds high-tech and able to affect average folks is that they are simple. An email message is just that – an email. You need an email application to read it. A web page is a web page. An XML feed does not say what it is supposed to be. It’s just an abstract concept. Like numbers. And look what you can do with numbers – anything.

Mesa's 8th Birthday Party

Mesa had her birthday party today. Lots of fun and good friends. I spent a lot of time holding Karen's new baby.

Pete and I hooked up Mesa's new zip line -- a wire strung from two trees with a trolley with handles that the kids use to zip down the line. After much tinkering, we found that attaching the end where the kids would zip to worked out better if was higher than the start. This makes it so that when they hop and on and weight the line down, they don't go screaming in to the tree and don't smash the plastic trolley into the wire tighteners, which damages it.

At one point I looked over and Pete was on the ground covered with kids. :) He mentioned to me earlier that he has never had grandkids before -- I guess he got his fill today.

Hard to believe I have an eight year old daughter now. Mesa has really grown a lot. I really enjoy hanging out with her. We have a lot in common. We like movies and technology and games and learning. Hanging with her at this age is like hanging with an old friend. We've been really getting into the Wrinkle in Time book series. The second book, A Wind in the Door, is quite philosophical. I was quite impressed that Mesa picked up the message loud and clear.

...and Aanan's hat.

Terran's hat...

The kids got some new hats last week when they went to Lake Winnipesauke for Mesa's birthday.

Terran went running around in the rain durning a thunderstorm the other day and then decided to grab the guitar on the porch and rock out.

This is our lower garden where we plant our early crops like lettuce, beets, spinach etc. It's cool because we just walk up to the garden around dinner and pull out stuff for a salad.

Aanan romping around the tomato plants (Click pic for supersize)

Garden

Terran & Aanan

Terran and Aanan are two years apart and usually have a great time hanging out with each other. I think they are really starting to look alike. Aanan has seemed to absorbed some of Terran's intense little-boy energy. I often find her stomping around the house going "psshhhh, psshhh, psshhh", looking for Pirates to fight :) She also likes to wander around outside by herself, talking to herself. Completely content and in her own world. I'll be doing some yard work and look around and see her down at the chicken coop or near the garden by herself absorbed in her independent play.

Got an old Masterlock that you've lost the combination to...

How to Find the Combination for a Master Combination Lock
Awesome. This is why I love the internet.

Summer Morning

We have this beautiful cow pasture next to our house. I love waking up on summer mornings and seeing the sun light it up like this. From the bay window in our kitchen, you sit below the pasture so you see the sun shining through the tall grass. One morning last summer Terran witnessed this effect and proclaimed: "Dad, the pasture is on fire"! :)

A great picture of Booper. (Click the picture for hi-resolution)

Early birthday gift

Ron got me a very early birthday gift that arrived in the mail today - a new digital camera! I expect my blogging to now increase 10 fold. Ron bought the camera via my Amazon wish list. What a great concept. Like a wedding registry with no occasion. :)

The camera. This is a pic of the refection of the camera on a disassembled hard drive I have on my desk at work:

A Guide to the Most Efficient Things in the World

This site looks to be a great resource. Our dryer has been broken forever, maybe I'll replace it with this one:

The Spin-X can remove one quart of water from clothes taken out of the Washing Machine, using the same amount of electricity the clothes dryer uses in 15 seconds.

The Spin-X spin dryer extracts at speeds of 3300 RPMs and pulls the water out at 1420 G forces as compared to a commercial extractor which only has a G force of 700 at 1400 RPMs.

10 lbs. wet load capacity (2 king size sheets, 2 large king size pillow cases, 1 bath towel, 2 hand towels)

Alas, the site has no RSS feed...

A picture that Linda just sent me from this weekend. Terran learned how to ride a bike without training wheels in literally about 5 minutes. Mesa taught him. He then practiced for a couple of hours and was able to get going on an incline by himself. He's good to go now. A regular bike rider. One more child to go and then we can do a family ride of the rail trail.

Bob Dylan

Lots of Dylan related things lately. In February I bought a copy of Masked and anonymous for Ron for his birthday and ripped a copy of it a last weekend with DVD Decrypter, (a great app). It's the sort of movie that needs multiple viewings. I read this review this weekend, which will help you out if you plan on seeing it -- and you should, because it is a great film.

Dylan recently released his Halloween 1964 concert as part of the bootleg series. I've had a *real* bootleg of that show for quite some time, (again from Ron), but grabbed the official release, (which is much better sound quality), from AllOfMP3. AllOfMP3 is a music download site out of Russia that sells music downloads by the megabyte. It's like buying clothes by the pound, (or by the bag from Pennywise in Pittsfield :) ). I signed up for 1 gigabyte of downloads, which cost 10 bucks. The cool thing is that you can choose which format, bitrate and encoder you want you music encoded with before you buy it. The music I have bought so far have been under a buck an album. An no DRM to boot. Screw iTunes!

I'm going to see Dylan play this Friday night here in NH. Outdoor show. Should be great!