Hacking n garden n stuff

Well, work has finished for another year. The expected JavaFX stuff didn't eventuate, and I spent the last couple of months on a little bit of maintenance and a lot of non-coding work.

So I wasn't in the right mindset for hacking of any sort - ARM assembly, android, video stuff (I noticed that JellyBean now has a Java api to the hardware video codecs though), nor had time to look at the Parallella SDK which I got last week.

Or kobo touch. Although I indirectly found a project that was using my "ReaderZ" code including the widget toolkit to write another frontend for it. I only found it as I noticed the mobileread site showing up in my stats information for this blog.

And I just haven't had the energy or need to work on anything much in my spare time.

So when I do have some time I've been looking after the garden - mostly the lawn, pot plants, and veggie patches. On the whole we had a very cold and dry spring this year so it's been pretty slow going getting some of the plants going, but I now have some well established purple beans, cucumbers, chillies, egg-plants, sweet potatoes, and even some tomatoes which sprouted on their own. Expecting a bumper crop of some purple beans - the vines are growing around 10-15cm per warm day and one is already 3m tall and has reached the gutter on the rear verandah!

Haven't been cooking too much interesting stuff, although i'm slowly working my way through the condiments and frozen curries - the lime chilly marmalade/chutney is the current favourite with a good strong cheese and some crackers.

And when i'm done with all that, trying to get some reading in. Which usually amounts to 2-3 pages to find out where I was, 2 pages of reading, and then waking up half an hour later with the device asleep and my spot lost again.

Now i'm on leave I'll wind down a bit, drink a bit, poke at the garden a bit, try to get out on the bike and visit friends a bit more often, try to at least get started on the shed floor and other junk in the yard ... and i'm sure even find time to hack on something if the inspiration hits.