Jay And Short Game Competition

Date:  Mar 22, 2015

There is only one medal for this short game competition.

Jay is the one of the youngest in his class.  The rest I think is P4-P6.

So far he has yet to get any medal this year.  The older kids are definitely much better golfer than him.  But he enjoys it.  

Today competition is to hit putting into the hole from all direction (with slopes) and score points.

Not so hard, not so easy either.  The kids needs to learn how to read the green, read the slope and putt so that it goes into the hole.

This is one of the hole that made him proud.  He is the only kid who get the ball in twice in the long putt.  The rest did not get it in.

He still learning how to read the green, so, some holes he is in trouble.

Chip and run.  Not too bad.  And he scores.

He learned the technique and applied it in his golf game.

He has some problem in the sand bunker shots.  He did not score well there.

I think he placed his ball too far right.  That is why the swing did not catch much sands and the ball flies up high.  

Jay likes golf a lot.  Kay expressed his interest in golf too.  So, it will be very happy for us if the whole family can go to Golf Vacation trip together when they gets older.

Next week is a big day for Jay.  he is going to take part in his first every Golf Game Competition.  It will be the monthly Junior Medal game competition with his peers.  Let’s see how it goes.  Anything can happen on the golf course.  HaHaHaHa.  Good luck Jay.

Aquaponics Labs

The Lab

Lives are in your hands: the fish, the plants, and the bacteria.  Doctors use lab results and imaging to diagnose pathology in patients, and you will do the same with your system.  Your imaging tools are your eyes...your lab...behold:

Follow me on a description of each lab, what they are, what they mean, and how you can salvage countless hours and dollars with as little stress as possible.  Similar to medicine, in most cases, you will see that HIGH values are the result of too much produced or too little consumed.  Similarly, you will see that LOW values are the result of too little produced or too much consumed.

Nitrates (NO₃^-). There is no concensus on the ideal nitrate level, and many sources provide figures that range from 2-150 ppm. Nitrates are not toxic to fish at comparatively higher levels, and are therefore more of a concern for plant growth than for fish health. Nitrates only come from one source: the bacteria (nitrobacter). Nitrates are removed from the system by one consumer: the plants. (See Aquaponics: The Bacteria post). Use your thinking cap to reason through this one:

• Nitrates too high: Hardly a concern.
• Nitrates too low:  Too little produced or too much consumed.
• Insufficient fish waste to feed bacteria: Not enough fish, not enough food, fish too small, too much water (dilution)
• Insufficient bacteria colonies feeding on nitrites: Immature system, improper dechlorination of municipal water, introduction of antiseptics.
• Insufficient water delivery to growth media:  Pump/valves/tubing too small.
• Excess vegitation consuming all available nitrates:  Lack of pruning, trying to grow more than the system can allow.

Nitrites (NO₂^-).  According to a number of sources, the ideal range of nitrites is 0.25-1.0 ppm.  Nitrites are toxic to fish, and we must be alert to high levels.  Nitrites only come from one source:  the bacteria (nitrosomas).  Nitrites are also removed from the system by one consumer: another bacteria (nitrobacter).

• Nitrites too high: Too much produced or too little consumed.
• Excess fish waste feeding bacteria:  Too many fish, too much feeding, fish too big, too little water (concentration).
• Nitrites too low: Not enough produced or too much consumed.
• Insufficient fish waste to feed bacteria: Not enough fish, not enough food, fish too small, too much water (dilution)
• Insufficient bacteria colonies feeding on nitrites: Immature system, improper dechlorination of municipal water, introduction of antiseptics.
• Insufficient water delivery to growth media: Pump/valves/tubing too small.

*Note:  You will almost NEVER see combinations of "Hi Nitrite/Lo Nitrate" because the nitrobacter almost immediately change nitrite into nitrate.  You will almost ALWAYS see "Low Nitrite/Hi Nitrate" because nitrobacter are eating the nitrite and converting it.

Ammonia (NH₃ / NH₄⁺).  Why are both listed? Check out Acid and Base post.  According to a number of sources, the idea ideal range of ammonia is 0.25-1.0 ppm.  Ammonia is toxic to fish and is their primary waste product.  Ammonia only comes from one source:  the fish.  Ammonia is removed from the system by one consumer:  the bacteria (nitrosomas).

• Ammonia too high:  Too much produced or too little consumed.
• Excess fish waste: Too many fish, too much feeding, fish too big, too little water (concentration).
• Insufficient bacteria colonies feeding on ammonia: Immature system, improper dechlorination of municipal water, introduction of antiseptics
• Fix action:  Remove fish for short-term fix. Add growth media and vegitation for long-term fix.
• Insufficient water delivery to growth media: Pump/valves/tubing too small.
• Ammonia too low:   Not enough produced or too much consumed.
• Insufficient fish waste: Not enough fish, not enough food, fish too small, too much water (dilution)
• Fix action:  Add fish, feed more,

pH. According to MANY sources, the ideal pH for both plant and fish health for any system is 6.5-7.0.  f you havent, read both Bacteria and Acid and Base posts, do so now. The pH for a system is a measure of acid (H+) concentration, and can affect the health of your entire system.  It affects protein structure, enzyme catalysts, toxicity to plants, fish, and bacteria.  If left unchecked, it can sink your entire operation.  The primary source of base in the system is ammonia from fish.  The primary source of acid in the system is H+ from nitrifying bacteria.  For every 1 ammonia shat/pissed out by fish in a mature system, 5 H+s are chemically generated, pushing your system WELL into acidic...and therefore a LOW pH. 

• pH too high:  Too much base or too little acid.
• Excess fish waste: Too many fish, too much feeding, fish too big, too little water (concentration).
• Insufficient bacteria colonies feeding on ammonia: Immature system, improper dechlorination of municipal water, introduction of antiseptics
• Excess addition of commercial base
• pH too low:  System working FINE but not monitored and/or treated.  System is supposed to be acidic due to nitrifying bacteria
• Inappropriate monitoring and/or insufficient use of commercial base.

Thats all for now.  More to follow.

The New Photo App My Experience So far

Date:  Apr 14, 2015

[Update]  Correction on Item 18.  I was inside “iPhoto Events” album within my Album under the new Photo App.  That is why all the Events are listed there.  Heng ah!

Last week, when you update your MacOS to 10.10.3, the new Photo app is finally available.

Apple has decided to replace iPhoto with the new Photo app.

They promise it will be faster, easier, and more make sense features.

So far, my experience is a bit disappointed.  There are some good features, but the pay off may be too big.

1.  There is this great feature.  You can now “upload” all your originals photos onto the iCloud.  Go to “Systems Preference”, “iCloud”, “Photo” and choose option, you will be given the option “iCloud Photo Library”.  Simply tick it, they will move your Photo Library onto iCloud.

2.  Before you do so, please check how much storage is your iPhoto Library or Photo Library.  If you are using a laptop/Macbook Air, most likely you have very few hard disk space, so you need to a) make sure you have space to migrate the iPhoto Library into Photo Library.  b) make sure you have enough iCloud storage space.  For me, I have to subscribe to the 500Gb iCloud. (You can cancel it any time).  If you are using iMac, you probably may want to check on your hard disk space too.  If you upgrade your iMac to SSD drive or Fusion drive, it is likely you do not have enough hard disk space too.  So, you got to do all these research before you migrate.

3.  Then, you launch the photo app, and go thru the migration.  After done, you go to Photo app preference.  There, under iCloud, you can select “Optimise Mac Storage”.  Or if you have the hard disk space, you can select “Download Originals to this Mac”.  For me, I am using SSD, so, I have to conserve whatever space I have.  Especially when my iPhoto Library is > 350Gb big.  When you choose this option, only “Thumbnail” photo will be downloaded onto your iPhone, iPad, or iMac.  When you select the photo, there will be a small percentage circle at the bottom right of the photo.  That means the photo is being downloaded, by how many percent.   

4.  My original iPhoto Library is 376.53GB.  After I migrated to Photo Library, it creates another library which is 438Gb big.  And I wonder what are the extra thing that is being created.  After I done that, I left with lesser than 10Gb on my SSD hard disk.  So, I got to get rid of the iPhoto Library.  So, I make a backup and move it to the Trash.  And I empty the Trash.  But after I have done so, my SSD hard disk reported on 75Gb hard disk.  ???? I deleted a 376Gb folder, and I only recovered back 60Gb space?  Something is fishy going on here.  But we will soon find out what is it.  I am still investigating this.

5.  So, I looked into the Photo Library folder.  I found a new “resources” directory that has 100Gb of space.  So, they created a “Moment” thumbnail files here.  That’s the extra 100Gb+ went to.

6.  I did a full scan of my system, and I have yet found where is my missing disk space.  Very mysterious.  At of this stage, I am missing of 300Gb of hard disk space.  Where does it go?  Where does it hide?    

7.  So, I keep using the tools to find what happen?  But It seems perfectly fine.  So, at the first place, how did Photo App converted or migrated my 367Gb photos given that my total space is 1Gb?  I really don’t want to think about it now.  hahaha.  It is so strange.  

8.  I checked again my backup drive, and it does have a full 376Gb old iPhoto Library on it.

Let’s don’t talk about that painful migration thingy… Let’s focus in some other things...

9.  You can add more share options now.  I love the “Evernote” add on.  So that I can now select any photos that I want to keep inside my Evernote.  

10.  I love that you can add Title, Descriptions, and Tag.  This is important, because, once you can do that, you can search for your photos.

11.  To delete photos now seems to be much much slower.  Once you selected the photos and you want to delete them, it usually takes 1-2 seconds to delete them.  Not sure why is it like that.  I am doing this on a SSD, so, I can imagine, doing it on the hard disk may be a bit slower too.

 

12.  After you select photos to delete, a Delete dialog will come up.  

13.  After I have turn on the “iCloud iPhoto Library”, my Photo app trying to upload my entire library onto the iCloud.  And after 2 days, it successfully uploaded about 3000 photos onto the iCloud.  Wait a minute, that is awfully slow!  I have 108K photos to upload, and it only uploaded 3K photos?  Let me calculate, that will takes almost 36 days to upload the entire library.  hahahahaha

14.  After I have turned on the iCloud Library, only iMessage can successfully attached the photos in my photo library without any problem.  That is because iMessage is Apple stock program/app.  Now, I have huge problem with my WhatsApp app.  When I try to sent a photo, it takes almost 1 minute to actually attached that photo into my WhatsApp message.  At first it is not doing anything at all.  You thought it is faulty or buggy.

15.  When you try to DRAG a photo from your Photo App on the iMac into the Desktop, or Finder Windows it works.  That is because it is Apple OS stock program.  Now, it does not work when you try to drag that photo and want to include into Vimeo, Youtube, or even my usual blogging App, i.e. MarsEdit.  It just won’t work.  So, a way to get around it, is to drag the photo onto the Desktop, or any Directory Finder windows, and then, from there, you drag it inside your App or your Web App.  I think it is a bug.

16.  When you plug in your iPhone, and you got new photos to import, you can click on “Delete Items after import”.  That will remove these photos from the iPhone.  If you forgot to click that?  Hmmm… you will have tons of photos on your iPhone and cannot be remove intuitively.

17.  For example, these are the photos “Already Imported”, in the iPhoto App, I can select an option to “Remove imported photos from iPhone”, but here in the new Photo I cannot find that feature.  That is bad.  And the only way to do it is to go into your iPhone Photo App and select them one by one and delete.  There is also no way to have “Select All” button.  hahahahaha

18.  My Photo Album is now a mix of iPhoto’s Albums & Events.  All those previously events are now placed in the Albums for me.  That is bad too.  Now, I have to one by one delete these extra Albums (Events) that I don’t want.  2609 Albums.  hahahaha.

19.  Some one share photos using photo stream, you can select to “Import” it into your library.

20.  Now, if the person sharing the photo to you is sharing an OLD PHOTO, the import function will place that shared photo into the correct date under Event.  It does not import as “New Photo”.  The problem will occur when you import and you cannot find where the Photo is located inside your Photo Library.

21.  So, what you should do is to go back to the Shared folder and then right click the photo you just imported, and there will be “Show in Library” option appears.  click on it will bring you right to the Moment of that photo.  i.e. the correct date.

After playing around with all these new settings here is my recommendation.

A.  Since Apple decided not to support iPhoto, so the best bet is to use the new Photo App.  Soon or later, you will need to migrate into it.

B.  I am not recommending to use “iCloud Photo Library”.  I am so stupid, at home, I already complaint and not using my iPhoto Library on my Synology.  And I have a Gigabits network at home.  I found it a bit slow, why I so stupid go and turn on the iCloud Photo Library and it has to use the public Internet, to upload all the photos onto the iCloud?  hahaha… everything seems so slow.  I don’t need all the photos in the library to be shared onto the iPhone or iPad.  

So, I finally after 3 days of testing the iCloud Photo Library, I turn off the feature.  And I will downgrade my iCloud back to lower disk space option.  (Yeah, they allow it).  And delete all the photos on my iPhone and iPad.  Turn off the iCloud Photo Library on the iPhone too.  And plug in my iPhone to the iMac and import those that has not been imported to my iMac Photo Library.

As soon as I have done this, my WhatsApp become fast again!  I am happy again!  hahaha

 

Beginning Homesteaders part 2

Moving right along. After about a year of dating, my neighbor she decide she really needed to go back to school and become a nurse like she has always wanted too. To make things easier on all of us financially she and her daughter moved in with me. She concentrated on her nursing school and graduated a little over a year later.

We had been talking about getting a house for quite awhile but neither of us had good credit and didnt think there was any chance we could get a mortgage, we couldnt even get a credit card approval let alone a mortgage. I started working on fixing her credit report, mine is hopeless especially with a bankruptcy on it. After a few months of getting her report cleaned up we saw her credit score start getting better and better.

Eventually it was high enough to get an approval on a home loan. We decided that we were tired of living in the ghetto neighborhood, if you seen the movie "Friday" that the only way I can describe it.

I couldnt believe I was saying it but I actually missed the very lifestyle that I couldnt wait to get away from years ago. We talked about getting a house in the country, growing our own foods, raising chickens and pigs, setting up a solar system and doing as much as we can to be self sufficient.

Another reason for my decision to get away from the city was my daughter, I wanted her to be able to experience things that I did when i was a kid and not being so concerned about her playing outside alone.

We searched and searched for the right place. We found a few that we wanted but they fell through and then one day we were just driving along and spotted a for sale sign in front of a home and we both knew that was the place we wanted.

It was only and acre but laid out like a football field, zoned open rural, right up the road from the inlet to the ocean, close to the beach, totally fenced in and gated and on a dead end street. The home itself, a small 8 yr old but very well cared for singlewide mobile home.






Im Happy to say that we closed on the house last week and life is good.

The intent of this blog is to chronicle the evolution of our small homestead.
Ill be adding a list of our short and long term plans and add photos as we go.

thats all for now.

an added note: the way the blogger is set up it publishes new posts to the top of the blog, to keep it in order I have to change the dates so new posts are dated earlier than old posts