Whilst away working in the Midlands I was introduced to my chilli’s plants northern cousins …

And by-gum these guys are monsters ! Each plant is over 14 inches tall which compared to my guys (of which the largest is now finally 4 inches high).

It would appear that the secret of this speedy growth is the size of the pots. Instead of working through plant pot sizes which is what I did. Go directly to the 10 inch pot !!

I have been promised photo updates which I will post as they arrive.

The summer has arrived and unfortunately whilst the plants seem to think this is excellent. It is making life difficult for the web cams. After attempting to do this in software it would appear that the range of bright light is just too much. So an initial first attempt at resolving this problem has been achieve by attaching a pair of my wifes broken sun glasses in front of the lense. After totally confusing the software it looks like it is an improvement – I believe applying an infra-red filter will probably be the way forward as this both filters out a lot of the visible light but also means I can monitor the plants through the night.

The quick answer is : CONTROL + U

(This is because F2 will cut the contents of a cell)

However if you want the complete list, open Help -> Excel Help and then type “excel keyboard shortcuts”

There is great article on this subject buy Rob Griffiths of MacWorld :

http://www.macworld.com/article/134549/2008/07/exceleditcell.html

After a long weekend away I arrived home to see the delivery of my BioGrow and BioBloom.

To cut a long story short I discovered that a work colleague of mine has been growing chilli’s for some time. The secret to his success is the feed he uses. Bio-Grow and Bio-Bloom. So I just had to get some and see how it impacts of the development of my guys.

In addition to this I noted that the guys I left in doors had developed a second tier of leaves and is now at least an inch taller.

So for this reason in addition to giving all the plants new medicine a second plant has now been brought indoors.

The company I purchased the Bio-Grow and Bio-Bloom from is Grotec (www.grotec.co.uk) also seems to supply various specialist technologies for speed growing. Bright lights (200 – 600w), hydroponics and numerious other items.

These are pictures of the rest of the plants at the front of the house.

We needed a xp pro pc running from the datacentre for downloading and local maintenance. No problems I thought however by default XP doesn’t seem to recognise the hard disks :

"Setup did not find any hard drives installed in your computer"

Well after googling the problem I stumbled across a website by Techhead and an article explaining how to proceed. A couple of notes you need to be aware of before proceeding.

1. VMWare offers two types of hard disk controller — choose LSI

2. Of the drivers available for these controllers there are two for the LSI chip. Try the old one first … oo and if you use the new one by mistake. Trash the vm and start again.

3. The mouse is seriously sluggish until VMWare tools are installed (even then it’s not the fastest thing).

Okay on with the detail

Step 1:

Download the appropriate floppy disk image of for the hard disk controller you wish to use.

They are available as :

Old LSI Logic XP Driver (recommended)

Newer LSI Logic XP Driver

Bus Logic XP Driver

store the image along with your ISO’s you use with your ESX server.

Step 2:

Create the virtual machine choose Windows XP Pro (32bit).
Connect your Installation CD/ISO file.
Choose the disk controller you want to us – VMWare recommend Bus Logic, it would appear that the LSI is quicker.
Ensure you have a floppy drive created and associate with the appropriate driver .flp file (DO NOT CONNECT YET).

Step 3:

Power on and when prompted hit F6.
Connect the floppy drive and back in the VM hit return.
Follow the prompts to install Windows.

Step 4:

Login and Install VMWare tools.

Step 5:

If this box is anywhere near the internet AntiVirus;  Firewalling and Windows Update immediately !

Good luck.

Mick

As a result of humidity mk2 there is insufficient room in the outside planter. So I thought it might be an idea to bring one of the plants in doors. In this way I can observe the differences and see if one improves over the other. For this reason my laptop webcam has been deployed as CHILLI CAM 2 which is now also posted on the chilli cam web page.

Various attempts at identifying a reliable camera mount have been investigated and a CD jewel case seems to be the most practical solution.

Since this plant is now on her own my chameleon telephone volunteered to keep it company along with his friend the lady bird.

Mk1 of the humidity solution has failed … or more specifically sprung a leak.

Having located an alternative planter that doesn’t have any holes in plants were moved.

Just a very brief update to advise that I have purchased and built a VELLEMAN USB I/O controller board.

After nearly 20 years I can still solder !!

The board is attached to a linux box running Ubuntu and I downloaded and built the drivers.Two files are needed to get up and running:

libusb-0.1.12.tar.gz

libk8055.tar.gz

Instructions

1. Unpack libusb into a folder and cd into it.

2. ./configure – this will checkout your system and setup the various dependencies needed to build

3. make – this will build the library.

4. sudo make install – this will install the library.

5. Unpack libk8055 into another folder and cd into the src directory.

6. Repeat the same instructions as before firstly doing ./configure then make and finally sudo make install

7. Next you need to configure udev so you machine recognised the board. To do this add the following to a file called /etc/udev/rules.d/40-k8055.rules

# udev rules file for Velleman K8055 USB Experiment Interface Board
#
SUBSYSTEMS!=“usb”, ACTION!=“add”, GOTO=“k8055_rules_end”# The K8055 device, including all jumper configurations

ATTRS{idVendor}==“10cf”, ATTRS{idProduct}==“5500″, GROUP=“k8055″, MODE=“0660″

ATTRS{idVendor}==“10cf”, ATTRS{idProduct}==“5501″, GROUP=“k8055″, MODE=“0660″

ATTRS{idVendor}==“10cf”, ATTRS{idProduct}==“5502″, GROUP=“k8055″, MODE=“0660″

ATTRS{idVendor}==“10cf”, ATTRS{idProduct}==“5503″, GROUP=“k8055″, MODE=“0660″

MODE="0666", OWNER="mick", GROUP="k8055"

LABEL=“k8055_rules_end”

8. To apply this file enter sudo /etc/init.d/udev restart

9. You should now be able to speak with your card.  On the board there are jumpers sk5 & sk6 which indicted the ID of your board. But assuming both jumpers are in (ID:0). Then type in k8055 -p:0 will get the board to report back to you. Sending commands like k8055 -p:0 d:255 will turn on all the digital outputs.

After yet more reading up on what makes a chilli plant happy. I noted that as they normally frequent hot countries they like humid environments.

To achieve this there are a number of recommendations:

1. Only water the plants with luke warm tap water.

2. Add stones to the saucer the plant pot is standing in. In this way water can be left in the saucer so it will evaporate creating humidity. Without the stones the water would be absorbed into the soil and the roots could drown.

We don’t have any spare saucers (that I would be allowed to use), and all the plant pots had holes in the bottom.  No option but to amend the pot I was already using for standing the current pots in.

Then armed with two orange milk carton tops and general household sealant I created two bungs. The pot was then filled with a layer of stones and just covering the carton tops. Water was added and after confirming no leaks in went the chilli plants.

Success!

The next project has got to be adding lights so I can monitor my plants in the evening.