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Occasional musings that fall out of my brain and on to the site. Occasionally more occasional than I'd like. But will try to fix that.

Roundup: House and Garden

Posted by stephen on Monday, 19th June, 2006 @ 01:27

Next, the house change around... I decided that the TV was being underused above the iMac. It wasn't practical for normal second monitor tasks (email and IM), and was a pain to use when wanting to use Front Row or MythTV (both of which appear on the primary screen only). So the original plan has happened and it's gone into my bedroom attached to the Mac Mini. It's quite nice having a big TV up there. The shelf I'd created now stores the surround decoder and front speakers, freeing up enough room on the desk for both the 17" LCD and my laser printer. And I can honestly say the 20" iMac screen makes for a very reasonable viewing experience.

Continuing on the house theme I finally got frustrated with the back garden and decided I must spend some time out there this year enjoying the occasional nice weather and entertaining with the odd BBQ. So Friday saw me entering my 5 foot grass jungle with the strimmer (I'd assumed the lawn mower wouldn't cope with 5 foot grass). A rather fruitless endeavour. The strimmer immediately clogged itself up with grass and seemed generally rather useless.

In desperation and out of curiosity I thought I'd give the lawn mower a crack at it. I'd purposely bought a mower with wheels rather than a hoovering one. And fortunately it also came equipped with metal blades rather than silly plastic ones. And to my great surprise it was amazingly effective. It just needed me to stop every five minutes to unclog the grass catcher exit shoot (I didn't use the grass catcher, but even then the shoot isn't designed for that volume of grass. What I'm left with from Friday is a bit of stubble and some long bits at the edges I didn't quite get to. A lot like my attempts at shaving really!

So in the course of this week I hope to finish the job, throw away some of the crap that's gathered in the garden and once again make it usable. Then I can finally test how this glossy MacBook screen copes with outside daylight, on those hard sunny days of working at home.

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