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The tentative chive

The first tentative tendrils of Spring’s imminent florescence, the indefatigable Chives continued to thrive despite recent arctic conditions.

A green mass carpets my tiny patch of experimental ground. What I love about my little patch is that, after a mere two years, it is completely self-renewing. This year I did absolutely nothing to it – I couldn’t, I wasn’t around – and yet, without any effort from me, a productive, colourful and interesting space emerged to greet the warming year.

This is the essence of lazy man’s gardening: zero perspiration for a heroic vegetation. Continue reading →

In March this year I quit smoking, but really the only reason I’m posting this now is because I like the graphic and it’s a slow post-writing day. Besides, I really identify with the quitter-and-proud-of-it ethic.

The graphic is by the immensely talented Natalie Dee, whose charm is only surpassed by her graciousness and tolerant understanding of copyright violations. Or at least I hope so.

Have a great Wednesday.

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Earlier tonight my site was offline because there was a splash page there. Using the built in iPage icon-based file manager I was able to figure out what file was loading the splash. Another icon indicated the delete button. I copied the splash file in case I broke the internet (belt and braces people), crossed my fingers and deleted the file. Lo and behold but wordpress launched no problem.

If I was much more technically literate, I’d go with nearlyfreespeech.net. Those guys have a great pricing philosophy that ends up cost the majority of users a helluva lot less than standard hosting.

But, for the rest of us, I’d go with iPage.

http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

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The Horrible Halloween cake had Annie's friends and family suitably horrified

My friend Annie told me I had to put this online or there would be trouble, and you don’t want to mess with Annie. She gets cranky.

This is a cake with various delicious somethings. Annie made it for Halloween, and all her friends and family were suitably horrified. That made her less cranky. Continue reading →

When Patrick Blanc was a boy, he suspended plants from his bedroom wall and ran their roots into a fish tank. The greenery received nourishment from the diluted—ahem—fertilizer and purified the water in return. Forty-five years on, the French botanist’s gardens have grown massiv’e in scale. One inside a Portuguese shopping mall is larger than four tennis courts, and there’s one in Kuwait that’s almost as big. But Blanc’s recently completed facade for the Athenaeum hotel in London (shown) could be his most high-profile project yet. Looming over Green Park, it’s an eight-story antigravity forest composed of 12,000 plants.

Get the rest of the story at Wired.