Rambling

Beavers to return to the UK

admin — Mon, 26 May 2008 11:02:25 +0000

Beavers used to be common in the UK, but they were hunted to extinction around 400 years ago. Now they may be reintroduced back into the UK next year.

Around 15 to 20 beaver, from 4 families will be brought from Norway this autumn. Next spring, after they have been quarantined and acclimatised, they will be released into the wild by the Scottish Wildlife Trust and Royal Zoological Society of Scotland. The beavers will be released at Knapdale, south of the Crinan canal near Lochgilphead in Argyll. An attempt to release beaver in Knapdale in 2005 failed because of objections by local land owners.

The beavers will be radio-tagged and micro-chipped so their movements can be tracked. If the project is successful more beaver may be released in other parts of Scotland in 2010.

Natural England, the government conservation agency, is soon to release details of it’s feasibility study into releasing beaver into the English countryside. Areas included in the study are Devon, Dorset, the Thames Valley, East Anglia and the Lake District.

Although I‘m sure the beavers will be a welcome sight for most people, even boosting tourism, I’m also sure other people will not welcome them.
Beaver are rodents, Europe’s biggest in fact, and as such breed like rodents. If not kept in check they could well spread and become a problem. Their activities can cause flooding on farmland, roads etc. and they can undermine river and canal banks.

Yogurt Making

admin — Sat, 24 May 2008 16:53:23 +0000

A friend was telling me about the yogurt maker she had bought, and how wonderful the yogurt was. I soon realised that all it is is an insulated tub that keeps the ingredients warm.

So I decided I wanted one too, the yogurt really was good! Searching the internet for the best price I came across several sites that said you don’t need a yogurt maker. You just need to insulate the tub with towels and keep it somewhere warm like an airing cupboard. I don’t have an airing cupboard, or anywhere suitable to keep the tub warm, but I do have a vacuum flask and found that works very well.

I made the yogurt by boiling ordinary milk then letting it cool a bit then adding a large spoon full of live yogurt bought from the shop. I put the lot into the flask and left overnight and in the morning had great yogurt. When I make my next batch I will use a spoonful of this batch to start it off.

I used ordinary semi-skimmed milk, but my friend says UHT milk is even tastier, so I will try that next time. She says the yogurt can be kept for two weeks in the fridge, but mine won’t last that long.

I put some chopped up strawberries in mine today, and it was lovely. Chopped nuts are good to add to it too, but I suppose you could add almost any fruit or nuts.

The Parrot Joke

admin — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:37:51 +0000

A woman went into a pet shop and saw a large, beautiful parrot in a cage. There was a sign on the cage that said £10.00 including the cage.

‘Why is the parrot so cheap,’ she asked the pet shop owner.

The owner said, ‘Ok, I’ll tell you, this bird used to live in a house of Prostitution and sometimes it says some pretty vulgar stuff.’

The woman thought about this, but decided to buy the bird any way.

She took it home and hung the bird’s cage up in her living room and waited for it to say something. The bird looked around the room, then at her, and said, ‘New house, new madam.’

The woman was a bit shocked, but thought ‘that’s really not so bad, I can live with that.’

When her two teenage daughters returned from school the bird saw and said,
‘New house, new madam, new girls.’

The girls and the woman were a bit shocked, but then laughed about the situation considering how and where the parrot had been raised. They decided that if that was the worst the parrot was going to say they could live with it.

Later, when the woman’s husband Matthew came home from work the parrot looked at him and said,

‘Hi Matthew’

A Neat Dictation Machine

admin — Thu, 01 May 2008 22:22:45 +0000

If you read my post about using JDVoiceMail to record memos and “To Do’s” to my self, you may be wondering how I solved the problem of recording them when I was away from my computer.

Well, the answer came sort of accidentally. I originally thought of buying a hand held dictating machine. I found some good ones on that well known auction site, and bid on a couple. The ones I bid on also had the facility to connect to a computer and copy files to and from it. Luckily for me I was out bid on both of them, one sold for £25 and the other went for £27.

I say it was lucky because at the same time I had bought an MP4 player from a seller in China and was waiting for it to arrive. It arrived after I had been out bid on both dictating machines and was busily watching several other auctions to see how high the bidding was going.

When the MP4 player arrived I was pleased to find it was fully working and a great little gadget. It can play music, videos, radio, you can even read ebooks with it, and it can be used as a USB drive. But what really pleased me was it can also record sound. You can click record and talk to it and it records everything you say in crystal clear quality.

So I had been bidding £20 on dictation machines that had 256kb memory and had the facility to copy files onto a computer. And all along I had bought this MP4 player which could do exactly the same thing, but had 8gb of memory.

So now I have a much better “dictation machine” that also plays music, videos, radio, shows photos etc, when it is not being used as a dictation machine. And it was nearly half the price of the dedicated dictation machine.

All in all I am well pleased with this little gadget, and so pleased I set my maximum bid at £20 for the dictation machines.

The one, small, draw back is the MP4 player saves the recordings as Recording01.mp3, Recording02.mp3 etc. so I have to rename them to something meaningful after copying them to my computer. A small price to pay for such a great little gadget.

Click here for a good selection of MP4 Players.

Voice Memos

admin — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:49:26 +0000

For years I have tried to use those “to do” programs, without any kind of success. I’ve tried specific to do programs, PIMs with a built in to do list and at work I have tried the to do facility in Outlook. I even wrote a “to do” database in access once, spent weeks getting it just right too. It did everything I wanted it to do without any bells or whistles. It was small, fast and very easy to use, but I gave up with it after a week.

I guess I’m not a “To Do” sort of person. I could never get into the habit of making a list of things to do, then checking and making sure I do the things on the list.

Then a few weeks ago I found I was having many ideas for posts in my blog, and for articles, but kept forgetting them before I had a chance to type them up. I tried my old “To Do” database, as the field for notes was a Memo field and can hold a lot of text. Unfortunately I gave up with that after a few days, partly because I’m not the type of person to use the database and partly because I wasn’t always at my computer when I had the idea.

Then, a couple off weeks ago I came across a great little program, JDVoiceMail. This is a Freeware program which cost nothing to download or use. It is designed to record and send voice messages by email. And it works very well too. However, I don’t use it to send voice messages by email, I just use it to record “to do” messages to myself and save them. JDVoiceMail saves the messages in mp3 format so they can be listened to by anyone with a program that plays mp3 files. All I do is hit the Record button and speak a message to myself then hit the stop button. After that you can email the file, delete it or save it. I choose the save option and save the file in my “memo” folder.

Note that when you do this and hit the record button it adds the next message on to the last one. To create a new message, in a new file, you have to use the File > New menu options. Or you can close then reopen the program.

Now, at a later date, I just click on the saved file and hear myself telling me what to do. It was a bit weird at first, especially as my voice sound bad when recorded, or when I talk on the telephone, or leave messages on answering machines. But I soon got used to hearing my own voice and now use JDVoiceMail a lot.

Now all I need a program that can transcribe my mp3 files into text and I can dictate entire posts or articles and have then typed up automatically.

I also solved the problem of recording messages when I’m not at the computer, but I’ll put that in another post.