I’ve finally persuaded my much maligned N97 to free up enough “C:” space to install the Nokia WordPress> app, well alright, the ginormous Qt library. It’s far from ideal, but should hugely cut down on the ol’ mobile gprs bills, especially for quick postcards. In fact, it’s crashed and lost this post 3 times so far. Ho hum

Another of the small recipes I picked up from this year’s NEC show is from Alys Fowler. Apparently if you pack some apples in elderflowers for a month, they come out tasting like pineapples. Knowing my luck they’ll turn out tasting of pollen beetle, but I’ll let you know how I get on

Alys Fowler

I picked up a couple of cheap pineapples from the supermarket, which was a good excuse to restock my jam supplies. It’s also nice to spread the bounty around a bit, it can make a fun, if horribly sweet, gift. It’s pictured here with some olive oil and herb foccacia bread I made.

The garden is showing some positive signs too, although more water would be nice. My pineapple guava plants are putting on lots of new growth, albeit from the bottom rather than the top, so it’s more hedging than a goblet shape at the moment. I’m hoping it will eventually flower like the professionally grown ones, here’s one I spotted at the NEC:

Pineapple Guava

I suspect that hoping for Yorkshire guavas is a touch optimistic though

The sweet peas are making steady progress up their supports and the garden peas are starting to swell nicely. Some of the tomato plants are looking very green and healthy, though the uneven watering has encouraged my spinach and cabbages to bolt like the oil seed rape in the field next door. Maybe next year I’ll find some seeds for this fun looking spinach variety:

Mexican tree spinach

One of the best things about my Humax 9200T PVR is that it includes radio as well as television, couple that with series link and its USB connection to download to a computer and you’ve got everything you need to never miss your favourite show again. Freeview radio shows take up about 80Mb per hour, so there’s little risk you’ll fill up your hard disk with them so go nuts, you can always delete unwanted programmes later on.

Automating the process took a little bit of thought, so I’m putting it online so it’s easier for me to find next time I format my computer and forget to back it all up.

Getting the files off the PVR

If you’re still running a 32bit copy of Windows XP, then use Humax’s Media e-linker application to copy the files onto your laptop. If, however, you’re using something that isn’t 9 years old, then you’ll need the help of some community experts to download from it.

I’m discounting the method of connecting a computer directly to the Humax’s builtin hard disk because many users at home aren’t comfortable with that level of hardware modifications, so this is strictly USB file transers.

First you’ll need a copy of Andy Chappell’s Humax Media Controller. This is a command line rewrite of media e-linker and uses the open source Libusb-win32 library to do the interfacing. However, the 2007 version of this library didn’t support 64bit windows, so you’ll need Mike Dimmick’s remarkably handy updated driver and specially compiled copy of libusb0.dll to make it work with your OS and HMC.

Transcoding from .ts into .mp3

Once you’ve got the files transferred onto your computer, you will likely want to convert it into something your phone or mp3 player will cope with. It comes as MPEG2 Transport Streams (.ts.) which VLC media player copes with just fine, and you can use it to transcode it into an mp3 and attempt to put an ID3 tag or two in using a tool like id3 mass tagger

This approach works just as well for video as it does for audio but because of the size of the files involved, you really do need two seperate hard drive spindles to split the reading from the writing, otherwise you’ll be there for hours.

The script that does the work is just below. Call it either one at a time or as a

for /f %i in (*.ts) do @transcodeThis.cmd

@echo off
echo %1
set out=%1
set out=%OUT: =%
set out=%OUT:'=%
set out=%OUT:ts=mp3%
echo %OUT%

set thisfile=%out%
set thisfile=%OUT:"=%
set thisyear=%thisfile:~0,4%
set thismonth=%thisfile:~4,2%
set thisday=%thisfile:~6,2%
set thishour=%thisfile:~8,2%
set thismin=%thisfile:~10,2%
set thistitle=%thisfile:~12,-4%

start /wait f:\Progra~2\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe %1 --sout=#transcode{acodec=mp3,ab=128}:standard{access=file,mux=dummy,dst=%OUT%} vlc://quit

rem ID3 v2 tag
rem f:\datafiles\pvr\id3.exe -2 -M -g "Podcast" -a "%thistitle%" -t "%thistitle% %thisyear%/%thismonth%/%thisday% %thishour%:%thismin%" -y "%thisyear%" %1
rem ID3 v1 tag
f:\datafiles\pvr\id3.exe -M -g "Speech" -a "%thistitle%" -t "%thistitle% %thisyear%/%thismonth%/%thisday% %thishour%:%thismin%" -y "%thisyear%" %out%

Spring has been in the air for the past couple of weeks and now the clocks have changed, it’s official. Which means it’s time to think about growing things again, most restful after the craziness of the past three weekends.

The lawn’s had its first weeding and haircut of the year, I’ve put some seeds in some compost, the veg plots have had their thick mulch of organic matter applied for about a month and have been dug over ready for the soil to warm up enough for some direct sowing and my amaryllis has flowered. I even spent a good 30 minutes with a screwdriver, can of air and vacuum cleaner to spring clean the inside of my computer, the dust filters over its inlet fans were gross.

After last year’s mixed successes in my current garden, I’m changing my planting plan slightly to match. The tomatoes are the same variety (F1 Totem) and I’ll be carrying on with the same spinach, chard and beetrooot varieties (largely because I’ve got loads of seed left over) but gone are the Nasturtiums and Strawberry Spinach, the round cucumbers (waah!) and squashes. In their place, however, will be a japanese variety of parsley, some more second early potatoes, three varieties of shallot and possibly a standard issue Pumpkin vine for my work’s annual competition.

I’m going to be doing three sowings of spinach and chard, 3 to 4 weeks apart, which should give a steady supply through the summer and not leave just the old and tough stalks in the autumn. In effect, I’m growing things that I use a lot of, but can be expensive to buy and I’m leaving alone the things I use but are cheap to buy.

My Amaryllis took a little over two years to flower again from when it flowered the first time and only had two blooms instead of four, possibly because I didn’t keep it sufficiently fed and watered. It was an interesting exercise to see if it works, but I don’t think it’s worth the space the pot and large spread of leaves take up. One of my bulbs was happy enough to split off a child, which is growing on strongly and might flower next year, if I keep it around that long. I may just to find a sheltered and sunny corner somewhere and plant them out so I’ve got space for the next fun things I’ve got in mind.

Amaryllis flower

It’s getting close to Easter, so I’ve had a quick experiment with a coffee chocolate fudge; mix up a quantity of plain fudge, melt 75g of good quality coffee chocolate and swirl one through the other.

Chocolate fudge