brainwagon

I’ve been interested in hydroponics for quite some time. It’s part of a growing interest that I have in sustainable and decentralized production of food and energy. At the Maker’s Faire, there was a display of a system which integrated both hydroponics and aquaculture: fish were grown in a tank, whose water circulated back to water some plants. This is called “aquaponics”. Digging around on the Internet this evening (hey, I was bored) yielded this excellent manual on a beginning system that uses a series of barrels. It seems very practical, and answers many interesting questions. The total amount of food produced is quite small, but the overall system is quite interesting. I’ll have to print it out and read up.

Faith and Sustainable Technology -- The Barrel-Ponics Manual.

Addendum: Here’s a little Youtube video detailing a system built by an amateur. It uses goldfish and carp fingerlings, and he is growing tomatoes and other vegetables and flowers.

I was up on the hill behind my house, moving a little antenna that I have, and was immediately struck by how blazing it was. Now that I am back inside, relaxing with the laptop, I did what every geek would: surf over to weather.com to find out how hot it was. This is what I got:

I don’t think so. All of the Bay Area temps on their site seem off. It seemed to me that their must be a network issue for them. I then recalled that there is an excellent network of user-supported weather stations called The Weather Underground. They reported a much more sensible temperature. Nifty.

Addendum: I thought I’d use my iPhone to find out what it thinks about the weather. Not surprisingly, the Weather Channel applet thinks the temperature is 69 degrees, just like their online page. The built-in iPhone weather app and the WeatherBug app both report the same temperature of 84 degrees, which I believe is the temperature as recorded at the Lawrence Hall of Science, but it is quite a bit warmer here. The Weather Underground app reports 92.3. Neat.