Category Archives: Personal Life

Postaday – June 4th

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If you could get all the nutrition you needed in a day with a pill — no worrying about what to eat, no food preparation — would you do it?

I can’t really see how this could end well. The pill would have to be one hell of a complicated mess in order to stuff everything you need into it. This doesn’t even go on with the notion that you’d be losing an incredible amount of pleasure – why stay alive if you can’t enjoy all the varied textures and flavors that food has to offer? I can’t see people salivating over a pill, yearning for the taste which probably is nil and the aftertaste or burp-up which has got to be rather nasty.

On a quite other level, it does put shame to your teeth. Why have them if all you need to do is swallow a pill? I suppose this would be good for people who have ALS and are trapped in their bodies, it would make nutrition at least possible if they’ve lost the ability to chew. For anyone else though, it seems a terrible waste of life’s fleeting pleasures.

Automatic Tag Generator for DayOne Journals synced with Dropbox

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Here’s how I created a system to automatically sync up keywords to tags in DayOne Journal. The journal is stored on my Dropbox, so if you have it in iCloud, I don’t know what you’re going to do.

First Step: Get text list of tags in a text file: (do this in the entries folder of your DayOne Journal, cd to it, if you can’t, google-fu.)

find . -type f |xargs sed -n “/<array>/,/<\/array>/p”|grep “<string>”|sed ‘s/<[^>]*>//g’|sed “s/^[ \t]*//”|tr -d ‘\011’|sort -f|uniq > tags.txt

Then copy this tags.txt folder to your home directory. Edit the file, be careful of phrases in XML that would confuse the system, Weather, Apple, DTD, String – that sort of thing, also be very careful around TLA’s as they can have unintended side effects. The later scripts that do the keyword searches don’t give a damn about cases, so your keywords or your KeYwOrDs will be equivalent.

You’ll need two more scripts. This one adds tags based on keywords passed to it as parameters: (be VERY careful, little L and capital I look very much the same, read man pages, yo)

tag.sh:

#!/bin/bash

cd /Users/username/Dropbox/Apps/Day\ One/Journal.dayone/entries

find . -type f -print0 |xargs -0 grep -L “<string>”$1″</string>”| xargs grep -li “”$1″” |xargs grep -l “<key>Tags</key>”|xargs -I file /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “add Tags:Key string “$1″” file

find . -type f -print0 |xargs -0 grep -L “<string>”$1″</string>”| xargs grep -li “”$1″” |xargs grep -L “<key>Tags</key>”|xargs -I file /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “add Tags array” file

find . -type f -print0 |xargs -0 grep -L “<string>”$1″</string>”| xargs grep -li “”$1″” |xargs grep -l “<key>Tags</key>”|xargs -I file /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “add Tags:Key string “$1″” file

Next, you’ll need another script called updatetags.sh, looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
cat /Users/andy/Dropbox/Apps/Day\ One/tags.txt|xargs -n 1 /Users/andy/tag.sh

The last bit will be a new LaunchAgent, so go to ~/Library/LaunchAgents and mock up a plist file by copying one from there, if you need an example, try this:

more ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.andymchugh.tag.plist
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN”
“http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”>
<plist version=”1.0″>
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>org.andymchugh.tag</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/Users/andy/updatetags.sh</string>
</array>
<key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
<dict>
<key>Minute</key>
<integer>00</integer>
<key>Hour</key>
<integer>06</integer>
</dict>
</dict>
</plist>

The name of the LaunchAgent has to be unique and the inside name (<string>org.andymchugh.tag</string>) should match the file name like you see here. Swap out the com bit for org, and forget the plist bit. This script will run every day at 6am. You can flavor it to your liking.

Then the final command to tie it all together:

launchctl load -w com.andymchugh.tag.plist

So now, when you write DayOne Journal entries you can mark up the tags.txt file that lives in your Dropbox. Value added, if you change this file anywhere, Dropbox will make sure it syncs up with all your other systems, so you can edit it and forget it pretty nicely as long as it’s not open-for-editing when your script fires off at 6am. That would be messy.

The first time you do it, you’ll notice your Dropbox churn for a long while and then all your other connected Dropboxes will churn as they sync up. Your iPhone and iPad will have huge downloads to do, but they’ll catch up well enough. As you create new DayOne Journal entries you can rest assured that your script will be doing keyword searching for you on your behalf and hooking up your tags to your DayOne Journal entries for you.

Just one more thing automated and out of the way. Hooray!

P.S. Backup your Journal, DIY. Be safe, be smart, learn how to use tar. man tar. Read it. Live it. tar is your delight and your savior. 🙂

EDIT: tags.sh needed a cd command first, otherwise it would just wander aimlessly. Sorry about that.

Slogger

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Memories.Slogger

Every once in a while I run across something I’ve seen before but ignored accidentally until I see it in great big headlines and neon and stop to pay attention to it and discover that it does something I really really want. This particular afternoon it was the product Slogger from Brett Terpstra. The software is a Ruby script, and Ruby is a delightful programming language that I’ve had the pleasure of dabbling in. Nowhere near the level of Brett and the people who help him, but here and there, little things.

The need came from a simple Google query, IFTTT and Day One. Looking for some way to bridge that divide between the automatic web service that I’ve fallen in love with, IFTTT and Day One, the journaling software that works quite well and renders DropBox a “Killer App”. Dropbox is the glue that keeps my Day One system together, on my laptop, my desktop, and all my mobile devices. When I found Slogger it was a definite Eureka moment, the answer all in one place. I downloaded the code as the author describes and tried to set it up.

Monumental fail. Pieces everywhere, error codes puking on the screen faster than I could read, pages and pages of interpreter and compiler errors, all surrounding one “Ruby Gem” module called hpricot. I knew why this was fail-town for me, it was because I had installed XCode CLI tools in order to get the mac_google_authenticator PAM module built. That CLI package rendered my system retarded when it came to processing gem requests. In the Ruby world there is a system established for distributing software written in Ruby, it’s called ‘gem’ and you run it much like apt-get in Ubuntu, it’s really quite straightforward and never has given me fits – until. Everything was complicated by the fact that I couldn’t really find where XCode was on my machine, all the likely targets to search didn’t have anything relevant and my find command returned pages of errors and I didn’t have the patience to pick through a thousand lines of “Permission Denied” to find the one spot where the file was hidden.

Didn’t need to complain, as I knew the solution. Download XCode for real. So off to Apple, download the monster and install it. That satisfied hpricot, and everything else installed quite nicely. I set Slogger up, pointed it at my Dropbox and configured the plugins that I wanted. The initial run crashed and burned but I figured out why, it was an errant space in the line that points to the Day One folder, a symbolic link fixed that and I was again off to the races. Of all the plugins that I configured these were successful:

  1. BlogLogger
  2. facebookifttt
  3. goodreadslogger
  4. lastfmlogger
  5. pocketlogger
  6. rsslogger

Then there were the plugins I tried to configure but couldn’t:

  1. fitbit
  2. flickrlogger
  3. getgluelogger

The primary problem with the fitbit plugin was that fitgem, the Ruby assistant program that you have to install is a phantom. You install it, it’s successful, and then it’s gone. No trace of it exists. You try again, poof, nowhere. Plus for the plugin setup there are API codes, User codes, and oAuth codes. I get the reasoning behind all of them and getting most of them was not an issue. I felt a little awkward creating an “Application” for just myself, it seems kind of a waste of effort to ferret all these bits and peices into a semiformal request procedure, but doing it wasn’t hard or cost anything, so what the hell. The part where it all falls apart for fitbit is where you have to get the oAuth token, since fitgem never worked and it’s invocation from slogger should have opened a web browser and asked for my approval, all of that never happened. I tried to be sporting and do the heavy lifting myself but all I did was irritate the API for fitbit and I figured, what the hell, I got most of what I was after and moved the fitbit plugin into the “unused” folder and forgot all about it. Abandon ship, y’arrrr!

Flickr is a pain in the ass. It’s Yahoo and as such, it’s kind of an Internet leper. You need your Flickr number, there’s a site that makes that easy, except it doesn’t work. Flickr username? Feh, either the one in Flickr or your linked Yahoo ID is meaningless. I half figured it was in the URL anyways, but then I thought about it and I don’t really use Flickr all that much beyond a solitary IFTTT rule and that’s precarious as it is. The only attractive part of Flickr is they gave out 1TB of storage. Still lepers tho. So, abandon ship! Y’arrrrr!

GetGlue was the last great effort. Much like Klout, it’s a site that makes sense sort of, but the name is utterly silly. GetGlue. What the hell? Why? Glue has nothing to do with TV or Movies. The only connection I could think of was celluloid and horses-processed-into-glue sort of connection. They give away stickers, what a wonderful bit of pollution that is, and as a gimmick seems dumb. The plugin needs an RSS feed for the GetGlue Activity Stream. It appears as though the GetGlue folks have moved away from RSS and towards “widgets” which seems stupid as in this application RSS is the answer and widgets are worthless. Alas, Google searching for the RSS feed method was fruitless. I was half hoping for something like http://getglue.com/user/bluedepth/feed.rss, where I could just craft it up and be on my merry way. No. You have to “View Source” to find it, which is stupid because that is so full of CSS flotsam and jetsam as to be utterly incomprehensible. Again, my ardor for that particular service was fog on a hot day. I don’t need it. I don’t use it. Whatever! Abandon ship! y’arrrrr!

So I tried the slogger script, it failed, tore out fitbit goop and then it worked. Then I went into my Day One app and mopped up all the mess that testing had made. The only oddity I noticed was the BlogLogger completely missed out on the text on my WordPress site that was between pre tags. Meh. Not really a reason to kick the entire thing to the curb, just something to honestly stop using. HTML is a right bastard, almost all of the time. CSS is a filthy abomination, but we won’t go there.

I would say that tonight everything will work as it should for Slogger, but I have to race to work tonight to turn everything off because work is going to exit-stage-left when it comes to the Internet. They are turning the entire thing off, at least for a few hours. I can’t wait for tomorrow, there will be lulz.

So, to Mr. Terpstra, thank you for slogger. I’m sorry the plugins didn’t work, that fitgem was a phantom, but at least most of what I wanted worked. So we sound a victory cheer, sort of. Yaaay!

All Set Now

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Beretta 92FS (left)

Earlier today, around 5pm in the afternoon I decided to swing by the Portage Barnes & Nobles Bookstore and get a snack and something to drink from the Cafe. I sat down with my Nook HD and was enjoying my drink and my snack and everything was going just fine until this one fellow came into the Cafe. He seemed like an average guy and I only briefly glanced at him, I half think because he was sitting adjacent to me and instinctually you just want to see who’s near you. I noticed that he was carrying a 9mm handgun in a holster attached to his belt. This was extraordinarily provocative and I couldn’t not notice it even though I tried.

I have talked at length about this very situation in a hypothetical sense with a loved one and I am fully aware of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution and I’m aware that Michigan has a fully respectable non-concealed carry law on the books. Nothing about this was a crime, illegal, or anything like that. It was however provocative, worrisome, and ultimately repellent.

This situation, now that I’ve been faced with it – and I’ve seen people carry weapons like these before, mostly state cops in their uniforms who stop at the bookstore Cafe for some coffee on their way along I–94, has created a new personal rule for me. None of this touches on honest police officers in their uniforms – it’s a part of their job and they have strict rules and extensive training on the conditions where they can access their sidearm. You don’t get bent at your appointed Gunslinger, Jake. But it has created a new rule for regular folk (or out of uniform police, carrying) that if I see that I will leave. I don’t have to remain anywhere I don’t feel safe, I have a car, I have feet, hell, I had my bike in my car. I could have pedaled away if the car wasn’t going to hack it. It isn’t against the law, and it wasn’t a crime, but it was definitely against my sense of safety and the risk was a bright throbbing red cloud around that gun.

How do you know that a situation won’t come up? Mistakes can be made. People can get weapons who shouldn’t have them and people can get permits to carry who really shouldn’t have them – how do you know? The uniform, or if not that, a displayed badge is enough to settle folk, but just a regular guy with a gun? It’s time to leave. So this is my new rule, it’s just for me and not necessarily for anyone else but if I see someone with a gun I will leave. I don’t have to be anywhere – my liberty guarantees me that and it’s all quite humdrum when you get right down to it. It doesn’t have to upset anyone, think of it as “I have to wash my hair” if it makes you feel any better. Just because people are allowed to do something doesn’t also mean that I have to stay where I do not feel safe. A bookstore is the last place where a gun should be, but that’s my personal opinion and the law is quite clear that the fellow carrying the weapon was in his rights to do such a thing, just as much as it was my right to get up and leave.

I know guns. I was trained by a competent marksman on how to handle various weapons and even how to load ammunition. I have read the Second Amendment and I know the law in Michigan. I would suggest that other people heed their surroundings with more consciousness and see people like the fellow I saw and do what they feel comfortable in doing. Each of us has to behave according to the dictates of our conscience and our morality. For me? Staying in a place where I don’t have to be (like the Barnes & Nobles Bookstore) makes it a snap. I just walk away calmly and quietly. I fully understand that the probability of gunplay is quite on the same level of being struck by lightning or winning the lottery, but what I know of a gun and what I know about the fragility of the human psyche – I’m all set now – Time to go.

I just wish there was a provision for private landowners, or in this case tenants of buildings like Barnes & Nobles to establish a Gun-Free Zone. Why have a gun in a bookstore? The people at a bookstore are not stupid, at least that’s the last thing one would expect, and they’ll likely be quiet introverted types who are averse to danger, risk, or doing something stupid. I look in the mirror for that. I know guns, I know people, and I know that the two really shouldn’t be mixed together – especially in public situations. How can you be sure that someone who has a permit to carry a weapon won’t have a spontaneous psychotic break, a stroke, or even temporal lobe epilepsy? What if they suddenly hallucinate danger? It comes down to risk. If you don’t care, then fine – but I do. People are a mess, on their own they are trouble, but with a gun? Now they are even worse trouble. Trouble waiting to happen.

And that’s what it comes down to. A gun is murder waiting to happen. What point is there in even having a weapon if you aren’t going to kill? It serves no other purpose, especially in a bookstore. You aren’t going to hunt a wild volume of Sherlock Holmes bargain book, it just sits there. It’s people you’ll be hunting instead. I often times wish I didn’t know, that I wasn’t so sensitive, that I could just get along and shrug and pay it no mind – but I just can’t.

So, I move along. All set now. Time to go.

photo by: storem

The Fionavar Tapestry – Guy Gavriel Kay

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I am all done reading the trilogy of books in this series that Scott so fondly loves. The books were written well, I’d put them somewhere between three and four stars out of five. The parts that I didn’t much care for were the pacing problems in the text, where the action comes in fits and starts, spasmodically. The background of Arthurian legend that the book rests upon is okay but the love triangle between Guinevere, Arthur, and Lancelot is rather annoying at first, but once established it evens out acceptably well.

The only other thing that I can really put my finger on, as to why I didn’t fall over myself about these books is the lack of setup for much of the book. Places with names that I don’t recognize or can’t put cognates to to keep in my head, the difference between Cader Sedat and Khath Meigol. Who and what the Paraiko are and why they are important, what skylore is and how magic is supposed to function in this fictive universe and the occasional god-drifts as godlings appear from pure deus ex machina to push the story along. You are just plunked down in the middle of Kay’s fictional creation without a map, a guide, or any way to connect common known things to what he’s trying to describe in his writings.

I was expected to feel something for the character of Cavall, but I just couldn’t emotionally connect with much of the characters in the book including Cavall. The only character I could really connect with was Dave Martinyuk’s father, in that I despised him.

The climax scene felt more accidental than momentous with game-changing details being uncovered in the narrative moments before and after the climax of the story comes and goes. While in the third volume of this series you note clearly that the author is running out of pages and hasn’t resolved the “big bad” yet, and I was worried that the resolution was going to be flimsy and cheap. That you can’t really do proper service to overcoming such a impressive villain in just a few pages. Kay takes the cake on this one, he deflates and disposes of the villain on one single page. Awesome cosmic villainy crumpled up and thrown into the trash basket, three-points!

I suppose if I was younger and still smitten with Arthurian legend this book would have read far differently. I cut the book a significant amount of slack because the general reviews are positively glowing and so I rate it higher than I feel I would if I wasn’t biased by the other reviews only because a shot-and-miss shouldn’t be a death knell for an authors work. It didn’t work for me, but three and a half stars because it might work for you. Without the other reviews I would have given it two stars and thrown the books with great force.

As I commented while reading, mocking Guinevere in these books “Oh Arthur! I love you! It’s so good that Lancelot isn’t here because then you’d be so much trash to kick to the curb. We are so lucky that I can settle with your minimal acceptability. — Oh! Look! It’s, uh, Lancelot. Hi there. {pose and moan}” LOL.

Knock Down The Door Easy Chicken

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Knock Down The Door Easy Chicken

2 chicken breasts
3 tbsp of Mayonnaise
2 tsp of Herbes de Provence
1 1/2 cups Italian Breadcrumbs

You will need a cookie sheet or other flat baking sheet, cover it in Aluminum Foil and spritz with non-stick spray to make cleanup a snap. Cut the breasts in half horizontally to make four thinner breasts. Put the mayo in a bowl with the Herbes de Provence and mix well. For each breast, brush on the mayo and herbes mixture thickly on both sides of the breast then dredge in breadcrumbs and place breast on cookie sheet. Repeat this for all the breasts. Heat oven to 350 degrees and place cookie sheet in oven for half an hour. At the end, test each breast with an instant-read thermometer and verify that it is greater than 150 degrees inside each breast. Plate and serve. Serves two to four people.

Doo

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As I was looking through my Pocket saved items I noticed an article from MacSparky in regards to a new service called Doo. It’s supposed to index all your documents and tag them so you can find them faster than with Spotlight. So, I downloaded the app and set it up. It pegged my MBP for hours and hours with fan-churning processing and made the entire laptop unusable. Then I noticed it had tried to index pictures, something I wish there was a way to turn off, but I couldn’t find it. I then noticed a section in Preferences and a place to define rules. But I didn’t know what some of the rules meant so I went online to search for documentation. All I could find was a hopelessly poor support site and absolutely no documentation whatsoever. So, that pretty much does that. Also they hand out 25GB of storage, but it’s unclear what they are storing. The index or copies of the files? Anyways, it was a mistake and I emptied the app, revoked all the links to my other cloud services and requested the company dispose of my account. I won’t ever be back. What a mess.

If you see Doo.net advertised, just skip it.

Who are you, Hugh?

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Several days ago, on May 24th I left work and headed home, on my usual path which takes me right through the center of Kalamazoo. I drive down East Michigan Ave headed east towards Eastwood, towards Kalamazoo Township where my home is. I’ve taken this path countless times and on a lark I had the roof of my car wide open and I was stopped at the light where East Michigan and Edwards Streets meet, waiting for the signal to turn. While I was waiting in traffic I idly looked up through the roof and I noticed a building, 275 East Michigan Ave. It was a plain building, tan with red highlights and I didn’t think anything of it until I noticed something unusual about it:

2013-06-05-HughMcHugh1885-Kalamazoo

 

Wha? Hugh J. McHugh 1885. He was someone important as his name was etched into the façade, on a nameplate of all things. This started me thinking. I knew that there were several notable McHugh’s, they had migrated to Chicago and I had a hunch that that family started MCHUGH construction which has been a part of several roadway projects in the city of Chicago. Just the idea that there might be someone with my last name in Kalamazoo isn’t really a huge surprise. Is he a relation of mine, other than his last name? I don’t know. But I did some research on him anyways and added him to my MCHUGH tree on Ancestry.com just for shits and giggles. He’s just an island at the moment as I can’t connect him to anyone in my family tree at all, at least not yet.

This is what I know of Hugh. He was 45 years old in 1880, he was in the US Federal Census in 1880 in Kalamazoo Michigan. He worked as a stone mason and later on he was appointed or elected to “Alderman” in Kalamazoo. I don’t know if the aldermen were elected or appointed.  He was also the subject of a Michigan Supreme Court decision, thanks to some documents I found at UMICH online. Something about a law in 1885 and a bond for mechanical something or other. He was married to Ann McHugh (Willson), she was 53 and was a Housekeeper. Rosa, their eldest child and daughter was 17 and worked as a “Servant”, Thomas was 15 and a Painter, Joseph was 11 and listed as “At Home” and they all lived with their maternal grandmother Sarah Willson who was 84 and stayed at home.

One curious little extra bit which I found remarkable was that in the Michigan Supreme Court case, a name shows up, Oscar T. Tuthill. I saw the name and just giggled. Tuthill is a name on my maternal grandfathers side of my family. So, we’ve got McHugh’s and Tuthill’s in Kalamazoo (or Lansing probably for Tuthill), something interesting to knock around at least.

It’s a surprise to see your family name carved in stone and on a building that has been there for 128 years.

I’ve gone as far as I can with Ancestry as I don’t have a paid account. It’s interesting and when I have some spare time maybe I can find the archivist at WMU and make some inquiries there. They’ve got stuff dating back to this period and more.

Byword 2.0

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Byword, one of my favorite apps for the Mac and for my iOS devices just upgraded to version 2.0. They have included publishing to blog platforms as a Premium feature and used the Mac App Store or iOS to distribute the added functionality for $4.99. So far I love this app and this was one of those features that I’ve been dying for, so I’m quite pleased. I can do all my writing using Byword and not have to worry about distractions or anything on the screen getting in the way of my writing. It’s all clear, clean, and simple.

The last post to my WordPress blog about Invention was written using Byword 2.0 and I’m quite impressed with it. I could suggest some other enhancements like enumerating the Category list and suggesting possible tags in WordPress posting, but I will take what I can get from the get-go. One thing that was a little dismaying, but not a show stopper was that the purchase of the Premium add-on only works for the App Store that matches the platform you are buying it for. The Premium add-on for Mac App Store is separate from the one for the iOS App Store. Their support was very clear and I pretty much assumed so even before I wrote to support, I just wanted to be sure. Frankly I could give or take the extra features on my iPad or my iPhone as Drafts works brilliantly there along with Poster app on those devices. Drafts hands off to Poster well enough without having to worry about buying Byword 2.0 Premium again for the iOS App Store. I bought the add-on for the Mac App Store because that’s where, when I blog on my Laptop or on my iMac, this will be the app that I’ll use to blog.

The only irking thing, and it’s not really anything really overwrought is the lack of pick lists and tag suggestions for WordPress, but I have faith that eventually they might take their software in that direction. Only time will tell, and developers. 🙂

Invention

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I may or may not have just invented something new! I’ve been pondering for a while how to feed all my apple trees. Specifically this came about when I looked at my Weather Underground app and noticed a rather beautiful but dry week ahead for us here in southwest Michigan. The problem is, how do I water the trees where I don’t overdo it, where I don’t spend a while outside being a buffet for mosquitoes, and where I can water my trees on days that won’t have any rain without having to fuss any.

As I was walking home from taking the bus today it struck me as I was looking at all the lawns and gardens that I pass on my way home from the bus stop on East Main Street. Why not repurpose gallon-sized water bottles? I buy pure water for my cats drinking and food-additive water when I go to the market anyways and after I scrounged around the house I found three exhausted one-gallon jugs of purified water. Usually I just crumple them up and throw them in the single stream recycling bin where they go to be recycled, but as I was walking it struck me, why not poke very tiny holes in the water jugs and then I could put them out by the trees base and let the jugs drip-water my trees. It works wonderfully well! I keep the plastic from the recycling stream and I can fill them up in the morning with exactly one gallon of clean water and then cap them. One teeny hole at the top lets in air while there are two teeny little holes at the bottom that slowly let the water drip into the tree’s base. I don’t have to screw around holding the hose, wondering how much water I’m delivering and exposing myself to those nasty little bloodsuckers, at least not any more than I have to in order to water my trees. The only trick was figuring out what to make the holes with. The perfect tool is a thumbtack but I don’t have any at home, no application for them, so I tried the next best thing – flair-button pins! We’ve got a decorative glass bowl full of flair buttons. I grabbed a worthless one that nobody would care about and pulled it’s pin out, turning it into a kind of funny looking thumbtack. It did the job perfectly. Poked a next-to-invisible hole at the top, then two or three in the base and that’s that, all done! I went outside, filled the jugs with water and walked them over to the trees. Over the span of maybe half an hour the jugs will lose all their water. I know I have delivered one gallon of very slow drip-drip-drip water to my trees, not flooding them and not having to worry about how much or exposure. In the mornings when it won’t rain I can go outside and with the hose fill up each jug lickety split. Cap them and walk away.

It’s free, easy, and I think at least a fair bit clever. I think this could also work really well for our garden once we get it going. No more having to worry about how much water, how frequently, or any of that. And no more buying stupid “watering hoses” that disintegrate or don’t work properly when you get them home. This way it’s free, active recycling, and for four apple trees, that’s four gallons of water. Bam. I could even sneak some fertilizer in there and shake the devil out of them and dissolve the fertilizer or food and walk away.

If you find this useful, please comment here, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Google+ as I link-dump on all those other services as well.