Bush-Cricket

This morning I went to help a friend with his computer. Before I left the house I noticed a nice spider's web on a gate, so I took a few pictures.

Fixing my friend's computer was a 5 minute job. He had run a routine upgrade on his Mint Debian/Linux server and installed the boot loader on the root partition not the master boot sector of the disk. So once the hardware had done it's thing it passed control over to the old boot loader which didn't know where things were and it couldn't work. It was a simple case of booting the computer with a live disk and then chrooting to the root partition on the disk and running the standard GRUB installer from there - installing GRUB in the right place this time. When we rebooted the hardware passed control to the new boot loader which knows where things are and hey presto it all works again!

I then had ago at trying to make osmosis work so he could convert open street map data into something he can use on his phone. Osmosis is written in Java, which is something I don't really know and I really don't like. After an hour of trying to make it work and pasting a wide range of unhelpful error messages into Google we gave up and I went home.

Today's blip is a young bush-cricket (a Tettigoniidae of some sorts, possibly a speckled bush-cricket, Leptophyes punctatissima) that I spotted on the way home.

This afternoon I had a go at fixing the skirting boards back onto the wall, but plaster is so thick than I don't have any screws long enough to go through the wood and the air gap and then far enough into the wall to grip. So I've built up the area where I want to fix the skirting board to the wall and I'll have a fresh go tomorrow (possibly with longer screws). DIY is always one step forward and two back...