🌧️ It’s 9:30pm and it is raining, finally. Thank you Kiko. Short lived, but it was something. Please keep it coming over the next couple of days.
Well today has gone from clear blue skies this morning to a slow build up of cloud from late afternoon. Hurricane Kiko approaches. Currently a category 1 hurricane, having weakened from a category 4 as it has crossed the Central Pacific Basin, it might still weaken further to a Tropical Storm … still not something that you want to be standing right in front of.
😮💨 Phew! After an hour or so of back and forth, installing one node/satellite at a time, I now have a new mesh system installed between a couple of buildings. This is our third configuration over…hhmmm, maybe 5 or 6 years? The other two started working fine, and then started playing up. Fingers crossed for this setup. It feels the most robust to me.
Sunset view one evening on Pico Island, looking across the water to Faial Island and Pico Gorda (3,422ft/1,043m), The Açores.
I can’t remember when I first came across the art work of Vlad Gerasimov, but I liked his wallpapers enough such that I took out a membership to his website.
Over the last two nights we watched the Netflix documentary, Shark Whisperer. As my review says, I found Ocean Ramsey’s story fascinating, it kept me watching, and the photography is beautiful. 🍿
When I am traveling, out on the road, and the busyness and run around of travel gets too much. When I find myself tired and in need of a rest. When I need to get away from the crowds and I pass a church that is open, from my experience most are open, I like to go inside and just sit quietly by myself. To meditate, regroup and come back to myself. I can then leave feeling refreshed.
This church is in Sete Ciades, on the island of São Miguel in the Açores.
Finished reading: The Guru Drinks Bourbon? by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse 📚
I sit here drinking my morning coffee and watch dark clouds drop rain out over the ocean as they take a circuitous route around Maui’s north shore coast. This island badly needs some rain and I wish that the clouds would detour from their route and head to land, this land.
It’s Not Possible to Deauthorize my Kobo Remotely
Browsing a thread on Mastodon this morning I learnt that it is not possible to remotely deauthorize a Kobo eReader. That came as a shock to me. This is not a good situation if you have had your Kobo eReader stolen, as was the case with the original poster of the thread that I was reading, or you loose it.
We went to see the new movie The Roses last night. 🍿
My grandson has suddenly taken a keen interest in jigsaw puzzles, so I brought up this one that I had at home to do with him. He was doing well with it, but in the end it proved that little too advanced for him. I went ahead and finished it anyway. 🧩
How still it is this morning. Not a breath of wind and only the birds singing. It’s as though the world knows that it is the weekend.
This morning’s rainbow…and “yes,” that is a slip and slide going down that hill. 🌈
While I was studying for my Masters I wrote a paper on lichen and moss. Sadly I remember very little about the contents of the paper except a couple of points,
- Lichen are multi organism, or multi species of plants. This from Wikipedia,
is a hybrid colony of algae or cyanobacteria living symbiotically among filaments of multiple fungus species, along with bacteria embedded in the cortex or “skin”, in a mutualistic relationship. Lichens are the lifeform that first brought the term symbiosis (as Symbiotismus) into biological context.
- Both moss and lichen (I think lichen especially) like clean air to thrive.
I took these photographs yesterday of two tree trunks in our back garden. I am taking their coverage in both lichen and moss as a good indication of the good air quality that we have here.
The Bunker: Wednesday 27th August, 2025
All credit to the artist(s) 🎨
These updates are to the back side of the Bunker and inside of the building. When I took the inside shots the smell of fresh paint still lingered.
Finished reading: Poison is Medicine by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse 📚
Kobo and Instapaper
Last night I was sitting reading a book on my Kobo Libra H2O, when notification of an update for the eReader popped up. Earlier this year Pocket, the read later service, announced that it was being discontinued. Pocket was integrated with Kobo devices so that web pages could be read later on Kobo. Although I am not a heavy user of read later tools - I tend to collect rather than read - I did appreciate being able to keep a handful of articles so that I could read them at the end of the day through my Kobo screen rather than on my Apple devices.
Nighttime.
Finished reading: Jénifer, or a French Princess - The (Truly) Unknown Islands (Jénifer, ou a Princesa da França - os Açores ignorados, in Portuguese) by Joel Neto 📚