Once again we’ve been offline for a few hours. Since last night in-fact up until I noticed this morning. I immediately thought another ‘update’ to the weather station software was to blame (it usually is)…

Turns out Microsoft pushed out a Windows Update last night which was sitting there asking me something about credentials before it would continue. This, obviously, stopped the weather station from loading in the first place. Most irritating.

Automatic updates of Windoze now turned off until I manually let them install.

Having spent 2 weeks wondering why all the charts were showing no data and tinkering with everything I could think of to no avail…

I realised this morning that an automatic update of the weather software on the website turned off historical data collection, which was the cause of the blank charts. #annoying

It’s all turned back on now so everything should populate over the next few hours. Apologies for the loss of service. Just in-case anyone cares 😉

Got up at 5am today thanks to it being (a) sunny and (b) warm and (c) those damned pigeons making that silly cooing sound…

It’s likely to be the hottest day of the year so-far in Leavening today, high 20s certainly and that’s pretty warm up here in the Northlands of Ryedale. The forecast reminded me that my UV Forecast had stopped working some time ago and, as it’s likely to be at record levels today, I thought it was time to fix it. It’s now working again on the main UV forecast page, the table on the main welcome page of the website and in my weather forecasts. Phew. Just in time…

It’s such a nice day I went for a walk and took a load of photos – you can see these in the header images on the pages. Unless you’re in the mobile phone view in which case the headers are hidden to speed things up a bit.

I hope you like the photos and watch out for this year’s fungus foray images which will be appearing soon. I’ve already found some Panaeolus and a tonne of LBJs (little brown jobbies) – looks like this might be a bumper year 😉

OH my, I posted that I’d fixed the issue with the graphing (see below) due to an updated version of some software which didn’t work correctly… 2 hours later the thing updated itself again despite me telling it not to. Therefore it stopped working again because it was back on the new (broken) version. I’ve downgraded it again and hopefully it can’t update until I let from now on. Let’s see what happens next 😉

If you’re a regular visitor you may have noticed that some data has been missing recently … I finally discovered that a WordPress Plug-In I’m using to present some of the data updated itself automatically and new version doesn’t work ;-(

It took me a week to work out what had happened, annoyingly. The author has promised to fix things with a new release at the end of March – lets hope this happens otherwise we’re stuck on the old version. Apologies for the issues.

About 18 months ago I decided to make something I’d found on instructables.com. Turns out it was rather more difficult than I’d anticipated but, due to Furlough boredom, I finally finished it …

https://www.instructables.com/VFD-Alarm-Clock/

It would have been cheaper and a lot easier to just buy a clock, of course. Next project is a Geiger Counter – I’m not sure why as I don’t think we have much radiation in Leavening 😉

I recently found this rare poroid mushroom whilst on holiday. In Britain the Orange Porecap is a recent introduction (or maybe the appearance of this sub-tropical species is the result of global warming); it is currently recorded in the UK from Devon and Cornwall.

This striking pored member of the family Mycenaceae originated in Madagascar, from where it spread – presumably when timber was being shipped – to Australia and New Zealand. Over the past couple of decades the Orange Porecap has been spreading across Europe, and its range now includes parts of Italy and Spain.

I’ve been out photographing mushrooms again and this year’s proving to be a bumper one … I’ve spotted more than ever and you can see a selection by looking at the images here.

Very excited to announce that I also found a rare/endangered Pink Ballerina Waxcap (Porpolomopsis Calyptriformis) on my travels around the area. Here she is :

So, no sooner than I declare everything’s working it goes and breaks.

Eagle eyed viewers might have noticed that a lot of the data entries on the main website pages were empty. This was caused by a database issue and is now fixed.

Unfortunately, it coincided with my having emptied my study in order to redecorate it so I couldn’t fire up a computer in order to fix it for a few days. Obviously, this isn’t acceptable but, hey, my study looks great now and it’s never happened before…

Also, we had issues with the rain gauge which are now fixed. The field containing the rain gauge had a herd of cows in it so I decided to wait until they’d been moved before trying to diagnose the lack of recorded rain. This is because I promised the kids they could help and I didn’t think it was safe for them. Turns out a combination of muck, spiders, moss and a leaf were to blame. All cleaned and fixed now so we should see much better data going forwards.

Today, Tuesday 22nd September 2020, is the first day I’m happy that every page looks okay and works as expected on the whole weather station. It’s a cause for celebration because, previously, there have always been odd parts which didn’t function as intended. Fingers crossed nothing breaks as I have more pages to add later this week…