Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

A daily posting on living with chronic fatigue, thinking about stuff and finding interesting stuff on the internet.
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Notes and links from 26 Aug

A view of the sky through some trees. The sky is dark and stormy.

A few days ago I was mulling over using our garden geodesic dome as a rainwater collection conduit. Not because it’s a particularly practical idea (the house roof is just over there and has guttering already installed) but as a dumb fun exercise. Soon after, Fi was continuing her slow emptying of junk in the attic and came down with a gazebo tent, albeit with no poles, which has been used to protect the camera obscura when it rained and was now without purpose.

A view into the geodesic dome. A joint of the dome is in the middle of the frame with six poles coming out of it. Behind is a green gazebo tent covering strung between four joints. Under the middle is a large plastic container on a small table.

On a whim I laid it out and measured it and the distance between the guy-rope hoops turned out to be exactly the same as the distance between three dome joints. Given a square was never going to perfectly match the corners of a decagon this was as good as it was going to get.

A view of the geodesic dome from above and to the side. A green gazebo tent is hung from four joints of the dome. Under the middle is a large plastic container on a small table.

Thunder storms have been forecast this week and today was the prelude. I hung the tent in the dome, cut a hole in the middle, weighed it down with a couple of crowbars and stuck a container underneath.

And it worked! An hour of rain half-filled a 45 litre Samla box!

Photograph of a large IKEA plastic container half-filled with dirty water.

Now, the trick is to automatically feed it from that relatively low position into a large storage butt, lest we be swapping out buckets during the next storm, but that’s for another day.

I spent a bit of time this morning fiddling with the layout of this blog, most obviously putting link emojis in front of each link in the link lists and making the section dividers within the post a little more obvious. It was pleasing. I like iterative design.