I've seen a couple of droppings on the lawn over the last week that I assumed might be cat, or maybe fox, but I've come to the conclusion that it's almost definitely hedgehog. They're very dark, sticky and show evidence of bits of beetle. Though according to my research you'd expect worms, fruit and seeds to be a major constituent too – which could well be the case here.

We have seen a hedgehog snuffling around the borders so it seems like a reasonable leap of logic. Cats don't tend to go on open grass, much preferring the freshly dug earth of the vegetable patch. There's not much for the urban fox in our back garden, and I'd expect bigger doings from such an animal anyway. I wonder if you can toilet train a hedgehog…

Hedgehog Poo

I was digging the borders in the garden this afternoon, and amidst the stones, buried crazy paving pathway and weeds I found some interesting bugs. First up, a millipede, though I couldn't tell you what sort. My brief research suggests there are at least 50 UK species of millipede and they can be quite hard to tell apart. It was about 30mm long I'd say.

Millipede 2

I got him side on from low down in this second shot, to see the little legs working away underneath in a wave like motion up the body. Millipedes have two pairs of legs per body section, easily seen here, whereas centipedes only have one pair per section. As always, click for bigger version. That's a gardening book in the background – we have a lot to learn!

Millipede 1

Precisely one week after it was launched, my copy of Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" landed on my desk at work. Apple claim to have posted it last Friday, but the bank holiday weekend and postal strikes have conspired to keep me waiting this long.

On my recent Mac Pro it installed in 28 minutes and recovered a startling 31GB of disk space. I'm not quite sure how it managed that to be honest, as it's a lot more than most others are reporting. [Update: actually I suspect it's because Apple have changed the definition of a GB for Snow Leopard, so my comparisons of space used before and after are not comparing like for like. Now 1GB = 10^9 = 1,000,000,000 bytes, whereas previously it was 2^10 * 2^10 * 2^10 = 1024 * 1024 * 1024 = 1,073,741,824 bytes.]

That same Mac Pro is also capable of booting into the 64 bit kernel by holding down '6' and '4' during boot. You can check it's worked in System Profiler, where on the Software page it should say  "64-bit Kernel and Extensions: Yes". I've not noticed any abnormalities and supposedly it might run a bit faster this way, so if it stays good then I'll probably set it to 64 bit kernel permanently.

Note that only XServe machines boot with the 64 bit kernel by default, and many 64 bit Macs (like older Core 2 Duo MacBooks) can't do so because they lack 64 bit EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface).

SnowLeopardDockMenu

In general I like Snow Leopard – it's the same as Leopard but all round snappier and a bit nicer. Some changes confuse me though. Take the new arbitrarily styled menus for dock items, as shown below. Nothing else in the system looks the same, and that's probably a good thing because it's hard to read, with the section heads and tick marks being far too low contrast. They're almost invisible! A real UI own goal if you ask me. Maybe they designed it before they set the gamma to 2.2

03. September 2009 · Comments Off on Test Page · Categories: Uncategorized

This is a test of the pages mechanism of TypePad.

It's starting to get wet and wild outside as autumn replaces summer and that means it's time for big brown spiders in the bath. Here's one that Mrs C was delighted to find last night. Click for scarier, larger version!

BathSpider (1)

A bit of research suggests this is an example of Tegenaria Duellica – i.e. Common House Spider in UK parlance. There seems to be a bit of confusion out there on the web (ho ho) as to the many close varieties of Tegenaria, but I think consensus is that Duellica and Gigantea are in fact the same thing, with Gigantea being the deprecated nomenclature.

This example is about 6cm across the legs, with perhaps a 16mm body. The long legs and slender body suggest it's a male, which makes sense as it's the males out roaming for a mate at this time of year, which is why we see so many of them all of a sudden.