Shoots & Leaves

Comfrey


Redcurrant

So

That time of year again; out with the seed packets, pots, propagators and compost. First off, in the flowery corner, French marigolds, cosmos and Canterbury bells and for the veg box, tomatoes, Brussels sprouts, broccoli and more broad beans.

Pong

Difficult to propagate and extreemely slow growing, Daphne Odora is in flower now, giving off the most incredible scent.

Flash Geek Talk

Couldn't get the BBC iPlayer to work today, after having to reinstall Mac OSX on my PowerBook, a shaggy dog story in itself, made all the more challenging by not having a working CD drive at the time.

Although some things are back to normal, I lost all my email addresses, despite backing up the Address Book, which now refuses to be imported into the new system. So if you haven't heard from me in a while, drop me an email so I can get your address back.

The physical installation of a new CD/DVD drive, with which to attempt to reset the unrecognised administrator password with a system disk, having tried and failed to do this by entering commands in the terminal window on startup, appears to have resulted in a mishap on the logic or motherboard, causing the Level 3 Cache to fail: Only one of the two 512MB memory cards are now recognised, which at first I thought just meant that one had come loose during the operation, but having swapped them both around, it's evident that the problem's deeper. I bore you with all this, because for a while, I wondered if this was why I couldn't watch telly on my iPlayer.

After some poking around I found that the minimum version of the Flash plugin required for the iPlayer is 9.0.115 and I only had 9.0.46. (There are a few handy sites that can tell you what version you're using, like this one at Adobe)

Except of course there are always weird exceptions and somehow, I got some of the large screen version of the iPlayer working in 9.0.46, which made me erroneously think for a while that it was iPlayer's fault, not mine.

It was tempting to follow the links and try to install the latest version 10.2, which is what Channel 4/4OD requires now (even though last week, like the iPlayer it worked fine with 9.0.46 or whatever I had installed then) but on closer inspection, that doesn't work on older PPC Macs. Instead, you have to download a whole collection of old versions from Adobe and select and install the relevant one, but before you install a new version of Flash it's recommended that you uninstall the old version, which requires an uninstaller that you have to download from Adobe too.

Half a dozen restarts and a few hours later, most of the iPlayer functionality is back, but along with the other pre-Intel Mac users out there, I'm now excluded from watching 4OD.

Spud U Forgot

Making the most of some sunshine and clearing a patch of ground, I came across half a kilo of potatoes from last year which were perfectly edible and enough for a meal.

Prima rosa

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