I recently read the book “The Forgotten Forest” subtitled “in search of the lost plants and fungi of Aotearoa” by author Robert Vennell who is a natural science curator at the Auckland Museum.

I have a few weeks off on leave so time to do all those jobs I have been putting off. One task is to upgrade the old noisy fans in my PC tower case.

I decided to replace them with 1700 rpm Noctua NF-P12 Redux fans which are a decent performing budget choice.

For Christmas 2022 I got some Diamine 'gold star' fountain pen ink, it comes in a cool bottle in the shape of an eight-pointed star: 

I have updated this website to run on Drupal 9.

There are a lot of back end changes, but the most obvious is the new theme. The URL is now rhizobia.nz rather than www.rhizobia.co.nz just to keep it short and simple.

I have kept the new Drupal 9 default theme 'Olivero' with almost no customisations so I don't have to keep up with security issues running a custom theme.

The Akai Pro MPK mini is a MIDI keyboard controller. Below is the firmware for the third version of this variably annotated as III or MK3

The links below go directly to the Akai website. The dates I have extracted from the creation date of the exe file.

My favourite song of the New Zealand band 'Headless Chickens' is called "Day of the Locust" from their third album "Greedy" released 1997. I bought this album on release in my teens. I could not find any lyrics online, so I transcribed them here myself. My copy of the album was unfortunately destroyed. As an interesting note both the bass guitarist and the drummer of this band (during this album) are also named Bevan!. Lyrics and music copyright Headless Chickens 1997, transcription CC BY 4.0 Bevan Weir 2021:

Thanks to the COVID-19 lockdown in New Zealand I have spent most of my working days at home rather than going to the office. Since I have a 50 km commute per day, I noticed that I am using much less petrol in the car. This got me wondering if this was a universal trend. I pulled the quarterly stats from MBIE and did a quick plot. The results of the last quarter are dramatic:

This collections of links is mostly for me, it links directly to the searchable web database rather than a webpage about the collection itself.

I can never seem to get on top of my emails, I feel like there is just too many coming in to deal with, many need considered answers or actual work to be done. Currently I am sitting on 281 unread emails which never seems to reduce.

I wondered if there was a way to plot my unread email over time, to feel some sense of accomplishment in dealing with these. I didn't manage to find a way how to do this, but I did find a piece of software called OutlookStatView that extracts statistics from your email inbox.

GenBank from the NCBI is an amazing and invaluable resource for DNA sequences, and combined with the searching tool BLAST it is really easy to identify your unknown gene sequence.