Worms farms are pretty simple pieces of equipment. You have a few layers of trays where you put your veggie scraps and worms, separated by a perforated mesh that the worms can move through. The top and bottom are sealed to keep the worms in and insects out, while collecting (very fertile) liquid at the very bottom. You fill the bottom tray with scraps, then move on to the next tray up. When the worms are done with the bottom tray, you empty it into your garden as wonderful compost and soil improver, move that tray to the top and continue.

Most worm farms are made out of molded plastic. The structures are very simple. The material is cheap. The Chinese manufacturing miracle should be able to churn these things almost for free.

Thing is, the cheapest I've been able to find is $65 from The Watershed, run by Marrickville and Sydney councils. At Bunnings the cheapest is about $80, yet you can buy a Mitre Saw, full of complex machinery and electronics, for $30. Someone, somewhere is making a lot of profit on these worm farms.

If anyone out there has any expertise in plastics moulding and mass manufacturing, there's a lot of money to be made undercutting these price gougers.

One option is to make your own, but it shouldn't be so hard!

Now that I can do GPRS at only mildly extortionate rates ($0.0058 per kb from Exetel, thanks to Graeme's tip) I've been playing with Jabber clients on my mobile. It can be kinda handy, and it's kinda cool. Problem is, all the clients I've found are either seriously crap or lilwannabebillgatesware.

So does anyone know of a Jabber client for J2ME (or native Symbian) that is free/libre and doesn't suck?

I also wonder if you can get one that gzip compresses the Jabber stream. The Jabber protocol is _incredibly_ verbose XML, which means it could cost quite a bit uncompressed but would be easily compressed.

I just downloaded Safari, Apple's web browser, and installed it on the Windows machine here at work. It didn't stay on my hard drive long.

First problem is it doesn't support proxy servers. Presumably this is a beta "feature" which will be fixed soon. Second thing is it refuses to act in a Windows-ish way, instead having all the sizzle and CPU-burning features of OSX. Bollocks to that! If I wanted all that crap, I'd run OSX.

This is a pretty common thing for Apple to do. It's also the reason I don't have Quicktime installed. I can't stand applications that unilaterally decide to ignore all the UI standards of the host OS. Imagine how rabid the Apple fanbois would be if a Windows application didn't do things in an OSX-ish way?

Regardless, all I wanted to do is be able to test sites in Safari. It'll have to wait until proxies work.

Much of my work uses Skype for instant messaging and since the development is in completely the wrong timezone, I have to run it. This meant I installed it on my laptop at home. Recently though it's been crashing my entire machine. Full, hard lockup. Not sure what freaky stuff they're doing, but it's a good reminder to stick with free software.

Looks like I'm not the only one too.

When did web site become a single word?

I figure the word "chutzpah", as mentioned in Mediawatch last night, probably isn't the most familiar term to Australian gentiles. It's a fantastic word so I thought I'd start a series of examples. Feel free to send in your examples. BTW, it's always been pronounced "hoos-pah" or "hoots-pah" by my Jewish friends, rather than how you'd expect from the spelling.

Chutzpah is... honking your horn at the kid riding across the pedestrian crossing on his BMX, while driving an SUV with two kids in the back and talking on a hand-help mobile phone. (Spotted this morning on Erskineville Road.)

Keating's still got it. The prime minister who made question time worth watching still has his acid tongue.

"The thing about poor old Costello is he is all tip and no iceberg."

Brilliant!

We've been using MythTV over the weekend using my shiny new silent front-end. Turns out, surprisingly to me, that the front-end has enough grunt to play Xvid encoded videos just fine, so we've been working through the backlog of great stuff from UKNova. I expected to have to re-encode it all as MPEG2, for which it has a hardware decoder, but it seems to be able to decode it all on its own.

Some people asked about the hardware I chose for my front-end, so I'll detail it here and some caveats.

I bought a Via EPIA ME6000 mini-ITX motherboard on the basis of this site and because I wanted something tried and trusted, that "just works" rather than faff about. The Melbourne company I bought it off, can't remember the name sorry, put it in a case with a CF-to-IDE adapter so the CF card slots into the front of the case. Very nice! Most important feature is it's completely solid state. No fans!

It runs Minimyth from a Compact Flash card. Minimyth was a joy to install, though configuration was somewhat trickier. It doesn't give particularly great feedback. As a result of this, I ended up ditching my existing serial-based remote and IR receiver and buying a Streamzap, which is well-supported and Just Works.

If you're going out buying kit, you'll find the ME6000 is hard to find. Via have a few other fanless motherboards, but be careful as some of the newer chipsets aren't supported by OpenChrome, the drivers for the hardware MPEG decoder.

My only criticism of Minimyth is that it includes a few Myth plugins like MythStream but doesn't include the interpreters they require, like Perl of Python. Granted, this is supposed be a lightweight system but there's little point including these items if you can't use them! As it is, MythStream is ridiculously complicated and, disappointingly, MythMusic doesn't seem to handle streaming media. I just want to add GPC!

Finally, the system is connected via wired ethernet at present. At some point I intend to try it out over wireless, to see if there's enough bandwidth. I expect there should be enough, and that means one less cable running around, which helps with the GAF.

Overall, very very happy with my setup. I picked up 2x300GB hard drives yesterday and now just need to buy a SATA card for the backend. Also need to slot in the new DVB tuner I bought last week.

Last night there was a huge storm in Sydney. Given how hot it was all weekend, that's not terribly surprising. Was a pretty cool storm, going from about 23:00 until well after midnight, as it kept swirling around. We'd be just dropping off to sleep when another crack of thunder would shake the house.

Anyway, we're sitting out the front watching the cool lightning displahy when both Holly and I spotted a very bright, green glow to the North-West. It was green lightning, but perhaps behind clouds.

Searching online, I've found other references to green lightning, but nothing explaining what causes it. Then again, it seems the causes of ordinary lightning are, amazingly, still open for debate, let along exotic types of lightning.

So anyone know anything about green lightning?

We've finally got MythTV up and running properly. I have a fanless Via EPIA system sitting on top of the telly as the front-end running MiniMyth. It's very very nice!

I had trouble getting my existing, serial remote receiver going with MiniMyth. It wasn't made any easier by being so difficult to debug on that platform, and my laptop not having serial connectors. So I ended buying a known working remote with the config files found here.

Still to get working is mounting my music and other video on the front-end using Samba or NFS. Also need to plug in the new DVB card I bought last night, which will involve some shuffling around of cards in the server. And I need to buy a SATA interface card to connect the 600GB of disks that Moz has for me.

So far, with only one tuner and 16GB of disk space, I'm very very happy with it! I just wish Australian TV was better at sticking to their bloody schedules. With more than one tuner, I can set it up to record five minutes either side, but I shouldn't have to.