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  Warm apple pie with ice cream 😋 Thanks @vaviurka@social.tchncs.de! #Yum #Food #Dessert

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  My bush experiments. I rescued these three from various horrible places inside rusty fences I was removing and/or choked with Virginia creeper. Planted them here to see what happens. They looked pretty dead for a while, but two out of three are alive and produced new leaves and twigs. One gooseberry and one rosehip. Particularly happy about the rosehip surviving. Makes nice filling for Krapfen. Or winter bird food. The fruit stays on the bush long after frost and snow. The other half of the g...

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  Put MX Linux on the nice Latitude E7470 we bought a while ago because its time @vaviurka@social.tchncs.de's bitrotting ancient Windows machine gets retired. All seems to be working hardware wise so far. Her software needs are simple: Firefox, LibreOffice, VLC, darktable, PDF thingie But now the challenge: Getting Civ 5 with Vox Populi to work :-P #Linux #LinuxGaming #Civ5

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  So many Youtube DIYers don't know about concrete vibrators and do shitty concrete pours or add excessive water to make it more "flowy". Mine was €60 from Ali and has done a fantastic job so far. Especially with casting against the old foundation it really gets the concrete flowing into the gaps between the stones to lock them in place. I see the air bubbles pop out of them when getting the tip near one and the concrete level drops as it flows in. Same for making sure it flows int...

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  Underway, #Knirps spotted this tractor and demanded we rescue it, so I pulled it out and chucked it in the trunk. Going to need some cleanup and repairs, I think. #Tractor #Toy #DumpsterDiving #Recycling

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  Chilling in the shade. #Funcik #Dog #DogsOfMastodon #DogsOfFedi #Garden #Well #Shade #Summer

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  Did ETA (Electronic Travel Authorisation) for an IT-inept relative who needs (not wants) to travel to Brexitannia and jeez, what a faff. Then you get to pay £20 in addition to the hour it took to get a photo in front of a white wall and a photo of the passport that their OCR could read and then pay through my Revolut account because their bank blocks foreign payments and each time restart the entire process because there's no login and the session expires and must be restarted from scra...

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  Uprooted bush refuses to believe its dead. Perhaps I should just replant it somewhere. 🤔 Also a good indicator of how much it rained this summer 😆 #Bush #Life #Roots #Uprooted #Homestead

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  Excellent Danish documentary on the practices of Ikea and the FSC in greenwashing the clearcutting of forests in Romania: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSV7RlgQtWc Well worth watching. Especially as they got Ikea to respond and send someone with very strange answers to every question. Or the sudden appearance of oak seedlings in plastic tubes after someone has been asking inconvenient questions. Also plain Mafia methods of intimidation against anyone investigating. #Ikea #FSC #Forestry

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  When the stork is fully charged the head pulls back, the beak faces downwards and it gets this smug look about it. #Stork #Bird #BirdsOfMastodon #FediBird #Homestead #Grid #Electricity

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  The last of Alan Birch is finally split and stacked. This was a tough birch. I thought I lost my mojo but some ancient oak and fresh maple logs did split just fine so it was just that this birch was really tough. Probably because it didn't grow in a forest but on its own on a windy hill. Sadly it rotted inside as forked trunks often do. As you can see I resorted to the chainsaw for some of the knottier pieces, the rest with wedge and axe. #Firewood #Birch #Homestead #Splitting #Wood #Wedg...

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  Oak. Outside it looks like rotten junk, inside it looks like it could've done another century with ease. #Oak #Wood

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  The woodworking section of the museum. A small model of a pit saw, or I guess since there is no pit, a trestle saw. And a working and relatively modern foot powered lathe. #Woodworking #Museum #Alanta #Tools #Sawing #History

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  Looms. And those things we have in the attic. I'm not sure what they are for. Some kind of winder. Perhaps for setting up the warp or just storing yarn? Its quite fun to go to the local museum and find pieces you have in your attic and work out what they were used for! :) #Loom #Weaving #Craft #Museum #Alanta

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  More professional outdoor electrical installation work, same park as before, powering the lights on a swing. To up it a notch, they used a GOST socket, which avoids pesky RCD trips because it has no PE contacts. 👍️ This has evidently worked well, as it looks like it has already caught on fire once. Its a nice park, but don't sit on the swing when its wet. #Electrical #Moletai

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  More supplies. These were cheaper than the "Basic" ones (Specialist brand, I think), let's try how they fare on rock. There are supposedly special rock drill bits (these are concrete ones) but they were astronomically priced and nobody had them in stock anyways. #Rock #Drill #Bit #Tools #Makita #Granite

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  Pakidge! #Pakidge #Homestead #Barn #Tractor

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  Late again, but progress was made. Hacked away the clay and some boulders on this stretch. This was more manual labour than on the previous side, because with the concrete overhang the excavator couldn't get as close to the wall. Also because it was hot and this is the south side and I of course ended up doing it at noon 😰 Next a lot of drilling, finishing the final hole as my last SDS bit melted. These rocks are really hard. The same drill bit will go through concrete like butter but die...

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  Garden update: Sunflowers doing well and growing tall. Sweetcorn is growing well too, although I've just spotted some brown patches on a stalk. No idea what that is, perhaps overwatering from recent biblical deluge? All three cucumber transplants have made it and we have the first cucumbers to eat. These loved all that rain. Peas are doing very well too and we've been eating them for a while now. Beans have started to flower. Pumpkins haven't flowered yet but have started to pr...

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  Fiber cement panels. For when you want your house to look like the death star. #FiberCement #Panel #Building #Renovation #DIY #House

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  A spell of sunshine before the next rain front hits. The young storks are facing it with glee. Each front arrived today with strong gusts of wind that blew stuff around the yard and let the juveniles hover above the nest and practice flying without the risk of leaving and being unable to return. Although at this point I think they're just being big chickens. One was several meters above the nest before dropping back down. You're basically flying already, mate! Get out there. #Stork #S...

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  Flight school. Our young storks still do not dare leave their nest for the first time, but they've advanced to hovering. The other two siblings have to keep their heads down because there is only one helipad and its also where everybody eats their food delivery and sleeps. At least they've soon learnt how to poop over the side. Should really move the compost heap under there for all this free phosphorus. Meanwhile the parents are either out collecting food or perching on a nearby chim...

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  Still no foundation digging weather with all this rain, so I grudgingly have to do some other stuff. Been down in the valley with the brush cutter, clearing a path through the jungle to get to the crooked old shack there. Inside is some old wood that may have once been the old sauna building by the river which is long gone but was stored here for re-use. Hauled a load up to the farm. Some usable stuff, although full of big nails. And some fuel for the sauna boiler. There are many more treasu...

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  Mushroom identification please. NB: I wasn't going to eat it. I was going to feed it to social media safety advisors. Plenty of those around and nobody is going to miss one if it turns out poisonous. That way they can finally be useful. #Mushroom #Identification #Lithuania

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  Traditional builders: We mix everything from clay, lime, cement and sand in specific ratios. Modern builders: We buy a bag of mix from the shop. What's in the bag? Who cares! What a loss. And the BagOfMix industry would prefer you not finding out that for example this bag contains only cement, quartz sand and a little bit of chopped glass and you could mix that just fine yourself. #Building #Industry

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  Stay off my lawn, err, corn patch. Damn weeds. #Scythe #Mowing #Gardening #Homestead #Sweetcorn #Weeds

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  These look ready. #Beetroot #Garden #Homestead #Harvest

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  Dear German Soldaten, come to Lithuania, it's nice! In summer its not so hot, for winter we built you a nice new Kaserne with brand new road. We still have real snow in winter! The Kebap is not so expensive as in Germany either. You might even spot your old car driving around that you sold 10 years ago. Vilnius has everything to offer you come to expect from a big German city: good coffee shops, expensive food, mediocre public transport and traffic jams. You can try learning the fiendish...

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  Mowed valley. On paper, this is a peat bog. As you can see, there is no peat, nor is it particularly boggy, except behind those alders on the right hiding a small river. We pointed this out and were promptly informed it doesn't matter, peat bogs are irrevocable. Good for us. Plowing peat bogs is forbidden, therefore this is no longer valued arable land. Which apparently means we're allowed to let it go and reforest itself or help along with tree plantings. So from next year, this w...

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  Second strimmer fixed, the one with the metal disc for thicker brush (and not leaving bits of plastic string everywhere). Honda GX35 4-stroke. Shook out most of the pieces of the shattered cam pulley, then flushed out some smaller ones with old petrol. Had to take the head and clutch cover off to find the timing mark on the flywheel. I don't remember doing that last time, I guess I just poked a screwdriver down the spark plug hole to find TDC, which works too. The replacement pulley has n...