Hummingbird Hawk-Moth

As many of you will know Bryony is most definitely not a moth person yet I have her to thank for the subject of this post. We were heading out in the car yesterday when she spotted something larger hovering at the bottom of the drive. Her initial thought was a large insect and it wasn't until I took a closer look that I realised it was a Hummingbird Hawk-Moth (Macroglossum stellatarum).

I've never actually seen one before, although I think one put in a brief appearance at my sister-in-laws wedding which I saw as a shape flying away. Fortunately they are kind of hard to confuse with anything else.

After a few photos I thought I'd try a video to show you just why it's called a hummingbird hawk-moth. Unfortunately the camera was playing up (it's working fine now so I'm assuming operator error) and it kept stopping after recording just a second or so; the longest useful clip contained just 14 frames shot at 25 frames per second!

Rather than showing the raw video I've cropped and processed it (a complex procedue that itself can and will fill a technical blog post at some point) to produce an animated GIF that loops around to give you an idea of how it behaves.

I saw it again, briefly, this morning in the back garden but by the time I grabbed the camera it had gone. Hopefully it will be back and I'll get some better photos and video.

Solar Eclipse

Long time readers might remember that back in 2008 I managed to get a photo of the partial solar eclipse with the help of a few clouds to stop the camera just washing out. On that occasion there was only a small part of the sun that was obscured. Yesterday's eclipse was an altogether more impressive sight, and yet again the cloud cover was just perfect for taking photos with a normal digital camera.

Both photos were taken from my doorstep, the one on the left at 9:11am and the one on the right at 9:35am which was roughly the peak of the eclipse. If you missed it, then you'll have to wait until 2026 so see a similar eclipse in the UK.

Neglected

Looking back over the posts for 2014 it seems this blog has been rather neglected. In fact I've made just 14 posts. It isn't that I'm not blogging as much as I used to but that my posts are now spread across three blogs. In total I've actually written 167 posts; six over on my code and electronics blog and 147 on model railways. I also joined Twitter at the end of 2013 and so have posted some items there over the last year as well. It does mean though, that I have a fair amount of catching up to do on this blog, so just as I did last year, I'll fill this post with brief glimpse of the rest of my 2014 adventures.

Looking back over the year the most interesting things (from a blog post of view) have probably been the trips away with work, as I've had the opportunity to visit some really great places. I visited four new places but only blogged, briefly, about the trip to Kaiserslautern. The first trip of the year though was in February when I went to Luleå in northern Sweden.

One of the main reasons for holding the meeting in Luleå in February was that there was a chance to see the northern lights. Unfortunately the weather was rainy rather than very cold and clear so I'll have to wait to see the northern lights. I did, however, get to experience a 15km ride over an ice road from Luleå out to the island of Hindersön. The trip was at night (we had dinner at the Jopikgården restaurant on the island which included reindeer steak and cloudberries) so there wasn't much of a view, which was probably a good thing as it was scary enough as it was. As we left solid ground and were driven onto the ice we were told to undo our seat belts as it's easier to escape from a sinking car without them on! If that wasn't bad enough part way over there was a little moment where the car wasn't pointing the right way, and our driver admitted he'd never driven an ice road before and it wasn't his car. It was certainly an interesting evening.

The following morning, before the meeting started, a small group of us managed to also make it out to Gammelstad which is a UNESCO world heritage site just outside Luleå. Apparently it's the best preserved church town and consists of 424 wood-built houses around the central church. Traditionally the he houses were only used on Sundays and during religious festivals by those members of the congregation who couldn't return home the same day due to the distance and travelling conditions.

After the icy cold of northern Sweden a trip to Turin in June made a nice change. It being Italy there was an awful lot of good food and coffee, although strangely I didn't have any pizza, but the highlight of the trip had to be the evening visit we made to the Egyptian Museum. Apparently it houses the worlds second largest collection of Egyptian artifacts after the museum in Cairo; it certainly was very impressive with lots to see and take in. Certainly well worth a visit if you are ever in Turin.

October saw the final work trip of the year to a new destination, this time Istanbul in Turkey. This was my first trip to Turkey and was certainly interesting. First of all Istanbul is HUGE. I don't think I've ever seen such a large sprawling city, which means I saw only a very tiny part of it, but what I saw was great. It's the first time I've seen the boundary between two continents. We had dinner at a restaurant on the European edge of the Bosphorus looking across the water to Asia. I also managed an afternoon of sightseeing and with a colleague in which we visited both the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia as well as sampling the delights of Turkish ice cream which is chewy and doesn't melt in the heat!

I've already blogged about some of our holiday on Skye in August including dolphins, seals, and Loch Coruisk but it's also worth mentioning that we had a wonderful lunch at the Kinloch Lodge Hotel; the first time I've eaten food that comes with a Michelin star!

Strangely I also seem to have spent quite a while fixing things this year, I even spent about 45 minutes on Boxing Day replacing the door lock on a dishwasher. My favourite fix of the year had to be the new bracket to fix the fridge door. I've already blogged about this, but I thought it worth mentioning agin especially as it made Shapeways review of the year blog post!

I also fixed a toilet using a piece of gaffer tape after it stopped flushing. It turns out that part of he mechanism is a rather flimsy plastic sheet, which can easily tear over time and when it does it can no longer lift the water to flush the toilet. Fortunately it's easy to repair... if you can get the toilet apart.

So it was an interesting year even if I didn't blog about a lot of it. Hopefully 2015 will be just as fun for us all!

Loch Coruisk

So having past the dolphins and the seals on the boat trip from Elgol on Skye we eventually disembarked from the boat and made the short walk to Loch Coruisk, which was perfectly timed for us to eat our lunch, and what a place to have lunch!

Getting to Loch Coruisk on foot would require a serious walk and while I'm sure that would have been much better exercise I wouldn't have got to see the dolphins so I think we definitely chose the better option!

So I've now done three blog posts covering just one day of the holiday. It was a very good day but there were certainly other blog worthy moments during the week so I'll try and pull at least a couple more posts together for you all to enjoy.

Seals

When we came back from our recent trip to Skye I really did intend to try and get blog posts up quickly, given how few I've written for this blog this year. Alas, I seem to have failed alread as it's now over a fortnight since we got home and so far you've had one post, albeit with a video of Dolphins. So here we are with a second post ... all about seals.

So having seen the dolphins playing right up against the boat, we eventually headed back towards the short and Loch Coruisk. The harbour entrance is protected from the worst of the weather by a number of small rocky outcrops and this, on a good day at least, is where the seals bask in the sun.

The boat did a number of turns around the rocks to make sure we all got a really good view, before heading into the harbour so we could disembark and visit the loch, but that will be for the next post, which hopefully won't take another two weeks to appear!

Perfect Weather for a Wedding

The weather last weekend, throughout most of the UK, was appalling thanks to the tail end of Hurricane Bertha. Fortunately we managed to find a nice dry and sunny spot to spend Saturday; Achnagairn Castle just outside Inverness. A trip to Inverness for the weekend isn't something we would normally do, the ten hours it takes to drive there usually rules it out, but on this occasion, even a full on hurricane wouldn't have stopped us from getting there as we were attending a family wedding.

When we got up on the Saturday morning we couldn't believe the weather as it was wonderfully warm and sunny, although the forecast was still suggesting rain for the afternoon. By the time everyone started to assemble there was still no sign of the rain. At this point I should probably introduce the happy couple; Gareth (Bryony's cousin) and his wife Carol.

Having been to a number of weddings in recent years I find this photo extremely interesting. At every wedding I've ever been too, I've either not seen the register being signed (this happens with church weddings when the bride and groom wonder off to sign the register), or have been explicitly told that photography during the signing is prohibited (some legal reason that I've never understood). Yes you'll have seen plenty of photos of people signing the register at their wedding, but they are all staged with a blank register, not the actual one. It appears, however, that in Scotland the laws are different. This is the first civil wedding I've been to in Scotland (we went to a church wedding in St. Andrews a few years ago) so the signing took place in front of us, but this time we were actively encouraged to take photos.

Anyway it wouldn't be a Scottish wedding without lots of men in kilts, including the groom and his father.

Given the long trip home, we called it a night at around midnight by which point it still hadn't rained and everyone seemed to have had a fantastic day. I've lots more photos to sort through so there might be another post, but I'll end this post by saying congratulations again to Gareth and Carol and thanks for inviting us.

Garden Bunting

While the garden is beginning to look really good after the hard work we've put into it this year, we aren't about to start hanging out the bunting. That doesn't stop a bunting enjoying the garden though. Specifically a Yellowhammer visited this evening. Sorry about the rather poor photo, but it was taken hand held in poor light (we lose direct sunlight to the garden by about 4 o'clock due to the railway and trees) and through the kitchen window which is definitely in need of a clean.

I haven't heard it sing the traditional "little bit of bread and no cheese" song yet, but I'm assuming it is primarily the male that sings, and this would be a female. Either way a nice new addition to the species list for the garden.

Keeping The Milk In

The fridge in the kitchen is old. I don't know quite how old, but we've been using it for over 10 years and before that it was in my Mother-in-law's kitchen. However old it is it still works and we'll keep using it at least until we redecorate the kitchen. For the last year or so there has though been a small niggling little problem. Periodically you would open the fridge only for the milk to go flying across the kitchen, usually leaking everywhere in the process. The problem was that one of the brackets holding the shelf edge on was broken.

I initially fixed the bracket by super-gluing the retaining pins back on, and while this works for a short while it will let go again after a few months. I also tried numerous varieties of tape to keep things together but this was worse than gluing; I'm guessing due to the cold temperature and moisture. Just after lunch last Friday I opened the fridge and yet again the milk went flying. This time it had been less than a day since I'd tapped the shelf edge in place and I'd had enough. Given how old the fridge was I didn't hold out much hope of being able to just buy a replacement part, and sure enough a quick web search didn't turn up anything helpful, so I set about creating a replacement part instead.

Long term readers of this blog may remember that almost two years ago I experimented with 3D printing for the first time. Since then I've designed and printed quite a few model railway items and even opened a shop on Shapeways. Given how easy simple geometric shapes are to model and print, I decided that it would be eminently feasible to design and print a replacement bracket.

It took me about half an hour to model the bracket in Blender using a set of digital callipers to measure the matching unbroken bracket. The part was quick to model as I focused on function rather than form (the model consists of just four cubes, a cylinder, and few mirror and boolean modifiers); it certainly isn't going to win any design awards!

After creating the model it was simple to upload it to Shapeways and less than 45 minutes after deciding to 3D print the replacement part I had one on order in the white strong and flexible material. Yesterday, just four working days after placing the order, the printed part arrived. A quick comparison with the original and it looked as if I'd got the measurements right, and indeed it fits perfectly, so now I can open the fridge without worrying about the milk going flying across the kitchen!

Whilst I really enjoy using 3D printing for producing small models, I think using the process to produce replacement parts is even more useful, especially when there is no other way to source the parts you need. Having proved how well it worked in this case, I'm sure this will be my first choice for any similar situation in the future.

Firefox

I'm sure many of you use the Firefox browser for surfing the web, but I'm guessing that many will also have never seen a real firefox before.

We recently had a weekend staying with friends near Oxford, and one of the things we did was a trip to the Cotswold Wildlife Park which have a pair of Red Pandas; otherwise known as a firefox.

Now before you all shout that the icon for Firefox doesn't look like a Red Panada it isn't intended to as the designer actually modelled the icon on a Japanese drawing of a fox!

Last Year's Loose Ends

So the world has moved on into 2014, and yet since August I've managed just a single post on this blog. It isn't that I haven't done anything interesting since August, but for some reason I've just never got around to blogging about what I have done. I suppose at least part of the problem is having multiple blogs, and now a twitter account as well, which means that when I do have something to share this blog isn't always the most appropriate place. So to make up for the lack of posts I'm going to do one long(ish) post that will hopefully bring me up to date.

After my trip to Gent in August the rest of the summer was fairly quiet; no work or personal trips and nothing particularly interesting to report from the garden either. Things started to pick up in mid-September when we had visitors to stay for the weekend of the Penistone agricultural show, for which the weather behaved. If the summer had been quite though, I made up for that in October.

First up was a trip to Thessaloniki in Greece for a ForgetIT project meeting. This was my first trip to Greece and it was definitely an interesting place to visit even if I did keep getting mixed up with the different alphabets (note to self: write things down for taxi drivers in the local alphabet). Half the fun of these work trips is the socializing with other participants and this time was no different; the photo shows some of us watching the fish in an unbelievably clear ocean on the first evening before dinner (thanks to Søren Schaffstein for the photo, especially as I didn't take any of any interest). As usual I didn't have that much time in which to explore, but I did experience a magnitude 4.5 earthquake on the final morning; I was in a rather decrepit lift at the time which certainly added to the experience!

Given my schedlue for October it was unfortunate that I managed to pick up some form of throat infection while in Greece that left me barely able to talk. I was fine when I boarded the place home in Thessaloniki but by the time I arrived in Munich I could hardly talk at all, even copious volumes of weissbier while waiting for the plane to Manchester failed to improve things.

Five days after getting back from Greece, and with a throat that still didn't want me to speak, I headed to London to take part in the BBC #newsHACK event at Shoreditch Town Hall. I've already blogged about this event over on one of my other blogs, so I won't bore you with the technical details, but I will point you at our hack/demo and possibly more interestingly show you the video of the pitch session: If you don't want to watch all 27 demos, you can skip to around 55 minutes to see our presentation; including hearing how bad my voice was when I tried to answer a question.

I ended October with a visit to the National Railway Museum in York for a one in a lifetime chance to see the six remaining A4 steam locomotives together (two of them are usually to be found in North America). As with the #newsHACK event I blogged about this trip elsewhere, so I'll just include the obligatory photo at this point.

October also saw me being paid for the very first time for the 3D models I have on sale via Shapeways; my first sale was back in January 2013, but they only pay out when you've made at least $30. I won't claim this as profit, as I spent more than I've made on test prints, but it's a very good start! In fact someone ordered another model this morning so hopefully 2014 will be profitable.

November was again mostly taken up with work, but we did take a few days off to have a long weekend in Warwickshire so we could attend both days of the National Poultry Show at Stoneleigh Park. I always thought that it was interesting looking at marque worth of chickens at the Penistone show, but I think I was all poultried out by around lunchtime on the first day. I'm not entirely sure how many chickens, ducks, geese, and turkeys we looked at but according to the programme there were nearly 7000 entires plus 500 sale pens, and as some of those will have contained more than one bird you can begin to imagine just how much there was to see. The hope was that by the end of the weekend we would have a much better idea of which breed(s) of chickens we would like to keep once we have sorted out the garden, but if anything I think it just gave us more options! Still it was a fun weekend.

December mostly saw us getting ready for Christmas and visiting relatives, and strangely I haven't taken many (if any) photos so there isn't really much to show for our travels. Anyway that brings the blog nicely up to date ready for whatever 2014 may throw at me. I hope you've all had a great holiday and wish you all the best for the new year!

Up North

I was outside doing some gardening this afternoon when I came across this moth, which I'm fairly certain I haven't seen in the garden before. I also had no idea what the moth was so I had to look it up.

Given the number of books in our house you shouldn't be surprised to find that I actually have two moth books; a photographic guide by Chris Manley and an illustrated one by Waring, Townsend and Lewington. While the illustrated one contains more textual information I find the photographic one easier to hunt through, so that was where I started.

It didn't take me too long to identify the moth as a Sallow (or in Latin Xanthia icteritia) the only problem is that the photographic guide suggests that common throughout Britain during September and October. Now I know the weather has been confusing the wildlife this year but we aren't even half way through August yet.

Fortunately the more detailed, illustrated guide came to the rescue. It says that there is one generation a year which flies September and October in the south and August and September in the north. So I'm guessing Penistone is in the north; thank goodness for that!

Gent

I realised yesterday that I never showed you anything of my trip to Belgium apart from a beer glass, so here is a panorama I shot from one of Gent's many bridges in the centre of the old town.

As you can see it wasn't exactly the ideal time of year for really appreciating the architecture as a lot of it was hidden behind the stages set up for the music festival. On the plus side there was plenty for me to do in the evenings, besides drinking Belgium beer.

Grasmere

As I mentioned in the previous post, last weekend we spent a few days away staying in Grasmere in the Lake District. While we did have quite a bit of wet weather we were lucky in that we did manage a single dry day for a nice walk around Grasmere; the lake not the village.

At the south end of Grasmere you can easily get right down to the waters edge, which seemed the perfect place to play with automatic panorama option on the new camera. I'm not sure if the quality is quite as good as when manually stitching the photos together (you can take a lot more photos that way), but it certainly is much easier and quicker, with the advantage of instantly knowing if it worked or not.

Over The Road And Far Away

Last weekend we managed to have a short holiday in the Lake District (we stayed in Grasmere and there will likely be more post covering the actual holiday) which as well as being an excellent break from work meant we got to test out the new camera I talked about in the previous post.

After three days of heavy use we are both extremely happy with the camera, although there are still a bunch of features we haven't played with yet. The photo I picked to illustrate this post shows off the x30 optical zoom quite well. We heard the woodpecker well before I managed to spot him on the other side of the road a few yards into a small woodland. Not only did the zoom allow me to get a decent shot but the auto-focus didn't get too confused by all the overlapping branches either. And the GPS co-ordinates embedded in the photo are as accurate as you could hope for (within the 30m accuracy figure often quoted for commercial GPS systems).

All in all I'm happy enough with the camera that I'd certainly recommend it to other people.

Bells And Whistles

After eight years and almost 30,000 photos our main digital camera, a Sony DSC-F828, has finally died. It had been suffering for a while from randomly misbehaving pixels, but the more recent problems are rather more fatal. It will still take photos but only if you don't try zooming in. Once you get past a zoom level of x3 (which isn't really very much) then pressing the shutter doesn't result in any mechanical sounds and the photo is highly over exposed. If you turn the camera on when zoomed in then you can feel the motor inside the lens buzzing rather than doing anything useful. So while I might continue to use it for close up macro work (especially given that I own a macro lens adaptor for it) it isn't going to see much use.

Given that we've had no problems (until recently) with the Sony camera and have found it easy to use we have replaced it with another Sony bridge camera; specifically the DSC-HX200V. This camera, while costing half what the old one cost, has a x30 optical zoom compared with x7 and an 18 megapixel sensor compared to the 8 megapixel sensor in the old camera. It's the number of new features though that amazes me, and these are just the ones I've found so far:

• sweep panorama
• 3D still images
• 3D panoramas
• HDR still images
• tracking focus
• background defocus
• face/smile detection
• GPS tagging

I'm assuming that some of these are more of a gimmick than truly useful (I don't see how you can do true 3D photography with a single non-moving lens), but others, like the GPS (which will mean I don't need to carry my GPS track logger around), might turn out to be really useful. It is also supposed to support full HD quality video recording, although any video recording would be better than that supported by the DSC-F828 (very poor quality VGA resolution), so I might start doing some video work as well.

So far it looks like a really good replacement for the old camera, what we need now is a holiday to give it a really good test!

Cold Storage

Over the years I've had quite a few hard drives fail on me. Fortunately, most of the time they've failed gracefully allowing me a short window in which I've been able to rescue their contents. In other words I've been exceedingly lucky not to have lost anything important, especially as I'm not particularly good at taking regular backups. The one thing I do tend to backup quite well are the digital photos we take.

My photo backup routine is simple. Firstly the photos end up on both my computer and Bryony's so we each have a separate copy. I also burn all the photos to two DVDs. One DVD I keep in the house and the other I periodically ship off to my parents for an off site backup. The off site backup is probably the most important, as while the copies in the house allow me to recover easily from a hard disk failure they don't insure me against a catastrophic incident at the house; fire, flood etc. Unfortunately DVD-R disks (and this also applies to CD-Rs) don't last forever.

As I've mentioned before we are trying to have a good go at tidying the house and getting rid of things we really don't need. Over the last 15 years or so I've burnt probably thousands of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs and most of the data on them is no longer need -- a lot of them contain installers for old versions of software or backups that have since been superseded by newer backups etc. Before throwing any of these disks away though I need to go through each one to check what was on them. So far I've managed to amalgamate around 50 DVD and CDs down into a single DVD, which is quite a good space saving. Unfortunately this hasn't been quite as easy as I'd expected as some of the disks had developed bit rot. Fortunately, with the help of ddrescue, I managed to extract everything I wanted from the damaged disks.

Some of the damaged disks I had to process were only around five years old and if they had been left much longer may not have been readable at all. Now while I've never bought the most expensive of blank CD-Rs or DVD-Rs I had expected that they would last for more than five years. Clearly if I want to ensure that my digital photos are still safe in ten or twenty years, as well as for future generations, then relying on DVD-Rs as the final backup probably isn't very wise. The solution, I think, is cold storage.

As I mentioned recently I've just started work on a new project called ForgetIT. ForgetIT, is essentially, an archiving project, with the interesting research focusing on incorporating human inspired models of memory and forgetting to ensure that we archive enough extra content to make the information understandable years after it was archived. In discussion one thing that kept being raised was where we intend to archive data to, and of course the current buzz word is The Cloud. While there are many possible online storage solutions (Google Drive and Dropbox being two popular services) they can all start to become expensive quickly. For example, with Google Drive you can store 5GB for free, but then an extra 25GB will cost you $2.49 a month and I've already got approximately 100GB of photos I want to store. These services are also designed around frequent and fast access; they are designed to act as a remote hard drive. This can be useful for syncing files across devices, but isn't necessary for long term archival storage. Cold storage takes a different approach to storage.

The idea behind cold storage is that it is for data you will want to access very infrequently, if ever. This approach allows service providers to take a different hardware approach (possibly turning off hard drives when they aren't needed or using tapes). This allows the cost to be reduced at the expense of access times. I think cold storage is perfect for the backup of last resort for photos as hopefully I'll never need to access them and if I do I won't need instantaneous access. I can also see this form of archiving being useful to companies for auditing or legal purposes where documents have to be be kept for a number of years but may never actually be requested.

Last year Amazon started to offer a cold storage service called Glacier. The headline information is that storage costs are just $0.01 per GB per month but that retrieval requests take four hours before you can start downloading your data. This means that I can store my current 100GB of photos for just $12 a year, and should I ever need to access them I won't mind a four hour wait. Before you all start rushing to copy your backups to Glacier there are a couple of points I've glossed over that need raising.

Firstly Glacier is part of the Amazon Web Servies (AWS) framework. AWS is a set of web services designed for developers and as such Glacier doesn't have an Amazon provided end user interface of any sort. Fortunately a number of people have started building applications. Some are command line tools which are great for scripted backup solutions, but there are also a few graphical interfaces. I've discussed these in more detail over on one of my other blogs where I'm currently recommending SAGU (Simple Amazon Glacier Uploader) although I'm also developing an application which I'm calling CORPSE (or COld stoRage backuP SoftwarE).

The more important issue is the cost. While the headline price of $0.01 per GB per month is certainly enticing it's worth noting that you are also charged for retrievals (although not for uploads). Firstly there is a per GB cost for transferring data out of Amazons servers (this is a standard AWS data out charge) which is free for the first GB each month but is then charged at $0.120 per GB (assuming you retrieve less than 10TB). This cost is at least easy to calculate. The more worrying cost is for the retrieval.

The retrieval pricing structure is really quite complex. Essentially "you can retrieve up to 5% of your data stored in Glacier for free each month ... [which] is calculated and metered on a daily prorated basis. For example, if on a given day you have 12 terabytes of data stored in Glacier, you can retrieve up to 20.5 gigabytes of data for free that day (12 terabytes x 5% / 30 days = 20.5 gigabytes, assuming it is a 30 day month)." This means, of course, that if you are willing to spread your retrieval out over a number of days/weeks/months/years then you can retrieve as much as you want without paying a retrieval fee. If you need your data quicker though then you will pay for the retrieval.

Calculating the amount you pay is complicated and I can't really summarise it without simply reproducing Amazon's examples so I suggest you go and read the details they have given. Their examples can, however, be summarised in a table. Essentially assume you have stored 75TB of data, so you're daily free limit is 128GB, and you want to retrieve 140GB. Depending how you spread out the retrieval changes how much you pay, as follows:

Hours	Peak Retrieval Rate	Peak Billable Retrieval Rate	Cost
4	35GB per hour	3GB per hour	$21.60
8	17.5GB per hour	1.5GB per hour	$10.80
28	within your daily allowance		$0.00

As you can see, as you spread out the retrieval over time the price drops to the point at which the cost for retrieval becomes $0. The problem is going to be keeping track of your downloads over time in order to try and estimate what a retrieval will cost. The best calculator I've found for this so far is unfortunately unofficial but seems to match up with Amazon's examples so should be a good starting point for estimating your costs. Of course my use of Glacier is predicated on the fact that I'm hopping never to need to access the data as it is the backup of last resort.

Even if you don't like the idea of cold storage, or Amazon's pricing structure, then I hope that this blog post will at least have made you think about when you last took a backup of any data you wouldn't want to lose and, more importantly, how long those backups are going to last for.

A Single Scotch

As well as drinking a far amount of single malt Scotch Whiskey while on Skye (Laphroaig Quater Cask if you're interested) we also saw another form of Scotch; a single specimen of a Scotch Argus (Erebia aethiops) butterfly.

This is only the second time I've ever seen a Scotch Argus even though I've had a number of holidays throughout Scotland over the years. I almost didn't recognize it as this specimen is very brown compared to the ones I've seen before which were almost black. This one was sunning itself just outside Portree, while I've previously seen them under Glenfinnan Viaduct.

Jessica's Postbox

So as I'm sure everyone in the UK knows by now, Royal Mail are painting one of their postboxes gold for each gold medal Team GB win at this summers Olympics. I've no idea where most of them are, but I knew that I had a good chance of seeing at least one, as Jessica Ennis is from Sheffield and was expected to get gold in the heptathlon.

She delivered a stunning performance to take gold and so Royal Mail duly painted a postbox gold. I'm not sure how they chose which Sheffield postbox to paint, but on my way to work the other day I couldn't fail to spot it. The crowd of people taking a picture of it was huge!. If you are in Sheffield and haven't seen it yet then it's in Barkers Pool just to the left of City Hall.

Phragmatobia Fuliginosa

Another day, another Latin post title! We spent an hour or so in the garden yesterday afternoon during the only time of the loooong weekend when it wasn't raining. Given that we weren't out for very long we actually got quite a bit done.

While gardening we saw at least three more Cinnabar moths and I also saw a species of moth, Ruby Tiger (Phragmatobia Fuliginosa), that I don't think I've ever seen before, and is certainly a new species for the garden.

As you can see from the photo on the left it was sunning itself on the lawn. While I could see that there was definitely a bright red underwing it wasn't until I tried to move it off the lawn (so as not to accidentally stand on it) that I saw just how red it's body is. Unfortunately I didn't get to see it fly or open it's wings, maybe next time.

Tyria Jacobaeae

Some of you may remember that last year I blogged about the very hungry caterpillars which were taking over the garden. They were the caterpillars of the Cinnabar or Tyria Jacobaeae moth. Last year I only saw one moth throughout the whole summer, but my assumption was, given the number of caterpillars, that this year I would see more. Being day flying moths they are much easier to spot and identify than many other moths and so far in six days I've seen five moths flitting around the garden.