Oh dear, I haven't really been checking in for a while, first it was because of my exams, but now that my exams are over, I've just simply been distracted.
Even my poor plant on Astrobotany hasn't had much love recently.
=> gemini://astrobotany.mozz.us/public/3fb154516dd343028d09129ec00a5cff/m1 my plant
## Garden
Our hakea laurina is blooming, and it's simply magnificent.
We caught two more rats, one in the walk the plank, and another in the cage trap we bought. Strangely enough, we seem to have more "strikes" when we forget to replenish the bait, perhaps the rats are getting desperate and careless? So far, the traditional traps have a success rate of 0%.
Unfortunately, the smaller birds have been taking an interest in the bait as well. I'm not sure if they're drawn to the peanut butter or the ants that are also feeding on the peanut butter. Today, I found a small honeyeater caught in one of the traditional traps. I hope I discovered it quickly, I think I heard the trap going off, which was why I looked outside. I went out to let it out of the trap, the bar had come down on its chest. It was just lying there for a bit, I thought it was badly injured and I tried to scoop it up with a towel to take it inside, but it quickly fluttered off and hid. I left out some food, when I checked the area again later in the afternoon I couldn't notice any activity, I hope it is okay. :(
After this, I threw away the traditional traps, one of the bars had snapped off and it was useless anyway. A few hours later, I spotted a willy wagtail *inside* the cage trap happily munching the bait off the spring-loaded plate, and another of those honeyeaters flying in to check it out too. I moved the cage trap inside the shed, we'll figure out what to do with it later on.
## XMPP server
I've been distracted with setting up an XMPP server on my Raspberry Pi (which was originally intended for a Gemini server, that's still in the works).
I've never set up my own server before, so I was really unsure about firewalls, port forwarding and dynamic DNS, and most tutorials I could find only covered one piece of the puzzle. I almost did my head in trying to figure out how all the different bits and pieces fit together. However, I think I've got the hang of it now! I'm still trying to fiddle around with other extensions giving it extra functionality, like voice and video calls. Anyway, I've compiled a list of things I've done, and resources. I hope to put it up on this capsule sometime...... sometime when I'm not so distracted!
