Yard Work and PC Work Today

Now that's dried out a bit (we got some rain over the weekend), I can finish up the back yard today. I have to finish the edging with my edger, and then get the weed whacker out to do the final trimming.

And then mix up some Roundup and spray the areas we're trying to keep clear.

I had a one gallon sprayer that came with a premix in it, but that ran out Friday afternoon. And then about 12 hours later we had the rain, so unfortunately, most of the Roundup washed away, and we still have some weeds along the driveway.

Roundup seems to work pretty well, as it "Kills The Root", and makes the dead stuff easier to rip out of the ground.

I've also used rock salt in the past with good results, but only use that where I don't want anything to grow, or to kill stumps. Just drill some 1" holes in the stump as deep as you can with a wood bit ("Paddle Bit"), and then fill the holes with salt. Add some water to get things started, and let Nature take over. Years ago, I bought some kind of chlorate compound from National Lumber (remember them?) that you did the same thing with, and then waited a couple of weeks. Once it was dry enough, you could light the stump with a propane torch, and it would start to burn, and continue burning, until the entire thing was gone. Pretty neat stuff, but I'm sure it's not available any more.

And on the PC front, I just finished up refurbishing a laptop and a desktop to take down to the Iowa for our Amatuer Radio use.

The desktop is a Core2 Quad running at 3GHz, with 8GB of memory (I remember when 8 Gig was a big hard disk!) and a clean installation of Windows 7 Professional. It also has an M-Audio "Audiophile 2496" soundcard that we'll be using with a SoftRock SDR receiver to use as a panadaptor for the Kenwood TS-850 that's our main SSB radio., along with a full suite of N3FJP software.

The laptop is an older Dell that somebody gave me that I added a bigger hard disk to, and maxed out the memory to 4GB, and installed Windows 7 Professional. We'll be using that on the "CW" station to do digital mode operation using the soundcard interface I built a while back.

I'll clean them up tonight and make sure all the updates are current, and lug them down to the Iowa Wednesday morning where we'll join them to the domain, and bring our station up a notch or two.