Back in May I spent a weekend in the woods of Surrey with a few friends on a Wild Retreat. I have been meaning to write a post on it ever since but just have not had time. Anyway I still don’t really have the time to write a long post so here are a few words with some photos to bulk it out.

The idea of a wild retreat is to allow you to spend a weekend living very simply in the woods without modern conveniences or luxuries. It’s not a survival weekend. You don’t hunt your food or track wild animals you simply spend time relaxing, cooking over the fire, partaking in a few activities and allowing yourself to live life at a far slower pace than usual.

Friday

We arrived at the site late Friday afternoon. We left the cars near the road and set off on a short 10 minute walk into the woods with all our stuff for the weekend. The area where we were to be based was all set up for us and looked far more comfortable than any of us were expecting.

When we arrived at the site we had about 2 hours of light left so got straight down to sorting out the sleeping arrangements. We each had a choice of a hammock and tarp or to have a tent. We all chose the hammock option and were shown the four knots we would need to make the whole thing work then sent into the woods to find a sleeping place.

I found a area I really liked and got my hammock set up without to much fuss only to realise that the trees I had chosen were actually a little to close together to stretch the tarp to its fullest. However rather than take it all down I improvised a little and turned the end of the tarp into a wind break for one end of my sleeping area.

Once we had all got our sleeping arrangements sorted we gathered around the fire while the evening meal was cooked.

The first night in the hammock was pretty cold and I ended up putting on every item of clothing I had taken with me but the hammock was actually very comfortable. There was some pretty loud snoring going on in those woods which would have frightened off any wildlife foolish enough to wander into the area. We also found we were within earshot of a monastery where the monks had decided they should each ring the monastery bell as they went to pray at 3am.

Saturday

One of the key things with living in the woods is to make sure you always have fire. Starting a fire can be quite hard work and it’s far easier to make sure the fire you have does not go out rather than having to start again. This means regular trips away from the site to find fire wood and making sure the wood pile stays stocked.

Once wood had been collected it was time to boil the kettle. At home that means flipping the switch. In the woods that meant getting some dry kindling and using a stick from the fire to light the fire in the bottom on of a kelly kettle. All sounds easy but there was a bit of a knack to it and many an hour was spent over the weekend trying to master it.

With the kettle on it was time for breakfast, getting all the stuff from the the make shift kitchen.

we cooked eggs and toast on the fire

before sitting round the table for a very leisurely breakfast.

With breakfast out of the way we spent some time just chilling out before undertaking the first activity of the day. Over the weekend there were several activities and basically you just chose which ever one you wanted during each activity session. For my first session I chose archery.

After a couple of hours of shooting arrows it was back to the camp area for slow paced lunch and then into activity session two where I tried some geocaching. There were quite a few geocaches near our site and we spent quite a few hours out and about around the countryside. It just so happened that we also passed a few pubs on route and felt it would be very rude to walk by without frequenting them.

At the end of the afternoon we all found our way back to camp and just spent time hanging out.

before cooking a sausage stew supper over the fire. With supper out the way a few hours were spent telling stories of our day and how manly each of us had been before we retired to our hammocks shattered from spending a day outside instead of in the office.

Far more sleep was had with the second night in the hammock as I started by putting all my clothes on to keep warm and used ear plugs to protect myself from the monks and the snoring.

Sunday

Sunday started by once again lighting the kettles and then partaking of a light breakfast

before spending the morning doing some bush craft. Basically we used knives to make mallets and pegs.

We also learnt how to make fire when no matches or lighter were available.

At the end of the morning we ate lunch together before breaking down camp and heading back to the cars for the three hour drive home. Every one of us was in agreement that the weekend had been a great experience and a fun time. We had all enjoyed taking life at a slower pace, learning to do new things and getting to know each other better.

The Mens Room

On returning home into the loving arms of our wives the first question was “but what about toilets?”. Well that was easy as it’s not particularly difficult to find a tree when you are in the woods. However in the interest of camp hygiene the Wild Retreat team had built a new composting toilet of which I have the honour of being able to claim to be the very first person to use it.

The strange thing about a composting toilet is you cannot pee in it. It must not get to wet or it won’t compost. It became a bit of a joke that the only place in the camp you were not allowed to pee was in the toilet.

Ok so the first thing I did on day 2 with the stand up desk was rebuild it. At my seated desk I have always had my monitor off to one side. I now realize that I also always sit at my desk at an angle so I am actually looking straight at the monitor and thus avoid neck strain.

Yesterday I found I was standing at my desk at an angle in order to look directly at the monitor. This actually worked pretty well and wouldn’t be a problem other than when I introuduce a treadmill to the set up standing at an angle will become difficult if not downright dangerous. So I have moved a few things around to get the monitor in front of me. I have also introduced a set of drawers for storage at a height they are easily usable while standing.

The introuduction of the draws has also meant I can now move my laptop back into view. For my standard set up I place my work onto the 30” monitor and use the laptop screen for email, Twitter, Basecamp etc.

For my second day at the desk I have stood for about 7.5 hours. My legs ache a little and I find I am most comfortable if I keep moving my legs. This is a good sign that potentially using a treadmill may actually be more comfortable then just standing.

I still mainly work using a 2008 unibody aluminium 13” Macbook. It’s getting a bit old but it has the 2.4GHz processor, 8GB of RAM and on the whole still works really well for what I do most of the time. About a year ago I replaced the 250GB HD in it for a 256GB SSD from Crucial. This improved the machines performance and convinced me my little baby still had plenty of life left in it.

The main problem with a 256GB SSD is that it is only 256GB. For the last 9 months I have also been using a 2.5” external HD to store all non essential stuff as the main SSD is rather full. Carrying an external drive with you is never great and I have been meaning to do something about this for a while but never got around to it.

Last week the Superdrive in my wifes Macbook failed. After getting some rediculous quote from the Apple store to replace it I decided that I very rarely use the superdrive in my Macbook and it might be a good idea to take it out , put it in my wifes machine and put a second HD into mine.

So I ordered a Seagate 750GB 2.5 inch SATA-II Momentus Hard Drive - 7200RPM 16MB Cache - ST9750420AS and an HDCaddy to hold it in the superdrive bay.

Fitting the whole thing was pretty easy and I could have probably worked it all out myself but it’s always better to get advice from someone who has done it before so I followed a YouTube video called Macbook 13” Unibody Disassembly Repair - Superdrive CD Drive Removal from Powerbook Medic

So now my 4 year old MacBook has 1TB of internal storage and is running fine. I will probably repleace it in the next year but I am waiting to see what Apple does with the next round of MacBook Pros. Internal storage is important to me. The last 9 months using an external drive has been a real pain so if the next incarnation of the MacBook Pros end up moving to just SSD I might find myself bying a current generation 15” model in order to keep my storage inside the machine.

Over the last few months many of my peers in the Mac & iOS developer community have been trying to overcome some of the health issues they have to face by sitting at a desk all day by experimenting with stand up desks and treadmill desks. After a little reserch I have decided to join the experiment.

The Goal

I think I would like to ultmimatley be using a treadmill desk as that will also help me with weight loss as well as general health and well being. However treadmill desks are not cheap (£3000+) and even building one yourself is a reasonable financial commitment. In order to make sure I dont waste my money I am going to start by trying to stand up to work and see how I get on. In order to do this I need a standing desk. Standing desks can be bought for around £400-£600. Again rather than just chuck money at something I might only stick at for a week I decided today to build a temporary standing desk and see how I do.

The Requirements

For the first fews weeks I am determined to use a standing desk that I have knocked together out of stuff I already have rather than going out and spending money. It is however important that the result is not compromised as that might not allow me to have a proper standing desk experience and therfore invalidate the experiment. As far as I can tell the most important (and maybe the only real) requirement of a standing desk is that it must be the right height to be comfortable. The suggested start place it to have a desk at about elbow height. It is also recomended that you have a place you can sit down to work when standing becomes to much. Proper standing desks have a motor that raises and lowers the desk to allow this. I currently have an L shaped desk and intend to develop one part as a standing desk and the other as a sitting desk to fullfill this requirement.

The Result

After an hour of scraping around the office for a few things and trying them out the desk has been built.

The main item used to raise the height of the desk is a small Ikea coffee table that was in the company meeting room. When placed on the exsiting desk it has brought the height up to exactly elbow height. The coffee table alone isn’t big enough as a desk so I needed to find something else to put my main monitor on. The monitor is a 30” Apple cinema display and quite heavy so it needs to go on something reasonably robust. In the end after serveral attempts I managed to create the perfect height stand using a cardboard box (filled with old books for strength) with a small flight case on top. (The flight case contains bits and bobs we use for NSConference so is not in constrant use).

My laptop and the connecting cables, power supply etc all sit under the coffee table. My paper junk has all been piled up (until I sort it) to the left of the coffee table. The area on the right of the L shape desk has been left clear to sit at when I get tired of standing. When I sit I will just use my laptop screen rather then the cinema display as returning to a bigger monitor will be part of the incentive to stand again.

Day One

I have now been working at the standing desk for about 4 hours. My legs ache a little and I feel physically more tired than I would normally do. Interestingly however, mentally I feel better than I normall would at 4:30 in the afternoon. Four hours is by no means enough time to come to any conclusions however I am happy that I have found my first half day less painful and probelmatic than I was expecting.

As a contractor I use github all the time to connect with client code and work on major projects. Github works incredibly well and will be a service I can see myself using for a long time.

My Problem

Where github falls down for me is for all the little projects I have that I want to keep in a DVCS but do not want to make opensource. Github charges by the number of private repositories rather than users so for someone who wants to keep maybe 20-30 projects on the go I could easily look at having to spend $50-$100 a month on storing and managing little projects that will probably never make any money because they will probably never be finished.

I will continue to use github to connect with clients and their code as it is by far the most popular service out there but for all those little projects I have been looking for a cheaper solution.

I have two basic requirements

• Distributed Source Control
• Issue Tracking

Source Control

BitBucket

First I am looking at bitbucket. Bitbucket now supports git as well as mecurial and charges by the number of users rather than the number of repositories which for a 2 man company like mamooba (Mamooba is the limited comapny that acts as a holding company for all my consulting and developing work and iDeveloper TV) is ideal. It has a nice interface and as far as git in concerned works in the same way as github. Bitbuket is free for up to 5 users which seems really generous.

Kiln

I am also looking at kiln from the folks at fogcreek. Kiln is based on Mercurial rather than git which I am a little uncertain about but know it’s close enough to git to not be a problem and used by enough people to proabably not go away. As these are all my own experimential projects interacting with others is not a big issue. Like bitbucket fogcreek charge by the user (A lot per user at $25 per month per user) but offer an unlimited 2 user account for free.

Issue Tracking

Having issue tracking for my own little projects might sounds a little over the top but in fact is incredibly useful. These are projects I work on in my spare time of which I have very little. However I will very often have an idea for one of them and being able to quickly add an issue/feature so that when I come back to the project possibly months later having all my thoughts right in front of me is really helpful.

BitBucket

I didn’t initially think that bitbucket supported issue tracking until I was told the other day that it does but you have to turn it on. As I didn’t know tit was there I haven’t actually tried it and have no idea if is any good or not

Kiln

Kiln is from fogcreek the makers of FogBugz an incredibly well known bug and issue tracking system. The free two user Kiln account also comes with a fully integrated FobBugz account. Now I know that FogBugz is probably massive overkill for my requirements but it does have the advantage that should I not get on with Kiln it can integrate into other DVCS systems so I could keep my issues tracker while changing my source control system.

Conclusion

I decided I wasn’t going to spend months trying systems I was just going to have a play , pick one and give it go on the basis that I believe (Possibly wrongly) that moving to an alternative at a later date will not be a huge issue.

I have suprised myself. I am going to start by trying out Kiln/Fogbugz. These are systems designed for hundreds of users and far larger than I will need. It also means I will be trying mercurial which also suprises me as I am a big git fan. It’s too early to tell if this is a move of genius or madness but feel quite confortable with my trial and will try and keep you posted on how it’s going.

When it comes installing cross platform tools such as Ruby on Rails on OS X I am bascially a complete idiot and therefore always look for a complete idiots guide. This was no different when looking to install Octopress on my developer machine.

I started by using the pretty straight forward guide found on the Octopress website but soon found things didn’t quite go as planned. It also didn’t help that I am running a developer preview version of my favourite OS X operating system.

Installing RVM

Octopress recomend using RVM to manage Ruby versions when using Octopress something that makes a lot of sense. However to install RVM you need gcc installed. Normally not a problem until you are using Xcode 4.3 or above where the command line tools are not installed by default.

No problem I just went to the Xcode preferences and choose the option to install the command line tools and then waited a while becuase I could currently get more bandwidth from a piece of string than I could from my rural broadband.

Installing Ruby

Ocopress requires Ruby 1.9.2 by default so with RVM installed that should just be a case of typing rvm install 1.9.2. However that genereated the result

the provided compiler '/usr/bin/gcc' is LLVM based, it is not yet fully supported by ruby and gems, please read rvm requirements

So instead I installed the latest (at this time) version of ruby 1.9.3 and that seemed to be OK.

The Wrong Version of Ruby

Ruby was installed but eveytime I switched into the Octopress folder I would get the message

WARN: ruby ruby-1.9.2-p290 is not installed. To install do: 'rvm install ruby-1.9.2-p290'

I soon solved this one after taking a quick look at Aral Balkan’s post on installing Octopress and seeing that this could be resolved by by editing the .rvmrc file and changing its contents to read rvm 1.9.3 instead of rvm 1.9.2

rb-fsevent

Next it was time to install all the dependencies using Bundler but this kept crashing telling me

rb-fsevent 0.4 required Max OS X 10.5+

I guess this is probably as I am running a developer preview and it couldn’t verifiy the version of OS X.

However I could not understand why it was trying to install rb-fsevent version 0.4 when rb-fsevent is at version 0.9. Hoping for the best I edited the Gemfile file in the Ocopress directory and changed the rb-fsevents line to read

gem 'rb-fsevent', '>= 0.9'

tried again and it all seemed to work.

Up and Running

Other than that everything seems to be running as the docs suggest it should. I have been a Jekyll user for a while (The iDeveloper TV id generated using Jekyll) but have never used it for a blog becuase of having to create all the template files. Octopress is a layer on top of Jekyll that does a lot of that for me so I am looking forward to seeing how it all works out.

For a number of years I maintain a blog called “Waffle With Meaning” that I posted to about three or four times a year. One of those posts alway appeared in early January each year when I would promise that this year I would post more than I did last year.

This year I have managed to avoid making that post until late February. In order to cover my lack of posting over the last two years I thought I would not just convientiently delete all the old posts but also delete the entire blog and move it to and new server and at the same time drop wordpress as my blog platform and move to the ever more popular Octopress static blogging platform

So will I post to the new Waffle with Meaning more then I did the old one. I have no idea. My intention is this becomes an eclectic bucket for any random thought I might have about life, faith, technology or just about anything. As the title suggests to you it might just be waffle but to me it will have some sort of meaning