Composting - My Journey - Tips & Tricks I Picked Up

As of 24 Jan 2020, it has been roughly 9 months that I have not sent any raw vegetable waste go to the municipal bin. I have been experimenting with varied success.
I harvested a batch of compost that I could incorporate in planting on 17 Jan 2020.

My criterion for success are the following:

1. Should be well 'digested' and soil-like [Not a wet lump of still rotting mass]
2. Should be odour free
3. Should crumble slightly if rubbed using two fingers
4. Should not kill plants but rather make the grow better (i.e. more robust, better foliage, bushier etc.)

Here is my journey in reverse chronological order (includes success and failures):

2020 Feb 06

Summary:

1. Bag 01 burst. Contents transferred to new bag.
2. Rats attacked and made a hole in Bag 02. Contents transferred to new bag.
3. Bag 03 started for fresh compost.

Bag 02 with Rat attacked Hole

Bag 01A(4.5 kg)

This is the existing compost from the older Bag 01 that split. Names 01A to retain continuity: 

• No evidence of earthworms. Assume they did not survive :(
• Compost a little too wet at the bottom (leachate accumulated)
• Added Crumbled brown leaves and turned the compost over
• Bokashi bran added
• Evidence of small white worms or larvae
• Compost temperature 33.7 deg c

Bag 02A(1.5 kg)

This is the existing compost from the older Bag 02 that the rats had a go at. Named 02A to retain continuity: 

• No evidence of earthworms. Assume they did not survive :(
• Compost a little too wet at the bottom (leachate accumulated)
• Added Crumbled brown leaves and turned the compost over
• Bokashi bran added
• Evidence of small white worms or larvae
• Compost temperature 33.7 deg c

Note:

• My hand is included to give a sense of scale

Bag 03(not weighed)

New compost bag started to accommodate fresh material since Bag 01 & Bag 02A are full: 

• Freshly chopped vegetable waste from kitchen added.
• Added a little bit of old coffee grinds remaining
• Added tea leaves from green tea + chamomile tea bags and coffee grinds from brewing
• Added crumbled brown leaves
• Added Bokshi bran + sprayed water & mixed

 2020 Jan 23

Added earthworms to 2 bags:

Bag 01(4.5 kg)

This contained: 

• Crumbled brown leaves
• Compost from successful bokashi bran batch
• Fresh vegetable waste (chopped orange peels, broccoli stems, coffee grinds)
• Bokashi bran 

About 4 earthworms with medium released. 1 large, 2 tiny, 1 wriggling segment. 

Included

Bag 02(1 kg approx.)

This contained: 

• Crumbled brown leaves
• Rotting un-successful batch (large clump, with quite bit of odour)
• Fresh vegetable waste (chopped orange peels, broccoli stems, coffee grinds, bean pods)
• Bokashi bran 

About 2 earthworms with medium released. 2 tiny

2020 Jan 17

Harvest of 'good' useable compost

 

Adding the OpenMeeting Moodle Plugin

I am going assume  that you already have OpenMeeting installed and running. Before I started, I had OpenMeeting working from http://103.28.141.113:5080/openmeetings/

Check OpenMeeting Instance

I logged in and checked that OpenMeeting was working 

Login to OpenMeeting and Check

Next I went to the Moodle OpenMeetings download URL (https://moodle.org/plugins/pluginversions.php?plugin=mod_openmeetings) and downloaded the plugin.

Download the OpenMeetings Moodle Plugin

After downloading, I extracted the contents. By default the a folder called openmeetings is created. I fired up Filezilla and logged on to the folder of my Moodle instance.

I copied the entire openmeetings folder to the /mod folder  (You could use any other FTP client or even use the browser to access using FTP and get this done)

Access the Moodle folder on server and copy openmeetings folder to /mod

 Once this was done, I logged in to the Moodle instance using my administrator login and password. If you have Moodle running already (as an admin) while copying the folder, you could logout and login again.

Moodle detects that a new plugin has been installed. I then clicked on the Update the Moodle database now button.

Click Update Moodle database now

Click Continue

After this, the Openmeetings plugin provides a screen to add the access credentials. Here I added my login and password for Openmeetings. The other fields I left as default since Openmeetings has a stock installation.

Add Login & Password, then click Save changes

After this, I tested to see whether I could include an Openmeetings as a module.

Note: OpenMeeting needs requisite server access to install. The process I described will work only once OpenMeeting has already been installed and tested and working.

References:
https://moodle.org/plugins/mod_openmeetings
https://docs.moodle.org/31/en/Installing_plugins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA2e4rajvL0
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OPENMEETINGS/Tutorials+for+installing+OpenMeetings+and+Tools
https://github.com/openmeetings/openmeetings-moodle-plugin

Increase & Decrease Video Playback Speed in VLC Player

At times I speed through videos (like training videos) to absorb more in the same time.

In VLC, using the keyboard, you can press:

• + to increase the playback speed (i.e. vide plays faster that the normal frame rate)
• -  to decrease the playback speed  (i.e. vide plays slower that the normal frame rate)
• [  to decrease the playback speed in finer increments than pressing -
• ]  to increase the playback speed in finer increments than pressing +

Using the mouse you can:

• Click on the arrows on either side of the playback control slider. The one on the right side increases speed while the one on the left decreases the speed
• Right-click the speed label in the bottom menu of VLC to adjust the speed.

References:
This post is possible because of the painstaking recording of procedures and facts by a number of sites. Here are some that helped me arrive at the solutions:

• http://www.howtogeek.com/196371/master-vlc-with-these-23-keyboard-shortcuts/
• http://www.makeuseof.com/answers/change-playback-speed-videos-vlc-media-player/
• https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=99610
• http://superuser.com/questions/546278/what-speed-is-fast-and-faster-in-vlc 

Better Internet Searching: Punctuation and Symbols in Search

As a 'power search user' using punctuation marks and symbols in your search is almost inevitable. 

Google search allows the following:

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en&ref_topic=3180167

You can use some punctuation and symbols to change your search terms. Except for the examples below, most punctuation is ignored. For example, a search for [courtney@dogs.com] is seen by Google as [courtney dogs com]. 

Punctuation and symbols that work in Google search

Symbol What you can use it for
[+] Search for things like blood type [AB+] or for a Google+ page like [+Chrome]
[@] Find social tags like [@google] 
[&] Find strongly connected ideas and phrases like [A&E]
[%] Search for a percent value like [40% of 80]
[$] Indicate prices, like [nikon $400]
[#] Search for trending topics indicated by hashtags like [#lifewithoutgoogle]
[-] Indicate that words around it are strongly connected like [twelve-year-old dog]
[_] Connect two words like [quick_sort]. Your search results will find this pair of words either linked together (quicksort) or connected by an underscore (quick_sort).

In case you are using Bing to search, you can use the following:

http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-in/bing/ff808438.aspx

Symbol	Function
+	Finds webpages that contain all the terms that are preceded by the + symbol. Also allows you to include terms that are usually ignored.
" "	Finds the exact words in a phrase.
()	Finds or excludes webpages that contain a group of words.
AND or &	Finds webpages that contain all the terms or phrases.
NOT or -	Excludes webpages that contain a term or phrase.
OR or|	Finds webpages that contain either of the terms or phrases.

Note

By default, all searches in Bing are AND searches. You must capitalize the NOT and OR operators. Otherwise, Bing will ignore them as stop words, which are commonly occurring words and numbers that are omitted to speed a full-text search. Stop words and all punctuation marks, except for the symbols noted in this topic, are ignored unless they are surrounded by quotation marks or preceded by the + symbol.< Only the first 10 terms are used to get search results. Term grouping and Boolean operators are supported in the following preferred order: parentheses () quotation marks "" NOT + - AND & OR | Because OR is the operator with lowest precedence, enclose OR terms in parentheses when combined with other operators in a search. Some features and functionality described here may not be available in your country or region.

Better Internet Searching: Using Search Operators in Google Search

The Google search bar allows us to include a number of search operators to make sure that the context of the search is better explained. 

This will help narrow down the results to (hopefully) more relevant results

Here is quite a comprehensive list of operators that can be used in Google search:

http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html

Web Search
allinanchor:, allintext:, allintitle:, allinurl:, cache:, define:, filetype:, id:,inanchor:, info:, intext:, intitle:, inurl:, link:, related:, site:
Image Search
allintitle:, allinurl:, filetype:, inurl:, intitle:, site:
Groups
allintext:, allintitle:, author:, group:, insubject:, intext:, intitle:
Directory
allintext:, allintitle:, allinurl:, ext:, filetype:, intext:, intitle:, inurl:
News
allintext:, allintitle:, allinurl:, intext:, intitle:, inurl:, location:, source:
Product Search
allintext:, allintitle:

Here is a small list of search operators that one can use in Bing search:
http://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2012/10/19/advanced-query-operators-filetype-ext-understanding-the-differences/


Here is what Google says abour using Operators
http://www.google.com/help/operators.html
OR
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/136861?p=adv_sitespecific&hl=en&rd=1

Reproducing what Google has to say:

Narrow down your search results by adding symbols and words to your search called search operators. Don’t worry about memorizing every operator - you can also use the Advanced Search page to create these searches.

When you search using an operator, don't add any spaces between the operator and your query. A search forsite:nytimes.com will work, but site: nytimes.com will not.

Search for an exact word or phrase  "search"	Use quotes to search for an exact word or set of words on a web page. This is helpful when searching for song lyrics or a line from a book. But only use this if you're looking for an exact word or phrase, otherwise you'll exclude many helpful results by mistake. "imagine all the people"
Exclude a word -search	Add a dash (-) before a word or site to exclude all results that include that word. This is especially useful for words with multiple meanings, like Jaguar the car brand and jaguar the animal.  jaguar speed -car pandas -site:wikipedia.org
Search within a site or domain site:	Get results only from certain sites or domains. For example, you can find all mentions of "olympics" on the NBC website, or any .gov websites.  olympics site:nbc.com  olympics site:.gov
Search for pages that link to a URL link:	Find pages that link to a certain page. For example, you can find all the pages that link to google.com. link:google.com
Search for pages that are similar to a URL related:	Find sites that are similar to a URL you already know. If you search for related sites to the Time.com, you'll find other news publication sites you may be interested in. related:time.com
Fill in the blank *	Add an asterisk within a search as a placeholder for any unknown or wildcard terms. Use with quotation marks to find variations of that exact phrase or to remember words in the middle of a phrase. "a * saved is a * earned"
Search for either word OR	If you want to search for pages that may have just one of several words, includeOR (capitalized) between the words. Without the OR, your results would typically show only pages that match both terms. world cup location 2014 OR 2018
Search for a number range ..	Separate numbers by two periods without spaces (..) to see results that contain numbers in a given range of things like dates, prices, and measurements. camera $50..$100
Find information about a site info:	Get information about a URL, including the cached version of the page, similar pages, and pages that link to the site.  info:google.com
See a cached version of a site cache:	See what a page looks like the last time Google crawled the site.  cache:washington.edu

Punctuation

When you search, most punctuation and special characters are ignored. However, there are some punctuation and symbolsthat work in searches.

Here are a few tutorials on how to mix and match options to search better:

http://www.googleguide.com/using_advanced_operators.html
http://www.googleguide.com/tag/advanced_search